“When a child has a fever, crush a ‘candlenut’ (fiyaai [Aleurites moluccanus]). Add water to the mixture, and apply it to the child’s body. The fever will go down.”
Indigenous Indonesian communities — like the Papuan Abui people of Alor — are the custodians of very ancient knowledge. Their traditional healing practices rely on the masterful use of medicinal plants.
Through years of fieldwork and research, we have documented how the names of local healing plants, their properties, and the related treatments are integrated into everyday conversation and practice among Indigenous communities. These names even shape local human geography (toponyms) and the plots of legends and folktales.
In short, those plant names are more than just vocabulary items in endangered or undocumented languages. They provide us with leads to a treasure trove of medical knowledge, cultural history, and unrecorded oral traditions.
Collecting the names, understanding the culture
Our studies on local phytonyms and medicinal plants represent an interdisciplinary effort originating from language documentation. We combine ethnobotany with field linguistics to document mainly Papuan Indigenous contexts from Southeast Indonesia (Alor-Pantar Archipelago) — including Abui, Kape, Papuna, Kamang, Kabola, Kula, and Sawila.
Collecting and analysing plant samples and their names involves working closely with Indigenous speakers — through direct and systematic interviews — as well as fieldwork and the development of an ongoing database. To ensure taxonomic accuracy, we verify every identification with botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
For every plant, we record more than just its scientific classification and specimen data. We document its local name, English translation, and cultural roots — uncovering the oral traditions, ancestral medical practices, and unwritten histories attached to each species.
This interdisciplinary work proves that medicinal properties, undocumented stories and myths, and ancestral beliefs are deeply and intricately interwoven.
Intertwined practices and heritage
Beyond their medicinal use, plants and fungi are woven into the cultural beliefs and traditions of the Abui people. They shape a complex system of Indigenous knowledge.
Take the ruui haweei, or ‘rat’s ears’ mushroom (Auricularia polytricha). Pregnant women eat this in the hope that their children will be born with beautiful ears.
Then there is the naai or ‘pigeon pea’ (Cajanus cajan). This plant is used to treat diseases in children believed to be caused by their father’s adultery.
In this ritual, healers serve cooked pea porridge to the mother. The number of seeds left behind in the pot is said to reveal the number of women the husband has slept with. According to local belief, this revelation heals the sick child.
Plants also play a role in conflict resolution. During tribal wars, the luul meeting or ‘long pepper’ (Piper retrofractum) was used to symbolically cleanse the ‘warm blood’ spilled in battle. By eating the roots or nuts, villagers purified the bloodshed, allowing them to share meals again and chew betel nuts in peace.
Finally, the bayooqa tree (Pterospermum diversifolium) bridges the gap between medicine and the spirit world. While its leaves treat wounds and dysentery, its wood is sacred. It was traditionally used to build worship platforms for the ancient god ‘Lamòling’.
Locals used these platforms in a ritual called bayooqa liik hasuonra (‘pushing down the platform’), performed forty days after a burial. Family members shared a ritual meal on a wooden slab before cutting down the posts and flipping the platform over — a final farewell to their relative.
Our findings show that healing plants are not only central to the daily medicinal needs of Indigenous Papuan communities, but are also part of a deep-rooted cultural heritage. This knowledge shapes their local identity and guides them through every stage of life — from birth to death.
Francesco Perono Cacciafoco received funding from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU): Research Development Fund (RDF) Grant, “Place Names and Cultural Identity: Toponyms and Their Diachronic Evolution among the Kula People from Alor Island”, Grant Number: RDF-23-01-014, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), Suzhou (Jiangsu), China, 2024-2025.
Source: The Conversation – France (in French) – By Camille Dormoy, Docteure en sociologie, spécialiste des politiques publiques de gestion des déchets/économie circulaire, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV)
Pour réduire les déchets, les politiques publiques misent de plus en plus sur les sciences comportementales, comme les « nudges » (dispositifs de suggestion). Cette idée est séduisante, mais elle déplace la responsabilité d’un problème systémique vers les individus. Les défauts de tris et autres dépôts sauvages sont alors souvent requalifiés comme de « mauvais comportements ». Le problème de cette approche ? Elle invisibilise les déterminants matériels, sociaux et politiques de la production des déchets.
Depuis une dizaine d’années, les collectivités territoriales, les agences nationales et une partie du secteur privé se sont engouffrées dans une voie présentée comme prometteuse : l’application des sciences comportementales à la réduction des déchets.
L’idée est que si les individus trient mal, jettent au mauvais endroit ou produisent trop de déchets, c’est qu’ils manquent d’information, de motivation ou parce que les dispositifs censés orienter leurs gestes (emplacement des bacs, lisibilité des consignes…) n’envoient pas les « bons signaux ». Des campagnes fondées sur les « nudges », des dispositifs incitatifs ou des signalétiques présentées comme « engageantes », sont alors présentées comme suffisantes pour transformer les comportements ordinaires et les pratiques quotidiennes.
Ce récit séduit. En effet, il permet d’agir vite, à moindre coût, et sans remettre en cause les logiques structurelles qui génèrent les déchets. Mais cette vision est réductrice. Elle repose sur une vision des conduites humaines qui méconnaît profondément les rapports sociaux, les conditions d’habiter, les trajectoires résidentielles, les inégalités matérielles et symboliques.
Surtout, elle déplace la question politique des déchets à l’échelle des individus. Ce faisant, elle en assigne la responsabilité aux habitants, présentés comme des acteurs indisciplinés mais rationalisables à coups de micro-incitations.
Dispositifs défaillants et production institutionnelle de la stigmatisation
Sur le terrain, les observations ethnographiques montrent un paysage différent. Il est davantage structuré par des dispositifs sociotechniques, économiques, organisationnels que par les intentions individuelles.
Dans de nombreux quartiers, le tri est entravé par des infrastructures inadaptées. Citons par exemple les vide-ordures encore en usage qui empêchent toute séparation des flux à la source, l’absence d’espaces de stockage dans les logements, les bacs trop éloignés ou difficilement accessibles… certains dispositifs semblent conçus sans avoir tenu compte des pratiques quotidiennes de circulation des habitants. On peut ainsi penser aux points d’apport volontaire dispersés sur plusieurs centaines de mètres, qui imposent de longs trajets pour trier le verre, le papier et les plastiques.
Ces contraintes matérielles façonnent les gestes quotidiens, bien davantage qu’un prétendu manque de volonté ou de sensibilisation. S’y ajoute un autre phénomène, particulièrement saillant dans les quartiers populaires : des pratiques de circulation d’objets – don, récupération, redistribution informelle – se trouvent placées sous un régime de suspicions et de sanctions.
Autrement dit, ce qui relevait auparavant d’une économie populaire du réemploi est désormais requalifié en dépôts sauvages et incivilités. Et cela non pas parce que les pratiques auraient nécessairement changé, mais parce que leur visibilité est perçue comme un problème par les institutions.
Cette requalification transforme des logiques de subsistance ou de solidarité en manquements à la norme. Dans ce cadre, les acteurs institutionnels chargés de la gestion des déchets valorisent avant tout une logique de salubrité publique. Leur action se concentre alors sur l’évacuation, la disparition rapide des traces, l’entretien visuel de la voie publique. Le déchet y est traité comme un rebut dont il faut se débarrasser, et non comme une ressource susceptible d’être valorisée. Ainsi, des objets laissés temporairement dans l’espace public dans l’attente d’un repreneur ou d’un réemploi sont ramassés par les camions de collecte. Et ce faisant, définitivement soustraits à toute possibilité de réutilisation, parfois réduits à l’état de déchets ultimes par le broyage.
Ce glissement est lourd d’effets. Dans ces quartiers, les déchets deviennent des marqueurs sociaux. Ils servent à requalifier des groupes, à leur attribuer des comportements naturalisés, à désigner des « responsabilités » qui coïncident souvent avec des stigmatisations ethno-sociales préexistantes.
La propreté devient alors un instrument de classement. La figure de l’« habitant défaillant » se substitue aux défaillances structurelles des dispositifs sociotechniques, économiques et organisationnels. Rebut d’un côté, ressources de l’autre : la distinction n’est pas seulement technique, elle est sociale et politique. Elle organise la manière dont les territoires sont perçus, traités et hiérarchisés.
Les sciences comportementales masquent les vrais enjeux
Dans ce contexte, le recours aux sciences comportementales agit comme un masque. Il détourne l’attention des problèmes très concrets qui structurent la gestion des déchets au quotidien :
infrastructures défaillantes ou mal pensées (vide-ordures qui encouragent à jeter sans trier, locaux poubelles saturés, équipements peu lisibles),
conditions de travail éprouvantes (gardiens inexistants ou cantonnés à « tenir » les parties communes sans moyens ni formation sur le tri, prestataires de nettoiement soumis à des règles strictes et à des cadences élevées),
et des conflits permanents entre acteurs (bailleur, métropole, prestataires, habitants).
