2023-10-22 17:12:00
During the protests against the A69
Photo: AFP/CHARLY TRIBALLEAU
More than 10,000 people from all over France demonstrated at the construction site of the planned A69 Toulouse-Castres motorway over the weekend. “This motorway is completely out of date,” activist Thomas Brail is convinced. “It harms the environment and is itself economically unreasonable and unnecessary.”
Brail founded an association to protect trees in 2019, which aims to fight against the construction of the A69. In September, the 48-year-old made headlines when he camped on a plane tree in front of the Environment Ministry in Paris for 10 days until police forcibly took him down and he then went on a 31-day hunger strike. Members of the initiative repeatedly hindered the construction work by setting up camps in the forest and occupying trees.
Many families and their children also took part in the weekend demonstration, for example from the village of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is to be divided in half by the planned motorway. There were also numerous farmers with tractors who protested against the expropriation and misuse of arable land for highway construction. Despite a large police presence, some activists occupied a farm whose residents had been expropriated and evicted. During the occupation of the site of a concrete mixing plant, three trucks were set on fire, which the organizers of the demonstration strongly condemned – they had announced peaceful actions.
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The environmental associations continue to hope that they can still prevent the highway. The construction work is already well advanced and paths have been cut through the forests and the area has been leveled. 40 percent of the planned funds have already been “used”. The 53 kilometer long A69, the planning of which goes back more than 30 years, is intended to relieve pressure on a national road. The concession was awarded years ago to the company Atosca, which is scheduled to start operations in 2025 and will collect a usage fee. It covers most of the construction costs of 450 million euros.
A few days ago, Thomas Brail and some colleagues were received for a conversation by Carole Delga, the socialist president of the Occitanie region. They were able to rely on a survey among residents of the affected departments, in which 61 percent of respondents were against the construction of the motorway and 81 percent were in favor of a referendum on the project. Delga, on the other hand, referred to an older survey commissioned by the motorway company, which showed 75 percent approval. Supporters, however, are primarily small and medium-sized companies who hope for better conditions for supplying large companies in Toulouse, especially the Airbus factories. In order to appease the opponents, the regional president promised to set up an express service with electric buses between Castres and Toulouse in order to avoid as many car journeys and the associated emissions as possible.
Transport Minister Clément Beaune, on the other hand, has so far refused to talk to motorway opponents. He simply had his office boss inform him that all other highway construction projects had been “put on hold” and that their economic sense and ecological consequences should be examined again. On the A69, however, this happened repeatedly. Beaune refers to “ecological compensation” for the construction-related interventions in nature. For example, for several wetlands that need to be drained, new ones should be created elsewhere and five new ones should be planted for every tree cut down. The environmentalists counter that 260 large trees have already been felled, which were more than 200 years old and will be missing for many years to maintain balance in the forest. For Brail, this is all “nothing more than greenwashing.”
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