Ecological summit and counter-summit in Marseille: the crack reaches the preservation of nature | Macron inaugurated a World Conservation Congress in France with Harrison Ford and Christine Legarde

Dressed in a white suit, Lagarde was one of the voices that opened the event combining ecology and economy: “there is no economic stability without the stability of nature”. The Prime Minister Chino Li Keqiang, went out by video call and followed this line: he spoke of seeking a “circular economy” and “building a beautiful and clean future”. Macron, for his part, defended the “30 x 30” project, promoted by the G7 and promoted by Joe biden, who seeks to achieve it 30% of the planet is a protected area by 2030.

The IUCN summit offers various excursions on the Côte d’Azur to accredited journalists, charge 1300 euros entry and occupies five pavilions of the Chanot exhibition center, between the conference rooms and the stands set up by environmental organizations but also by governments, such as el United States Department of State Yeah European Commission, and large French companies in very different fields, such as L’Oreal, BNP O Pernod Ricard.

At the IUCN congress there was a world convention of indigenous peoples, but it only lasted four hours, was completely virtual and mixed native voices with those of French, Swiss, North American and Norwegian officials. According to the United Nations, 80 percent of the biodiversity that remains on the planet is found in indigenous territory.

Pioneer and missionary

The Supreme Court judge Ricardo lorenzetti will participate this Tuesday in a panel at the IUCN Congress, on “Judges and the Environment”. He will do it virtually from Argentina. The only Argentinian official who participates in person in the Congress is Patrick lombardi, Minister of Climate Change de Misiones, the first to lead a portfolio bearing this name in Latin American history. He shared a panel with the mayor of Bogotá, Claudia lopez, and with him Berangère Abba, secretary for biodiversity of the French government.

In dialogue with Page 12, Lombardi assured that “we must rely on the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples, from here I go to Zurich to see a Swiss senator who works with a foundation that wants to buy two thousand hectares that has a sawmill in Montoya, Misiones , and they want to give them to the Guarani communities so that they can preserve it ”. Lombardi has worked with Jeb Bush in the state of Florida and also on the R21 foundation with Soda Stereo drummer Charly Alberti. He won Pope Francis’ trust after visiting him and showed him a satellite photo of Misiones, where the Argentine province is considered a green island, amid deforestation to plant soybeans from Paraguay and southern Brazil . Lombardi’s goal is for Misiones to take the opportunity to enter the carbon market.

Asked about the model of energy creation represented by the Yacireta In the context of climate change, Lombardi says: “Yaciretá is finished, we have to produce energy, in Misiones it is 39 degrees and people want to turn on the air conditioning. The missionary minister gets along well with his national peers but says no one in Argentina is wondering how to make a great ecological transition.

The debate by climate change is always a novelty in Argentina, Lombardi says he sometimes feels like an alien among his peers: “They don’t understand what I’m doing, I say a holistic character is needed and they look at me like they say he’s a hippie , but no, it is the one to do, otherwise we will end up without a planet, here there is no crack ”.

The counter-summit

Meanwhile, the NGO International Survival, of English origin, and indigenous leaders from five continents organized a counter-summit called “Our land, our nature” to “decolonize conservation”. It took place this Thursday and Friday on the third floor of the Coco Velten Cultural Center, in the old port, one of the most popular areas of Marseille. Mordecai Ogada, the Kenyan ecologist author of the book “The Great Conservation Lie” – one of the main speakers of the counter-summit – said page 12, referring to the IUCN congress: “If Harrison Ford is going to open a congress on conservation, let me be invited to open the Oscars.

At the counter-summit, the voices of indigenous leaders have been interspersed with those of anthropologists and scholars like Ogada, who believes that indigenous peoples should not be open to debate with those who defend the current conservation paradigm. Ogada accuses the organization WWFFor example, promote the creation of national parks by displacing the indigenous peoples who live there, such as the Baka in the Congo Basin. “The current paradigm of conservation wants to protect the nature of local populations, protect them from inhabitants, from humans. In the West, being an environmentalist seems to be progressive, but in Africa, the environmentalists are conservatives, it is the Prince of England, the right, the racists who give arms to the park rangers ”, dice Ogada.

For the anthropologist from the University of Rennes, Guillaume Blanc, the flaw lies in the humanization or dehumanization of conservation, since in some protected areas “farmers have been replaced by tourists”. Argentina Longo flower, of Survival International, agreed with Blanc and said that the climate crisis is in fact a “human crisis”. Ashish Kothari, of the indigenous Kalpavriksh people of India, denounced that “there is no place to participate in conservation”: “leaving wildlife in 30 percent without changing the way of life in the other 70 is unnecessary”.