Au lieu de rendre ces dysfonctionnements visibles, l’analyse se concentre sur le dernier maillon de la chaîne : l’habitant, présenté comme celui qui se trompe, résiste ou ne fait pas assez d’efforts. C’est pourtant l’organisation du système qui crée les conditions mêmes de ces « mauvais gestes ».
Les éboueurs, les agents de tri, les services techniques et les décisions politiques disparaissent derrière une théorie simplifiée des comportements, où l’individu devient un point d’application dépolitisé. Pour les instituions, cette approche est séduisante à plusieurs titres :
ensuite, parce qu’elle évite d’avoir à ouvrir le dossier – plus coûteux et plus conflictuel – de la réduction à la source, de la régulation de la production, ou de la reconfiguration des infrastructures (transformation matérielle et organisationnelle des dispositifs existants). Cela impliquerait ainsi de remettre en cause des équipements qui orientent structurellement les pratiques vers l’évacuation plutôt que vers la valorisation. Ou encore de redéfinir le rôle des acteurs de terrain – gardiens, agents de propreté, prestataires –, aujourd’hui cantonnés à une gestion de la salubrité visible ;
enfin, elle s’accorde avec une conception néolibérale de l’action publique où chacun est sommé d’être responsable de son empreinte.
Pourtant, cette logique se heurte à deux limites majeures.
La première tient aux résultats eux-mêmes de ces interventions comportementales. D’abord, leurs effets sont difficiles à mesurer. Elles peuvent également se révéler peu durables, puisque fortement dépendante des configurations sociales et matérielles dans lesquelles elles sont déployées. Enfin, elles peuvent modifier les comportements à court terme, mais ces ajustements se défont rapidement lorsque les incitations cessent, tant que l’organisation concrète reste inchangée. En pratique, les effets observés dans des cadres expérimentaux se révèlent difficiles à transposer durablement dans les contextes ordinaires.
La seconde limite est politique. En recentrant l’attention sur les comportements individuels, ces interventions contribuent à déplacer la responsabilité vers ceux qui disposent de la marge de manœuvre la plus étroite. Les habitants les plus précaires deviennent les premiers visés par ces dispositifs correctifs, alors même qu’ils subissent des infrastructures défaillantes et des conditions d’habiter plus contraignantes que d’autres.
Pendant ce temps, les ressorts structurels de la production de déchets demeurent intouchés. L’action publique se focalise ainsi sur ceux qui ont le moins de pouvoir d’action et épargne ceux qui déterminent réellement les volumes et les flux.
Sortir de la vision psychologisante de la gestion des déchets
En finir avec les sciences comportementales appliquées à la gestion des déchets ne signifie pas rejeter toute forme d’attention aux pratiques quotidiennes et individuelles. Cela implique plutôt de déplacer son centre de gravité. Pour cela, il convient de sortir d’une vision psychologisante, de réintroduire les dimensions matérielles, institutionnelles, historiques, politiques et sociales, et enfin de reconnaître que les déchets ne sont pas seulement une affaire d’individus mais aussi de systèmes.
Les infrastructures, les logiques économiques de production, la division sociale du travail, les politiques urbaines et les rapports de pouvoir façonnent bien davantage les volumes, les flux et les gestes que ne le feront jamais les autocollants sur un bac jaune.
Si les sciences comportementales ont pu offrir quelques outils ponctuels, elles ne constituent ni une théorie sociale ni une politique publique durable. La gestion des déchets exige une compréhension plus exigeante, celle d’un monde où la matérialité, les normes, la stigmatisation, les inégalités et les infrastructures s’entremêlent. S’y dérober en réduisant sa complexité à des micro-incitations n’est pas seulement inefficace, c’est aussi renoncer à penser ce que les déchets révèlent réellement de nos sociétés.
Camille Dormoy ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Face à l’urgence écologique, l’inaction est souvent justifiée par nos biais cognitifs individuels. Mais cette lecture psychologisante occulte l’essentiel. Des causes politiques, économiques et sociales sont à l’œuvre dans l’effondrement du vivant actuel. On le verra à travers l’exemple des océans et des milieux marins.
Face à l’urgence climatique, pourquoi sait-on mais n’agit-on pas ? Telle est la question posée par l’activiste Camille Étienne dans son documentaire Pourquoi on se bat ? (2022). Parmi ses invités figure Sébastien Bohler, journaliste et chroniqueur, notamment connu pour son essai le Bug humain (2019). Dans l’ouvrage, il explique que notre cerveau privilégierait le court terme au détriment de la planète. Il en conclut qu’il faut rééduquer notre cerveau pour déclencher l’action collective.
Ce discours, qui attribue l’inaction écologique à des biais cognitifs, c’est-à-dire à des mécanismes automatiques du cerveau, est repris par de nombreuses communications grand public. Sa simplicité est séduisante, mais il pose plusieurs problèmes. En effet, il ne dit rien des écarts considérables de comportements que l’on peut observer entre individus ou sociétés, il occulte les facteurs politiques, économiques et culturels et surtout il offre un alibi aux industries qui ont tout intérêt à maintenir l’exploitation intensive de la nature.
Cette explication est attrayante, mais ne permet pas de comprendre ce qui organise l’inaction ni d’y apporter des solutions concrètes et efficaces. Le cas du milieu marin illustre particulièrement cette logique : la gouvernance de l’océan est particulièrement délicate dans un contexte où prédomine l’exploitation économique, alors que les problèmes qui en découlent (catastrophes environnementales, destruction des moyens de subsistance de celles et ceux qui en dépendent ailleurs dans le monde…) sont souvent invisibilisés.
Cette découverte est relativement récente. En effet, la recherche océanographique s’est développée plus tardivement que ses équivalents terrestres, du fait, entre autres raisons, des difficultés d’accès du milieu marin. Ce retard explique en partie pourquoi la prise de conscience environnementale liée à la mer a été plus tardive que celle concernant les forêts ou les terres agricoles, par exemple.
Surtout, l’océan est un milieu qui nous est étranger : la dégradation des fonds, la raréfaction des espèces ou l’acidification des eaux se produisent hors de nos champs sensoriels.
Ce contexte est particulièrement propice à l’émergence de biais cognitifs pour expliquer leur effondrement écologique.
Des biais réels mais surestimés
Depuis les années 1980, la recherche sur le sujet a montré qu’il existait à la fois des biais psychologiques et des remèdes à ces derniers. Pour n’en citer que quelques-uns : biais d’optimisme, de présentisme (c’est-à-dire, notre tendance à préférer les résultats immédiats au détriment des résultats futurs) ou encore distance psychologique.
Appliqués à l’écologie, ils se traduisent par une minimisation des risques environnementaux, qui sont alors perçus comme lointains, temporaires ou réversibles. De ces constats naît l’idée que l’inaction environnementale serait préprogrammée dans notre cerveau de façon universelle et que les solutions devraient viser cette partie rétive de nos psychologies.
Autre exemple : le phénomène de « shifting baseline » (aussi appelé amnésie environnementale), qui décrit la tendance pour chaque nouvelle génération à réévaluer comme « normal » un état de plus en plus dégradé de la nature. Pour le milieu marin, les professionnels prennent alors pour référence des niveaux de biodiversité déjà appauvris. Chaque nouvelle étape de dégradation des écosystèmes est ainsi intégrée comme un nouvel état stable, ce qui rend la perte globale plus difficile à voir.
Souvent mobilisés pour expliquer les comportements humains, ces biais peinent pourtant à décrire toute la réalité. Raisonnons par l’absurde : s’il existe des biais universels qui nous poussent à minimiser les enjeux environnementaux, voire à détruire l’environnement, comment expliquer les écarts parfois importants en termes de croyances et de comportements que l’on peut observer d’une personne à l’autre, d’une société à l’autre ?
L’effondrement écologique ne peut se comprendre sans faire l’analyse des sociétés qui y contribuent et qui exacerbent nos biais individuels. Dans nos sociétés industrialisées, l’accroissement du capital structure à la fois nos environnements sociaux et nos motivations. Or, l’avènement des sociétés capitalistes n’a pas été le résultat de seuls biais cognitifs ou de processus biologiques universels : il a été mené par une petite fraction de l’humanité qui, avec les moyens matériels et politiques adéquats, a pu l’imposer à la majorité, entraînant la rupture des rapports sociaux et environnementaux préexistants.
Dans les milieux marins, l’effondrement écologique s’explique surtout par les conditions économiques et politiques qui le rendent possible à l’échelle globale : pêche industrielle peu régulée, marchandisation de la biodiversité marine (tourisme, aquaculture…), intérêts économiques et politiques liés au contrôle de l’extraction minière et énergétique (hydrocarbures offshore, minerais marins)… Le tout inscrit dans un système économique global fondé sur l’accumulation.
