(Paris) The French writer and philosopher Pierre Rabhi, a reference in environmental activism who has tirelessly preached all his life for a sober existence and for “agroecology”, died on Saturday at the age of 83.
Author in particular of Towards happy sobriety, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, his son Vianney told AFP.
“There is a kind of unconsciousness, we are in a blind modernity, in the sense that we only see the financial gain”, he declared in October 2018.
Pierre Rabhi had established himself as one of the fathers of agroecology, an agricultural practice aimed at regenerating the natural environment by excluding pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
A method applied from the 1980s in sub-Saharan Africa, where he made many trips, but also in Ardèche, in the south-east of France, where he had settled since 1961, living on a farm.
With Cyril Dion, author of the successful activist documentary tomorrow, Pierre Rabhi had co-founded the citizen movement of Hummingbirds, which calls for local actions, such as shared gardens, educational farms or even short supply circuits.
“Today I lost a friend. A big brother. It breaks your heart. We didn’t always agree and in recent years we had moved away a bit, but Pierre was one of the meetings that changed my life, ”Cyril Dion wrote on Instagram.
Rabah became Peter
Born in 1938 at the gates of the Algerian Sahara, he was very early torn between “modernity and tradition”, when his father entrusted him to a family of French settlers, in order to provide him with better education. Rabah will then become Peter.
“Heartbreaks, ruptures, suffering, there was a lot of it”, confided this autodidact.
In him, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard saw a “brother of conscience”. And he was admired by personalities as diverse as the actress Marion Cotillard or the former French Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition Nicolas Hulot.
His numerous works have met with undeniable success and influenced several generations of environmental activists.
The one who was the friend of Thomas Sankara, the “father of the Burkinabè revolution”, or of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, experienced a certain media exposure in 2002, on the occasion of an ephemeral candidacy for the presidential election, by desire of ‘“Introduce ecological urgency into the debate”.
He then divided his time between interviews, animation of his foundations, conferences and writing of books. But the time spent on gardening was “not negotiable,” he explained in 2018.
Legend of hummingbirds
He always told with the same energy the Amerindian legend of the hummingbirds, which gave the name to the group created with Cyril Dion.
“History says that one day there was a big forest fire. All the animals were discouraged. On the other hand, the hummingbird does not give up, it will take a drop of water in its beak and will throw it on the fire. For a moment the armadillo said to him: “hummingbird, you won’t believe that it is with these drops of water that you are going to put out the fire? He replies: “I know it, but I am doing my part” “.
Pierre Rabhi, who refuted the label of guru, will make a maxim: “everyone must do their part”.
“Agroecology is recognized now, even by the United Nations, as being the right solution to solve the problems of food in the world”, rejoiced the former worker, champion of the return to the earth and of “disalienation “.
Because “we were not born to produce”, he said.