UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

“Contrasting Visions on Collapsing and Struggles for Land. The Case of a Zone to Defend”

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Public canonical key

radar:r-1fbb5a8dd196e9a02291f166dbea3d75

Authors

Bulle, Sylvaine

Reported year

—

Reported language

French

Source type

journal article

First detected

2026-11-13T09:01:03.823346+00:00

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2026-11-13T09:01:03.823346+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

his article examines the temporal and ecological grammars of the zone à défendre in Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Brittany, France), an emblematic environmentalist struggle and a project of political autonomy that spanned between 2012 and 2018. The zone à défendre, or Zone to Defend (ZAD) refers to the resistance movement to the building of an airport. Initially led by local elected officials and a local residents’ association, the ZAD was joined by new occupiers in 2010, most of them from the autonomous anarchist movement. The occupation lasted from 2012 until 2018 and included around sixty collective dwellings set up in a fragile environment to be preserved. Continued resistance and self-defence led public authorities to abandon the airport project in 2018. Our study does not deal with the history of the struggle or the ZAD’s social organization, but rather questions the different temporal and ecological representations at work in this quest for emancipation. Through the mobilization of an array of values and emotions, the ZAD expressed preoccupation with ultimate endings and the survival of the world, which intersected with a critique of capitalism and institutions, and more generally with social critique.The study sets out with a theoretical hypothesis concerning the temporal grammars likely to be at work in this kind of autonomous experiment. Its particularity is that it gets past the utopian imaginary and the great revolutionary narratives, and anchors itself in the “here and now”, giving maximum value to this present as finite time of collapsing within which radical subjectivities can be born. My hypothesis feeds in particular on the concept of exodus as developed in political philosophy. It is linked to a sociological observation which shows that, beyond certain commonalities, there is a wide variety in the actors’ practices. While the autonomous anarchist actors were united in their attempt to create self-instituted time-spaces separated from the outside world and in their common quest for emancipation, the ZAD appeared as a community of contrasting values, as the actors’ relationships to time, habitability and economy showed. This arises from the second part of the analysis, which focuses on the eastern sector of the ZAD, where the relationship with the environment was the most comprehensive. The third section examines the relationship between the collectives (or inhabitants) and productive activities, in the light of their temporal conceptions of a more or less symbolic exodus. Eventually, it appears that the collapsing, as the preoccupation with ultimate ending, gives rise to diverse ecological commitments, ranging from autonomy to extreme environmentalism bordering on asceticism. The climate crisis, therefore, has the potential to emancipate individuals and communities and to transform environmentalism itself.

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article

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journal article

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