Tout cela montre que l’effondrement écologique actuel est davantage la conséquence d’arrangements sociopolitiques que de biais cognitifs individuels qui nous pousseraient naturellement à détruire les écosystèmes. Il nous faut sortir de cette vision et agir sur les causes systémiques qui produisent l’inaction.
En effet, nous pouvons agir sur les organes politiques et économiques qui encadrent la gestion des milieux naturels, dont les milieux marins. Or, c’est précisément ce que les discours majoritaires sur les biais psychologiques empêchent de faire. En légitimant l’idée selon laquelle ces biais universels – car inscrits dans notre biologie – seraient à l’origine des problèmes d’exploitation, ils invisibilisent les rapports de pouvoir, déresponsabilisent les politiques et fournissent des outils permettant ensuite de justifier l’inaction.
Que faire ? Individuellement, il est bien sûr possible d’agir sur sa consommation de produits issus de la surpêche et de l’exploitation animale, de limiter les déplacements polluants ou encore de rejoindre des collectifs afin de gagner en capacité d’action et d’information.
Quels arguments pour convaincre et engager à l’action ? La recherche en psychologie et en communication environnementale a identifié six « vérités clés » :
le changement climatique existe,
il est créé par nos sociétés industrielles,
il existe un consensus scientifique,
il a des conséquences graves sur l’humanité et la biodiversité,
la majorité des personnes en sont inquiètes et veulent agir,
enfin, des actions efficaces existent.
L’action collective doit ensuite œuvrer à tous les niveaux, du local à l’international, en gardant pour boussole :
le respect des droits et de la dignité des populations,
une gouvernance la plus égalitaire et démocratique possible,
et la mise en place de mesures efficaces, contrôlées et collaboratives de gestion des biens communs, tels que des aires marines protégées exigeantes.
L’effondrement du climat et de la biodiversité ne sont donc pas des fatalités, mais les conséquences des systèmes sur lesquels nous pouvons avoir un impact – à condition de les réorienter vers des modèles plus justes et soutenables.
Pierre-Yves Carpentier est membre de l’association Alternatiba06 qui œuvre pour l’écologie.
Benoit Dérijard a reçu des financements du CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), de l’Université Côte d’Azur, du FEAMPA (Fonds Européen pour les Affaires Maritimes, la Pêche et l’Aquaculture), de la Région Sud et de l’OFB (Office Français de la Biodiversité).
Clara Vincendon ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
We were standing by a large white board in one of the prison’s educational areas, debriefing how our study on hope had gone when the man slipped into the room without a sound. Like the other participants he was over 60, and serving a life sentence. He had grey hair, and was very tall and slim.
He slowly picked up a chair before slamming it down. I invited him to join us, but he stayed still while the others watched. Then he dragged the chair across the floor with a piercing scrape. I could hear my own pulse.
As I began to speak I noticed he was crying. At first, it sounded like a whisper of sobs, but then it got louder. He rose abruptly, and came up close to me. I wrote in my fieldwork notes from that day:
My heart is racing. He asks, towering over me: ‘How dare you ask us about hope.’ The alarm blares. Guards escort him out. The others sit in stunned silence, eyes locked on us, waiting for a reaction.
In the months that followed, I would meet many other men for whom hope was not necessarily a lifeline as is so commonly assumed, but a burden that they had to carry, sometimes painfully.
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Hope is not a soft word in prison. It shapes how people cope with their sentence and it determines whether – and how – they engage with staff and other prisoners. It shapes whether they commit to vocational and educational activities, and it sustains connections with people on the outside.
For older life-sentenced prisoners specifically, hope becomes interlinked with accelerated ageing, with bullying from younger prisoners, and with the fear of release into an unknown world.
My project (In search of Hope: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners) began in August 2022. We were investigating how the “right to hope” – as defined by Judge Ann Power-Forde in her concurring opinion to the European Court of Human Rights judgment Vinter and others v the UK (2013)– translates behind prison walls for older people serving life sentences, many of whom face slim prospects of release due to their advanced age and the length of their prison sentence.
The research was carried out across three English prisons over 12 months by myself and research associate, Helen Gair, with a small team of research assistants. We conducted fieldwork in a Category A prison (reserved for people presenting the highest levels of risk), a Category C (mid-security level prison, often aimed at training and resettlement), and a Category D (open prison or the last stage before release).
Each facility had its own smell and sound. The spatial layout and daily rhythm varied too. For instance, the high security site was an old red brick Victorian building, and the wings were arranged in a half panopticon (circular) design. Outside the main block, guard dogs were walked on a strip of green that ran along a ten-metre-high wall. Inside it was loud; lockdowns were frequent, and it smelled of sweat and mould.
In the open prison, the smell of cannabis drifted through the grounds. Men greeted us in grey tracksuits, often carrying disposable cups of tea. There were ducks and a pond and a RAF plane on display.
In the Category C prison, we often got lost. The alphabetical alignment of buildings made little sense to us. We had our own set of keys which meant we could move around independently. However, rusty locks slowed us down often, and every gate and door had to be opened and closed behind us.
Men aged 50 and above and serving life sentences were invited to participate. We collected diaries, completed ethnographic prison observations, and ran one-to-one interviews with each participant.
Additionally, interviews were conducted with prison staff, both working in frontline and office-based roles, to get a sense of how those who work closest to ageing life-sentenced prisoners perceived hope and whether prison practices preserved or restrained it. Overall, we wanted to find out how hope was experienced by prisoners and how it was handled as a prison practice.
Idealised hope v prison reality
In the 2010s, a case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights by Jeremy Bamber, Douglas Vinter and Peter Moor. They had each been convicted of murder in the UK and been given whole-life orders – the most severe form of life sentence.
This means that by law, they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison with no minimum term set for parole or release. Only a small percentage of people get such severe sentences: Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe being two examples.
On July 9, 2013, the human rights court ruled that whole-life orders which do not include any prospect of release or review would amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The notion of a “right to hope” was first mentioned by Judge Ann Power-Forde’s concurring judgment:
… Even those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts … nevertheless retain their essential humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and to do that would be degrading.
The right to hope is thus vested in a possibility of release and review. What this means is that there must be a realistic possibility that any prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment be considered, at some point in time, for release or that the justification for their continued detention needs to be reviewed.
But how does the right to hope account for the fact of ageing in prison?
The rapid and global “greying” of the prison population indeed complicates the human rights jurisprudencial understanding of a right to hope. As of March 2025, there were 87,919 people in prison in England and Wales, with nearly one in five (18%) aged 50 or older, according to the Ministry of Justice.
Compounding matters, life-sentenced prisoners now make up around 10% of the sentenced population, and this group is ageing rapidly. Almost a third of “lifers” are over 50. As a result, old, life-sentenced prisoners are the fastest-growing subgroup in the system.
This phenomenon combined with the current overcrowding crisis produces a range of managerial and ethical challenges: bed spaces are tied up for decades, healthcare and social care demands are on a steep rise, and the pressures on ill-equipped prison staff increase.
The myth of prison release
One important finding from our project is that parole and the possibility of release during a prisoner’s life span becomes somewhat of a myth for those serving life sentences at an advanced age. Usually, life-sentenced prisoners are given a minimum tariff, which is a period when they are not eligible for parole. This legal principle does not account for age however. Dean, 62 , was a life-sentenced prisoner at the Category A prison who had served six years. He told us how unrealistic parole felt in light of his age:
I will be 80 years old before my first parole hearing and in all honesty I don’t know if I will reach that milestone. Although my health is reasonable, I’m on all kinds of medication to keep me going but incarceration has a way of dragging you down so I am not optimistic.
Trevor was 73 when we interviewed him in the Category C prison and had been inside for 27 years. He was sat in a wheelchair and had an elastic band wrapped around his middle finger and thumb. He explained to us that it helped him hold a pen.
He described years of postponed parole hearings, medical delays, and transfers to lower security prisons being denied because his health needs could not be met in open prison conditions. He asked us simply:
If you were in my situation would you live in hope or would you resign yourself to your future?
The experience of no longer believing in release is supported by official data that shows that few prisoners sentenced to life get released during their lifetime.
One in five lifers are now beyond their tariff, often by several years with age-related barriers to parole contributing to prolonged incarceration. What we noticed during fieldwork was that older prisoners often struggled to access or complete accredited programmes because of mobility issues and cognitive impairment, but also due to managerial prioritisation of younger prisoners or those convicted of shorter sentences.
Rising deaths in England and Wales among older prisoners further underscores the illusory prospect of release.
Nearly nine in ten of the 192 deaths from natural causes in the year 2025 involved older prisoners and the number of people in prison requiring palliative care continues to grow.
From 2016 to 2020, hospitals recorded 190 admissions of older male prisoners with a palliative care diagnosis. In roughly 40% of those cases, cancer was the main condition on entry. The charity, Inquest, reported in 2020 that many of the deaths in prison were neither inevitable nor unforeseeable, pointing instead to systemic failings in healthcare provision, communication, emergency intervention, and medication management.
