Lost Illusions

In his timely new book, French climate activist Clément Sénéchal argues that the environmental movement itself is also partly to blame. Pourquoi l’écologie perd toujours (Why Environmentalism Always Loses) is a survey of the increased pessimism among ecologists, such as could only be expected from someone who has devoted the first years of his adult life to the cause. The book charts how Sénéchal, a former campaigner with Greenpeace France, lost faith in the multinational NGO — and the broader mode of environmental politics in which such groups are embedded. “As I broach middle age, my generation finds itself in an ontologically degraded natural world, in a negative reality,” Sénéchal writes in the introduction. “We still have our lives to lead, but it seems like they’ll only play out in a continuum of dead-ends.”

For the author, the original sin of political ecology lies in its failure to establish itself as a durable mass movement, picking up where broad-based struggles such as the labor movement, feminism, and anti-racism leave off. Despite ever-present warnings about climate change, environmental politics and policy remain the preserve of well-educated and genteel urban dwellers, the “new ecological class” as the late philosopher Bruno Latour lauded in a recent pamphlet. This demographic’s concern and sense of urgency is undoubtedly sincere. But its domination over the movement’s main organizations — from legacy NGOs such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to the tepid Green parties of western Europe — has been politically catastrophic. Since the 1970s, when that organizational ecosystem first took form, environmentalism has diverged from what Sénéchal views as its natural home: in a working-class politics that incorporates the defense of the environment into the critique of capitalism.

Sénéchal devotes much of his attention to the failings of environmentalism in France itself, offering a useful overview of the key tripping points and impasses of the Emmanuel Macron years. Since his election in 2017, the French president has sought to project himself as a global environmental ambassador. But actual results have been minimal, with the president delighting corporate boards and the wealthiest by limiting his focus to advocating individual consumer action — what he calls environmental “voluntarism.”

Ostensibly ambitious legislation such as the 2021 Climate and Resilience Law were a mirage of environmental policy. Macron’s hallmark bill offered a rump policy translation of the useful suggestions proposed by the Citizens’ Convention on the Climate — the 150-member consultative body, selected at random from the French public, that was set up in the aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests. With much talk in 2020 about the “world after” the COVID-19 pandemic, France’s government dusted off a fancy title, the “high commissioner of planning.” But since then, there’s been little plan for a material ecological transition.

Indulgent of Macron at first, France’s leading environmental organizations, Sénéchal argues, have been unable to fully capitalize on the president’s postponement of serious climate policy. While France’s Green party, known as the Écologistes, has had some success in municipal and European elections — low-turnout contests well-geared toward its more middle-class base — it’s failed to consolidate itself as the center of gravity on the Left.

This party more often serves as an off-ramp for voters who can’t decide between the centrist Parti Socialiste and the left-wing France Insoumise. I have lived in Paris for seven years now, and the only card-carrying members of the Écologistes I know are a civil servant at the Finance Ministry, and a handful of NGO-type jurists. That may be the “new ecological class,” but it’s not the commanding majority of tomorrow.

For Sénéchal, official environmentalism can’t move beyond its indecisive wavering between two poles: a moderate wing in search of an “ecology of government” that might appeal to the political center and a left-wing in favor of anti-neoliberal “rupture” and ties with the broader left, such as the pact reached last summer under the Nouveau Front Populaire.

Environmentalism as Spectacle

Of particular interest is Sénéchal’s treatment of the past and present of Greenpeace. Quite visibly at odds with his former employer, the author takes Greenpeace as representative of the decadence of official environmentalism. Eschewing a coherent critique of the environmental crisis, organizations like Greenpeace, according to Sénéchal, are more devoted to agitprop demonstrations and photo ops better geared to satisfying activist egos rather than advancing strategic goals.

These contradictions were apparent from the 1970s. Greenpeace took shape as the brainchild of a coterie of yuppies from Canada and the US Pacific Northwest opposed to a new round of nuclear-weapons testing in Alaska pushed by Richard Nixon’s administration. For all the lore around the journey of the Phyllis Cormack that set off from Vancouver in 1971 to interrupt those tests — the precursor to Greenpeace’s contemporary fleet of ocean-protecting vessels — that mission was a resounding failure. The nuclear test on Amchitka Island was conducted with some delay. The activists who had planned to sail into waters near the test site turned around before completing their mission. That original group excelled at one thing, however: self-promotion, developing the image of a brazen band of activists, a happy minority wading out to confront pure evil.

