<
https://www.wired.com/story/climate-activism-radical-new-face-lena-lazare/>
"The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and
two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the
farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are
technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a
gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas.
Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds
up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of
the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickax.
The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s
important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do.
She drives the pickax into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again
and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more,
another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they
find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network
designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built
near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of
the ground.
In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and
banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming
the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the
government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In
response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water
storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry
months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to 720 million liters,
the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively
hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and
local groundwater systems depleted.
That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She
talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow
protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this
clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever
a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder.
When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue
overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that
moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the
earth.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
