Popular presenter of the weather for ten years, on France 2, Chloé Nabédian chose, at 37, to change her life. She announced it, on December 15, 2022, live, during her last bulletin, explaining that she wanted to “develop other projects around the climate”. It’s done. The journalist embodies every Saturday, since July 29, “A la vie, à la terre”, an environmental program designed as a journey, which goes to meet the inhabitants of a country affected by climate change. With, for particularity, to take his time. The shots are long and the interviews not cut short, in order to allow everyone to express themselves at their own pace, on the difficulties encountered or on the initiatives put in place.
After Les Iles de la Madeleine in Quebec, threatened with being swallowed up, Morocco, in the name of oases and Congo, trees and men, Chloé Nabédian is going, for this part, to Cameroon, where Cécile Ndjebet, founder of Cameroon Ecology , has been undertaking for thirty years to save the forests and the mangroves, victims of wild cuts. “The problem is that young people who engage in this activity do it to survive,” she laments.
In Cameroon, wood is, in fact, essential for heating, cooking food, building and for smoking fish – an important but energy-intensive action. The presenter avoids no difficulty, showing, among other things, the delicate dialogue with young people or, later, with timber debtors acting completely illegally, and with complete impunity…
Hope is reborn with the visit of a nursery, then with those of an orchard, community forests or a factory of chips made from plantain bananas. If the tearful scene at the grave of the mother of Cécile Ndjebet, agronomist and forester, seems incongruous, the report points to a real injustice: only Cameroonian women take care of the land, but it belongs to men. Direction, then, the north of the country, where the rising water threatens, then Kribi, where the land is dwindling because, this time, of land occupation by industrialists.
In search of the right tone
Chloé Nabédian seems to be looking for the right tone, between empathetic interviews, solution journalism and investigation. But Hugo Clément – ??journalist committed to ecology, presenter of “Sur le front” on France 5 – is not the one who wants it. The sequence devoted to the Camvert concession, a palm oil producer (Cameroon is the world leader), is thus moderately convincing.
After a few detours – a field devastated by elephants, a volunteer who collects plastic waste – the resumption of a sequence of “Special Envoy” of January 6, 2022 devoted to “Forest Man” is relevant as it is edifying. The Indian Jadav Payeng is thus nicknamed for having alone, for forty years, planted, tree after tree, a forest on his island (Majuli) in the middle of the Brahmaputra river. It now covers 750 hectares.
With a precious plan in hand, he recounts his story, which began at the age of 16, to save his island from flooding. World famous, he continues to plant a tree every day and tries to take over. “On your birthday, instead of eating a cake, plant a tree!” “, he says to the students of a class. Then, turning to Chloé Nabédian: “And you, you’re doing a documentary, that’s good. But you too should plant a tree. The advice applies to everyone.
