The Diplomats

Living with wolves
Baptiste Morizot
320 p., 2016

ENGLISH RIGHTS SOLD

This book has been a bombshell in France. This model of diplomacy is the foundation of what will become in the future the source of new forms of law, of properties relations and of sovereignety.

How do we react to the sudden return of wolves to France, to their dispersal throughout a French countryside that, because of rural flight, is nearly as empty today as it was in the days of ancient Gaule? This is, first and foremost, a geopolitical problem. The return of the wolf challenges our ability to coexist with the very biodiversity that gives us life—and challenges us to invent new forms of diplomacy.

Our sense of property and borders comes from a “sense of territory” that we have in common with other animals. And our diplomatic skill has its origins in an animal know-how that is inscribed deep in our evolutionary history.

Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Aldo Leopold, and many other “diplomats”, Morizot offers us an essay on animal philosophy.

Like a prairie fire, this book sweeps across and renders fertile the great topics of environmental philosophy, ethology, and even ethics. It draws for us a picture of a world where we might “live intelligently with that which, inside of us and outside of us, refuses to be domesticated.”

L'Inexploré

The nature that escapes us
Baptiste Morizot
432 p., 2023

This book is not a book. It’s a map. And it is not a map but a cartography workshop, in which maps are drafted before our eyes. And it is not a workshop because we are on the trail: this is the story, told in real time, of the halting exploration of a new, unexplored continent – one that is none other than the living Earth, whose nature has suddenly changed beneath our very feet.

For the first time since the dawn of modernity, the nature of nonhuman creatures escapes us. In our era of extinction and climate crisis, our relationships with living things have become unstable.

We have awakened from the modern illusion according to which « science » has stablized our relationship with the world. We no longer know what « nature » and « politics » mean.

We have entered an era of metamorphosis, a time of myth: those times, outside time, where our relationships with the world are renegotiated. Between nature and politics, we must walk on carefully, seeking the in-between: the sunken continent.

This is a relational space whose existence we have hidden, or even denied, a space of fitting consideration toward the nonhuman living world.

Daniel Pauly

The dramatic destiny of one of the greatest whistleblowers of our time.
David Grémillet
408 p., 2019

ENGLISH RIGHTS SOLD

An epic life story: Daniel Pauly, the child of a fleeting romance between an African American GI and a French factory worker, defied the odds to escape his Dickensian childhood for university halls and ultimately, the open ocean.

A life’s work: When Rachel Carson wrote The Sea Around Us in 1951, man’s impact on marine ecosystems was already becoming evident. Thirty years later, Daniel Pauly’s extraordinary career has led him into the battle of a lifetime—to identify and establish the scale of overfishing and tell the truth about the state of our world’s oceans.

A big-picture moment: The first book to present overfishing as a global issue, both politically and for the environment in accessible terms.

A clear example of how our collective environmental crisis ties into questions of justice and inequality between the global North and the global South.

The Economy Explained to Humans

The economy, explained by an insect
Emmanuel Delannoy
Preface by Hubert Reeves
144 p., 2011

RIGHTS SOLD TO CHINA

Dear Homo sapiens, great primate endowed with reason, it is to you that I write today. Before I go any further, and despite the fact that it might disturb you, I have something I would like to confess: my name is Cerambyx cerdo, and I am not a human being.

Cerambyx cerdo (also known as the capricorn beetle), is a member of the order Coleoptera who usually resides in old oak trees. He has wanted to talk to you for some time, and he has a lot to say.

About the economy, collective intelligence, biomimetism, the end of petroleum, the “services” rendered by the natural world, the industrial economy… This big bug has come to turn our perceptions upside down and show us the way into the future.

An accessible, educational, and highly entertaining introduction to the principal schools of thought that, for the last few decades, have been transforming the economy in the era of environmentalism.

For readers age 10 to 100.

Permaeconomy

An engaging introduction to the permaeconomy
Emmanuel Delannoy
140 p., 2017

RIGHTS SOLD TO CHINA

Beneath the clamour of the old world, an economic revolution is underway. Inspired by permaculture, the permaeconomy protects the richness of the biosphere, the foundation of all prosperity.

With the way it functions currently, our economy does not seem able to create the kind of shared prosperity that we have a right to expect from it. Our trust has been broken. And whose fault is that? Certainly, the fault of the excesses of over-financed, “ungrounded” capitalism, but also of the silent majority who allow it to happen, overwhelmed by a system whose workings seem beyond them.

To understand is to disobey. To engage differently, to produce differently, to consume differently is to resist. New revolutionary models are already in the works: circular economies, product-service systems, biomimetism…

The permaeconomy brings these models together in a coherent whole.
For citizens, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers.

Apartheid and the Animal

Towards a politics of connectivity
Estienne Rodary
340 p., 2019

Fascinating, erudite, and clear headed. This book takes on a topic that has up to now received little attention from theorists in political ecology.

This study of southern Africa’s national parks seeks to demonstrate how such protected areas are emblematic of a modernist, colonial approach to ecology.
If separation has been the defining feature of modernity, then we are perhaps already living through something else, an after-modernity that is defined by copresence—a phenomenon that is shattering the borders modernity built.
Our repeated attempts to create “enclaves for nature” are everywhere in conflict with a world that is socially and ecologically interconnected.
To escape from this impasse, Estienne Rodary invites us to radically rethink the relationships between human societies and the Earth.
The first essay on political ecology from one of the founders of environmental geography.

The Property of the Earth

Does land have rights?

Sarah Vanuxem is shaking up the very notion of property with the idea that places are more than just things.

Going against the dominant doctrine, Sarah Vanuxem shows that property cannot be understood as the “sovereign power of an individual over things.” Even in modern law, specifically the French Civil Code with its Roman and Medieval origins, the notion of property is caught up in community.

By showing that it is possible to confer rights upon a place, Sarah Vanuxem allows us to escape, via the law, from our modern, Western understanding of property—and shows what our legal heritage has in common with radical indigenous and ecofeminist perspectives.

Resisting Disaster

A Dialogue with Isabelle Stengers
96 p., 2019

What can we make today that might ultimately be a resource for those who come after? – for me, this question englobes your whole philosophy, and I would like to draw a few threads from it, like so many suggestions, if not answers to this question.

This short book is an invitation to enter the universe of one of the most important philosophers of our time. A universe with myriad implications, where thought travels the spaces in between.
A torrent of ecology and freedom that clears the path for transforming action and going beyond the things that hold us prisoner.

Flamingo Politics

Actors, conflicts, and the story of Europe’s
largest environmental restoration project
Raphaël Mathevet et Arnaud Béchet
320 p., 2020

The Greater flamingo nested regularly in the Camargue, the Rhone delta wetland in the south of France, until the 1960s, when the species all but vanished from the region. After a great deal of conservation effort, surveillance, counting, and banding, the creation of a new reproduction site and the management of water levels, the Greater flamingo is no longer endangered. But are they still wild creatures? Nesting as they do on an artificial island located in the preconcentration pool of an old sea salt production facility, constantly surveilled by scientists and rangers?

The saving of the Greater flamingo is the flagship effort of the largest environmental restoration project in Europe’s history, and it reveals a vast and complex network of conservation actors and local stakeholders. But in the shadow of its apparent success, the project poses many pressing questions about the state of the natural world and our relationships with it.

Taking up this topic through the lens of both animal geography and political ecology, Flamingo Politics offers a keen analysis of the species’ mobility, and an entry point for exploring the social, economic, and ecological dynamics that define one of Europe’s most exceptional biodiversity hotspots.

What is a bioregion?

An introduction to one of ecology’s most important revolutions
Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner
Drawings by Emmanuel Constant
152 p., 2021

The bioregion is where the geographical and poltical meet. It is where you live, the place you reinhabit, the thing that makes it possible to seek a more earthy, eco-centered existence.

Most residents of developed countries do not know where the water in their faucets comes from, where their trash goes after it is emptied, what type of soil they have beneath their feet, when the next full moon will occur, when to plant which vegetables, or the name of the bird that sings each morning outside their windows.

Getting curious about one’s bioregion means asking where we live and with whom, learning from the places around us in order to cohabitate with other living things. A bioregion is a lifeplace where all stakeholders endeavor to live together in a sustainable, lasting manner. By starting from the ground up, from river basins, micro-climates, soil types, and flora and fauna, the places where we live take on new meaning.

This pocket-sized guide offers an accessible introduction to the bioregional movement and philosophy in four parts: first, a dialogue between writer/activist Marin Schaffner and bioregionalist architect Mathias Rollot, along with quotes from major bioregional writers such as Peter Berg and Doug Aberley. Second, a short quiz helps the reader evaluate their bioregional knowledge. The third part offers concrete examples of four different bioregions by David McClosky (Cascadia, North America), Giuseppe Moretti (Bioregione Bacino fluvial del Po, Italy), Chloé Gautrais (Biorégion-écotone de Sancy, France), and Marin Schaffner (La biorégion des oliviers, Mediterannean Basin). Each of these is illustrated with black and white maps and ink drawings by Emmanuel Constant. The fourth and final section invites the reader to go further, presenting one-paragraph summaries of thirty essential books on bioregionalism (ten in English, ten in French, and ten in Italian).

Shortlisted for the Political Ecology Book Prize from the Fondation de l’écologie politique (France).

Pastorales

In the company of beasts

Violaine Bérot, Florence Debove et Jean-Christophe Cavallin
142 p., 2024

A reinvention of Virgil’s Bucolics…This book brings literature into the pastures, rather than the pastures into literature.

In a mountain landscape that is increasingly becoming a walking path for tourists in search of wilderness, a shepherdess and a goatherd recount the hours and days they have spent in the company of animals. Their high-altitude stories do not sing the praises of a bucolic dream, but rather the craft of pastoralism and its gnarled realities.
Intertwined with the prose of an urban visitor, the work and the days of these solitary lives form an earthly ode to the dual crafts of writer and herder.

Uncertain Ground

Witnessing the Anthropocene in the Rhone and Mississippi River Deltas

Matthieu Duperrex
240 p., 2019, nouvelle édition 2024

Through his incredible study of these two rivers, Duperrex manages to make sedimentation into both an earth science and a natural philosophy that is extraordinarily silent and mutable.

The deltas of the Rhone and the Mississippi are the setting of intense ecological, historical, industrial, sociological, and political issues. Profoundly hybrid territories, these deltas are emblematic of our current relationship with the Earth.

After a long stint in the field in France and the United States, the author returns with a series of 31 narratives, each centered around one of 31 species of plants and animals. Between theory and storytelling, this work invents a new way of writing, one that is attentive to the interrelationships between living things. The untold story of our modern landscapes.

I would like to build myself a little cabin in Tonkin. It would be my Walden Pond and I would spend my time pretending to be Thoreau, writing a new ethics of nature in the middle of the swamp with the din of the Arcelor foundry, the roar of the quay cranes, and the rumblings of the tractor trailers as my soundtrack…

Nitassinan

A Novel
Julien Gravelle
288 p., 2011

An ambitious debut novel that tells the story of a piece of land, in nine narratives taking place across five centuries.

The bear had loved the taste of forest berries, of ant larvae, the flesh of fawns. He had fought pitched battles for females who smelled so sweet, and poached on human lands. And he had thought he would be able to live one more summer as a lover of the forest.

Nitassinan : “our land” in the Ilnue language. North of Saint-Jean Lake in Quebec, there is a stretch of boreal forest about which not much has been written. Nine stories, nine destinies, nine time periods stretching over five centuries of turbulent history. American Indian hunters, colonists, coureurs du bois, a scientist, dogs, bears, caribou, wildlife.

Sweeping and powerful stories enigmatically stitched together to form the epic story of a piece of earth, a vast narrative of place.

Summer Pastures

From the Alps to the Chiapas
Pierre Madelin
180 p., 2016

One morning, a philosophy student decided to become a shepherd. That first summer in the Alps would change the course of his life. From the solitude of mountain pastures to a burgeoning political consciousness, from the Alps to Colorado to Mexico, from the dream of untouched wildnerness to the reality of national park police and chiapatec rebels—this simple coming of age story imparts lessons learned from more than ten years in the mountains.

A Beast Between the Lines

Zoopoetics and the Animality of Literature
Anne Simon
400 p., 2021

Anne Simon’s zoopoetics prove that humans only exist fully when we open ourselves to the incredible creativity of other living things.

