samedi 27 mars 2021
Hi XR,
My website address is https://www.cv09.toile-libre.org/
I’m an ecological activist and writer living in the Ariège in SW France for the last 13 years, seeking out some collaboration. Sorry about the length of this letter, but as I said, I’m a writer.
I have looked though your website and think I could help with being an international go-between, but mostly in logistics, actions and systemics. I have a plan to propose to those of you who are free and would like to make a moveable ZAD – ZAD Partout, as the physical counterpart to your web platform. We could start tomorrow. The advantage is that we would, in so doing, already be living the climate and biodiversity-positive lifestyle and infrastructure that we preach, cheek-by-jowl with the present system. I have already done it for eight or nine years, without support, which proves that it is viable, as I am still alive. Please read on.
For the last eight years I have been living totally without money, without petrol in a long-term immersion experiment to see what infrastructure (political, social, interactive, not just individual) can work NOW, in real life, in an industrial society, whilst being net carbon (ecologically and socially) positive. It’s not just that, it’s also a logical self-organising infrastructure – but in real life, not virtual. I have lived it for seven and more years, in the face of an all-car, all-internet and phone society, which is a pretty good feasibility study.
I am now in the business (since three months ago) of transcribing and transmitting the hard-won information about how I did it and what pitfalls I encountered – to gain time for others, I hope. I need assistance in this task - something which could work at a distance.
I have been moving each week around markets on a bicycle, holding stands, participating in political squats at Toulouse-Mirail, creating habitat, all with a strictly no petrol, no internet vow. I have always been an ecological activist – my main and real job, even if non-remunerated. I was at the ZAD at Nantes (2012-13), in the 1990s tree protests, in particular Newbury Bypass and Manchester Airport protests in Britain, where I put together self-written newsletters by protesters. Before that I did Fair Trade in war zones in Latin America (Peru, Guatemala, Mexico), which was really a mistake, on hindsight. Cleaning up our own mess, at all levels, here in Europe, is the hardest and most important job to do. To the degree that we set a post-industrial example, we can hope to save our own dignity. This cannot be done merely as indiviuals, it has to be a question of entirely remodelling the infrastructure and enabling verybody to participate, without delay.
Your positioning on ecological solutions is similar to mine, focused on enablement and cohesion, not prescription. The problem with us activists is that we fail to provide large structures which build over time, instead leaving small rumps in power when focus fades. I learnt how to mobilise, literally, through my ZAD and tree protest experiences. I believe that the human physical practices I have evolved could gain us the 3.5% support you mention, and do this very quickly. This could do more in the way of participatory democracy than an over-dependence on a de facto centralised web platform and a series of semi-virtualised media events. These practical methods draw upon the re-humanising of a moving, truly bottom-up, mutually self-adjusting information structure, composed mainly of us. The interactivity framework is inherently decentralised, and also able to maintain cohesion in the face of local power centres. I am the lowest of the low, I should know ;).
In a nutshell, it is to move around under our own power, meet people and do things, in a strictly “carbon-positive” and certainly socially positive way, creating the infrastructure and gaining mutual confidence as we move together. It is particularly germane in the present circumstances, as we come out of COVID-psychosis, given that most people are now aware of the stakes – defence of our basic freedoms of movement and association - and eager to come out and play.
Note that demographic pressures are becoming greater as the rich take possession of the land, and the difficulties encountered grow in proportion – which should not deter us, it is a simple truism that the world is becoming harsher and that our job is to create confidence and determination in the face of this. The system I am proposing has the merit of giving a real job to adventurous spirits, it is a very good training ground for civil activism. It dramatically reduces social tension as well, if the backbone is strictly Non-Violent Direct Action. It could be just what is needed to sustain and channel things as we come out of Covid. It works as a social antidote structure within the Covid context as well, in a scientifically defensible way. All this is covered on the website/book noted above (article “Sortie de Crise Corona”), that I am writing up since three months ago. I would like help and cooperators in completing this – it is effectively a physical activism/ecological infrastructure manual, based on real life, now. Yes, I know I am repeating myself, but some people just scan texts ...
