Climate activist Greta Thunberg stood out again last weekend. At a climate change rally in Amsterdam, she reaffirmed her anti-Israeli positions in reference to the IDF’s current war against Hamas. A man then burst onto the stage to take the microphone from his hands and declare “I came to a climate demonstration, not a political demonstration”. He was of course evacuated from the stage manu militari to the boos of the crowd. This incident alone perfectly illustrates the excesses of an environmentalism which risks costing the planet dearly…
As we will have understood, it is not a question of speaking out here on the Palestinian cause, as Greta Thunberg did, but of criticizing the mixing of genres. The fight against global warming has nothing to do with Israeli events. This mixture of genres is unfortunately not an epiphenomenon. Greta Thunberg is not the only one to indulge in it. On the contrary, it is symptomatic of the environmentalist drift, we find it today everywhere in the discourse of dominant environmentalism and in all the mouths of its most media apostles. According to them, to fight against the degradation of the planet, we must fight against social inequalities, against patriarchy, against neocolonialism, against racism, against capitalism… In a word, ecologism wants to make ecology a intersectional movement, a sweeper car of global justice bringing together all struggles under its banner.
This speech is extremely pernicious. Because, by anchoring itself in a certain reality, it makes a generalization that is ultimately very dangerous for the environment. Indeed, there are undeniable points of intersection between ecology and certain social struggles. Thus, it is difficult to conceive of an environmental transition that ignores its social impact. The episode of the yellow vests was a cruel reminder of this. No ecological measures without redistribution aimed at supporting households, people and businesses most heavily impacted by these measures. Likewise, accelerating the demographic transition in the South to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint requires defending women’s rights: the right to contraception for all those who wish it and the right to education for all little girls in the world. world. So we can say: planetary rights, women’s rights, same fight!
But these occasional meeting points between ecology and social struggle cannot lead to conflating ecology with any social struggle. However, this is the step blithely taken by intersectional ecologism. A quantum leap which completely distorts the environmental fight and considerably weakens its scope. First, it confuses the message. What are we fighting for? Second, it levels it, bringing the fight for the planet down to the level of others. Third, it ties it to a political camp, that of the left generally, and the extreme left in particular. Because it is the far left that is intersectional. Which makes this environmentalism anti-capitalism.
Very bad strategy for the planet, all that. Firstly because instead of bringing people together, this approach is by nature divisive. Then, because it distracts from real environmental objectives. We cannot make people believe that liberating Gaza will decarbonize the world… Finally, even more fundamentally, anti-capitalism cannot deliver an ecological transition worthy of the name. Indeed, there will be no transition without the market. The latter is the only force, via price mechanics, capable of changing the behavior of consumers and producers from one end of the globe to the other. Definitely, the transition is not the Big Evening. And as long as intersectional environmentalism continues to triumph, it will be to the detriment of the planet.
*Antoine Buéno is an essayist and sustainable development advisor to the Senate. He has just published Should we have a green dictatorship? (Flammarion).