standing by to put a price tag on the non-ravaged areas for the benefit of tourists and the wealthy.
The Airport
Big businessmen from Brittany announced the reasons for ‘displacing’ the Nantes airport in the summer of 2014, at a moment when the construction at Notre-Dame seemed more and more imminent.
Today, it is airplanes that are the vectors of economic development … In today’s economy, we can’t let ourselves slow down. We must always take the lead. I’m not asking for lines that go to the four corners of the earth, but which at least open the doors to all of Europe and connect us easily with all the big hubs.
– Louis Le Duff, founder of Le Duff group
(Ouest-France, April 3, 2014)
We are certain of territorial development and we are working for our children and grandchildren. We need this supra-regional equipment that will allow us to take roundtrips to all the big European cities for our business affairs.
– Patrick Gruau, director of Gruau group
(Ouest-France, April 4, 2014)
So, clearly there are people in this world who are awaiting impatiently a new airport that would respond to their ‘need’ to regularly traverse the continent both ways in a single day. The project has the support of local leaders, on the left as well as the right, who share the same vision of progress, as grey and unbreathable as it may be for lowly mortals. The ‘citizen’s association’, ‘Wings for the West’, in charge of propaganda for the ‘yes’, has its offices in the regional chamber of commerce and industry. At its head reigns an opulent automobile dealership and a band of real estate developers avid to construct their glass and steel towers on the lots close to the old Nantes Atlantique airport, finally opened up to urbanization. The future Airport of the Greater West, a crossroads of the traffic between Saint-Nazaire, Nantes and Rennes, will offer an additional new captive territory favourable to the construction of future zones of ‘competitive’ activity.
These entrepreneurs, certain of their rights, have seen the project stumble in the past few years. But there are others for whom it has proved a trampoline: Mr Notebaert, in charge of the mission to the Ministry of Transportation in 2000 at the time when the project was revived, became director of the Vinci group, the company tasked with building the airport through their affiliated company, AGO, and a multinational at the head of the worldwide market in public construction works. Or Mr Hagelsteen, former prefect of Loire-Atlantique, and then Pays de la Loire from 2007 to 2009, who, after having gotten through the Declaration of Public Utility for the airport, found himself occupying the position, the following year, of counsellor to the President of … Vinci motorways.
By undertaking the construction with the financial aid of local collectivities, within the framework of what is called a ‘public–private partnership’, Vinci was also awarded the exclusive concession and use benefits, first of the Nantes Atlantique airport, and then of its presumed successor at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, for the next fifty years. Not without forgetting to add a clause requiring payment of a sum equivalent to the total of the projected benefits in the instance of the abandonment of the project.
This whole little world, in the AGO offices or in the business centre of the Brittany Tower, is counting on maximizing the returns on its investments. To this end, it can count on the active help of its sponsoring partners, the state and the region, who have not been stingy in finding ways to justify the pertinence of the ‘displacement’ of the airport, in the face of growing opposition. Even if it meant falsifying documents, they had to show that the existing infrastructure was too small and too close to a nature reserve, even though the opinion of their own technical services – kept secret at the time – showed the displacement to be much more prejudicial to the nature reserve. They had to convince people of the urgency to destroy, beneath the tarmac, lands placed at the confluence of two watersheds considered a veritable water-tower for the region. The ultimate argument, at a moment of crisis, is always that of jobs: the public utility of any project can be defended so long as it employs a few dozen interim workers.
Nevertheless, it becomes more difficult to defend the need to augment airport traffic when it becomes clearer each day that human activity in the industrial era and its release of CO2 are irremediably devastating the planet. But since it is always possible to put a good face on things in the era of ‘durable development’, the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes has thus become a project of ‘High Environmental Quality’, with trees to adorn the parking lots, gardens to cover over the smell of kerosene, and terrains purchased in the surrounding areas to compensate for the losses and recreate the swamps and the hedges elsewhere.
The conception of the airport targets an optimal integration with the landscape by proposing an airport built in a single floor, very horizontal and covered with a ‘vegetalized’ (plant-covered) roof. Thus, at a human height, the terminal will appear like a section of the bocage that rises up.
– Presentation of airport project on AGO-Vinci website
The prose wielded by the propagandists of concrete is caught in its own trap, for the bocage has, in fact, risen up. The project has become the very symbol of the harmful and imposed character of market development of the territory – and soon its Achilles’ heel.
The TAV
The Susa Valley has always constituted a privileged route for crossing the Alps, as testifies the Domitienne Way used at the time by the Romans to reach Gaul. A border and a passageway, the valley has always enjoyed this double role, making of its confines not a cul-desac, but a space of exchanges. This was true at the time when distances counted and the borders of motorways were places full of life. The concept of transportation having been modified, the valley was not the same. The hills lost their importance to the Fréjus Tunnel built in the 1980s and from which emerged a bewildering motorway which, from the galleries to the viaduct, absolutely negates the mountainous geography. Truck engines are heard in it at all hours, leaving the two national motorways that snake their way through the bottom of the valley a little freer. The idea of adding a TAV line to all of that, a supplementary projection from the embankment, not surprisingly, gave rise to opposition from the outset.
In the 1990s, the Susa Valley became for Europe a link in the chain of ‘Strategic Corridor Number 5’. This corridor was supposed to link Lisbon to Kiev at great speed, passing through Lyon and Turin. Only one problem: between the two cities can be found the highest mountain range in the continent. No matter, the tunnel entries were pierced: five on the French side of 86 cumulative kilometres, three in Italy of 68 kilometres, and the longest, along the border section, of 57 kilometres. Finally, of the 221 kilometres separating the two cities, 154 would be underground. No matter, either, that a TGV already runs through the valley, on a track that somewhat limits its speed, it is true. And no matter, either, that the trains travelling today between Turin and Lyon are half empty.
The construction work began with opening up descent tunnels perpendicular to the principal gallery, which would serve as access ways from that point on. In France, three of these digs have already been completed, but in Italy, the unique work zone has hardly advanced at all. It is located at the Maddalena, beneath the little village of Chiomonte, in the upper Susa Valley, near an important archaeological site. In an area that has been cleared of trees and leveled, behind imposing barbed-wire fences, an immense militarized zone surrounds the hole, from which thick spouts of dust escape depending on the mountain winds, that climb or descend the valley following the sun’s path. It’s a dust that causes coughing and teeth-gritting when you are aware that the mountains contain asbestos and uranium. The valley is even the principal source of uranium in Italy, and the mines lie a few hundred yards from the construction site in Maddalena. Geiger counters go off crazily at the site and at football games on the Gaglione terrain, made out of fill taken from the mountain – fill, by the
