What if ecology was ... right?

A graduate in history and political science, Max-Erwann Gastineau is an essayist and member of the editorial staff of the journal Limite. He has just published The New Eastern Trial (Éditions du Cerf, 2019)

The last municipal elections recalled the preponderant place of ecology in our political life and referred the right to its shortcomings. "We must carry an environmental policy compatible with our values," affirmed by way of a start, the Secretary General of the Republicans (LR), Aurélien Pradier, the day after a cataclysmic second round for his party in the big cities. But then what values, and for what project?

On the right, ecology divides, or rather embarrasses. We do not know how to understand it, how to appropriate a discourse, an idea born from the criticism of the effects of the market and technical progress on man and his environment. So it is often content with denouncing a “punitive” ecology, which is prejudicial to individual freedoms. An entirely acceptable angle of approach, except that the right is, historically, rather convinced of the opposite; that from coercion or from rule can arise a more just order, greater security ("first freedom"). What is true for the preservation of society, the security of property and people, would it not be true for the land and biodiversity? What about the "precautionary principle", enshrined in our constitution under the chairmanship of Jacques Chirac? Does it not constitute an unbearable obstacle to individual freedoms, to personal initiative and to scientific innovation, fuels economic dynamism? Even from its balance sheet (we have omitted to mention the organization of the Grenelle of the environment by Nicolas Sarkozy), the right does not know what to do ...

She forgot that she was a pioneer. In the early 1970s, ecology entered politics. Sign of the times: the 1974 presidential election saw the first candidate labeled "ecologist", the sociologist René Dumont, submit to the votes of the French. But the turning point takes place earlier. We owe it to the Gaullist president of the time, Georges Pompidou. In a France turned upside down by the “ardent need” to continue the “modernization” of the country, Pompidou created the first environment ministry. As a counterweight to the whirlwind of change, the former Prime Minister of General de Gaulle offered the country a ministry of continuity, against the race for innovation a policy of preservation. A logical choice for this aggregator of classical letters, a former professor of Latin and Greek, who was fully aware of the questions that the development of industrial societies posed to the human condition. Evidenced by this speech on "the crisis of Western civilization", made in 1970 in the sprawling city of Chicago: "Nature appears to us less and less as the formidable power that man at the beginning of this century was still beating to be mastered, but as a precious and fragile framework which it is important to protect so that the earth remains habitable for man. ”

Ecology does not question change or the possibility of "progress" (the ability of men to put their creativity at the service of an improvement in their living conditions). It questions "Progress" (with a capital "P"); the belief in a vast movement which would mechanically coincide future and prosperity, transformation and improvement. "In the crowding of large cities," continues Pompidou, " the man is overwhelmed with servitudes and constraints of all kinds that go far beyond the advantages that bring him the rise in the standard of living and the individual or collective means. placed at his disposal. It is paradoxical to note that the development of the automobile for example, each of which expects the freedom of its movements, is ultimately translated by traffic paralysis. ” A passage of astonishing topicality and which reveals one of the great driving forces of the ecological vote in Lyon, Paris or Bordeaux: not the desire to “come back to the earth” (this desire, many urbanites realize it every year), but deeper discomfort related to the feeling of suffocation experienced in crowded transport; the concentration, the density of population that the tertiarisation of the economy and a regional planning policy focused on the development of large cities have accelerated in proportions never before achieved.

Pleading for the safeguard of "the house of the men", Pompidou made pass in 1973 a law on "the wooded spaces to preserve", declined in the form of a famous letter addressed to the trees of the edge of the road. “Modern life in its concrete, bitumen and neon frame will increasingly create a need for escape, nature and beauty in everyone. The highway will be used for transport that has no other purpose than speed. The road, it must become again for the motorist of the end of the XXth century what was the way for the pedestrian or the rider: a route which one borrows without hastening, by benefitting from it to see France. We must therefore be careful not to systematically destroy what makes it beautiful! ”

"Fragile", "precious", "beauty", "nature" ... the lexical field of Pompidolian ecology did not call into question the triumphant colbertism of the beginnings of the Fifth Republic, which was to give France strategic industries necessary for the preservation of its rank and the consolidation of its independence. It is undoubtedly here, in the conciliation - which some will deem "unnatural" - of ecology and a certain industry, of the imperative of safeguarding the beauty of the world and of sovereignty, of decarbonization (of the economy) and of reindustrialisation (of the country), that a crest line is drawn for the right. And comes under the name of "energy transition".

