The Garden of Babylon: Nature, a Revolutionary Force – Bernard Charbonneau

Bernard Charbonneau’s The Garden of Babylon (1969) is not only an impassioned, deeply personal and nostalgic manifesto on behalf of nature, traditional farming and rural culture—which are being destroyed by industrial and urban expansion and by government policies supposedly designed to save them but which in fact only promote financial interests and mass tourism—but also a revolutionary polemic on behalf of human freedom, whose indivisible unity with nature was ambiguously reflected in the “feeling of nature” that arose during the 18th century: “it was no mere coincidence that the century that discovered nature was also the century of the individual and his freedom”.