Who in Quebec remembers the poet Huguette Gaulin (1944-1972)? Very few people. Especially lovers of poetry. In order to give an intimately Quebec flavor to the global struggle to save nature, journalist Raymond Lemieux honors, at the beginning of his book Ecology. An endless battle, the memory of the woman who, after dozing herself with gasoline, strikes a match and immolates herself in public, screaming at everyone: “You have destroyed the beauty of the world. »
Outstanding popularizer, in particular thanks to his experience as the magazine’s editor-in-chief Quebec Science From 1994 to 2006, Lemieux recounts the evolution of Quebec environmentalism which, parallel to what was done elsewhere in the world, took off in the 1970s. He says that in 1977, with a dozen other students from cégep Maisonneuve, in Montreal, he formed a vegetarian, anti-nuclear circle, asserting himself against waste and for a passion for cycling.
These idealists invite the naturalist Pierre Dansereau (1911-2011), Quebec pioneer of ecology through his work Biogeography. An Ecological Perspectivepublished in New York in 1957. Despite this memorable encounter, Lemieux pointed out that the “ecological shift” appeared illusory in Quebec.
He draws a despairing conclusion. The number of cars there more than tripled from 1970 to 2018, energy consumption increased by 15% from 1990 to 2016, air pollutant emissions linked to transport increased by 21% between 1990 and 2018, the spread urbanization has wiped out thousands of hectares of agricultural land and wetlands.
Despite everything, Lemieux detects glimmers of hope that concern not only Quebec, but the entire planet. He cites the protocol adopted in Montreal in 1987 by 24 countries banning refrigerants that destroy the atmospheric ozone layer, the 1991 Canadian-American agreement on acid rain which obliges the two countries to reduce the acidity of their industrial emissions .
But that is nothing compared to global warming, against which the “30 years of blah-blah” of the planet’s leaders “have led to no action”, according to activist Greta Thunberg, whom Lemieux mentions sympathetically. The essayist shakes us even more by the local resonance that he gives, without really wanting it, to the world situation.
By admiring Dansereau, this innovator, Lemieux penetrates the secret of a very Quebecois couple who crystallizes the universal debate between the ecological dream and its implacable adversary: the cult of money. An exalted poet by nature, somewhat of the stamp of Huguette Gaulin, Dansereau was not immune to the gentle teasing of his wife, Françoise Masson, coincidentally a direct descendant of Joseph Masson (1791-1847), the first French-Canadian millionaire.