INTERVIEW
How can we wake up to the urgency of consuming, producing and exploiting nature differently? First by informing: in seven months, humanity has consumed all that Earth can produce in one year. Then, setting the example: this is the daily struggle of skipper Yvan Bourgnon, president of the SeaCleaners association, which works for the preservation of the oceans.
"Myself, I was not a perfect ecologist"
"Every citizen can have a hummingbird action", insists the French-Swiss navigator at the microphone of Europe 1. "We can really act on our consumption, choose to evolve and change, myself, I was not a perfect ecologist a few years ago, I knew how to adapt, I knew how to change, "he says.
>> READ ALSO - "If the whole of humanity lived like a French, we would need the equivalent of 2.7 planets to satiate our consumption"
And it is according to him of "the only true beautiful solution" today. "Unfortunately," he breathes. Because Yvan Bourgnon is not one of those who expect an imminent political change. "Our ecology is managed within a government which, inevitably, depends on the economy.It is completely aberrant", denounces this fighter of marine waste. "As long as we do not have a very clear institution that will manage the ecology independently of the government, we will not be able to do anything concrete".
More than men, it is especially the institutions and their operation that he points out: "The problem is that with our current political system, we are not able to make decisions at ten, twenty or forty years, because that's what it should do, "still the skipper, who has just landed in Morocco after having beaten with his son the record of distance traveled in 24 hours aboard a sports catamaran .
In emerging countries, "it's worse than anything"
The browser is not here on vacation. What he sees there does not help him to relax: "It's worse than anything, we realize that in these emerging countries, which have more and more access to plastic, for example, the consumption explodes literally and it will be even worse in many other African countries in the next ten, fifteen years, "he fears.
In the meantime, he continues to develop his Manta project, these large offshore vessels capable of collecting plastic waste on the surface of the oceans. With 300 of them, "we can hope to eradicate 30% of the pollution that happens every year in the oceans," he says. A very encouraging figure for a hummingbird.