Published column January 29, 2022 in “Front Populaire” online, then resumed on the site Common Places. Hyperlinks removed during the initial edit have been restored.
The projections of Sandrine Rousseau regularly provoke disbelief, consternation or hilarity, to the point that we were delighted to see the insipid Yannick Jadot promoted to embody the “government” ecology – that is to say, powerless. But we should take seriously the power of the so-called “woke” movement in the environmental movement: to counter these delusional speeches requires, above all, understanding how we got here.
Islamo-indigenous entryism
In reality, it is not only the EELV device who parades and rubs shoulders with Islamo-leftists like Esther Benbassa, Fatima Ouassak ou Ali Rahni, or “green” municipalities (Grenoble, Bordeaux,Lyon…) at the forefront of “neo-feminism” or vegan ideologues. There are most circles university, editorials et media who massively disseminate the speeches of the“decolonial ecology” but also reference newspapers such as Reporterre who promote the Traore gang ou Nabil Ennaseri, close to Qatar. There are still many small groups like "For a Popular and Social Ecology" who are following the school of Danielle Obono ordeRhokaya Diallo, but also historical activist magazines such as Silence ! who convert to this new catechism or the environments of the permaculture, organic and eco-friendly places gradually infiltrated by the halal, inclusive writing andeco-jihad. And it only took one trip to the USA for Greta Thunberg to declare the fight "for the climate" a fight against the “colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression”. The few rare opponents like the review Degrowth ou Parts and Labor harvest the agreed anathemas,threats or even violent actions.
This is not simply the consequence of a temporary infiltration: this groundswell constitutes the latest stage in a long trajectory which is mobilizing very foundations of political ecology.
Questioning the foundations of political ecology
This was gradually established in the post-war period, tying together the scattered threads of previous decades and centuries, at the intersection of feminism and the exact sciences, popular struggles and hygiene, resource economy and religious sentiments. This heterogeneity was swept up in the movements of the 60s and then ousted over the course of the ideological domination of the progressive left. Since then, and despite a few attempts, political ecology has never freed itself from this mental universe, and has only been drawn into the slow degeneration of the left until today, of which "wokism" is both the glaring symptom and the terminal phase. Just as the continuous outbidding of the Islamo-leftists forces the left and its extremists to a deep, but tacit, introspection, ecologists should also ask themselves how they could have gotten to this point.
The ecological critique of the modern world being a radicalization of the critique made by the historical left towards modern societies, it takes up their worst faults while also radicalizing them.
Absence of nature workers
Thus, contrary to its historical roots, the left has progressively abandoned the "working classes", which were too disobedient, gradually preferring the fellagas, the Viet Cong and the Chinese masses, then immigrants, preferably Muslims and today "racialized"... Political ecology, as it was established at the end of the Trente Glorieuses, almost immediately cut itself off from the "countryside", from all those who worked, concretely and daily, this nature with which it was nevertheless a question of reconnecting: hunters, farmers, fishermen, gardeners, breeders or foresters, with their age-old knowledge and their practices, their questions and their desires. Environmentalists, however alert and cautious for the protection of "indigenous peoples" all over the world, have not known, been able or wanted to join the last representatives in the agony of a civilization in direct connection with the biosphere struggling with state bureaucracies and trusts. The consequences of this gaping gap are incalculable: it is the whole dimension properly and profoundly conservative of political ecology that has remained unthought of but also, and consequently, any tangible link with a concrete and lived nature as with any real people… Even more than the voters of the “left”, the clientele of the ecological parties is caricatured urban, well-off, educated, organically integrated into the economic megamachine. These good souls thus hope not to have to decide between the oligarchic/progressive forces and the populist/nationalist revolts. The ecologists in need of popular support logically encounter in their wandering the indigenous, Islamist, community and racialist ideologues presenting themselves as the “damned of the Earth” and promising them, not without calculation, a substitute people
Obsessive anti-Westernism
