“MMr President of the Republic, we need you. “The mayor of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains (Haute-Savoie), Jean-Marc Peillex (various right), made public this Tuesday, September 20 his “plea” addressed to Emmanuel Macron. A long letter in which the city councilor attacks those who maintain “the business of overcrowding” at the risk of natural sites such as Mont-Blanc, in his commune, and calls on the Head of State to act to regulate the mass tourism.
In 2020, the mayor had already obtained from the president a decree for the protection of natural habitats to protect the highest peak in Europe, limiting the number of mountaineers who can start the ascent. If the problem of overcrowding has been known for a long time for large cities like Venice, it is affecting more and more French sites: Étretat, the Verdon or Ardèche gorges, Corsica, the creeks of Marseille… These last have, this summer , decided to impose a quota via a compulsory reservation. Radical tools that Jean-Marc Peillex wants to see generalized to protect nature from the floods of tourists. He explains to the Point.
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Point : You sent this Sunday a “plea” to Emmanuel Macron, calling on him to help you save natural spaces. What do you actually expect from him?
Jean-Marc Peillex: The state must play its role. Overcrowded sites and excessive demonstrations must be supervised. Today, in the name of freedom, it is no limit. The State must set the framework, then the prefect and the local elected officials must sit around a table to determine, problem by problem, the limits to be imposed. It’s good to see the overcrowding, but now we have to act!
In 2020, you convinced the president to issue an order protecting the summit of Mont-Blanc. It was not enough ?
This decree, which requires having a reservation at the refuge to begin the ascent, and therefore sets the limit of the capacity of the refuge, has solved the problem of overcrowding. It’s common sense. We now have 200 people per day on average over the season. But at the same time, we still have 50,000 to 100,000 daily tourists arriving in the Chamonix valley. And the operator of the Aiguille du Midi lifts is delighted to have done even better than in 2019… The mountain is a space of freedom, but to what extent?
In your letter, you also scratch the Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc…
Putting 30,000 people in a natural space in the mountains like that is madness! They added a race this year, didn’t adapt the event at all to the drought, bring people further and further away… Not to mention the deplorable carbon footprint. Nature is not business.
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Should the regulation you are calling for go through quotas, as experienced by the Calanques National Park in Marseille this summer?
We must become reasonable, and not welcome more people than we can absorb. We are not necessarily going to reduce the number, but spread it out. It is the peaks in attendance and the concentration on the season that are destructive. But the answer must be global. We also need to raise awareness: people will pet marmots or foxes; they disturb wildlife because they don’t know the codes.
Will it be necessary to financially support tourism professionals for this transition?
The big players took the money, we are not going to help those who made profits on the back of nature. They do business on a daily basis, they don’t care what will happen in fifteen years, they will go elsewhere. The chosen ones must dare. It’s when you don’t regulate that it costs money. At the Aiguille du Midi, the day when the mountain will be so damaged that the anchorages will no longer hold, then there will be no one left at all…