Our vision

I support the idea of live travel.

2024 is the hottest year in the last 100 years, but it's also the coldest and most stable in the next 100. So it's easy to understand the fluctuating world that awaits us.

We have to stop doing things that concern few people, are dispensable and pollute a lot; private jets and yachts for example, lion hunting, Brazilian ype terraces, 4×4s in cities, kiwis all year round in supermarkets.

We need to stop focusing on performance, and move towards greater robustness. The call for sobriety and resilience is a dead end, in my opinion. Resilience is there to help us get back on our feet, but to go where? resilient, we emerge dented from the hole we've fallen into, to resume our journey, resilient, in the same direction... until the next hole, which we now know will be even deeper and harder. And so it goes on. So it's a question of not falling, but of changing the road, and even better, of forking it, even reversing it.  

It's a question of trying the 3rd way, that of the living, and imitating it. Darwinism is not the law of the strongest or the most efficient, because living beings have no use for our "always more, always further, higher, faster". Intelligence is a measure of our ability to adapt to our environment and to survive (last, pass on). In today's highly fluctuating world, we need to build up our robustness, i.e. our ability to develop despite fluctuations.

As opposed to performance, robustness is a constructive and perennial direction. It is built on 8 values, including randomness, inconsistency, slowness, redundancy, heterogeneity... This means multiplying interactions. This is what all robust living beings do. Parasites, for example, build the robustness of those they attack. In a never-ending loop, life needs everyone: bacteria, microbes, parasites, fungi, ungratefully named weeds, flowers, trees, mammals, toads, sardines, albatrosses, ants, dragonflies, foxes, sparrows, earthworms, tireless workers in feeding us all. Glory and thanks to earthworms!

And how does homo sapiens multiply interactions? We travel!

Isn't curiosity his first talent?

Its ability to make living things sacred, to challenge them, to study them, to love them, and to marvel at a waterfall in Iguaçu, for example. This ability to understand the world, to love it, to grasp that planet earth is round, and that it is part of a galaxy, and itself in an accelerating universe?

Curiosity, exploring, traveling, interacting with the world and others (Otherness) is the essence of our species and I like to think that it's the most beautiful thing there is and that it's what will enable us to rebuild what we've been destroying for a century, without even knowing it.

So there's no point in cursing my own species and complaining about it. I'm not outside or separate or above the living, I'm part of it, so long live the living, long live life, long live the journey.

Notre espèce a un rôle particulier dans tout cela. Elle est sans doute la seule espèce vivante à s’interroger sur la vie et du pourquoi de tout cela. Et à saisir qu’elle est en train de scier la branche sur laquelle elle est magnifiquement assise et qui fait partie d’un tout qui est la meilleure maison qui soit, de la taille l’épaisseur de la bulle de savon… Nous sommes en train de dévaster notre habitat et le vivant, et nous le savons.

La météorite ne va pas tomber, ce n’est pas le scénario de Don’t look up, il est déjà tombé, il est déjà trop tard. Nous devons désormais développer notre robustesse, c’est ce que nous avons de mieux à faire, et d’aimer la vie et le vivant. Et donc d’arrêter de travailler pour des gens qui arrivent en jet privé, car c’est insulter l’avenir que l’on souhaite et nos croyances.

And we can still continue our work in a different way, which is to multiply the interactions of living things. In short, let's put an end to dispensable, polluting tourism, for few people. And let's sell extraordinary travel.

But what do we do with robustness if all we're up against are high-performers?

If my opponent wants to kill me, and sends me high-tech remote-controlled missiles, with AI trajectory calculation, undetectable, in short, inevitable...

Or if my competitor is doing the same thing as me, but not as well, and with no ecological value, and who doesn't question my good intentions, but is cutting prices because he's young and also wants to succeed in life, then I have to be competitive or else I'll disappear and what I've built up over the years will crumble, and do I want to find myself in a mess?

We're in a world of abundance, and there's an abundance of travelers who are going to leave anyway. And in a world of abundance, what works is competition, performance. Robustness would therefore consist in being able to perform when necessary, and robust the rest of the time, or robust at the same time, because that's it, my everyday activity is in a world of abundance. Just as my temperature rises when I'm attacked by a virus, before returning to its cruising temperature when I'm better. But the overall context is highly fluctuating, made up of strong and unpredictable uncertainties, and one thing is certain: the future is uncertain. I'm going to have to adapt while surviving, and be robust all the time and efficient when necessary. Adaptable, stable, despite fluctuations, and thus imitate the living. No wonder, I'm alive myself, aren't I?

So how do you go about doing business robustly and efficiently?

Performance (effectiveness+efficiency) is built at the expense of robustness, the ability to remain stable despite fluctuations.

Avec Terra Gaïa, nous choisissons la voie de la robustesse et de la bio-économie, autrement dit de l’éco-entrepreneuriat.  Comment allons-nous faire ? 

- We recognize the need to develop our robustness, our ability to grow despite the certainty of entering an unpredictable, deteriorating and multi-crisis world.

– Nous décidons de mettre de la circularité dans notre activité (abandonner autant que possible l’économie linéaire au profit de l’économie circulaire).

– Nous renonçons aux gains provenant de choses les plus toxiques, qui concernent peu de monde, et qui sont aisément dispensables (par exemple les clients venant en avion pour faire une éco-pause dans le désert de 3 jours).

- We produce something useful, available and sustainable.

- We reduce our harmful impacts and increase the virtues of our circuits