Francis Hallé dreams of recreating a forest heritage, a forest free of any human intervention, without cutting wood, without exploitation or care: a primary forest. On the European continent, the last is in Poland, it is the Bialowieza Forest. But it is particularly threatened, attacked hectares by hectares by chainsaws. This is what prompted Francis Hallé to launch and create his association in 2019.
At the age of 80, he is one of the greatest specialists in the canopies of tropical forests, which he has spent his life as a biologist and botanist studying, from Vanuatu to Guyana, via Laos and Gabon. Suffice to say that it did not take long to draw up the list of what it takes to obtain an equivalent in Europe.
Starting with the land: 70,000 hectares minimum. If that seems like a lot to you, tell yourself that the planted forest of the Landes de Gascogne covers a million hectares, 70,000 hectares nearby, it’s the equivalent of a small town. Then, it has to be in the plain, and it has to be cross-border, to make it a European heritage and not just a French one. Finally, who says “primary forest” says no plantation, no chainsaw, no hunting, no picking mushrooms, not even collecting dead wood: no human intervention.
On the other hand, Francis Hallé wants us to be able to watch the forest grow: we would walk on wooden walkways 50 centimeters above the ground, like in the big American parks, just to not compact the humus and mistreat the roots, we would observe, we would meditate, we would marvel.
“What I offerhe says in his latest TedX talk, it’s a completely free thing, neither expensive nor profitable, (…) it’s a transgenerational, long-term project since it’s going to take about six centuries.“Six hundred years is the time it takes for such a forest to change from secondary forest to primary forest.
It’s dizzying, but it’s not utopian: two sites are being studied, one in the Ardennes, the other in the Vosges, both straddling the Belgian and German borders. It remains to embark everyone, from the European Commission to the local populations, hunters included. But Francis Hallé believes in it. And when asked what motivates him, he responds with the intoxicating beauty of trees, that something that should be priceless.