Chronicles on www.philomag.com, starting in March 2025

On my Mastodon account from February 25, 2025 (@PierreCassouNogues@mastodon.social)

From March to June 2025, I plan to cycle along the Atlantic coastline. Somewhere between a travelogue and a theoretical essay, these chronicles serves as a snapshot of the coastline in the face of the environmental crisis. They are also a reflection on the forms of coexistence involved in technological objects.

The French coastline, in its current form, gradually took shape in the mid-19th century with the rise of seaside tourism. Today, it is threatened by the environmental crisis: forest fires, coastal erosion, and new forms of beach pollution. This slow-paced journey is, above all, an attempt to document, in a philosopher’s manner, the state of the coastline in the face of this crisis—the challenges it faces but also the projects aiming to renegotiate humanity’s relationship with its environment.

Technological objects—such as the bamboo bicycle on which I will travel thousands of kilometers, a bike I built myself—should be considered as “machines for coexistence,” much in the way Le Corbusier spoke of housing as “machines for living.” Each object, in fact, implies a certain form of coexistence with an extended environment, linking human and non-human elements, the surrounding landscape, and even a distant horizon. This journey by bicycle offers the opportunity for a slow reflection on the forms of coexistence embedded in our ways of life and everyday objects.

The cartographer Claude Masse, who explored the region from La Teste to La Rochelle in the early 18th century, described in the texts accompanying his maps a coastline that was sparsely populated—formed of shifting dunes that buried the few villages and of marshlands. The sea, he wrote, “makes even the bravest man’s hair stand on end.”

In the 19th century, the development of seaside tourism, the planting of pine forests, and the arrival of the railway completely transformed the coastline. Several travel guides provided a second description of the area—this was the coastline of the Landes forest and the emerging seaside resorts. Sophie de Lalaing, for example, traveled much of the coast on foot over four summers to document it in great detail (1886–1890). Another key reference is The Aquitaine Coastline by Élisée Reclus (1862). This book, along with the broader work of the communist, anarchist, and vegetarian thinker, raises important questions about human-driven transformations of ecological environments.

The philosophical inquiry I propose offers a description of the coastline at a time when seaside resorts and the Landes forest are facing the environmental crisis. This chronicle is not a geography textbook, nor a sociological essay, but a travelogue—a kind of tourist guide for an imagined future.