Frémeaux, Isabelle, and Jay Jordan. _We Are “nature” Defending Itself Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones_, 2021. [https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=3101456](https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=3101456). # Progressive Summary This book is a rallying call to artists to quit the "Nero culture" of capitalism, to stop creating "extractivist art", and to create community by dissolving "the separations between art, activism, and everyday life." It is an indictment of artists who "make a career out of sucking value out of disaster, rebellion, animism, magic, whatever is a fashionable topic at the time, and regurgitate it into un-situated detached objects or experience elsewhere." It is an account of how squatters were able to protect "4,000 acres, with their farmland and forest, nine springs, over 200 ponds and 222km of hedgerows" from being paved over for an airport, the culmination of a 40-year-long struggle. # Key Points Isabelle Frémeaux and Jay Jordan have boycotted air travel since they met in 2003. They started The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination in 2004. It was a London-based collective that organised forms of resistance that were both joyful and effective. But after awhile, they felt increasingly discontented with the fact that after every action, they returned to lives embedded in capitalism. In 2007, they occupied a site where Heathrow Airport's third runway was planned. "Its single strip of tarmac alone would produce the same amount of carbon as all of Kenya." The [[We Are Nature Defending Itself#^11276e|bocage]] of Notre-Damedes-Landes was earmarked for an airport since the 1960s, but was put off by the whims of politicians and the market. Since it was going to be eventually turned into concrete, it was never subject to *remembrement*, the process of turning bocages into industrial agricultural land. # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Tempests > Let’s develop our power to tell yet another narrative, another story, if we manage, we will delay the end of the world. > – Ailton Krenak, journalist, philosopher, and Indigenous movement leader, of the Krenak people > Our lives were dedicated to multiplying edges of all sorts. The points where a forest meets meadowland, or the sea slaps against the shore are the most dynamic parts of an ecosystem. It’s in those slithers of space that a multitude of different species coexist, and the engine of evolution moves fastest. Our favorite edges were between art and activism, pleasure and protest, cultural institutions and radical social movements. Possibility emerges in those magical spaces of neither nor, the trans spaces, the non-binary worlds, the entangled hedges and edges. > But even 20 years ago we felt a toxic pattern repeating. As the adrenaline of those days of rage would wear off, a fissure seeped in sadness would grow inside us. We would always return home to an everyday life still besieged by capitalism. Our forms of life would continue to nourish the extractivist logic of the capitalist metropolis. We had to do something before the fissure became an abyss. > “There is only one immutable truth,” writes biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, “no being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life form less like a warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life.” > The storms are always coming, poet and activist James Baldwin reminded us, but the challenge is not so much to get through them but “to bear witness to something that will have to be there when the storm is over, to help us get through the next storm.” ## Scream > You are artists and you are working in the Capitalocene, an era marked by a system, whose obsession with limitless growth means it will always place the economy in front of life, sucking the living into its globalized circuits of capital, forever expanding and voraciously devouring more and more worlds. Some biologists call humans “the future eaters.”10 But to blame ‘humans’ is to let the real culprits off the hook: only 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the world’s resources. A recent official European Commission policy paper ended with the warning that if we go beyond 1.5 degrees of warming, “we will face even more droughts, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people; the likely demise of the most vulnerable populations—and at worst, the extinction of humankind altogether.”12 The least responsible for the climate-wrecking emissions are the worst affected by it. > > We are living in a war against the poor. We are living in a time where it is easier to imagine the collapse of life as we know it than reinventing the right ways to live together. We are living on the edge of an epoch. > > No artist or activist has ever had to work in such a moment in history, and yet our culture continues to turn its back on life. Business as usual is the order of the day, especially in the museums and theaters of the metropolis. We could call it extractivist art. Extractivism takes ‘nature,’ stuff, material from somewhere and transforms it into something that gives value somewhere else. That value is always more important