Ser bosques

Western civilization has been built, stone by stone, on the ashes of the forests. But, in addition to being devastated to obtain raw materials, the forests have also been devastated because, for as long as there is memory, they were a refuge for free men and women, heretics and resistant, of all those who do not allow themselves to be governed. Today, this political and economic dynamic that continues to plague the tree masses is called "territorial planning", but it must be understood as a low intensity war: against forests, but also against animals and the human communities that inhabit them. And that they defend them, many times with their lives, because we must not forget that, beyond the bulldozers, tear gas and rubber balls of our democracies, the murder of environmental activists has doubled in the last decade. For all these activists, and for the part of society they represent, the forest is the seat of the community, a temporary refuge, a sacred place, shelter from the wild. For this reason, the Mexican peasants of Guerrero have been fighting for fifteen years against the industrial exploitation of that territory; Cree trappers in Canada defend the boreal forest against deforestation; the Penan of Borneo arm themselves with blowguns against the oil palm companies; in the Rhineland, the resistance is organizing to block the extraction of lignite in one of the last primary forests in Europe; the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes faces the French state and its laws... Battles are fought everywhere in which the same idea resonates: the forest is not a biomass deposit, nor a zone for free development infrastructure, not a biosphere reserve, not a carbon sink. The forest is a people that revolts, a defense that is organized, imaginations that intensify. There is a forest where the general existential misery can no longer be borne. There is forest where we are forests, there where we are ungovernable.