Building on this, academic scholars Philippa Tomczak and Ròisìn Mulgrew argued that classifying deaths in custody as “natural” obscure the ways in which prison environments contribute to deaths that might otherwise have been avoided.
Additionally, research has repeatedly linked self-harm and suicide patterns to experiences of hopelessness and social isolation. The participants in our study similarly tied the removal of hope to suicides, citing examples they had witnessed in prison.
In his prison diary, a participant with thick rectangular glasses called Ian, 65, who had served 33 years of his life sentence and was now held in a Category C prison, wrote:
With the absent (sic) of hope you have despair. I have known prisoners who have committed suicide, they had no hope or expectations only misery and despair.
So there appears to be a contradiction between the legal possibility of release and its practical improbability in the context of old and ageing, life-sentenced prisoners.
The fear of release
Beyond the practical improbability of release, many participants described how much they feared the world they would hypothetically re-enter one day. Several participants in their 60s and 70s reflected on how they no longer recognised the world outside.
For them, the time spent in prison combined with their physical and cognitive decline has institutionalised them. They felt they could not fare alone outside prison rules and environments. One man named Roy, who had spent decades in various Category A prisons wrote in his diary:
I have no hope of, or real wish to leave prison, where I am now completely institutionalised, I have no responsibilities other than abiding by prison rules, and few expenses.
Another frail-looking man named Russell, 68, described in his diary (which he completed from his Category C cell) how the very idea of a future had become hollow: “It’s difficult really because like I say, I haven’t got any hope of getting out of prison as far as I’m concerned. That is it. I’m in prison and that’s as far as it will go.”
Practical matters such as technological advances and housing also made the very thought of release overwhelming. Gary, 63, who had served 24 years, wrote poignantly about his fears of release, saying: “Release frightens me because of the label that has been firmly given to me and that brings its own problems. Where will I live? How will I live?”
A 73-year-old participant named Kevin, who was transferred during the project from a Category C to an open prison, spoke about how, after 21 years in prison, things will have changed too much on the outside for him to deal with. As he stood on the doorstep of freedom, he worried about getting his head around new technology and accessing simple things like his pension. He said: “Technology has moved on at a phenomenal pace, seems very scary to me … I should stay here in prison where everything is regulated and structured rather than going out to something that is quite alien to me.”
These feelings are exacerbated by the erosion of social networks, the death of family and friends, and the disappearance of any meaningful horizon. Social isolation means that the world they would be reintegrating into has become alien and they will have to navigate it mostly alone. Kevin added:
People that I used to call friends no longer want to know me or have died. One thing for sure that I can [say] is true, you certainly find out who your true friends are … when you come to prison and especially if you come to prison for a long time.
This sense of destroyed horizons, where release holds no promise and the outside world has become even more terrifying than the cell, has been dramatised in popular culture.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the character Brooks, released after 50 years inside, finds himself unable to cope with the pace and impersonality of the modern world. His suicide becomes a haunting metaphor for the crushing effect of institutionalisation that hollows out the self and the possibility of meaningful social reintegration.
When hoping becomes harmful
Other prisoners we spoke to seemingly decided it was more beneficial for them to give up on hope altogether. Some – like Barry -– wondered if giving up on hope of release would be less torturous.
Barry was 65 when we spoke to him and has spent over four decades in prison on a life sentence. He’s tall and slim. When he walked in, we noticed he had a limp and used a cane. The first time we met, he sat with his hands clasped, speaking in a measured voice that occasionally broke into a laugh, not from humour but more from what I felt like was exhaustion. Though parole is technically available to him, he has come to see the pursuit of release not as hopeful but as harmful.
Over years of disappointments, Barry wondered if living with no hope would be less painful and felt it had become “pointless” to hope. He wrote in his diary:
Hope is when I want something to happen or something to be true … I often ask myself would it be kinder to live with no hope and just live with a ‘wait and see’ kind of attitude.
Indeed, every parole hearing postponed, every dashed expectation had eroded the value of hoping. Ultimately, giving up on hope is captured as something that eventually preserves mental health. As Barry added:
An empty case of hope is healthy, I say that because of the amount of men I have seen become ill; disappointment becomes despair, becomes depression, becomes mental ill health … then when you stop hoping, you start to recover and you no longer feel hopeless, as you are not hoping for anything. So hope is a paradox, it can disappoint or make you feel there is a real possibility of things to come.
He recalled reading about an American woman sentenced to life without parole who had begged for the death penalty instead. Her explanation (“I don’t just want to be alive, I want to be able to live”) resonated with him so powerfully that he said it, “almost knocked me off my chair”. He recognised in her plea the same cruel paradox he faced: that to prolong his existence in hopeless conditions was no life at all. His conclusion was irrevocable:
I understand more than most the need for hope, but all the years that I have been in prison and all the hopes I have had destroyed, I see hope as an enemy.
But then Barry equally admitted that he still hoped, no matter what. His hope was like a human natural reflex, over which he had no control, it just happened. He said: “We all hope … I hope I’ll get out on my next parole.”
What then, is hope in prison? Is it cruel and torturous or is it a human feature that brings relief and drive?
Recalibrating hope
We found hope meant different things to different people. It is not just about release. Some needed detailed plans, others focused on the day to day. Sometimes hope shifted towards modest goals that are tied to imagined places outside prison: a quiet retirement, a chance to study, to garden.
Terry was 65 and had served 38 years in category A prison. He told us that all he hoped for was “a quiet life in retirement”, while Russell, who was about the same age but had served over 12 years and was in a Category C when he wrote his diary, said that he hoped to, “… someday be released and to live the remaining years I have left in a small bungalow with a small garden in a village miles away from my old area of England. Have a pet cat.”
Others cast their hopes in more detailed and concrete plans about what the future would look like. Carl, 60, who enjoyed cooking and working out, for example, said he hoped to move in with his daughter and grandchildren for a while in an area where his ambition is to build his own house. He added: “I designed and roughly costed the development plan that helped to reinforce the hope that these plans were achievable.”
In the moment
But other participants recalibrated hope to more immediate aspirations set in the present, and in day-to-day encounters.
Barry said: “My hope is that I continue to live in the moment … You know, cause right now I’m in this office with you two guys, it’s calm. It’s nice. It’s peaceful. It’s a nice moment. But I’m not gonna think about what it’s gonna be like at 4pm because I might walk out that door and straight into a prison riot.”
Russell agreed, adding: “Looking for the future, I just go from one day to the next. It’s no good planning too far ahead.”
This shift of hope raises questions about how prisons shape and even limit the ways people can access and imagine their futures.
Another participant, Craig, who was 66 and had only served just over five years in the Category A prison when we met him wrote: “… you personalise hope to suit the circumstances.”
For the institution and those working in prison, these attitudes towards hope could be perceived as successful because prisoners sentenced to the longest sentences demonstrated a commitment to live a crime-free life, set in the present moment, focused on small menial things that will not raise any risk for management.
But when hope becomes so short-termist and bland, we are able to capture a shift in the very logic of imprisonment – one which is less about nourishing transformation aimed at resocialisation, and more about the life-long containment of decaying and dying bodies.
Hope matters
This article opened with a man telling my colleagues and I: “How dare you ask us about hope?” That moment has echoed throughout this study, both as an outburst that shows how prison research can be fraught with complexity but can also propel further and deeper reflection on humanitarian ideals such as hope.
When people in prison speak of the cruelty and fallacy of hope, you begin to wonder how much beauty and promise hope really holds in spaces of high control and constraint.
When transposed to prisons, hope no longer seems to be attached to an open horizon, evocative of lightness and liberty found anew. Instead, it represents dissociation from the outside world, and the cause of frustration, mistrust and a sense of abandonment.
Hope in prison exposes a disconnect between abstract legal humanitarian ideals and the empirical realities of ageing while incarcerated for long periods of time. And this claim could probably be extended to other settings of heightened regulation and tight monitoring, such as care homes, immigration detention centres, or even youth justice facilities.
The decision to depart from hope’s conventional, perhaps slightly romanticised meaning, and to recalibrate it towards real, daily conditions could nonetheless illustrate new ways for how older life-sentenced prisoners (and others under constraint) regain agency and keep going.
Ultimately, hope matters – not only for the people I met and interviewed – but also for broader society.
Imprisonment marked by hopelessness is linked to deteriorating mental and physical health, increasing pressure on prison healthcare and, upon release, on community health and social care services.
This is exacerbated for older prisoners released after decades inside. Hope is not a sentimental indulgence, but a condition that shapes whether imprisonment prepares people to live safely beyond prison or releases them with profound unmet needs. Regimes that erode hope risk merely displacing, rather than resolving, social harm.
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Marion Vannier receives funding from the UK Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellowship.