than the continuation of life of the communities from which wealth is extracted. So many artists make a career out of sucking value out of disaster, rebellion, animism, magic, whatever is a fashionable topic at the time, and regurgitate it into un-situated detached objects or experience elsewhere. Anywhere in fact, as long as the codes of the world of art function. > Under capitalism, mobility is always more valuable than getting to know and paying attention to somewhere. We are discouraged from being attached to anything or anywhere, except perhaps to our careers or to our lofty rhetoric and detached radical theories. Words and ideas that rarely have consequences, rarely translate into transforming worlds. To be attached to something material and relational is dangerous because it means you might fight to defend it. > Art-as-we-know-it is an invention. Manufactured by the white European colonial metropolises, it is only a little over 200 years old. It arose hand in hand with the beginnings of industrial capitalism, it rested on the same philosophical myths that enabled extractivism everywhere: the toxic dualisms between nature and culture, mind and body, individual and common, art and life. > > Art-as-we-know-it was just one more weapon of separation to exclude the poor, the rural folk, the craft people and popular culture of all shades, from the calm contemplative spaces of the rising metropolitan monied class. With its cult of individual genius, exported around the world to teach everyone the great supremacy of the white European imagination, Art-as-we-know-it became the pinnacle of humanity. > > Two centuries on, many are still caught in the trap of Art-as-we-know-it, representing the world rather than transforming it. Showing us the crises rather than genuinely attempting to stop them or create solutions. It’s as if someone had set your home on fire and instead of trying to extinguish the blaze, you took photos of the flames. What kind of separation must have to take place in our minds that when faced with such an existential emergency we think only of representing it? And whom do such “pieces” serve, ultimately? > > Why make an installation about refugees being stuck at the border when you could codesign tools to cut through fences? Why shoot a film about the dictatorship of finance when you could be inventing new ways of moneyless exchange? Why write a play inspired by neo-animism when you could be codevising the dramaturgy of community rituals? Why make a performance reflecting on the silence after the songbirds go extinct when you could be cocreating ingenious ways of sabotaging the pesticide factories that annihilate them? Why make a dance piece about food riots when your skills could craft crowd choreographies to disrupt fascist rallies? > > Why continue with Art-as-we-know-it, when you could desert this Nero culture, which fiddles while watching our world burn? ## Disobedient Desires > Every form of collective action we know—boring A to B marches to barricades, hunger strikes to boycotts, flash mobs to occupy camps—emerged out of the coordinated imaginations of people in struggle. Many of those who pursued these tactics knew that disobedience is what makes history. From the right for women to wear trousers to the legalization of contraception, from the workfree weekend down to the fact that you can read this independently-published (and not government censored) pamphlet, all these ‘privileges’ were the result of people disobeying the laws, and often the norms, of their epoch. ## Following Swallows > We know that the birds will return in spring, but in their departure is a shadow of a deathly future, a prefigurative feeling of this world if they went extinct. Without them, there would no longer be the joy at watching and recognizing that force of ‘yes’ in their flying bodies, that desire for life which we share with them and all other beings. When a being goes extinct, a bit of us is lost as well. > Watching the swallows’ grace and ingenuity, surfing air and sculpting mud, we realized how much they could teach us about an art of life in these trembling times. Their foundation story reminds us that transforming our worlds often means taking the risk of deserting the comfort of what we know and pursuing an adventure toward what we don’t. The swallows teach us to arm ourselves with the ability to adapt to change, while holding on to the core of who we are and what we want. And what we want is life. ## Extinction Machine > If the French state, together with the Vinci corporation (the world’s second largest construction multinational) and local business elites had had their way, these 4,000 acres, with their farmland and forest, nine springs, over 200 ponds and 222km of hedgerows, would have been sucked dry, paved over and disfigured into another model of ‘development’: a massive new international airport to replace the existing and ‘award winning’ one in the nearby city of Nantes. > > Without the emergence of an incredibly creative diverse trans-local but profoundly situated and anchored struggle, the dawn chorus that wakes us every morning would have been replaced by the deafening growl of jet engines. Instead of the sweet smell of summer hay, the winds would