It all started with a travel proposal. Last year, the airline Lufthansa made an enticing advance to the AgroParisTech student office: allowing students from the prestigious engineering school to benefit from discounts on their flights. “It was a promotional opportunity, there was no advertising!, assures Martial*, a member of the BDE. In the long term, it could have led to a partnership”. But as soon as it was announced internally, the advance offered by the low-cost airline did not pass. “In a loop of emails to the entire class, some complained and told us that it was shameful for Agro students to encourage the plane, when it’s bad for the planet, “We may have miscommunicated, but we just wanted to offer discounts to students.” That day, the exchanges fuse, and the mailboxes of all the promotion are flooded with a few dozen answers on the subject. “From there, we understood that we had to be very careful in the way we presented things. We abandoned any idea of partnership. This debate took place with a few people, while the majority of the promo did not even participate, rattles Martial. For me, it is quite representative of what is happening in the school: some make choices, personal, which should not apply to everyone ” .
Martial is thinking of one choice in particular. And it is significant: that of orientation at the end of the diploma. In a video uploaded Tuesday, May 10, taken from a graduation ceremony that took place a few days earlier, eight students created the event. They held a radical and very political speech on the stage of the Parisian hall Gaveau. Strongly attacking the consumer society, they assured that they did not want to take their part in the trades which are traditionally reserved for them. “Several of us do not want to pretend to be proud and deserving of this diploma which globally pushes us to participate in the ongoing social and ecological devastation”, they assured, before embarking on a devastating enumeration: “Traffic in plant lab for multinationals (…) inventing ‘good conscience’ labels (…) developing so-called ‘green’ energies (…) or even counting frogs and butterflies so that concrete workers can do them disappear legally. In our eyes, these jobs are destructive and to choose them is to harm”.
The tone was direct, sharp. To everyone’s surprise, he hit the mark. “Originally, the video only circulated between us, in school email loops. But when it came out, my friends and I were surprised that it caused such a buzz”, confides Louis, student at AgroParisTech. The 7-minute video was feverishly picked up in the press and met with an unexpected response, totaling 800,000 views on YouTube.
Desire for rapid changes
The speech will have had the advantage of fueling the debates in this school with already very lively discussions. In recent days in WhatsApp loops, on Instagram, during weekends with friends, the engineering students of AgroParisTech had only this speech in their mouths. “Basically, we all agree: the fact of having entered Agro already denotes a concern for ecological subjects”, assures Arthur, currently in first year.
Among the students of AgroParisTech, the general feeling therefore seems to be one of approval of the message, of an appreciation of their punchy formulas. Many find themselves in the sense of urgency carried by the graduates, as well as in their frustration with a “system” deemed too slow to find solutions. In their twenties, AgroParisTech students are not immune to the anxieties of their generation. “We are more and more wanting faster, more effective and stronger changes and we do not necessarily have the impression that we are being given the weapons”, advances Adonis, 22 years old. Like the rest of 16-25 year olds, future engineers are also affected by eco-anxiety.
Climate generation
The subject is at the center of their concerns, as evidenced by this meeting organized in 2019 at the heart of the Claude Bernard campus, in the very chic 5th arrondissement of Paris, on “the collapse of the living”. The term, very connoted, is not innocent: it echoes collapsology, a current of thought notably carried by the lecturer Pablo Servigne, author of the essay How everything can fall apart. Small textbook of collapsology for the use of present generations. On the presentation page of the “Disputes”, the cycle of debates of the school, we can thus read in presentation: “Should we therefore prepare for degrowth? Or seek at all costs other forms of energy ?”. “I am not a collapsologist! jokes Benoît Gabrielle, professor at AgroParisTech and participant in this conference. But the subject had been requested by the students, which clearly reflects their anxiety”. During the following conference, questioning “Is collapsology a thought of engineers?”, Yves Cochet, former Minister of the Environment and French leader in collapsology, was also invited. “During our debate, we finally talked about ecological transition and the fight against global warming rather than collapse, nuance Benoît Gabrielle. But the subject has emerged in society, and the students’ requests reflect it”.
