The Comb Lab Letter : Global change; local issues

New issues are gradually taking their place in our daily lives: security and surveillance versus individual freedoms. Or furthermore, identity versus solidarity, power versus democracy. The retreat of the welfare state and the growing difficulty of interpreting the jolts of the geopolitical scene attest to a precipitous change of era that few have accurately anticipated.

These political shifts are taking place in the midst of devastating floods, wildfires, persistent droughts, polluted bathing waters, melting glaciers and receding coastlines. Today’s climate sceptics are acting in bad faith as their latest strategy to deny the real causes of these events.

Given the hardening of the political framework and the intensification of meteorological hazards, we can say that the world is well and truly changing. This was a shocking statement just three years ago. Today, the irreversibility of the change in environmental conditions and, as a result, the violence of the race to appropriate underwater and permafrost resources is only exacerbating the problem. But let’s be realistic: would a shift towards a real ecological transition on a very large scale prove less harmful to the environment? That remains to be seen… In any case, continuing predation only seals the irreversible distancing of human societies from the environmental conditions that are favourable to their development.

Once this overview has been established, the question becomes: how can these far-reaching upheavals be expressed in terms of issues faced by rural areas? After all, if local businesses and craft industries are to function, electoral timetables are to be respected, medical services are to fulfil their mission, etc., we have to continue to live by today’s standards.

Anyone who frequents bookshops will have noticed the profusion of books dealing with, let’s put it generically, the end of a world. Among the many authors producing works of great quality, we propose here to put into perspective the work of four researchers who enable their readers to introduce a salutary shift in perspective to take a more adjusted look at the contemporary world.

In his book Le monde confisqué, Essai sur le capitalisme de la finitude (XVI° – XXI° siècle), published by Flammarion in early 2025, the economist Arnaud Orain develops the thesis that liberal capitalism, which began in the modern era, developed from 1815 to 2010, with inevitable periods of decline, such as during wars. In 2010, the author marks the transition from liberal capitalism to the « capitalism of finitude ». Taking into account the finiteness of the world and therefore of the stock of primary resources, he argues that « this capitalism of finitude is a vast naval and territorial enterprise to monopolise assets – land, mines, maritime zones, enslaved people, warehouses, submarine cables, digital data – carried out by nation states and public or private companies in order to generate an annuity income outside the competitive principle ».

He goes on to say that in this new order, where only a few empires can gain a foothold, « the idea of global growth in wealth makes no sense, as the promises of expansion of the 1990s have been shattered by the ecological limits of the planet ».

Understanding of the speeches made by Trump, Vance and Miran, the President’s financial adviser, suddenly becomes clearer. To some extent, so does Putin’s speech at the Munich conference in 2007. In fact, power, conceived as the underpinning of the ‘capitalism of finitude’ edifice, is opposed to abundance and democracy. The future will justify or contradict this analysis. However, Pierre Legendre in 2016 with Ce que l’Occident ne voit pas de l’Occident, Xavier Ricard Lanata with La tropicalisation du monde in 2019 and finally Kishore Mahbubani with L’Occident s’est-il perdu, Une provocation, published in 2019 had, each in their own way, announced this shift.

The work we are doing to gather all this information and link it together is leading us to ask a highly topical question, both for the Combrailles and for all localities that also have a territorial identity:

how can we apply at local level the same cocktail of factors that we have been analysing in our successive letters: climate change and the loss of biodiversity, the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948?

We maintain that the first priority is to popularise factual information on climate change, on how to use AI so as not to be enslaved by it, and on scholarly analyses of the way the world is behaving. The aim is to give as many people as possible a clearer picture of contemporary developments, so that they can reflect on the need to prepare for a new kind of future. If today, it is more than difficult to influence the measures taken by the public and private powers beyond our control, sooner or later the cracks will open in these policies of headlong rush for the benefit of the better-off. Then the obstinate work being done in archipelagos across the planet by a multitude of islands of citizen intelligence will reveal their full potential in a world that is bound to be damaged.

Let’s create an island of citizen intelligence in Combrailles by taking a first step on Saturday 13 September in Saint Georges de Mons at the Festival des possibles organised by the Communauté de communes Combrailles Sioule et Morge. Comb Lab and the Centre d’innovation sociale Clermont Auvergne (Cisca) are organising a serious game session as part of the participatory action research being conducted jointly by the two organisations. The game will enable participants both to formalise their representation of the Combrailles region, and also to demonstrate the tensions, debates and compromises that allow democracy to work at a local level. A few weeks later, we’ll be hosting a regional game. This will enable a wide range of participants to express what they expect from the area in five or ten years’ time, based on what they perceive as needs, vulnerabilities and other issues in this short term.

Don’t hesitate to sign up for these serious games sessions, all the information you need will be sent to you by return.

Welcome back everyone!

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