The rebirth of a primary forest in Western Europe: The paradoxes of an extraordinary project

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The project to revive a primary forest in Western Europe combines the singularity—even exceptionality— of its purpose with the narrow scope of an associative framework for action. Simple at first glance—doing nothing… over an area of 70,000 hectares—this project actually raises a number of extremely complex issues. The approach it implies is part of a wider movement around free evolution and rewilding. What sets it apart, however, is that it replaces the process of gaining strength through the accumulation of local initiatives with a global perspective that is powerfully evocative. This gives the movement an unprecedented capacity to mobilize both the general public and social players. Paradoxically, however, this embodiment and the demand for concrete action that underpins it place the movement in a position of dependence on decision-making by the public authorities. For the latter, the l’association Francis Hallé (AFH) (Francis Hallé Association) project is both a political problem and an opportunity for a full-scale test of all the transformations in public policy required by the ecological transition. A project to revive a primary forest was inevitably going to be a civil-society initiative, but it requires a more open approach in terms of the conditions for its realization.