Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the climate crisis and the imperatives of sustainable development have placed green growth firmly on the agenda, with the European Green Deal its latest incarnation. In her book, the economist Hélène Tordjman unravels the complex mechanisms at work in this new economics, whose stated aim is to respect a nature transformed by human activities.
In the first chapter, the author recollects that with the rise of nanotechnologies and biotechnologies in the 1990s came the hope that their convergence with information technology and cognitive science (engendering NBIC) would pave the way for a sustainable exploitation of natural resources, creating a “bioeconomy.” A conference organized in the United States in 2001 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave impetus to this program; meanwhile, transhumanists, inspired by a scientistic ideology, set themselves the goal of radically transforming the human species through NBIC-derived techniques. In response to these American ambitions, the European Commission issued various reports between 2010 and 2012 stressing the need to develop the bioeconomy. Synthetic biology (genome synthesis) is one of the key technologies of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” celebrated in 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Hélène Tordjman recalls that Jacques Ellul, in his work La Techn...
