Dream Big by Elsa Grangier

To the question "Which planet are we leaving to our children?" “, Elsa Grangier responds in echo: “What children are we leaving to our planet? ". In his book dream big, the director tells the backstage of a collective adventure, that of the "Lobby de Poissy", the first movement to protect the planet represented by children.

Once upon a time… a class of CM2 educated in a disadvantaged suburb of this town of Yvelines. Anxious to protect the sentient beings who inhabit the Earth, the students and their teacher Anaïs Willock succeeded in bringing together 310 young people - including students from Reunion, Guyana and French Polynesia - from ten European states to think and write , together, the first European Declaration of the Rights of the Planet and Life (1)

The author, who was part of this adventure, convinced "that the school is the cradle of civic engagement", reveals with a tremendous sense of suspense the many twists and turns. Throughout these 192 pages, we share with emotion the hopes, victories and setbacks of the Poissy Lobby, which always dreams higher. Up to the firmament. From their green class, in 2017 in Isère, where they watched the stars hang the sky from their five branches at their presentation, on November 27, 2019, of their inspiring Declaration in the heart of the hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in which floats the blue flag adorned with twelve gold stars, passing by the arrival in their school of the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves who has become their lucky star. At each stage of the journey, Elsa Grangier takes the reader on board, as during the meeting of the students with the former President of the Republic, François Hollande, to whom one of them asks the annoying question: "Why do we congratulate ourselves on the Paris Agreement when we can't even get it applied? ". Another significant meeting, with Nicolas Hulot. The former Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition describes government contradictions to them and notes, faced with the relevance of their questions: "They have understood that we say everything that is necessary, but that we do nothing of this. that need ".

The strength of these "advocates of planète to use the expression of Karima Delli, the MEP who opened the doors of this institution to them, is to speak from the heart. Didn't Hubert Reeves himself say that "the energies are mobilized when you speak to the heart, not to the mind"? Reading this book, released at a time when the Coronavirus is spreading globally, we too begin to "dream big": as painful as this pandemic is, may it lead us to see where the essential is and to implement everything, as this "positive" Lobby invites us to do, to preserve the living.