“The imagination irrigates feminist and ecological struggles. This is the theme explored in the fifth and final episode, Climate Dreams, of the documentary series “One Day the Earth Opens”, fourth season of the Injustices podcast produced by Louie Media.
According to a United Nations study, Gender Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction, women are fourteen times more likely than men to die from an extreme weather event. This “limits their access to the information and resources they need to reduce disaster risk,” says UN Women.
Journalist Lucile Torregrossa gives the floor to Camille Etienne, environmental activist and content creator; Ketty Steward, poet and science fiction writer, and Marie Toussaint, MEP, founder of the Notre affaires à tous association, which campaigns to give legal personality to rivers, lakes and other natural areas.
Place so intimate
“I dream that I am in the Maldives, the beaches are destroyed, the palm trees bent by the storms. I realize that I will never reach dry land again. Thus begins the episode, on a background sound mixing waves and protests. Climate change permeates the dreams, this place so intimate. Even if it remains difficult to illustrate because “we cannot imagine the conditions of our own extinction”, we think that “it will necessarily happen to others”, says Camille Etienne.
Ketty Steward is convinced that to dream of all the possibilities is to consider multiple reasons to be optimistic. The science fiction author wrote a short story Lethal Return to the Land (in the collective work Turn-around as soon as possible. Territories of the Imagination, La Volte, 2014). This native of Martinique describes herself flying over the West Indies, in ninety years, her nose glued to the window: “I had seen this image a hundred times. It was no longer a satellite photo, only thick glass now separated me from the former flower island: I was immediately too hot. »
Back to the concrete, here and now. No imagination in Bure, in the Meuse, but a reality: the Cigéo project (Industrial Center for Geological Storage) to bury the most dangerous nuclear waste. In the camp of the collective Les Rayonnantes, a sort of zone to defend based in Bure, June, non-binary and transgender, and Anna are mobilizing, with hundreds of people, alongside Greenpeace France. If we store waste here that will take thousands of years to lose its radioactivity, the flora will no longer develop, and the risk of fires will be inevitable in the affected area. Their strength to move the lines? “The power of the collective, and above all the joy,” says June.
