Garonne dry in November: who is drinking the Pyrenees' water?

According to franceinfo, the Garonne is showing levels "historically low compared with the last 30 years", an unprecedented situation for a November. The consequence: releases of water from the Pyrenean reservoirs have been extended. The river is therefore kept on a drip, even though autumn should already have topped it up.

What the dispatch does not say, and so what we do not know: who benefits from these releases, in what quantities, and according to which priorities. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

A mountain reservoir is not a neutral tap. When you empty it to support a river, you are making choices. Between drinking water, aquatic habitats, industry, energy and irrigation, someone decides. And that someone is not all the inhabitants of the basin, but managers, prefects, irrigators' unions, operators. We are constantly told that "we are all responsible for water". False. Pumped volumes have recipients, and they are not shared equally.

This is where the notion of a "metabolic rift" comes in handy. In Marx, it describes the break between society and natural cycles, caused by an agriculture and an industry that exhaust the soil as they exhaust the workers. Applied to the Garonne, the idea is simple: a system that always demands more output per hectare consumes water faster than the cycle can replenish it. The cost, meanwhile, is passed on to ecosystems and to the most modest, who have neither a private borehole nor the cash to wait for rain.

The release scheme also reflects a logic of catching up. We do not change the model that makes us thirsty; we compensate by drawing elsewhere, higher up, in the mountains. Adaptation consists of shifting the shortage. The river holds, and the system with it, until the next reservoir runs empty.

Finally, there is a question of ownership. When water becomes a resource to be allocated, contracted and secured for profitable uses, it slides from the common into capital. Marxists speak of accumulation by dispossession: collective resources converted into private advantage. We do not claim that this is what is at stake here; the dispatch does not allow us to say so. But it is the question to put to the managers.

So what must be demanded is concrete. Publish who consumes what, and at what price. Rank uses through public deliberation, not through the balance of power between lobbies. Plan sobriety where it truly weighs, that is, on large volumes, not on the citizen who turns off the tap while brushing their teeth.

A river at its lowest in November is not a weather anecdote. It is an accounting statement. The question is who signed it, and who will pay the balance.