Down the rabbit hole

Faced with all the remarkable initiatives I have come across, I keep asking myself how to scale them: how do you make agroecology, the bioeconomy, the circular economy or nature-based solutions the new foundations of our societies? I wrote this book, "Changing the Rules of the Game", to try to set out a broader, more systemic framework for the tools we now have — economic, financial, technological, governance — to carry transitions through, and to set them against the locks that hold change back and open a way past them. Taking on the transformation of food systems is like going down Alice's rabbit hole: the further my research went, the more I kept finding new scientific advances, innovative experiments, inspiring initiatives and unlikely collaborations — but also striking parallels with other episodes in our history, and other economic, financial or political locks that help us rethink the future. Since I am the sort of person who reads the bibliography first and then works back to the source of the source of the source, this dive into the heart of the calorie machine could have gone on for a very long time. My publishers, Audrey and François, are wonderful, patient, committed people — and they played their part as Occam's razor to perfection: no clutter, no getting lost in digressions. The work had to end somewhere. This blog is the logical continuation of that work: so many questions still open, so many fields to explore, voices to give room to, patterns to bring out, solutions to share — and I will try to keep them alive here.