“Beyond the mega-basin, the horizon”
“As the surface of the earth warms and the arctic begins to see rain rather than snow, the oceans threaten to swallow whole islands, whole regions, whole coasts. For others, the problem is quite the opposite: wildfires, severe droughts, creeping deserts, and massive species-extinction”
“Although located in a “safer,” more temperate zone in the European center, France nonetheless belongs to the latter group”
“The last few years have seen a terrible drought, so bad at times that wildfires rage across the southwest and nuclear power plants must be shut down for want of water with which to cool the reactors”
“This drought has been especially difficult for French farmers, who struggle to maintain sustainable crop yields in the absence of rain. In response, the French state has imposed broad restrictions on water use and begun to construct a series of mega-basins, enormous artificial reservoirs designed to draw the region’s groundwater to the surface and make it available during the hot summer months”
“In its natural state, groundwater functions as a sort of subterranean agricultural commons, protected from solar evaporation and, at least in part, from different kinds of industrial or atmospheric pollution, such as runoff from factories or the life-cycle of other organisms (like insects or animals). Once drawn to the surface and encased in concrete, the water changes shape entirely, becoming a “resource” to be allocated according to the ends and interests of the state and its partners”
“While restrictions on water usage extend to everyone, only those who partner with the state have access to the mega-basin reserves, transforming the groundwater from a vital commons serving all life and even the land itself into another kind of private property”
“This expropriation of the groundwater is by no means necessary or permanent”
“The first action described, which occurred just ten days ago, attacked and sabotaged the Lafarge Cement Factory, where the cement needed to construct these mega-basins is produced”
“The second, the massive rally against the construction of the mega-basin Saint-Soline back in August, brought together a thousands of different people and a coalition of organizations to bring work to a halt for over a week”
“Like the Zapatistas fighting for the right to a life lived in common and a world in which many worlds fit, like our indigenous comrades fighting the construction of pipelines across their reservations and burial grounds, like our friends sitting in trees and fighting charges of “domestic terrorism” in the Atlanta forest, like the joyous masses who burned down the Third Precinct during the George Floyd Rebellion, we, too, are part of these uprisings of the earth”
“And so we hope you’ll read these pieces as the invitations that they are, to join in the uprising and fight for a horizon of life that sacrifices no one”
“On December 10, 2022 at 6pm, 200 people invaded the Lafarge plant of La Malle in the city of Bouc-Bel-Air, taking the plant by surprise and disarming it. With a determined and joyful atmosphere, the infrastructure of the plant was attacked through any and all means: incinerator and electrical devices sabotaged, cables severed, bags of cement eviscerated, vehicles and construction equipment damaged, office windows ruined, and walls repainted with tags”
“we will continue to dismantle the infrastructure of disaster ourselves. We call on all those who stand up for the earth to occupy, blockade, and disarm concrete”
“Extracting rock under the protection of the State, even if it means feeding the war. Selling cement to rebuild what the wars have demolished. And in the process, destroying our living conditions and our environments to build a world of concrete and death, whether through greenwashing based on carbon neutrality or low-carbon cements produced by incinerating waste”
“There has been a great deal of discussion in France about this demo against the mega-basins in Saint-Soline from October 29 and 30, and for good reason. The diverse and energetic crowd routed over 1700 police officers and six helicopters, much to the ire of the Minister of the Interior, among others”
“Starting from a given region and a relatively new form of infrastructure, which its promoters plan to spread everywhere, it is possible to unravel the knot tying together water monopolization, the maintenance of the agro-industrial complex, and the current unwavering support offered to it by the State”
“More than an action of ecological resistance that suddenly increases the balance of power in a specific struggle, the action in Sainte-Soline engages in the necessary reconfiguration of the political field”
“Its offensive texture—comprised of teenagers grown up in a shipwrecked world and of lovers of the little bustard, of debaucherous rioters and retired people whose age has rendered them all the more diehard, of trade-unionists rediscovering their taste for sabotage and elected representatives, for once acting courageously”
“A convoy of farmers from Loire-Atlantique shifted the narrative framing produced by the opposing camp, showing that this was not simply a fight between environmentalists on one side and farmers on the other, but rather a split between two possible agricultural horizon”
“Our slogans no longer appeared as empty threats: if they started a new construction site, we would come and stop it four weeks later. The clarity of this objective did not prevent more than 150 organizations from joining the call. And by the beginning of October, as soon as the first grids were laid around Saint-Solin, the preparation meetings were in full swing and a map of the companies involved in the project was published. For months now, the territorial network of Bassines Non Merci has continually amazed us with its connections to people in different trades and social strata, which have relayed material solidarity and sources of information”
“First victory of the day. The tarpaulin trucks and the police vans are already positioned on departmental road 55, which separates us from the construction site, supported by six helicopters. Faced with them, we will respond with a game. Between 10am and 2pm, several teams go through the crowd distributing a leaflet entitled 1,2,3… Basin! Inside it, one reads a proposal to divide into three processions and to try to melt, taking different routes and assuming different attitudes, towards the target and to bring down the fence enclosing it.”
