A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #352 - Vertement écolo 352 (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In the summary of the section: ---- Illegal dam at Caussade, Sivens and 
Rémi Fraisse... ---- Meanwhile, EDF is swimming ---- The Rhône will flow 
in Catalonia ---- In passing... ---- {{Illegal dam at Caussade, Sivens 
and Rémi Fraisse... ---- How sweet to the ears of nature 
conservationists was this declaration by Marc Fesneau (former Minister 
of Agriculture) in 2023: "There is no ambiguity: all illegal reservoirs 
will obviously be emptied and dismantled." After this stern statement, 
the Caussade dam didn't have much longer to live. Unfortunately, we've 
seen what the situation is (see the February 2025 CA): the Prefecture's 
formal notices, such as the requirement to "appoint an approved expert 
specializing in these hydraulic structures" to assess the condition of 
the dike and draw up a list of works to "bring the structure into 
compliance"[1](totally favorable to the water robbers and offering them 
a way out), fell flat in the face of the virile response from the former 
leader of the Rural Coordination of Lot-et-Garonne, Bousquet-Cassagne: 
"We will do nothing the prefect asks us to do... We will not put a cent 
more into work for Lake Caussade."

The endless saga of water appropriation by 24 large-scale fruit growers 
seems to be heading towards a completely favorable outcome for the CR: 
in early 2025, "... the Bordeaux administrative court ruled today that 
the State did not commit repeated errors in the 'Caussade' affair" (even 
though the lake is still illegal!)
And, the results of the elections to the Chamber of Agriculture 
validated the CR 47's positions: "the farm managers who participated in 
the elections to the Chambers of Agriculture in Lot-et-Garonne (2,588 
out of 4,330 registered) gave it nearly 70% of their votes (10 points 
more than in 2019)"[2]
So, why bother... even outside the department. Water theft must become 
the rule for unionized thirsty voters. Because, why bother now? The 
state is giving in to Caussade, but it's on our side in Sainte-Soline. 
Valiant farmers, let's launch a crusade against those who prevent 
pollution under the banner of our union, the Rural Crusade. Let's steal 
and capture water as we please, by force, plunder, and violence. Profit, 
greed, the brutal exploitation of the soil, the destruction of all 
wildlife, the joys of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, the absolute 
pleasure of enjoying power by humiliating our opponents are in our 
ultraliberal, fascist, and virile DNA. And we are simply conforming to 
the spirit of the times. Wauquiez, Retailleau, Duplomb, the MEDEF 
(French employers' association), Bolloré, Putin, Erdogan, Trump, 
Netanyahu, each at their own level are showing us the way.

Thus, since 2022, the CR 47 has been campaigning (with some heavy 
electoral ulterior motives) in the Tarn to encourage "farmers to build a 
dam in Sivens outside of any legal framework..."[3]to save the Tarn 
farmers reduced to poverty by the Drought Witch, the Zécolos, and other 
Zanarchists.

However, it is not certain that this virile call for illegality will be 
accepted in the Tarn, where the death of Rémi Fraisse has left its mark. 
Rémi Fraisse was the young naturalist activist killed on October 26, 
2014, by a nighttime grenade attack during two days of protests against 
the lake project. Rémi Fraisse, whose death resulted in a definitive 
dismissal in 2018 for the gendarme responsible for the shooting and his 
superiors. Move along, there's nothing to see here.
Rémi Fraisse, whose family has just obtained, after 10 years of 
proceedings, a condemnation of France by the European Court of Human 
Rights. "The judges invoke a violation of Article 2 of the European 
Convention on Human Rights, on the 'right to life.' It took more than 10 
years for the state's responsibility in this tragedy to finally be 
recognized."[4]But the increasingly militarized "French-style" policing 
continues imperturbably to injure, maim, and kill: Yellow Vests, 
Sainte-Soline, the A69... while waiting for the next step.

{{Meanwhile, EDF is swimming.
For EDF, surprises follow one after another, and are all different.
It must be said that EDF is in turmoil because of a state-boss 
increasingly heeding the sirens of sovereignty and industrial relocation 
at any cost. In 2022, its CEO, Maurice Lévy, before being fired, filed 
"an appeal on behalf of the company against the government's decision to 
impose on EDF an increase in the volume of electricity sold at a loss to 
its competitors..."[5], which was rather comical for the CEO of a 
national company.

