rjzimmerman:

Fun story, about how the local mayors in parts of France are taking matters into their own hands and banning certain pesticides, regardless of the decisions made by the EU or France. As Tip O’Neil once said, all politics is local.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

If France is going through an ecological awakening, its spiritual center may be here in Langouët, a quiet village in Brittany, where the environmentalist mayor has become a folk hero to fellow small-town officials all over the country.

Dozens of mayors are following the example of Langouët’s leader, Daniel Cueff, even though the French state has rapped him on the knuckles, dragged him into court and told him that he, the shepherd over a mere 600 souls, had no right to ban pesticides by ordinance from his village.

The other French mayors, from the Alps to the Atlantic, don’t seem to care and have passed their own restrictions in as many as 40 small towns.

Mr. Cueff, a steely eyed 64-year-old veteran of the environmental wars who earned his chops four decades ago in fighting a nuclear reactor, is used to being considered an outlier. Not this time.

“Isn’t the mayor of a village called on to fill in for the state’s deficiencies?” he asked in an interview in his wood-paneled office — powered by solar energy, like the other municipal buildings.

After a scorching summer in which the French were frightened by successive record heat waves, brutally underscoring the reality of climate change, there is a premium on politicians who are seen to act. The Greens made a strong showing in last spring’s European Parliament elections, environmentalists are on the rise and establishment politicians are genuflecting.

The lesson has not been lost on President Emmanuel Macron, who recently declared, “I’ve changed,” in matters ecological.

“We rural mayors are faced with a real decline in our environment,” he said. “The trees are dying. The insect population is in free-fall. You look around the hillsides here, there are huge brown patches. We’ve had three droughts in a row. Climate change is taking place before our eyes.”