They wanted to symbolize “a wall across the ways of agribusiness”. This Saturday, March 19, near Pontivy, in Brittany, around fifty demonstrators opposed to industrial agriculture built a wall of breeze blocks across the railway tracks. “The above-ground breeding system is going straight into the wall, we must put agro-industry down,” said the collective “Brittany against factory farms”, to which the activists belong.
During their action, they blocked a train transporting cereals intended for the manufacture of animal feed, before dumping part of the cargo on the tracks. “It will be up to the judicial authorities to provide the appropriate responses and to characterize the criminal offense of these acts, indicated the prefecture of Morbihan in a press release. This act of food waste is scandalous at the very time when France must consolidate its capacity of food production in a difficult international context”. For its part, the collective explains its gesture by ensuring that it defends “peasant agriculture, living, agro-ecological, territorialized, job-creating and remunerative”.
In a context of soaring commodity prices, the action was however deemed “scandalous” or “inadmissible” by many politicians and agricultural organizations. Several complaints have been filed.
This operation questions the changing face of radical ecology. Could she be moving from civil disobedience to a more violent mode of direct action? To answer it, L’Express interviewed Marc Lomazzi, journalist, author ofUltra Ecologicus: the new crusaders of ecologypublished by Flammarion editions.
L’Express: Can this Saturday’s gesture be defined as a violent action, or as an act of civil disobedience?
Marc Lomazzi : Saturday’s action is very similar to the strategy used by radical environmentalists, namely civil disobedience. It is claimed today by radical ecological groups and includes eco-sabotage. Today, they all accept the idea that we can attack machines, equipment. The limit is not to attempt human life. It is a typical operation of radical ecologists, very well organized, well prepared, with militants trained for that.
Saturday’s action is very significant, as it contains the idea of incapacitating companies they consider guilty of “ecocide”. Here, in this case, the Sanders group, a company supposed to feed animals in huge factory farms. The latter is also a subsidiary of the Avril group, one of the largest industrial groups in France. We therefore have in this gesture both the method and the standard target of ecosabotage.
What distinguishes ecoterrorism and ecosabotage?
Proponents of ecosabotage consider that the ecological emergency is such that we are heading for disaster. That we must raise our voices because the marches for the climate have been ineffective. I think that this state of mind, especially among the younger generations, will increase. But ecosabotage is different from ecoterrorism.
The latter is based on the idea that we are going to wage a total ecological war to put an end to the destruction of the planet by bomb attacks, the destruction of strategic sites such as oil pipelines or power stations. This, even if there are deaths. The idea is that we must put out of harm’s way the industrial capitalism which is destroying the planet, in a total ecological war. It is not certain that France has reached this stage. It develops more in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Why does this phenomenon emerge in Anglo-Saxon countries rather than in France?
There is an antecedent: ecoterrorist groups arose in the 2000s in these countries, following the example of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical branch of Earth First! (Earth First!), classified as a terrorist organization by the FBI. The members of these groups were partisans of an ultra-radical defense of nature.
Then, we can also explain this presence across the Atlantic by a long tradition of armed struggle. It is not new in the United States that radical political groups favor violent action, from white supremacists to the Black Panthers, including radical environmentalists. Everybody is armed.
There may certainly have been extremist animalist groups in France. There is the Vegan corporation, Boucherie abolition, or, to some extent, 269 animal liberation. These groups aimed to put an end to intensive farming by violently intruding into slaughterhouses. A special cell, the Demeter cell, was charged by the State to monitor these groups, and they were put out of harm’s way fairly quickly by the gendarmerie.
Do you think there is a risk that younger people will turn to violent action?
Some of them are tempted. When I investigated, members of groups like Extinction Rebellion, Alternatiba, or Deep Green Resistance told me: “It’s crazy, the young people who come to us want to fight it out”. They are not interested in climate marches. They read very influential thinkers like Andreas Malm, a Swedish university professor, radical environmental activist, who advocates violent civil disobedience.
Another element then comes into play: different profiles exist in these radical groups. On the one hand, young idealists, who throw themselves headlong into these ideological journeys, because they were born in ecological emergency. On the other hand, young people who come from the ultra-left, and are libertarian communists, anarchists, won over to the idea of social and ecological insurrection. They push for radicalization and violent action. The intelligence services are worried about a possible drift, and follow these two profiles very closely. And that’s not to mention the next generation: the youngest members of the groups mentioned advise talking to today’s high school students, who are sometimes even more radical than them.
Should we expect operations by the police and intelligence services against radical environmental protest?
It’s all about the priorities of the intelligence services. Political violence is currently the work of nationalists, as in Corsica, and Islamist terrorist groups. So far, the ecoterrorist threat is watched, but not considered extremely serious. In the future, a trigger could change things. It would be enough for an action or a demonstration which degenerates, that there are deaths on the side of the ecologists – even if there have already been, like Rémi Fraisse or Sébastien Briat in 2014 – so that we can see the emergence of ultra-violent ecological groups.
Couldn’t these movements find a more classic form of action, via politics, for example?
All of these groups are rather out of the system. If the presidential election had been the occasion of a strong breakthrough of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, a political exit could have appeared for them. This was not the case, on the contrary. Today, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts is fractured between the government ecology of Yannick Jadot, rejected by these people, and the very radical ecology, carried by someone like Sandrine Rousseau. These are two irreconcilable ecologies. Which means that the political outlet is moving away, and that we find ourselves in a logic of all the more important radicalization.
After a year of investigation, I am quite pessimistic about what could prevent very committed young people from turning to violence. Everything in the news shows them that the generation of “boomers” has understood nothing. There is a conflict between the ages, which risks turning into a generational clash.