The Choice of the Campaign...
Sometimes I get carried away by our choice to live in the Countryside. The peasant common sense that flows through my veins is exasperated by certain moral lessons. Please excuse my rather loud language!
City rats, country rats…in my eyes the divide (the bill too) is there.
Daughter of an exile from Franche Comté and a woman from Auvergne from Creuse (heavy passive), I settled in the heart of the Sologne forest 32 years ago after 20 years of Parisian asphyxiation...
What we are experiencing today, in my eyes, is the result of one single error: centralization.
How could we empty our countryside in this way, cutting so many people off from their roots!
We pushed 1 farmer to replace 50 to feed all these barren cities.
And today the worst disaster is happening: city people are telling rural people how to live!!!
We, the country people, with our methane-producing cow farms, our tractors and diesel vehicles, our polluting wheat fields, our dogs unhappy to roam the woods, our noisy chickens and roosters, our hunters emptying the forests, we are the monsters devastating biodiversity.
So this morning when I got up, I asked myself what my carbon footprint was, what could I do to improve it. I will take my car three times a week, thinking about grouping everything together during these outings so as not to waste time, but dropping off the shopping at my parents' house to save them having to go out and the bread at my neighbor's.
I will eat salads from our garden as well as our tomatoes, maybe a chicken that we raised on wheat and with the leftovers of our meals or a piece of wild boar that my partner killed on the lookout and share with his 4 friends (1 wild boar for a week of looking out, our big predators are not gifted). And then we also have grapes and apples on our land... we will collect this evening the eggs of our chickens and our quails (poor little creatures raised on 1000m² of meadows).
I will spend my day working in my workshop while Fabien cuts the wood for this winter (yes because in the forest there is dead wood that we cut to allow natural regeneration), and then our neighbor, a retired farmer (another one who raised methane-producing cows to feed the people of the city), will come to drink a "cht'i canon" while bringing zucchini and we will talk about the seasons, which are not like before, the weather this winter, the rut that has started, the property opposite "who clear-cut the plot next to the pond of the motte to replant Corsican pine because it resists drought better... (Another one who will plant a forest that he will not see grow but for the next generations perhaps)" and then rheumatism is not good to get old and this damn virus... (looking at my farmer neighbor I wonder what his carbon footprint is in terms of clothing with his old sweater and his tired jeans… he doesn't care, they are comfortable for the garden). To finish the day we will take a little bike ride, taking care to leave our dogs at home so as not to disturb the wildlife (poor dogs locked up on 5000m² of land), to go and listen near François's to see if the deer are bellowing, "and that way you will see where we shot the wild boar", my man is very proud, who did not shoot the little sow with young that passed under his watchtower.
This description is not idyllic, it is our daily life, a choice of life close to nature, the real one, the one that is as beautiful as it is cruel (look at the predation of a fox on a deer fawn, the diseases that sometimes decimate the populations of large animals and you will understand what I am talking about)... nature is powerful, dangerous and fascinating, even if in Sologne it is not that of the sea or the mountains.
Do you think we want it to disappear? Aren't we the best placed to defend it, we who live it in the four corners of France, the shepherd, the forester, the hunter, the breeder, the farmer, the photographer, the walker, the small shopkeeper and the entrepreneurs of our villages... are we not passionate about our ways of life?
Ecology is not a dirty word, it has been unfairly hijacked for political purposes. We are not the polluters and murderers of nature, we live with it and by it!
And you, from the top of your buildings, your choices, your noise, visual and atmospheric pollution... you want to take away our way of life!
We are not perfect since we are human, but this summer, about fifty swallows hatched in our barn, the sparrows feed on the wheat of the chickens, and this winter tits and small passerines will come out of the forest to take refuge near the house if the season is hard.
And you, what will you do? What will you live?
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