Diverse Voices Enter the Movement

Workers and Environmental Justice

The 1970s saw growing awareness that environmental problems affected different populations unequally. Industrial workers, long exposed to toxic substances, began connecting workplace health to environmental concerns. The strike at the Peñarroya lead factory (1972) explicitly linked occupational and environmental health.

The Lip watch factory occupation (1973) became iconic for attempting to unite workers' control with ecological production. Workers proposed manufacturing socially useful products with environmental consideration. Though ultimately unsuccessful, Lip inspired visions of "red-green" alliances between labor and environmental movements.

Immigrant workers faced particular environmental burdens. North African workers in chemical plants suffered disproportionate toxic exposure. Portuguese and Spanish workers lived in bidonvilles (shantytowns) lacking basic sanitation. Their struggles, often overlooked by mainstream environmentalism, raised crucial environmental justice questions.

Women's Movements and Ecology

Women played central roles in environmental activism, though often uncredited in movement histories. The Mouvement pour la Libération des Femmes (MLF) connected body autonomy to environmental health, critiquing pollution's impacts on reproduction and child health.

Rural women organized against pesticide spraying near schools. Urban mothers demanded lead-free gasoline and safer playgrounds. The nascent ecofeminist movement, influenced by thinkers like Françoise d'Eaubonne who coined the term in 1974, theorized connections between patriarchal domination of women and nature.

Women's environmental activism often emerged from daily life experiences—shopping for safe food, caring for children's health, managing household resources. This grounded approach brought practical focus to sometimes abstract ecological debates.

Regional and Cultural Diversity

Environmental movements took distinct forms across France's diverse regions. In Brittany, protests against nuclear plants connected to broader Breton cultural assertion. Activists used Breton language at demonstrations, linking environmental and linguistic preservation.

In Corsica, environmental activism intertwined with autonomist politics. Opposition to toxic waste dumping and coastal development expressed broader resistance to external domination. The Aléria incident (1975), though primarily about wine adulteration, raised environmental dimensions of Corsican self-determination.

Overseas territories experienced particular environmental contradictions. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, chlordecone pesticide poisoning of banana plantations created lasting contamination. In French Polynesia, nuclear testing provoked indigenous resistance that connected environmental and decolonial struggles. These movements challenged metropolitan-centered environmentalism to address colonial dimensions of ecological destruction.