One hopes that the researchers in social and human sciences are at their starting blocks, doped up like Olympic competition animals, ready to jump and heat up the neurons one imagines as muscular. For this period in time is more than exciting from an intellectual and scientific perspective - which will perhaps allow us to renounce the everlasting commemorative debates (Look out: The fifty-year anniversary of May 1968 is coming in nine years and nine months!) and endless disputes (Do you side with Sinè or Val?). Here we have a world that is evolving, turning at a phenomenal speed, dragged along, shaken up by the energy and environmental crises.

    Climatologists (When exactly shall we begin to boil?), oceanographers (At what speed will the seas cover us over?), geologists (What oil reserves exist?), biologists (How many species do Homo sapiens sapiens exterminate every day?), economists (How will that work, oil at $250 a barrel?) and geo-strategists (Who will be the future king of the post-petroleum world?) give themselves over to these subjects with sad hearts, describing and forecasting one catastrophe after another.

    A bit depressing, for sure. But the period also offers us the possibility of being present for astonishing laboratory experiments, ones that social psychology enthusiasts or sociology fans could only dream of. That is, a whole planet - with its economic system, its social relations, its urban organizations - on which new constraints obtain. Such as, for example, a barrel of oil, at $150 to begin gently, then at $200, $250, $300 - just like increasing the temperature in a fishbowl.

    Watch the little white mice that we are change our behavior. First, insouciance - everything will be all right in the end. Then, the first inflections - to use or not to use the car; that is the question. And then difficult trade-offs - do we really need a detached house? The first signs of change are fragile, but visible: 15 billion fewer kilometers driven by American drivers in May, 20 billion in June. In percentages, obviously, it's rather less spectacular: traffic is decreasing three to four percent only in the United States. Enough, all the same, to contribute to a fall in demand for gas, and so for barrels of oil, and ... to restore hope to the little mice who would like to continue to make their wheels spin as though nothing had changed!

    With global warming, the stakes are more distant, or at least are not yet directly affecting our wallets. But here we are, faced with transformations that will undoubtedly be difficult to live though, but thrilling to dissect. A unique opportunity, deep down, for opening the black box of social life. What behaviors are we going to develop? What decisions forced by emergency? By the government? By our wallet? Who will win? Who will lose? What will the secondary effects be?

    The suspense is intense. For the world perceives the precursors of new behaviors - beginning with our own practices. The return of the local after decades of abolishing distances? A reconsidered urbanism that puts an end to the dispersal of the last century? Adaptation by companies to sell us "durable throwaways?" Alternative modes of consumption? New migratory flows? Buried by the oceans, boiled by global warming, overwhelmed by natural catastrophes, the little mice will come to know much more about themselves. We reassure ourselves as well as we can.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.