Think of hydrogen. Ultimately, this energy must contribute to the decarbonization of industries that consume a lot of energy (steelworks, refineries, etc.) and numerous transportations, notably by rail, as in the Grand Est region or in Occitanie, where SNCF, Alstom Transport and State environmental agency (Ademe) are working on the construction of hydrogen trains to revitalize the small lines of peripheral France. Across the entire value chain, the French hydrogen sector has leading brands (Air Liquide, Engie, EDF, Alstom, Michelin, etc.). But a decisive thing is missing in the deployment of the potential of this set: massive public investment. Because the market alone is not enough. To take off, an industrial sector needs public propellants. Old French reflex? It is little to know the history of the industry and the contemporary practices of our neighbors and international competitors.

Anxious to follow his steps in those of his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing undertook an important reforming action in the field of the environment. Examples include the law on nature protection, which established a national list of protected species, a statute for domestic animals and the creation of impact studies before the construction of infrastructure. Or that of 1975 creating the Conservatoire de l'Espace Littoral, in order to sanctuarize the French coasts in the face of threats of urbanization. Questioned by a journalist judging this policy anchored "on the left", President Giscard d'Estaing had this answer: "Ecology is to be afraid for what exists ... that's also to be right. An answer that deserves attention. Because it alone sums up the disposition of soul at the foundation of conservative thought.

Ecology is about being afraid for what exists ... that's also about being right.

Conservatism, explains the late Roger Scruton, author of Green Philosophy in 2012, is " this feeling that all mature people share without difficulty: the feeling that good things can be easily destroyed, but not easily created" . The "fear" of which Giscard d'Estaing speaks is therefore not this scarecrow which paralyzes and pushes to give in to the sirens of withdrawal. It is this feeling that the essential (fauna, flora, such landscape, such art of living, such language, such heritage ... everything that gives meaning and substance to our presence on Earth) is questionable, vulnerable, because depending on our ability to surround it with constantly renewed attention. She recalls that ecology is an ethics of responsibility, combining concern for the consequences and awareness of the permanence without which the future would have the tasteless taste of fate. An ethics that hinders a distorted conception of freedom, synonymous with unrestrained adaptation to a sense of history that the lack of internal resistance of modern man pushes to espouse without precaution. It is up to us to erect this ethics, as Hans Jonas urged us to do: "The Prometheus definitely unleashed, to which science confers forces never before known and economics its unbridled impulse, demands an ethics, which by freely agreed hindrances prevents man's power from becoming a curse for him. ”

The "obstacles" mentioned by the great thinker of ecology must be - let us note - "freely consented" . They cannot therefore be imposed from outside, by a tutelary power asserting itself in defiance of popular aspirations. Nor can they be erected without sovereignty. For it is only within the framework of a sovereign nation, mistress of its destinies, that a people can consent to such obstacles; build natural parks and areas protected from mass tourism, limit the exploitation of its forests, support reasoned agriculture, tax imports of products that do not meet the environmental standards it has set for itself ...

Finally, we cannot be complete without mentioning human ecology, which is not a dirty word, especially at a time when Parliament is preparing to unravel our bioethics code. Contrary to what the First Secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, affirms, this ecology does not put "nature above man" but the human above technology. Man is not a malleable material, the guinea pig for societal experiments of progressivism. He too calls for an ethics, which cannot simply correspond "to developments in science and society" , as advocated by Professor Jean-François Delfraissy. Bioethics is a compass, an anchor. It exists to set "benchmarks" for citizens, in the face of "sometimes dizzying advances in science" , and to respond to requests "from researchers and practitioners who often feel too lonely in the face of the gigantic consequences of their reflections and their work" , explained not La Manif pour Tous but François Mitterrand, when the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE) was created in 1983. But probably because he too was, basically, a man on the right…