The environmental activist organization is coming back more and more in the news often for dreaded mobilizations like in Sainte-Soline or on the Lyon-Turin line, but what is the group “Les Uprisings of the Earth” all about?
Would a green movement sow discord within the government? Emmanuel Macron would have complained about it personally in the Council of Ministers, regretting the slowness of Gérald Darmanin to dissolve the Uprisings of the Earth. This organization bringing together several environmental groups, including members of the former ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in Loire-Atlantique, created in 2021 is in the sights of the Minister of the Interior after several mobilizations. The Earth Uprisings clearly show their goal: “to build a network of social struggles while stimulating a movement of resistance and land redistribution on a larger scale”, according to their founding text.
The list of signatories to this forum published on Médiapart reveals the participation of Extinction Rebellion, Attac France, Friends of the Earth, the Confédération paysanne for the most well-known associations in the militant and environmental group. Firm partners and names from the world of research are also part of the organization’s fight.
Benoît Feillu, one of the spokespersons of the Uprisings of the Earth, details the action of this collective in Le Monde: “This coalition has set itself the goal of intervening on two aspects: the artificialization of the land of a side and their capture by agribusiness on the other.”
The Earth Uprisings have made a name for themselves blockading several production sites of cement heavyweights Lafarge and Eqiom. But it was above all the event in Sainte-Soline that made them known to as many people as possible. After the violent clashes around the mega-basin under construction in Deux-Sèvre, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, indicated before the National Assembly his intention to dissolve this collective. His motives? “Several strong abuses against the police, several destruction of property, hundreds of gendarmes or police officers injured, several calls for insurrection.”
“We gave ourselves as methods of action, both the possibility of going to occupy land, but also of being able to intervene on construction sites, on infrastructures which we consider responsible for the ecological disaster to dismantle these infrastructures”, explains Benoît Feillu. He goes on to defend this method: “It is judged that there is an absolute climate emergency and that there is an environmental inaction by the government which is absolutely catastrophic.”
They communicate via a calendar divided into seasons. Each year, a mobilization season, “season 5” is in progress from March 25, 2023 until August 31, 2023. They will thus be present in the Larzac plateau in August and in the Maurienne valley from June 17 to protest against the Lyon-Turin rail project.
Recently, the group made a name for itself during an operation near Nantes. The goal was to protest against the exploitation of sand for the benefit of the construction industry. But agricultural land was ransacked during the demonstration. Experimental greenhouses of the Federation of Nantes market gardeners were vandalized in a few minutes. Damage that shocked even within the environmental movement, because these greenhouses serve as laboratories with crops without pesticides, for example.
Their main actions target agro-industry, the privatization of soils and their artificialization. They present themselves as “rebellious young people who grew up with the ecological disaster as a backdrop and precariousness as the only horizon. We fought against the labor law, police violence, racism, sexism and the climate apocalypse. ” Their actions are mostly illegal, the collective makes no secret of this by explaining that “being content with forums, petitions, demonstrations-walks” is no longer possible in the face of the climate emergency.
Le Parisien, via a note from territorial intelligence, argues that “the hard core of the Earth Uprisings, initially composed of ultra-left strategists, has gradually expanded to activists from environmental collectives, such as the civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion, in which many members, gradually disillusioned by the demonstrations and actions of civil disobedience deemed sterile, are inclined to switch to radicalism.
They are thus compared to the black bloc movement, visible in the demonstrations, because their activists would not hesitate “to confront the police to commit their abuses (degradation, intrusions, sabotage, etc.) equipped with gas masks, umbrellas, and armed with stones, mortars, molotov cocktails, petanque balls.”
Faced with the threat of dissolution, the Earth Uprising remain unmoved. “It is difficult to see how Darmanin could dissolve a movement, we are not an association or a collective”, underlines Basile Dutertre, spokesperson, with BFMTV.
