Paul from Paris

Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, a few weeks short of age 101.

I admire Lévi-Strauss because he led a transatlantic life. He did anthropologic field work and teaching in Brazil, and subsequently taught in the United States.

I also admire Lévi-Strauss because he was a superb writer.

His most well-known and most accessible work is Tristes Tropiques. English translations usually keep the French title, which literally means “sad tropics”; one English edition entitled it “World on the Wane”, which captured the work’s spirit or feeling.

Tristes Tropiques is accessible because it need not be read cover-to-cover. The casual reader will find selected chapters worthwhile, or can put the book down, then resume it later. It’s also accessible because its prose is beautiful to read, although its structure and the ideas Lévi-Strauss expresses are intricate and complex. For those who are short on time or attention span, I’d recommend the first three chapters, which have enough content to inspire a full and stimulating college or executive education class.

I’ve read and recommend another book by Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. The book’s title is usually translated in English as “The Savage Mind”, but the French is a pun: it also means “The Wild Pansy”. To drive the point home, French editions show the flower on the book cover. It’s a typically French work, heavy on theory, in this case structuralism.

Levi-Strauss’ death has been widely reported in France. He was arguably the last well-known French intellectual. There are others, especially in biology or physics, who are prominent but not familiar to the reading public.

Ulva armoricana, referred to colloquially in French as algues vertes and in English as sea lettuce, proliferates along the Brittany coast.

Fertilizer runoff and animal waste from intensive agriculture cause the proliferation.

Its effects include large amounts of plant matter that wash ashore. When the plants decay, they can generate toxic fumes that may have caused the death of animals and a worker.

In an interview with French daily Libération, the French junior minister for ecology, Chantal Jouanno claimed to seek transparency about adverse health effects for people and animals, and hopes that a study will lead to an action plan.

What sort of action does Jouanno envisage? Picking up more sea lettuce, including at sea. The junior minister doesn’t venture an estimate of what collection efforts cost now or are likely to cost in the future.

What about reducing the effluents responsible for the problem? Don’t expect much, replies in essence Jouanno. At least not for two years. What’s special about two years? Nothing, so far as the environment is concerned. Everything, where politics are concerned: French presidential elections will occur in 2012.

To my eyes, sea lettuce is a classic example of a failure to address a problem. Indeed, sea lettuce is a problem, recognized as such; there are no defenders of sea lettuce. There are, however, defenders of intensive agriculture, that has made Brittany an agri-business powerhouse. Some of the costs of this achievement have been socialized and passed on to commons: rivers and sea coast, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. So long as the official French response ignores costs and benefits, and focuses on harvesting-at-sea, I have trouble giving credence to bolder French schemes on issues like global warming.

What the French call green algae, more exactly Ulva armoricana, commonly referred to as sea lettuce, was fingered last month as the probable cause of death of horse on a beach in Brittany.

Now sea lettuce is suspected as the possible cause of death of a person.

On June 22, a 48-year old truck driver transported several loads of sea lettuce to the Lantic area dump, more precisely to a compost site.

After shuttling between the seashore and the dump, on his third visit to the dump, something happened.

The driver was later found dead, next to his truck. At the time, the death was attributed to heart failure.

Voices have been growing in number and in volume to look into the cause of the driver's heart failure, particularly whether it was attributable to the noxious fumes that decaying sea lettuce produce.

The proliferation of sea lettuce results from identified activity, particularly intensive agriculture and livestock. Unlike global warming, a change in human behavior would influence the proliferation, probably halting or reversing it. Change would, of course, entail costs (just as sea lettuce does). To date, no one openly discusses what these costs might be and whether they should be imposed.

Veterinarian Vincent Petit was riding his horse on the beach on July 28 when the animal fell ill and suddenly died; Petit has to be carried away from the scene.

The culprit was quickly identified: green algae, more exactly Ulva armoricana, commonly referred to as sea lettuce. It’s common in Brittany. The photo below shows the beach at Saint-MIchel-en-Grève, where the death occurred; the numbers indicate where samples were subsequently taken for analysis.

What’s more intriguing are the origins of the sea plants. They’re indigenous to the area. But their proliferation isn’t natural; it results from human activity.

Other areas of France are sunnier or more populous, but Brittany is an agricultural powerhouse. It’s home to 60% of French pig farms, 45% of French poultry farms, and 30% of French dairy farms. The regions is the leading producer in France of cabbage, artichokes, green beans, spinach, and potatoes; Brittany is also the runner-up producer in France of peas and tomatoes. With its Atlantic coastline, Brittany is the leading French region for fish and seafood capture.

This bounty comes at an environmental price. Extensive fertilizer use boosts nitrate levels in the water, to which livestock add impressive quantities of waste. This soup flows from streams and rivers to the sea, where it becomes a nutritious brew for sea lettuce. This plant thrives, but as it proliferates it takes up oxygen and pushes out other, slower-growing plants. When the tides sweep the sea lettuce to shore, sunny weather accelerates decomposition and production of dangerous gases.

Here’s the problem, and the paradox: the problem has a human origin, and human action could stop it. Fertilizer use could be curtailed, and animal waste disposed of otherwise than by discharge into waterways. Is there an economic incentive for doing so? Today, there is not. Is there the political will to require behavioral change? Certainly not. Environmental protection is not about aspirational efforts to “save the planet”; it requires tradeoffs and exacts real costs. People in France are prepared to make neither, whether as consumers or as voters. My bet is that sea lettuce will enjoy a good future in Brittany.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall passed away last month, at home in Santa Fe.

I’m grateful to Hall for The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, and The Dance of Life. (Hall wrote other books, but these are the ones I know.) And I’m indebted to Hall for expressing novel ideas clearly, and for using evidence from everyday life.

As a modest gesture in memory of Edward T. Hall, this post aims to spread an observation about time and life in France: what sets the rhythm or beat of French life today is the school calendar.

I think that others have made this observation before me (and I’d be happy to cite them if they’d send me references). Original or not, here are the points that I’d like to make about the pace of French life:

• The year really begins with the rentrée, the “re-entry” period when the school year begins. In terms of how people think and act, this means something. It certainly means more than the start of the calendar year or a religious calendar (with the possible exception of rosh hashanah, the Jewish new year, which falls soon after the French rentrée). It’s also an odd inversion of the agricultural year: the beginning coincides with fall harvests, not plantings.
• The rentrée is meaningful for all families with school-age children. But it’s extended to basically all of society. It’s when publishers release new titles. It’s a time when people make resolutions (to lose weight, to join a gym, to subscribe to a magazine), when business and government make plans. It’s part clean slate, part new beginning, part the building of a new level or the writing of a new chapter.
• The school year lasts about ten months, just a bit longer than a human pregnancy. This makes necessary a summer recess (in July and August) and a tradition of summer vacation: without a recess, there couldn’t be a rentrée and a new beginning.