This contempt for the indigenous working classes is widely shared by the left, which has long since abandoned the analysis of capitalism to blame Western societies for all evils – even antediluvian ones – and then, today, to transform the “white male” into a global scapegoat. The position is reproduced by the majority of currents of political ecology which, here again, amplify it. If in a perspective of a self-transformation of society, the critiques of consumerism, productivism or reification are essential elements, they have become, over time, the supports for an unequivocal condemnation of Western civilization in its entirety – in continuity with Heideggerian philosophy, mother of all contemporary deconstructionisms. At the same time, the interest in traditional societies, local knowledge and indissolubly biological and cultural diversity has turned into a caricatured primitivism that erects the entirety of the non-Western (or even pre-Neolithic) world as a model of "harmony with nature". Two complementary positions, each as false as the other, and in many ways, which deny political ecology its eminently fundamental essence. western. For ecological science is not a religious cosmogony, but rather an open and rational research into natural processes that is the direct result of the great scientific adventure that began in Europe in the 13th century. Similarly, politics, as we understand it, is not the work of the prince, the sultan, the pharaoh or the tribal chief, but rather explicit deliberation on the self-organization of adults forming society, an eminently Greco-Western creation in the process of disappearing. The post-modernism that is making a great noise through political ecology brings us back rather to a pre-modernity, whose infantile fantasy quickly dissipates upon brutal contact with unpleasant realities that are easy to experience, for example, in the "lost territories" of metropolises and their margins.
Secular-religious millenarianism
Coming from materialist and rationalist currents, the Marxist left has engendered a vulgate and totalitarian regimes whose profoundly religious character has been slow to be understood. Ecology is not left behind and, here again, it reactivates with all the more radicality an imaginary that is properly mythological. It is no longer a question here of a new monotheism with sacred book, prophets and apostles, chosen people and Parousia but rather of a syncretism which tends towards an authentic millenarianism: the great cosmic reconciliation by the establishment of a communion with a sacralized Nature. There we find in a jumble apocalyptic whiffs and noble savages, Gardens of Eden and Golems, a Man fisherman who must reintegrate a divine Creation modeled for him, the return of the categories of pure and impure, contrition and destitution, Mother Nature and witches, magical thinking and the children's crusade ("for the climate"). This translates, in the respectable academic and activist language that proliferates, by the "questioning of the naturalist ontology of the West", or the abandonment of the Nature / Culture distinction, on the model of the animism of the Achuars of Amazonia popularized by P. Descola. This anti-Enlightenment intellectualism seeks to "go beyond" the distinctions between human society and natural determinations, politics and science, opinion and knowledge, belief and rationality, the human and the non-human... We can thus understand that the crazy wild ideas taught today in lecture halls under the cover of so-called "gender" or "decolonial" "studies" find an echo among many ecologists. They seem incapable of grasping the totalitarian overtones that emerge from this confusion induced by the desire to make politics a science and science a policy - which is precisely what those who claim to be political ecology are trying to achieve..
These are, as we can see, major trends: the "radical excesses" of political ecology are in reality only the logical unfolding of its leftist axioms inherited from history. They also explain the almost total nullity of the so-called "reasonable", "managerial" or "realistic" ecology of which Yannick Jadot is the latest avatar and which allows us to avoid any questioning of social organization, its means and its ends or the role of contemporary techno-science behind generalized greening. Abstract radicalism and reformist caution reflect on each other their lack of a consistent social project - they ne are in your of political ecology but form an ideological conglomerate that must be called theecologism, in the process of hybridizing with the most regressive currents that further darken our already very dark era. The dissidents of this ready-made thinking are numerous – they even form the majority of those who care more about the future of human civilization on the planet than about their reflection in the mirror of political correctness. They are the ones who, silently, without even knowing it, always far from the ecological or leftist “language effects” of these noisy minorities, work to bring about a true political ecology, which has yet to be born.
