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Humiliated by the Republic
During the industrial revolution, people were forcibly moved from the countryside to cities or industrial estates where there were factories or mines. Karl Marx turned these displaced people into a class, the proletariat. In the 1970s, they were dispossessed of their places of work by moving their sources of income abroad. Companies seeking to increase…
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Decivilisation
Decivilisation is the new buzzword. The French government use it to describe workers who take to the streets, young people in the suburbs or environmental activists. All of Europe’s right-wing parties use the same word to say that Europe is losing its civilisation and is being replaced by barbaric migrants. “By using the term “decivilisation”…
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Fashion
On average, it takes 10,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of cotton, or 2,500 to 3,000 litres for a standard T-shirt (250 to 300 grams of cotton). That’s a lot of water consumption for such a small piece of fabric! 4% of the world’s drinking water is used to produce our clothes. The…
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Illegitimate authorities
The European Commission, religious leaders, consultancy firms (Accentur, Mac Kinsey, Ernst and Young, PWC), crowds, senates and social networks are all examples of illegitimate authorities in countries where the people are self-determining as a democracy. Big business like Coca-Cola or Total is powerful; what is illegitimate is the representative of the people who puts the…
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Ecoterrorism
Terrorism is the use of terror for ideological, political or religious ends. The word “terrorisme” was first used in November 1794, when it was used to describe the “doctrine of the partisans of the Terror”, those who, some time earlier, had exercised power by waging an intense and violent struggle against the counter-revolutionaries. It was…
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Police and justice for the people
It’s obvious that the rioters, those who burn, steal and commit violence, are criminals who must be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law. There’s a lot of drug trafficking in the suburbs. But when the police catch a trafficker, that trafficker is very often released because the justice system can’t take it anymore.…
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Stop the all-concrete approach
Concrete dominates today’s buildings. And yet it has major shortcomings. It consumes a lot of water and energy, produces a lot of CO2 and lasts only 80 years at best for reinforced concrete. What’s more, it doesn’t provide sufficient protection from the heat, leading to increased use of air conditioning, which in turn exacerbates global…
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Fair trade and organic farming
I’ve heard a lot of good ideas about fair trade and organic farming, but I have a few thoughts and reactions. First of all, I think it’s excessive to imagine a substantial change based on consumers paying more. In most European countries, our producers are paid a pittance by the middlemen because they are able…
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Protecting water
We recently received instructions to save water. We all agree that water is a precious resource that must be preserved. Why aren’t the big water consumers targeted by these measures? Intensive corn, cotton and soya farming (including in deserts and devastated forests), concrete buildings, golf courses or clothing manufacturing consume a lot of water. What…
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Peru, biodiversity in danger
The biodiversity in Peru is enormous and unique, 3000 to 4000 varieties of potatoes, 52 varieties of corn, 163 varieties of tomatoes, 7590 varieties of flowers that exist only there, 4400 varieties of butterflies, 3 varieties of cocoa, avocados, cotton. We use only a few varieties of each crop in Europe. If these were to…