Agroecology is losing one of its main figures in France. Writer and philosopher Pierre Rabhi, co-founder of the Colibris movement, died Saturday, December 4, at the age of 83, from a cerebral hemorrhage, his family announced. This activist of the environmental cause was the author in particular of Towards happy sobriety (2010), sold over 460,000 copies.
Director Cyril Dion, close to Pierre Rabhi, welcomed “a pioneer of the return to the earth”, which was “one of the first to have warned about the harmful effects of growth” on the living. “Everything we hear today, Pierre was already saying it more than 45 years ago”, he underlined, on the phone, on franceinfo.
Born in 1938 at the gates of the Algerian Sahara, this pioneer of neo-ruralism settled in 1961 on a farm in the south of France. He will remain as one of the pioneers of agroecology, an agricultural practice aimed at regenerating the natural environment by excluding pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
His countless works have met with undeniable success each time. With Cyril Dion, he co-founded the citizen movement of Hummingbirds, which calls on everyone to act on their own scale and to take part in local actions, such as shared gardens, educational farms or even short supply circuits.
Reference in the ecologist and alter-globalist seraglio, Pierre Rabhi experienced some media exposure in 2002, during an ephemeral presidential candidacy, for already “introduce ecological and human urgency into the debate”. Father of five children, he then divided his time between interviews, animation of his foundations, conferences and writing of books.