On Saturday October 29th thousands of people marched across a field at Sainte-Soline as they sought to avoid the blockades of the police and gendarmes who were there in huge number. Their aim: to demand a halt to plans for a 'mega reservoir' that farmers in this corner of western France will use to irrigate their crops.
The protest is similar to past environmental struggles in the country; over the extension of a military base at Larzac in the south-west in the 1970s, against a nuclear power station at Plogoff in the west, and more recently in opposition to the construction of a new airport at Notre-Dames-des-Landes, also in the west. The fight against the 'mega reservoirs' represents a more widespread concern about the availability of - and open access to - a fundamental resource: water.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Putting to one side for one moment the controversies that followed the protest, it is this battle that is the initial message to take away from this event. Whether it be the protestors on the site or the many politicians on the Left who came to offer support and put the issue on the political agenda, we can safely say that everyone took seriously the warning given by President Emmanuel Macron at the end of the summer when he declared: “We are living through the end of [an era of] abundance.”
Of course, not everyone is experiencing an end of abundance. In particular, not those favoured sectors that are protected by the government's economic policies. In contrast, the prospect of doing without is already known to many households who have to limit their spending and who worry about the money they have left to live on after their household bills are paid. That was why the president caused such shock when he used the phrase.
But from a collective point of view there is some truth in the statement: we have tied our lifestyles and hopes to an unsustainable extraction of raw materials and energy. To be exact, we live in an economic system whose continuance rests on an endless quest for growth which exhausts both the human workforce and the ecosystem's resources, leaving the latter spiralling out of control.
The problem is that this government and its MPs appear not to have got their own houses in order in the face of this damning analysis. Yet it should be the government that harnesses political energy across the spectrum and uses all available know-how to to get us out of this clear impasse in the right way – in other words, by doing so fairly and democratically. In this current case, the logic behind mega reservoirs simply defies all rationality.
A symbol of current politics at a time of climate imbalance
Just last year some 200 leading figures, including scientists, issued an alert in an op-ed article in Le Monde about such irrigation systems. They wrote: “The mega reservoirs only benefit a small minority of irrigators who will continue to grow in scale while their neighbours disappear. Operating on borrowed time faced with climate change, they simply seek to maintain a form of production that is intrinsically dependent on chemical input which sterilises the soil, destroys flora and fauna, and pollutes waterways and tap water.”
However, a bit like those magazines that produce special reports on the climate emergency but which are funded by adverts for SUVs, the government's response to all this is completely contradictory.
On the one hand climate objectives are announced loud and clear at a national and international level, where it is considered good form to criticise leaders who want to deviate from the 2015 Paris Accord on the climate (which themselves remain insufficient to ensure that we can respect planetary boundaries). On the other, the government continues to play the game of international economic competition, the protection of profits levels and the repression of environmental movements.
The level of policing deployed for the Sainte-Soline demonstration had already made clear the government's approach. But in addition to the mistreated protestors, it was the comments made by interior minister Gérald Darmanin on Sunday October 30th which best illustrated the unlikelihood of any serious political debate as to whether life on Earth is sustainable.
According to the minister, the “extremely violent” demonstration was in effect taken over by “around 40 people flagged as being from the far-left” whose “operating methods are related to – and I'm not afraid to say this - ecoterrorism”. He repeated this description in another declaration. “I want to repeat that it relates to ecoterrorism. The state will act firmly,” the minister said.
To start with, it would be good if the firmness of the person who uttered these words was sometimes aimed at the political groups who really do threaten, intimidate and beat people up, namely the far-right, who were, for example, able to march unperturbed through the streets of the eastern city of Lyon ten days ago, shouting xenophobic slogans.
In this particular instance, the choice of adjective is obviously completely lacking in common decency with regard to the memory of victims of terrorism, as well as exhibiting an utterly mediocre level of politics. The minister is just seeking to outbid the opprobrium that has been heaped over the years on environmental activists, who have been described as “Khmer Greens”, “environmental ayatollahs” and “green jihadists”.
