Professionally we were an independent group of experts, and our working program for the coming years was oriented in three directions: the fight against desertification with the inclusion of the issue in the agenda of the Earth Summit to be held in Rio in 1992 and the support to awareness and education campaigns around the initiatives led by Riel Huaorani; the support to indigenous people with the planning and organisation of a world congress to follow the results of UNCED; the implementation of relevant studies and the organization of training opportunities in the fields of development, environment and sylvilization. 

The partnership agreement we had UNEP/ROA was defining quite well the type of expertise we could offer to governments, international agencies, municipalities. It eventually led to the creation of SEEDS - Seattle Experts for Environment, Development and Sylvilization, freely referring to the "green" version of Chief Seattle's speech to express the spirit in which our team was working and wanted to work. 

At community level, we were actually looking for a place or a country where we could live in peace, without any social pressure. To some extend, natural eco-living had become the cornerstone of our community life. It was something existential rather than mystical or intellectual. Since people had met for the first time in 1976 we had gone through many experiences and developed close ties similar to a big famiy. 

People had seen us in France, and all over Europe, on the road and in the woods. We had founded non-profit-making organizations, arranged workshops, classes, congresses, festivals and awareness campaigns. We had created alternative shops and restaurants. We had learned how to pick up and transform plants for or own needs. We had planted thousands of trees and experimented with organic and native ways of gardening. We had walked some 15,000 km across mountains and forests. We had sung and danced  human solidarity, natural harmony and peace. We had witnessed the return to values that had brought us forward. We had studied, researched and revived craft techniques and vernacular knowledge that people had forgotten, although they were in use in remote periods of history.

In the beginning of the 80's, we had reached a peak of two hundred people fully involved with the experimentation of sylvilization. This was the way of the “savages”, another way of seeing the world from and through Sylva, the Forest. We had a strong motivation to innovate, culturally and socially, and were eager to free ourselves as much as possible from the yoke of history which sees in Western industrial civilization the topmost stage of human progress. At least to experience with some kind of alternative. 

We had built a community of interest and there was still an ocean to be explored. We were neither a New Age community, nor a band of hippies, nor a group of ecologists. We were all these, and a bit more. But deep in our heart, we felt ourselves to be a small tribe, a small nation, without land and with an urgent need for a permanent settlement where we could build the forest eco-village of our dreams, ationalize all what had happened to us within those years and live in peace with ourselves and the world around us. 

We felt a close connection with those pioneers and adventurers who had gradually fled to the New World when Europe was broken down by war, famine and epidemics, and who had woven links of heart and blood with native peoples. Most of them preferred life in the wilderness among the tribes to the constraints of the Cross and the Sword in the colonies. In 1864, a new first nation called the Métis was born on the "Frontier" between Canada and the USA. We thought it could be a direction where to look. One reason was that descendants of the Metis were living among us. 

This internal debate about our identity as a group was quite interesting. To us as individuals, our passports meant very little. “The Earth is our home and the universe our garden” as someone put it. We were a collection of citizens from many different countries: France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Japan, Brazil, North Africa, Senegal, Canada, Poland, Russia, Denmark, Sweden. And we had many more nationalities or "ethno-culturalities": Roms, Basques, Normans, Bretons, Slovenes, Walloons, Ainus, Wolofs,  Berbers, Micmacs, Malecites.

One day, Erkki Pulliainen, a scientist and member of Finnish Parliament, visited our temporary camp in Northern Sweden. He thought that we were just what his country needed. He promised to arrange a social contract with the government so that we could implement a seven year research program on original cultures in his country. In the same time we could build our forest eco-village that would also become living and learning center. In 1991 some of us started moving to Finland.

The ESSOC program - Ecological Survival and Sylvilization with the aid of Original Cultures - was based on the idea we could implement field and experimental studies on a wide range of issues related to forest eco-living in Finnish wilderness. After preliminary visits to several places in Finland, a pilot village was set up two hundred kilometers North of the Polar Circle. Arrangements were made with the owners of a tourist resort who agreed to gave us the free use of a large piece of forest land. Things went very well for a while. We could start carrying some botanical research and getting used to the climate.

It didn't last long. Soon they wanted us to become a tourist attaction. Those contrasting interests with our staff and the commissioners of the programme left us without grounds to allow the renewal of our permit to stay in the country. Made up stories of all kinds started to circulate about us. We got on the first page of the media during several months. TV crews arrived even from Japan. At first we had been seen as an object of curiosity, but very soon it seemed that we had become a national threat. 

There was such a heavy pressure that we were invited to leave the country. Finns joined forces and started an independent campaign of information backed up by a committee of renown academicians. The Ombudsman for Aliens,who had visited us several times was on our side. But in the end nothing could be done to withdraw the decision of the authorities. Some human rights organizations saw it as an act of mass deportation.

While we had made an appeal to the Supreme Court of Finland, we organized a protest march. Over the years, walking had become a second nature. We had lost everything in this country. Before leaving, we wanted at least to save our reputation  by meeting personally as much people as possible. Within 5 months we walked across Finland from Helsinki to North Cape. In October 1993 most of us were gone. Finnish governement kept our passports. As a result, we had to refer to our own embassies and consular services to get them back. 

For months I had been put on the frontline organising our peaceful resistance.  Handling our relations with Finnish media and authorities had been my main duty. I was exhausted. Many people involved with the ESSOC programme would never come back to Finland. It seems that exploring the "old ways" as a group, together with the concrete implications it meant, had become a political crime. A new Europe was to be born.