In “Sur le front”, the environmental investigation magazine presented by Hugo Clément, the beaches of France are not invaded by tourists – not yet – but by backhoes and trucks, which come and go, loaded with sand or pebbles. Filmed before the summer, this episode offers, in fact, a “tour of France” of the initiatives attempted by some municipalities to safeguard their coastline. A very practical formulation supposed to attenuate the impression of catalog, felt by watching this series of reports without any real common thread.

Too bad but not prohibitive, especially since “the coast remains the favorite destination of 65% of French holidaymakers”, according to Ipsos (June 2022). Knowing how Anglet, in the Basque Country, Biscarrosse, in the Landes, Sète and Agde, both in the Hérault, have invested in pilot projects or are spending large sums of money to have the beaches ready for the summer. the biggest number.

The “tourists” are precisely the main cause of this debauchery of unsustainable means. So Hugo Clément takes care to make it known to each of his interlocutors. The harshness of his comments can tire and the warrior vocabulary can displease – “fighters” preserve the habitat of the ocellated lizard; in Capbreton (Landes), “an army has risen”.

Animated educational sequences

The main thing remains. The rise in the level of the oceans is pushing back the coastline and threatening homes (as illustrated by the report in Lacanau, in Gironde). If the program “Sur le front” is not the first to talk about it, it allows us to meet Eric Chaumillon, a marine geologist who works in search of natural solutions and has just experienced one, life-size, in La Rochelle . Small animated educational sequences effectively complete the explanations, to show, among other things, how certain tracks “recharge” on their own, and not others.

To continue with the chapter on solutions, in the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, Ifremer is studying the constructions of hermelles, these sand worms whose concretions are visible from space – as already seen in Vivant, the film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, broadcast on France 2. In Soulac-sur-Mer (Gironde), the emblematic Signal residential building was wisely destroyed, before being rewilded: the result, magnificent, offers a beautiful note of hope .

The rant of the day, meanwhile, is devoted to the pollution of industrial plastic pebbles (GPI), microbeads that insinuate themselves everywhere in the sand, the soil… Also called “mermaid’s tears”, they come exclusively from factories where they are used as raw material. Hugo Clément and Cristina Barreau, another passionate interlocutor (from the Surfrider association), go near one of them, in Normandy, in the industrial zone of Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine, to film the extent of this pollution which is very difficult to clean up.

However, in December 2022, an unidentified grounding occurred. Described as an “environmental nightmare”, by the Minister for Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, who “brought legal action” on behalf of the State, after the mayors of Pornic, La Bernerie-en-Retz (Loire- Atlantique), Les Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée) and the regional council of Pays de la Loire have jointly filed a complaint against X. The investigation is ongoing.