Anxious about global warming, students do not hesitate to mobilize, including in the street. Many have participated in climate marches in Paris when they had the opportunity. “When I was in first year, in March 2019, the majority of my promotion went to demonstrate,” says Marlène, currently on a gap year in Colombia. These members of the “climate generation” are thus described by their elders as more prone to activism than the previous promotions, deemed to be quieter. This cleavage was also embodied in a very specific struggle: the mobilization around the project to privatize the Grignon estate, the cradle of French agronomy and the campus of AgroParisTech engineers.
A rejection of the productivist system
In March 2021, the students had organized a blockade of more than two weeks to refuse that the site be handed over to property developers. With success: in November, the State announced that it was temporarily abandoning the project. “It had been several years since this sale was supposed to take place, and the previous promos protested, without embarking on this type of action as visible, notes Diane, a former student. When we have this episode in mind, we understand that this confrontation could have given them wings, instilled in them the idea that mobilization paid”.
Arousing media interest, the demonstration also attracted politicians, following the example of Jean-Luc Melenchon, intervened in September during a rally against the privatization of the site. “It is proof that this mobilization took place in an electoral context, in the same way as the discourse of the graduation ceremony. Neither ecological commitment nor radicalism are foreign to AgroParisTech, but this exacerbated politicization is”, squeaks a close friend of the school administration. A politicization which, according to our interlocutor, aims to question “the whole economic system in which we live”, and which notably involves a lively questioning of the very formation of AgroParisTech. The latter is thus accused of still emphasizing a “productivist” vision of agriculture. “All the same, we have to put things into perspective: I have been hearing this protest discourse, a little anti-system, for twenty years at Agro, comments Sophie Carton, head of the experimental farm at AgroParisTech. There is always a handful of protesting students in each class”. In the great clichés of the school, certain sectors are even taxed with being more “roots” (previous generations would undoubtedly have used the word “hippie”) than others. “This is the case of the environment sector, for example, when those agri-food or health are deemed closer to companies”, describes Ariane. “Yes, it’s the cliché businessmen against alterglobalists!, laughs Maud, another former. But things are obviously more complex”.
A minority discourse
Beyond the widely followed mobilization of Grignon, relating to the preservation of a school site, the speech of the eight students during the graduation ceremony would actually be quite a minority. If they are widely approved on the observation, the solutions they propose – “desertion” and “bifurcation” – are far from being unanimous with their comrades. “From what I see, we are splitting into three big groups: 10% of us think they are right all along, 10% think they are totally wrong, and the bulk of the students find this intervention courageous , destined to shake things up, gauges Marlène. But they are nevertheless not ready to change their plans after school to follow them”. Although sharing the observation, many students do not imagine in turn changing paths.
In the numbers, it’s hard not to see these eight students as an exception. According to the 2021 survey carried out among young graduates by AgroParisTech, the vast majority of them do not “fork out”, on the contrary. The main outlets for the latest promotions are consulting and service companies (21%), the agri-food industry (16%), followed, in equal parts, by education and public and private research, administrations, and organizations professional and agricultural (9% each). “A lot of people from my class have left for large groups like Danone or L’Oréal, confirms Ariane, who graduated in 2018 and is now an eco-landscape project manager in a real estate consulting company. However, we were already saying to ourselves that it was better not to set foot in there. Yet, we did it all the same”. These backward commitments also lead to retraining, like Florent-Claude Labrouste, the depressed agricultural engineer from Serotoninpenultimate novel by Michel Houellebecq – himself a former student of AgroParisTech.
loss of faith
But others believe hard as irons in their trajectory. “I did three years of school, I was trained, I’m not going to spit on it”, explains Arthur. For him, choosing not to integrate positions of responsibility in the industry would be tantamount to abandoning his position. “I think the role of an engineer is to raise awareness and make things happen from the inside, he adds. To desert en masse is to abandon our responsibilities. How do we act from the outside?” The remarks made on the stage of the Salle Gaveau have puzzled more than one, who see it first of all as a renunciation… But also a loss of faith in science and technology.
“These are people who believe in degrowth, but in a somewhat contradictory way with their training, believes Florent, a former student of AgroParisTech, who now works in consulting. Progress will be an indisputable part of the response to the climate emergency. Sobriety is important, but so is innovation!” Arguments which join those of the director of the school, Laurent Buisson: “I was very surprised by the fatalism of these eight students. I find it difficult to see how to say “we cannot change the world so we withdraw” can improve the situation”. But maybe create an electroshock?