There was good chemistry between his successor, Luc Rémont, and Macron, 
and everything was going well. He secured the complete renationalization 
of the group, launched the EPR2 program, and successfully improved the 
group's net results (EUR11.4 billion in 2024). However, he was abruptly 
fired in March 2025 because his industrial and management logic (develop 
the company, reduce its debt, and make profits) clashed head-on with 
other players in French crony capitalism.
Those who got him were the electro-intensive industrialists (chemicals, 
steel, paper and cardboard, plastics, textile fibers, etc.). These 
humanists of job blackmail, these athletes of public subsidies and tax 
evasion, did not at all appreciate his plan to "auction new, more 
expensive nuclear production contracts," they who, since the world 
became electric, have benefited from tons of price discounts. (Guess 
who's paying the difference?)

His successor, Bernard Fontana, a nice guy-he's had a career with all 
the electricity-intensive industries and Areva-who has a clear roadmap: 
"Guarantee competitive electricity for industry..."-is already caught up 
in the boiling pot of global warming.
For several years (2018, 2022, 2023, etc.), EDF has been forced to 
reduce the power of its reactors in the middle of summer due to the 
decline in river flow, but also because the discharged water is too hot 
for environmental standards.
But this year, on the Rhône, this nuclear-powered river envied by the 
whole world, problems are already piling up by mid-June. Yet, water is 
flowing abundantly because there has been heavy rainfall and the water 
table is at its highest.

What's going on? The heatwave is hitting hard and early this year, and 
"Due to forecast high temperatures in the Rhône, production restrictions 
are likely to affect EDF's nuclear power plants starting Wednesday, June 
25, and more specifically the Bugey site."[6]
The suspense is unbearable, but this preventive communication (so rare 
and virtuous on the part of EDF) seems above all to be a deliberate 
scenario to accustom us to future shortages.

Moreover, EDF, one of the largest users/polluters of the river, has many 
other concerns to manage: a EUR53.4 billion debt; the obligation to sell 
its electricity below cost; ruinous EPRs, in disrepair and unable to 
boil pasta water; tubes that are cracking and corroding in active power 
plants (in Penly and elsewhere). And one of its favorite uranium 
suppliers, ORANO, is falling apart in Niger (nationalization of its 
subsidiary Somaïr at the end of June by the military dictators). Not to 
mention a growing and uncomfortable dependence on the Russian 
state-owned nuclear giant, Rosatom (production, transportation, storage, 
and waste reprocessing), which dictates its own rules[7]. Not ideal for 
putting pressure on Russia in the midst of a war in Ukraine. Besides, 
for nuclear power, as for Russian chemical fertilizers, the word 
"sanctions" doesn't exist. CEO of EDF, it's no piece of cake!

Bure September 2025
{{New and interesting: the Rhône will flow through Catalonia...
On maps, the Rhône starts from a glacier in the Alps, is joined by the 
Saône in Lyon, gradually widens, becomes a delta, and flows into the 
Mediterranean.
Well, that hasn't been entirely true for quite a few years now. Since 
1960, the river's water has been captured in the Hérault region-through 
a network of canals and pipelines-for human consumption and irrigation 
in the Hérault, Gard, and Aude departments[8]. Acqua Domitia is now its 
nickname. It was the Occitanie region that commissioned the Bas-Rhône 
and Languedoc Development Company (BRL) to implement this necessarily 
virtuous program of "water security on the coast."
A strange kind of security when, between the 1990s and 2010, this same 
operator-in which (miracle!) a private water trader (SAUR) had acquired 
a stake-attempted to export water to Spanish Catalonia to fuel the 
expansion of the Costa Brava seaside resorts and Catalan industrial 
agriculture. The project was firmly supported by the former Maoist 
Georges Frêche, who became the socialist caudillo of Montpellier and the 
region.

This project, born from the brains of crazy developers and money-hungry 
capitalists, posed a whole series of interesting problems: priority to 
Spanish agricultural irrigation, disruption of the region's hydrography 
("low water level of the Rhône, distracted silt from the Camargue and 
risks of the salty corner rising"[9]. In short, all the hassles for the 
French to the benefit of foreign actors. It was to be the "first major 
international transfer, which gives it a symbolic value. In fact, apart 
from being completely useless, except for the companies that would 
benefit from it, it would encourage a water policy through supply that 
was brought to its highest point in Spain... and it would then be the 
first link in a European water network." One wonders why BRL-a public 
operator with a strictly regional vocation-fought over Spanish water 
suppliers. A little, but a lot of liquid must have circulated through 
carefully calibrated pipes...
Faced with an outcry from French Catalan industrial farmers who saw it 
as unfair competition with Spanish fruit and vegetable producers, the 
project collapsed.
But, faced with the chronic drought in the Perpignan region, the 
socialist Delga, president of the Occitanie region, is relaunching an 
irrigation project.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, the farmers and the Catholic fascists who 
organize processions to make it rain in Perpignan have found their 
agricultural Messiah, and what's more, it's a woman! The Occitanie 
region voted on April 25, 2024, to conduct a feasibility study for 250 
km of large pipes at an estimated cost of EUR500 million. What joy in 
the eyes of the big kids, the zealots and the entrepreneurs, even if the 
same ecological problems as those of the past will arise, aggravated by 
the drought affecting the entire Rhône basin and the predicted decline 
in river flow (minus 30 to 40% in the second half of the 21st century).[10]

