Icon of the Week: Camille Etienne
by Prune Fargetton | February 2, 2025
Here’s an anecdote that will delight Isis readers, I thought to myself, a story that could almost single-handedly qualify her for our Icon of The Week: Camille Étienne was accused of hacking Björk’s Instagram account to post a video denouncing the insufficient protection of marine areas (in fact, Björk herself had decided to collaborate on this issue). But beware, this is a carefully woven net, a bait targeting your slightly pretentious taste for Icelandic electronica. For Björk’s Instagram is but a tiny footnote compared to all the reasons to write about Camille Étienne.
Étienne was president of an Amnesty International student section. She spoke at the European Parliament alongside Greta Thunberg. She created and now leads Avant l’orage, an NGO bridging art and ecology. In 2023, she published her first book—some of her sentences are accomplishments on their own (regarding the public reactions to Just Stop Oil’s actions: “Selective outrage conveniently ignores the fact that the fossil fuel industry condemns Van Gogh’s sunflowers to be nothing more than still life”). A documentary. A lawsuit against Total Energy in Yemen. And now, a second master’s in public policy—here, at Oxford.
Camille and I studied at the same university in Paris. Seven years my senior, we never crossed paths and she didn’t know me. I did, though, because at barely 26, Camille is already among Sciences Po’s illustrious alumni—one of those whose mere existence makes the usual trope of good grades, good university, €4 beers, hesitant situationships, a few hobbies, a few protests and a vague sense of being lost feel a bit small. This is what was on my mind when Camille walked into the café.
I ask Camille about student activism, and she seems somewhat detached. “I tried to look into it, but it’s really more about talks, recycling workshops… At Sciences Po too, I felt like climate activism was quite limited. Some people do a lot, but the militant culture at University around ecological issues always felt weak to me—especially compared to other causes, where students can be remarkably combative.” Her focus is elsewhere—in courtrooms, in government negotiations, in the invisible power structures of industries.
And yet, despite operating at this level, Camille resists being turned into a figurehead. She doesn’t like people asking about her “turning point”. She says: “There is no new morning, there is no great evening”. Camille finds dangerous the radical singularity that we think we see in her. The starification of activists is inescapable (and, to some extent, morally reassuring), and I myself couldn’t help feeling intimidated when I found myself in front of her. Still, it’s an act of bad faith. “Whether you love them or hate, it’s the same thing”, she says, “In both cases, it’s a way of keeping them at a distance. It’s about identifying a group that suddenly gets it, and relying on them.”
Thus, no messianic narrative here—just a near-Olympic childhood: cross-country skiing, biathlon in the Alps, in Pracompuet. In middle school, she began getting involved in social issues, particularly related to the prison system. She didn’t switch from social justice to environmentalism; the continuity between these two realms is obvious to her: she became an activist realising that the “environmental catastrophe is another consequence of an economic system that crushes bodies, crushes lives, compromises the future of generations, and, in the process, condemns species, natural spaces, landscapes that never asked for any of it.”
How did activism become her main pursuit? “After a few years, I had accumulated too much anger and knowledge to do nothing. It would have been cowardly,” she says. When does activism stop becoming a conviction and become a moral obligation? For myself, I can’t shake the fantasized idea of a defining break but for Camille, she speaks of an evolution in her activism. A big part of her work is lobbying and advocacy. She’s often invited on TV panels, and she now rejects the simple role of a media figure labeled “eco-activist”, always in opposition, “constantly reacting to what’s going on in the news.” During her time at Oxford, she enjoys stepping back from the media, giving “very, very few interviews.” Sorry, Camille.
More fundamentally, when she speaks to the media, she has in mind “the idea of reestablishing a political time,” quoting Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. This means not being a passive commentator, but choosing to bring existing issues to the forefront of public discourse that wouldn’t normally make it there. I tell her with no modesty, “Let’s reestablish it now, then” (readers, dear readers, you are now part of the resistance to the media establishment).
Camille brings it up casually—a study just confirmed that the rivers in England are contaminated. The Isis, eternally contaminated—not by the cryptic themes that once governed its publications, but by something far more pernicious: PFAS, or ‘forever chemicals’.
The term has a nearly mythological dimension, yet PFAS contamination is a very concrete catastrophe. They are chemical molecules that never disappear. PFAS were invented as part of the Manhattan Project in the United States, before being introduced into industry, initially in Tefal pans as a non-stick coating, and then everywhere else. Everywhere. In the air, in the water, in the soil, in our bodies, in everyday products like makeup and waterproof textiles. These particles accumulate endlessly and act as endocrine disruptors: cancer, fertility issues, neurological damage. Some are even classified as carcinogenic by the WHO. Yet, there is no real regulation: out of the 10,000 known variants, only two have been banned—immediately replaced by others.
In a month, a law could be passed in France to ban the use of forever chemicals in cosmetics and textiles, as well as to mandate the cleanup of water and soil. Camille is fighting for the ‘polluter pays’ principle to finally be applied—so that those who have poisoned us for decades are held accountable. But for that to happen, the battle for media attention still needs to be won. The issue cannot be drowned out by the flood of fleeting crises.
But if her work is so deeply political, does she see herself in politics one day? She hesitates. “The question is where I’d have the most leverage to push forward our ideas. Right now, I honestly don’t think it’s in opposition to a right-wing government. I find being outside the system more useful, at least for now. More freedom, more time to dig into issues in depth. Less running from one meeting to the next, chasing compromise after compromise.”
Before we part, I ask Camille who her ‘Icon of the Week’ would be. She chooses Stéphane Horel. An investigative journalist at Le Monde, Horel exposed the extent of PFAS contamination in Europe, revealing how the chemical industry has been lobbying to downplay their risks. Just ten days before the scheduled release of her major investigation spanning 15 countries and 49 newsrooms, her home was broken into—for the third time.
For Camille, “it is a clear act of intimidation, because nothing was stolen”. An official inquiry is underway, but suspicions point squarely at the industry Stéphane Horel has spent years scrutinizing. “We can’t say for sure who’s behind it,” Camille adds, “but it’s obvious that investigative journalism comes with risks. And yet, people like Horel keep pushing forward. That’s courage.”
A few days after the interview, I told some friends about our conversation and a statistic Camille mentions in her book: If every French person were a perfect ecologist in their individual behaviour, it would only reduce the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter. One of my friends reacted virulently, urging me not to put it in my article, because it would make people feel justified in their passivity.
But the real takeaway from this statistic isn’t that individual actions are pointless; rather, it’s a reminder to choose where to invest our time and energy wisely. “The real issue is coming together to organise, to push for a structural change”, by joining activist organisations. Indeed, the ones who benefit from the system, have no reason to do their part because they’ll be insulated from the consequences for much longer (though even that is not without limits, as she points out, with the fires in Los Angeles as a clear illustration). So, Camille chooses to resist this active minority, which, despite its limited number, is responsible for the other three-quarters of the emissions. She says, “It’s not my responsibility, but it’s my problem.”∎
Words by Prune Fargetton. Image courtesy of Camille Etienne.