Green algae in “Le Monde”, the slow awareness of an ecological disaster

TAnything green is not environmentally friendly. Take these seaweeds, all full of reassuring chlorophyll, which cover certain foreshores or lakeshores almost every summer. Any Breton or inhabitant of the shores where they proliferate knows well the environmental and health scourge they represent. These drippings, the color of despair, smear shores and coves, invade beaches, boots and nostrils.

Green algae are the central characters and the eponymous evil heroines of Pierre Jolivet’s film, which will be released in theaters on July 12, but whose previews are already filling up in the major Armorican cities. The screenplay is inspired by a successful comic strip by Inès Léraud and Pierre Van Hove, Green algae. The forbidden story, published in 2019 (Delcourt). It tells the adventures of a journalist who investigates those responsible for this disaster.

Those of World first groped on the subject. In their defense, “the class of algae is a whole world”, as written on February 27, 1954 Claude-Georges Bossière. “The eighteen thousand species that it groups present very great differences in size, shape, color”, writes the scientific journalist who immerses his reader in this infinite marine world. He mentions in his description “unicellular freshwater green algae whose cells have an oval shape of about one hundredth of a millimeter along the longest dimension”. It describes its unsuspected potential and richness.

For another twenty years, the articles will above all praise the goodness of algae, good luck for man and the planet. Their nutrient absorption properties such as nitrogen are emphasized. This plant can both wash the environment and feed man. Are we not qualifying certain green algae, in this case ulvae, as “sea lettuce” ?

Focus on modern agriculture

But, on June 22, 1974, Jean Videau wondered. The journalist tells how the sea was able to recover from the oil spill from the Torrey Canyon, in the spring of 1967. But he sees another threat emerging, otherwise insidious and still unexplained, “the discharge for several seasons at the bottom of the bays of a green tide of small algae, the ulva, which accumulate on the beaches and rot by spreading miasma that the scents of the sea can no longer conceal”. “Green Tide”,expression appears and will soon flourish. Faced with this phenomenon, which we guess is of anthropogenic origin, in Hillion, in the Côtes-d’Armor, an association for the protection of nature has even been created, specifies the author. This is the beginning of an endless fight.