Madrid, December 2019. Climate activist Marie Kolo has come all the way from Madagascar to take part in the COP 25 World Climate Conference. A determined 31-year-old with her tongue firmly in her cheek, Marie Kolo had taken the liberty, a few days earlier, of criticizing Madagascar’s Minister of the Environment, Alexandre Georget, on Facebook. In front of the COP delegates, he came across her, grabbed her by the arm and insulted her. How could a young woman have the nerve to criticize a male member of the world’s powerful caste?

Madagascar. The average age of the island’s 28 million inhabitants is 19. However, young people’s voices, wishes and concerns are generally not heard or represented in parliaments and power structures. Marie Kolo insists on the place that should be given to young people and to women. An article in Der Tagesspiegel (a German daily distributed by subscription only) puts it this way:

She describes herself not only as a climate activist, but also as a gender advocate and ecofeminist, a term first coined in the 1970s and traced back to women’s rights activist Françoise d’Eaubonne, who died in 2005. For ecofeminists like d’Eaubonne and Kolo, ecocrisis and the oppression of women are linked. The exploitation of nature and the oppression of women are, in their view, the two faces of capitalism.

Marie insists on the link between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature:

Many don’t even know that there is a link between gender and climate change. And when it does, it has little or no priority in the negotiations. Those who suffer most are women.

One of the many examples Marie Kolo highlights is the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti: after the quake, women refugees in emergency camps were often physically and sexually abused. Another example:

In the patriarchal societies of the global South, women are responsible for many daily tasks. They look after the family’s food and water supplies, for example. To do this, women have to walk long distances in the arid regions of Madagascar – often ten, sometimes up to twenty kilometers. When they get home, they can’t drink the water, no matter how exhausted they are. First it’s the men’s turn, then the children’s, then the animals’. In the end, the women can drink, if they have anything left. The same applies to the food supply.

Marie Kolo says she was a rebel from the age of 8. It was a few years later, when a textile factory opened not far from her home and began “to change the color of the fields”, that Marie Kolo became an activist. Her petition against industrial air pollution was successful, and the factory was forced to close shortly afterwards. Women who inspire her: Wangari Maathai (“the woman who planted trees”, Kenyan, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2004) and Vandana Shiva (Indian ecofeminist activist, head of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources, alternative Nobel Prize winner in 1993).

At climate conferences, the majority of delegates are white, elderly men. (translated with DeepL)

The Earth’s circumference is 40,000 km, and all human ingenuity will never add a single metre more,” Françoise d’Eaubonne used to say. We live in a finite world. Yet Patriarchy and Capital blindly pursue infinite growth in production, exponential consumption and limitless demographics.

The Meadows Report is 50 years old. Limits to Growth (its real title) was written in 1972 at the request of the Club of Rome (a think-tank bringing together scientists, economists and national and international civil servants). Françoise had probably read it when she became aware of the ecological emergency in the early 1970s. On the occasion of its reissue (published a few days ago by Rue de l’échiquier), the online daily Reporterre published an interview on March 3 with emeritus researcher Dennis Meadows, one of the report’s authors.
*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***

He created a worldwide sensation. It is often considered one of the monuments of political ecology. Yet the ideas of the ground-breaking 1972 report Limits to Growth, better known as the Meadows Report, have been little or never taken up by the world’s leaders. It demonstrated for the first time that the economy could not continue to grow indefinitely in a finite world.

50 years on, where do we stand? The 2022 report by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has just taken stock, focusing on the consequences of climate change and how societies can prepare for them. The msn portal interviewed one of its contributors, ecologist and geographer Wolfgang Cramer.

Today, there are concrete examples of adaptation to climate change everywhere. Among these, there are some interesting options that can be put forward. Agroecology is one of them. In many regions, this model of agricultural production (which relies as much as possible on the functionalities offered by natural ecosystems and seeks to reduce pressure on the environment as much as possible) is now seen as an important avenue for adaptation.
(Translated with www.Deep)