{{By the way...
This summer, if you feel like it, you can read and distribute the 
excellent booklet "Just Once Making Waves - A Critical Account of the 
Earth Uprisings" written by three members or former members of the 
StopMicro collective (including two founding members).
Unlike other texts, it recounts from the inside the takeover by the 
Earth Planners under the pretext of "supporting a struggle" for the 
organization of the March 30, 2025 demonstration near Grenoble (see CA 
350). Falsely presented by the Aménageurs as a co-organization AT THE 
REQUEST of StopMicro (even though they came to belly dance with them 
several times to fool them), the brochure aims to "... testify to our 
experience and take the time to formulate a fundamental critique of the 
Earth Uprisings because we believe that the methods of this 
organization, currently hegemonic in the French activist/ecological 
landscape, are in many ways harmful to the struggles and that they are 
rarely criticized... More broadly, it is a critique of the strategy of 
the Uprisings, particularly its avant-garde dimension, that we engage in 
in this text." Text available on various sites or from the authors;

Read "The Confiscated World: Essay on the Capitalism of Finitude 
(16th-21st Century)" by A. Orain (Flammarion). The historian 
convincingly analyzes the current transformation of global capitalism 
into a world that has become finite again, and whose limited wealth must 
be appropriated as quickly and brutally as possible (privatization of 
the seas, eviction of liberal market mechanisms, creation of imperial 
trading zones, violent coercion, return of private firms with state-like 
attributes over large physical or virtual spaces, etc.).

As nothing is simple on this issue, where theories and semantic battles 
rage (capitalism of finitude, techno-feudalism, cannibalistic 
capitalism, etc.), reading the booklet "Power and Decline: The Fragile 
Trumpian Synthesis" by Temps Critiques contributes to the analysis of 
capitalism reinvigorated by AI and ketamine;

Support Éditions de la Lenteur (publishing quality texts with an 
anti-industrial perspective), which is experiencing financial 
difficulties after 20 years of operation. Donations should be sent to 
"Friends of Slowness" c/o Fanny Monsonis, Le Bourg, 43300 Pébrac.

Read issue 10 (and others) of "Nunatak - a magazine of mountain history, 
cultures, and struggles." It covers, among other things, the Saint Alban 
psychiatric hospital and François Tosquelles, a season of guiding on an 
Icelandic glacier, botany, sex, and sexism, and unearths a fierce 
critique of mountaineering ideology published in 1980... Contact.

Freux and Eugene the Jeep

Notes
[1]Caussade Lake. "We won't do anything the prefect asks us to do." 
Farmers ready to confront the prefecture. Céline Serrano and Thibault 
Grouhel. France 3 Nouvelle Aquitaine. 21/21/2024

[2]Caussade Dam: the State about to give in to farmers. Ph. Baqué. 
Reporterre. 03/03/2025

[3]The Rural Coordination of Lot-et-Garonne defends the Sivens dam 
project. France 3 Nouvelle Aquitaine. Serge Bousquet-Cassagne: "Lake 
Sivens must be completed." Pays sud. 10/30/2014

[4]Rémi Fraisse: 10 years already. France condemned. France Nature 
Environnement. 02/28/2025

[5]Dismissal of Luc Rémont: Short circuit between the State and the CEO 
of EDF. Sébastien Bernard. The Lawyers' Club. 04/02/2025

[6]Heatwave: Faced with high temperatures in the Rhône, nuclear 
production risks declining in Bugey. According to Reuters. L'Usine 
Nouvelle. 06/20/2025.

[7]Russia, a uranium hub. Report. Greenpeace. March 2023

[8]"When it arrived, it was bliss": Will Rhône water transported by the 
Aqua Domitia network save the Pyrénées-Orientales from drought? France 
Info. 01/05/2024

[9]A controversial water transfer from the Rhône to Catalonia. Michel 
Drain. APHG Aix-Marseille. April 2006

[10]The Rhône could lose a third of its flow by 2055. Reporterre. 06/03/2023

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4512
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en