What connection is there between a contemporary French environmental activist and a great Italian novel written seventy years ago?
In *The Baron in the Trees*, Italian novelist Italo Calvino tells the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a twelve-year-old aristocrat in the 18th century who refuses to eat the snails forced upon him, gets angry, climbs an oak tree in the garden, and decides never to come down again. He remains there until his death, decades later, reading, hunting, eating, entertaining guests (including Voltaire and Napoleon), waging war against the Moors, organizing the peasants, and finally clinging to the rope of a passing hot-air balloon and disappearing forever.
Cosimo did not climb trees to escape the world, but to see it better, understand it, and take action within it. He understood that, to think clearly, one must step outside conventional perspectives. And that one must live entirely according to one’s principles.
How can one not draw a parallel with Thomas Brail, the activist arborist from the Tarn region who, in 2019, began a hunger strike perched in one of Mazamet’s century-old plane trees, which were threatened with felling to make way for a parking lot. Buoyed by his success, he embarked on other battles, all of which were lost: in Le Mans, where 200 maple trees were ultimately cut down to make way for hydrogen-powered bus routes; and in the Tarn, where century-old groves are set to be destroyed to complete construction of the A69 highway, for which the Council of State has just granted final approval (June 29, 2026).
Thomas Brail’s fight is vital: during this heat wave, we must remember that the only way to reduce this terrible threat is to capture CO₂, which is its cause. And this can only be done by the oceans and forests, which release oxygen into the atmosphere, store carbon in their biomass (trunks, branches, roots) and in the forest soil—often for centuries—regulate local precipitation, maintain soil moisture, cool cities, and protect groundwater.
Today, deforestation is accelerating at a tragic rate: Between 1985 and 2022, the Amazon biome lost 640,000 km² of forest, or just over 11% of its area. From 2002 to 2024, 16% of the world’s tree cover disappeared.
In 2024 alone, 8.1 million hectares of forest were lost worldwide. There are multiple causes: urbanization, industrialization, and the production of seven key agricultural commodities (palm oil, soy, beef, timber, cocoa, coffee, and rubber). This deforestation prevents the capture of more than 10% of global CO2 emissions each year.
And yet, despite advances in scientific understanding of the ecological role of trees, legislation around the world still considers them solely in terms of their economic function and market value.
Thomas Brail is not the only one fighting this battle: In Brazil, the renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado has planted and nurtured nearly ten million trees over the past 25 years and restored more than 2,000 water sources, at a cost of approximately 20 million euros. Niger has also developed, in collaboration with rural communities, an original and low-cost approach known as FMNR (Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration): instead of planting trees, farmers allow existing stumps to regrow naturally while managing them; millions of hectares have thus been regenerated locally since the 1980s, at a negligible cost.
Global public initiatives are less effective: “The Great Green Wall” (a flagship initiative of the African Union, launched in 2007 as a 15-km-wide corridor stretching 7,800 km across Africa from Dakar to Djibouti and passing through 11 Sahelian countries), which was intended to reforest, promote biodiversity, improve food security, create jobs, and transform the lives of millions of people, has so far achieved only 4% of its goal set twenty years ago. And in Europe, it wasn’t until 2024 that the first regulation on nature restoration mandated a target of zero net loss by 2030, followed by an increase—without any monitoring mechanisms or funding to ensure compliance
The common lesson from all these cases is clear: what works isn’t just planting trees (and quickly, because time is working against us), but protecting existing forests, involving local communities, and maintaining political will over the long term. This is exactly what Thomas Brail and Juliano Salgado are seeking to build, each on their own scale.
Like Italo Calvino’s Cosimo, Thomas Brail climbs trees to protest a social order he deems unjust. Like Cosimo, he lives there for days or weeks. Like Cosimo, his action is both concrete (blocking the bulldozers) and symbolic (declaring that a tree is worth more than a highway). Like Cosimo, he chooses a different vantage point to show that we must look at the world differently; and to show that we must observe humanity from a place that it scorns but that he sanctifies, forcing others to look up. Like Cosimo’s, Thomas’s circle sees him as a visionary. The only difference: while for Cosimo the tree is first and foremost the site of his personal freedom, Brail climbs trees for the sake of the trees themselves. Calvino writes a metaphor for the committed intellectual; Brail experiences a concrete environmental emergency. Both are necessary: thinking and acting. Ceaselessly.
This is what Calvino had understood as early as 1957: there is a fundamental human stance, common to both the intellectual and the man of action—that of someone who knows it is almost too late, but who acts anyway and refuses to remain rooted to the ground with the others; not out of arrogance, but out of loyalty to something greater: the salvation of humanity.