In Praise of Vagabonds

The following translation presents the Introduction and concluding essay, "Planet, Country without a Flag," from Gilles Clément's Éloge des vagabondes: Herbes, arbres et fleurs à la conquête du monde, originally published in 2002 by Nil Éditions of Paris.

Introduction

Plants travel. Especially grasses.

They move about as quietly as the wind. We can't do much about the wind.

Were we to harvest clouds, we would be astonished to find a weightless seed mixed in with the loess, a fertile dust. Unpredictable landscapes take shape in the sky.

Chance organizes the details, exploits all possible vectors for the distribution of species. Everything is conducive to travel, from marine currents to shoe soles. Travel essentially belongs to animals. Nature charters berry-eating birds, gardening ants, calm, subversive sheep, whose wool holds field upon field of seed. And the human—an animal shaken by incessant movements, free trader of diversity.

Evolution benefits from all of this. Not society. The slightest management project runs up against provisional timetables. How to order, hierarchize, tax: possibilities emerge at every moment. How can we maintain the landscape, and manage its expenses, if it is transformed at the whim of hurricanes? What technocratic grid could we apply to the overflow of nature, to its violence?

In the face of winds, and birds, the question of what to regulate remains. Innovative nature sends the legislator back to his documents, in search of reassuring language.

And if we were to insure against life?

Such a project—security at all costs—finds unlikely company among the ecological radicals, keepers of nostalgia. Nothing should change, our past depends on it, say the ones; nothing should change, diversity depends on it, say the others. Everyone rails against the vagabonds.

Discourse goes further. As a politics, it brings minds together around the necessity of eradicating species that come from elsewhere. What will we become if strangers take our ground? We speak of survival.

Science comes to the rescue: ecology, held hostage by its own fundamentalists, serves as justification. Hypocrisy is born: statistical calculations and inventories lead to a quiet, legal, and planetary genocide. At the same time, a larger imposture emerges: designating the least trait of identity—a site, a landscape, an ecosystem—as an inheritance, so as to expunge from it all that does not reinforce it.

Forces gather, in the name of diversity—a treasure that must be conserved for unmentionable aims: might there not be a few bucks to be made, some patents to secure?—to strike against the intolerable processes of evolution.

To begin with, we oppose life-forms that have no business here. Above all if they are happily established. Eliminate first; we'll look into it afterward. We order, account for, set up baselines for a landscape, quotas for existence. We declare the life-forms daring to cross these limits enemies, weeds, menaces. We prepare a lawsuit, establish a protocol for action; we wage war.

This book opposes such a blindly conservative attitude. It considers the multitude of encounters and the diversity of beings as so many riches added to the territory.

I observe life in all its vigor, with its normal degree of amorality. I do not judge, but I take the side of energies likely to invent new situations—probably to the detriment of number. Diversity of configurations versus the diversity of life-forms. The one does not exclude the other.

In Praise of Vagabonds sides with the garden, with the planet considered as such. With the gardener, Earth passenger, privileged matchmaker of unexpected marriages, indirect and direct actor of vagabondage, vagabond himself.

Planet, Country without a Flag

A troubled world decries the invasion of life-forms from elsewhere. Strangers, plants, animals, how dare you reach our shores? Articles on the topic abound. We hold conferences, organize world summits on the urgency of the struggle against all that is not indigenous, local, and national. We advise the user to eradicate by any means necessary species not featured on the authorized lists. We pass laws, set up quarantines, insure. Once the system is in place...