Gilles Clément, an Advocate for Sustainable Gardening on a Planetary and Local Scale, Criticizes Macron’s Disrespectful Attitude.

From his garden in the Creuse, he experiments and fervently defends biodiversity. This treasure that man squanders while his survival depends on it. Interview with Gilles Clément, in honor of the Bap! Biennial of architecture and landscape, in Versailles.

«Luring my horticultural engineering studies, I learned to kill. All. Insects, fungi, weeds, rodents, moles… » Since then, the landscape gardener Gilles Clément, 78, has undoubtedly managed to be forgiven for these youthful packages. Cantor of the “planetary garden” – another definition of biodiversity -, this Creusois by birth and still Creusois never ceases, in words and with his hands in the soil of the gardens, to celebrate life. “who constantly invents”. This plant lover is also worried about the attitude of his fellow human beings who often only see nature as a pretty decoration, whereas it is the condition of life. of our survival. To explain this approach, Gilles Clément, in association with the landscape gardeners of the Coloco collective, presents, in the vegetable garden of the king, in Versailles, within the framework of the Biennial of architecture and landscape (Bap!), a thematic exhibition and a garden experiments that advocate “the precedence of the living”.

What is meant by the “precedence” of the living?
It’s about giving it back its primacy. To put it in its true place: the first. Whether it is a micro-organism, an animal, a plant or a human being, the living is an extraordinary thing. It is no longer possible to continue destroying it. And yet… We are in a situation that has probably never existed on the planet, even if there have been great extinctions during evolution. Our time, which is called theanthropocene or the age of man, and that some start with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth^e century, others with the atomic bomb in 1945, is rushing us at high speed towards a sixth extinction.