Source: The Conversation – France (in French) – By Nishant Kumar, India Alliance Fellow, National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore & Department of Biology, University of Oxford
Des chiffres vieux de dix ans évoquent une population de 60 millions de chiens des rues en Inde, bien trop pour les rassembler dans des foyers.Dasarath Deka/Shutterstock
On compte plus de 60 millions de chiens errants en Inde. Depuis le déclin des vautours à la fin des années 1990, l’apparition de nouvelles sources de nourriture issues des déchets leur permet d’accéder aux déjections des abattoirs, au nourrissage spontané et aux carcasses abandonnées (la disparition des vautours a entraîné l’absence de régulation des populations de charognards, comme les chiens et les rats). Le comportement de ces animaux opportunistes a évolué, révélant l’interdépendance complexe entre chaîne alimentaire, pratiques humaines et santé publique.
Quand j’étais enfant, dans l’Inde rurale, ma grand-mère donnait chaque après-midi au chien du village un demi-chapati et un bol de lait, manifestement insuffisants pour couvrir ses besoins. Le chien survivait en fouillant les environs et en récupérant de la nourriture auprès des maisons voisines. Des années plus tard, à Delhi, j’ai croisé des chiens errants refusant des biscuits tant ils recevaient de nourriture de la part des habitants du quartier, qui tous rivalisaient d’attention à leur égard.
En Inde, l’entrelacement de valeurs religieuses et culturelles a instauré une forte tolérance à l’égard des non-humains et de la faune sauvage, toutes classes sociales confondues. Une attitude ancrée dans des millénaires de coexistence. Les populations acceptent délibérément de s’exposer à des risques importants pour vivre avec les animaux. Mais cet équilibre se fragilise à mesure que les villes s’étendent et que les chiens deviennent plus territoriaux dans des espaces partagés toujours plus encombrés et jonchés de déchets.
L’Inde compte au moins 60 millions de chiens en liberté, selon un décompte vieux de plus de dix ans. Des enquêtes plus récentes en recensent environ 1 million rien qu’à Delhi. Dans le même temps, le pays concentre plus d’un tiers des décès dus à la rage dans le monde.
À la différence de la plupart des pays occidentaux, la culture et le droit indiens proscrivent l’abattage. Les chiens doivent être capturés, stérilisés, vaccinés puis – impérativement – réinstallés sur leur territoire initial. En pratique, ces règles sont fréquemment bafouées.
Tout change en août 2025. Après plusieurs attaques de chiens errants contre des enfants, la Cour suprême indienne ordonne brièvement la capture de tous les chiens des rues de Delhi et de sa région, avec leur placement en refuges ou en fourrières, promettant pour la première fois depuis des décennies des rues sans chiens.
La décision est inapplicable – il n’existe tout simplement pas de structures pour accueillir des millions d’animaux – et déclenche une vive réaction des associations de protection animale. Deux jours plus tard, la Cour fait machine arrière et rétablit la politique de stérilisation en vigueur.
Les décisions ultérieures ont resserré le périmètre d’application. En novembre 2025, la Cour a ordonné le retrait des chiens des écoles, des hôpitaux et des zones de transport public dans tout le pays, tout en imposant des restrictions à l’alimentation des chiens dans l’espace public et en encourageant la mise en place de clôtures pour les tenir à distance.
Plus récemment encore, le 7 janvier 2026, elle a demandé aux autorités de clôturer et de sécuriser l’ensemble des 1,5 million d’écoles et d’établissements d’enseignement supérieur de l’Inde contre les chiens, et ce, en seulement huit semaines. Mais, comme les précédentes injonctions, ce calendrier ambitieux fait abstraction des contraintes d’infrastructure et a peu de chances de réduire significativement la fréquence des morsures et des infections qui en découlent. La Cour entend actuellement les parties prenantes, cherchant une voie médiane entre le retrait à grande échelle des chiens et le respect du bien-être animal.
La nation est divisée. L’État semble incapable de tuer ces chiens, de les héberger dans des foyers ou de les contrôler. La question de leur devenir relève à la fois de la sécurité publique et de la protection animale, mais touche aussi à quelque chose de plus profond : le dernier chapitre de l’un des partenariats les plus remarquables de l’évolution.
Les chiens sont la seule espèce de vertébrés à avoir suivi les migrations humaines hors d’Afrique, à travers tous les climats et tous les types de peuplement. Si le moment exact de leur domestication reste incertain, on sait que les chiens ont évolué pour vivre aux côtés des humains. Mais ce lien entre espèces se heurte aujourd’hui à un défi inédit : celui de l’urbanisation tropicale.
Les chiens des rues en milieu urbain peuvent se montrer très territoriaux. thinkpaws.org
Au cours des derniers siècles, alors que les chiens gagnaient leur place dans nos foyers, les humains ont créé plus de 400 races, belles, laborieuses ou affectueuses. Cette coévolution est importante : elle a rendu les chiens sensibles aux signaux humains et capables de développer de forts liens avec des personnes ou des lieux précis. Dans l’Inde urbaine, où les chiens n’appartiennent à personne mais ne sont pas vraiment sauvages, ces liens se traduisent par un comportement territorial autour d’un foyer ou d’une personne qui les nourrit.
Le laboratoire socio-écologique unique de l’Inde
L’Inde offre une perspective inégalée sur cette relation. Historiquement, les chiens des rues jouaient le rôle d’éboueurs. Dans les quartiers plus modestes, ils le font encore. Mais dans les zones plus aisées, ils sont désormais nourris délibérément.
Chiens, cochons, vaches et humains coexistant. thinkpaws.org
Des recherches préliminaires à Delhi menées avec ma collègue Bharti Sharma montrent que les chiens s’organisent en meutes autour de foyers précis, où quelques personnes qui les nourrissent régulièrement peuvent couvrir presque 100 % de leurs besoins alimentaires. Cela permet des densités de chiens bien plus élevées que ce que le rôle d’éboueur pourrait supporter.
La collision urbaine
C’est ici que la coexistence ancienne se heurte à l’urbanisme moderne. Les rues indiennes sont des espaces multifonctions. Dans les climats tropicaux, les récupérateurs de déchets et les travailleurs manuels opèrent souvent la nuit – exactement aux heures où les chiens se montrent les plus territoriaux et où les habitants plus aisés qui les nourrissent dorment.
Dans les climats tropicaux, les chiffonniers et les ouvriers travaillent souvent la nuit – précisément aux heures où les chiens se montrent les plus territoriaux et où les habitants plus aisés qui les nourrissent dorment.
Les chiens ont adapté leur comportement – aboiements, poursuites, morsures occasionnelles – de manière à être involontairement récompensés par ceux qui les nourrissent, tout en créant des dangers pour les autres. Les chiffres sont inquiétants : des millions de morsures et des milliers de décès dus à la rage chaque année.
Pour autant, une réaction contre les décisions de la Cour suprême était inévitable. Avec la gentrification, qui redéfinit qui peut décider de l’organisation de la vie urbaine, un conflit de valeurs est apparu : certains défendent la présence partagée des animaux, d’autres privilégient l’élimination des risques.
La voie à suivre
Les villes indiennes ont peut-être atteint leur « apogée de coexistence ». Malgré les nuisances quotidiennes – aboiements, poursuites – des millions de personnes continuent de nourrir ces chiens. Pourtant, le même chien qui remue la queue devant ses nourrisseurs familiers peut mordre un inconnu. Il ne s’agit pas d’agression irrationnelle, mais d’une protection territoriale née d’un lien profond avec une communauté humaine spécifique.
Les villes occidentales ont abattu leurs chiens errants il y a longtemps, car les priorités sociales y étaient plus homogènes. La diversité de l’Inde empêche un tel consensus. Il faudra sans doute encore de vingt à trente ans avant que l’ensemble de sa population urbaine considère la présence de chiens territoriaux comme intolérable.
À mesure que l’Inde s’urbanise, elle doit choisir entre préserver des espaces pour des relations anciennes, antérieures aux villes elles-mêmes ou suivre la voie occidentale d’un contrôle total. Le rituel de ma grand-mère, donnant son demi-chapati, incarnait un ancien accord : un investissement minimal, une coexistence pacifique et un bénéfice mutuel. Les chiens de Delhi, suralimentés et défendant leur territoire, incarnent aujourd’hui une nouvelle intimité plus intense – et il n’est pas certain que cette situation soit bénéfique pour les deux espèces.
Nishant Kumar bénéficie d’un financement de la DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellowship. Il est chercheur associé à cette bourse au National Centre for Biological Science, TIFR, à Bangalore, en Inde, son accueil à l’étranger étant assuré par le Département de biologie de l’Université d’Oxford. Il est également cofondateur et scientifique en chef d’un think-tank de recherche basé à Delhi, Thinkpaws : www.Thinkpaws.org.
