AThen the government has just dissolved the Earth Uprising movement, it is not useless to wonder about the results of half a century of ecological struggles in France. Because, apart from the great victories passed on to posterity, such as the aborted extension of a military camp in Larzac (Aveyron) or the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport project (Loire-Atlantique), the essential fights for the environment has fallen into oblivion.
In 1999, geographer Bruno Charlier offered an initial assessment of this in his doctoral thesis, “Environmental defence: between space and territory”. He started from a key source, the environmental review nature fightfounded in 1974. With a few thousand subscribers and all that France had of environmental associations at the time, it echoed local or national struggles, thus constituting a documentary treasure – the history of “environmental foot soldiers”as summarized in an article by World. From an exhaustive count, Charlier had identified 1,619 mobilizations between 1974 and 1994.
Three sectors stood out, generating more than half of the conflicts: tourism, transport and energy. Before the nuclear power plants, it was the ski slopes, the seaside installations or the automobile circuits which mobilized the ecologists. Next in order of importance: pollution affairs, quarries, landfills and, finally, industrial agriculture (clearing, hydraulic installations, etc.).
Contrary to the self-satisfied cliché of “raising awareness”, environmental mobilization rather waned between 1974 and 1994, going from 100 conflicts per year in the 1970s to around 60 in the 1980s. According to the author, the arrival of the left in power, which had raised hopes in terms of ecology, had probably demobilized the associations. Finally, given the share of tourist facilities and dams, it was unsurprisingly on the coasts and the mountains that the conflicts had been the most numerous, the department of Finistère winning the prize for mobilization.
At the cost of life
This scientific project was taken up more recently in a special issue of the journal Silence published in October 2022, with the collaboration of academics Gaëlle Ronsin and Juliette Piketty-Moine and consultant Hermine de Francqueville. They looked not at environmental struggles, but only at victories. Without being exhaustive, the census counts 180. Among the abandoned projects, we note once again the strong presence of tourism: two ski resorts in the Vanoise National Park (Savoie) in 1969, a tourist megacentre in the Gorges du Verdon, straddling the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and the Var, or even, in the 1990s, a ski resort on a bog in the Vosges at just 1,000 meters above sea level.
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