“I was sitting behind a desk, doing slides, while our shareholder launched a new climate bomb”

2023-09-03 16:00:07
CLARA DUPRé

The first time I had doubts about my work was at Christmas in 2021. I was going through a period of great eco-anxiety at that time. I had the impression that the world was out of order, I read articles every day about the madness of human activities and their impact on our world. And me, on a daily basis, I was doing slides. Christmas was also a complicated time, with family meals and the traditional “It’s the fault of the Americans, climate change, we can’t help it”.

I grew up in Vannes, in Brittany. For my parents, studies should above all lead me to job security. I dreamed of being an architect, but the job of process engineer seemed to have more opportunities. So between drawing houses or calculating the length of a pipeline, the balance tipped towards the second. At the time, ecology was not part of my life, and being admitted to a preparatory class for engineering schools was a first step towards secure employment.

It was a specialized physics-chemistry and mathematics preparation, the challenge was to understand molecules and the functioning of atoms, flows and chemical processes. But my interest in these subjects diminished during my studies. In the last year of engineering, a large part of our week was devoted to conferences given by professionals in the sector, chemical product producers, concrete, plastics and oil manufacturers, who extolled the merits of their companies and of their products. At the same time, some of our teachers were making quite disturbing statements like “the seventh continent of plastic does not exist”, or simply failed to talk about the impact of the materials being studied.

“Linking my studies and my convictions”

I then began to realize the disconnect between what I read daily on ecological subjects, and the reality of this industrial world for which we were trained. We were very rarely questioned about the impacts of what we were going to produce, or so in a few specific courses. At the end of my course, I understood that I didn’t want to be an engineer to produce more and more, I wanted to use my skills to reduce the impact of what we produced. That’s when I started to get active to find an internship, not in a big industry, but in the ecological transition. So I applied for an internship that linked my studies and my convictions: consultant in products, materials and substances in a consulting firm in ecological transition.

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