It’s a real-life scene. In a high Pyrenean valley, a man deviates from the path to save time and cuts the slope in a straight line. A tourist immediately says to him: “Stop! You are damaging nature!” Bad luck: the man who has just been arrested is local. “This trail was made by my grandfather, and to get here you used a road built by my great-grandfather. And you claim to teach me how to walk this mountain?!”
The exchange took place on the territory of the commune of Laruns, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. It reveals the frequent oppositions between two visions of nature, that of the inhabitants of the place and that of the city dwellers who go there for their leisure.
This locality could be presented in two ways. The first would be to say that it is a small town, with barely 1,200 inhabitants. The second, more accurate, would emphasize the immensity of its surface area: 250 square kilometers (2.5 times the size of Paris), which makes it one of the largest in the metropolis. A territory covered with meadows, forests and high mountains, occupied every summer by tens of thousands of sheep, cows and mares, watched over by shepherds. And this has been the case, according to historians, for 7 to 8 millennia. Suffice it to say that the men and women of this commune in Haut Béarn maintain a carnal, physical, often tripartite relationship with this land. Suffice it to say also that they are sometimes surprised, not to say annoyed, by the thoughts of certain tourists and certain civil servants who, from their offices, refuse or modify this or that of their projects.
Robert Casadebaig (without label) has been the mayor of Laruns since 2008. This former manager of a public works company was born in the town and has always lived there. Here he describes the incomprehension that sometimes reigns between the rural population he represents and those he calls “bobo ecologists”.
“We, local elected officials, live with our constituents and know better than anyone what they need. Let people finally trust us!” asks Robert Casadebaig, the mayor of Laruns, in Haut-Béarn.
© / South West
Do you have the impression that your vision of nature is not understood by some city dwellers?
Quite. From our birth, we, residents of Laruns, have had in our genes a love of our Ossau valley, both rich and fragile. What urban dwellers don’t always understand is that this nature is beautiful because it is maintained and developed by humans. Our magnificent meadows that hikers explore on sunny days are not “natural”: they were created by shepherds, who have brought their flocks there every summer for thousands of years – I mean thousands of years! It is previous generations who, through their patient and intelligent action, are at the origin of the remarkable biodiversity found here. Biodiversity that would be degraded without human action.
What do you mean ?
Let’s take the example of burning. At the end of winter, we burn meadows located on non-mechanizable slopes in order to destroy weeds. These fires, organized by specialized commissions, are controlled by state services and the firefighters. However, because it generates smoke, this age-old practice is today criticized by passing Parisians or Bordeaux residents: “What? You’re burning the mountain! You’re doing anything!”. We don’t do anything. On the one hand, without burning, the meadows would be replaced by ferns and brambles. On the other hand, this practice is very virtuous in terms of biodiversity. Scientific studies have shown this: non-steamed areas have only 7 or 8 species of seeds, while this number is between 40 and 50 in scoured areas. Burn-out therefore prevents the mountains from closing in while improving floral diversity. It doesn’t matter if the townspeople don’t know about it. That some allow themselves to oppose it is more difficult for us to admit.
The reintroduction of bears also illustrates this opposition…
Obviously. We must first remember that, contrary to what we sometimes hear, the “Pyrenees bear” is not a species in itself. This is the common brown bear. We must then remember that this brown bear is in no way threatened with extinction: there are thousands of them in Europe! The Berne Convention on Endangered Species should therefore not apply. And yet, in 2018, we took people to our mountains – by helicopter! – two bears from Slovenia, despite the resolute opposition of the inhabitants. We had a very bad experience, because the bear poses a threat to the shepherds. Not only can he attack a sheep to eat it, but above all, he can cause an entire flock to flee if it panics – it happens. The bear therefore weakens pastoralism, the heart and symbol of the agropastoral civilization of Béarn and the Pyrenees. We do not want to experience the catastrophic situation in Ariège or Cantabria, in Spain, regions which, because of the bear, are being emptied of their populations.
That said, the wolf is an intelligent predator and an even greater threat than the bear. Because of him, some shepherds did not return to certain cabins last summer.
Do you feel the same feeling of incomprehension regarding your forests?
Quite. Rather than importing fossil fuels from the other side of the planet, I want to make Laruns an energy-independent municipality by relying in particular on our forests. For example, I installed wood boilers for our swimming pool, our media library and our performance hall. Isn’t this what we call a short and virtuous circuit? To go further, I therefore need our forests, but I come up against certain doctrines advocating a purely landscape and unbalanced vision for our structural timber and our local sawmills. However, we only operate 600 hectares out of the 6,000 in the commune. We cannot therefore say that we are massacring our heritage!
In the book you have just published (1), you denounce environmental standards, which would block some of your projects…
Alas… Consider the case of this shepherd who had to walk an hour and a half to reach his summer hut where he milks his sheep and makes his cheeses. A journey that he also had to make every morning and every evening, knowing that in the meantime he had to go back down to the valley to make hay. We therefore decided to create a track to serve his cabin. Well, for this simple track, the investigation lasted 10 years. 10 years ! And this is not an isolated case. In a neighboring town, it took 7, all because certain state agents slowed down this project considerably. The worst thing is that one of them – who never came there – made remarks to us which proved that he had looked at the map upside down!
I will give you another example. Some time ago, we needed to replace a chairlift at our Artouste ski resort. Before that, we were asked to carry out 4-season flora and fauna studies. It cost us dearly, but we complied. This did not prevent our file from being challenged by a few bohemian ecologists working in state services. Do you know why ? Because our studies noted the presence of a butterfly and – hold on – we had not planned any compensatory measures to protect it! However, I repeat, it was not a question of creating new equipment on a virgin site, but of rebuilding an already existing chairlift, and this in exactly the same place. So we set off again, with new studies which will still cost us some 20,000 euros. This normative madness is unbearable! It is this which partly explains the current anger of farmers.
What should be done?
For a long time, civil servants from the departmental directorates of equipment and agriculture sought to help elected officials. Today, the administration only applies the texts with their excessive standards. As a rural mayor, I denounce these standards dictated by the environmentalists who populate administrations, whether local, national or European. They block the projects of those who, in the countryside, produce and try to act. Let’s stop this pile-up and limit ourselves to useful and serious laws.
It is time to move away from Jacobinism, this historical arrogance which believes that Paris is France and that as a result, the capital knows better what to do than those on the ground. This vertical attitude is a nuisance. We, local elected officials, live with our constituents and know better than anyone what they need. Let people finally trust us!
(1) The mayor, the mountain and the menby Robert Casadebaig, Editions Sud Ouest.
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