The Green King 🌎

The King’s dedication to the environment has been hard-fought. “When I went organic forty years ago, I was accused of perfidious activity,” he told me.

In this issue of The Green Dream Newsletter:

• Interview with landscape architect Bas Smets, who is redesigning the plaza and gardens surrounding Notre-Dame de Paris in a more pro-environment manner.

• King Charles III’s lifelong dedication to the environment, including his new fashion initiatives.

Four years ago, Notre-Dame de Paris, the 12th-century cathedral in the heart of Paris, caught on fire. The city was smothered in smoke for days, and hearts around the world were broken. Notre-Dame is a gem of gothic architecture, an incomparable beauty in the center of the city. A site for pilgrimage and tourism–before the blaze, more than 12 million people visited each year. That's an average of 30,000 people a day, and, during peak season, it was 50,000.

Notre-Dame has inspired artists and authors for centuries: it is the central character in Victor Hugo's 19th-century novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and it famously rang its nine glorious bells on August 24, 1944, announcing the liberation of Paris from German occupation at the end of World War II. It is also kilometer zero–all the distances from Paris to other cities in France are measured from Notre-Dame.  

As the cathedral smoldered, the city of Paris pledged to rebuild it as it was. But the mayor had also set forth a plan to make Paris the greenest city in Europe by 2030, and realized that redoing the landscape around Notre-Dame in a more ecological manner could help Paris reach that goal. In September 2021, the city launched a pro-environment design competition for the site, and last summer, the jury selected a team led by my latest guest on The Green Dream podcast: the award-winning Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets.