Few individuals know the ocean higher than Guillaume Picard. He grew up on a ship moored within the port of Hyères in southern France after his mother and father left Nineteen Sixties Paris. His first job was on a crusing boat. Then he spent 30 years within the service provider navy earlier than changing into a industrial captain, ferrying vacationers and containers throughout the Mediterranean for greater than 20 years.
Now aged 65, his gray hair in a ponytail, it’s with no small be aware of unhappiness that he says, more and more, it’s the land that calls him. “To be fully trustworthy, I wish to go to sea much less and fewer,” he says. “I’m going mountain climbing quite a bit within the mountains with my spouse, and we’ve discovered an setting that’s far more preserved. The mountains are lovely wherever you go.”
Picard’s beloved sea is being destroyed, he believes, by one thing uncomfortably near residence: cruise ships. Fifteen years in the past they have been a uncommon sight in Marseille. Now, France’s second metropolis is one in all Europe’s busiest cruise ports. Final yr, 2.5 million passengers stopped off, in response to the port authority, 1,000,000 greater than the yr earlier than.
Confronted with this new actuality, Picard has determined to change into the ocean’s protector, swapping his captain’s whites for the all-black of a non-violent protester. His new crew is a rising group of activists often called Cease Croisières, or Cease Cruises. “Sooner or later we can have to choose for our youngsters, for our grandchildren,” he says. “Can we proceed to enlarge and extra energy-consuming ships with increasingly more individuals on board? Are we actually going to have the ability to proceed to dwell on this Earth like this?”
The group is a part of a rising protest motion in opposition to the cruise ship trade and overtourism throughout Europe’s cities extra broadly. All through August, Extinction Rebel stopped cruise ships coming into ports within the Netherlands, and earlier within the yr vacationers have been focused with water pistols in Barcelona by campaigners demanding, amongst different issues, the closure of cruise ship terminals.
Some cities are implementing measures to restrict the cruise trade’s exercise, comparable to banning the ships from metropolis centres, decreasing the quantity that may go to and introducing a tax on passengers. However in Marseille the state of affairs appears tougher to alter.
Two years in the past, town’s mayor, socialist Benoît Payan, launched a petition calling for limits on the variety of cruise ships allowed to reach throughout instances of peak air pollution, declaring: “Marseille is suffocating.” It attracted greater than 50,000 signatures, however little additional motion. As a substitute, plans are going forward for a brand new cruise terminal to open in 2026 within the Port of Marseille, which is managed by President Macron’s authorities in Paris.
“We’re not in any respect choice makers in Marseille, not like different ports the place there are extra restrictions for native communities,” says Sébastien Barles, deputy mayor for the setting. “I feel nobody in Marseille, apart from some retailers, can say cruises convey them some huge cash.”
Cease Croisières first attracted consideration in 2020 when its members – the core of whom now quantity between 50 and 100, says Picard, together with paramedics, attorneys and ecologists – unfurled a banner over a bridge within the northern neighbourhood of L’Estaque, saying: “In Marseille, respiration kills.” The group made the information once more in 2022 when it carried out its first kayak stunt, holding up the Surprise of the Seas, then the world’s largest cruise liner. Then final month the group kayaked out into the mouth of the port of Marseille and delayed three cruise liners for a number of hours earlier than being arrested. After each the group’s kayak stunts, its activists have been arrested after which launched.
Picard, who has two daughters and grandchildren, has change into a type of father determine to the group. “I’m extraordinarily touched by the dedication of all these younger individuals I see at Cease Croisières,” he says. “They may all be my kids, virtually. And I discover them extraordinarily motivated, nicely organised, and conscious of the world by which we dwell.”
For Picard, the swap from boat captain to protester has been a protracted journey of self-education. When he began engaged on ships he knew they have been “machines that pollute quite a bit”, however little greater than that, he says. He turned more and more conscious of the affect of parking such “massive monsters” in the midst of a metropolis, and when his first grandchild was born he determined he wanted to behave. He says some former colleagues now resent him, whereas others sympathise with out daring to talk out. The captain of one of many liners the activists stopped final month was an previous colleague who left him a voice message through the protest. “I haven’t listened to it,” he says.
He has regrets about his former profession as a industrial sailor, however is making an attempt to share his data of the maritime world with as many individuals as attainable within the hope that it may be helpful. “I actually really feel responsible,” he says. “It’s guilt for having participated within the destruction of life. However perhaps that’s the engine that makes me an activist now.” There may be additionally one thing stronger than guilt driving his actions. “I even have an enormous feeling of anger in opposition to the transport corporations.”
Regardless of his disillusionment with the present state of play, he has not misplaced hope of rediscovering his love of the ocean. “For the second it’s a bit prefer it’s on standby, the ocean. With Cease Croisières I work together with it another way.”
Supply hyperlink
