I was born Franco-American and grew up between New York and San Francisco. Before anything else I played tennis: former USA college tennis player, Division one at the University of California, Davis, and two years on the low level professional circuit.

I then built my life in France. I wrote four books, including one on American politics, ran the GoodPlanet Foundation, advised the President of the French National Assembly, and started teaching at Sciences Po Paris in 2013.

For years I taught and spoke about ecological transition from Paris. In 2019 we decided to go and live it. With Fanny Agostini, journalist, farm manager and co-founder of Landestini, we left the city for a farm at 900 metres in Boisset, a village of Haute-Loire, in Auvergne.Seven years later the reasons still hold: consistency between what I say and how I live, better health, resilience in the

Seven years later I would make the same choice. We eat what we grow, we are outside every day, and we are better prepared for a changing climate. It also means I no longer talk about the transition from a distance.face of climate change, and the move from speaking about the transition to actually doing it.

Our two sons, Darwin and Corto-Joa, are growing up here, between the kitchen garden, the orchard and the animals. What I now build for other children started with them.

Ferme de Chaumont: three hectares at 900 metres in Boisset, Haute-Loire. A kitchen garden of one acre, an orchard of fifty fruit trees, a goat herd of the Massif Central breed, hens, ducks, peacocks and a small forest.

I am not a commercial farmer and I do not pretend to be one. I run this farm: we grow our own food, we look after the soil and the animals, and we learn what adapting to a changing climate at altitude actually costs. It is also the registered office of Landestini, and it hosts company seminars and sustainability training retreats, so what I teach elsewhere is tested here first.

In the village, we also took over the bar-cafe of Boisset to keep a meeting place alive in a rural area where such places close one after the other.

In 2019, with Fanny Agostini, I founded Landestini, a French non-profit organization working on ecological transition, food and rural areas. I am its president. What we are after is simple: give children a better start, and protect the living world they will inherit.

Its flagship programme is the Vegetable Garden World Cup, a competition that challenges schools and youth organizations to create and care for a vegetable garden through the school year. Children sow, grow, cook and eat what they produce, and learn where food comes from.

Since the first edition in 2020-2021, more than 1,200 different schools and organizations have taken part worldwide, more than 50,000 young people, in more than 25 countries. In France alone, more than 800 different schools and more than 25,000 young people.

For the 2025-2026 edition: more than 550 schools, more than 23,000 young people and 15 countries. The 2026-2027 season, seventh French edition and fourth world edition, brings together 16 countries and territories in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

This is the part I care about most. A child who grows vegetables eats better, spends time outside, and learns to look after living things. Do that with tens of thousands of children and you change their health and the way a whole generation treats the planet.

I have taught at Sciences Po Paris since 2013. My course, The Food and Agricultural Transition: a new era of innovation, cooperation, and sustainable lifestyles, is taught in English to master's students of the School of Management and Impact.

Six sessions built around guest professionals from farming, food industry, retail and catering, with a final assignment that students present directly to them. I also taught at HEC Paris (MBA) from 2022 to 2024.

I teach the food transition in a Paris lecture room, then go back to living its consequences on a farm at 900 metres. I also teach English at the village school my eldest son attends.

Repeupler les campagnes, Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2022

Faites le plein de nature, with Fanny Agostini, Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2018

Allô Houston: les États-Unis vus par un Américain en colère, Éditions Max Milo, 2016

Le Déni climatique, with Thomas Porcher, Éditions Max Milo, 2015