This is a method of depoliticising those who oppose you by criminalising them, or even treating them as psychologically abnormal. Just as with the alleged anarchist 'cell' of the Tarnac group in central France, portraying them as a terrorist collective removes the political dimension of their commitment. In then introduces a bias in the way they are regarded, which in turns justifies the exceptional legal measures used to deal with them. “This shameless rambling strategy looks like an effort to make sure climate crimes and those responsible for them are forgotten,” the global justice group ATTAC said in a statement.
In making this declaration, Gérald Darmanin clearly forgot that if 'ecoterrorism' has a parent it is Ted Kaczynski alias the 'Unabomber' who traumatised the United States by sending 16 bombs, killing three people and leaving 23 others injured, between 1978 and 1995. In France his only known fan was not in the environmental movement but on the far-right. This was Patrick Barriot, the health advisor to far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who boasted about having had a long correspondence with the American terrorist.
Faced with those who warn about our long-term survival, the government responds with repression, stonewalling, the absence of any empathy towards generations who fear for their future and a refusal to heed the substantive arguments put forward by those opposed to mega reservoirs.
This is a clash of interests which is typical of a political era which is no longer just about fighting over how to share out economic surpluses, or fighting over the denial of rights to such and such a minority, but which now concerns a battle over resources that are crucial to our very survival.
The curious disappearance of France's green party
This moment should have been an opportunity for green politicians to point to the prescience of their warnings and the strength of their proposals, and to step up the offensive against the current government. Yet the memory of their presence at Sainte-Soline on Saturday – many politicians from the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) party were at the site – is an unappetizing one.
The former green candidate for the presidency, Yannick Jadot, who targeted his campaign in April's election more at voters disappointed by Macron than at the climate movement, and who was much criticised for his presence at a demonstration by police unions featuring slogans attacking the justice system, was booed when he appeared at the protest last weekend. His car also had graffiti scribbled on it.
The episode highlights the mistrust that exists among a section of activists towards an environmental moment that is seen as too institutional, despite Jadot's own militant track record as a Greenpeace activist. It might be thought immature to reject supporters of the movement who are likely to give credibility to the cause in the eyes of the wider public. But Yannick Jadot should hardly be surprised at the reaction after his recent and rather paternalistic comments about green activists who had sprayed paintings when he said: “The climate deserves better than this idiotic mockery.”
Another prominent green politician, Sandrine Rousseau, who advocates “radical environmentalism”, distanced herself from the incident with her rival's car. Questioned about this episode, she even plunged the knife further into wound, stating that Yannick Jadot had to understand that “we need to rediscover combative environmentalism”.
In any case, the reactions of these two rivals offered up a media spectacle that highlights the open splits within EELV, where arguments over the right direction and over personalities continue six months after its failed presidential election campaign. The approaching party congress, in which the leadership is up for re-election, may perhaps make the movement's line clearer. The first part of the congress, which will choose between different motions on the party's direction, will take place on November 26th, with the second round on December 10th.
Whatever the responsibilities of individual figures, it is rather sad to witness an event in which a protest about our capacity to subsist on the planet, a ploy by the interior minister to strip that protest of its legitimacy, and the collective inability of the EELV to represent a positive political alternative, all collided. For a party that has been around for some 40 years, and which was born out of a conflict that is now more than ever a part of public debate, there is some serious soul-searching to be carried out within the EELV ranks.
“Our reason has driven all away ... we end up by ruling over a desert,” the French writer Albert Camus once wrote. The phrase risks being a prophetic one in relation to the environmental disaster that is unfolding at a global level. It is regrettable that the forces that “drive all away” and create this emptiness - in other words those who have no interest in the systematic changes required by this situation – are today so well promoted within the state, by the very people who have control of the means of coercion.
But is it even more regrettable that the environmental political movement, which should be one of the essential cornerstones of the current leftwing coalition, still itself appears to be an “empty force”. It is these two profound and serious realities that have been spelt out by the mega reservoirs affair, issues far removed from the sabre-rattling that was fabricated for the news channels.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter