A battered plastic fox with one oversized ear overlooks a highway in Tunis. His painted eyes have paled and his arms are missing; his satchel and behind are punctured to reveal his hollow inside. This fox (or more precisely, this fennec), whose name is Labib, used to be Tunisia’s national mascot for the environment and could be found in every corner of the country; now his species is near extinct. 

This particular Labib lost his ear at the time of the 2011 uprising, which toppled the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and then served as inspiration for protest movements around the world from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Spanish city plazas to Wall Street. There was a smaller Labib statue, or “his son,” as the fast-food vendor across the road describes it, by his side but he, like most Labibs, was eliminated completely. Sadek, a 21 year old car decorator, participated in taking down a two-metre high Labib near his house in a Tunis suburb. “When you push, he falls easily,” he remembers. “I saw people breaking the legs so I went and broke the arms and got hold of the bag.” The dismembered Labib was set on fire and people chanted “khobs, mé, Ben Ali lé” (bread, water, no Ben Ali), he said.  

Labib told citizens they could save the environment by not littering. At school, kids were taught to be like the fennec, a small fox who “cleans the desert” by eating carrion and scorpions. On TV, cartoons would show Labib descending on beach picnics, reminding families to clean up behind them. “The environment is just about “cleanliness” in Tunisia, there are no deep questions, especially at the time of Ben Ali,” says Inès Labiadh, environmental justice officer at the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights. “Labib was the greenwashing trend, you had to show you were acting in this direction to get [international] funds.”

A few years into the campaign, statues of Labib were erected in every city on roundabouts, in parks, on beaches and on roadsides. Boulevards were renamed in honour of the environment. “There were certain places where there had been statues of [Habib] Bourguiba [Tunisia’s first president after independence]. Bourguiba was gone, so they took him away and put Labib in his place,” said Chedly Belkhamsa, the cartoonist who was commissioned by the Ministry of Environment to draw Labib. The dotting of the country with a cartoon character instead of himself matched the surreptitious nature of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, he added: “he did not become a dictator on the first day, the system of Ben Ali came into being little by little.” 

The absurdity of Labib’s environmentalism was particularly felt in the historically neglected interior and southern regions. In the north-western city of Kasserine, which saw the highest number of martyrs to the revolution, the state did not build a proper road before naming it “Environment Boulevard” and erecting a Labib, remembers Iheb Guermazi, an architect from the city, who was a child at the time. “It was the feeling that the state was doing nothing, it was like you were starving and someone comes and offers you a flower,” he said. In the late 90s, someone climbed up the statue and shat in his hand. In the oasis city of Gabès, which has been devastated by the phosphate industry, Labib seemed to be missing the point. “The state would fine people for dropping litter on the floor but they weren’t giving any fines to the big factories that are dirtying the environment,” said Khalil Achour, 30, an accountant in Gabes. “To me, this is a bit stupid.” 

The overnight near-disappearance of Labib seems to have been a spontaneous act of urban reorganisation by the masses – much like the removal of the purple of Ben Ali’s party from the public space. Then, in 2012, the Minister of the Environment at the time, Memia Benna, took the decision to abandon the mascot, stating in a press conference that Labib, this bastion of cleanliness, was linked to the “era of corruption” – in actual fact, as well as symbolically. 

While diverting attention from the role of the state and industry in the degradation of the environment, Labib was also used to redirect money into the pockets of officials. Mehdi Mlikka, Ben Ali’s nephew, who was the minister of environment from 1992 – 1999, had the idea to create Labib  after seeing Malta’s mascot, Xummiemu the hedgehog. He proceeded to create his own company to win all the state contracts associated with Labib, including UN funded projects, according to Belkhamsa, who left the Labib campaign at this point and received no royalties. “He monopolised the Labib market and he made a fortune,” said Benna, who discovered the file upon arriving at the ministry in December 2011. “They imposed Labib on almost every roundabout in the country, then there were Labib bowls, Labib ties, Labib jumpers.” The same company also produced statues of Morjana the mermaid mascot, which were stationed by the sea and outside water purification centres run by a national agency that Mlikka directed before and after his tenure as minister.  

During the events of the revolution, Mlikka’s luxury villa in a Tunis suburb was ransacked and his assets were later confiscated by the state. In the same period, on 17th January in Gabes, the inhabitants of Chott Salem, a town just metres from the industrial zone, occupied the phosphate treatment plant, which continues to dump tons of phosphogypsum waste into the sea and threaten the health of the local population. As the civil society space opened up, new environmental movements appeared, which, unlike Labib, were pinpointing the environmental crimes being carried out by the government and were engaging on one of the primary demands of the revolution: justice. “There were activists before the revolution, but they were isolated,” says Khayreddine Debaya, one of the coordinators of the Stop Pollution movement in Gabes. “Since 2011, we have popular campaigns, we can contact citizens directly without being part of the one party.” 

The official deposition of Labib sparked a national debate that reflected the political polarisation of the day between the Islamist party Ennahda, which won 41% in the 2011 election, and the “modernist” camp. Benna, who wears a veil but is not part of Ennahdha, said that the “decision” in 2012 was a sort of accident in response to a journalist, who was apparently insinuating that she had removed Labib because “in Islam, a figurine is a sin.” After the announcement, the TV channel Elhiwar Tounsi gave Labib a beard. For some children of the 90s, the decision and the backstory to the Labib industry came as a shock. “They said Labib was a symbol of the dictatorship, I didn’t agree – this is part of our childhood memory,” said Rabeb M’barki, a 30 year old filmmaker. “Labib didn’t do anything, he was used.”

The debate blew over and no definitive action was taken to remove the statues that linger, or to reinstate him. Equally, little has been done to revolutionise the state’s ecological policy. Labib’s approach of “shaming people for throwing a plastic bottle in the sea, for selling a plastic bag” is still favoured by the state and NGOs, says Aymen Amayed, project officer at the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and the Environment. “The real issues are camouflaged, like meat production and food production, which [contributes to] climate change, deforestation and the over-consumption of water.” For some movements, there is still the tendency to isolate the environmental cause instead of seeking global change, says Debaya of Stop Pollution. “Ecolos shouldn’t be like another species, a new species [of activist] that fights for one thing.” 

The Labib species, meanwhile, has not completely disappeared. In addition to the surviving statues, a new cannabis legalisation campaign has appropriated him as its mascot. On a recent visit to a state environmental agency, he peered down at me from a poster on the wall.