“Thinking about it, it just wouldn’t be possible, it’s extremely hard to imagine. Sandrine Glatron, research director at the CNRS in Strasbourg, did not hide her surprise when I asked her what Strasbourg would look like suddenly emptied of all its animals. “It would look like a city put under a huge bell,” she sketches.
Let’s resume our middle school biology lessons. The earth is made up of the degradation of the rock but above all of the organic matter of the small critters (their corpses, their excrement) which swarm there. Without them, no land and, therefore, bye bye trees, flowers, lawns and plants. Not to mention the end of pollination with the disappearance of bees. The city parks would end up in vast expanses of gravel. “The only solution would then be to cultivate plants in an aqueous medium and feed them artificially”, imagines the researcher. Of course, the Sunday walk at the Orangerie in…