a day. We ran into semi-punk naturalists and former railway workers, tenacious farmers and ski instructors, young runaway-squatters and radical women militants from the neighbouring city. We shared a little of the lives of those who are not waiting for a better tomorrow, but who throw themselves, with no railings or safety nets, into the boiling alchemy of the struggle. This is the place where that which comes together is everything that elsewhere is kept carefully apart. How can it seem to hold together? By what magic? NoTAVs like meetings, hundreds of them can be found in the Bussoleno festivals or on an occupied motorway. An old white-haired woman takes the microphone, she climbs up on the central platform so that she can be seen and heard. She is the owner of a chalet who has just been evicted, she begins at the beginning: why they built it there where the construction was supposed to begin, what their aims were, how it all got underway. Everyone listens, even those who are most on top of the situation. She is not trying to inform, she is telling a story, once again, the very real epic saga they are all pursuing together. She takes time for anecdotes and details, even though in this crowd, there is not anyone who has not heard them before. She traces the contours of a common narrative that, patiently, opens a pathway to understanding and to decisions made together. Listening and sharing are vital for keeping together the imperative mandates of political organizations and the azimuth spontaneity of affinity groups that blend into the movement. Something is being invented here on a patch of asphalt, something like a capacity to decide, at the level of gestures and practices, that is the opposite of representation and delegation. A few days later, on the same motorway, now reopened to traffic at 80 miles an hour, a friend unfolds for us, mile after mile, the escapades of NoTAV: ‘There, in front of the tunnel, we made a blockade of burning tires … the fire lit up the whole mountainside’. Farther along: ‘We made a blockade here, and when the police forced us to move and chased us into the village, the villagers opened their doors to hide us.’ The sad concrete of the motorway is transformed into intoxicating décor, the overpass pilings become the crucible for shared gestures and acts.
At Notre-Dame-des-Landes, there is, as of now, no motorway. And yet the motorway-plan designed to serve the future airport is of very high priority on the schedule of construction, this winter of 2016. The motorway is supposed to join up the national roads that, from Nantes, extend to Saint-Nazaire and Rennes: eleven kilometres of road, one going through the zone. Opening up arteries in a hostile territory is as much about getting construction underway as it is a military operation, and the different groups in the movement make no mistake about it. These last months, they have thrown themselves into battle together, breathlessly: pursuing legal judgments, demonstrations, information dissemination, occupations, blockades to assure that none of the announced machinery shows even the tip of its hood in the area. At the same time, all of the anti-airport forces unite behind the so-called ‘historic’ inhabitants threatened with eviction, just as they united in the autumn of 2012 behind squatters who had come to defend the zone. The greater the battle stakes, the greater the solidarity and collective intelligence. The forms, presences and modes of action of the different sensibilities and political lines of the struggle learn to act together, and, in so doing, are themselves transformed. All this is a sketch in what we might call an art of composition.
To Make a Movement
Out of edifying victories in demonstrating strength, came a general desire to make a bit of these struggles come to life elsewhere. A little of these struggles – that is, especially the practices, tactics, and a frank and direct manner of taking on the task of the conflict, making it last, living it. This is also a political leaning, that of seeing in the opposition to infrastructures a space for thwarting the inexorable expansion of a nightmarish world. For this we certainly need more than a slogan like ‘zads everywhere’ or ‘fermarci è impossibile’ (‘we cannot be stopped’). If the myth and the media images sometimes speed up our progress and bring about promising encounters, it is always perilous to try and copy elsewhere a method or a recipe that was elaborated in a specific context. What does it mean to spread combats whose particularity lies precisely in their being anchored somewhere specific? In the Tarn, the Ligure, in l’Isère, in Sicily, the Morvan, Trentin or in Aveyron, some people have not waited to formulate a clear response to that question to seize opportunities. This has led to striking successes and to severe disappointments. There again, the need to understand the long histories of the zad and of NoTAV made itself felt. Not in order to imitate them more scrupulously, but to sharpen our analyses and to understand the powers at work, to learn to ward off foreseeable blows and to make our gestures more certain.
Before we can elaborate these four structuring themes of the book, we need to introduce the two infrastructural projects and devote the first chapter to a narrative of the two epic struggles against them. It will then be easier to find our way and understand the befores and afters that mark the two movements. There are points of transition and of rupture, merry-making and long tranquil years, twenty-five days of battle on one side, forty on the other. Certain accelerations made us lose our breath, others gave us inspiration:
The first day, the old lady brought coffee and cakes to the policemen. She said: ‘Poor souls, they must be freezing, they are so young …’ After the night raid against the cabin with its dozens of wounded, no one in the valley ever again had the idea of feeding the police. Never again!
There is the tempo brought on by modifications in the projects or by political deadlines, there is the rhythm which, despite all that, each movement manages to make for itself, and there are strategies and dreams: ‘We are already together in the post-project’, says someone who lives near Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Nothing is finished and yet we had to stop writing. The adventure continues beyond the final period.
The Two Projects
At first glance, what is striking is the absurdity of the projects: why in hell pour tons of cement and asphalt on a wetland in order to move a perfectly functional airport? Why insist on building a high-speed train line between Turin and Lyon when the two cities are separated by mountain summits over 4,000 metres high and when a railway line already links them? And why these huge projects, when we are bombarded every day with the news that our world is in a state of aggravated crisis – ecological and economic, among others? How can we not notice the blaring contradiction between promoting the construction of a new airport while at the same time bragging about hosting the world-wide climate summit, or between pouring millions of euros into a destructive infrastructure all the while preaching the need to reduce public expenditures?
One need only ask who profits from the crime. And who will be made richer by the destroyed lives of the people living nearby, or by the annihilation of the flora and fauna. It is certainly neither in the ‘public utility’ that is supposed to legitimate these projects, nor in the ‘inutility’ with which they can be accused, that the answer lies. It lies in a certain logic which, however absurd it is, nevertheless reigns over most of the globe. Capitalism quite openly depends on the fantasy of infinite economic growth. Yet, the limits of the resources on which that growth is based having well been reached, a critical phase presents itself – one that torments the managers of the world economy. Never mind! As worthy inheritors of western modernity, rather than working with the world, they will work against it: as long as our environment is a resource, it must be exploited, and if it becomes an obstacle, it need only disappear. And that is the real meaning of large transportation infrastructures: abolishing space.
Ignore the rivers, the dwelling places, the hills, the forests that slow down the circulation of human and non-human merchandise. Thus, the swamps, hedges, fields and those who cultivate them at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the mountains, valleys and those who live in the Susa Valley are so many obstacles, seen from the very particular perspective of a territory-management plan. Exactly in the same way that salaried workers are one burden among others from the point of view of an economic restructuration plan. The logic is implacable, and can assure its own renewal even after the mere ‘crisis’ has become a veritable catastrophe. The more the economy and governmental planning prove destructive of the world that they claim to care for, the more the recipes provided by the economy and planning are mobilized to carve out habitable enclaves. Those who claim to act upon reality free from all its
