The resignation of environment minister Nicolas Hulot – a solitary decision, sincere and considered, taken without any perverse calculation – has a double dimension.
Firstly, it has the immediate effect of highlighting further the impasse in which the presidency of Emmanuel Macron finds itself. In the space of one year in office, the president has abandoned all the pretence of his electoral campaign talk of finding a just balance in policy making, revealing himself instead to be deaf to the profound expectations of society and to what are the decisive issues at stake in our current times.
Secondly, it has a historic character in that it resonates like an alarm bell sounded by a man of goodwill, and free of all partisan prejudice, over the crisis of civilisation that threatens to submerge our species and ruin all life on the planet.
Among the explanations given by Nicolas Hulot when he announced his resignation live on France-Inter radio, he denounced the “striving to maintain an economic model that is responsible for all the climatic disorders”. These calm and level-headed words are also the most merciless critique of the policies imposed in a rough-and-ready manner by Emmanuel Macron since his election in May 2017. This pro-business executive has turned its back on the public interest and common good.
Nicolas Hulot listed, with emotion, all the battles lost in face of various lobbyists and private interests, self-interested and voracious, and which he said led to him fearing he in turn would become “cynical” in his approach: “At times I surprised myself in lowering the level of my requirements.” He not only demonstrated that the issue of ecology in Macron’s communications is but a token show of virtue, unmasked by the real choices made in favour of off-shore capitalism which seeks immediate profit and ignores collective interests. He above all underlined that ultra-liberal economic policies – which deepen inequalities, dismantle social rights and promote an excessive state of competition – are incompatible with addressing the ecological challenges that humanity must meet.
In sum, he told Emmanuel Macron and his small group of lieutenants that ‘you are the old world’, while the urgency of environmental issues demands a new one, one that is the opposite of what the president personifies; an obsession with growth, of accumulation, of consumption, that of everyone for themselves, and selfish enrichment. It is an old world that attacks everything that keeps a society together; indifference towards the imperative duties regarding the common destiny of humanity, divided in face of the migrations prompted by world disorder. An old world that refuses the demands of all those who, in the field, are inventing alternatives for tomorrow, inextricably democratic, social and ecological.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The modernity that Emmanuel Macron claims to represent is in fact nothing other than the eternal old world of conservative policies that preserve the established order, one that is in the service of the economic interests of a social minority. It is what the French philosopher Emmanuel Terray illustrated in his 2012 book Penser à droite (Think to the Right); policies of the supposedly established facts, of an immovable reality and the absence of any alternative, all of which were largely illustrated to be those of the French president in the television interview he gave to Mediapart and RMC-BFM on April 15th (see the video and summary here). From that point of view, Macron’s vision is that of “presentism” as defined by the French historian François Hartog. Whereas a risk must be taken in engaging with a rupture with the old ways, a move for invention, the French president imagines no further than the immediate present, quite simply because he has made the choice of preserving and reinforcing the interests of a minority to the detriment of the highest number.
While the return to business as usual after the summer holidays is marked by the brutal reality of budgetary reforms (tax breaks for the most wealthy and for large corporations, the impoverishment of the state, economic pressure on households and pensioners), and after the lid was lifted on a monarchical practice of executive power by the Benalla scandal, the decision taken by Nicolas Hulot strips away the substance of Emmanuel Macron’s speeches of convenience on ecology, showing them to be simply theatrical demagogy. The planet and the species that dominates it – our own, which is largely predatory and terribly reckless – require a political ambition far beyond the infantile bedtime-story presentations like that of Emmanuel Macron in this video.
We are facing a crisis in Western civilisation, in the sense of that it has imposed on the world for the last five hundred years, a crisis of its triple commercial, technical and nationalist dimensions. Our interdependent world is heading for ruin in the absence of an awakening of solidarity between nations and peoples. In the face of this challenge, those who govern us are irresponsible, rather than realistic, in their belief that everything can continue as before. Since the end of the Bronze Age, from Rome to the Mayas, the history of humanity has often seen civilisations collapse. The causes, interacting the ones with the others, are always multiple, but what links them all together is the short-term vision of these societies about themselves, their blindness to the relationships that hold them together which are ignored in favour of the competitions that destroy them. It is time, if ever it is not too late, to change our approach.
In that sense, Nicolas Hulot’s resignation is a happy and salutary return to the starting point, that of the Appel des solidarités – the petition calling for 500 measures in favour of greater social solidarity and environmental responsibility launched during the 2017 presidential election campaign by more than 80 NGOs and associations, including the foundation championing environmental causes created by Hulot (now called the Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme), and which was his only policy commitment during the campaign. It was resolutely on the side of the creative effervescence of civil society which was again in evidence this summer at the August conference in Grenoble of NGOS, associations and trades unions who are joined together in a ‘Social and citizen movement’. The political coconut shy that circumstances offered to Emmanuel Macron – the head of the En Marche! (On the move) movement who since his election has become an authoritarian en force leader, turning his back on the majority of voters who elected him not for his policies but to block the road to power of the far-right – has eclipsed the dynamic of the Appel des solidarités initiated by the Emmaüs organisation that combats poverty and social exclusion, and notably its chairman Thierry Kuhn.
It suffices to read again the programme of the Appel des solidarités (set out here, in French) to realise the great divide that now stands between this unbiased and unprejudiced expectation borne of goodwill, and the brutal reality of the Macron presidency, its economic cynicism and political amorality. The resignation of Nicolas Hulot, who has drawn the only logical conclusion about the impasse in which he found himself from the very first day of the gamble of his presence, alone, in government, makes the text of the programme of the Appel des solidarités all the more pertinent than ever,. It is a call for a general mobilisation of society to collectively invent the alternative that is missing.
“We continue to assert that no human being on earth is illegal and that each man, each woman, each child occupies a legitimate place,” it reads. “We will continue to fight, without concession, against a model that produces exclusion and which destroys the planet. We will continue to fight all forms of resignation and withdrawal. We will continue to oppose the mutually driven competition of all against all. We will continue to defend social justice, unconditional universal access to fundamental rights, and solidarity with future generations.”
“We will continue to militate in favour of the freedom to come and go, to create, to innovate, to imagine other things possible. We will continue to build alternatives, oases of freedom and equality. We will continue to take small and large initiatives which replace the human at the centre. We will continue to bring together all those who as of now are creating solutions for tomorrow. We declare ourselves responsible for our destiny in commonality, responsible for the heritage that we will leave for our children. We are the artisans of a new form of radicality. A humanist and fraternal radicality. Together, we declare a social, ecological and, in solidarity, state of emergency. Together, we are already the world of tomorrow.”
It sometimes happens that the sudden jolt of a single person awakens those around them from the slumber of indifference. This admission by Nicolas Hulot of failure to reach his goals, tells us that everything is connected, ecology, social issues and democracy. To believe that a strictly national policy on social issues can suffice on its own, in an indifference to the world and others, is to create the conditions for xenophobia and racism, as dramatically illustrated by the alliance in Italy of the Five Star Movement with the heirs of Italian fascism. To believe that less democracy helps in meeting the colossal challenges facing our common humanity is to open the path to authoritarian regimes which are as disastrous for their own peoples as they are for world peace.
To believe that resolutely ecological policies can be put in place and blossom within a government leading unjust social programmes and predatory economic policies is to heighten the disorders and dangers that one seeks to avert.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse