More-than-Human Figurations in Occupied Forests: Towards Ecological Solidarity within Environmental Conflicts

Abstract

This contribution offers a theoretical, empirical, and conceptual approach to more-than-human figurations in occupied forests. It combines insights from posthumanist thought, relational ontologies, and science and technology studies and puts them in dialogue with debates about extractivism and socio-ecological transformations. Through insights from social movement and protest studies and based on empirical and participatory research, three more-than-human figurations within environmental conflicts, specifically in forest occupations, are carved out: 1) extractivist figurations between sand, forests, and economic actors within a globalised sand and gravel economy and its local impacts; 2) figurations of solidarity between humans and more-than-humans within and across forest occupations in Germany and 3) repressive more-than-human figurations, which articulate the ecologically destructive effects of sand extractivism, repression against climate (justice) activists and forest squatters. These three figurations are conceived as entangled elements of a string figure, which compose a counter-community of an ecological class aiming at the prefiguration of possible futures.