WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL CA #347 - Sainte-Soline and Bélâbre: ups and downs (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Behind the pretexts put forward by the government to reject projects,

there are different strategies of struggle that are hidden behind what
we consider a victory or a defeat. ---- The high point is the court
decision concerning the basins near Sainte-Soline in Vienne. On December
18, 2024, the Bordeaux Administrative Court of Appeal ruled that four
water reserves, including that of Sainte-Soline, were illegal on the
grounds that they threatened the survival of the little bustard, a
protected species.
The low point is in Bélâbre, in neighboring Indre, the burial of the
project for a reception center for asylum seekers. The financial
difficulties of the association in charge of the project forced the
mayor of the town to throw in the towel.

In Sainte-Soline, we remember that it was an unprecedented mobilization
of several tens of thousands of people that had developed over the past
few years against the monopolization of water by agribusiness
industrialists and which had culminated in the demonstrations and
clashes of October 29, 2022 and March 25, 2023, at the initiative of the
Bassines non merci and the Soulèvements de la terre collectives.

In Bélâbre, it was the far right from the RN to the Zemmourians who had
mobilized on several occasions "against the arrival in the Commune of
"foreigners endangering our women and children". Faced with the few
dozen fascists led by an old friend of Bardella, Pierre Gentillet, there
were hardly more demonstrators who came to support the mayor's project
and shout "fascism will not pass".

Of course, the scale of these two projects is not the same. It is
however impossible not to notice that the strategies of struggle, as far
as those that we support are concerned, have not been the same and have
not produced the same results.

Concerning the basins around Sainte-Soline, the protection of the
bustard was a pretext put forward by the judges to avoid giving the
impression of giving in to the arguments on water and the criticisms of
agribusiness put forward by the anti-basins and especially to give in to
the force of a mobilization that risks spreading, in a context where the
probassines have shown themselves, for their part, incapable of
mobilizing on the ground.

In Bélâbre, the financial difficulties mentioned to stop the project
were only a pretext, among others prefectural, to avoid admitting that
the pressure of the extreme right had been decisive in the face of a
very pale and moderate support for asylum seekers. The mobilization and
communication (the mayor of Bélâbre recognizes it!) against the
opponents of the project were not supported by spectacular initiatives
shaking up the ultra-legalist order of humanitarian associations that
primarily focused on the legal. The extreme left, certainly not in great
shape, did not see fit to make this conflict an abscess of fixation
going beyond the traditional denunciation of a fascism deemed illegal,
to try to reinvigorate an anti-racist expression and support for
immigrants rather at half-mast in the region.

At a time that some consider gloomy (we saw to what extent the social
return to school - read November's Alternative Current - had been even
more bloodless this year than the previous one), it must be recognized
that it is on the terrain of struggles wrongly called environmentalist
(1) that the contestation of the established order scores some points
and remains alive and visible. Despite the criticisms that have been
made, and which must be made, the strategy of the Soulèvement de la
terre has proven to be profitable for the moment by allowing to maintain
a level of inventiveness, impertinence, confrontation, even risk,
necessary so that anti-capitalism, which is nevertheless diffuse in
French society, like the desire for communism (to a much lesser extent!)
do not boil down to moralistic whining leading to having to choose one
day between the plague and cholera.

What was missed in Bélâbre is not, however, completely and definitively
successful in Poitou: if three basins can no longer legally be filled,
the one in Sainte-Soline which is half full can still benefit from a
"protection" downgrade concerning the bustard. It's up to us to play.

jpd

Note
1 - I prefer to call them territorial struggles because they cover not
just a relationship between humans and nature but also the antagonisms
and divergent interests between humans themselves regarding the use of
their environment. Green parties tend to consider that "we are all in
the same boat" when it comes to the degradation of this environment,
rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. This is not our point of view.

https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4370
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca