In Europe

completely. The British were moaning about the creation of a ‘brave new countryside’, where no one had dirt under their fingernails.
    My brother shows me the stump of a tree that once stood in the middle of an overgrown path, between what used to be the pastureland and gardens of his village. ‘I counted the rings,’ he says. ‘This tree began growing around 1950. In other words, by that time there was no longer any real reason to keep this path cleared. It was a turning point, apparently most of the villagers had left by then.’
    Here, after the great dying out, came the great flourishing. Everything became covered in forest. ‘All the woods you see here are new, all those terraces have become overgrown, this whole view didn't exist back then,’ my brother says, waving his arm. ‘Only a few old people still remember what the old landscape looked like. I know them, but it won't last very long. Then even the memory will be gone.’
    A few days later I drive into the Pyrenees. The days are warm and clear, the nights cold, the houses low and grey. A girl is herding her sheep, a cigarette between her lips. The road becomes narrower all the time. A lone bird of prey is circling high above. A barn, ‘
Vive de Gaulle!
’ written on it in faded blue. My newspaper, which I read on my laptop, welcomes the six billionth earthling. When my father was born in 1899, we reached a billion. Now it's six times that. We're living in strict accordance with the disaster scenario sketched for us by the Club of Rome in 1972, which, along with the oil crisis, rang in the end of the golden years of 1945–73.
    At the time, the club's calculations brought the world down with a bump. It appeared that less than a third of the human race consumed four fifths of the most important raw materials, and those were quickly becoming depleted. At the same time, the world population continued to grow by leaps and bounds. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the reportsaid, ‘people everywhere are increasingly confronted with a series of intractable problems, almost impossible to deal with: environmental disturbance, a crisis in norms and customs, bureaucratisation, the uncontrollable expansion of the cities, uncertainty concerning employment, alienation on the part of young people, economic disruptions and the rejection by a growing number of people of our society's value system.’ These seemingly divergent issues were extremely complicated, showed up all over the world and had a pronounced mutual interaction ‘in a way we cannot as yet comprehend’.
    Within the next twenty-five years, the report said, countermeasures could still be taken, but after the year 2000 it would be impossible to turn the tide. ‘The world system simply no longer has the space and the abundance to tolerate such egocentric behaviour on the part of its inhabitants,’ and if the world did not impose ‘limits on growth’, it predicted scarcity, catastrophe and wealthy states which would increasingly withdraw into themselves.
    A quarter of a century later, what everyone talks about most is climate change: in a pub in Kent, people wonder aloud about why it has not snowed there since they were teenagers. ‘The average English garden moves 200 metres south each day,’ a British magazine reports; my friends in central Italy note the arrival of strange, multicoloured birds, apparently from the tropics; my newspaper in the Netherlands reports regularly on unprecedented flooding; Wladek Matwin in Warsaw sees the spring growing shorter, the winters growing longer, and by late May it is already as hot as in the middle of summer, all very unusual.
    I pick up a hitchhiker, a man from around here. He spends his Saturdays as follows: he climbs a mountain, turns the contents of his bag into a giant bird, jumps off the mountain and then flies around like an eagle amid the summits and valleys. ‘That must be fantastic,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but there isn't much more I can say about it.’ A silence. ‘Yes, it's fantastic.’ Again he falls silent. ‘It's totally peaceful up there, only the wind. Unless the weather starts acting up, then you get a rollicking too, my God, yes …’
    In late afternoon the first billboards begin popping up – Hôtel SainteBernadette, Hôtel de la Grotte, Hôtel Virginia – and then the Las Vegas of Sorrows looms up before me. I pull into Lourdes just in time fordinner at the Hôtel Majestic. There is a lot of cheerful laughter at the