To (really) bet on the ecological transition - Nicolas Hulot (Preface),  Alain Grandjean and Hélène Le Teno (Author) - Editions de l'Atelier - March 2014 - 191 Pages

Although the ecological transition is rather silent, it is already underway. Numerous initiatives are proving their worth, in France and abroad, demonstrating that the great shift in the transition is possible, provided that a social project is carried loud and clear, which dares to put the citizen and the general interest back at the centre of the action.

Faced with an emergency, how can you do better with less to eat, to move around? What to do with your time and money? Which political orientations should be favoured? This book presents many practical ways to enlighten everyone's choices and thus move from living-together to doing-together.
Because it is a large project open to all, the ecological transition can be an exciting challenge.

Alain Grandjean is a graduate of École polytechnique and ENSAE. Co-founder and partner of the consulting firm Carbone 4, he is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Nicolas Hulot Foundation.
Hélène Le Teno is a graduate of the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. She has worked in industry, research and service professions in France and China. She is a manager at Carbone 4.

Excerpt from the introduction

Our global economic machine is running out of steam: OECD countries are having hiccups, emerging countries are seeing their markets weaken, traditional oil exporting countries are flirting with a dwindling windfall, the countries of the South are exposed to the voracity of all for their supposedly renewable resources...
The doctors - political scientists and economists - called to the sick planet's bedside each make their own diagnosis and propose ever more refined remedies to resolve the monetary crisis, to regulate international finance, to control national debt, to revive the economy through consumption or construction, to make it more competitive through innovation...
Current events give the impression that this therapeutic relentlessness is frankly ineffective: it is high time to think about change - and to do it - rather than change the dressing.
Our great patient has gigantism and voracity in common with the dinosaurs.
In Europe, for example, every year the economic machine devours the trifle of 12 tonnes of material per inhabitant to make concrete (sand), drive cars (oil), eat (animal feed, fertilisers) and produce goods and services. But there are more and more of us on this planet whose resources are finite: we have entered a world of scarce resources, in a world where the search for "more and more" has led UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to say: "We have our foot on the accelerator and we are heading for the abyss."
The world that is being forged today is therefore that of the great ecological transition towards a much more resource-efficient economy, capable of guaranteeing a minimum of stability and social equity and which could save us from many future conflicts.
It is also a world where the sense of action and the pleasure of existing will gradually compensate for the eventual feeling of withdrawal or material limitation felt by the modern urban dweller, as soon as he feels that the right to do and accomplish together generates as much if not more pleasure than the right to work in order to consume.
Finally, it is a world in which territory will eventually regain its place as an indispensable provider of resources: energy, wood and biomass, arable land, the more the machines will be hungry for scarce and expensive oil, the more arms they will need to work harder to reap the benefits. We must therefore actively address the future of our territories and how we want these common goods to be governed tomorrow.
Let's be clear, in this book we renounce all the misery of the world. We are living in a great time that will make us forget the much vaunted era of the baby boomers and the Glorious Thirty, we are on board a rocket that will take us at full speed towards an exciting future, we have a thousand talents that will express themselves with ever greater strength. The crisis we are going through is the apparent, emerging face of the transformation process, or even metamorphosis in progress.
All of us, citizens in the midst of transition - and often without knowing it - have the desire and the ability to implement a collective project that will make our economies prosperous, our homes happy, offer stimulating jobs to everyone, and energize and balance the territories.