Every year, more than 100 billion items of clothing and accessories are sold around the world: a consumption that has doubled in only 15 years thanks to this toxic system of overproduction and overconsumption. The fashion industry has become one of the most polluting: it produces 20% of the world's wastewater and 10% of the world's carbon emissions, more than all the emissions from international flights and shipping.
The real challenge today is above all to radically transform our production models and our organizations in order to reduce our emissions at the source, because to date there is hardly any company that can claim that its CO2 emissions are decreasing in absolute value. Emissions should decrease by 5% per year for the next 30 years if we want to reach the objective of limiting global warming to +1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era, and yet they continue to increase every year. Between fatalism and solutionism, there is a third way, full of hope, which consists in urgently engaging in a real transition because the solutions and technologies for an admissible sobriety and without regression exist.
During the ecofeminist festival 'Seeding Freedom' held in Berlin on September 4th, and of which La Mèche was a partner, the participants of the writing workshop directed by Hélène Coron did us the honor of sharing with us their texts, written with talent and emotion, on the theme of 'Poetics of the Earth'.
Sapotage is an association composed of 4 young market gardeners - Christopher, Selma, Yasmine and Layla - who are committed to growing healthy vegetables without chemical treatments in Versoix. In search of a larger, more permanent plot of land, the team is facing obstacles. We went to meet them to discuss the place of race and gender issues within the Swiss agricultural landscape.
As an echo to our article on ecofeminism, we would like to share with you a series of 4 podcasts presented by Elisa Gratias, German author, and Emilie Langlade, French journalist. Discover a Franco-German audio journey into the vibrant and gushing heart of ecofeminist literary works. Visions, dreams, utopias and actions are intertwined from emblematic places of women's history in Berlin. Authors and activists are invited to share their experiences in order to shape a possible new world out of the systems of oppression, domination and destruction of women and nature.
Last October, an Extinction Rebellion activist burst into a Paris Fashion Week show with a poster reading "Overconsumption = extinction". The operation denounces the impact of the fashion industry, which produces 8 to 10% of global CO2 emissions per year, on climate change. Despite the dramatic ecological and ethical situation, many of us still buy clothes from the fast fashion industry. Why is it so difficult to give up this consumption habit?
Ecofeminism, a movement of converging struggles, is more than a simple juxtaposition of ecology and feminism. The term has been around for almost 50 years and addresses the structural causes of systems of domination in order to solve the ecological crisis and end gender oppression. This movement, which has seen a resurgence in recent years, aims to offer constructive solutions and is now very much in the news.
Young people are increasingly concerned about climate change and their commitment to the environment is growing. With their future threatened by global warming, more and more young people are speaking out and their movements are flourishing. So, are they the ones who will save our planet?
At a time of vaccination but also of the multiplication of variants throughout the world, this question in the form of a joke implies several levels of reading that question the sustainability of Covid-19 and of our own. Is this coronavirus, which has made the whole planet hold its breath for more than a year, destined to remain in our lives and change the way we function for good?
