If you ever meet Laure Waridel, BA’96, for coffee, make sure you choose a cafe that sells fair-trade coffee and tea. For Waridel, the cofounder of Équiterre and the author of Acheter, c’est voter (Buying Means Voting) and L’Envers de l’assiette (Underneath the Dinner Plate), every coffee bean and tea bag has symbolic and economic impacts on the environment, equity and social justice.
“Humanity has done great damage, entire species have disappeared, we won’t erase all our [greenhouse gas] emissions, and we’ve let globalization turn greed into a system. But I think we could work miracles if we channelled all [our] knowledge into something positive,” says the sociologist, an associate professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s Institut des sciences de l’environnement.
Waridel made a name for herself very early on in Quebec’s environmental movement. She was 20 and in her first year of sociology studies at McGill when she joined a group of students inspired by the global movement ASEED (Action for solidarity, equity, environment and development), in 1993.
Five years later, the group founded a local chapter of ASEED, renaming it Équiterre, which went on to become a hugely influential organization around environmental issues in Quebec.
“I loved [our] approach,” recalls Waridel, who was Équiterre’s spokesperson until 2006. “You have to denounce, yes, but you also have to take action and propose solutions.”
Now 52, Waridel has never been more concerned about social justice and the environment.
“Scientists have known about the problem for a long time. They have been sounding the alarm bell since 1972. All the IPCC’s predictions are coming true, and even sooner than expected.
Laure Waridel
Still, even with rising levels of populism and climate skepticism and the associated challenges posed by the return of Donald Trump to the White House in the U.S., she believes common sense can make a comeback.
After all, she recalls, one of the instigators of the political fight against climate change was a Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who helped bring about the 1997 Montreal Protocol on the Ozone Layer and the 1991 Canada-U.S. Air Quality Agreement.
“These are two convincing examples of politicians who listened to scientists and created the necessary rules. So, yes, change is possible when there is an understanding of the issues at stake and the political willpower to act.”
Waridel attended her first conference on climate change back in 1990 and she has little patience for those who pronounce themselves to be skeptical about the threats the world is facing.
“Scientists have known about the problem for a long time. They have been sounding the alarm bell since 1972. All the IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] predictions are coming true, and even sooner than expected. In some respects, the IPCC’s warnings have even been a little conservative.”
An environmentalist at a young age
Waridel’s environmental convictions began in high school. That’s when she got involved with Club 2/3, a non-profit organization that was intended to be Quebec’s meeting place for young people committed to progressive causes.
Later, at Cégep de Sainte-Thérèse, she was active in both the student association, serving as president, and in the environmental movement, which managed to put in place the school’s first recycling program.
Waridel says she is a pure product of Quebec’s environmental education movement, the Association québécoise pour la promotion de l’éducation relative à l’environnement (ErE), an association that brings together educators, education specialists and trade unionists. “Quebecers have played a pioneering role in the sector since the late 1970s.”
Waridel is the daughter of Swiss farmers who immigrated to Quebec shortly after she was born. She grew up on a 30-cow farm in the shadow of Mont Saint-Grégoire, in the Montérégie region. “We were not a rich family; my mother sewed our clothes and grew a vegetable garden.”
Her first contact with school was difficult because of severe learning difficulties that affected her for many years. “I had very little exposure to Quebec society before I went to school. Then, a big yellow bus suddenly pulled up and I didn’t understand what was going on, and I was dyslexic.”
She was able to regain her self-confidence thanks to the solid support of educational and speech therapists. She says she still reads very slowly today.
She decided to attend McGill because she aimed to work in international development and wanted to improve her English. “I went to England for eight months to learn the language before I started university, but I still had trouble reading English textbooks.”
At McGill, she met several figures who would be pivotal in her career, including environmental sociologist Roger Krohn. “I still have a plant that was one of his cuttings. I remember crying in his classes because of the magnitude of the human environmental footprint and its destructive nature, but also because he made me understand the enormous complexity of the processes.”
With the support of Thom Meredith, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Geography, she carried out an independent research project on fair trade in a coffee-growing community in Oaxaca, Mexico.
That experience would pave the way for Waridel to capture the attention of Quebec environmentalists, and then the wider public. Her student essay, which she turned into a 71-page book entitled Cause Café, provided the framework for Équiterre’s first major activities.
“Thanks to a $20,000 grant from Oxfam, we turned it into a comic book, a play, and a student kit, and that led to invitations from research groups and university conferences and numerous media interviews. Oxfam really got its money’s worth.”
Waridel’s enterprising side has been a constant throughout her career—notably, in her ability to showcase her work in various ways.
Her bestseller, Acheter c’est voter (Buying is Voting), became the name of her first radio show on Radio-Canada, which gave her a larger public profile. Later, her doctoral thesis in anthropology and sociology of development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva became the basis for another book, La transition, c’est maintenant (The Time for Transition Is Now).
Cultivating her garden
Waridel currently writes a weekly column for the Journal de Montréal and sits on the boards of McGill’s Bieler School of the Environment and the organization Mères au Front. That movement, which she co-founded with filmmaker Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, brings mothers and grandmothers together to promote environmental protection and to put pressure on governments to make the kinds of policy decisions that will benefit future generations.
At the same time, she is embarking on a more personal project, Le Jardin des possibles. She and her husband, Montreal lawyer Bruce W. Johnston, BA’88, BCL’92, LLB’92, have purchased a vast 100-hectare tract of land adjacent to their Frelighsburg home with the goal of creating an activity centre for neurodivergent people.
The idea stemmed from the problems experienced by her own 20-year-old daughter, Alphée, who suffers from a rare genetic disease, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, which causes intellectual and physical impairments.
“State support stops at age 21, which makes no sense. It often spells catastrophe for families, who then must turn to charities or community organizations for support,” says Waridel.
The aim of the couple is to encourage contact and social integration through activities such as animal care, vegetable gardening and food processing. What makes Le Jardin des possibles so special is that it will cater to all types of neurodivergent people (with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, neurocognitive deficits and more), rather than just one, which is generally the case elsewhere.
“It may sound very utopian, but we believe it’s possible,” says Waridel. “We’ll just see if it’s feasible.”