be wafting the sharp reek of kerosene. Instead of providing healthy local food, this place would pump out climate-wrecking molecules. Instead of carbon-sequestering pastures and wetlands, a shroud of concrete and tarmac would have smothered everything. Instead of absorbing and storing the rain, cooling the land, and regulating the hydrology of two major river systems, this place would unleash more local flooding and toxic runoff into the valleys far and wide. > > With their bulldozers, they thought that they could destroy the complex relationships between the millions of beings that share these lands. They thought they could erase the ties between the peasants and their meadows, between the oak tree and the fungi that they share their minerals with, between the woodpecker and the wood worms that help it dig its nest. They dreamed of building another temple to hypermobility, another extinction machine whose bad breath spreads droughts and death, famine and flood; another airport. This place could have become yet another non-place, like all the others, erasing all the human and more than human communities and stories that were unfolding here before, destroying everything particular and special about this land and its inhabitants. ## Rebel Bocage > The bocage is the name for this increasingly rare type of landscape sculpted by two centuries of collective peasant life, planting hedges, digging ditches, tending pastureland and creating a checkerboard patchwork of small fields, crisscrossed by kilometers of hedgerows and little forests. Its network of ditches and ponds were designed to keep the water of the wetlands flowing and to stop erosion and flooding. Its polycultural mix of milking cows and fruit trees provided the conditions for a fairly autonomous closed-loop agriculture, with little need for imported resources and not much waste. This landscape is neither just wild nor just farmed, but both; it has been cocreated by human and more-than-humans over generations. ^11276e > As the eighteenth century progressed, Nantes became France’s main slave port, accumulating wealth with the ‘triangular trade’ which saw over 12 million Africans enslaved to work on Caribbean sugar, indigo, and coffee plantations. The excess capital flooding in the pockets of the bourgeoisie needed to be invested somewhere. Waves of privatization followed, enclosing nearby moorland which was seen as terra nullius wasteland and needed to be rendered ‘productive’ to the ‘economy.’ *terra nullius - a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". It was a principle sometimes used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it. (Wikipedia)* > Then another form of remodeling the landscape to capture it some more for capital unfolded across France. From 1914 to the 1990s, in several waves of what was called the remembrement, bocages were bulldozed and leveled, leaving unrecognizable landscapes made up of large open fields tailored to the industrialization of agriculture, dependent on fossil-fuels, toxic pesticides, and imported fertilizer. The destruction of the bocages marked the end of local subsistence peasant agriculture and the locking of farming into the logic of global capital, based on maximizing profits for the agro-industry and often plunging farmers into debt. The irony is that the airport project here somehow ‘protected’ the bocage of Notre-Damedes-Landes. The land earmarked for the airport was put into a kind of legal time capsule, waiting decades for the building to start. The airport was first planned in the 60s but put on and off by the whims of politicians and market. As it was meant to be eventually concreted over anyway, there was no need for any remembrement. *This landscape is thus a certain palimpsest of capitalism’s stages of emergence, with its layers of extractivism, enclosure and colonial violence.* > > Thanks to the artfulness of the airport’s architects, the memory of this bocage was to remain after its annihilation in the form of special herb gardens set next to the two runways, planted in squares of different colors, which, according to the project’s glossy brochure, would “remind us of the geometric surfaces framed by the hedgerows, yet without them.” The plan included the replanting of some hedgerows to line the new motorway that would serve the airport and divide up its acres of parking lots. But, due to the danger birds might pose to airplanes, care would be taken to ensure the trees used would discourage nesting. *To certify their airport as ‘green,’ the project would employ a form of ‘biodiversity offset,’ to compensate for the nefarious impacts of the project, in the logic that turns life into equations and sustainability into a game of math.