It could be termed "dynamic intra-human infrastructure" – which means that we follow circuits, like the old market circuits, on foot, by bicycle, certainly without cars, in all probability without portable phones, living in close symbiotic connection with local people and contributing to the local economy (ecology) as we move (no tents, no cutting off from local ecological priorities). Those who adopt this rôle are called “domiciliés boucle” – circuit dwellers – nomads have rights too. The civil activism dimension is also to maintain the right to freedom of movement and association – for all. The “accueil”/hospitality dimension is high on the “to do list” – we need to successfully defend the right to be poor farmers and create living space for mobile gardeners in the countryside. Here, in South-Western France, bordering Spain, is a good place to start the ball rolling – few places in Europe are left now which have the necessary profile. The people who still have the peasant skills are here - we can help them till their gardens and bake their bread, they can help us recover knowledge. Hospitality and work organisation teams can replace "I did it my way, all on my lonesome" (with a chainsaw).
The weekly markets are used as contact points, around each market day there is provision for an overnight stay, those who participate follow the circuit, no money is necessary. Using the two- or three-market weekly circuit, we are contactable via the waypoints – this puts the ball back in our court in terms of who puts tabs on who, word of mouth and face-to-face contact being real functional options. I was initially drawn to this idea as I wished to establish equality of treatment and integration for poor refugees, given that French discrimination against nomadic lifestyles is traditionally severe. I have succeeded, at least, in becoming a poor refugee (!) to better know what is needed. It doesn’t yet exist, partly because alternative livers already have a lot on their plates to defend themselves and tend to live in close-knit, effectively closed communities which are encouraged to keep quiet under the menace of eviction and persecution. I have practised this itinerant life method, each week, for seven years, as the situation steadily deteriorates again and old traditions of communal retrenchment reassert themselves. We need to act fast and incisively before this small window of opportunity also closes, as part of the "ecological shutdown process".
When groups move in the way I propose, this can defuse community retrenchment, there are real physical interactions of mutual benefit. It is a method of bringing students in human geography, ecological installation, botany, health service and many other functions into interaction with hard-to-reach dispersed populations, at very low cost. If you wish to see it this way, it is also, in summer, an ecologically updated version of the festival circuit, version "no petrol, no money, open to all". Team recruitment and best practice have a chance of becoming “normed” very quickly, as well as highly specific, functional interfaces with local activists of all generations. This can create a sustainable snowball effect.
The model, once achieved in one French department, can be easily replicated in each of the the roughly 100 other departments, the nodes on the circuits intersect. In this way, even those on very long point-to-point paths still leave positive traces of their passage at local level – the means becoming part of the end on the way. Linear gardens, information transmission by voice and human memory, transport of goods and services between waypoints are all accommodated (the system is intrinsically redistributive, can use digital stock and organisation methods, frugally and precisely targeted). It is easy to concentrate our forces on specific objectives, such as the defence of small ecological projects, as the infrastructure lends itself to the rapid self-assembly of the necessary concentrations of people and skillsets. The physical bodies are by definition available – they are already on the move, in communication and physically able to be there.
As I note above, I am in the process of writing it up, the website address is https://www.cv09.toile-libre.org/ . It’s all in French, my next job is to translate it, but my English is rather rusty and my words a little wooden. This letter is practically the first time I have used English for years. If you have someone who is at ease in French, they may wish to appraise and relay the texts I have so far transcribed from hand-written notes.
I would like to get a group of people, Parisiens, Londonians, Toulousains, to start trekking around these circuits. I hold out very little hope for those of us who are already in the French countryside, without the injection of people from outside the rural sphere. In the industrial countryside people all have cars and machine tools and have no intention of abandoning them until jobs and infrastructure exist which allow this. That would be our job – to provide direction and structural support where government doesn’t – and I mean local government even more than national. Parochialism abounds – this is one of the dangers of your linkage and local-group structure – that you will simply fall upon the local centralists who have done bugger all except intercept and stymie free information flow for three decades. There are those who are busy and those who are onlookers – or who don’t even know what is happening. This ridiculous situation, logistically speaking, must change – we also must stop reproducing the situation of social haves and social have nots – for this reason I strongly endorse your desire to act as intermediaries and facilitators - and your ten-point "getting-on-together" plan. Please keep in mind that some of us would like to be free to work together without being obliged to exude charm and charisma, we tend to look on this as a basic human dignity issue - so affinity groups can be a risk, making it difficult for people to speak out.
