Chronic. “Imagine. You wake up and something has changed. You no longer hear the birdsong (…), the landscapes you once cherished are now parched and all life gone. Air and water, everything you breathe that sustains life is altered. (…) The time for denial is over. We are not only losing the battle against climate change, we are losing our battle against the collapse of biodiversity. »
Rereading, four years later, this warning from Emmanuel Macron, posted on social networks at the end of March 2018, gives the full measure of the great denial of the five-year term which is ending. The environmental cause, which seemed destined to be a central axis, completely disappeared after only eighteen months in office.
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The supporters of the candidate president have three emblematic decisions to cite to their credit on the environmental front: the abandonment of the airport projects at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Loire-Atlantique), the Montagne d’Or mine, in Guyana, as well as the EuropaCity complex in the Triangle de Gonesse (Val-d’Oise). Not to mention, it is true, a few positions taken by the Head of State on the stage of the diplomatic theatre.
For the rest – whatever the sympathy that this young and dynamic president, free from the shackles of the old parties – may inspire, the demand for truth imposes to recognize it: on ecology, the political action undertaken during the five years has been marked by clientelism, the priority given to productivism, contempt for the law and scientific advice, the privatization of common goods and the criminalization of militant commitment.
Permeability to the hunting lobby
Hunting offers one of the most striking examples. Claiming to announce himself, on March 29 on the site of the Parisian, the program of the candidate president on the subject, the boss of the National Federation of Hunters, Willy Schraen, said it with disarming sincerity. « [Emmanuel Macron] will put all his energy to meet our requestshe explained. I have his word. He did not disappoint me. No law or amendment that could damage hunting has been adopted in this five-year period. Each time we had a problem to settle with an ecology minister, he intervened. »
Mr. Schraen is right. The price of hunting licenses has been halved, rifle carriers now sit on the new French Office for Biodiversity, the number of huntable bird species, of which around twenty are threatened, is at a level of more than two times higher than the European average… It is moreover the permeability of power to the hunting lobby which had finished convincing Nicolas Hulot to leave the government, in August 2018. It has never been denied. In the aftermath of the World Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, organized with great fanfare by France three years later, the government tried to reauthorize the traditional non-selective hunts that the Council of State had just deemed illegal. .
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