Levet forcefuly denounces the "green totalitarianism" of recent environmentalists, pleading for an environmentalism of the senses, of gratitude.

Employing an approach as political as it is philosophical and literary, informed by such authors as Jean Giono, Albert Camus, Colette, Italo Calvino, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Vaclav Havel, Bérénice Levet proposes a different kind of environmentalism: one of the senses, founded on humans and their experiences, attachments, loyalties, and need for continuity and stability – needs shouted down by reigning ecologists and their party line. This work offers a profound and precious reflection on the human condition. It is a hymn to western and especially French civilization.