At the Village de l’eau, humans and non-humans respectfully cohabit.
From July 16 to 21, the environmental collectives Les Soulèvements de la Terre, Bassines Non Merci and more than 120 other organizations gathered at a temporary camp in the city of Melle in southwestern France. This militantly makeshift Village de l’eau (“Village of Water”) quickly transformed into a space for learning, collaborations, conversations and care.
Reported by Elsa Ferreira, illustrations by Roger Pibernat
“The time has come to build a network of resistance, to weave a web of popular counter-powers (…) to forge new alliances and deploy new strategies, reaching out to numerous collectives, unions and organizations.” In its manifest “For an Anti-Fascist Uprising”, Les Soulèvements de la Terre (which literally translates to “Uprisings of the Earth”) sets the tone. In a particularly alarming political context of police suppression, where environmental activists are increasingly treated as criminals, the time has come for activists of all stripes to unite their forces. The six-day gathering of the Village de l’eau rose to meet that challenge.
Some 7,000 people gather on a field borrowed from the mayor of Melle, in the southwestern Deux-Sèvres department of France. The program includes discussions, activism training, screenings, concerts. It’s a way of moving “the dynamics from the background to front stage” according to Zuli, 25, a member of the team that chronicled life at the camp in a daily gazette and podcast. “We wanted the Gazette to be a space where we could reveal what was invisible: the subsistence work that held up both the Village and the fights.”
The Village, building it and maintaining it, become a means by which the activists could make their voices heard. “Committing to a fight isn’t always easy. Ours is pretty wordy,” says Anne-Morween Pastier, camp coordinator. “Building dry toilets, maintaining the living space is a form of commitment.” With a PhD in geoscience, Pastier is the author of a counter-expertise on mega-basins. Last April, she founded Larouste, a radical, oblique laboratory for earth-science emergencies.
Coming to the Village is also a way of supporting those who are not ready to return to the field and face the authorities. France’s Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin had announced with great fanfare the deployment of 3,000 police and gendarmes. Entering the Village is subject to systematic daily police checks. A helicopter surveys the field at all times. Occasionally, police on motocross bikes make their way to the edge of the camp.
Care in the tents
Care is used to combat suppression. “Even in logistics, there’s care. It’s not just cables and tents,” says Anne-Morween. And with good reason. The Village is organized with lightning efficiency and fluidity. The 120 toilets installed for the occasion are always clean, thanks to an armada of volunteers. It’s not an easy task – the camp is located on a drinking water catchment area, so not a drop must overflow from these temporary toilets. An impressive network of pipes installed by a volunteer plumber channels urine and grey water into a temporary sewer system. As for feces, they flow into a compost bin crowned with an effigy of Gérald Darmanin. All the more reason to get on with the job.
On the other end of the intestine is the catering area. Here again, the organization is so efficient that it seems easy. In reality, over 20 community canteens have been working together for six months to decide the menus (both vegan and balanced), inventory pots and pans and calculate the necessary space. Nearly 200 volunteers come in every day to prepare the meals and wash the dishes to techno music. “We can’t fight for our rights on an empty stomach,” says Cutter*, 41, a kitchen volunteer. “When we prepare food, when we share a meal, we unite. There are no more social classes, labels or categories.”
From signage and care (keeping watch, risk reduction) to documenting actions and disseminating information, to deploying a large translation team and legal team, every aspect of the Village seems to run smoothly without a glitch. “Without the huge network that has developed over the years and at various events, it wouldn’t have been possible,” emphasizes Anne-Morween.
In a nutshell, the village serves to create an international, solidary, militant community. “When we do things together, we find compromises. Sometimes we get stuck in our spoken intentions; when we’re doing things in practice, we find solutions,” continues Anne-Morween.
“There’s a lot of joy, despite the repressive context of control, confiscation and criminalization,” reports Dalidou, an instructor at the Village. We tell ourselves that we can move forward together: Antifa, queer, groups like Attac and farmers’ unions. We may have common political ideas and dreams, but we don’t have the same practices or the same culture. That can create friction. Preparing together – three days of preparation for two days of actions – helps create a common culture.” Over one week, there were no conflicts. Not bad for a village of 7,000 inhabitants.
“What would it take for a protest to be authorized?”
If care is the keyword this year, it’s because the scars of last year’s demonstration in nearby Sainte Soline, where violent clashes with the police left some 200 protestors injured, are still fresh. “It was very traumatic, horrible,” recalls Chou rouge*. The 27-year-old activist says the violence at the demonstration left him “depressed and shocked”. Here, “It’s a place for hope. We can tell the government: ‘You tried to intimidate us, but we’re back – more organized and more numerous’”. He has met people here with whom he shares painful memories of last year. “It’s strong.”
Marguerite, a seasoned activist in her sixties and a member of Friends of the Confédération Paysanne, was there last year. This year, she stayed in the Village. “It was crazy violent,” she recalls. She remembers walking along the path where the seriously injured were taken behind a cordon of elected officials trying to protect them, and seeing “men in riot gear getting out of vans”. “I didn’t want that,” she laments.
