The 20th
anniversary
edition
March 14 & 15, 2025
at UNESCO • Paris

Eric Julien has three qualifications that led him from Political Science in Grenoble to a DESS in Multimedia Systems, Social Communication, and Information Systems, before "ending" with a DEA in Geography. He wouldn’t be here today without his incredible encounter with the Kogi people of Colombia, who healed and welcomed him in the highlands of the Sierra Nevada more than 30 years ago.

Still an entrepreneur and APM expert, he is also a writer and the founder of the association Tchendukua ici & ailleurs, here and elsewhere, which supports the restitution of ancestral lands for the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, particularly the Kogis and the Wiwas. The association also supports the regeneration of biodiversity, fosters awareness-raising activities, and promotes dialogue between ancestral knowledge and scientific expertise.

Eric, along with Muriel Fifils, co-founded the Ecole de la Nature et des Savoirs and Caminando, a primary school that guides children on the path to Nature and Life.

Eric, as we can see, you have a rich and unique career. Can you “set the scene” and share the key moments, fractures, successes, and hopes?

Eric Julien: A bit of Geography, lots of mountains, from hang gliding in the Alps to the French Alps, political science, then business consulting, training, and a long journey with indigenous peoples—humans who still know how to call upon the essentials. I nearly died several times, notably from pulmonary edema at high altitude, and it was the Kogi Indians who saved my life. Despite my advanced studies, I had never learned silence, humility, or solidarity in vulnerability. These are beautiful teachings these societies shared with me. Looking back, it could be said that my career has been that of a generalist, much like our old family doctors, who had an overall view of their patients, which allowed them to contextualize a pathology and possibly shed new light on it. Some might say that being too much of a generalist means you’re a specialist in nothing. Others would argue that the broad, dynamic view of a generalist allows for making connections that others might miss. This broad perspective resonates with me, especially as a Geographer, a discipline that invites dialogue around our commons—territories and the nature that unfolds there.

My fractures? The wounds of my youth, soul wounds, which took me a long time to identify and heal.

The successes? My family, my children, and in another realm, 3,000 hectares of land bought, reforested, and returned to the indigenous communities of the Sierra Nevada in Colombia. With the restitution of this land, there is the trust that we’ve managed to rebuild with these people whom our modern societies have long despised and destroyed. There is also the joy and simplicity that sometimes emerge in some of the participants I take to nature, where we touch together the beauty and joyful peace of life. That is my greatest happiness and my hope for each new day ahead. Walking beautifully toward a simple and joyful fraternity.

When you decided to launch the association, you truly embarked on an entrepreneurial journey that covers many aspects: what is your vision of intention and action? How do you articulate the two?

There’s this quote from Goethe – "As soon as we commit ourselves fully, Providence also starts to move, helping us and bringing about all sorts of things that otherwise would never have happened…" With Jacqueline, a loyal friend, in 1997, we started from a blank sheet of paper, with a deep intention: to return the lands to the indigenous societies of the Sierra. And it’s true that all sorts of things happened, enabling us to move forward. Patrons appeared, like Paquita, whom I thank here, Sébastien, and many others; opportunities arose; movement itself facilitates the emergence of the unexpected. After that, one has to know how to surround oneself and solidify everything, adding a little organization, values, communication to shift from a management of impulse to one of accompaniment, but trying never to stifle the initial dream. I feel that vibration precedes action, it conditions it, and action precedes reflection. This may seem paradoxical, but it’s true! If I had started with reflection, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.

Why did you choose twelve years ago to associate a "nature school" for primary children with your project?

We now know the proven beneficial effects of mindfulness, especially in nature. We, modern people, need evidence. The combined effects of these two practices are excellent for both health and psychological balance, for children and adults alike. "We are the world, we function like the world, but we have forgotten it. We need to bring the world and nature back into our actions and thoughts," the philosopher Michel Serres once told us. Having become urbanites disconnected from nature, it is vital that we reconnect with the external nature, the condition for linking with our inner nature. Our modern societies have a vital need for reconciliation and peace with nature, from which we originate and depend. "Man is nature becoming conscious of itself," the libertarian Geographer Elisée Reclus reminded us. But one must first open the way, show the path, learn, and practice, especially for primary school children, this crucial age that marks the transition from childhood to adolescence. Nature is first and foremost an experience. An experience that provides sensations and emotions. Emotion moves us. In our current era, where the future seems full of anxiety, it is an immense responsibility to restore confidence in children, to rekindle their passion, to prepare them for the challenges of the world ahead, and to show them that there are adults who can guide them on this path. In our country, schooling is mandatory, but pedagogy is free. This is constitutional. It seemed essential to us to bring life back into school, to make children eager to go to school, to inject some enthusiasm back into their learning. (* "Touched by life").

If you had to summarize the "essential" observations you think are relevant at this stage of humanity’s evolution, what would they be?

Find peace, make peace within ourselves so that we can make peace with nature. Let’s not fool ourselves, climate change is primarily in our minds. It reflects our inner turmoil. The Kogi Indians, with whom we were traveling through a tunnel during a trip to France, asked me – "Why do you make holes in the earth like that?" I still hear myself answering that it was to get there faster, to avoid going around. After a pause, a second question came: "But how far do you want to go faster?" What is the meaning of our frantic development, this always wanting to go faster, which exhausts us and takes us away from ourselves? On our life paths, there comes a point when the important is no longer enough. It no longer nourishes our souls and leaves a bitter taste. The frog has become bigger than the ox, and ??? Then we set out in search of the essential: joy, presence to the body, to others, the quality of our relationships, meaning. "How long has it been since you sang, how long has it been since you danced, how long since you told a story," said the wise man, and you’re surprised to be sick. The inner child is there, lurking, joyful, let’s learn to awaken it before it’s too late.

For you, in this particular context, what would a desirable future look like?

I’m not sure it’s necessary or even interesting to wish for a desirable future, as desirable as it may seem. Perhaps we should just try to step out of control and allow life to emerge and breathe a living future. For that, we would need to explore a stance that moves away from doing, controlling, and mentalizing, to allow the living – of which nature is the expression – to express itself through us, in us, and on our territories. What if we integrated nature not as an object, but as a subject with which we must interact? What would it whisper to us? Life obeys principles, laws – the laws of "SE," as the Kogis call them. Universal laws that sustain life, while we counter them with human laws that we change when it suits us, based on our interests and ideologies, which don’t respect life. Worse still, they ignore or destroy it. Imagine, we managed this terrible feat of turning roses into deadly plants because a pregnant florist, handling these flowers, passed the chemical pesticides used in the greenhouses to her daughter, who died of cancer at age 11. This ignorance, this disrespect for the laws of life, is largely responsible for the imbalances and many of the pathologies in our modern societies. We need to learn to preserve nature rather than control it, to listen to it, to work with it, rather than constrain it and try to subjugate it. "Know yourself, and you will know the universe and men," said the wise man. We often think the solutions to our difficulties lie outside of us, in projects, technical inventions, new ideas, or activism. There will be no "desirable" external future as long as we have not made peace with our own inner nature, agitated, immature, and cut off from life. Life is unity, interrelation, non-duality, emergence. Our modern societies divide, separate, harm, oppose, and create conflict. A desirable future might simply consist of trying to live the values of the republic at last. Bringing them down from the pediments of our schools and town halls, and applying them with young people, teachers, elected officials, and citizens. Fraternity, if it were truly lived, would undoubtedly open the doors to a desirable future much more reliably than geo-engineering or the power of artificial intelligence (AI) compensating for the sad limits of natural intelligence (NI).

And now, what do we do? What, from your perspective, are the most urgent issues to address and immediate actions to take to move toward this desirable future?

Our modern societies suffer from a major imbalance. THE earth, LIFE—this imbalance comes from the destruction, in our organizations, businesses, territories, schools, and imaginations, of the sensitive, intuitive, invisible, dynamic, circular, feminine dimension of the world and life. A dimension dominated and damaged by a controlling, rational, analytical, linear praxis, essentially masculine, which alone decides the direction of our modern societies. The feminine gives life, it allows for the emergence of the unfulfilled. The masculine controls it. If there’s only one thing to do, it’s to reopen feminine spaces where we can imagine a desirable future together, nourish a new narrative that sets things in motion. We need some courage and audacity to shift from "I" to "we." I’m sure we can collectively do this.

Our next Université de la terre will focus on the theme "NATURE = FUTURE": what does that inspire in you?

It’s time we finally ask the question and, more importantly, make that connection. How could we have imagined for a second that our future could be separate from nature? Before being beings of culture, we are beings of nature. We are the children of a long and mysterious history, in fragile interdependence with all forms of life, from the smallest to the largest, that develop on our common vessel, the Earth. The indigenous Kogi people of Colombia, massacred and long despised by our self-designated "civilized" modernity, now confront us with the following alternative:

• Either we continue colonizing the earth, exploiting its resources, damaging its life webs (rivers, forests, oceans), and we will die,
• Or we open a dialogue with societies like the Kogis, who have not lost their alliance with nature, and we could try to invent a new perspective on the world to save what can still be saved and extend the story of humanity. "It’s not by doing more or better of the same thing that we’ll get different results," Einstein, one of our shamans, reminded us. We must try something different. Dialoguing with indigenous societies could open the path to a new paradigm, one that would joyfully invite us to make peace with nature. "If you move forward, you’re dead. If you move backward, you’re dead. If you stay still, you’re dead," a Zulu proverb reminds us. So, let’s move forward, joyfully.

Interview by Coryne Nicq