Saving Agrafa: A rooted defense of wildness in the age of climate change

Abstract

Today, the environmental movement seems riven by divergent commitments to climate justice, on the one hand, and to wilderness conservation, on the other. In an essay titled ​​“In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World,” historian Andreas Malm (2018) suggests that these commitments might be reconciled through the recognition of common social justice values and liberatory aspirations in the protection of what he calls “wildness.” This article responds to that essay, challenging that, due to insufficient attention to contemporary environmental struggles and the question of land, Malm fails to precisely diagnose and, therefore, address the cause of the movement’s internal rift. In service of an alternative analysis, this article turns to an ongoing struggle that aims to defend the “wildness” of the Agrafa Mountains of central Greece by opposing the local installation of industrial-scale ‘renewable’ energy infrastructures. Through a review of activists’ self-published literature, this article attends to their objections to these popular, techno-scientific climate fixes and traces how these objections shape their refusal to subordinate the earthly defense of wildness to the planetary cause of climate change. It suggests that activists’ counterproposal to instead get to the “root” of the socioecological crisis presents an alternative path to the reconciliation of the environmental movement’s factions, one which parallels the recommendations of degrowth scholars in its demands for systemic social and economic transformation. Therefore, this article concludes by urging degrowthers to recognize as co-theorists and co-practitioners the communities that are directly challenging growth as they struggle to defend relatively “wild” lands.

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