Francis Hallé’s Project for a Large Primary Forest in Western Europe and a New Understanding of Our Relationship with the Biosphere

Abstract

Dean of French botany Francis Hallé (1938) has been promoting a utopian project since 2019: to return to Western Europe a portion of its primitive jungle in the form of a primary forest (70,000 hectares). The project is neither romantic nor lacking in utility. Science, in fact, has already pointed out its benefits. And so has philosophy, a discipline that long has been concerned about the issue of deforestation and whose collaboration in the development of this initiative seems more than desirable. The project has an important philosophical background since, were it ever carried out, would be the most unequivocal material expression of a new understanding of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere and, as such, a response undermining Cartesian dualism. In this chapter, we show that the project for a primary forest in Western Europe contains, in the formulation itself, a revision of the values that have governed human relationships with other species, and implies a new way of inhabiting the world, which is currently harassed by policies of domination of nature and beliefs of human superiority encouraged by certain forms of thinking.