The expression “fighting climate change” hadn’t really struck me until now. Reading it in a newspaper article, I wondered why it is so commonly used, both in English (fighting, tackling…) and in French (lutter). Is climate change an “enemy”? Certainly, it is a threat to humanity, but isn’t the source of this threat humanity itself, specifically its growth and the competition for development and acquisition of wealth?
In 2020, during the lockdown periods, I was surprised by the use of warlike vocabulary by the French government. After all, “the virus” has not been defeated, nor any of its variants, but rather, means of protecting ourselves from it have been developed.
The idea of fighting against a danger, whatever its nature, demonstrates how the problems we face are spontaneously viewed through the lens of oppositions. It is as if conceptualizing a common enemy is the only way to unify wills and share a common goal. However, when this enemy is none other than humanity itself, masked by phenomena (warming and its consequences) that originate from it, one can wonder if the metaphor is also the manifestation of a vicious circle: the fight, supposed to extinguish the fire, is a cause of it.