What groups like Greenpeace ultimately offer, according to Sénéchal, is “environmentalism as spectacle.” This critique looms large in his book, and charges that environmental activism remains unduly obsessed with consciousness-raising exercises that elude the need to confront the material basis of the environmental crisis. His narration of Greenpeace organizing drives and campaigns is often even amusing, whether that’s the energy spent in capturing appealing images and footage or what he calls the “Disneyland stage” of climate organizing in pseudo-political “happenings.”

This is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of political effectiveness. Sénéchal pillories the NGO-environmentalist milieu for accepting subordination to corporate and state actors. It invests in a policymaking dialogue in which few tangible gains are ever won — even as its adversaries are legitimized by the impression of sincere and productive negotiations. Sénéchal saw this firsthand in his work at Greenpeace’s legislative campaigning arm. “I once sincerely thought that I was useful. But in reality the only thing I ever built was a sufficient career among the professional personnel of the environmental scene,” he writes.

In his lobbying work, the “dark underbelly of the spectacle,” Sénéchal found himself playing a “juggling role designed to keep the NGO in the hands of governing elites. Was I never anything more than a hired speaker? On a tactical level, these regular contacts with the establishment are counterproductive; campaigners lay out their hands before actors who are really only looking to prepare their eventual response; we get snippets of unverifiable information in return, that allow us to shine at the office, in discussions with the press or at dinners. What’s worse, these exchanges eventually lead to our own domestication.”

Revolts of the Earth?

Sénéchal is less convincing in his suggestions of where to go from here. He is quite right to diagnose the failure, from the 1970s, to link working-class movements to environmentalism — a disconnect that haunts climate politics to this day. That original failure is especially surprising given the broad-based attention, especially in western Europe, won by the nuclear disarmament movement, notably amid the so-called “second Cold War” of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Yet Sénéchal doesn’t quite find a way to bridge the gap today. He seems most interested in the various direct-action groups that have sprung up out of the vacuum left by the failure of mainline environmentalism. He sees promise in the radicalism of newer movements such as the French organization the Revolts of the Earth, known for its participation in a series of occupations and marches targeting reservoir projects concocted in the interests of big agriculture and other unneeded infrastructure projects, mostly in rural areas. Direct confrontation with the material and productive apparatus driving the climate crisis has Sénéchal treading on similar terrain as thinkers like Andreas Malm, author of the 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

That’s all good — and a much-needed option in the playbook, you might say. And perhaps I’m being pessimistic, but I think there’s a good deal of wishful thinking driving claims like the following: “Little by little, we’re seeing the environmentalism of confrontation prevail over the environmentalism of consensus, as the old NGO apparatuses fall into decline. What’s happening is a cultural battle for hegemony within environmental politics.”

This battle is no doubt taking place. Yet I still fear that it’s a fight for control over a quite small world. That’s the real problem. Perhaps occupations and muscular confrontation will prove to be an effective and galvanizing long-term strategy, one leading to the emergence of what the French author Corinne Morel Darleux calls an “archipelago” of resistance. But another reading is that jolts to the productive apparatus have a nasty habit of hardening the identification of the forces invested in the very thing being attacked, including major segments of the working and lower-middle classes.

Bizarrely, Sénéchal devotes only a handful of pages to the gilets jaunes — arguably the most important political chapter of the environmental crisis during the Macron years. Is that because the gilets jaunes also pose complicated questions? The 2018–19 Yellow Vests movement was provoked by the flagrant injustice of a gas tax rise designed to greenwash Macron’s attempt to cover up a hole in state revenues. Sénéchal is right to recall the movement’s initial rejection by mainline environmental organizations. And that some parts of the movement did link cost-of-living issues — what the French often call “end-of-the-month” anxieties — with the problem of the looming “end of the world.”

But things could have turned out very differently in the winter of 2018–19. The gilets jaunes revolt was a reminder that forced reductions in energy consumption are perhaps the most politically combustible pressure of our time. Any wrong step can stoke the flames of anti-environmentalist resentment. There are few simple answers. For that matter, it’s revealing that Sénéchal has little to say about the dirty politics of nuclear energy. This is arguably a blind spot of the left wing of France’s environmental movement, whose wholesale rejection of nuclear power has yielded the question to right-wing forces.

It’s understandable that Sénéchal, an activist at heart, devotes much of his book to strategies and tactics. But making sense of the failure of environmentalism needs a greater sense of the obstacles. Environmentalism has a rightful claim to being the mass democratic movement of the twenty-first century. But in doing so, it is going to have to unwind a very tight Gordian knot of assumptions. For at least two centuries, democratic aspirations have been inextricably wound up with humanity’s material domination of its natural environment. Unlearning that connection is not an easy political task.