La Forêt Magique

First, there were the forests. Before mankind, they occupied most of the land on our planet. Then, after living for a long time in harmony with their environment, human beings aspired to rise through civilisation: they built cities that constantly pushed back the limits of the forest. The Greeks, then the Romans, and finally the monotheistic religions and the West looked down on it, sidelined it, and began to deforest it, until the massive destruction of today’s globalisation. Over the centuries, trees and forests have been alternately venerated and feared, protected and hated, considered as an inexhaustible resource and more recently as a complex ecosystem, like that of the entire planet.
The forest has been part of our imagination since time immemorial. At a time when we are in danger of losing them, it is time to give the forests their rightful place: because they are one of the indispensable foundations of our survival, but also because they are the ultimate refuge of the imagination, one of the last places of resistance to uniformisation.