For seven years, Clément Sénéchal was a spokesperson for Greenpeace. The desire to get involved and the memories of the attack against the Rainbow Warrior pushed him to get involved in this movement in 2015. “When we get there, we are dazzled by the structure and the financial means at our disposal. We have the impression of accessing a privileged world where we are paid to campaign. We have the impression of being on the right side of history, close to the forces of good,” he says.
And then, little by little, the person who notably participated in bringing the idea of a climate ISF into the public debate began to become disillusioned. “Quite quickly, I came up against glass ceilings that were both sociological and ideological,” he confides, until he has the impression of becoming “hamster in a wheel”. He leaves Greenpeace in 2022.
While Cop29 began, Monday November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Clément Sénéchal explains the reasons for the current failure of political ecology, in his work in Why ecology always loses (Le Seuil, 220 pages, €19). Interview.
Clément Sénéchal was a spokesperson for Greenpeace for seven years. Manon Jalibert
Ecology should be a unifying theme. We all want to keep a habitable planet. However, she faces more and more mistrust, she is relegated to the background. How do you explain it?
Clément Sénéchal: Ecology has two problems today. First, extremely powerful adversaries. Powers – social, economic, cultural – are concentrated in the hands of a small social class which has no interest in ecological bifurcation. The ecological crisis introduces a major tension into the system of capitalist accumulation. Our ecosystems are not capable of meeting the needs of an economy based on perpetual growth, as we have known since the Meadows report in 1972.
Then, we have ecology professionals who have taken a harmless posture by depriving it of any revolutionary horizon. Scientists and NGOs never criticize capitalism. In the 1970s, a compassionate and ecumenical environmentalism appeared, based on the defense of a few symbolic species, completely ignoring the social question. It was a way of making the environmental fight consensual.
The famous antiphon which says that ecology is neither right nor left…
Absolutely. This has long governed the positioning of green parties in Europe. Ecology has become a fragmentable, negotiable cause which has given rise to a whole business of good conscience, from NGOs like Greenpeace and the WWF, to CSR (corporate social responsibility) in the private economy. They offer a form of power of attorney to those who don’t really want to get involved. All of this ended up becoming institutionalized, becoming a provider of careers, a source of positions that no longer have any interest in social change. They would have too much to lose.
We now have an ecology far removed from class struggle, which does not understand the social workings. An ecology of spectacle, symbolic, without any influence on society. It is also symbolic ecology. For example, all the certifications, labels, systems which give the impression that multinationals are taking charge of the environmental issue. The institutional folklore of empty promises, like the Grenelle, the One Ocean Summit. Or even the over-equipped banners of Greenpeace for the photo…
You denounce the ecology of spectacle, but aren’t the new forms of struggle that are emerging, like Extinction Rebellion or Last Renovation, also based on this model?
In their beginnings, they were marked by these codes. Last renovation, with few resources, managed to get people talking about its causes. But they had a targeting problem. When they block the ring road, they block poor people who need their car to work.
The relevant civil disobedience actions are those which hinder the categories which have a major responsibility in climate inaction or the production sites which maintain the environmental crisis. Extinction Rebellion has evolved to get closer, in connection with the Earth Uprisings, to local struggles. The Uprisings of the Earth is an ecology of the anti-spectacle. Media coverage is a means and not an end in itself. These are actions anchored in the territory, which will defend specific ecosystems: the A69, the mega basins, etc.
The only way would be civil disobedience?
It’s not just that. Ecology must refocus on the territory, in contact with ecological devastation. There are the ways of blocking, of mobilization, of legal tools. On the A69, it was very useful: large, useless projects are often riddled with illegality. In this type of battle, antagonistic groups such as naturalists and hunters can come together to avoid, for example, seeing a forest disappear. Thus, ecology can become something more interesting for categories of the population who, until now, could feel attacked on a moral and symbolic level. Alliances are possible between a cultural bourgeoisie which has abandoned capitalism and conscious working classes who can no longer bear being washed away by this system. We need an ecology that takes sides, that fights against capitalism and puts itself at the service of the working classes.
But ecology no longer speaks to popular circles, it even makes them bristle…
Indeed, it was built on a form of class contempt. Its demands are soluble in liberal society without any form of concern for social justice. What is at the center of dominant ecology and the Grenelle Environment Forum is the “polluter pays” principle: the carbon tax, carbon quotas, carbon compensation, etc. Basically, what does that mean? That if you have money, you have the right to pollute. It is ecologically ineffective but what’s more, it punishes economically and morally the working classes who are already suffering from pollution and the crisis. If you have little money, the carbon tax is much heavier to pay. Obviously, this provoked a very legitimate rejection, particularly during the Yellow Vest movement. It’s the same thing with eco-friendly gestures. It takes time and money. We individualize the moral injunctions for the ecological transition without worrying about real social conditions. This creates symbolic violence among vulnerable populations.
But can’t these eco-friendly actions also produce beneficial effects?
The problem is that they had the perverse effect of depoliticizing the subject. The State has exonerated itself by shifting the responsibility onto the citizen. It creates disarray. At my individual level, do I have the impression of having control over the ecological devastation by sorting my waste? No way ! What predominates are lifestyles, housing, transport, energy. It makes economic structures, the role of multinationals, banks, pension funds invisible.
How can we convince the less well-off of the benefits of an ecological bifurcation?
We must free entire sections of the economy from the law of profit, which means organizing a more democratic mode of production, and carrying out a general rebalancing of material resources. The least well-off groups will increase their standard of living while the privileged groups, who today benefit from truly crazy inequalities unprecedented in human history, must decrease. The ecological discourse must directly attack the upper classes by telling them that no, their way of life cannot be universalized. We are in a suicidal civilization with levels of accumulation that the planet cannot support. We can choose to continue in an increasingly authoritarian liberal democracy. But, if we do ecology, we cannot ignore a frontal critique of capitalism.
