Taking stock of this course, I am especially proud to have been able to participate, for more than 40 years, in a major international civil movement, self-organized, based on free sharing and improvement of resources and ideas, in the general human interest, without ritualization or commercial or financial exploitation of the goodwill of anyone. In doing so, I was able to pass on an essential public cultural heritage, deriving no remuneration other than an ethical satisfaction from it.

And I think that all of this was in the making since my childhood. Because from my first years of school, I was both sharer and curious about everything, and I liked to analyze, organize, synthesize, project. Both during my studies and my professional life, I was as eclectic as possible, and I did not specialize in a particular field. I tried to accumulate as much experience and knowledge as possible in several fields, in relation to different people, needs, and techniques. After maturation, I wanted to pass on what I had learned and understood, in order to give back to my society at least as much as it had brought me, but thinking like HD Thoreau that " How vain it is to sit down to write when one has not stood up to live"

Indeed, life standing up brought me a lot of risks, fights, dangers, adventures, and (obviously) knowledge, so I built myself, and I built my life, with all that. Among my adult constructive activities, I was an engineer and environmental expert, notably for the 6th Research Framework-Program of the European Union, then a creator of productive enterprises, and a leader of civil organizations. From 1998 to 2008, I became President of an international grouping of eco-humanist NGOs, strictly independent and non-aligned, which I represented at the UN as part of its permanent consultative status. I have also been an organizer and trainer for executives and facilitators of various eco-humanist organizations in several countries.

I was then elected, from 2008 to 2009, as Chairman of the Development Committee of the Conference of NGOs in permanent status at the United Nations. All this in total freedom, and because my eco-humanist path resulted from a synergy between a deep personal involvement in the reality of my contemporary society, and an enthusiastic discovery of the perennial roots of historical humanism.

In fact, I had felt a motivating interest in discovering that it was possible to coordinate and extend the works of ancient Greek philosophers and those of humanist philosophers of the European Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, notably by bringing certain Vedic texts into closer contact with them. Before that, I had also been impressed by the work of my father Louis Carl, an ethnologist-explorer who had worked on the ancient civilizations of the Sahara. And in 1972, Maurice Joyeux had pointed me towards the rationalist philosophers, following articles I had published in the newspaper Le Monde Libertaire, which he was sponsoring.

I immersed myself with pleasure in the valorization of all this, by being particularly interested in the historical relation of Humanity to its evolving environment, and in the thinkers who best dealt with this subject. Little by little, I selected and deepened some major texts, bringing them closer to modern scientific overlaps, and all this seemed to fit together and complement each other in a surprising way. To the point that I wanted to bring out a synthesis as clear and exhaustive as possible, while remaining in the trajectory of evolution and transmission which had led these contributions up to our time. I then began to write the basics and the template of what will be compiled to become my books "Eco-knowledge for all" and "A great human project".

Moreover, in researching what could already exist of similar, I also realized that talented precursors had already made this kind of approach, but without insisting enough on the fact that an overall synthesis found its coherence by dynamically inscribing itself in the long philosophical tradition of a natural humanism in permanent evolution, even correction. And the further I went, the more I discovered that all this was indeed part of a natural, immanent evolutionary process, a true intrinsic project self-generated, carried, and corrected by Humanity. This process was underlying, but it tended to emerge better. It was only necessary to clearly discern its insight into the future, its foresight, its projectability, so that its content reveals all its meaning. I tried to convince environmentalists I knew, because it also shed new light on modern ecology. It has been difficult.

I had supported with some of them the political campaign of the environmentalist René Dumont in 1974, for the Presidency of the French Republic, but it had failed, and most environmental activists of this time were beginning to be considered by public opinion as excessive, or even sectarian, or anti-human. It was therefore better to rely on more sensible, more constructive values. Finally, in 1979, with a few friends who shared these ideas, we decided, for lack of a better way, to organize ourselves by our own means to develop structures that harmoniously combine scientific ecology and historical humanism, with an updated philosophy of the Grand human House (eco/oïkos) in joint development in its external (natural) and internal (societal) environment.

Our approach has been followed by others, since other associations and networks promoting this innovative eco-humanism have been constituted in one country, then in another, year after year, according to our example. I advised and trained many animators end executives of these new structures. On this occasion, I also realized that we needed ad-hoc synthesis books on the philosophical, historical, and scientific foundations, and on the main themes, of our current of thought in reactualisation. In 1998, I took back my working notes from the 1970s, and the sheets I had written for the first training courses of the 1980s, and this served as a core for me to write the books "Eco-knowledges for all" and "Discourse on humanist ecology and the philosophy of evolution", later modified to become "A Great Human Project" in 2010. In doing so, I have mainly worked since, in fact and in mind, as an anthropologist.

And there, the process of permanent self-correction, fundamental to eco-humanism, has been particularly useful for me to gradually improve these works, and for the training of my students and animators. On the one hand, I have corrected these books several times, and on the other hand, it has also led me to deepen the meaning of human evolutionary cultural programming. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, in the early days of computer science on a PC (with my Alphatronic, Amstrad, and then IBM), I had started programming a simple application of artificial intelligence, in order to facilitate the management of a cooperative business, by combining a database, operating rules, and an inference and self-learning engine.

I have had not enough free time and experience in advanced programming to technically finish this project, but I had schematized and tested at least its logical operations. I did conceive artificial intelligence only as a simple ersatz created by human intelligence to usefully outsource certain tasks, and thus free up its cognitive abilities for other non-externalizable tasks, requiring human intuition and arbitration. But the logical design of such an artificial intelligence could also, under certain conditions, shed light on new aspects and drivers of our societal functioning. In this case, and although eco-humanism cannot be reduced to or assimilated into a cybernetic system, I had noticed that the eco-humanist cultural tool had adaptive features that made him comparable in some respects with expert software, capable of managing our evolutionary synergies well, provided that the knowledge bases, operating rules, and learning and inference algorithms, remain adequate and proactively controllable by the overall human collective brain.

I improved my knowledge and practice of eco-humanism and anthropology by taking this into account. And I passed the torch to others who wanted to continue on this path, which implied the priority of the legitimate human will and of the general interest in human development, without preventing the use of effective designs and tools that did not contravene such development.

Today, with all these memories still vivid in my mind, I continue to wish courage and perseverance to all the eco-humanists. Let’s continue to share and to mutualize our resources, and to help each other. We will feel all the more motivated and stronger to succeed.

Marc CARL back