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Richard Grove’s book, Green Imperialism (1995), has had a lasting influence on environmental history and, moreover, on the understanding of the links between climate, environment and the Enlightenment. In choosing to see the Ile de France under the governance of Pierre Poivre, who was supervising commissionaire there between 1767 and 1772, as a laboratory of the theories of dessication applied to the protection of forests, Grove displaced the roots of environmentalism geographically from the United States of the 1870s to the colonial peripheries of the eigtheenth century and, thematically, from the protection of wild nature to the politics of climate. Thus, Poivre became, in the English language, a central figure of environmental history while still being overlooked by the readers of his own native country.This article retraces the reception of the Pierre Poivre who features in Green Imperialism and became in the years 2000 the first thinker of global climate change. Recently, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz pointed to the limits of such a thesis. This article shows that such a reading of Poivre is in fact a return to a more faithful reading to the 1995 original edition which allocated a smaller place to the issue of climate change. This opens up a new reading of Poivre as an actor among others in a vast and nebulous Enlightenment web, intersecting military as well as scientific rivalries. This Enlightenement Ecology – the French side of which still remains to be explored – was focused on the interrelations between soil and cultures, delineating a largely forgotten dimension of nature conservation.