My name is Mathieu and it has now been five years that I have set up my roots in the village of La Grande Fosse, a small hamlet of 130 inhabitants in the Vosges mountains. I have built my own strawbale home using almost exclusively local natural materials (earth, straw, wood and stone) and with the help of no petrol-based machinery. Thanks to its passive solar design, I can live in this house all year round with no heating or electricity expenses, allowing me to dedicate my time to produce my own food and to missions that are dear to my heart: biodiversity protection and local resilience.

Coming from academia and having spent some years doing research on climate change politics at doctoral level, I set up Habiter la terre to put to good use the pedagogical and scientific skills that I had the chance to acquire. The state of environmental breakdown calling on us to radically shift our lifestyles, it became to me obvious that the theoretical reflections that my years at university allowed me to have needed to be accompanied by concrete hands-on work on the ground.

Our ways of building, of feeding ourselves, of heating our homes, of entertaining ourselves – all of our ways of inhabiting the world and to be in relation with the rest of life on earth have to be rethought. Here lie the ambitions of the permaculture mouvement that seeks to bring about permanent cultures capable of standing through time without carrying the seeds of their own demise. Well beyond simple gardening techniques, it is a whole array of vernacular skills and knowledge of our local ecology that we need to (re)discover. Having spent the past ten years gathering and putting into practice such knowledge on subjects as diverse as natural building, agroforestry, botany, mycology or microbiology applied to food, I can offer my assistance in your personal (or collective!) journey towards a more resilient lifestyle.