* For every pond destroyed, two would be built elsewhere, and a few samples of the rarer species of animals and plants would be collected and moved to new homes. > Behind our compost toilet, looking out to the ghost of the runway, stands a farmhouse. Like most of the communes and collectives that now inhabit this land, we built into this one special swallow doors that let them into the buildings. Often, they swoop over our heads during assemblies that co-decide life here, flying in and out to feed the chirping hungry chicks in their nests. *Made of spit and mud, defying gravity hanging off the beams holding the weight of numerous babies, these swallow buildings don’t require engineers’ measurement, architects’ designs, or planning permission. They are dwellings built with sensing bodies, generated by the specific axioms of the space they inhabit, they are pure sense and situation, every one unique, the result of a deep presence and awareness of how a material feels, a deep direct attention to things, a totally embodied form of home making and inhabiting.* > > An art of life. ## Departure Lounge > It’s really important, as we deal with the necessities and the huge scale of the changes that are needed, that we remember that we have to keep dream- ing about the world that we want to create, because only by keeping our focus on that horizon will we be creating the world that is actually better than this one, and that combination of dreaming and determination to fight is what is going to carry us through. What is more and more necessary is that we withdraw consent and our participation from the current economic system and there is no single answer to how that’s done, that’s down to every single person to look at their role in the economic sys- tem and start saying “how the fuck do I get myself out of this—and fast?" – speech by Oli at 2007 Climate Camp > These actions would bring people together with a certain irresistible intensity, but this activism as ‘event’ felt too distant from our everyday life. We would always end up returning to business as usual, a re- turn to jobs, the flat, the mortgage, the weekly organic food box subscription, the dependence on money, the nuclear family. We often felt a recurrent sense of dread returning to the metropolis afterwards, because we felt deep down in our gut that our form of life was feeding the very culture and system that we wanted to dismantle. ## Desertion > Embedded in the concrete, steel, tarmac, powerlines, and fiber optics, cap- italism’s ideology molds and controls all aspects of life, convincing us that there is nothing else. No other form of life, no other possibilities than this. And this is the materialized high point of progress. Development, efficiency, and productivity become the only possible goal of our species. Relationships are captured and commodified. We are split from our food sources, from our soil, from our plants, from our weather and water. The many worlds and beings that sustain our life become alien. We float, without body or territory, detached from everything in a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship with the econ- omy. As philosopher farmer Wendell Berry sums up: “Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money can bring forth food?” > Of course, the answer is not for everyone to desert the city, ‘go back’ to the land and become a farmer. But we must desert the logic of the metropolis, which also forms much of the ‘countryside’ to its likeness: dousing fields with chemicals, planting monoculture forests as carbon offsets, imposing work- consume-sleep patterns, forcing farmers into debt, and imposing comput- erized planting schedules. It is possible to reappropriate cities by finding cracks and interstices to rebuild commons based on solidarity and mutual aid that reconnect us to more than ourselves. > “The town, and the distinction between the town and the countryside, develop along with and after the development of the state, because the state, or the figure of the despot, immediately settles in a center, with its fortresses, its temples, its shops.” > – Clastres, Pierre, and Miguel Abensour. _The Question of Power: An Interview with Pierre Clastres_, 2015. > It’s easy to forget how recent the idea of a centralized state power is. Until 400 years ago, one third of the globe was beyond its reach, political scientist James C Scott reminds us: “The state can be said to dominate only the last two-tenths of 1 percent of our species’ political life." It is a blip in history, but it feels almost impossible to escape. > – [[Against the Grain]] > We dreamed of waking up every morning in a place where secession from the system was a permanent process. Of course, every society needs its car- nivalesque rebellions and short-lived eruptions to turn the world upside down, history is often made by such outbursts. But how could we maintain those momentary disobedient cracks throughout our everyday life? How could we overcome the separation between the way we think, the way we make art, the way we resist and the way we live our lives? ## Mud and ACAB > Our accomplices that day are human and mud: that dark humid complex holding billions of bacteria, fungi, viruses, actinomycetes, algae, protozoa, and nematodes, recycling the flesh of plants and animals, turning decay into food, transforming death into the gift of life. > > That night’s last blog sentence read: “The word humble (like the word human) has its roots in humus, it means to literally return to earth. Perhaps the future will be built by heroic acts of humility rather than arrogant temples to growth. Perhaps civilization’s dream to suck this zone dry with its concrete and tarmac, steel and plastic will be vanquished by wetness.”