Olivier Blond is president of Bruitparif, a noise observatory in Île-de-France, and special delegate in charge of environmental health at the Île-de-France regional council. He is the author of
To put an end to punitive ecology
(Grasset) and
Plea for right-wing ecology
(Albin Michel).
THE
FIGARO.
- The journalist and environmental activist Hugo Clément, has drawn the wrath of part of the left and environmentalists for agreeing to debate with the president of the National Rally during an evening organized by the weekly Valeurs
Actuelles
.
Behind this controversy, a question: is ecology the prerogative of the left?
Historically, isn't ecology as nature conservation intrinsically right-wing?
Oliver Blonde.
-
Hugo Clément was right to open this debate because we must give back to ecology its pluralism.
There have long been environmental currents on the right, even on the far right.
And we must remember that it was Georges Pompidou who appointed the Prime Minister for the Environment, Valery Giscard d'Estaing who launched the first campaign to save energy ("the hunt for gaspi"), Jacques Chirac who included the environment in the constitution and Nicolas Sarkozy who launched the Grenelle de l'environnement.
In comparison, the record, or the legacy, of the left is non-existent, even negative when it comes to nuclear power and the country's energy policy.
As there is a diversity of living beings, there is a diversity of ideas concerning ecology.
And this is quite logical because ecology is intrinsically political, in the sense that it affects the functioning of our society, the vision of the future, the way in which we want to produce or distribute wealth or risks.
Read alsoThe right wants to regain control of ecology
The left seeks to erase this diversity.
She wants to believe that there is only one truth, her own, the one she has called “political ecology”.
It also tries to discredit those who do not share this unique truth.
But it is a construction intended to build a hegemony.
It is important today to deconstruct it and revive the great variety of ecological ideas.
To cite just a few examples, there are more animalistic ecologies (often marked on the right for example with Brigitte Bardot), a conservative and romantic ecology whose origin dates back to the 18th century, an ecology attached to the Catholic religion, such as the integral ecology, and we can even go back to an ecology resulting from the sustainable management of royal forests and
a decree of Philippe 6 de Valois in 1346… All are different and each brings their own contribution.
To use, with a twist, a quote from François Gemenne, researcher and contributor to the IPCC, ecology is not a consensus.
It's better this way.
If ecology is today associated with the left, is it not the fault of the right? Has she sinned by excessively asserting the rights of reason against "collapsologists" and by portraying environmental activists as "Green Khmers"?
Collapsology has had a success that never ceases to amaze me, given all the objections that could be brought to it.
And great personalities of left ecology like the philosopher Catherine Larrère have demonstrated its inanity, in a book entitled
The Worst is not certain
and whose subtitle is explicit:
essay on catastrophist blindness.
Still, the left kidnapped ecology in the 1990s, and since then the right has experienced a form of Stockholm syndrome, reinforcing this situation with its hostility to what it has long considered a subject for hairy leftists.
But the situation has changed a lot since then.
There was the Grenelle.
And, since then, a generation of local elected officials has taken up the subject, in a pragmatic way, like Valérie Pécresse.
Does the left still have the intellectual resources to bring about the ecological transition?
Outside of the decreasing and extremist credo, there are no more ideas on the left.
Olivier Blond
This practical and concrete ecology contrasts fundamentally with those of the extremists who lay a trap for us: that of appearing moderate or lukewarm.
The situation calls for a resolute commitment.
We must assume it to redefine what radicalism is.
It's not about giving yourself adrenaline rushes by throwing molotov cocktails at the police, but about getting to the root of the problems and resolutely giving yourself the objective of finding a solution to them.
This new radicality is that of doers, women and men of action, in associations, companies, research laboratories or in institutions, it is what is changing the world in concrete terms.
This radicalism is completely foreign to extremists who especially do not want to get their hands dirty in the real world.
Does the right have the intellectual resources to think about this theme?
I won't start asking the question the other way around.
Does the left still have the intellectual resources to bring about the ecological transition?
Outside of the decreasing and extremist credo, there are no more ideas on the left.
It also refuses to think about modernity, for example on the energy question: it braces itself on the old lanterns of the last century, the opposition to nuclear power, and it prefers to open new coal-fired power stations in Germany, which is absurd in the face of climate change and criminal for air pollution.
The left hides this intellectual desert by overbidding radicalism.
And unfortunately, even the moderates now feel obliged to support violent actions, as in Sainte Soline, when they should be denounced.
They pretend to be peaceful but in fact deliberately maintain a double discourse.
Conversely, there are authors, mainly Anglo-Saxon, who present strong ideas that should be assimilated, even if they are not all cataloged on the right.
For example Garrett Hardin, inventor of the tragedy of the commons – a fundamental idea in the Anglo-Saxon world, William McDonough, founder of the circular economy or Amory Lovins, pioneering engineer and founder of the Rocky Mountain institute… they are giants compared to small stars social networks of ecology as we know it in France.
In our country, we must obviously mention Luc Ferry, who has written extensively on ecology.
But there are also three other major personalities: Christian Gollier, who heads the Toulouse School of Economics, who also works with Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2014. There is also Esther Duflo, also Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. All three seek to renew the thought of action with the economy on the one hand, or lessons from the field on the other.
Their thinking is a thousand times more fruitful than the cookie-cutter declarations of this or that social media starlet.
There are several ways to do ecology, including on the right.
But we must reinvent ecology against degrowth.
This is what I call an ecology of supply.
Olivier Blond
How to articulate, today, a right-wing discourse likely to unite the French? Should we insist on the beauty of the world, local roots, and attachment to the peasant world
?
There are several ways to do ecology, including on the right.
But we must reinvent ecology against degrowth.
This is what I call an ecology of supply.
Rather than reducing demand (degrowth), we improve supply, the way of producing.
This means relocating – for the industry, and defending our food autonomy and defending our food production capacity for our peasants.
This means producing wealth, but consuming fewer resources.
And it's possible, it's called decoupling and even the IPCC report talks about it!
It is essential because everyone agrees today on one point: the ecological transition will require gigantic investments.
But to invest, you have to produce wealth!
We must relocate production – we saw how essential this was during the Covid crisis and several studies show that this would save hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2.
Producing locally and ecologically also means recreating employment, revitalizing territories that have been abandoned: it means combining the ecological, the economic and the social.
And this is the very definition of sustainable development as proposed by the United Nations.