“We Are Nature That Defends Itself”: Care Ethics and Politics Prefigured in the French environmental activist movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

Sammanfattning

What would it mean to take Care Ethics as the organizing principle of environmental struggle? This thesis takes that question as its starting point, and Les Soulèvements de la Terre (LSDT), a French environmental activist movement that has made the defense of land and living beings its central political project, as its object of study. Using Hajer's (1995) argumentative discourse analysis with Joan Tronto's (1994) ethico-political framework of care, this thesis analyzes the storylines structuring LSDT's discourse. Across three storylines, the movement constructs a powerful counter-hegemonic narrative that, by naming capitalism as the structural cause of both ecological devastation and social precarity, stimulates the imagination of alternative social and ecological organizations. At the same time, LSDT’s discourse reemphasizes the need for a political responsibility grounded in practice, for instance, care-giving practices. To face the institutional inefficacity to overcome the ecological crisis, the movement acts, resists, protects, and reframes blocking, disarming, and occupying as acts of caregiving rather than acts of violence. The thesis positions LSDT’s discourse and practices in the ecofeminist tradition as it revalues forms of labor, knowledge, and relational practice that patriarchal capitalism systematically devalues. Ultimately, LSDT does not merely demand a different world but already begins to build it within its organization, and care practices which represent a form of prefigurative politics: a strategic tool to regain hope in the future and collective power.