On Monday, August 10, a massive influx of jellyfish forced the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France to shut down three of its reactors. As was the case last year, their abnormally high numbers (direct result of global warming and industrial fishing that has eliminated their predators) paralyzed the North Sea water pumping stations that cool the plant, forcing half of the reactors to shut down.
After heat waves and droughts hindered the cooling of power plants to the point of forcing several shutdowns across Europe, including Romania’s only nuclear plant, it’s now jellyfish arriving from the sea that are filling in for the dried-up waterways, once again forcing the sacrosanct “nuclear revival”.
While more and more pseudo-environmentalist technocrats seek to portray nuclear power as the best environmental option, natural disasters and suffering wildlife (according to Le Monde, 6 billion fish, jellyfish, and crustaceans die each year because of French nuclear power) remind us all that nature does not need nuclear power, indeed, that it is completely opposed to it and its extractivist world, even in rivers and seas.
And even for us humans, in this context, we must ask ourselves about the wisdom of our energy dependence on infrastructure that causes devastation and pollution upstream, and downstream enables the electrification of an ever-growing number of tech-trash, particularly data centers. This is all the more true as, over time, ecological disasters increasingly highlight the fragility of this industrial energy production.
We cannot help but recall the incidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear power is “safe” as long as a natural disaster doesn’t reveal new vulnerabilities that hadn’t yet been anticipated. Such as, for example, a massive influx of jellyfish caused by global warming.
The frequency and unpredictability of such disasters can only increase in the coming years as the Earth’s climate is disrupted as never before.
Yet, throughout human history, numerous technical organizations, other than industrial ones, have enabled societies to take fewer risks and achieve greater resilience in their daily lives and their coexistence with nature. Without even having to survey the many non-industrial indigenous peoples across the globe, we need only look back a few centuries in France to see how French craftsmanship and peasantry afforded individuals a far greater degree of technical autonomy than that enjoyed by modern “homo numericus.”
The recent popular mobilization in response to the wildfires in Gironde (and across the globe) should serve as an opportunity for us to support the revival of a militant environmental movement: no longer merely “for the climate” (and the profits of the green-tech industry), but rather “for nature” (and, through it, human freedom)! For defending nature and the possibility of living within it means reconnecting with the potential for truly ecological and resilient practices, through farming, craftsmanship, and breaking free from our energy dependence on the industrial system, and thereby regaining our individual and collective freedom to inhabit this world sustainably.
Because, on the contrary, unless one is an apostle of a messianic AI, the techno-world has nothing left to offer us but pollution, the risk of explosions, or energy shortages for the sake of data centers… Just as the peasants before us, at the beginning of the 20th century, rose up in Ukraine, Mexico, and Spain for Land and Freedom, let’s organize to free ourselves from industrialists and reconnect with nature and a more sustainable way of organizing our technology!
