If we hadn't fought, with our bodies
and with our paper work, our legal work, and all this diversity of tactics
from  sabotage to petitions, from hunger strikes to people up the trees
and if we hadn't done that then we'd be right here in the middle of an airport building.
and the way we fought that was not just through resistance but was through constructing alternatives.
The ZAD itself was set up in 2009 following a climate camp
that took place in that field just over there.
In doing that climate camp, local residents who were against the airport read out a letter saying
we think that in order to defend a territory you have to inhabit it.
And they invited people to come and squat the empty farmhouses, squat the land
and start to build what we now call the ZAD, the zone to defend.
It was also at that moment when the slogan for this struggle became "against the airport and its world".
It's not just against the airport its against everything that airport embodies
in it's concrete, in its hierarchy, in it's governing territory through infrastructure and so on.
In fact we built the light house right next to where they wanted to put the control tower.
But this land had a history before the struggle.
All lands have histories of struggle and on of the struggles that took place here was against enclosure.
Enclosure is the classic moment where a commons,
that doesn't belong to a single person but is shared
and the resources of that place are shared  and decided upon together,
when that commons is enclosed by a fence or a hedgerow or a ditch
and becomes private property.
and, if we'd been standing here before the 18th century
we wouldn't have these hedgerows like this
it would be a moorland.
Low fertility,  Breton, classic moorland,
with small holdings and run as a commons for a thousand years.
Nantes, which is the nearby city, was also the centre of the slave trade in France.
and had therefore a huge excess of capital.
And the people there, the rich slave dealers and owners
decided to privatize bits of this land and build these hedgerows.
They used a byproduct of the sugar industry called the black animal
to put on the land to make it more fertile.
Now what's special about this landscape are these very hedgerows.
It's called a bocage
which is this kind of mixture of wetlands, checker board fields,
little feilds with thick hedgerows and little forests.
In most of France that was destroyed during the 70's and 80's
in a process called le remembrement
where they basically had to open up the land for industrial agriculture.
Because they had planned the airport here from 1965,
they were like "it's going to be covered in concrete,
no point, we don't need to destroy it because it will be destroyed anyway.
Of course it never got covered in concrete and so now we have this bocage.
So this kind of palimpsest, these layers of history of different land management here
which are very interesting because now
we're saying we want to keep this bocage because it's very rich in biodiversity
and we want to keep the commons, or return to the commons.
And the battle that we've just seen where the state had announced the canceling of the airport
on the 17th of January and in the same breath the minister said "but we will evict the ZAD",
that battle is against the commons. in a way it's the revenge against the commons.
It's the state in its neoliberal, individualistic, market dictatorship
saying "we cannot have a model of any kind of alternative at this scale".
Here we're on 4000 acres, it's not a tiny little ghetto of utopia.
This is a mass popular movement on 4000 acres supported by thousands and thousands of people.
59
The beautiful thing about humanity is that its so fractured and divers and different everywhere.
The mechanisms have always been incredibly different
and based on where they inhabit.
And again, that's what the ZAD is really about is how do we inhabit a territory.
The kind of DNA, the two strands that bring the ZAD together and are our strength
is this mixture of resistance and creativity.
Of saying, no we don't want another capitalist infrastructure, yes this is how we want to live.
we want to live in common we want to live collectively, together, sharing.