A panoply of beasts—familiars both fearful and benign—stalk between the lines of our texts, cultures, and lives. Anne Simon brings forth the richness of these animal connections through the dreams and narratives of great writers.
If literature is able to evoke the power and extravagance of animal lives, it is because language and writing—often considered unique to humans—are themselves imbibed with animality. Poetic language gives us privileged access to these beasts, the very ones who taught us the art of reading signs by inscribing their stories directly into the fabric of the world.
Navigating between the dawn of the world when humans evolved alongside wild animals and the current day of the Sixth Extinction, Ann Simon explores the “book-Arcs” that summon up the fascinating worlds to which animals can open the door.
These voyages through our collective imagination—in dialogue with the work of historians, anthropologists, and philosophers—open up our mental galaxies, allowing us to renew our connection to other living things.
An invitation to (re)discover Marcel Proust, Jean Giono, Maurice Genevoix, Béatrix Beck, Jacques Lacarrière, Andrzej Zaniewski, Jean Rolin, Olivia Rosenthal, Yves Bichet, Maryline Desbiolles, Tadeusz Konwicki, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Marie Darrieussecq, Éric Chevillard, Svetlana Alexievitch, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Christophe Bailly…

The Gang of the Kosmos

Poetics and Politics on American Ground
Kenneth White
352 p., 2015

Rights to the original English manuscript available from Wildproject

The poetic biographies of four American poets: Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers.

Tracing the poetic heritage of Walt Whitman through these four figures, Kenneth White offers us a continuous stream of poetry that has all the chaos of a boxing ring. An intoxicating literary performance for four voices, a night out with friends that goes on until morning.

Written in 1978 and still unpublished in the original version (English), The Gang of the Kosmos is the keystone of White’s work; and without a doubt, one of the best books ever written about the Beat Generation.

A French Borderland

A journey along the contested border between global North and South
Michel Samson
192 p., 2013

A beautiful travel story full of humanity.

Acclaimed journalist Michel Samson navigates between living memories and archives to uncover the secrets of France’s longest land border : a 730-kilometer-long line of water and jungle along the Oyapock River that separates French Guiana from Brazil.

Long a bone of contention between Portugal and France, then between France and Brazil, it is crossed daily by all sorts of border-jumpers: gold miners, traders, teachers, sandal-buyers, Amerindians, Guianan Creoles, Haitian exiles, scrap metal merchants, crack dealers, prostitutes, johns, and all sorts of vagabonds looking for a better life.

The French and Brazilian presidents decided together to construct a bridge across this border river. Finished but never officially inaugurated, this stretch of cement has incited strikes by ferrymen, no-confidence votes, and many, many meetings between important people.

To straddle the border is to discover the echoes of obscure Amazonian battles that poisoned the world for centuries and understand the senseless clashes that still pit North and South against one another.

The Rio Negro Journal

The Birth of Integral Naturalism
Pierre Restany
160 p., 2013

A myth.

In the late 1970s, in Amazonia, the art theorist of New Realism created something new: Integral Naturalism.

In the summer of 1978, French philosopher Pierre Restany set off on a voyage into the heart of the Amazon joined by Brazilian artists Frans Krajcberg and Sepp Baendereck.

Their journey by boat up the the Rio Negro would prove to be a profound and deeply moving sensory experience. For Restany, it would also be the catalyst for a theoretical revolution: his Journal du Rio Negro later gave rise to the manifesto of Integral Naturalism (Naturalisme intégral).

Drawing on the principles of New Realism, Restany affirms that the question of nature will henceforth be at the very center of art and culture. Braving mosquitoes and hangovers, he invites the Western world of the 21st century to launch a “second Renaissance.”

Thirty years later, this daring and prophetic text has established itself as a classic, one that reveals Restany in his natural state.

Bach's fugue

Bach in love
Jean Salmona
92 p., 2011

A luscious tale of initiation which shows us a Bach at the both carnal and mystical…an aesthete before the Lord.

One spring morning, Johann Sebastian Bach announces to his family that he will be going away for a few weeks to a hunting lodge in Saxony so that he can compose alone in peace.

In reality, though, he brings along Eva, an exceptionally gifted student, in order to instruct her in the science of music—and gastronomy.

This musical, esthetic, and culinary initiation will go on to become a sentimental education and an apprenticeship for the senses. God and flesh, body and soul.

How far will the master be able to follow his disciple?

M.A.R.S.

The History of Rap in Marseille
Julien Valnet
224 p., 2013
Over 10 million albums sold, 30 years of stories. Hundreds of musicians, both famous and forgotten.
From the first songs on the radio to the big commercial hits of IAM and the Fonky Family. From the first dancers of the Marseille City Breakers to the the underground scene of the early 2000’s. From old samplers to the emergence of home studios. From one generation to the next.
A story never before told.
MCs, DJs, managers, journalists, fans, producers: Julien Valnet has interviewed more than 60 actors from Marseille’s hip hop scene. Their testimony, mixed with written sources, forms the backbone of this book.
M.A.R.S. reveals the true magnitude of Marseille’s rap scene, plunging us into the heart of the city. Its neighborhoods, its legends, its conflicts. Its successes, failures, and dreams…

M.A.R.S. is magic. / A little heart to stop the machine.

À fond de cale

A Century of Jazz in Marseille
Michel Samson & Gilles Suzanne
320 p., 2012

A masterpiece, a treasure. We are in the dark no longer. All the evidence is there. This book recounts, recalls, gets the job done, and brings tears to your eyes.

The city of Marseille has played a role that is far from insignificant in the history of jazz. We’ve heard its sound on the piano keys of Georges ArvanItas, Heri Florens, Magali Souriau, and Perrine Mansuy, from the base cords of Paul Mansi, Christian Brazier, or Eric Surménian, streaming from the saxophones of Marcel Zanini and André Jaume, or roaring from Christophe Leloil’s trumpet…though few recognize its true origin. And its story has yet to be told: Marseille’s contribution to jazz has been considerable. Often called the first foothold of music-hall on French soil, recognized as a laboratory for rap, and for rock and world music before that, this city on the Mediterranean has swayed to jazz sounds for over a hundred years.

GR®2013 Marseille-Provence: The Metropolitain Trail Around the Inland Sea of Berre and the Massif de l’Etoile

200 p., 2013

The route sets out to represent the nuts and bolts of everyday Provence, leading past shopping malls, disused railway lines, nature reserves, country manors, industrial estates and other landmarks that you pass every day without necessarily looking at them.

This is no ordinary path: it has been devised by artists to reveal aspects of Provence that are rarely seen and less frequently appreciated.

The magnificent Massif de l’Étoile, the Massif of Garlaban, the vast inland sea of Berre: two undeveloped spaces that have been surrounded by cities, roads, and rails. In the center, the plateau of Arbois, both wild and metropolitan.
The countryside around Aix-en-Provence, Aubagne, and Salon-de-Provence. City centers and suburban developments, the hills above Marseille, the Gulf of Fos, the mining valley of Gardanne, the ranges of Nerthe and La Fare… A collection of stories and landscapes that make up the Provençal metropolis. The GR®2013 offers adventure: 365 kilometers of it, following in the footsteps of the walking artists who inspired the project.
This trail is for everyone: residents and tourists, families and athletes, artists and hikers… Whether an hour-long escapade or a 20 day odyssey, a walk on the GR®2013 offers the chance to revive the relationship between city and nature.

The Revolution of Paris

A metropolitan trail
Paul-Hervé Lavessière
192 p., 2014

Greater Paris, finally embodied

A voyage on foot of 130 km, over 6 days across 37 towns : the author, a 25-year-old geographer, designed the route along which he takes us around the French capital, creating a new geography of Paris.

Two friends set off to visit the French capital on foot. But they don’t go to the Eiffel Tower, or the Île de la Cité, or the Louvre.

On a six-day long loop drawn by the author, they cross Saint-Denis, Créteil, and Versailles. Gardens and burrstone houses, market squares and highway interchanges, urban agglomerations and public schools, overgrown lots and electrical wires, churches and industrial zones, forts and mosques, gypsum quarries and train depots, canals and rivers…

From one metro terminus to another, their journey through “Greater Paris” draws the blueprints for a new geography, suggesting new ways to use the city. Welcome to Paris. Welcome home.

The Greater Paris Trail

A walking tour through Europe’s largest metropolitan area
280 p., 2020

Totally unique; a new kind of hiking trail.

A huge project !

The Greater Paris Metropolitan Trail is a 615-kilometer hiking path that connects the historic center to the “grand couronne” of the post-war metropolis. River basins, storied waterways, ports and industry, roads and rails, city blocks and urban agriculture, royal hunts and hip-hop… The product of three years of research, the book offers a tour of the city through 153 stories tied to places along the trail.