We are Forests

From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.

1    Where We Live, Where We Struggle 2    A Country Like No Other 3    A Little History of the Map 4    Friction on the Ground 5    Welcome to the Park! 6    A Genealogy of Territorial Planning 7    Devastating Accounting 8    The Physiocrats and the War on the Commons 9    All That Is Solid Must Be Liquidated 10   Total Calculation 11   From Encampment to Logistics 12   Forests Versus Wood-Energy 13   Bringing the Outside In 14   Returning to Forests, Becoming a Secessionist 15   The New Nomos of the Earth References Notes