The Comb Lab Letter : Local solutions to headwinds and adverse currents

The US administration is banning the use of words and expressions relating to climate and environmental issues. The European Union is postponing provisions on the same subject indefinitely. Responding to the urgent need to reindustrialise the country means undoing environmental standards and abandoning the obligation to monitor working conditions at subcontractors. The urgent need to tackle climate change and the loss of biodiversity is really becoming an adjustment variable, and losing credibility. Similarly, the need to create the conditions for resilience so that the terroirs and territories can move as quickly as possible into the « post-climatic shock » is losing its priority status.

These headwinds act as a masterful slap in the face of the climate imperative.

In the face of these winds of stubborn denial and an unfortunate inability to take a global view of reality, a number of newspapers, documentaries and video channels are bearing witness to the collective intelligence being invested by local communities across the world, who are taking full account of environmental degradation and building for the future.

But these winds set in motion undersea currents that reduce the conceptual scope of the climate change underway. This is how Alexandre Truc, a CNRS research fellow, objectivises the perverse undercurrent tending to cause ecological damage to become entangled in the nets of the « logic of commodification ». ¹

« This trend (towards bringing environmental disasters before the courts) needs to be examined in the light of the resulting risk of commodification of the environment. Ecological damage has in fact been particularly defended as a solution aimed at integrating the cost of environmental destruction into a market logic ».

Through his careful arguments, the author offers the reader a clear understanding of the risk of reducing the ecosystemic, social, health and economic value of the environment to the supposed market value of the environment. (Examples include the convictions of those responsible for oil spills). As a result, perverse trends are trapping environmental damage in the net of the « marketable whole ». (For example, the sale of pollution rights). This approach overlooks the fact that it is extremely difficult to assess damage, because damage can have consequences in many areas. What’s more, damage that goes unnoticed at first can manifest itself over potentially very long periods.

Faced with the inertia of national and European policies in these areas, local and even micro-local actions aimed at regeneration offer hope. Two examples among many illustrate this point. These are two blind spots in ecological and climate concerns: soil and photosynthesis.

In the private sector, from large farms down to the level of the individual gardener, making it a priority to maintain the living character of the soil means ensuring sustainable harvests in terms of quantity and quality. Taking care of the ecosystem services of a living soil – fertility, facilitating the water cycle, carbon capture – considerably reduces the risks of flooding and other major disruptions to economic and social life.²

As far as the public domain is concerned, let’s encourage our local councils who manage forest plots with communal and sectional status to offer small cutting lots that are accessible to small sawmills rather than large lots for big sawmillers. This approach favours the local circuit, as small sawmills can thus offer services to local craftsmen. Managing the forest by successive thinning keeps it « continuously green ». The permanence of a forest stand ensures, without effort or mechanisation, the continuity of carbon capture and photosynthesis.

These two examples show once again that the private sector and local authorities have powerful levers at their disposal to tackle environmental issues. We remain convinced that the hybridisation of the private and public sectors at local level multiplies the power to act. Over and above the power to act alone, hybridisation, while respecting the asymmetry in status that distinguishes the elected representative from the citizen, reinforces the awareness that political action can be a shared endeavour.

1La revue des droits de l’Homme, Revue du Centre de recherche et d’étude des droits fondamentaux.

https://journals.openedition.org/revdh

2 Cf. Corinne Manson & Camille Dreveau, juristes, Vers un véritable droit des sols. Le Un, parution du 25 septembre 2024