On October 4th, I visited the Fête des Possibles (Festival of Possibilities), held near the Utopia cinema in Pont-Sainte-Marie. My feedback on this event fits into several sections of this weekly.
On the writing front #
My copies of L’Enfant des Esprits have arrived! Let me know if you’d like one. I limited this first print run to about thirty copies because the book is quite hefty and therefore harder to store (I manage my stock myself), and 9 of them are already gone.
When you print a book on paper for the first time, you must register it with the French National Library (BnF). To do so, you go on this old, very ugly but perfectly functional site: https://depotlegal.bnf.fr. To fill out the entire form, you need to have on hand:
- Your printer’s name and address (which will then be registered as the printer in your account, so if you keep the same printer for your next book, you can simply select them again. And yes, even old ugly sites can do that.)
- Your ISBN.
- Your book’s dimensions in centimeters.
- Images of the front and back covers (separate), weighing no more than 2 MB each.
- The pitch from your back cover.
It’s fairly quick, and once the online process is complete, you just need to send them the physical book in parallel. This mailing benefits from postal exemption, so shipping is free and only costs you the price of the envelope… and of one less book you obviously won’t be able to sell. All in all, it can add up.
On the web front #
This week, I was made to research the challenges of Agentic Engineering. Not that it thrilled me, but hey, sticking to reading theory doesn’t hurt too much.
That’s how I discovered Dimitris Kyrkos’s article series: https://dev.to/cyclopt_dimitrisk, which are, all in all, very interesting for avoiding major mistakes when implementing AI-based features. I also found some very sensible quotes there, such as:
“The best engineers aren’t the ones with the most complex stack. They’re the ones whose systems are still simple enough to understand when something breaks.”
“The most effective engineering decisions are often the ones where someone looked at a problem and said ‘we don’t need AI for this.’ Not because they’re against AI, but because they evaluated the problem honestly and chose the tool that matched the complexity of the problem, not the complexity of the tool.”
“Velocity tells you how fast you can create code. Maturity tells you how cheaply you can live with it.”
In the garden #
In the darkness of one of the Utopia’s screening rooms, I attended Fabrice Desjours’s talk about the various forest-garden projects he’s working on with his team, in partnership with companies, local authorities, and scientists.
He notably discussed the terrible poverty of Europe when it comes to plant biodiversity. While planting local species is a recommended approach for protecting garden biodiversity, Fabrice Desjours argues that some species we might assume to be exotic once grew in Europe and would be worth reintroducing to increase our food diversity.
Our culture of edible trees has been lost. Cédrel, caper, autumn elaeagnus, pawpaw, cucumber tree… so many little-known fruit-bearing trees that nevertheless grow very well in our regions. Fabrice Desjours is the author of several books devoted to forest-gardens, which include, among other things, species profiles interesting for our food supply.
On the culture front #
My current reads (Le Coût de la Virilité by Lucile Peytavin, Eloge de la plante by Francis Hallé) and my encounter with Fabrice Desjours at the Fête des Possibles conference continue to highlight the links between our relationship with plants and our cultural patterns.
Fabrice Desjours argues that societies around the world that primarily feed themselves through agroforestry are generally more egalitarian. And for good reason: in a forest, production isn’t visible at first glance, which greatly disadvantages the accounting logic that highly hierarchical societies need, societies where farmers hand over a percentage of their production to the ruling entity. Thus, to impose cereals in our Western societies, it was our cultural patterns that were transformed: the forest and ready-to-collect food were relegated to the idea of laziness and bestiality, and a veritable war was waged against the tree—an indispensable ally we nevertheless managed to destroy with pesticides and fertilizers. Today, we struggle to relearn that cereal-based agriculture is not the only possible model, and that agroforestry can work and be profitable.
Given the state of our soils and Europe’s new climate, awareness is urgent.
For what it’s worth #
It’s not always easy to know what to do when you find an injured animal. If you find a bird or a small mammal like a hedgehog in distress, you can contact the headquarters of the LPO (Bird Protection League). They will redirect your request to the association’s local representatives.
Unfortunately, wildlife care centers are few and far between. In the Aube region, for example, the center near Brienne will not reopen as planned. A zoological center in the Argonne volunteered to take in animals from the Aube—provided they are brought there. From Troyes, that’s a journey of over 150 km. The LPO volunteers who agree to drive the animals have set up a network via WhatsApp and organize relays so that no single person has to cover the entire route. It’s far from ideal, but that’s the situation as it stands today.