The UK government has just announced the results of its biggest-ever auction for new offshore wind projects. By doubling the budget at the eleventh hour, it managed to award contracts for a massive 8.4 gigawatts of new capacity. Energy secretary Ed Miliband described it as “a monumental step towards clean power by 2030”.
But despite the headline success, this outcome actually makes the government’s own clean power targets harder – not easier – to meet. While the auction successfully awarded contracts, it does nothing to address the bottlenecks that mean these projects won’t start producing electricity for many years.
German company RWE dominated the auction. It has been awarded contracts for 6.9GW of capacity, securing revenue for its Dogger Bank South, Norfolk Vanguard and Awel y Môr projects. The only other big winner was SSE, for the next phase of its Berwick Bank project in the North Sea, currently the largest planned offshore wind farm in the world.
The government’s “contracts for difference” scheme guarantees developers a fixed price for electricity to protect them from market volatility. This auction result should help stabilise an industry that was running into problems.
After the disastrous collapse of projects like the proposed Hornsea 4 wind farm last year, the government tweaked the rules for this round of auctions to prioritise deliverability over costs. It also extend guaranteed revenue contracts from 15 to 20 years, giving investors long-term certainty.
It’s a pragmatic move. By relying on established giants like RWE and prioritising projects that are actually likely to get built, the UK hopes to leave the era of high-profile collapses in the past.
Installing a large floating wind turbine at a pilot project in France, 2023. Obatala-photography / shutterstock
Floating wind risks sinking
But this safety-first approach has left the more innovative end of the sector out in the cold.
Floating turbines are the next big thing in the wind industry. They enable electricity generation further offshore, where winds are even stronger and more consistent.
However, their low level of funding was already a talking point in the industry, and in these new auctions the budget for floating wind projects remained stagnant. Only two floating offshore wind farms have been awarded contracts, each a modest 100 megawatts (these days, a single big fixed-bottom turbine can generate about 15 megawatts).
The UK government has doubled down on established technology, but has missed a crucial chance to drive the standardisation floating wind will need before it can be deployed on a much larger scale.
Behind the bottleneck
But the ultimate problem is time.
The government’s clean power 2030 action plan sets the ambitious target of taking fixed-bottom offshore wind capacity from around 16GW today to nearly 50GW by 2030. The new 8.4GW may sound like a huge step towards that total, but signed contracts aren’t the same as actual turbines.
In the short-term, there are still serious bottlenecks. There aren’t enough of the huge and specialised ships needed to transport and deploy offshore wind farms. Grid connections are backlogged, and essential port upgrades can take a decade to complete.
Despite the government prioritising the most mature projects, doubling the budget at the last minute just adds even more capacity lined up behind these backlogs. In fact, the UK already has a significant pipeline of 96.4GW of offshore wind in various stages of development.
The newly-awarded projects will almost certainly not be generating power by 2030. Even with more investment in ports and supply chains, the timing is simply too tight.
The new auction demonstrates the balancing act between the need to grow confidence among investors and progress towards renewable energy generation targets.
Tweaks made to the auction design should result in fewer incidents like Hornsea 4 and will help revive a struggling industry, but political uncertainty is growing. In the UK, Reform is leading the polls and has promised to roll back net zero initiatives while, in the US, Donald Trump’s vendetta against offshore wind has resulted in legal battles that have global ramifications for the industry.
The industry needed a win and it got one. The new auction should ultimately deliver more wind farms. However, it won’t accelerate the transition to net zero. If the goal really is clean power by 2030, the government will need to do much more.
Thomas York receives funding from the University of Leicester’s Future 50 Doctoral Training Pathway.
Au début des années 2000, une importante étude sur la santé des femmes, la Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a fait la une des journaux. Lancée dans les années 1990 et toujours en cours, elle vise à déterminer si le traitement hormonal de la ménopause (THM), utilisé pour soulager leurs symptômes, pouvait également protéger contre des problèmes de santé graves survenant à un âge avancé.
Une sous-étude, la WHI Memory Study (WHIMS), s’est concentrée sur la santé cognitive des femmes ne souffrant pas de démence au départ.
Cet article fait partie de notre série La Révolution grise. La Conversation vous propose d’analyser sous toutes ses facettes l’impact du vieillissement de l’imposante cohorte des boomers sur notre société, qu’ils transforment depuis leur venue au monde. Manières de se loger, de travailler, de consommer la culture, de s’alimenter, de voyager, de se soigner, de vivre… découvrez avec nous les bouleversements en cours, et à venir.
Ses résultats, diffusés en 2002, ont provoqué un choc. Les personnes sous THM présentaient un risque accru de développer des maladies cardiaques, des accidents vasculaires cérébraux, des cancers du sein et de la démence. Les médecins ont rapidement déconseillé le THM, les ordonnances ont chuté et ce traitement a pratiquement disparu du débat public.
Les conclusions diffusées à l’époque étaient incomplètes. Les résultats de l’étude n’étaient pas faux, ils révélaient des risques réels. Mais au cours des années qui ont suivi, les chercheurs ont réexaminé les données, non seulement celles concernant le cerveau, mais aussi celles relatives au cœur, aux accidents vasculaires cérébraux et au cancer, afin de mieux comprendre quand, pourquoi et comment on devrait avoir recours au THM.
Aujourd’hui, les experts s’accordent à dire que pour de nombreuses femmes qui commencent ce traitement autour de la ménopause et qui n’ont pas de contre-indication médicale, les avantages l’emportent sur les risques. Dans de tels cas, le THM peut être prescrit en toute sécurité pour traiter les symptômes de la ménopause.
Pourtant, plusieurs mythes persistent, notamment concernant le vieillissement cérébral.
Nous allons examiner ici les principaux mythes à ce sujet.
Mythe n° 1 : le THM augmente le risque de démence chez toutes les femmes
Selon l’étude WHIMS, les femmes ayant commencé un traitement hormonal à 65 ans ou plus présentaient un risque accru de développer une démence par rapport à celles qui n’en avaient pas pris. Cependant, la plupart des femmes entreprennent un THM beaucoup plus tôt, généralement dans la quarantaine ou la cinquantaine, à la périménopause.
Le moment où l’on débute le traitement est important.
Les chercheurs évoquent l’hypothèse d’une « fenêtre critique » : entreprendre un THM autour de la ménopause pourrait favoriser la santé cérébrale, tandis que le commencer plusieurs années plus tard pourrait augmenter le risque de déclin cognitif et de démence.
L’étude WHIMS n’a pas testé cette « fenêtre » : la plupart des participantes avaient dépassé depuis longtemps l’âge de la ménopause et ne présentaient plus de symptômes. Les résultats n’offrent donc pas de conclusion quant aux effets du traitement hormonal lorsqu’il est utilisé au bon moment et pour les bonnes raisons (présence de symptômes de la ménopause).
Des études récentes apportent un tableau nuancé : certaines femmes qui commencent un THM autour de la ménopause vont constater des bienfaits cérébraux plus tard dans leur vie, comme une meilleure mémoire et un risque de démence réduit. Pour d’autres, les résultats en termes de cognition et de risque de démence seront peu marqués, mais pas moins bons.
Cependant, entreprendre un THM plus tard, par exemple après 70 ans ou plus de cinq ans après la ménopause, peut être associé à une accumulation accrue de protéines Tau, marqueur de la maladie d’Alzheimer.
En résumé, le THM n’est pas nécessairement mauvais pour le cerveau, mais ses effets peuvent dépendre du moment où il est commencé et du type d’hormones utilisé.
Mythe n° 2 : tous les THM ont le même effet sur le cerveau
Lorsqu’on évoque le THM (anciennement connu sous le nom de traitement hormonal substitutif ou THS), on peut penser qu’il existe un traitement standard. Or, le THM se présente sous de nombreuses formes, et celles-ci changent la donne. Dans le cadre de l’étude WHIMS, les femmes recevaient des comprimés d’œstrogène équin, et de l’acétate de médroxyprogestérone si elles avaient un utérus. Cette combinaison était autrefois le traitement standard, mais elle est rarement utilisée de nos jours.
Le mode d’administration du THM (comprimé, timbre, gel, crème, vaporisateur ou anneau vaginal) est important, car chacun est métabolisé différemment.
Les comprimés oraux passent par le foie et peuvent accroître le risque de formation de caillots sanguins et d’hypertension artérielle. Ces effets peuvent avoir des répercussions sur la santé du cerveau, en ralentissant le flux sanguin et en augmentant le risque d’AVC.
En bref, tous les THM ne se valent pas. Mais si on a la forme et le moment appropriés, les THM peuvent-ils prévenir la démence ?
Mythe n° 3 : l’étude WHIMS a démontré que le THM pouvait prévenir la démence
Avec le temps, le THM est passé de traitement contre les symptômes de la ménopause à moyen de prévention de la démence. C’est l’étude WHIMS, qui visait à déterminer s’il pouvait réduire le risque de démence, qui a engendré cette vision.
