In 1974 the first environmental candidate at a French presidential election, René Dumont, ended his debut campaign television appearance by drinking a “glass of precious water” (see the video here). “If we carry on like we are, there'll be a shortage,” he prophesied, after giving concrete illustrations and precise data to back his conviction that “we're not forecasting the apocalypse, it's here right now, among us”. Far from being a gentle dreamer, René Dumon worked out in the field. An agronomist by profession, he experienced farmers' problems as if they were his own, with the added advantage of being able to make comparisons with other countries because of his knowledge of the developing world.
René Dumont was a visionary. Half a century later, almost to the year, the battle over water is raging here in France itself. What is at stake in the current protests at Sainte-Soline in west France over the construction of massive water 'basins' - artificial reservoirs filled from natural underground water reserves to be used by farmers for irrigation - is the monopolization of an ever-dwindling resource to the benefit of private interests and to the detriment of the common good. This appropriation is being carried out as part of an economic logic that makes worse what it claims to resolve, perpetuating productivist agriculture whose agro-industrial model is not just doomed because of climate change, but is accelerating it and making it worse.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The social movement for water which is now rising up to stop such practices is therefore not like other environmental protests: it shows an environmental awareness that goes well beyond the usual activist networks, because water is the lifeblood of our planet (see this article in French by Jade Lindgaard). This movement doesn't just have right (that of the general interest) and knowledge (reports from the climate change panel the IPCC) on its side; it also has the law, and thus the rule of law, backing it. Several court decisions have, in vain, quashed projects to build reservoirs, dams and agricultural water reservoirs, constructions that are still being used illegally and with the state's complicity (see this report by Mediapart and this report in Le Monde).
Taking place as it did at the same time as the continuing police violence against the pension reform protests (a violence which has astonished the entire world), the unprecedented repression seen at Sainte-Soline on Saturday March 25th is not just the story of authoritarian irresponsibility carried out by a presidency that is ready to brutalise democracy to impose its own wishes, even whims. This repression also forms part of a long tradition of blindness on the part of French governments and administrations when it comes to environmental emergencies. These governments have constantly demonised, criminalised and attacked the environmental awareness, commitment and protests that have been sparked by these major challenges to the planet's entire life and the future of its species, including our own.
The two protestors from Saint-Soline who are, at the time of writing, in a critical condition, the hundreds more who were also injured there, some of them seriously, the clear use of weapons of war and the unleashing of state violence no matter what the human cost, all serve to remind us of other martyrs of the environmental cause. After each of these tragedies the aftermath proved the protestors to have been right and the state wrong. These events proved that it was the protestors who showed good sense and that it was officials, state prefects, governments, ministers and presidencies who were being irresponsible.
On July 31st 1977 Vital Michalon – a peaceful demonstrator and physics teacher without any political affiliation - died from the blast of a concussion grenade during a protest against a prototype fast breeder nuclear reactor called Superphoenix. Designed to be the most powerful of its type in the world, it was built at Creys-Malville in France, close to the Swiss border. Its construction took place without any debate at the National Assembly, and led to protests which went beyond France's borders. Even back then these protests were equated to terrorism, with the state prefect charged with maintaining law and order readily attacking the actions of the 'Baader-Meinhof Gang', the Red Army Faction, among the German protestors. This was the same prefect who had been France's police prefect in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence.
On July 10th 1985 a Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, drowned after an explosion that sank the environmental group Greenpeace's flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in New Zealand. He was the collateral victim of action by the French secret services that had been ordered by the French government, in this case by the socialist president François Mitterrand, with the instructions passed on by armed forces minister Charles Hernu. This sabotage operation was designed to stop Greenpeace's campaign against France's nuclear tests in the Pacific; without an ounce of proof, the French government libellously claimed that the environmental group had been infiltrated by Soviet agents.
Nearly three decades later, on October 26th 2014, 21-year-old environmental activist Rémi Fraisse died when a so-called offensive grenade was thrown during protests against plans for a dam at Sivens on the Tescou river, a tributary of the River Tarn in south-west France. Even then protestors were engaged in a battle over water, with the stakes the same at that time as they are now in the current protests over the agricultural irrigation reservoirs. For two long days the French government, in the form of prime minister Manuel Valls and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, refused to acknowledge the state's responsibility in the student's death. It even spread defamatory rumours that Rémi Fraisse's backpack contained explosive substances.
