“We want to decrease in order to live, and to live better”

DIn a few months, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV) will hold its congress, after a year marked by an electoral disappointment which did not make it possible to place ecology as high as required by the climatic imperatives. The alliance with the left, thanks to which we found a place in the National Assembly, leaves us today in the political and media shadow.

This assessment is also that of too long years of semantic and political procrastination, which have diluted our ability to make a project of rupture heard and to impose a new imagination.

In a world which, everywhere, is collapsing and raising the abyssal question of the very survival of humanity, our ambiguities have not made it possible to respond to the aspirations of those who, in the anguish of future, want to fight to preserve a habitable earth. We have been overtaken by the acceleration of the current collapses and the upheavals they carry.

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However, in the face of runaway crises, we know well that the horizon of a desirable future lies neither in the blissful belief in technological innovation nor in green and supposedly low-carbon growth. We are well aware that infinite growth generates a system of predation both on ecosystems and on living beings, that it is already exerting unbearable pressures over energy resources, letting powerful dictatorships and warmongers prosper, as well as multinational corporations and super-rich profiteers of crises and enemies of the Earth.

Changing lifestyles

We know very well that we will not be able to continue to live as we do today, that those who say the opposite are propagating deadly chimeras, that the individual car everywhere and all the time, the “open bar” airplane, meat at all meals, fashion in click and collect, these are all ways of life that we need to change. What we so badly need is to deal differently with the living, humans and non-humans alike and, in this sense, we know very well that the path, the only viable one, is that of a drastic and rapid reduction ecological burden of human activities.

It is not just a question of small efforts, but of carrying out a clear and unambiguous project of degrowth, democratically agreed and profoundly social. Our party must be the one which, without concession, carries the massive reorientation of our activities towards education, culture, health, justice, in short, a reorientation towards an economy of well-being rather than towards material ultra-consumption, that immoderately absorbs our resources and produces nauseating waste suffocating our soils, our air, our rivers and our oceans.

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