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NY Times, Sept. 19, 2019
A Revolution in Brittany: Mayors Defy French State to Ban Pesticides
By Adam Nossiter
LANGOUËT, France — If France is going through an ecological awakening,
its spiritual center may be here in Langouët, a quiet village in
Brittany, where the environmentalist mayor has become a folk hero to
fellow small-town officials all over the country.
Dozens of mayors are following the example of Langouët’s leader, Daniel
Cueff, even though the French state has rapped him on the knuckles,
dragged him into court and told him that he, the shepherd over a mere
600 souls, had no right to ban pesticides by ordinance from his village.
The other French mayors, from the Alps to the Atlantic, don’t seem to
care and have passed their own restrictions in as many as 40 small towns.
Meanwhile, the citizens in Langouët have plastered public spaces on the
village’s empty main street with signs addressed to the national
government’s regional representative: “Madame prefect, let our mayor
protect us!” A hand-scrawled sign where fields end and village begins
makes the same point.
When Mr. Cueff was hauled before the tribunal in the regional capital,
Rennes, this summer, 1,000 people were on hand to applaud him.
Mr. Cueff, a steely eyed 64-year-old veteran of the environmental wars
who earned his chops four decades ago in fighting a nuclear reactor, is
used to being considered an outlier. Not this time.
“Isn’t the mayor of a village called on to fill in for the state’s
deficiencies?” he asked in an interview in his wood-paneled office —
powered by solar energy, like the other municipal buildings.
“France voted for the European directive to protect the population from
pesticides. It’s not doing it,” he said. “I don’t want to be accused of
nonassistance to people in danger.” His desk was piled with letters of
support from across France.
After a scorching summer in which the French were frightened by
successive record heat waves, brutally underscoring the reality of
climate change, there is a premium on politicians who are seen to act.
The Greens made a strong showing in last spring’s European Parliament
elections, environmentalists are on the rise and establishment
politicians are genuflecting.
The lesson has not been lost on President Emmanuel Macron, who recently
declared, “I’ve changed,” in matters ecological.
He has made a show of new environmental initiatives, taking on Brazil’s
president over fires in the Amazon, convening a citizens’ panel for
recommendations on climate change, rejecting a heavily criticized trade
agreement with Latin America on environmental grounds, and insisting
that members of his cabinet focus on the environment, and not just the
minister for “ecological transition and solidarity.”
With important municipal elections coming up next year and the Greens
benefiting from solid support in France’s cities, Mr. Macron has his
eyes on the polls. France’s leading pollster, Jerôme Fourquet, writing
in the newspaper Le Figaro, recently described rising environmentalism
as possibly the “new matrix” underlying the nation’s cultural identity,
taking the place once occupied by Catholicism.
The president has even expressed cautious support for the newly
notorious mayor in Brittany, saying of Mr. Cueff: “I support his
intentions, but I can’t agree when the law isn’t respected,” even though
“the mayor’s motivations are good.”
Mr. Cueff scoffed. “In politics, it’s not the intention, it’s the
practice,” he said.
As with elsewhere in rural France, the rolling fields of corn and wheat
surrounding this village creep up right to the doorsteps of the
residents’ homes — along with whatever chemicals are applied to those crops.
The farmers tending their fields are not supposed to spray pesticides
unless the wind blows at less than six miles an hour. But this is
Brittany, a peninsula thrust into the Atlantic, where the wind blows in
strong from the ocean.
The mayor has spent much of his career trying to put into practice what
he calls “the ecology of action, not incantation.” In 2003, he became
the first mayor in Brittany to install solar panels on public buildings;
the school toilets use recycled rainwater.
On May 18, Mr. Cueff banned the use of pesticides within 450 feet of any
dwelling, putting much of the village off limits. Some of the farmers
were furious, the powerful farmers’ union was fiercely opposed and its
national president, Christiane Lambert, mocked Mr. Cueff on the radio,
asking, “Why not cars, too?”
In late August, a judge struck down his ordinance after the central
government argued against it, saying the mayor was “not competent” to
make the decision.
“We had to create an electric shock,” Mr. Cueff said. “To put the
farmers on notice and make them move.”
Juries in the United States have awarded a handful of enormous judgments
against Monsanto, in cases brought by people who claimed that the
company’s popular weedkiller RoundUp had given them cancer. Thousands of
similar lawsuits are pending.
Tests on the people of Langouët showed levels of glyphosate — one of the
most widely used herbicides and the active ingredient in RoundUp — in
their urine up to 30 times the recommended limit. It was especially high
in children.
“The parents are traumatized,” Mr. Cueff said.
“We were really shocked,” said Hélène Heuré, the local librarian, who
has two children in the village’s elementary school. Her own level was
nine times the limit.
“Of course, it’s scary,” she said. “And the mayor said he would try to
find a solution. We’ve got to question this kind of agriculture.”
“Twenty years ago we were a bit alone,” said Daniel Cueff, the mayor of
Langouët. “Today it’s the opposite. People come to me and ask if they
can’t do more.”CreditAndrea Mantovani for The New York Times
Feelings are still raw among the half-dozen farmers, mostly dairy
farmers, who practice what Mr. Cueff called “conventional” agriculture.
“This is a catastrophe,” said Dominique Hamon, standing next to his milk
tanker at the edge of the village.
“We’ve been here to feed people, and now they are making us out to be
dangerous. We’re not even free to do our jobs anymore,” said Mr. Hamon,
adding that he would quit the business at the end of the year. “At least
he could have asked our opinion.”
But Mr. Cueff says he doesn’t understand why, on the one hand, the state
barred town governments in 2017 from using glyphosate, but still allowed
its use on farms cheek by jowl with small towns.
“This is a contradictory message,” he said. “Here in Langouët there are
no contradictory positions.”
It is that implacable logic, fed by the pall of environmental fear that
hangs over all of France, that is governing the decisions of Mr. Cueff’s
colleagues in small towns across the country.
“There’s obviously a problem. Either it’s toxic or not. And so we
decided to get out in front of it,” Bertrand Astic, the mayor of
Boussières, near the Swiss border, said in a telephone interview. “I’ve
assumed my responsibility to protect my citizens.”
Mr. Astic has banned glyphosate and he, too, is being fought by his
local prefecture.
“We rural mayors are faced with a real decline in our environment,” he
said. “The trees are dying. The insect population is in free-fall. You
look around the hillsides here, there are huge brown patches. We’ve had
three droughts in a row. Climate change is taking place before our eyes.”
Back in Brittany, Mr. Cueff in confident that the palpable weight of
circumstances — this summer’s staggering heat — has put public opinion
on his side.
“Twenty years ago we were a bit alone,” he said. “They thought we were
exaggerating. Today it’s the opposite. People come to me and ask if they
can’t do more.”
At the solar-heated apartments he has had built, the heating bill is
about $180 a year. “People say, ‘Good God, if this is ecology, this
isn’t so bad,’” he said.
“You see, the big ecological ideas, they create anxiety. And if you are
in that logic, you get depressed,” he said. “But here we are showing
that there are solutions.”
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