Life and Career
Lalonde was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, the son of Fiona (née Forbes) and Alain-Gauthier Lévy Lalonde. His maternal grandparents were Americans Margaret Tyndal (Winthrop) and James Grant Forbes. He is John Kerry's first cousin, sharing the same maternal grandparents. His father changed the family name from Lévy when he was a child. His (and Sen. Kerry's) g. grandfather Forbes was a poppy botanist and opium dealer in the China trade during the Opium War, who wrote a book on Chinese plants.
Lalonde was a student leader during the May 1968 student uprisings in France, when riots and upheaval scared the French population away from Revolution and the old Left, but toward an adaptive and calmer socialism.
In 1968, Lalonde was President of the Union nationale des étudiants de france (UNEF), the French National Students' Union, which brought France to a standstill with protests and riots. Lalonde, with David McTaggart, an activist involved in the Greenpeace protests against French nuclear tests at Mururoa, helped create the confrontational strategies of boarding ships at sea in the 1970s. In July 1973, he was arrested by the French Navy during protests against nuclear tests in Mururoa, along with the General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, the priest Jean Toulat and the writer Jean-Marie Muller.
In the Summer 1999, Brice Lalonde went to Afghanistan to support the commander Massoud, called by some the Afghan de Gaulle, against the oppression of the Taliban. He was candidate for President of France in 1981 and later Environment Secretary of France (1988–90) and Environment Minister of France (1990–92). From 1995 to 2008, he was the mayor of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a small Breton village where the Forbes family keeps an estate.
In 2007 Brice Lalonde was designated by President Sarkozy French Climate Ambassador and has been heavily invested in the multilateral climate change negotiations until the end of 2010, when he was designated by the UN Secretary-General Executive Coordinator of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), which is to be held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in June 2012.
Lalonde founded in 1990 the party Ecology Generation, which enjoyed a runaway electoral success in 1992 but soon declined in front of the French Green Party's competition. He failed to run for president in the 1995 and 2002 elections, being unable to obtain the necessary 500 signatures of French mayors or MPs and had to leave the leadership of his own party. Close friend of several right-wing figures including Alain Madelin, his current positions are fairly center right-wing, and he has been criticized as being a bit of a turncoat. He had strongly denounced leftist entryism in the French Green party. Brice lives at the Forbes family estate in Saint-Briac. See Forbes family of China and Boston.
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