The environmental destruction of our planet is tangible. As the effects of this destruction encroach upon everyday, radical environmental movements are proliferating. From blockades, treehouses and (re-)occupations of planned industrial zones, activist emit a physical cry of “no pasaran” to extractivist industries and (colonial) states. These sites of resistance are, however, more than an outburst of civil disobedience. They are also sites of worldmaking. Through the collective activity of building infrastructure of resistance, activists develop and revive alternative ontologies and ways of living together. For Indigenous peoples active in reoccupations, environmental struggles are constitutively entangled with decolonial struggles. Their struggle for land is intertwined with the resurgence of Indigenous knowledges and practices. At anti-fracking protests in the UK, feminists mix knowledge of Indigenous peoples with neo-paganism and evocations of the suffragettes. At the protests against lignite mining in Germany, villagers hold Christian-inspired services for cut-down trees next to an anarchism-inspired forest and village occupation. Environmental protests draw on a wide variety of sources for inspiration. By doing so, they form unexpected coalitions where knowledge is transferred far over social, local and national boundaries.
Through multi-sited ethnographical fieldwork in Europe and so-called British-Columbia, I show that Indigenous reoccupations, anarchists ZADs and neo-spiritual movements, although often operating in different socio-political contexts, share a fundamental rejection of the reductionist and oppressive way Man (with a capital M) treats nature (including humans). Each in their own way recognizes the importance of building post-anthropocentric and post-naturalist alternative worlds that better embody the entanglement between humans and the rest of nature and between ideas and matter. At the same time, the juxtaposition of different worldmaking projects within and across these camps draws out some contradictions and difficulties that activists face in their attempts to establish ways of seeing and being in the world that are better suited to an environmentally sustainable future. The juxtaposition of different ontologies poses the questions How do we go beyond dichotomous approaches of ontologies as either modern or Indigenous? How do ontologies transform? And how can different ontologies coexist?
Speaker's Bio
Anton Vandevoorde is a PhD student at the Department for Conflict and Development at Ghent University. He studied geography (Ghent University), global studies (Ghent, Vienna & Dalhousie Universities) and sociology (Binghamton). He does ethnographic, participatory research at environmental protest camps in Europe and North America, where he studies the creation and revival of alternative ontologies for a sustainable world.