Green campaign's breast poster outrages feminists

Feminists and environmentalists, social pressure groups which usually see eye to eye, have clashed over a shock poster campaign on the streets of Paris and other French cities.

The poster shows a woman's breast dribbling a dirty, oily fluid. There is no caption or explanation, other than the name of a private, ecological foundation, run by a celebrated television journalist and green campaigner, Nicolas Hulot.

M. Hulot says the poster, on display at 500 sites until 8 August, is intended to warn passers-by that the "very essence" of life is in danger. But the use of a large, battered-looking breast, and ugly, grey mother's milk, has drawn angry protests from feminists, from breast-feeding advocates and from a former environment minister.

French feminist groups have been campaigning for years against the use of female breasts and bottoms to advertise everything from pasta to DIY stores. They accuse French advertising companies of following a demeaning and lazy policy of offering "tits with everything". So the use of a breast in a political advertising campaign, even in a worthy cause, has outraged Florence Montreynaud, France's best-known activist against sexism in advertising.

Mme Montreynaud, a writer and lecturer at the Sorbonne, has written to M. Hulot, asking him to withdraw his posters. "It is a serious business to represent the female breast at a source of death ..." she wrote. "Sperm is just as white as milk. Would you have displayed the male member with a blackish liquid spilling out of it?"

Anne Catteau, of La Leche Ligue, an association which promotes breast-feeding, said: "When they look at this poster ... mothers are going to think breast milk is polluted."

Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, said she regretted "women's bodies are again being associated with something negative. When it is not pornography, it is pollution".

M. Hulot, 47, a former press photographer celebrated for his boyish good looks and his films for French television on threats to the environment, refuses to stop the campaign, a gift to his foundation from an advertising agency and the JC Decaux company which owns the poster sites. "I'm not interested in knowing whether this poster is sexist or not," he said. "What shocks me far more is the passivity of our society in the face of the despoilation of the planet." He said he chose the image of polluted mother's milk, the ultimate "symbol of purity", as a way of shocking people into understanding that "the very essence of life is in danger".

He added: "Our planet is in a bad way and we can longer close our eyes. "Global warming, exhaustion of natural resources, pollution of soil and water, disparity of wealth, malnutrition and a terrifying rate of extinction of natural species; the diagnosis is alarming."

The campaign was intended, he said, to make people reconsider their actions and try, as individuals and as a society, to "reverse this destructive tendency". How precisely the poster campaign will help is unclear. M. Hulot's website (www.planete-nature.org) offers choices. You can send money to his foundation. Or you can start walking rather than driving, letting your lawn grow taller and preventing water leaks by brushing the insides of taps and lavatory cisterns with vinegar.