Normalien, associate of philosophy, Jean-Loup Bonnamy is a specialist in geopolitics and political philosophy. He published, with Renaud Girard,
When psychosis makes the world derail
(“Tracts” collection, Gallimard.).
Some literary texts sometimes seem strangely prophetic.
It is often because they have been able to detect underlying trends, already present in their time and which are only bearing fruit in our time.
This is the case with a short short story by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-1889), entitled
L'amour du naturel
, published in the collection
Contes cruels
(1883).
This crucial text allows us to better understand the political issues related to ecology.
Villiers tells the story of a President of the Republic, who goes incognito for a walk in the countryside, "
quite happy to see other"
faces
"than those of the prefects, sub-prefects and mayors: that to him rested the sight. "
There he meets a couple of young shepherds, Daphnis and Chloé, who, ruined, had to leave Paris and wanted to get closer to Nature.
But the President, visibly cut off from the field (one would say today "
disconnected
"), ignores that behind the rural appearances hide the artificial and the false.
Industrialization and the consumer society are producing a new world of artificial objects, massified and standardized, a new world which comes to replace Nature.
Thus, “
milk can be drunk: because it is made, I believe, with excellent sheep brains.
- As for the toast, murmured Daphnis, as for the bread, you know, with the new yeasts, one is never sure… but as for the butter, I admit that it seemed to me an interesting margarine. .
If, however, you preferred cheese, here is one you can trust, where tallow and chalk enter barely a third: - it is a new invention.
Villiers also clearly saw the role that the globalization of trade and the United States would play in this process of standardization.
The Americanization of the world was already underway: “
Do you want two mirror eggs?
These are all the rage.
They come from export, you know?
of those three million artificial eggs that America ships to us a day;
they are soaked in acidulated water which makes the shell: it is instantaneous.
Believe me, taste it.
We'll have coffee after.
He is excellent!
it is this first choice false chicory whose annual sale, in Paris alone, amounts, according to the official totals, to eighteen million francs.
"
Even wine, a symbol of French identity, is no exception to the rule, as Villiers has clearly seen, who already mentions the risks to consumer health: “
a leaf of this mixture so well tartrated, plastered and duly arsenic that four or five hundred modern people have died!
".
A fervent progressive, the President reacts.
One would say today that he "
does pedagogy
" and "
fight against the fakes news
" propagated by the "
conspirators
" and the "
reactionaries
": "
believing to unravel, in these last words, a vague intention of irony to the address of Progress, he thought he had to take a little of his official air
”and, like a true fact-checker before the hour, he specifies that many things remain natural: the sky, the mountains, the sea ...
But the President is mistaken, because Villiers, from his time, well understood the problem of light pollution, which ravages our cities today, hides the stars from us and disorients animals: "
It is because," murmured Daphnis, endless electric rays, starting from the polygon, cross the shadow of their immense brooms of clear fog: this modifies, at every moment, the clarity of the stars and adulterates the beautiful moonlight on the wood! ... The night is no longer ... natural.
As for the nightingales, Chloe sighed, the continual whistles of Melun's trains terrified them;
they don't sing anymore.
"Ditto for the sea, which was already beginning to be crossed by large submarine cables:"
is that we are not unaware that a large cable in aniaise, from one end to the other, the immensity well overrated.
"
This Nature, which was previously omnipresent, universally and immediately accessible, becomes a luxury product
But Villiers could not imagine how the situation of our oceans would deteriorate further.
Crossed by cables for the Internet, polluted, depopulated by overfishing, exposed to oil spills, soiled in the Pacific by a vortex of plastic waste ("
the plastic continent
") that is three times the size of France, our oceans do not grow. not wearing well.
But the most interesting is the moral that concludes this news.
After his walk, once returned and installed in the former apartments of King Saint-Louis "
the honorable president of the current regime, smoking a real cigar in the oratory of the victor of Al-Mansourah, Taillebourg and Saintes, could not help recognizing, in oneself, that deep down, the love of too natural things is nothing more than a kind of dream of the less realizable, good to pay, at the most, the verbiage of the people late, and that Daphnis and Chloe, to lead, today, their way of the past, their simple rural existence, to feed themselves, finally, on real milk, real bread, real butter, real cheese, real wine, in real woods, under a real sky, in a real cottage, and bound with a love without ulterior motive, should have started by putting their said cottage on a base of about twenty-five thousand pounds of income , given that the first of the benefits for which we are, positively, indebted to Science, is to have placed the simple things e
essential and "
natural
" parts of life beyond the reach of the poor.
