4 4. See The Convivialist Manifesto (www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/global-dialogues/convivialist-manifesto-a-declaration-of-interdependence) and the convivialists’ website (http://convivialisme.org/worldwide/).
5 5. P. Kourilsky, Le Temps de l’altruisme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009); P. Kourilsky, Le Manifeste de l’altruisme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011); M. Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, trans. C. Mandell and S. Gordon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015); M. Ricard and T. Singer (eds), Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion (London: Macmillan, 2015).
6 6. J. Lecomte, La Bonté humaine: altruisme, empathie, générosité (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012).
7 7. E. Jaffelin, Petit Éloge de la gentillesse (Paris: J’ai lu, 2010); F. Martin, Le Pouvoir des gentils: les règles d’or de la relation de confiance (Paris: Eyrolles, 2014).
8 8. J.-L. Laville, Politique de l’association (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010).
9 9. R. G. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
10 10. P. Dardot and C. Laval, Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, trans. M. MacLellan (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); B. Coriat (ed.), Le Retour des communs et la crise de l’idéologie propriétaire (Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2015).
11 11. F. de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (London: Penguin, 2010); J. Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
12 12. J.-M. Pelt, La Solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains (Paris: Fayard, 2004); A. Supiot (ed.), La Solidarité: enquête sur un principe juridique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015); R. Mathevet, La Solidarité écologique: ce lien qui nous oblige (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).
13 13. Despite the recent progress made by certain companies, it is clear that the business milieu is afflicted by appalling inertia. Gauthier Chapelle was a business consultant in sustainable development (in the field of biomimicry) for ten years. He strove to show corporations that, by drawing inspiration from the supportive relationships of the living world, their organization would not only be sustainable, but much more efficient. Unfortunately, he often found that many companies did not want to take the risk of changing their structure and purpose.
14 14. For an overview, see A.-S. Novel, La Vie share: mode d’emploi. Consommation, partage et modes de vie collaboratifs (Paris: Alternatives, 2013); S. Riot and A.-S. Novel, Vive la corévolution! Pour une société collaborative (Paris: Alternatives, 2012); D. Filippova (ed.), Société collaborative: La fin des hiérarchies (Paris: Rue de l’Échiquier, 2015). On the means of communication, see J. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); M. Bauwens, Sauver le monde: vers une économie post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer (Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2015). On companies, see F. Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness (Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014); J. Lecomte, Les Entreprises humanistes (Paris: Les Arènes, 2016). On energy, see J. Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
15 15. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, first published in 1902 and available online: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution. Incidentally, the French translation (Entr’aide) was the work of Kropotkin’s friend, also a geographer and anarchist, Élisée Reclus; the word entr’aide was a French neologism of his coining, losing its apostrophe in 1931 to become entraide. See M. Enckell, ‘Notes sur l’histoire d’un mot’, Réfractions, 23, 2009, pp. 5–8.
16 16. In this work, we have cited only about a third of the sources known to us.
17 17. We are both trained agronomists and animal biology specialists. Above all, we have shared, since our earliest childhood, an unease at being surrounded by the myth of a cruel, aggressive and competitive nature. This does not fit with our experience, our observations or our feelings. Even if our naturalistic sensibility immunized us against this ideological soup, it still took us more than twenty-five years to transform this intuition into certainty, and a few more years to pull the latter into a coherent synthesis.
18 18. For years, the results, assumptions and theories of each discipline remained contradictory. No overall picture emerged. There were too many gaps between the disciplines, and each continued its work while ignoring the others. It is only very recently that tremendous progress has made it possible to propose a comprehensive structure for this ‘other law of the jungle’.
1 The history of a forgetting
Imagine a beautiful sunny valley where snow-capped peaks stand out against the blue sky, overlooking a mix of multicoloured meadows and dark forests. In these forests in North America, it is common to see two species: the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and Rocky Mountain fir (Abies lasiocarpa). But – ecologists ask – how do these two species get along? Do they tread on each other’s toes or, on the contrary, do they need each other?
Across the valley floor, the distribution of pines and firs is random. Researchers have also noticed that when a pine tree dies, the neighbouring fir trees grow more healthily. In other words, the trees seem to hamper each other. You could say they’re in competition. Nothing unusual about that: we all imagine the forest as a place where the trees overshadow each other and where the small shoots have to make their way up to the light, or die.
Science is fully aware of this: for more than a century, ecologists have observed these interactions. These ecologists are steeped in the classical theory which, in the ecology of communities (of plant populations), gives pride of place to competition. However, on rare occasions during the twentieth century, a researcher would occasionally observe something odd: for example, that in some places the grass grew better under poplars. But nobody really paid any attention, because it didn’t fit into the theory.
Let’s return to the cohabitation between pines and firs. It was in the 1990s that the team run by Ragan Callaway, an ecologist at the University of Montana, started to take an interest in these ‘exceptions’. The researchers compared the situation of trees at the bottom of the valley, an environment where life is good, with the situation on the mountainsides, at a certain altitude, where living conditions are much more difficult.1 What a surprise! At altitude, things were utterly different: not only did the firs grow only around pines, but, when a pine died, the surrounding firs fared less well… These trees compete when living conditions are good, but help each other when they become tougher (in cold or windy weather, poor soil, etc.). Until then, people had seen only half the picture.
Callaway and his colleagues were the first to take these observations seriously in plants and measure them accurately on a large scale. For more than twenty years, they travelled the world and accumulated experimental data, published in major international scientific journals,2 which show the extent of mutually beneficial relationships between plants (which they call ‘facilitation’).3 Quite enough to radically change our vision of the world!
Everywhere, all the time, and in every colour
From Darwin onwards and throughout most of the twentieth century, biologists and ecologists believed that the main forces which structured the relationships between species within ecosystems were competition