Cependant, réduction des risques ne signifie pas prévention. L’étude WHIMS n’a pas évalué si le THM prévenait la démence. Comme elle portait sur des femmes longtemps après la ménopause, ses résultats ne permettent pas de savoir ce qui se produit lorsque le THM est administré pendant la transition ménopausique. Ses conclusions sont néanmoins utilisées pour étayer des affirmations plus générales sur le THM et la santé cérébrale, alors que ce traitement n’a jamais été conçu pour prévenir la démence ou servir de stratégie unique pour en réduire les risques.
Ce ne sont pas toutes les femmes qui ont besoin de suivre un THM, ou qui devraient le faire. Certaines traversent la ménopause sans difficulté, tandis que d’autres rencontrent davantage de problèmes. Le traitement hormonal n’est pas une solution universelle.
Mais pourquoi certaines femmes présentent-elles des symptômes et d’autres non ? De nouvelles recherches suggèrent que les symptômes de la ménopause pourraient fournir des indices sur la santé du cerveau, reflétant sa sensibilité à la baisse du taux d’œstrogènes. Comme les œstrogènes influencent la mémoire, la réflexion et l’humeur, un nombre plus important de symptômes pourrait indiquer une vulnérabilité accrue au vieillissement cérébral.
Il ne s’agit pas seulement des symptômes, mais aussi de leur impact sur la vie quotidienne. Lorsque les sueurs nocturnes perturbent le sommeil ou que les changements d’humeur mettent à rude épreuve les relations sociales, le stress et la fatigue peuvent être néfastes pour le cerveau.
En résumé, le THM n’est pas un remède miracle contre la démence. Toutefois, la prise en charge des symptômes de la ménopause peut contribuer au bien-être actuel et à la santé cérébrale future des femmes qui souffrent et peuvent avoir recours à ce traitement.
Et la suite ?
L’étude WHIMS a marqué une étape importante dans l’histoire du THM, mais la recherche continue d’évoluer.
Les scientifiques se posent les questions suivantes : quel est le meilleur moment pour entreprendre un THM ? Quelles sont les hormones les plus importantes ? Qui en bénéficie et pourquoi ?
Déjà des milliers d’abonnés à l’infolettre de La Conversation. Et vous ? Abonnez-vous gratuitement à notre infolettre pour mieux comprendre les grands enjeux contemporains.
La ménopause est différente pour chaque femme. Pour certaines, le traitement hormonal apporte un soulagement et améliore la qualité de vie. Il n’offre toutefois aucune garantie contre la démence. Mais pour les personnes qui en ont besoin, le THM commencé au bon moment peut favoriser un vieillissement cérébral sain, ce qui est encourageant pour la prochaine génération qui entre dans l’âge mûr avec plus de connaissances et de soutien que jamais.
Vous souhaitez participer à l’évolution de la science ? Vous pourriez vous joindre à des études canadiennes telles que CAN-PROTECT ou BAMBI, qui explorent comment le THM et les expériences de la ménopause influencent le vieillissement cérébral.
Zahinoor Ismail reçoit un financement des Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada et de Gordie Howe CARES.
Jasper Crockford reçoit un financement des Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada, de l’unité de soutien SPOR de l’Alberta, de la Fédération canadienne des femmes diplômées des universités, de la plateforme de formation vasculaire et de Brain Health Care Canada.
Maryam Ghahremani ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matt Jacobsen, Senior Lecturer in Film History in the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary University of London
Few long-running horror franchises manage to feel both expansive and intimate. The Bone Temple, the second film in a projected trilogy revisiting the world of classic British horror 28 Days Later, achieves exactly that balance.
The Bone Temple is a brilliant example of a well-told, powerful yet small-scale story operating confidently within the parameters of an existing franchise. With this film, American film-maker Nia DaCosta takes the directorial reins from Danny Boyle and puts her unique stamp on the series. Working from writer Alex Garland’s screenplay, she has created a wonderfully off-kilter, wild horror film about survival and the legacy of shared trauma on the national psyche.
In the world of the franchise, Britain has been overrun with the hyper-contagious “rage” virus, resulting in hordes of violent infected.
Garland and Boyle changed the zombie genre forever in 28 Days Later (2002) by making the traditionally shambling creatures fast-moving and aggressive. This newest film follows the example set by the first film by asserting that the most immediate threat following the collapse of civilisation may not be the zombies themselves but fellow survivors, irrevocably altered by the breakdown of society.
Returning from the excellent, bracing 28 Years Later (2025) are teenage Spike (Alfie Williams) and former GP Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). The hauntingly beautiful and brilliantly conceived bone temple of the title is Kelson’s monumental construction, first revealed in 28 Years Later. It’s a sprawling series of obelisks made from the bones of the dead, created as a memorial to the loss of British life.
The trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
In the last film’s most memorable and impressive scene, Spike ascends a tower of skulls to place and memorialise the remains of his mother (Jodie Comer). The act signifies a cultural commemoration and a momentary acknowledgement of grief and mourning that is usually unavailable to survivors living with uncertainty.
The Bone Temple follows two stories that converge inevitably and explosively in a startling climax. In the first, Kelson forms an unexpected bond with the “Alpha” – an infected man he names Samson – and the discoveries he makes about the rage virus in the process. The other follows Spike’s encounter with the group of survivors called The Jimmys, named and styled by their leader Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) after British celebrity Jimmy Savile.
Sporting Savile’s trademark tracksuit, platinum blonde wig and gold chains, the group are trained in martial arts. Crystal is convinced he is the offspring of Satan – as teased in the superbly baffling final minutes of the previous film.
Savile, the formerly well-loved presenter of Jim’ll Fix It – the BBC programme that delivered life-changing experiences to needy children – was revealed to be a serial child sex offender in 2012, a year after his death. In the film’s world, where society collapsed in 2002, Savile is still an apparently charitable if eccentric personality.
It is deeply unsettling and uncomfortably humorous seeing his tarnished image animated so aggressively in acts of extreme violence. A version of his catchphrase “Howzat!” is uttered by the group in cultish reverence.
Through The Jimmys and their peculiarly brutal, ritualised existence, DaCosta’s tragic film is concerned with the psychological effect of collective trauma and suffering.
DaCosta’s brilliance
DaCosta has spoken about Garland and Boyle’s encouragement that she take creative control and put her stamp on the material, and about her attitude to making this film as “letting her freak flag fly”.
She has certainly delivered on that promise. This is a brilliantly strange film that is continuously surprising and provocative despite its small-scale storytelling.
I would be surprised if anything else at the cinema in 2026 can match the bizarre spectacle of The Bone Temple’s best sequence. In a tour de force of over-the-top theatrics that is as joyously silly as it is visionary, Fiennes gives a career highlight performance, complemented by pyrotechnics and set to the searing riffs of Iron Maiden’s heavy metal anthem The Number of the Beast.
DaCosta’s treatment of location plays a key role in defining the eerie, unsettling character of The Bone Temple. While the director’s father is British-born and raised and she visited the UK regularly during her childhood, as an American she brings an outside perspective and sense of wonder to the northern British rural landscape.
Where 28 Days Later gained its critical reputation from the melancholy uncanniness of dilapidated urban spaces fallen into disrepair, this film is set entirely in the lush, dramatic pastoral environments of Cumbria.
DaCosta intersperses the action of the film with deeply unsettling, atmospheric shots of the countryside. The choice recalls the mythic strangeness of influential folk horror films Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973).
More so than any other film genre, horror pushes boundaries and it must evolve to stay relevant and potent. DaCosta and Garland follow that ethos and have crafted a continuously surprising, spiky and abrasive take on familiar elements of folk horror and the zombie film.
The Bone Temple stands proudly within the recent wave of acclaimed horror films including Weapons and Bring Her Back as a bold and original experience that genre fans will celebrate.
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Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Governments across the world want AI to do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to public services. The plan is apparently to make make things much more efficient, as algorithms quietly handle a country’s day to day admin.
For example, AI might help tackle tax fraud, by working out ways of targeting those most likely to be offending. Or it might be to help public health services screen for various cancers, triaging cases at scale and flagging those deemed most at risk.
But what happens when such a triaging system makes a mistake? Or when government agencies deploy AI to identify fraud and the model simply gets it wrong?
There is already sobering evidence that AI errors can have devastating consequences. In the Netherlands for example, flawed algorithmic assessments of tax fraud were dealt with in ways which tore families apart and separated children from their parents.
In that case, a risk‑scoring system was used to identify families it deemed likely to be committing benefits fraud. It then fed these assessments into automated operations that ordered repayments, driving innocent households into financial ruin.
So states should be extremely wary of substituting human judgement with AI. The assumption that machines will almost always get it right is simply not true. People’s lives cannot be easily reduced to data points for algorithms to draw conclusions from.
And when things do go wrong, who is responsible? What happens to human accountability?