"
We can remember several things from this news.
First of all, we see that the poor are driven out of the cities.
This is exactly the phenomenon that we see today with the gentrification of large cities, the explosion in the cost of real estate in metropolitan areas and the migration of the working classes to peripheral France.
Today, the rich are in Paris and the popular classes, like Daphnis and Chloé, live in Seine-et-Marne, the place where the Villiers news takes place (and the only department in the Ile de France to have placed Marine Le Pen in the lead in the first round in 2017).
Then, one could believe that by living far from big cities, the popular classes would be closer to Nature.
Read also:
"Wind turbines are a staggering environmental scandal"
Paradoxically, as Villiers clearly saw, this is not the case.
It's quite the opposite.
The poor have never had so little access to nature.
You can live 500 meters from a forest without ever having set foot there.
This Nature, which was previously omnipresent, universally and immediately accessible, becomes a luxury product.
Villiers shows us poor people deprived of Nature.
However, this is exactly what we see today: the poor condemned to an Americanized and artificialized life, to the dictatorship of commercial areas and mass distribution, to hard discount, to hyper-processed foods, to junk food, poor quality Made in China… all this costing less than healthy and local products.
A product from the other side of the world is sometimes now cheaper than the same product grown a few kilometers from home.
Our ancestors of the Middle Ages, who ate only local products, and for whom the price of a commodity increased mechanically with distance and transport, would lose their Latin.
Finally, today it is the rich, who, thanks to their money, confiscate Nature for their own benefit (unaffordable organic products, healthy food and detox juice, parks and trees in big cities…).
A century ago, all of our food was organic.
Like Monsieur Jourdain, who wrote prose without knowing it, we all ate organic without knowing it.
Today organic is a luxury product.
But this confiscation of Nature by money in no way implies a better knowledge of Nature among the wealthy classes.
Before the Industrial Revolution, it was the poor who were close to Nature and the rich who were far from it.This is a major historical and anthropological shift.
It should be noted in passing that this is a major historical and anthropological shift.
Before the Industrial Revolution, it was the poor who were close to Nature and the rich who were far from it.
It is the figure of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who advocates poverty and proximity to Nature, as opposed to the Tyrant who lives in a Palace, where sophistication, artificiality, pomp and luxury reign.
Likewise, in the French comic film
Les Visitors
, we see that the two main characters (Lord Goddefroy the Bold and his squire Jacquouille) are infinitely closer to Nature than any Frenchman of the 21st century, but that the squire knows her even better than his master.
Jacquouille la Fripouille is said to be
"cunning and sniffs the tracks well"
.
He bathes in the river, sometimes sleeps in the forest, imitates the cries of animals, is good with horses ... This is why his master uses him.
Likewise, less technologically and economically developed, Native Americans were closer to Nature than their European invaders.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot have thought about this at length.
Gauguin painted it in the Pacific Islands.
Today, this link between poverty and natural life is broken, as Villiers clearly saw.
We note today that it is mainly the elites, the inhabitants of large metropolises, the bobos, the winners of globalization, the "
anywhere
" (people from anywhere to use David Goodhart's expression) who carry the discourse of political ecology and environmental claims.
However, this wealthy population is the big winner of an economic system, globalization, which is at the origin of most of the global pollution and which is deeply anti-ecological.
And she often tends to champion societal innovations, like surrogacy, which clearly violate the laws and limits of Nature.
It is this population which claims more ecology and swears by the organic while yet it lives in big cities, ignores everything real and concrete Nature and would be hard pressed to differentiate a beech from a birch.
To read also:
Referendum: "A government which closed Fessenheim is not credible when it speaks about environment"
Paradoxically, it is the rich who have access to organic products who are asking for more ecology.
While the poor, condemned to junk food, laugh at political ecology.
For them, employment, purchasing power, housing, security, immigration, identity are far more important priorities than environmental protection.
When you are struggling to make ends meet, the climate seems far away.
Worse, they often see in ecology a speech of the rich, contemptuous, haughty and of which they will be the first victims.
