The former Nicolas Hulot Foundation turns the page of its founder with a new presidency

The Fondation pour la Nature et l'Homme (FNH) has chosen a new management tandem to relaunch, 18 months after being shaken by the shattering withdrawal from public life of its founder Nicolas Hulot, accused of rape and sexual assault. The FNH announced Wednesday that it has appointed Gildas Bonnel, an actor in environmental communication, as president, who succeeds economist Alain Grandjean, a member of the High Council for the Climate. Political scientist François Gemenne, co-author of the IPCC, takes over the presidency of the scientific council of the foundation, still composed of about twenty intellectual personalities, including climatologist Jean Jouzel.

'Overcoming divisions'

"After a year 2022 of transition", this new co-presidency "opens a new chapter in the history of the foundation, without its founder," said at a press briefing the director general Stéphane Clément-Grandcourt. "By losing Nicolas Hulot, the foundation has obviously lost an emblematic spokesperson, undoubtedly also lost a small part of itself, but it has not lost either its strength or its identity," she said. On November 24, 2021, the environmental activist, former minister and former favorite personality of the French, had announced to leave "definitively public life" ahead of the broadcast of a documentary giving voice to women accusing him of sexual violence between 1989 and 2001.

The NGO, founded in 1990, now has the mission to "overcome divisions" and "inspire courage" to find solutions to the climate and environmental crisis. The FNH has decided to focus on five areas: biodiversity (through its work on soil artificialization), carbon-free mobility for the most precarious, pesticide-free agriculture, sustainable livestock and collective catering. "The FNH is very much in tune with the ecology that I promote by its pragmatic aspect: we will be as close as possible to solutions turned towards people, we will not be in indignation, sterile gesticulation," explained François Gemenne.

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The political scientist then defended the "pivotal role" that the FNH can play to "bring people together". "As much as the French are gathered on the observation of environmental degradation, climate change, erosion of biodiversity, they are sometimes divided on solutions," he analyzed. Citing as an example the building contractors and activists of the collective "Last Renovation", he said he was "convinced that these people have never met while they agree that thermal renovation is the priority of priorities in France". The FNH has distinguished itself over the last decade by its activism on several issues: carbon tax, fight against neonicotinoids, against the EU-Canada trade agreement (CETA) and in favor of environmental "mirror clauses".