These are the kind of questions that have often been overlooked amid all the clamour – and vast levels of investment – that AI has attracted. Yet even if we set aside the possibility that this is another speculative bubble ready to burst, there is growing evidence that AI in its current form does not deliver what it promised. The problem of “hallucinations” – when AI generates plausible yet nonfactual content – [remains unresolved] [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3703155], and expensive developments have often been underwhelming.
Even leading figures in the industry, including the co-founder of OpenAI have acknowledged that that simply making large language models (LLMs) larger will not improve things significantly.
Yet these systems are rapidly being embedded into key sectors of our lives, including law, journalism and education.
It’s not even that hard to imagine a future university where lectures and assignments are generated by LLMs operated by a particular faculty, to be absorbed and completed by LLMs operated by students. Human learning could then become a byproduct of machine-to-machine communication, and the long-term consequence could be that critical thinking and expertise are hollowed out in the very institutions charged with cultivating them.
All In?
But all of this integration is highly profitable for AI companies. The more AI is woven into public infrastructures and business operations, the more indispensable these firms become, and the harder they are to challenge or regulate.
Integration into the defence sector for example, with the development of autonomous weapons could simply make a firm too big to fail, if a country’s military security depended on it.
And when things go wrong, the asymmetry of expertise between governments and citizens on one side, and AI developers on the other, simply increases the overall reliance on the very firms whose systems created the problems in the first place.
To understand where this trajectory might lead, it’s worth looking back a couple of decades to when social media companies first appeared, apparently with the simple goal of connecting people across the world.
Today though, the reach and power of some of those firms is the source of major concerns around privacy, surveillance and manipulation. There have been scandals on everything from undermining democracy and spreading misinformation to inciting violence.
Yet we now find ourselves experimenting with a potent mix of social media, AI and machine learning. Social media feeds on attention while LLMs can generate vast amounts of attention grabbing content. Meanwhile, machine learning systems determine what each of us sees on our various screens, trapping us in ever tighter informational bubbles.
So even if, for the sake of argument, AI evolves as promised, becoming more accurate, more robust and more capable, should we really be ceding control over more domains of life to algorithmic coordination in pursuit of order and efficiency?
Technology alone cannot resolve social, economic or moral problems. If it could, children would not go hungry in a world that already produces enough food to feed everyone.
Critics of AI are often dismissed as Luddites. But this is a misreading of history. Luddites, the 19th-century English textile workers who opposed some automated machinery in the mills where they worked, were not opposed to technology per se.
They were simply opposed to its misuse and unreflective deployment, and sought a deeper examination of how technology reshapes work, communities and everyday life. Some 200 years later, surely that remains a reasonable demand.
Akhil Bhardwaj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vassilis Galanos, Lecturer in Digital Work in the Management, Work and Organisation Division, Stirling Business School, University of Stirling
Around the turn of the century, the internet underwent a transformation dubbed “web 2.0”. The world wide web of the 1990s had largely been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal sites with content from a few publishers.
Then came the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many heavily financed, lightly useful internet businesses collapsed. In the aftermath, surviving companies and new entrants leaned into a different logic that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than pages, participation rather than passive consumption.
And on January 15 2001, a website was born that seemed to encapsulate this new era. The first entry on its homepage read simply: “This is the new WikiPedia!”
Wikipedia wasn’t originally conceived as a not-for-profit website. In its early phase, it was hosted and supported through co-founder Jimmy Wales’s for-profit search company, Bomis. But two years on, the Wikimedia Foundation was created as a dedicated non-profit to steward Wikipedia and its sibling projects.
Wikipedia embodied the web 2.0 dream of a non-hierarchical, user-led internet built on participation and sharing. One foundational idea – volunteer human editors reviewing and authenticating content incrementally after publication – was highlighted in a 2007 Los Angeles Times report about Wales himself trying to write an entry for a butcher shop in Gugulethu, South Africa.
His additions were reverted or blocked by other editors who disagreed about the significance of a shop they had never heard of. The entry finally appeared with a clause that neatly encapsulated the platform’s self-governance model: “A Wikipedia article on the shop was created by the encyclopedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales, which led to a debate on the crowdsourced project’s inclusion criteria.”
As a historical sociologist of artificial intelligence and the internet, I find Wikipedia revealing not because it is flawless, but because it shows its workings (and flaws). Behind almost every entry sits a largely uncredited layer of human judgement: editors weighing sources, disputing framing, clarifying ambiguous claims and enforcing standards such as verifiability and neutrality.
Often, the most instructive way to read Wikipedia is to read its revision history. Scholarship has even used this edit history as a method – for example, when studying scientific discrepancies in the developnent of Crispr gene-editing technology, or the unfolding history of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales explains how Wikipedia was created, July 2005. Video: TedX.
The scale of human labour that goes into Wikipedia is easy to take for granted, given its disarming simplicity of presentation. Statista estimates 4.4 billion people accessed the site in 2024 – over half the world and two-thirds of internet users. More than 125 million people have edited at least one entry.
Wikipedia carries no advertising and does not trade in users’ data – central to its claim of editorial independence. But users regularly see fundraising banners and appeals, and the Wikimedia Foundation has built paid services to manage high-volume reuse of its content – particularly by bots scraping it for AI training. The foundation’s total assets now stand at more than US$310 million (£230 million).
‘Wokepedia’ v Grokipedia
At 25, Wikipedia can still look like a rare triumph for the original web 2.0 ideals – at least in contrast to most of today’s major open platforms, which have turned participation into surveillance advertising.
Some universities, including my own, have used the website’s anniversary to soothe fears about student use of generative AI. We panicked about students relying on Wikipedia, then adapted and carried on. The same argument now suggests we should not over-worry about students relying on generative AI to do their work.
This comparison is sharpened by the rapid growth of Elon Musk’s AI-powered version of Wikipedia (or “Wokepedia”, as Musk dismissively refers to it). While Grokipedia uses AI to generate most of its entries, some are near-identical to Wikipedia’s (all of which are available for republication under creative commons licensing).
Grokipedia entries cannot be directly edited, but registered users can suggest corrections for the AI to consider. Despite only launching on October 27 2025, this AI encyclopedia already has more than 5.6 million entries, compared with Wikipedia’s total of over 7.1 million.
So, if Grokipedia overtakes its much older rival in scale at least, which now seems plausible, should we see this as the end of the web 2.0 dream, or simply another moment of adaptation?
Credibility tested
AI and the human-created internet have always been intertwined. Voluntary sharing is exploited for AI training with contested consent and thin attribution. Models trained on human writing generate new text that pollutes the web as “AI slop”.
Wikipedia has already collided with this. Editors report AI-written additions and plausible citations that fail on checking. They have responded with measures such as WikiProject AI Cleanup, which offers guidance on how to detect generic AI phrasing and other false information.
But Wales does not want a full ban on AI within Wikipedia’s domain. Rather, he has expressed hope for human-machine synergy, highlighting AI’s potential to bring more non-native English contributors to the site. Wikipedia also acknowledges it has a serious gender imbalance, both in terms of entries and editors.
A video made by Wikipedia to mark its 25th anniversary.
Wikipedia’s own credibility has regularly been tested over its 25-year history. High-profile examples include the John Seigenthaler Sr biography hoax, when an unregistered editor falsely wrote about the journalist’s supposed ties to the Kennedy assasinations, and the Essjay controversy, in which a prominent editor was found to have fabricated their education credentials.
There have also been recurring controversies over paid- or state-linked conflicts of interest, including the 2012 Wiki-PR case, when volunteers traced patterns to a firm and banned hundreds of accounts.
These vulnerabilities have seen claims of political bias gain traction. Musk has repeatedly framed Wikipedia and mainstream outlets as ideologically slanted, and promoted Grokipedia as a “massive improvement” that needed to “purge out the propaganda”.
As Wikipedia reaches its 25th anniversary, perhaps we are witnessing a new “tragedy of the commons”, where volunteered knowledge becomes raw material for systems that themselves may produce unreliable material at scale. Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974) dramatises the dilemma Wikipedia faces: an anarchist commons survives only through constant maintenance, while facing the pull of a wealthier capitalist neighbour.
According to the critical theorist McKenzie Wark: “It is not knowledge which is power, but secrecy.” AI often runs on closed, proprietary models that scrape whatever is available. Wikipedia’s counter-model is public curation with legible histories and accountability.
But if Google’s AI summaries and rankings start privileging Grokipedia, habits could change fast. This would repeat the “Californian ideology” that journalist-author Wendy M. Grossman was warned about in the year Wikipedia launched – namely, internet openness becoming fuel for Silicon Valley market power.
Wikipedia and generative AI both alter knowledge circulation. One is a human publishing system with rules and revision histories. The other is a text production system that mimics knowledge without reliably grounding it. The choice, for the moment at least, is all of ours.
Vassilis Galanos has received funding from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling. He is affiliated with the Hype Studies group, the AI Ethics & Society network, and We and AI.
