Their say
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“Libé” returns to meet the French who made the news in our columns to discuss the presidential election. Today, Eric Lenoir, landscaper and nurseryman in Yonne, hopes to see climate change finally take the place it deserves in the debates.
“What did I think of Macron’s five-year term? Am I allowed to answer abruptly? We answer in the affirmative, a bit curious about the formula to come. “So the first word that comes to mind is ‘grotesque’.” The frame is fixed. To tell the truth, when we proposed to Eric Lenoir to discuss politics and the presidential election, we expected no less. The last time we spoke to him about it, one morning in November 2020 – by telephone, confinement requires – he had just started a hunger strike.
For “put the church back in the middle of the village” and “stop being the helpless victim of criminal governments that do not live up to their duties”, the forty-year-old had stopped eating at the same time as a few dozen people scattered all over France. Doctor, market gardener, former elected official… All hoped, through their action, to force the French and European authorities to take much more ambitious measures to deal with climate change. “Agriculture, employment, migrations… All the ills of our society are completely correlated with the climate, and yet nothing or almost nothing is done to act”, he explains a year and a half later, in a sympathetic tone that clashes with the alarmism of his remarks.
Fight against “the dramatic effects of climate change”
His environmental fiber, Eric Lenoir draws it from his profession. Landscaper and p…