Something interesting is happening in France, according to Kristie van Riet. A 73 year-old Algerian-born farmer, philosopher and environmentalist is beginning to impact not just on the electoral process, but one of Europe’s oldest democracies. He’s managing to bring together the French tradition of humanism with the increased national ecological conscience.
Pierre Rabhi was born into a Muslim family an an oasis in southern Algeria, in 1938. His mother died when he was four years old. His father, a blacksmith, musician and poet, was forced by economic circumstances to close his workshop and work in the mines. The father persuaded a French couple to raise Pierre; his childhood thereafter was shared between France and Algeria, and the Catholic and Muslim worlds, until he was 14.
He chose to convert to Christianity when he was sixteen, and completed two years of secondary education, but had to leave college because his family were unable to cover the costs. When the Algerian War broke out in 1954, Rabhi was rejected by his father for having converted to Christianity, and by his adoptive father following a dispute. He decided to settle in Paris.
In France, Rabhi, with no knowledge of agriculture, moved with his new family to the country; this was well before the French ‘neo-rural’ movement of the late 1960s. In 1963, after three years working as an agricultural worker, he became a goat farmer. Appalled by the impacts of industrialised agriculture on ecosystems he had witnessed in the Sahara, and around him in France, he developed the practice of ecological agriculture.
“I am often called a philosopher”, Rabhi told an interviewer, “but you must know that I came to ecology through farming”. On his farm in the Cevennes of Ardèche, he has lived for 13 years without electricity, water, or modern technology. Through this experiment he has discovered that “man has created a radical break between activities that enable them to feed themselves and essential principles of nature. The little plot of land that I cultivated in Ardèche widened my horizons and enabled me to connect with time and space all around the world”
Rabhi wondered whether his experiment was transmissible. In 1985, he set up an agro-ecology training centre; and in 1988 he also founded an International forum for the sharing of knowledge about applied agricultural practices, CIEPAD. “I realized that the South had been trapped by modernity, that it was connected through chemical fertilizers and pesticides” he explained; ‘the South is especially affected by ecological disasters, by the disappearance of animal and vegetal biodiversity, by desertification’. He has since launched oversees development programmes in Morocco, Palestine, Algeria, Tunisiea, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mauritaniea, Poland and the Ukraine.
Most interestingly perhaps, in the run up to the 2012 French elections, Rabhi has launched a ‘campaign without a candidate’. He is travelling around the country to demonstrate that there is an alternative to politics-as-usual. Describing the campaign as an “insurrection of the conscience”, Rabhi explains that the campaign is not about reforming present society with its ‘banal consumption’ and ‘pervasive fear’. Rather, it is about accelerating the emergence of its replacement.
Awesome.