TO GO FURTHER
SlowTrip is the combination of a travel dream and a questioning about our society. Beyond a travel concept, it is an approach that aims to give meaning to our actions. The fact that society is running out of breath has led us to raise awareness of the current state of the world in order to initiate the dynamics of change towards a sustainable civilisational future.
Le constat
The paradigm of our society is based on growth, profit, which translates into an unbridled consumption of fossil resources.
For many years, we have observed in all areas the limits of the functioning of our system (pesticide residues in food, recurrent economic crises, increasing inequalities, chemical pollution of our environment, warming and intensification of climate phenomena, loss of social ties, etc.).
In addition to causing serious repercussions that inevitably lead to destabilizing our society, the functioning of our thermo-industrial system is unsustainable.
This is based on exponential growth and dependence on finite resources (oil, uranium, rare metals, etc.).
Not only is this limitless growth fundamentally impossible in the finite world in which we live, but we have reached the peak of extraction of the vast majority of the planet's resources, and exponential growth contributes to accelerating resource depletion.
Collapseology or the study of collapse is not intended to frighten or spread a catastrophic image of the future of humanity. On the contrary, it aims to understand and anticipate the collapse despite its inevitability.
Collapsologists who study the issue of collapse with a holistic approach are announcing the end of our thermo-industrial system in a few decades. According to them, we will witness the collapse of this dying system during our lifetime. A collapse is systemic, it remains very difficult to anticipate in its course but implies, according to Yves Cochet, a situation in which "basic needs are no longer provided to a majority of the population by services regulated by law".
Our vision
Like Cyril Dion and Pablo Servigne, we believe that part of the answer lies in building new stories, a new paradigm. A story different from the one that led us to this situation and that wrongly tells us that consuming makes us happy. Knowledge of the notion of collapse is, in our opinion, useful because it allows us to deconstruct the current narrative before telling another one.
The efficiency of our complex system has certainly enabled us to achieve access to knowledge and medicine that has never been seen before in the history of humanity, but this system is fragile because it is based on excessive consumption and we do not know how to do without this energy mismanagement.
In short, we live in a system that is effective in many areas because it meets its objectives, but is not resilient, that is, it does not have the ability to return to normal functioning after a disruption. Resilience requires a learning process that must be implemented today, in the comfort of a thermo-industrial society.
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SlowTrip makes sense through this awareness and analysis of the levers for change. It is a question of imagining today the world of tomorrow, a post-oil world with all that this implies. In this way, the journey itself will be based solely on soft means of transport, i.e. using only sustainable resources.
We will travel by bike, sailboat, horse... by punctuating the itineraries with stops in third places, communities, which offer a vision of a post-petroleum world. The aim is to disseminate examples of systems that will be resilient to collapse and climate change. The objective is to show that this future is possible, that it will be happy, alive and more human than the present. By nurturing the general imagination, we also wish to develop new initiatives.