About this web site

" After many years of frustration trying to answer people what my life and my work are about,
I decided to start this web site.

I've been a bit around in the world. What has stuned me is to see how the acceleration of technological development at global scale has given us the illusion that we can master Nature and replace it with something that works better. This is clearly apparent in our culture of competition, consumption and mass media which keeps us away from Mother Earth and her teachings. The result is the gradual deterioration of the human and natural ways to relate to the world around and within us. 

Being able to enjoy a good, real and simple life based both on the natural rhythms and the ways of co-operating with all life forms - known and unknown, material and immaterial, animated and unanimated - has become the main challenge of our time. 

Empowering people and communities to make a change, to look back for their upper roots, to share a vision of life where elements apparently separated one from another co-operate for the benefit of the whole, is what has kept me busy for many years.

It has been an exciting journey - and still is - where I've been lucky to meeet people from many different walks of life and cultures. Some of them have inspired my life, given me the energy and motivation to go on. I'm very greateful to them. 
 
 

Looking back on my youth, I see clearly that I've always been among those people who believe there are different ways to look at the world, and to make it. 

Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John Mohawk, two long-time native activists, suggest that people have three choices to resist global materialism and economic culture: to become "good subjects", by accepting the premises and promises of modernity, progress and development; to become "bad subjects", by always revolting against the "civilized" way of affairs; or to become "non subjects", acting and thinking in ways removed from those imposed upon us.

For almost twenty five years, I've consistently been searching for the many different ways to reconsider the basic assumptions on which our Western civilized culture is built. Considering and integrating what are the ethical, social and practical implications of such an understanding has become a way of life.

I found in Sylvilization (1), the so called "old ways" of native, indigenous, aboriginal, tribal, primordial people, some concrete answers. I also discovered that experiencing those ways leads to a practical knowledge of the connecting channels on which depends life on Earth. The power of transformation it gives is worth to try. It opens up to new horizons of intelligibility that are able to inspire each of us. Like Manitonquat, an elder of the Wampanaog nation, puts it: "There is nothing we can't do together". 

I finally came to the conclusion that Civilization and Sylvilization are two polarities, or mental categories, and as such they can't  include the "whole".  Exploring the  creative tension that exists between these two polarities is one of the choices that presents itself to each of us. And I truly believe it's there where the "magic" of life and love reveals itself fully. 
 
 

So, my life and my work are about that creative tension where culture, society and ecology meet together and give us renewed possibilities to feel at home on our small planet in the contemporary world. They are also about exploring both the old and the new ways that help us to go beyond the premises of global economic integration - which are also the promises of total human tragedy. And in the end, they are about getting back what modernity and post-modernity are trying to steel from us: our freedom, our joy, our sense of responsibility and commitment for the Earth and the coming generations.

This web site is dedicated to my son Joonatan, and to the children of the world - the small and big ones - who are too often the victims of the new uutopia that see our final deliverance into a techno-paradise mediated by free-market forces."

(1) From Sylva, the Forest in Latin. The term was coined in the 70s by some representatives of the Lnog Iriadamant Metis community from the East Coast of canada.