If you want to find me in Rennes, you can look for me at home or in the department, but the time and place you are most sure to meet me is Friday afternoon-evening in O'Connells. It is less regular, but I also sometimes go on Sundays. Anyways, Rennes without the pub, and with the often sort of unexpected conversations with the regulars, would lose much of its charm for me. Here is some more non-sense about the pub.
- "Forster" and "Small things like that" by Claire Keegan.
- "The Friend" and "The vulnerables" by Sigrid Nunez.
- "Campesinos y señores", or for that matter anything by Theodor Kallifatides.
- "The cost of living" and "Things I do not want to know" by Deborah Levy.
- The first two volumes of "On the calculation of volume" by Solvej Balle.
- "Lost cat: a memoir", by Mary Gaitskill.
After many years of renting, and after many years of adhering to the Spanish idea that one has to live in the center of town, a few years back we bought a house with a garden of about 200m^2. Hating the idea of dealing with all that grass, my plan was to concrete over the garden. Painting it green, I guess. But how things have changed... I guess that we started by planting a few trees there, but things scalated and now, next to some less useful plants like a palm tree, we got figs, quices, ichang lemon, yuzu, nashi, feijoa, and I stop here because the list is long. The garden is packed. And being obsessives we ended up buing a field of about somewhere near Rennes, 25-30 km away. It is just a field, not water or electricity and definitively no building. In terms of size it is perfect: 1000m^2. Small enough too see that one does something, but too big to hope to make it really nice: a lot of weeding, some positive vibes, and no guilt. There were already some trees there, but we took some out and we planted others, but most of the work I do is to fight all sorts of a invasive spiky plants. When the weather is good we go there once a week, on Sundays. Afterwards I have to use the lift when I want descend a flight of stairs at the department... Anyways, if you get me a beer I tell you how we got a bench to the field, ordering it online and carrying it there via metro, train and then brute force. In fact, I suspect that my student Sophie will tell you that if you then get me a second, a third, or a fourth beer, I will you with each of them the same story again...
In the winter of 2019 I got the flu. It was a combination of the flu and, even worse, the man flu. And with all that time stuck at home, I decided to really try to look at the issue of climate change and more generally about the ways that humans are changing the environment (destruction of bio-diversity, soil degradation and such). Well, I went out of that flu being a vegetarian, having decided to limit my flying to at most a flight a year, and really worried about climate change. Here are some not-original-at-all thoughts about all of this.
Climate change is a really big problem. There is a 5C temperature difference between the pre-industrial era and what was there in the peak of the last ice age (20000 years ago), when both the Midlands in the UK and Nashville in the US were under the ice sheet. Maybe it is me, but common sense kind of suggests that if 5C colder made such a difference, 2/3/4C hotter will also make a huge difference. And now, if we go ballistic on the problem, we have a chance to stop it at 2C by the time that kids the age of my daughter (she is 10) reaches the current expected life span. Note that “if we go ballistic” means that most likely we won't.
One has to inform oneself. There is a lot of noise, and most articles one reads in newspapers and such are pretty empty and shallow, and either non-existing or really alarmist sounding. The best thing I found so far is Jean-Marc Jancovici's course in L'Ecole des Mines in Paris. It is long, 20 hours, but that is about 1/4 of the duration of “Vikings” or “Game of Thrones”, so there... Then, it is in French... I don't know of anything comparably good in English/German/Spanish. And yes, Jancovici is as French as they get (he keeps mentioning all the great achievement of French scientists over history, basically just stopping short of claiming that the wheel and cold water were French inventions...), but he gives data and talks science. And although I am sure that some of the data can be counterbalanced by other data, and that the science is as always just an approximation to reality, it is clear to me that it is hard to find anything as good as Jancovici's course.
It is evident that, as a society, we are not doing anywhere close to enough, that we are dreaming that some technology is going to come to our rescue so that we can keep going. One hears talk about things like hydrogen planes, fusion, carbon capture, etc... these technologies don't really exist, or they exist at a minimal scale. We speak about nuclear, renewables, electric cars, heat pumps and biodiesel. All of this exists, and thank all the gods for that because we will need it all, but if you do that math, then it is kind of clear that enormous efforts would be needed to deploy them at the needed scale... if it were possible at all. I mean, to phase out oil/gas/carbon from just the electricity production (electricity is the cause of 25% of worldwide emissions) we would need to roughly increase nuclear production worldwide by 700%... and, at the current level of use, there are uranium reserves for 90 years... that means that if all those nuclear power stations could be built, they would have fuel for 11 years... And yes, I have no idea how much solar and wind one can really get, but among all sorts of logistic problems like the dunkelflaute one has to consider that wind turbines have a life span of 20 years... We should use technology, but to say that without doing the math, is akin to not saying anything.
