DAMAGE CONTROL

According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.

- Morgan Meaker

IS MORE FESTIVAL than crime scene. There's an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums.

It's a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There's a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickax.

The then-24-year-old's long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That's important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she's about to do. She drives the pickax into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can't dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they've been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new "mega-basin"-a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.

In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins-which can hold up to 720 million liters, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools-are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.