Victims by paying more for their electricity and gas.
14% of households are already in an extremely precarious situation.
Victims by paying even more taxes.
Victims seeing the use of the automobile further penalized.
However, when you live in peripheral France, dependence on the automobile is an absolutely fundamental fact.
Victims of wind turbines, which are located in Peripheral France and not in the heart of metropolises, with their infernal noise, audible several kilometers away, and their procession of nuisances, nuisances which scare away animals (birds, squirrels ...) and make sick humans (migraines, hearing problems…).
Moreover, the presence of wind turbines nearby lowers the value of a house by 40%.
These are the houses of the Yellow Vests, the modern Daphnis and Chloe, which will lose value because of the wind turbines and not the preparations of the voters of Anne Hidalgo.
Let's face it, paying taxes to finance a device that ruins your life is annoying to say the least.
Victims of a French economy weighed down by environmental standards, standards which will destroy even more jobs, cause us to lose even more in competitiveness, and deindustrialize us even more.
Let us not forget that the major crisis of the Yellow Vests was sparked by a proposed diesel tax.
And that in 2013, Brittany rose up with the movement of the Red Bonnets against the installation of ecoportals.
political ecology seems both punitive and completely inefficient and environmentally counterproductive.
Moreover, the ecological question is not a determinant of the vote for the big elections.
A party like EELV, which blithely mixes ecology and post-modern societal demands (like the GPA), achieves good scores in the European elections (16% in 2009, 13.5% in 2019) and asserts itself in metropolises populated by bobos (Bordeaux, Lyon, Grenoble, Poitiers, Paris ...), but collapsed during the presidential and legislative elections (2% in the 2012 Presidential).
Even more surprisingly, political ecology seems both punitive and completely ineffective and environmentally counterproductive.
Absurd examples abound.
This is, for example, the case with wind turbines.
The supporters of political ecology want both to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (which is commendable) and to reduce the share of nuclear power in French electricity.
But the two objectives are contradictory.
Betting on wind power means having less reliable and more expensive energy.
Its development will lead to more frequent cuts (especially in winter), more expensive bills that will weigh on the purchasing power of households and on the competitiveness of our economy.
The affordable energy offered by nuclear power, a symbol of French excellence and a pledge of sovereignty, is one of the last assets of a very sick French industrial competitiveness.
Above all, the more we replace nuclear power with wind power, the more greenhouse gases we will emit, because the intermittence of the wind (the fact that the wind does not blow all the time) pushes us to resort to gas and coal , very polluting, while nuclear emits much less CO2.
Nuclear power plants emit on average 80 times less CO2 per kilowatt hour produced than coal power plants and 45 times less than gas power plants.
The closure of the Fessenheim reactors is already resulting in the additional annual emission of 8 million tonnes of CO2 in Europe, i.e. the equivalent of 15% of the annual emissions of a region like Île-de-France, and by less reliable supply.
By abandoning nuclear power and taking wind power to the pinnacle, Angela Merkel significantly developed coal, which blew up the pollution emitted by Germany, to the great detriment of air quality in Germany and around the world. .
Germany is today the sixth largest polluter in the world, far ahead of France, emitting more than double the amount of CO2 compared to us.
Read also:
Ecology: when catastrophism paralyzes political action
A wind turbine has 50m blades which rest on a 100m mast.
It rests on a reinforced concrete base of 300m3.
1,500 tonnes of concrete are needed per wind turbine, or 30 million tonnes for the 20,000 wind turbines that are planned to be installed (concrete transported by 1.2 million journeys of mixer trucks, which operate ... 'gasoline).
It is full of scrap metal and plastics as well as used engine oil which risks polluting the groundwater at any time.
Not to mention the rare metals necessary for its manufacture and extracted on the other side of the world in a very polluting way (pollution of the air by CO2 emissions, of soil and water).
When its blades are frozen, the ice must be melted by helicopter spraying water at 60 degrees, heated in an oil truck.
We notice the same type of contradiction on the question of animal welfare: as Le Figaro underlines, “
we are delighted that Parc Astérix is closing its dolphinarium, but the animals will be transferred elsewhere in Europe, to pools that are already occupied. : their well-being will therefore actually decrease
”.
Why is political ecology so little attentive to reality and ecological efficiency?