Another usual idea/reaction is that it is up to politicians/billionaires/the United Nations/industry to do something, because there is nothing oneself can do... and Taylor Swift flies a lot, so it does not matter if I fly... Well, I strongly agree that until politicians do something, nothing real will be done. But politicians will only do something when it is clear to them that the population is ready to not chop their heads if they do it. I mean, where do we expect the money for all those investments to come from? If politicians do things to stop people from flying or driving or using fast fashion or eating as much meat, they (or society, if you so wish) have to make it possible: build public transportation, put taxes on fast fashion, a painful carbon tax, allow for much higher food prices, etc... Politicians will only do these things if they think that enough people demand it. So, it matters what each one of us does.
What do I do? Well, some people get organized and engaged with associations... Some people leave their careers to do permaculture... I don't. I am not one of those people. I am too much of a parasite. What I try to do is what I can do as my own scale. I stopped eating meat. I never drove a car, and thus it is no sacrifice to go everywhere by bike/foot/public transport. I put some money into improving the isolation of my house. I limit very, very much how much I fly. I try to consume less, but too often can't resist. I write this text and annoy people on Facebook with my preaching. When I buy something I try to keep in mind not only price, size, color, and such, but also whether it makes ecological sense. I am definitively no saint and buy far too many things that are at best wasteful and, although I flight very rarely, it probably still fly more than the average European. And I don't think that everybody should do what I do. But what I think is that everybody, mostly people who like me have already done a lot of damage, should aim to think of the ecological effects of their acts. I wish that, before shopping, before planning the next holiday somewhere warm and nice and far away, before agreeing to another conference to which one goes because it is in a nice place but to which one would not really go if it happened in Wolverhampton, people like me were to stop for a moment and think whether what they want to do right now is worth the ecological effects. At the end of the day, it is not only me who has a daughter.
One has to take care of one's mental health. Evidently, I would not listen to myself when it comes to this, but keeping myself busy with math helps me.
Thank you for reading this.
During one of the COVID-19 lockdowns, I started picking litter in my somewhat extended neighborhood. I guess that boredom played a role, but I also wanted that it was clear to my daughter that one needs to take care of things. Anyways, it escalated over time and nowadays, I do that at least once a week.
I guess that I find it relaxing to walk around, listening to a podcast (recently it has been The rest is history) doing something for an hour, but it would be difficult to nail down what do I expect to achieve. When I fill a 20 liter bag, I often think that nobody would prefer all those plastic wrappers in their garden or in the playground where their kids go. I guess that this means that what I do must have some form of a point.
I guess that I am also hoping that the saying “litter begets litter” has some truth to it, and that people will be more careful if things are already cleaner. Evidently, it is la ville de Rennes who does most of the cleaning.
Likewise, I guess that another motivation is that I live in a kind of mixed neighborhood (Le Blosne), where next to little individual houses like mine, there are plenty of housing projects. This means that there are plenty of people with a weaker socio-economic status, with a considerable proportion of people with a migration background. It seems to me that it can't be bad for society if somebody like me is seen regularly cleaning the playground next to a project. Evidently, most people don't say anything when they see me, but some people sometimes thank me for what I do and then sometimes we talk for a bit. They tend to be really surprised by me being a math professor, and not living in one of the projects. I guess that this says something about my public appearance... Anyways, a few times I got offered a joint. I didn't take it, although apparently the stuff comes from Nador and is excellent. In any case, I took it as a success. I also take as a success that all the older French people living in the little house see, and appreciate, that it is their immigrant neighbor, the one with a horrible accent, who, just because it is a nice thing to do, cleans the street in front of their houses.
It is not clear to me why I go out to pick up trash, but I guess that I will continue doing it.
In 2024, I started going one a week to help kids do homework. The whole thing is organized by Le Crab Rouge but there are many other in Rennes. In the one or two hours that I am there I end up helping a few kids and I guess that this makes me feel good about myself. You can read more about it here.
I tend to get acute obsessions which last a few months and then stay with me in an attenuated way for a long time. Besides math, they can go from the Bizantine empire, History of west expansion in North America, history of the Royal navy, Chinese cooking, Indian cooking, Iranian cooking, Ottolenghi, investing, climate change, you name it. I can rant for a long time about making tofu at home, and, again with a beer at hand, I can get totally excited about the real beauty of the efficient market hypothesis, and about why it totally makes sense. But an obsession with politics has been a constant. Partly because of that, partly because of finally getting afraid of the power that companies like Amazon or Google have, speacially when it comes to the way they deal with our data, I finally decided to degoogle. After years of using gmail, google drive, google sites, google pay, and google everything, it has been not the easy but now it is almost done. This is why this webpage is hosted by gitlab. This is why I now pay for a Proton account for e-mail, drive, and such. About 10 years ago I left the Apple ecosystem, that is the Apple trap. It was a bit of a pain but I have not regretted it for a moment. I don't see myself regretting to have divorced myself from Google.