Translator: Zahira Ransome Reviewer: Hélène VERNET
I have a question for you.
I'd like to know who here has ever taken paid leave.
And if you have ever done so, I'd like you to stand up.
Anyone?
If you could remain standing for a moment, I have another question.
Is there anyone among those still seated who has ever used contraception?
Male or female?
If you could also stand up ...
(Laughter)
I can see a few people still seated.
Is there anyone among these who has ever read an independent magazine,
such as Fakir, for example?
Now, I think I've got almost everyone standing.
Thank you. You can sit back down.
If you and I were standing this evening, it's because we have something in common:
political engagement.
There are men and women who decided one day to get involved.
They fought for our rights.
And today these rights are the norm, we have earned them,
they seem natural to us now, but they were not back then.
I'm here to talk to you about
how I unintentionally fell into the universe of political engagement,
and how I drifted from engagement into civil disobedience.
(Laughter)
What a promising program! (Laughter)
My family was not militant, let alone activist.
My political education boiled down to a vague explanation
of the difference between the right and the left given to me at age 15.
So it was rather fuzzy.
Anyway, as soon as my mum would hear
that someone was accused of something,
she'd always have the urge to try to understand what was behind it
by asking herself:
what are the arguments? what are the viewpoints?
why is this person accused? is that accusation fair?
There was always this sense of justice and equity in her words,
which affected me deeply.
On my dad's side, it was different.
He spent his childhood in Africa, so he would tell me about that Africa,
the huge trees, the monkeys, the baobab trees, the boas constrictor.
So due to that combination, those influences,
by the age 16, 17, 18,
I had an innate desire to protect the planet.
I wanted to work at protecting the environment.
I didn't really know what that meant, but I wanted to go down that road.
Since there was not much I was able to do other than studying,
I thought: "Let's make use of what I'm good at: studying."
And I decided to become a forestry engineer.
So I became a forestry engineer specialized in tropical forest
since that's where there is an alarming rate of deforestation
and where an urgent action was required.
However, before the end of my studies,
I crossed paths with an absolutely extraordinary woman,
Claire Nouvian.
who had founded an NGO called "Bloom",
a very small and equally extraordinary association
that fights for the preservation of oceans,
oceans and deep seas.
While I was studying,
Claire Nouvian came to give us a three or four-hour lecture
about the destruction of our oceans,
the man-made devastation of marine riches,
and the catastrophic state of marine resources.
While I was focused on my forests, she opened my eyes to the oceans.
My reaction was: "Wow! There's work to do in that area too,"
except that I knew nothing about it, so I finished my studies.
I went off to the tropical forests, and, after a year, I came back
with this NGO still in my head.
I said to myself, "I really want to help them.
I don't have the money to do so, nor do I have any ocean expertise,
let alone any knowledge in political lobbying -
she works a lot in Parliament in Brussels."
So I looked into what I was good at and thought:
"For a few years, I've been making videos to tell people about forests,
and there's not much video content on their website.
Maybe I could offer to make a movie for them."
So I sent an email: "Hello, we met a year ago,
I'd like to make a documentary about your campaign
before I go back to my forests."
They said "OK" and the adventure began.
Eight months later, we published our film "Intox",
open access in YouTube,
and it turned out that it did pretty well
because a few months later, it had 30 to 35,000 views.
It's 40 minutes long. And it's past 35 000 views now.
It has been selected for various festivals, won one award,
and ended up being screened in the National Assembly
as part of a debate on deep-sea fishing.
It was an amazing adventure because afterwards
people came to me saying, "Is it you who made Intox?
Look, since I saw your movie, I donated to Bloom,"
or "I saw your film about deep-sea fish.
I can't eat them anymore, I've changed my diet."
It was really moving because although I didn't have any training
in oceans, politics or video-making at first,
I managed to make that contribution to the NGO.
Well, the adventure didn't end there:
in fact, we got along so well that Bloom hired me.
So I ended up suddenly working in Paris on oceans.
So I left my forests behind.
We worked together on sharks, marine life conservation and lobbying.
Then Paris Climate Change Conference COP21 was held,
during which I worked for Bloom with other organisations,
and with other activist networks during my free time,
on the climate question.
At that point, I wanted to go further, go into the field, and be more creative.
I wanted to explore the exciting world of activism.
And then, I got an email.
It came from an organization called "350.org"
that was inviting me to take part in a training course
to become instructor for the Climate Games.
Climate Games is a very brilliant concept of civil disobedience.
It's a life-size game that took place during the COP21 in Paris
and that invited people, activists or not,
to organize teams that will engage in direct and creative actions
or in acts of civil disobedience.
It could be confrontational
such as blockading the headquarters of an oil company in Paris for example,
but it could also be something more fun
such as dressing up the lion statue of Denfert-Rochereau square in south Paris,
as a polar bear.
(Laughter)
It was a playful, creative act to raise awareness on the climate issue.
So I plunged into the world of activism.
Then, COP21 ended.
I found myself in a group of people
who were trained like me as instructors and put to work in the Climate Games,
we met up, and we thought,
"The Paris Agreement hasn't solved the climate issue yet.
We've gained tools, a network, and we're motivated.
Maybe we can continue with this?"
And so we launched the collective "Diffraction".
It's not an NGO, it's an informal collective.
We started meeting up regularly
and started launching new workshops and new training courses
to help people to take creative action for the first time,
to engage in civil disobedience,
or for those accustomed to protests and traditional strike action,
to imagine more playful, festive, and colorful interventions
in order to change the way we engage in civil disobedience.
We did that for a few months, it worked well,
and quickly we connected with a movement called "Break Free."
It's a civil disobedience movement but on a global scale.
It militates for fossil fuels to be left in the ground,
anything related to coal, oil, etc.
At the heart of this global movement, there is a campaign called "Ende Gelände,"
which took place in Germany.
Its aim was to assemble as many activists as possible from all over the world
at a coal mine, in order to blockade it.
It looked like this.
The first time the local German communities launched this movement,
a few hundred people came.
In 2015, 1,500 people came.
And in 2016, there were 4,000 of us blockading the coal mines.
Diffraction was there and so were others,
some of whom had never taken part in any sort of activist event.
We blockaded the railways.
We blockaded a power plant and forced it to shut down for many days.
All the national media covered it
and talked about the role of coal in the climate crisis.
It was incredible, Ende Gelände. In fact, it was magical.
We were all starry-eyed when we came back from this event
because you are there with total strangers,
and you realize that you can trust them.
And that's amazing because, when you're there,
you find yourself going down into the mine with people like you, committed to this,
and you know what happens if someone is taken into custody,
is arrested, or has any health issue.
There's always a strong sense of goodwill,
and no one ever acts alone.
We are always in pairs, fours, etc., we form like-minded groups,
we work together to be efficient but always in a way that is sustainable,
with goodwill and concern for safety.
That is what I really liked about it.
Except that, when we came back from Ende Gelände,
the climate crisis was still there which was the reason for our movement,
the reason we wanted to fight.
And there was also the issue of political emergency.
And during COP21, what stunned me
was that, with France in a state of emergency,
whilst we were protesting in the Climate Games and so on,
there had been house arrests.
I have friends, colleagues, activists, environmentalists,
who were placed under house arrest -
they were unable to move about freely, or take action for environmental causes -
they were placed under house arrest by our own government.
And that shocked me profoundly:
how environmental activists fighting to defend a shared asset,
a planet that gives us resources that belong to us all,
how can they be locked up and their freedom of expression taken away?
That affected me deeply.
But facing the state of emergency that is both political and climatic,
there are committed people.
And that's the good news.
There are people who take action and it works.
Let me give you an example, in France, in the 1990s.
I don't know if you've heard about the dismantling of the Millau McDonald's?
Well, it's a very simple story:
the prefect had decided to authorize the building of a McDonald's.
And the people living there said,
"You know what? We don't want your McDonald's."
The government authorized it anyway,
and the construction started.
And rather than saying, "Oh well, it's over,"
they said, "Actually, we really don't want it."
And they got together,
men, women, the young, the less young, with activist José Bové, among others,
and they went there.
They took the pieces of the McDonald's and they dismantled it.
And the McDonald's was never built.
That is a striking example of men and women who said one day,
"That is legal, yes, but is it legitimate?
We don't think so. We don't want it."
And they took action.
There's another movement that I like a lot, this time in the U.S.
It's a group of farm workers,
a very small group of tomato producers,
who were paid a scandalously low wage
and had terrible working conditions too.
They were organizing protests, strikes, but with little or no effect.
So one day, they thought "Maybe we should form an alliance."
And they did.
Who did they go to see? They went to see some students, notably.
They formed an alliance with agriculture students and other groups,
such as religious groups or other labor groups.
Students have great power.
They created a mass movement that was unprecedented.
They started petitions.
They called for a boycott.
And both the farm workers and the students,
rather than addressing their employer,
decided to address the people who were buying their tomatoes,
namely businesses such as Taco Bell, McDonald's, or Subway,
in other words, businesses that citizens could put pressure on.
So by calling for a boycott and starting petitions,
citizens and consumers who were unaware of this movement
got involved and boycotted Taco Bell.
A few months later, Taco Bell signed up,
increased the salaries and improved the working conditions.
The next year, MacDonald's signed up, followed by Subway a year later,
and so on until 2014 when Walmart, one of the biggest food corporations,
signed an agreement.
The best thing about this story is that this alliance still exists
and focuses on other battles.
Let's return to France.
There are examples like that absolutely everywhere in the world.
I'm just going to mention one: the ZAD in the village of Notre-Dames-des-Landes.
The Zone to Defend.
Forty years ago,
the government decided to build an airport,
lay concrete and fly planes over farmland that was rich and fertile,
rich in biodiversity especially.
The inhabitants there - there was a long movement over years -
finally said, "Really, we don't want this airport."
And, like with the McDonald's, the builders went in,
and the people blocked their path saying,
"In fact, really, it's a no, thank you.
Our community doesn't want it, not the concrete, not the planes.
We want farmland, biodiversity, rivers, wooded countryside."
Today, the airport still doesn't exist.
And if you go to the Zone to Defend in Notre-Dame-des-Landes,
it's absolutely magical, there's an incredible atmosphere.
It's certainly not a Care Bear utopia.
There are tensions like everywhere else,
but there are people who are living together and trying things out.
It's a real laboratory and an incredible source of creativity.
There are fences
that could be the envy of many architects and engineers.
Cabins were built in the extraordinary trees.
Most importantly, there is an harmony, a cooperation,
an extreme benevolence.
I went there many times to attend events
and gatherings of many tens of thousands of people.
And you can stroll around, go get something to eat,
you meet people who talk to you spontaneously,
who smile at you, who tell you stories,
who tell you about their lives.
This kindness is difficult to find in big French cities
or in other places in the world.
This kindness is what I'm looking for
in the movement for political engagement and civil disobedience.
There are many battles to fight.
And before I leave you, I'd like you to ask yourselves,
each one of you.
to think about the kind of society you'd like to have,
the kind of society you want to have today and tomorrow,
about the world you want to see today and tomorrow
because the history of society
is written by men and women.
Every man, every woman writes it.
Together, we write the history of our society.
And together, we change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)