Quite simply because political ecology is above all a way of defining oneself, of sending back to others and especially to oneself a certain social image of oneself.
In his book
La Distinction
, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized that the bourgeoisie did everything to distinguish itself and that if it went to the Museum, it was more to give a sign of recognition and belonging by distinguishing itself from those who did not go there not only out of a real love for art and classical culture.
Today, part of the upper middle classes seek to distinguish themselves by adopting a progressive and environmentalist discourse.
“
Look, we are good people!
We are altruistic and kind.
We are smart and we believe in science, so we protect the climate.
We are not like all these rednecks, these climate-skeptical admirers of Trump, these yellow vests, these racist beaufs who pollute and make fun of Nature
”.
Political ecology is only the new form of a powerful narcissism and a no less powerful class contempt ...
It is Benjamin Grivaux who castigates "
the guys who smoke cigarettes and run on diesel
".
It is Hillary Clinton who calls Trump voters a "
basket of deplorable
".
And the very punitive vision that the same Hillary Clinton had of ecology, wanting to massively close the coal mines, was not for nothing in her electoral defeat of 2016.
The bobo may despise the hunter, but the hunter knows nature infinitely better than he does and actively participates in the regulation of species.
As Pierre Vermeren writes: “
it is more convenient to attack hunters, bullfights and circuses, to gain a clear conscience than to the real factors of the planetary extinction of flora and fauna.
When you live in a metropolis, far from wind turbines, and know nothing about Nature, it is difficult to measure the ecologically negative impact of certain measures that we defend in the name of ecology.
The bobo may despise the hunter, but the hunter knows nature infinitely better than he does and actively participates in the regulation of species.
If political ecology is a simple mode of social and cultural distinction, it does not need to be environmentally effective.
A fashion, an imagination (the wind and the little birds), an ideology, sometimes sectarian and fanatical, a means of social distinction do not need to be rational or seek the cost-benefit balance.
Emotion prevails.
The symbol is enough.
Does this mean that we must abandon all ecological concerns in politics?
Certainly not.
On the contrary, it is urgent to build another realistic, alternative and credible political ecology.
It must be a popular and patriotic ecology.
Whether we like it or not, the facts are the facts: the ecological emergency is there and calls into question the sustainability of our Nation and our ways of life.
Every year one to two million people die in China from pollution.
Same in India.
Pollution therefore kills more in these two countries than Covid-19 in the whole world.
And in France, pollution threatens our health.
The patriots, the Gaullists, the conservatives, the populists, the sovereignists (left and right), the defenders of identities and traditions, in short all the contemptors of a globalization gone mad, must seize the ecological question to not to leave the monopoly to the Torquemada and the Tartuffe of the progressive bourgeoisie.
Let us not forget that Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was the first in the United States to take national measures to protect the environment.
A great lover of Nature, passionate about hunting (proof that ecology is not incompatible with hunting), a pioneer in sustainable development and the preservation of natural resources, he created 150 protected national forests, five national parks and 51 reserves. ornithological.
Then the Republican Richard Nixon, elected on the slogan "
Law and order
", took, from his first year in office, numerous environmental measures: law governing the implementation of major projects, creation of the large federal agency in charge of to protect the environment (EPA), vote of the Clean Air Act against air pollution and intended to "
ensure a healthy environment for every citizen
" ...
In France, it was Georges Pompidou who created the Ministry for the Protection of Nature and the Environment in 1971. Faithful to Einstein's message according to which “
if bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live
”, Philippe de Villiers stood up against bee-killing insecticides.
As the historian René Rémond underlines, “
The traditional right wing advocates respect for natural cycles, believes in the immutability of human nature, distrusts the proud initiatives of man which risk upsetting the balances desired by Providence. or fruits of necessity.
"
This new political ecology must be based on a few simple principles.
First principle: Never take measures on an emotional or symbolic basis, but always seek efficiency, that is to say concrete improvement of the environmental situation.
To do this, we have to worry about the consequences and carry out cost-benefit assessments.
This will probably lead us to revise downwards our ambitions in wind power.
Second principle: be popular, social and democratic.
For that, it must be incentive and positive, and not negative and punitive.
It must encourage initiatives, reward good behavior, be loved by creating jobs and growth and ensuring a better quality of life.
