We do not see ourselves as ‘talents for a sustainable planet’.
We do not regard ecological and social devastation as a ‘problem’ or a ‘challenge’ to which we must find solutions as engineers.
We do not think that ‘all kinds of agriculture’ are needed. Rather, we see that agribusiness is waging a war against living beings and against farmers all over the world.
We do not regard science and technology as neutral and apolitical. We think that technological innovation and start-ups will save nothing but capitalism. We believe neither in sustainable development nor in green growth. Nor in the ‘ecological transition’, a phrase that implies that society can become sustainable without getting rid of the dominant social order.
Every year AgroParisTech trains hundreds of students to work for industry in various ways: manipulating the systems of multinationals’ laboratories that reinforce the enslavement of farmers, designing ready meals and then chemotherapies to treat the diseases they cause, inventing ‘clear conscience’ labels so that managers can believe themselves heroic because they eat better than others, and developing so-called ‘green’ energies that make it possible to accelerate the digitalisation of society, thereby polluting and exploiting the other side of the world.
Drawing up Social and Environmental Responsibility reports, meanwhile, is all the more time-consuming, and it is madness, because the crimes they conceal are scandalous. (…)
We are speaking to those who doubt, whether that doubt is ephemeral or fleeting.
To you who accepted a job because ‘you need a first experience’, to you whose loved ones work to perpetuate the system and who feel the weight of their gaze on you, on your career choices, to you who sit in an office and look out of the window dreaming of space and freedom.
To you who take the TGV every weekend in search of a well-being you have never found.
To you who feel a growing unease without being able to give it a name, who often find that this world is crazy, who would have liked to do something but did not really know what, or who hoped to change things from the inside but no longer believe it.
We want to tell you that you are not the only one who thinks something is wrong, because something really is wrong. We too have doubted and sometimes still do, but we refuse to serve this system and have decided to look for other paths, to build our own paths.
Yes, we met people who were fighting and we followed them in their struggle. They showed us the other side of the projects we could carry out as engineers.
I think of Cristina and Emmanuelle, who watch concrete being poured over their land because of the Paris-Saclay project. I think of that dry hole, a truly paltry compensation for a pond full of newts.
Or of Nico, who from his tower block watches the working-class gardens of his childhood being razed to build an eco-district.
Here and there we met people who are experimenting with other ways of living, who have the knowledge and skills never to depend on the monopoly of polluting industry. People who know how to inhabit their territory without exhausting it, who actively fight against harmful projects, who practise a popular, decolonial and feminist ecology every day, who find the time to live well and take care of one another.
It is all these encounters that inspired us to imagine our own path.
- For two years I have been living at the ZAD (Zone to Defend) of Notre-Dame des Landes, where I do collective, sustainable farming.
- I am setting up a beekeeping business in the Dauphiné.
- I joined the Soulèvements de la Terre movement to fight against the grabbing of farmland and the spread of concrete across France.
- I went to the mountains, did seasonal work and started drawing.
- I am moving to a collective in the Tarn, on a ‘Terre de Liens’ farm, with four other market gardeners, a wheat grower and baker, and three brewers.
- I am running a campaign against nuclear energy near Bure.
- I am preparing myself to be able to work with my hands.
We consider these ways of living more than necessary, and we know that they will make us stronger and happier.
Are you afraid of stepping aside because it would not look good on your CV? Of distancing yourself from your family and your network, and thereby depriving yourself of the recognition that you deserve a career after AgroParisTech?
But what kind of life do we want? A cynical boss at work? A salary that lets us fly, a thirty-year loan for a house in the suburbs, barely five weeks a year to relax in a cool, alternative holiday village, an electric SUV, a Fairphone and a Biocoop loyalty card, and then… a burn-out at 40?
Let us not waste time, and above all let us not let this energy boiling inside us slip away.
Let us desert before we find ourselves trapped by financial debts.
Let us not wait for our children to ask us for money to go shopping in the metaverse, because we will no longer have time to make them dream of anything else.
Let us not hope to be incapable of doing anything other than a pseudo-reconversion to the same profession, merely repainted green.
Let us not wait for the 12th IPCC report, which will show that states and multinationals have only ever aggravated the problems and which will place its last hopes in popular uprisings.
We can change direction now.
Start training as a farmer-baker, take part in a work camp at a ZAD or elsewhere, get involved with people in need, invest in a self-managed bicycle workshop or take part in a weekend of struggle with the people of Soulèvements de la Terre.
It can start like that.
It is up to us to find ways to change direction.
