This text is part of the special section Les prix de l’Acfas
Eco-anxious early on, Claude Villeneuve has made his fears the driving force behind his environmental vision for more than 50 years. Receiving the Acfas Pierre-Dansereau prize for social commitment has a very personal meaning for him: the great ecologist was his teacher, his mentor and his friend.
Claude Villeneuve remembers his discussions with the scientist Pierre Dansereau, whom he met in the early 1980s and whom he later invited, at the dawn of the year 2000, to meet his first eco-consulting students at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC). Accompanied by his brother, filmmaker Fernand Dansereau, he came to present a documentary on his journey, A few reasons to hopea title that could cover Claude Villeneuve’s research and moods.
The one who was also the student of Dr Hans Selye, a key figure in the field of stress studies, and an accomplice of the famous and late animation director Frédéric Back (The man who planted trees, The river of great waters) does not only alarm his contemporaries about the accelerated degradation of the planet. This biologist by training and professor in the Department of Basic Sciences at UQAC has prepared and still prepares generations of students to continue his relentless work in favor of sustainable development.
“In primary school, we were taught that we had to go down to the basement or hide under the desks in the event of an atomic alert, remembers Claude Villeneuve, with a smirk. As a teenager, I was already outraged by the way people treated the environment, but I wasn’t the only one. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1970s, in the wake of the work of the Club of Rome created in 1968, the publication of one of the founding essays of ecological thoughtSilent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson, and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970, the man who was director of the European Institute for Environmental Consulting in Strasbourg (1993-1994) already felt the dawn of a new era.
Today very associated with sustainable development and the importance of understanding the dynamics of forests to make them invaluable assets in the face of climate change, Claude Villeneuve quickly stood out for the relevance of his warning signs. From his first try, Human-sick animals? (1983), he attracted international attention. He was approached by UNESCO to design the very first university course on sustainable development, inspired by the work of Maurice Strong and Francesco di Castri, and resumed in 1987 with the famous Brundtland report, written by the World Commission on the Environment and the development of the United Nations.
Measuring sustainability
The professor still remembers a question, seemingly banal, from one of his first students, in 1988, which was to shake up the rest of his work. “He asked me: how do you measure if something is sustainable? I replied that I didn’t know… but that we had to work on it! Claude Villeneuve quickly got down to work, developing analysis grids recognized by the United Nations, training several cohorts of eco-advisers capable of instilling best practices in all environments, and also creating Carbone boréale.
When it was created in 2001, this chair of research and intervention in eco-advice and research infrastructure looked like “a crazy idea”, according to Claude Villeneuve. “Since that time, we’ve planted 1,700,000 trees and are posting hopeful things about using the boreal forest to deal with climate change. »
Besides, whoever wrote Is it too late? Update on climate change does he have as much hope as his mentor? “In this book published in 2012, my forecasts for the years 2020-22 are correct and show that we are exactly on the wrong track… Pierre Dansereau said: “Our bankruptcies are those of the imagination.” Human beings have lived for millions of years in a biological system without disturbing it too deeply. The key to sustainable development is figuring out how they will live there without destroying it. We have the ability to project ourselves into the future, to consider alternatives. »
And as if to conclude on an optimistic note, Claude Villeneuve specifies: “So far, the pessimist is right, but that does not mean that he will be right until the end. »
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the To have to, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of To have to did not take part.