Rewilding in Greece?

A PROPOSAL FOR ZONES OF REFUGE

AND ZONES TO DEFEND

Presentation and Discussion

WITH GENE RAY

Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Violence against human and more-than-human relatives and the destruction of our shared (bio)pluriverse are now the urgent core and highest stakes of planetary politics – yet, this urgency, these stakes, still hardly register in public debate in Greece. Drawing in part from his new book, After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners, Gene Ray offers a two-part proposal for acquiring land and establishing Zones for Rewilding and Zones for Commoning & Permaculture, based on successful campaigns and social struggles in France. Could you afford a 25 Euro/year membership fee? On that basis, an association in France bought a 500-hectare forest near the Grand Leval agroecological farm and permanently locked it in “free evolution.” The synergies between commoning, permaculture and rewilding open paths beyond the paralysis of watching the Holocene biosphere die. And they align well with an internationalist and anti-imperialist politics. Is it possible in Greece? Let’s talk about it!

Gene Ray is a recovering modern. He teaches critical studies at Geneva University of Art and Design. His new book is After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners (Autonomedia, 2024).

Image: Photo by Jay Jordan of the ZAD lighthouse, built illegally exactly where the French state planned to build a new airport control tower. From the ZAD (Zone to Defend) to Les Soulèvements de la terre (The Uprisings of the Earth), France is convulsed with an emergent planetary politics.