Former journalist at Release, Committed to environmental protection, Laure Noualhat is also an author and documentary filmmaker. She humorously shares her experience to reduce her carbon footprint and tries to put ecological guilt into perspective. His latest work, How to stay green without ending up depressed (Tana Editions, 2020), was published in paperback in October 2021.
Journalist specializing in environmental issues for almost twenty years, what does your daily ecological life look like?
Before 2013, I lived in Paris, I didn’t have a car but I often went on assignments to Release. Today, I live in the countryside, in Joigny, in Yonne, I have a vehicle that I share, 95% of what’s in my fridge is local and I no longer fly. My carbon footprint has clearly decreased but I remain imprisoned for life with my little ethical and carbon arrangements. The latest: meat, which I haven’t been able to do without yet. I therefore only eat dead animals that I have known to be alive, favoring extensive and local agriculture. Here at the Association for the Maintenance of Peasant Agriculture [Amap], we have the cows and the Galloway buffalo in front of us, the producer’s lamb… That’s my own negotiation.
Does it save you from whipping yourself (with your vegetable whip)?
Yes, but in the long term, these personal arrangements are not tenable, because everything we do, it must be multiplied by almost 8 billion individuals. The problem with negotiation is that you relativize your efforts: you say to yourself: “Why deprive me when it won’t change anything on a global scale? I also used to tell myself that since I don’t have children, my carbon footprint will stop when I die. For a long time I made jokes saying that the best green gesture was suicide. But once you understand that all human activity causes pollution, the idea is to make your personal equation between what you can’t give up and what you can transform.
How not to let go?
There is an effort to be made throughout one’s life, that of accepting that one is not going to be the person who is going to change things and that, whatever one does today, even if we were all 2 tonnes CO equivalent2 per year, there would still be a warming of more than 2°C [d’ici à la fin du siècle, objectif fixé dans l’accord de Paris de 2015]. Flogging ourselves because we can’t change our consumption patterns, it’s a shame, because our society has been organized so that we use the car, eat meat… And then it’s paradox: the more people act, the more CO emissions2 increase. Globally, they have exceeded 400 ppm [« parties par million », équivalant au nombre de molécules polluant sur un million de molécules d’air] while twenty years ago, they were at 250. The hardest thing is to live with that, without ceasing to do things.
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