The Comb Lab letter : Challenging through collective action
Mega-fires in the second city of the United States, geopolitical tremors and haggling over a national budget are creating a whirlwind of news that is as dizzying as it is uncomfortable. Conversations everywhere are projecting socio-economic concerns against a backdrop of climate change issues.
Meanwhile, the European Union is postponing the implementation of the Green Deal, and the US President is turning his back on any concern remotely related to the environment. Yet the facts are stubborn: mega-fires, hurricanes and repeated floods are stark evidence that the time has come to challenge denial and procrastination with acts of environmental civil action rather than sterile polemics.
This is all the more true given that every year the media report the « day of overshoot », i.e. the day on which humanity consumes more resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. This day of overshoot comes earlier and earlier in the year. This means that our way of life will very soon run out of « ecological credit ». Translation: the process of exceeding planetary limits (mentioned in our previous letters) is not only continuing but, by force of circumstance, accelerating. When you have to use several barrels of oil to extract a single barrel, you have to recognise that either the resource is dwindling or you have to invest more and more in energy-intensive technology to access new resources. In both cases, the model proves to be economically insolvent.
That said, it would be wrong to conclude that the wall of technical impossibility for maintaining our way of life is approaching. In fact, we have already reached the wall. Insurance companies are now classifying certain meteorological risks as uninsurable. Today, insurance companies, like other business sectors, are experiencing with their customers the very tangible reality of the wall.
Protesting means distancing ourselves from pro- or anti-environment rhetoric and putting our energies into something concrete, useful and visible. Examples: planting trees, hedges, regenerating soil depleted by chemicals, etc.
Resisting the flood of information that levels out announcements and disorganises their hierarchy protects us from confusion and depression. It seems to us that distancing ourselves from sterile polemics and developing concrete, immediate and specific projects rather than idealised ones is a practical way of challenging the procrastination of economic and political decision-makers. With this in mind, we are working with the municipality of Biollet and the schoolchildren of Biollet, Charensat and Espinasse to create the Jean-Paul Touveron educational garden. We are also putting together the displays for our stand at the Combrailles Food Forum (Saturday 17 May 2025) with the help of researchers from Cisca, Greffe and INRAE. The aim of these events is to mobilise the elected representatives and citizens of the Combrailles region around concrete actions to make the region more resilient, because the same concerns affect each and every one of us, regardless of our social status.
We believe that acting collectively allows everyone to be creative, to acquire new knowledge and the skills needed in severe weather. Getting to know each other makes it easier to build solidarity, even between people who do not share the same ideals. Collective action is also a powerful lever for challenging food inequality. In particular, by taking action locally to nourish and hydrate the soil, with the aim of supporting biodiversity and ensuring that people have enough to eat. In this respect, the deployment of the Combrailles Food Programme brings real added value to the region.
As soon as a number of players think and act together for the common good, in this case feeding the population, democratic processes are easily, if not spontaneously, established. Finally, the more a social group feels that it is constituted and anchored, the stronger it becomes to cope with the flow of people and commercial enterprises driven out of urban areas when they are reclaimed by the swamps of yesteryear, when submergence pushes back the coastal strips and the land becomes infertile and then tips over into aridity.
All these considerations take on much more substance when you consult the « Adaptation des Pratiques Culturales au Changement Climatique » (AP3C) (Adapting Farming Practices to Climate Change) sheets produced by SIDAM, an organisation representing 16 chambers of agriculture in the Massif Central. It states in particular that: « between now and 2050, climate change in Saint Gervais d’Auvergne predicts that cumulative annual rainfall will remain at around 830 mm. At the same time, the cumulative annual evapotranspiration of water contained in the soil and water transpired by plants (ETP) increases from 820 to 910 mm. As a result, the potential water balance is deteriorating, with an increasingly marked water deficit in summer and spring. We will be putting the results of the AP3C programme and the food issue into perspective in future newsletters.
- Evapotranspiration Potential ↩︎