It does well to bear in mind that we need to engage with the countryside, not just the towns, by definition. Much turns on how we integrate again. Groups of energised people who move and are available for all manner of ecological endeavour can be well-received, giving welcome relief from the oppression of the local oligarchies, affinity groups and opinion leaders, more and more right-wing and elitist. We move, we don’t look to stay, but we come back each week – sect-like monopolies are harder to maintain in such contexts. This resolves the problem of groups not achieving a critical functional mass or cross-fusion in the countryside, becoming small enclaves surrounded by industrial processes instead. The solution is “towns and country”, not “urban activity and rural desert” (the latter consisting of political fiefs for the rich).
Thus one could form the human backbone and reach needed by Extinction Rebellion – the materialisation over greater periods of time of sustained efforts and shared culture, with very few inherent logistical costs. It could also provide the framework to involve the active populations concentrated in the poor suburbs of big towns who desire greenery and have no possibility of engaging positively with nature, as things stand.
To develop a method of engaging a great number of people with nature without destroying it is of the utmost importance, democratically – it manufactures informed consent, to paraphrase a known dictum. The infrastructural envelope proposed favours participatory mobilisation and disfavours dictators and central cliques, with a few golden rules and a lot of movement. It is calculated to self-order as it grows.
So I would like to invite you to come, as sacrificial cats amongst the pigeons! The timing is good, if you react fairly fast, in Britain people are hoping to really come out of confinement I believe, and in France we are still taking a beating, with little to inspire us, but keen. Serious engagement is needed – people who live what they preach and do it together. I have been reading Naomi Klein (see my beginning of a write-up on website) and she clearly establishes this as the major hitch for ecological groups – they do not actually DO serious ecological solutions at an infrastructural scale – they don’t just say “No” to industry when it makes no earthly sense to try to work with it – how can they be deemed credible? By their acts. I come from a Quaker background – and I AM doing it, with no support, even though it could be said that I am supporting what people have said should be done, for years. As with the actions I helped start in England, there can be as few as three or four people to start a movement which goes to 10,000 in a period of one or two months. The art is to have a logistical structure which can accommodate success without disintegration, which is where my simple system can help, it is well tested.
I very much hope that you can put this paper before those who may be in a position to act upon it, both in France, in Britain and elsewhere – that’s also how I justify writing it in English. Barcelona and Pampluna are also not far away, regarding this part of France as part of their own, not without reason. Etc.
Best wishes,
Julian
PS: I am loathe to start bandying my name about on the net, to have an individual avatar on the net, or to participate in social groups on the net which are anathema to me. We should have group emails, accessible without individuation. So far I have pretty much a clean sheet, I was absent from the web and mobile communication or ten years. Yes, I am a bit bashful but I have nothing in particular to hide, it’s more a peer-to-peer thing. You are of course free to publish all and any of my writings, as they are all anticopyright - General Public Licence (GPL - Stallman). Indeed, that is what they are for, to be published – I will also put this open letter on my website – which I would like to help make a platform for many.
I will endeavour to send this mail via a friend/contact, who can act as the recipient for mails from you – I will also try the protonmail idea on your PDF, but my internet facilities are shaky. I am mulling over the idea of offering to start a group “Extinction Rebellion” in the Ariège, for the form and in some desperation over the “reach” of what I am doing, but am wary of the “Greenpeace” corporate syndrome – you are favoured, I hope I am right to do so ;). If others read this messge, they should start the group. It is also tricky, no longer belonging to the E.C. and I would like friendly contacts, in an increasingly unfriendly context – just like a lot of us – if you have good contacts in Toulouse that would be useful. If you need to fact check who I am (although physically meeting me would obviate the problem), I am generally well-known by my first name and my bike, having been moving around here here for aeons.