2023-10-05 16:24:30
For some, ecology involves the fight against megabasins, for others through recycling. Gaspard Koenig prefers earthworms, the hero of his latest novel, Humus. Georgian interview.
You have just published Humus (Éditions de l’Observatoire), a story of earthworm rescue which ends in civil war. Do you fear eco-warriors?
Gaspard Koenig: Ah ah, not exactly! Humus isn’t really a dystopia, it’s set roughly in our time and the environmental conditions are roughly the same as today. But I was struck that after I finished this book, the Earth Risings appeared. This is what I partly tell in the novel, how environmental activists gradually emerge from a posture of entirely pacifist civil disobedience, and consider that violent actions, at least against property, are legitimate in relation to violence of the crisis itself.
Your novel pits a green-tech fanatic, Kevin, against Arthur, who has become a sort of angry neo-rural. Which side have you chosen?
The two heroes are initially at approximately the same point and share with their generation the characteristic of not being radical, but conscious. I see myself more in Arthur, but I am not yet an anarchist like him. The character gives me the opportunity to ramble as much as possible. In the end, I don’t take a position, I let myself be guided by them. There is no message regarding the two paths they choose. There is no right or wrong, there are no nice neo-rural people against businessmen. They both pursue the same goal, saving the earthworms, and take different paths.
How did you come to focus on this subject?
I have made a shift towards ecology since my horseback crossing. When I came back, I bought a farmhouse in Orne, with my vegetable garden. Everyone enters into ecology in their own way. There are some who are frightened by the disappearance of birds, others by the melting of glaciers, etc. For me it was more the earthworms. I became interested in the subject, I met geodrilologists (earthworm specialists, editor’s note), I read the few books that exist on the subject.
Why this obsession with the earthworm?
He is a social worker: he is an animal who never stops plowing the earth. They are also animals that live in “society”, they hibernate together, know their galleries. And he is a hermaphrodite, in the earth there is no sexual differentiation.
Have you discovered an earthworm philosophy?
The earthworm is the tiller of the soil. Darwin wrote his last book on the earthworm and he explains that it is the earthworm that digests the earth, decomposes its elements, provides the necessary nutrients to plants, etc. If there is a philosophy of earthworms, it is that of man and the cycle of nature: everything dies, dissolves and is reborn. The word “man”, it is well known, comes from “humus”: all religions bring man out of the earth. There is also the fashion for humusation, a new technique which allows the body to be decomposed in the earth in a professional but natural way. It is a way of detaching oneself from all transcendence.
It is a vision that goes against today’s progressive attempts to make oneself immortal, through AI and avatars for example.
With AI, we replay religions from before. We want to give ourselves crazy hopes of bringing our spirit back to life by reproducing it in computer form. Same with cryonics, which almost makes more sense. But you have to let go of the matter at some point, and accept that it will end. Technophiles fall back on old theological obsessions.
You are an ardent defender of liberal philosophy – your hero Arthur is a great reader of Thoreau – how do you reconcile progress and ecology?
The idea of progress does not go against nature. I consider myself “a-growing”. Man can improve nature and biodiversity according to the criteria of nature itself. The idea of a deep ecology where we let nature do its thing and where man watches as a spectator induces a dualism. We can improve a natural space which, left to itself, will become wasteland. We can do something richer with it. The goal is to have healthy soils that are themselves productive. Well-maintained soil is more productive than conventional agriculture.
Have you made any attempts in your vegetable garden?
I try different things, with mulch, horse manure, there are things that fail, other names. When something is industrial, all you need is instructions and it works every time. In nature, not at all. But it’s fun.
Is the agriculture of the future the big challenge of the coming years?
The biggest challenge is to repopulate the countryside and succeed in getting neo-rural people and those who have been there for several generations to coexist. The chosen rurality will be one of the social issues of the next twenty years.
How do you write a novel about contemporary issues without falling into an ecological essay?
Without going into things that are too romantic and staying in the vein of social realism, I took inspiration from Giono. He has a style that I admire a lot. There is also something very Houellebecquian in the cynicism of capitalist criticism. Houellebecq is very keen on things of the earth, he was an agricultural engineer, in Sérotonine he also features a farmer. In a recent interview with JDD, amidst a thousand bullshit, he defends the importance of taking care of the soil. The Houllebecquian characters see a possibility of happiness in rural life, before everything falls apart. I’m just a little more optimistic than him!
Your next topic?
The water. Also starting from something very concrete, water management, soon transferred to the communities of municipalities. The latter will therefore lose control of their water to the benefit of people like Veolia. Culturally, it is very violent. And then there is a mythology of water that interests me. Now that I have broken my political ties (Gaspard Koenig launched the Simple movement in 2021, editor’s note), I want more creative activities, and I really want to stay there for a while, on the novel.
Humus, Éditions de l’Observatoire,
384 pages, 22 €
By Violaine Epitalon
Photo Élodie Grégoire
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#Gaspard #Koenig #neoearthrian #anarchist