We cannot have both globalized free trade and ecology.
Third principle: Any credible ecological policy necessarily implies a certain degree of de-globalization.
There is no ecology without protectionism, without sovereignty, without borders, without economic patriotism, without reindustrialisation.
Without protectionism, ecology is an empty word, which can only harm our economy and our jobs.
There is no point in imposing ecological standards if this penalizes us and leads us to import, after long and polluting transport, products manufactured on the other side of the world without any respect for environmental standards.
We cannot have both globalized free trade and ecology.
Some countries pollute massively and practice real environmental dumping by ignoring the standards that we impose on ourselves.
In such a situation, it therefore seems normal to protect our industry, to relocate production to us and to sanction these countries with taxes, subsidies to companies that produce in France, customs barriers, national or European preference policies and import quotas.
Fourth principle: Favor renewable energies over carbon energies.
Of course, nuclear power must be considered as a renewable in its own right, and even as the renewable par excellence.
Our nuclear industry must therefore be made safe, developed, constantly improved (in particular on issues of safety and waste management) and exported.
Fifth principle: Implement a major thermal renovation plan for the building, creating activity and jobs.
Sixth principle: Fund innovation to green our industrial and agricultural production and better trap CO2 without harming our economy.
Seventh principle: Set up a major plan to preserve biodiversity in France, to protect animals, plants, landscapes and heritage.
In the 1970s, Pasolini was already worried about the disappearance of fireflies in Italy.
In ten years, France has lost the equivalent of the Seine-et-Marne department in agricultural land due to concreteization.
Today, as Pierre Vermeren points out, species such as hedgehogs, butterflies, bees, crayfish or even amphibians (due to the scarcity of ponds) are threatened in our regions ... This protection plan involves in particular to fight against the concreteization and artificialization of soils: in ten years, France has lost the equivalent of the Seine-et-Marne department in agricultural areas because of concreteization.
Consequently, it will be necessary to review our policy with regard to wind power, but also with regard to mass distribution, since car parks in shopping areas play an important role in this excessive concreteization.
And reduce the number of our dear ones (in every sense of the word), which our mayors like so much.
One in two roundabouts in the world is in France and between 500 and 800 are built here per year.
Eighth principle: Review our development aid policy towards Third World countries.
The aim of our development assistance should not be the industrialization of poor countries, their urbanization, or their full integration into globalization.
Winners in the short term, they are in fact losers in the medium term because industrialization generates enormous ecological problems, which is bad both for their own environmental record and for that of the Planet.
A city like Lagos in Nigeria (13 million people crowded together, chaotic traffic, horrible pollution, rampant violence) is simply an allegory of hell on earth.
The more poor countries industrialize, the more it is done to our detriment (relocations, etc.).
In addition, their industrialization and their integration into globalization destroy their traditional solidarities (those of the village) and their ancestral ways of life, which makes these countries very unstable and favors the will to emigrate towards Europe while it is is precisely what we are trying to prevent.
With a low-polluting industry and thanks to nuclear power, France emits less than 1% of global CO2
On the contrary, we must put in place a co-development which fully integrates ecological questions, conditioning aid to efforts in the fields of ecology, birth control and the fight against clandestine migration and which values the local, the subsistence farming, organic farming, traditions, local ties of solidarity and identity… This is how we will convert these countries to ecology and we will limit the migratory flows that come from them.
But it will also be necessary to act so that our big companies stop considering Asia and Africa as their trash.
Ninth principle: Defend quality, small businesses, crafts, small farmers, the French art of living, short circuits… The scandal of horse meat in lasagna at the Spanghero factory (2013) is a good example of the drifts born of the multiplication of actors and the excessively long circuits.
Tenth principle: Establish a diplomacy of ecology.
France does not have to be ashamed of its own record: with a low-polluting industry and thanks to nuclear power, it emits less than 1% of global CO2.
Its share in global pollution is therefore no greater than its share in the human population.
We must put pressure on Brazil, whose policy of deforestation in the Amazon is simply suicidal for humanity.
We can also initiate major international plans to safeguard the oceans, preserve biodiversity and combat desertification.
It is with these guiding principles that we will be able to come out on top of the nightmare described by Villiers de l'Isle Adam in L'Amour du Naturel.