Jacques Tassin is a research scientist in plant ecology at Cirad (Centre de cooperation international en recherche agronomique pour le développement - Agricultural Research for Development). He is the author of several books that have been very well received.
In this time of great ecological catastrophes, twenty-first-century human beings have become abruptly aware of their impact on the environment. If that impact is being violently revealed today, it has been developing quietly for several centuries – precisely since the invention of the steam engine and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. From that time there dates the great rupture between the rational and the sentient, the body and the soul, humans and nature, a rupture for which we are paying the price today.
A paradox: scientific ecology, the imprint of that mechanist vision of things and of the living world, completely neglects the human and sentient dimension of our relationship with nature. This book aims to establish a different form of ecology. Rather that great concepts, calculations and complex simulations, we must henceforth think of the living being and its environment as an indissoluble whole in order to rediscover the very simple pleasure of direct contact with plants and animals, that essential proximity from which everything else will flow. This ecology of the sentient, and not just of reason, is perhaps the key to our survival.