Overview
Piet Haerens is the founder of haedes, where he has served as Chief Soul & Strategy Officer since January 2020. He is based in Gent. In July 2019 he founded S@lto Consulting, which he also still runs, and from October 2020 to September 2025 he was Vice President of the Belgian-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce.
He spent more than a decade at IMDC, joining in June 2007 as a project manager for coastal and marine infrastructure and for offshore wind farms, and going on to work as an ISO auditor, knowledge manager for coastal and marine infrastructures, commercial head of the offshore, dredging and environment department, and finally CEO from January 2017 to January 2019. Earlier he was a project manager and advisor at HAECON INTERNATIONAL from 2000 to 2007, a researcher at Universidade do Algarve - CIMA from 2005 to 2006, and a project engineer at Geologica.
He holds an MSc in engineering with a focus on topography from KU Leuven Ghent Campus and an MSc in coastal and marine studies from Universidade do Algarve, and has since studied regenerative development and kynology.
Career history
In the news
- This afternoon I took my coffee in the garden, stood still and looked at the apples on the trees. Ripe. Heavy on the branch, but no one, even not me, making time anymore to harvest what's given. That image stayed. These days we talk about climate-crisis, meta-crisis, poly-crisis — but "crisis" is the wrong word. It comes from the Greek "krinein" — to separate, to decide. Naming our condition this way is an act of separation. A crisis is a deviation from a normal state. We haven't deviated. We're exactly where the story we've told
- Physics and philosophy. That's the subtitle of Carlo Rovelli's latest book. You could call him a theoretical physicist - but that is a label to simplify reality. "On the Equality of All Things" makes you feel it. No thing holds a higher degree of reality than another, because nothing possesses properties as a self-contained unit. Is blue the color of the sky? The color of the sky only exists in contact with my eye. I see blue, because of how I am shaped by what connects with me. "The sky is blue" is one layer of reality. For my
- 5 The Maverick — The future is upstream. Walk along a river - and it stays a view. Walk with the River - and something in you changes. Not the water. You. The way you see, the way you be. Episode #5 is out (see comments). This is the timeless episode. Time was never the only thing the River Zêzere refused to keep track of. Ask the water where it ends, and it only asks you back where you think it began. Somewhere downstream, the water in the Zêzere becomes water no equipment will ever measure. Downstream? Not really
- Today, whilst having my early breakfast outside, I listened to the rough cut of the next episode of *The Maverick* under preparation. As I listened, a question popped into my mind and body: “Am I creating this audio story?” or “Is it the multifaceted context of my culture and the history of my ancestors, the breakfast I’m digesting, the companion of the sheep in my garden, Zazu - kin to them, and by my side -, those whose love shapes me, my colleagues, the Portuguese language, the more-than-human beings, the Zêzere itself, that are
- Earlier this summer, in a conversation about a project we thought needed motion, the Rio Zêzere unfolded us into both motion and standing still — the same one, at once. "If to river were a verb, it would mean: to take the space you are given, and to flow through it. To inhabit and to move. To rest in what holds you — and to keep going. Both at once. Always. The same verb." We tend to treat motion and rest as two states, as if we can choose, as if they are separated. But are they? They're two ways the same undivided movement shows
- The spots are not a fault. They are a story unfolding." The black mulberry trees in our garden look different. They carry light green, yellow leaves with brown spots and red edges, where I used to see fresh green full of energy leaves. My first automatic reaction was: “What’s wrong? Which disease is this? How do I fix it?” That is how I am trained. STOP ! The black mulberry tree does not let itself be reduced to a diagnosis easily. The tree rooted here before my grandfather was born. A storm once threw it to the ground. Still
- This morning I picked grapes in our garden in Flanders. Ripe, sweet grapes. Very sweet. Sweeter than ever measured. This too is "climate change," I thought. STOP ! I don't want to speak of "climate change" anymore — to read it, to hear it shouted. Say the word and the sweet grapes in Flanders become a symptom — something we watch from outside, instead of something we stand in. I want verbs. To be kin. To belong. To be included. Does it become this: "The heat asks. The root answers. The fruit sugars. I am one word in a sentence
- 4 The Maverick — No edges? Walk along a river - and it stays a view. Walk with the River - and something in you changes. Not the water. You. The way you see, the way you be. Episode #4 is out (see comments). This is the homecoming episode. Not an arrival, but an experiment in being — just as you are. Nothing added. Nothing left out. What happens when you cut the motor — and drift? The heron that was here all along — while we made our noise. The stillness is not mine — it is what holds me. The boat carries me. The river
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