“I think more than half of what I planted died” Louis is standing in a garden near the beach in Belgium where he has been trying to plant a food forest over the last 7 years. “There are plants that survived.” he goes on. His goal? Prove that food forests work in the worst conditions possible. Sand, not soil. “I probably won’t feed the world with it, I won’t even feed myself with this. But it gives me a lot of hope that with a very tiny piece of land you can create so much.”

Louis de Jaeger • louisdj.com • Linkedin • @louis.de.jaeger

Louis de Jaeger is one of the people I’m building this club around. His story sits across many things at once: soil, water, monarchy, music, abundance, poison, food and what we call climate strategy.

Louis was sitting between other sustainability speakers at Elena Dom’s book launch in Antwerp. A woman in the audience asked what she could do to get her school community more invested in its garden, she was doing most of the work herself. Louis said, "Try harder." The room laughed. Then applauded.

I was biting my lips, sitting on the automatic solutions I would have loved to tell the Canadian. My head works like this: problem – solution. I have solutions ready for all my friends when they tell me about their problems. (And when they don’t). But Louis advice was far more advanced. Simple, to the point. His head works like this: problem - 1000 possible solutions, try till 1 works. What if we knew for sure that we only need to try 12 times to make our new business idea work? Or ask 7 businesses for financial support for our community garden to flourish? We’d try right? We’d try harder. 

"I am relentlessly trying, trying" Louis replies when I tell him about this moment on the phone. He's on his way to work, just jumped on the train when I reach him.

When I asked for an interview he said "call me." When I called asking for 30 minutes, he said: "Now? Okay, I like spontaneous." We talked about his film Dune Forest, which he made with his friend Liener Van Hauwaert. We got lost in the specifics of pioneer plants, dandelions and the power of the Jerusalem artichoke. When we say goodbye I’m still not sure who this guy is apart from a very enthusiastic lover of everything edible, who has decided not to give up. Fiercely.

"If I'm already doing it, then I want it," he says. "If that means I'm in the mud, then I'm in the mud." Everything Louis does, he tells me, boils down to regeneration, inspiration and celebration.

Last week Louis launched his new book in Brussels: Red eerst jezelf, en dan pas de planeet. Save yourself first, then the planet. Why we urgently need more egoists.

The subtitle wants us to bristle. More egoists? Paalease! But look at the story we are standing in right now. Our status quo argues: more means worse and self means selfish.

Louis is fed up with that. He’s reframed the more. More health. More peace. More life. More clean water in your tap, more food without pesticides, more clothes that aren't shedding PFAS into your skin, more cookware that doesn't emit fumes into your lungs.

The book's research is a catalogue of what consumer capitalism has taken from us under the cover of abundance. The more he's arguing for is what was always there before everything got poisoned. The egoism is taking your own body seriously enough to refuse the poisoned version.

Saving yourself first because you can't save anything else from a body that's being slowly degraded by what you eat, wear, breathe, touch. This is degrowth without the deprivation framing that loses every political fight. Louis is refusing the framing where suffering is the climate strategy.

“We should not be against bad things, but for better things. Not doing less bad things, but more better things.” The climate narrative of less has failed because it asks people to martyr themselves while the systems poisoning them continue. Louis is naming that, and offering the inversion: Your body is an ecosystem. Take it seriously.

My favourite Louis move? Co-founding the Ten Lives Festival together with Nastassia Gumuchdjian & Nathan Stranart. They began crowdfunding last year and they’ve thrown the first party at the beginning of May, only a few weeks ago. The whole thing is based on a quotation from Louisa Ziane: “to change the world, throw a better party than those destroying it.”

Climate work that the activist canon would call serious takes place under the same tent as the dance floor. Hundreds of hectares restored in the mornings. Us people doing the restoring. Dancing starts when the work is done.

The festival is the visible part, the invisible part is the research, education, and community building tied to it. If you want to come dig and dance, save your October tickets here.

Louis doesn't wait for the conditions to be right. He builds the alternative until the old story looks absurd. He started a food forest in sand, wrote a book on saving yourself first, and has thrown a festival that combines digging holes with dancing. He doesn’t go alone, he moves quicker because others are at his side.

Mythmaker | Louis didn't argue for food forests. He built one and filmed it. The festival where you dig in the morning and dance at night. The book that argues we need more egoists, not fewer. These are worlds under construction, visible enough that people can join it without needing to be convinced first. The myth: don't prepare for collapse. Prepare for paradise.

Opener | If sand can't grow food, plant food anyway. If the climate narrative tells you to suffer, host the party instead. Louis's move: the conditions are never the point. He plants in sand because that's the worst soil. He throws a party because that's the wrong format for activism. He writes to the King asking him to switch his lawns to meadows because … why the heck not? He keeps trying. Relentlessly.

Why are you waiting for the conditions to be right before trying?

Stay curious. Stay courageous.

PS (from Louis): “If someone ever asks you the question: is it better to plant trees, even if you know they will only be there temporarily, the answer is always YES.”

^{Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.}