“Almost instantly, all the participants agreed to play this game, forming three groups of several thousand people. The lines of gendarmes, visibly disoriented by the ardor of these processions, are re-routed in all directions as their narrow set of tactics singular deployments are overtaken by successive waves of farandoles, chains, races, or volleys of projectiles. One team, the reds, supported by the mobilization and advance of the other two teams, manages to enter the site en masse for a few minutes before planting its flag. They take down a good portion of the fences, which effectively stops the construction from resuming for some time”
“Shortly after, the three processions meet in front of the basin’s construction site for a snack interrupted by shots of flash-ball grenades. We have just witnessed Episode Two of the “Taking of the Basin.” The next day, a pipe intended for use in filling the basin is dug up and disconnected by hundreds of people around a pickup truck marked “freewheeling irrigators,” broadcasting maloya music. We then celebrate the dismemberment of one of the arms of the octopus and the exposure of its underground tentacles”
“The government unilaterally announced that the movement’s intention was to create a zad, in order to claim, in spite of everything, that it had succeeded in preventing something from happening. But instead of a zad, a simple altar was left on the field. We know we can come back or redeploy elsewhere”
“At the heart of the “disaster,” as it is called, are the readjustment measures by which power attempts to regulate (and prolong) the catastrophic situation it has itself perpetrated.”
“Beyond their evident specificity, the mega-basin projects are emblematic of this broader logic: perpetuate for a few more years an agricultural model that has run its course, until there is not a drop of water left”
“There is a kind of resignation in the air that the complex heritage of ecological struggles has not yet mitigated in the realm of theory. We seek to overcome this resignation with a certain pragmatism, among other things, beginning from the tangible grounding of the Poitevin marsh and the complicities we have found there. Our wager today is that the construction of this game of complicity will allow alliances of circumstance to transcend the contours of strict ideology and militant conventions”
“To push the government back more definitively, the anti-basin movement will have to continue to aggregate. History has shown us that growing a capacity for force almost systematically implies adding a fairly extensive diversity of practices of struggle and actors to its repertoire. But the diversity in question must not become the heart of what brings us together, nor even the collective objective. We must first elaborate and share a certain tactical sense of emergence, a way of taking advantage of the different tools that our predecessors have passed on to us, and reinventing them as often as necessary”
“A revolt is always a point of overflowing beyond all the forces which first composed it, but a revolt which gives itself the means to last, and therefore to become something else, is generally also the result of a long and meticulous work of elaboration, which includes the construction of a language, a repertoire, a grammar. It is the circulation of a common culture between all those who have the desire to seek a path that absolves them of the identity that has shaped them”
“On this path, questions appear regarding territories, social determinisms, gender, power relationships, and so forth. So many questions, impossible to sweep away with a wave of the hand, which draw the contours of what could be the camp of those who revolt”
“Disaster today is everywhere, to the point of not knowing where to turn, and the task of trying to repair the innumerable errors that human beings have accumulated often seems out of reach. Yet front lines are appearing and, however modest they may be in the face of the extent of the catastrophe, they call out to be joined. The fight against the mega-basins is one of them. It has even become, along the way, a serious rallying point. We will certainly need others to extend the threat and spread our forces to new horizons”
“No basarran!”