Laure Noualhat: “Living with less is much better. There is pleasure in sobriety”

Journalist, Author and director of documentaries specializing in environmental issues, Laure Noualhat offers those who try to reduce their carbon footprint to relativize their ecological guilt.

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Former release journalist, engaged in the protection of the environment, Laure Noualhat is also a documentary and director. She shares her experience with humor to lower her carbon footprint and tries to relativize ecological guilt. His latest work, how to stay ecolo without depressive finishing (Tana Editions, 2020), appeared in pocket in October 2021.

Journalist specialized in environmental issues for just twenty years, what does your ecological daily look like?

Before 2013, I lived in Paris, I did not have a car but I often started in reporting for liberation. Today, I live in the countryside, in Joigny, in the Yonne, I have a vehicle that I mutualize, 95% of what is in my fridge is local and I no longer take the plane. My carbon footprint has clearly decreased but I remain imprisoned for life with my little ethical and carbon arrangements. The last one: the meat, of which I have not yet been able to pass me. I do not eat dead animals that I have known alive, privileging extensive and local agriculture. Here, the association for the maintenance of a peasant agriculture [AMAP], we have the cows and the buffalo Galloway under the eyes, the lamb of the producer … it is my nego to me.

Does it avoid you flagging (with your vegetable whip)?

Yes, but in the long run, these personal arrangements are not careable, because all we do, it is necessary to multiply it by nearly 8 billion individuals. The problem with negotiation is that you relativise your efforts: you say, “Why deprive me while it will not change anything globally?” I also used to tell me that, as I Do not have children, my carbon footprint will stop when I die. I have long made jokes by saying that the best green gesture was suicide. But once we understand that any human activity leads to pollution, the idea is to make its personal equation between what we can not give up and what we can transform.

How do not drop?

There is an effort to provide throughout his life, that of accepting that we will not be the person who will change things and that, whatever we do today, even if we were All at 2 tons equivalent co 2 per year, there would still be a warming of more than 2 ° C [by the end of the century, objective set in the Paris Agreement of 2015 . Flagebage because we can not change our consumption modes, it’s a shame, because our company has been organized to use the car, we eat meat … and then it is Paradoxical: The more people act, the more the 2 CO emissions increase. At the global level, they exceeded 400 ppm [“parts per million”, equivalent to the number of molecules polluting over one million air molecules] while twenty years ago, they were 250. The hardest, It’s to live with that, without stopping doing things.

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