“Police suppression is on everyone’s mind,” confirms Sarah, 36, who came to the Village alone from Paris to get ‘another image, different from violence’. Even in Paris, she doesn’t go to protests. “I don’t want to involve my family, when they have to come and pick me up at the police station, or end up with a missing eye or hand”. She finds other ways of making her voice heard. “In a capitalist world, I believe that you can be an activist with your money. I donate a lot and invest in projects such as Terre de liens and Télécoop.” In the village, she volunteers at the toilets.
Can we express our point of view calmly without putting our life in danger?” asks Françoise, a 62-year-old recent retiree who came with her friend Brigitte. “I’m terrified of the police force. When you hear what’s involved in preparing for a demonstration, it’s kind of like preparing for war.” She regrets the French exception when it comes to maintaining order, where in France the police resort to brutality more than elsewhere in Europe. She cites the documentary Sainte-Soline, autopsie d’un carnage and wonders: “What would it take for an anti-basin protest to be authorized?”
Affinity groups and activism training
Faced with this violent police suppression, citizens are getting more involved. The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme has increased the number of field observers from 18 last year to 50 this year. Les Amis de la Confédération Paysanne has gained an additional 1,500 members. Les Soulèvements de la Terre and some 120 organizations in the Village are also doubling down on efforts to protect their activists while maintaining their capacity for action.
First, by training them. Among the dozens of workshops and conferences that are held every day, many are devoted to preparing participants for action: how to move as a group, how to make decisions in an emergency situation, knowing your rights, understanding police weapons, limiting risks, etc.
One of the basic concepts is the affinity group: “groups with common goals – for example, a clown group, canteen group, or frontline group during protests”, according to Dalidou, 40, originally from Paris and a trainer at the Village. He comes from the Diffraction collective, created in 2015 at COP21 to train activists to “fight without burning out and address issues of power and privilege in our activist spaces”.
In these affinity groups, everyone takes care of each other. “We ask ourselves how we feel emotionally and physically, what we’re prepared to do, how much risk we’re willing or able to take, how long we want to stay, and whether we want to wait for our teammates in front of the police station if we’re arrested,” Dalidou explains. It’s a technique inspired by Ende Gelände, the German anti-coal collective whose multiple, protean formation is reminiscent of Les Soulèvements de la Terre.
A genuine culture of care develops. In addition to activism training, the prevention and psycho-trauma awareness workshops are all full. “We take care of people because we’re in a very hostile context,” Dalidou explains. “But also because it’s very important politically. We don’t want it to be only the most dominant, the strongest, those with privileges, who can to continue the fight. This claim for the right for anyone to protest, echoes Emmanuel Macron’s remark after a septuagenarian activist was injured during a Yellow Vests protest in 2019: “When you’re fragile (…) you don’t put yourself in these kinds of situations.”
“Be Water My Friend”
The second lever for protecting activists from police suppression is to implement a fluid action strategy – “Be water my friend”, in the words of Bruce Lee. During actions, the challenge is to “avoid head-on clashes” without falling into collective impotence,” says a member of Soulèvements de la Terre. They count on the unexpected, on “framework overflows”. Does the planned action at the mega-basin site in the Saint Sauvan forest presage violence? The organizers plan a festive picnic by the river in Migné-Auxances. The city of La Rochelle is cordoned off by police roadblocks? 200 protesters walk across the Ile de Ré bridge. An agile and creative organization.
The objectives are specific: to disarm and make visible. During the two days of action, each target is chosen to highlight its role in agribusiness. On the first day, activists target Cérience, a seed seller and member of the agro-industrial group Terrena, and Pampr’œuf, a factory farm for laying hens with a capacity of 305,000 animals, also linked to Terrena. Pinned down in 2021 by the animal rights group L214, the poultry company euthanized over 285,000 hens in 2023, to stop the spread of the bird flu virus. Given the police protection of the dedicated mega-basin for factory farms, the protestors send a kite carrying a basket of duckweed, so that the plant grows inside the pipes of the infrastructure. A poetic act of low-tech sabotage.
On Saturday, La Pallice harbor is targeted. It’s France’s biggest importer of forest products and second biggest exporter of grain, scheduled for expansion in 2025. “The proliferation of mega-basins upstream and the expansion of the port downstream are two sides of the same coin in a juicy business,” Les Soulèvements de la Terre explain on their website. The protest, which takes place in several processions, including a family and maritime one, attracts between 5,000 and 10,000 protesters and leads to violent clashes. Once again, the protesters decide to stop and return to the Village.
These precise, localized actions are in the DNA of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, who are committed to “leaving a protest with the feeling that something has changed”, as they write in their book Première Secousse (La Fabrique éditions, 2024). Let’s hope that the massive, multi-faceted gathering at the Village de l’eau will help set the record straight: far from the image of eco-terrorists pinned on environmental activists by the Ministry of the Interior, the cause of water and agricultural practices is everybody’s business. And it deserves a voice.