Three previous cases, three deaths, three similar series of events: extreme repression, assumed criminality and a victim treated with contempt. And three victories. Alas, Vital Michalon, Fernando Pereira and Rémi Fraisse were not able to witness them. In 1998 operations at the Superphoenix fast breeder reactor ceased, and the state-owned EDF energy utility has still not finished dismantling it. President Jacques Chirac stopped the nuclear tests in 1996 and France finally signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and dismantled its Pacific nuclear test centre. The dam project at Sivens was stopped following a decree by the local prefect on December 4th 2015, a measure reinforced in July the following year when the administrative court in Toulouse struck down, after the fact, the initial declaration that the project had been in the public interest.
In 1974 presidential candidate René Dumont's book outlining his manifesto was called 'L'Utopie ou la mort' ('Utopia or death'). This was a concrete, rational and reasonable utopia, forged through solidarity, mutual aid and caution, faced with the commercial folly of accumulation, competition and domination. Echoing the 1972 Club of Rome report 'The Limits to Growth', René Dumont called for people to speak out against the “religion of growth” that had been imposed by the “oligarchy of the wealthy”. Human beings have since given their lives for this ideal, as was the case for all the forward-looking causes carried out in the name of common humanity and against privilege, injustice, and oppression.
The French martyrs of this just cause represent but a tiny fraction of the defenders of the environment and environmental activists who have been killed by commercial selfishness and voracious capitalism. According to the non-governmental organisation Global Witness, which keeps a count, more than 1,700 environmental activists were killed during the decade 2012-2021, in other words roughly one person killed every two days, a figure that is probably an underestimate. The worst year was 2020 with 227 deaths, the majority being in Latin America where Mexico, Colombia and Brazil head this grim table.
Over and above this macabre ledger, France - which, represented by the current government, likes to glory in the Paris climate accord agreed in 2015 - reveals its impotence through its actions and inaction. Was the French state not condemned by the administrative court in Paris in October 2021 for its climate inaction, without drawing the slightest conclusion from that? In fact, as guarantors of an economic order which is responsible for the environmental catastrophe, the wealthiest states who signed the Paris Agreement help this calamitous capitalism whose beneficiaries follow their own path. These beneficiaries seek to profit from the climate crisis, to rule without sharing and to enrich themselves without end.
The fact that the next climate summit, COP 28, which is due to take place at the end of 2023, has as its president Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, boss of the oil giant ADNOC and industry minister for the United Arab Emirates, is enough on its own to illustrate this back-to-front approach in which the cause of the disaster is held up as the remedy. “Of course we have to avoid excesses, but it's unthinkable that limiting [greenhouse gases] is carried out to the detriment of economic growth,” he said in a recent article. These sorcerers' apprentices are paving the pay for, and playing into the hands of, what the historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz called in 2018 “carbo-fascism”, an emerging political monstrosity that lies at the junction between authoritarian regimes, identity-based ideologies and climate-sceptic beliefs.
From Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, including various versions of the hard, far, populist, nationalist and supremacist right, all have in common a denial of reality when it comes to climate disruption. They care little about tomorrow while they can profit, accumulate, enjoy themselves, consume, spend and waste, feeling untouchable and showing a complete lack of scruples. In that sense the environmental cause is posing an existential question on behalf of a shared world, of a unified humanity, through its stubborn refusal to let a minority find its salvation at the expense of the great majority.
As with the movements against discrimination and racism, which are caricatured as separatism, wokism or Islamo-leftism, the demonising of the environmental uprisings highlights the lost nature of the privileged and the dominant, the extent to which they have sold out and are now ready to make common cause with the far-right in the hope of surviving the catastrophe. “Eco-terrorism”, “far-left”, “green totalitarianism” etc: the current government speaks the same language as the opponents against whom it was twice elected, thus normalising and boosting the standing of the far-right politician Marine Le Pen and her supporters
This is yet one further reason to support and assist the creation of a political environmentalism that promotes links, mutual support and solidarity, prudence and listening, exchange and sharing, confronted with a world that is as brutal as it is doomed, and brutal because it is doomed, and which has no arguments other than violence and lies.
“A man doesn't let himself do that,” the French writer Albert Camus quotes his father as saying in his posthumously-published novel 'Le premier homme' ('The First Man'). Against this world of men who refuse to hold themselves back and who, on the contrary, want to profit and accumulate, exploit and dominate, attack and destroy, the demonstrators at Sainte-Soline have shown the path of salvation and the way ahead. Let this be a tribute to them.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter