# Bringing environmentalism down to earth: the case of Earth Uprisings in France

Pablo Lapuente Tiana

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/87668

DOI: 10.4000/15127

ISSN: 2294-9135

**Publisher:**

Société Royale Belge de Géographie, National Committee of Geography of Belgium

**Electronic reference**

Pablo Lapuente Tiana, "Bringing environmentalism down to earth: the case of Earth Uprisings in France", *Belgeo* [Online], 4 | 2025, Online since 28 January 2026, connection on 03 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/87668; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15127

This text was automatically generated on March 3, 2026.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
# Bringing environmentalism down to earth: the case of Earth Uprisings in France

Pablo Lapuente Tiana

## Introduction: Earth Uprisings as a case study

<footnote n="1">1. Over the past few decades, environmental justice (EJ) studies have grown into a wide-ranging field of inquiry, expanding far beyond its initial, rights-based articulation in the United States. As the concept has traveled, it has taken on new meanings—shaped by the particular histories, geographies, and political cultures of the places in which it is applied (Bowen, 2022; Schaefer, 2008). With this expansion comes a persistent challenge: how to make sense of EJ in contexts that differ markedly from the U.S. settings where the concept first emerged. Scholars have increasingly called attention to the need for geographical specificity, urging closer attention to how local conditions shape both environmental struggles and the language used to describe them (Walker & Bulkeley, 2006). France offers a particularly instructive case. Here, environmental and social mobilisations typically follow traditions that are not explicitly framed in justice-oriented terms (Deldrève et al., 2019). Moreover, when the language of EJ has entered French debates, it has often done so via academic channels, rather than through grassroots activism (Blanchon et al., 2009; Coolsaet & Deldrève, 2023). Yet despite this apparent disconnect, many French environmental movements embody principles that closely align with EJ¹. Their struggles are frequently local, rooted in place, and deeply attentive to the intersection of environmental harm and social inequality. Still, these movements remain surprisingly underexplored in the broader EJ literature².</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. This study explores these dynamics through the case of Earth Uprisings (Les Soulèvements de la Terre), one of the most prominent recent expressions of radical environmental activism in France. Established in 2021, Earth Uprisings emerged from a coalition of climate activists, far-left groups, farmers, and local associations, and is</footnote>
widely known for its direct-action tactics—including land occupations and sabotage—aimed at polluting industries and large-scale development projects. The group exemplifies how this tradition of entangled environmental and social struggles is not only continuing but intensifying in new forms. Contemporary French environmental activism increasingly merges with broader social movements (Senac, 2021), a phenomenon Robineau (2020, p. 50) describes as the “radicalisation of environmental activists [and the] environmentalisation of radical activists”. In the case of Earth Uprisings, this fusion is deeply spatial: the group was explicitly founded to support and connect place-based struggles, particularly in peripheral regions, emphasising place and its inhabitants as the primary focus of political contestation³.

3

This study argues that Earth Uprisings can be understood through an EJ perspective. The group is positioned within a broader tradition of French radical environmentalism, that has historically conceived activism as locally rooted and linked to both environmental and social justice concerns. This lineage is evident in movements like the Larzac protests of the 1970s and 1980s (Terral, 2011), a key influence on Earth Uprisings. While the Larzac campaign has been analysed through various lenses—spatial contention (Franquemagne, 2007), political economy (Ayres & Bosia, 2011), and transnational activism (Gildea & Tompkins, 2015)—its explicit connection to EJ remains unexplored. Similarly, the ZAD movement, which directly influenced Earth Uprisings, provides a compelling example of the intersection between environmental activism and justice demands in France (Ollitrault, 2021). However, scholarly engagement with ZAD from an explicit EJ perspective remains limited. Existing analyses have primarily focused on territorial studies (Florez et al., 2022), critical political ecology (Dunlap, 2020), and social space theory (Schüler, 2017). While these approaches offer valuable insights, they typically avoid explicitly framing their analyses within established EJ frameworks. This pattern extends to the progressive farmer's union *Confédération Paysanne*, another source of inspiration for Earth Uprisings, which has been analysed through sociology of activism (Bruneau, 2007; Morena, 2014; Bruneau, 2015) and political economy (Snikersproge, 2022), but not EJ.

4

Given its recent emergence in 2021, scholarly analyses of Earth Uprisings are still scarce. Existing literature has approached the group from various perspectives, such as geography of mobilisations (Marendaz, 2023), legal studies (de Gliniasty, 2024; Schill, 2024), critical political analysis (Haeringer, 2023), and anarchist anthropology (Lecerf, 2024). However, while these studies provide valuable perspectives, they do not engage with the group as an EJ case. Coolsaet & Deldrève (2023) note that EJ in France has largely developed through top-down, policy-driven approaches, with limited space for claim-making and protest. Using an EJ lens to examine Earth Uprisings, this study reads its campaigns as part of a French tradition of site-based environmental activism whose struggles over exposure, recognition, participation and autonomy closely align with EJ concerns. This approach highlights grassroots forms of EJ in France and their specific features, addressing an overlooked dimension of how EJ demands emerge from below. Building on Coolsaet & Deldrève's work, the study contributes to the ongoing effort to expand and contextualise EJ in France and argues that Earth Uprisings represents the latest expression of this activist tradition. Against this backdrop, this research seeks to answer the following questions:

5

- How do Earth Uprisings' campaigns contribute to understanding environmental justice activism in France?
6

- What role does the spatial dimension play in these campaigns, and how is it connected to environmental justice activism in France?

7

Rather than revisiting well-established theoretical debates on the concept of justice⁴, this study adopts a pluralist conception of EJ to enable adaptation to the specific context of social protests in France. Such an approach draws on contributions from scholars who emphasise the importance of contextual flexibility in applying EJ across diverse settings (e.g. Schlosberg, 2004, 2013). More specifically, it employs a poststructuralist perspective, viewing justice as contingent, and socially constructed, informed by scholars such as Hobson (2006) and Jamal & Hales (2016). To effectively analyse Earth Uprisings through this lens, this study employs analytical tools from Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT). PDT, which focuses on how meaning is constructed through social practices, has proven valuable in analysing local environmental protests (e.g., Griggs & Howarth, 2004; Özen, 2009; Mert, 2019). This allows the study to examine how environmental harms are rendered intelligible as injustices and how heterogeneous demands are assembled into a collective subject, while mapping the justice dimensions of these claims. It is important to note, however, that this article does not claim that Earth Uprisings self-identifies as an EJ movement. Rather, it examines how its own discourse can be read as articulating justice claims that become intelligible through EJ's analytical dimensions.

8

While discourse-analytic approaches are now common in EJ research, the explicit and systematic integration of PDT with environmental justice remains relatively rare. A handful of studies mobilise PDT or closely related post-structural frameworks in analyses of climate justice and local environmental conflicts, but they either treat EJ only tangentially or focus on different empirical and national contexts⁵. This study aims to contribute to exploring the insights that may emerge from their dialogue. Specifically, this research will analyse a range of textual sources produced by Earth Uprisings between January 2021 and September 2024. These sources include movement statements, organisational documents, and published articles, providing a rich dataset for understanding the group's discourse and its connection to EJ claims⁶.

# Poststructuralist discourse theory and environmental justice: an analytical framework

## Environmental justice as a discourse formation

9

The evolution of EJ studies has been characterised by increasing diversity in both regional applications and conceptual frameworks, producing a complex interplay of perspectives. Among these, the poststructuralist paradigm constitutes one of the lenses through which EJ has been examined. This paradigm is grounded in the premise that meanings are not inherent or fixed, but historically constructed. From this perspective, justice is not seen as a stable, universal principle, but as a concept continually shaped through practices of meaning-making (e.g. Hobson, 2006; Velicu & Kaika, 2017). These practices can be understood as discursive, in that they rely on language, symbols, and other social practices that produce and organise meaning.

10

In the context of EJ, this perspective focuses on how communities collectively frame environmental harms as injustices and on how justice claims are expressed. This does
not mean that material inequalities or embodied harms only *exist* once they are expressed. Rather, the poststructuralist lens examines how such conditions are rendered visible, named, and contested. Through these processes, specific understandings of justice emerge within “webs of relationships” that allow such meanings to be shared, reinforced, and acted upon (Valverde, 2017). Building on this approach, the study conceptualises EJ as a discourse that articulates environmental harms as effects of unequal power relations and constructs a collective subject who contests these harms through political struggle.

## Poststructuralist discourse theory as a framework for contestation

11 PDT provides the analytical lens for examining the dynamics of political conflicts. While other discourse lenses are widely used in EJ research (e.g., Stanley, 2009; Cowell et al., 2011; Banerjee & Steinberg, 2015; Boelens et al., 2022; Schlosberg et al., 2024), focusing on interpretive framing or the formation of institutional narratives, PDT has received comparatively little attention. Originally developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, PDT is based on the idea that individuals' cognitive frameworks—how they perceive and understand the world—are socially constructed through discourse. For these authors, discourse encompasses more than spoken or written language, including all practices that produce meaning. Crucially, PDT foregrounds the inherently political nature of these articulations (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014). Political relations define the boundaries of social orders by determining which meanings and practices are legitimised and which are excluded. PDT is useful here because it offers a clear account of how social protests create a shared rhetoric of contestation. It does so by showing how separate demands are linked into a collective identity, shaped around a community seen as deserving of justice. PDT also helps clarify related dynamics, such as which symbols bind groups together and how they define their adversaries.

12 Since the empirical focus is political contestation, the analysis emphasizes the PDT tools best suited to explaining these dynamics. It specifically draws upon the concept of *the logic of equivalence*, which refers to a dynamic often observed in political conflicts, where diverse demands are articulated as an *equivalential chain* through their shared opposition to a common adversary. Through this process, a collective *we* is constructed in opposition to a defined *them*, polarising the political field into two camps. Social movements often centre their diverse grievances around a symbolic demand that encapsulates broader struggles, termed *empty signifier*. An empty signifier functions by universalising particular demands while remaining sufficiently indeterminate to accommodate multiple interpretations simultaneously. Together, these concepts situate EJ claims within political logics of articulation that help explain how contestation is assembled and sustained⁷.

## Mapping environmental justice claims

13 To specify the substance of Earth Uprisings' justice claims, the study draws on EJ scholarship and distinguishes four justice dimensions: *distribution, recognition, procedure, and transformation*. These dimensions provide a compact vocabulary for tracing how grievances are framed as unjust and what remedies are demanded. The first three originate in critical justice theory (Fraser, 2020) and form the triad most commonly used in classical EJ scholarship (Schlosberg, 2013)⁸. They can be framed as three radical
questions: who bears environmental harms and who receives benefits (distribution)? Whose identities, knowledge, and experiences are acknowledged, and whose are ignored or stigmatised (recognition)? Who can participate meaningfully in decision-making, on what terms, and with what power to influence outcomes (procedure)? The fourth dimension, transformation, is a more recent addition, introduced mainly through normative debates within critical environmental justice (Pellow, 2025). In the context of social protests, it refers to demands for systemic change to unjust power structures and to the alternatives proposed for enacting justice (Faber et al., 2021; Borgias & Berry, 2024). It is guided by the following questions: do the protest's claims and strategies aim to change the power relations that produce the injustice, and which alternatives are proposed? In the analysis, these dimensions function as analytical coordinates. Claims may cut across dimensions, and they may be articulated indirectly through narratives of harm, exclusion, dispossession, or autonomy.

## Analytical strategy and coding approach

14 The analysis distinguishes between the complementary roles of EJ dimensions and PDT. While EJ dimensions help specify what is being claimed, PDT clarifies how such claims are articulated into collective demands and identities. Where the EJ dimensions identify the content of justice claims, PDT specifies the mechanism through which such claims are unified in a shared discourse of contestation. Accordingly, the analysis used a two-layer coding process: (a) passages were coded for EJ dimensions (what harm or risk is described and which EJ dimensions are invoked), and (b) for political dynamics through which claims are articulated (e.g. antagonism, chains of equivalence, and key signifiers). The EJ dimensions and PDT concepts functioned as sensitising concepts rather than a rigid coding scheme. Initial readings were guided by the framework, but codes and categories were refined iteratively in response to the empirical material. After initial coding, patterns and regularities across the corpus were traced. Justice claims were not assumed to appear through explicit references to justice or rights-based language, but could also emerge through distinct rhetorical forms.

15 For this study, EJ relevance was assessed at the level of passages. A passage was treated as EJ-relevant when it coupled an environmental harm or risk with at least one claim analysable in terms of distribution, recognition, or procedure (and, where applicable, transformation when explicitly linked to those claims). Such claims could be articulated through notions such as dignity, health, autonomy, land, safety, or exclusion. To avoid over-extension, passages were not coded as EJ where environmental harms were described without any articulation of unequal power relations, misrecognition, or contested decision-making. The transformation dimension required particular caution, since systemic-change demands can extend beyond EJ discourse. To keep the analysis focused, transformation was coded only where it was explicitly connected to distribution, recognition, and/or procedural claims (for instance by linking systemic critique to patterns of unequal exposure, marginalisation, or exclusion from decision-making).
French radical environmentalism: historical and
political context

16 To understand Earth Uprisings and the radical environmentalist tradition it originates from, it is essential to situate the movement within France's broader socio-political context. France has historically been characterised by a highly centralised political and administrative system⁹, as well as strong universalist principles that reject recognition of regional, ethnic, or communal particularities. This system has historically concentrated power in Paris, reinforcing an administrative hierarchy that limits decentralised decision-making. Compared to other Western European countries, the French government has retained extensive executive authority, historically strengthened by neo-corporatist relationships aligning state institutions with industrial interests. France's centralised system has contributed to enduring geographical tensions, including hierarchical decision-making with limited local participation, disparities between the centre and periphery, and persistent post-colonial legacies that continue to structure inequalities particularly in the governance of racialised populations and overseas territories. Such dynamics have historically strained relations between the state and grassroots mobilisations (Kitschelt, 1986; Rootes, 1999). For radical environmental activism in particular, they have helped shape a political orientation defined by opposition to centralised authority and alignment with locally grounded struggles.

17 Earth Uprisings emerged from a longstanding tradition of radical environmental activism rooted in the May 1968 counterculture and left-wing agrarian movements (Martin, 2014). These movements have historically opposed state control while advocating for territorial decentralisation, fostering collaboration with groups whose activism extends beyond purely environmental concerns (Hayes, 2002, p. 13). A key influence on this tradition was the decade-long campaign in the 1970s and 1980s against the expansion of a military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. While not strictly an environmental protest, the defence of the natural landscape—threatened by the planned construction—became deeply intertwined with the concerns of local farmers, who opposed the project due to the expropriation of land and damage to grazing areas. This convergence attracted many environmental activists who became deeply involved, making Larzac one of the defining moments in the history of French environmentalism (Rootes, 2007; Ollitrault & Villalba, 2014). The Larzac campaign not only established a repertoire of actions—including land occupations and blockades—but also created a unifying mythology, framing sites of contention as symbols of collective resistance (Drent, 2023), a narrative later adopted by subsequent movements.

18 This tradition continued into the 21st century, most notably in the land-defence campaign at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in north-western France, widely regarded as one of the most influential environmental campaigns in recent French history. Initially a local struggle against the conversion of agricultural land into an airport, the campaign gained momentum in 2008 when activists established a permanently occupied area, which they called the ZAD ('Zone to Defend')¹⁰. Over time, the movement expanded beyond opposition to land expropriation, embracing broader demands for rural autonomy and land justice. Over the next decade, the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes evolved into a landmark within French activism (Verdier, 2018), inspiring similar ZAD occupations across France. The eventual cancellation of the airport in 2018 solidified
the significance of Notre-Dame-des-Landes as a reference point for many activists, and
provided a model that Earth Uprisings would later adapt in its own mobilisations.

19

Earth Uprisings was founded in December 2020 during a meeting at the occupied area of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. At this gathering, various activist groups—including farmers, radical-left organisations, climate activists, and local associations¹¹—came together to strategise ways to revitalise social mobilisation following the decline in public protests due to Covid-19 restrictions in 2019. The outcome of this meeting was encapsulated in a statement titled “A call to reclaim the lands and to block the industries that devour them” (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2021), which established a unified stance and marked the official formation of the group. This document underscored the need for a broad-based alliance to overcome the limitations faced by individual groups. Central to this coalition was “the land issue” (*la question de la terre*), a shared opposition to land grabbing and extractive practices. Moreover, the statement went beyond a mere defence of natural and rural lands, advocating instead for these spaces to be seen as collective living areas—spaces conducive to implementing radical forms of social organisation and serving as incubators for transformative, prefigurative institutions (Schlosberg & Coles, 2015).

20

To translate these principles into action, Earth Uprisings adopted a repertoire of direct-action tactics, centring on three key methods: blockades, the occupation of land and sites, and sabotage (referred to by the group as “disarmament”) targeting industrial machinery and infrastructure (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, n.d.-a). The group’s strategy was not confined to isolated protests but aimed to link localised struggles into a nationwide network of resistance. By integrating ongoing campaigns organised by different local groups, typically situated in rural and peripheral areas, Earth Uprisings sought to amplify their reach. These mobilisations have frequently connected multiple issues, such as the disproportionate environmental harm affecting low-income communities, and the marginalisation of small-scale farmers by agribusiness corporations¹².

21

A defining aspect of Earth Uprisings' approach was its strategic selection of mobilisation sites—choosing locations at the very source of conflict rather than symbolic arenas. Beginning in 2021, the group launched campaigns addressing issues such as urban expansion into community gardens, the appropriation of farmland for infrastructure projects, and deforestation for industrial purposes (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2023-a). Among the most notable actions was the occupation of a Lafarge cement factory, where 400 activists blocked entrances and disabled machinery in protest at its environmental impact. In 2023, the group also played a central role in the mass mobilisation against a controversial water reservoir project in Sainte-Soline, western France. The project, criticised for monopolising water resources for large agricultural corporations, sparked a demonstration of approximately 30,000 people. The protest escalated into violent confrontations with the police, prompting the French government to accuse Earth Uprisings of engaging in ecoterrorism and to initiate administrative procedures to dissolve the organisation. However, France's administrative court later overturned the decision, citing insufficient legal grounds.
# Analysis

22 The following analysis examines how Earth Uprisings organised its protests, exploring the narratives employed and the role of space within these mobilisations.

## Who speaks as We?

23 As noted before, Earth Uprisings took shape as an alliance. From the outset, the group emphasised the importance of incorporating different actors within a coordinated organisation that remained open enough to accommodate a wide range of views. This approach became a founding organisational principle, reflected both in public statements and in internal theorising through the concept of *composition* (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2023-a, p. 47)¹³. Read through PDT, composition works as an equivalential chain: a way of linking demands from ideologically diverse actors into a shared discourse. This is visible in the group's recurrent self-enumerations (young climate activists, farmers, radical-left groups, and local collectives and residents) presented not as separate constituencies, but as a single we spoken in the plural:

> We are young activists outraged by the climate emergency. [...] We are peasants who grow food while caring for the land [...] We are autonomous groups [...] We are local collectives and residents determined to stop construction projects that threaten to destroy our homes (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2024, pp. 8-9).

24 The idea of composition is not only articulated in written statements but also staged visually. Earth Uprisings' audiovisual materials, for instance, often portray farmers, along with their tools, such as tractors, together with other activist groups, alongside visual elements drawn from the repertoire of occupation movements over the past fifteen years, such as tent camps in occupied areas (fig. 1 and 2). Despite their differences, these groups largely shared a common political orientation. As a result, early work of articulation primarily forged links among demands that were already connected, even if only loosely. In many cases, Earth Uprisings acted as a catalyst by joining protests that local groups were already organising and incorporating their demands into the broader equivalential chain. By connecting with a variety of local campaigns, the group expanded the chain to include a larger and more open set of demands. In this sense, the collective subject articulated in Earth Uprisings is composed of an open-ended set of actors, generally linked by two features: a shared experience of exposure to environmental harms, dispossessions, and exclusions, and organisation in struggle against them.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Earth Uprisings' protest at Sainte-Soline, March 2023.</figcaption></figure>

Screen capture from *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* (2023-b, minute 00:48).

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Earth Uprisings' protest at Sainte-Soline, March 2023.</figcaption></figure>

Screen capture from *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* (2023-c, minute 00:48).

25

Among these affected communities, the most persistent subject in Earth Uprisings' discourse is the small farmer and peasant. This prominence is evident in the number of rural workers' groups participating in Earth Uprisings' campaigns, as well as in the number of radical-left activists and environmental activists who have embraced small-scale farming. Peasantry is consistently associated with natural environments, and its practices are presented as being in balance with nature. Conversely, environmental destruction is framed as inseparable from the destruction of these livelihoods:

> In a single movement, the agro-industrial complex wages a chemical war: it wipes out insects and birds, while also wiping out the peasantry, and with it the worlds, languages, and know-how that sustain rural life. Ecocide and ethnocide are two sides of the same coin (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2024, p. 117).

26

Small-scale rural workers and residents are frequently articulated alongside other communities exposed to the same, or similar, environmental harms. These links may be
grounded in spatial proximity, as with inhabitants of peri-urban areas, or in sectoral connections, as with immigrant communities employed as precarious agricultural labourers in the surrounding region:

The hedged farmland of Saint-Colomban faces a double threat: extractivism serving the metropolis, and land grabbing by the market-gardening industry—both carried out in contempt of the residents and farmers who keep this area alive. [...] At the opposite extreme from peasant market gardening, environmentally respectful and oriented toward local residents, we find a capitalist consortium that destroys and poisons farmland [...]. It embodies the agro-industry we reject: intensive pesticide use, pumping from aquifers and storing water in reservoirs, and the exploitation of immigrant labour (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2023-d).

For decades, Paris' suburbs have been the testing ground for runaway urban planning, which is destroying what little agricultural land remains in the Île-de-France region. It also threatens everyone living in the inner suburbs, who watch their area reshaped by projects that are ever more absurd and harmful (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-h).

The chain is also extended beyond French sites by linking the harms experienced by these communities to those borne by communities in the Global South, often in intersection with other forms of vulnerability:

[...] It is always the Global South that pays the highest price. Millions of children are born there with respiratory illnesses in greater numbers than in the North, and more people die there from polluted air than from any other cause. Armies, and the fossil-fuel, extractive, trade, digital, and agribusiness industries, contaminate bodies, soils, and water sources for generations, dumping tons of toxic waste. Climate disasters exacerbate these structural and racial inequalities. [...] And it is Black, Indigenous, and racialised women, children, disabled people, and trans people who are most affected (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2023-a, p. 60).

27 The glocal character of Earth Uprisings' discourse is evident across these articulations. It moves across scales, connecting local conflicts to global structures, and shifts between concrete campaign statements and more abstract political analysis. Such elasticity reflects the breadth of the group's output, which ranges from analytical writings to highly situated materials produced for particular campaigns, including propaganda pamphlets.

## How injustice is told

28 As with the diversity of actors brought into the alliance, the range of demands articulated across the materials reflects the principle of composition. Earth Uprisings' documents articulate dozens of grievances and targets, including water grabs, land take, industrial pollution, and infrastructure projects (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-c, n.d.-d, n.d.-e, n.d.-f). Many claims are highly specific, especially where they emerge from local campaigns, while others operate at a more general level. The two registers frequently intersect, as local conflicts are repeatedly framed as manifestations of broader structural problems. The chain includes claims that do not, in themselves, meet criteria for EJ coding, such as anti-capitalist, ecological, or civilisational critiques. Yet the most recurrent way in which the materials render conflict intelligible is by linking environmental harm to asymmetries of power and allocation, through motifs of dispossession, uneven exposure, and top-down decisions. This recurring narrative gives EJ a predominant role across the chain.
29 These claims rarely adopt an explicit, rights-based vocabulary of justice. Instead, justice is invoked through other registers: narratives of dispossession, uneven exposure to harm, the delegitimation of affected communities, and decision-making imposed from above. Land concentration and the disappearance of small-scale farming, for example, are treated as distributive stakes, questions of who controls land and livelihoods. Across the materials, distributional injustice emerges as a persistent thread: large-scale industrial expansion and extractivism generate environmental and welfare harms, deepen inequalities, and appropriate natural resources that are reclaimed as commons:

> The capture of water—a shared necessity for all living beings—by a small minority of agro-industrial operators (4% of farmers) will not only accelerate the drying out of watersheds. It will also intensify land grabbing—and therefore deepen inequalities within the farming world (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2023-i).

> This (extractivist) agriculture is driven by a frantic race to expand farms and increase profits, with no regard for the environment, food quality, or working conditions. It demands ever greater reliance on mechanisation, automation, and chemicals. It massively poisons the commons that are land and water. It kills birds, rodents, insects, and humans (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, n.d.-j).

30 On recognition, Earth Uprisings frames injustice as the systematic devaluation of affected communities' ways of living and knowing. This narrative often appears through portrayals of local practices and knowledges being dismissed by major corporations and industry. While the emphasis varies with the concreteness of the text, the recurring focus is on large-scale industry ignoring or denigrating small peasantry. This misrecognition is presented as systemic and as affecting a wide range of subordinate actors:

> [Industrial ideology] reflects a centuries-old contempt among the powerful for subsistence practices—and for the subordinate populations who sustain them. [...] It produces a senseless society that devalues the activities we cannot live without, along with the people who do them (precarious workers, feminised and racialised). [...] A class of technocrats and entrepreneurs—mostly men in suits—decides what counts as a need and administers territory, while keeping those most affected at a distance. Ways of life are standardised; environments are remade into artificial systems. Anything that disrupts capitalist “optimisation” is flattened: bulldozers, explosives, and toxic chemicals do the work—deployed with little restraint by armed forces, agro-industry, and the construction and public-works sectors (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2023-a, p. 138).

31 A procedural justice dimension is also consistently present across the materials. It typically appears through claims that governmental authorities ignore protests, exclude affected groups from decision-making, or circumvent opposition through biased consultation processes. Confrontational forms of protest are frequently connected to such claims, particularly through recurring assertions that demands have gone unheard and that earlier mobilisations were repressed. In campaign-specific texts, these concerns are expressed through grievances about inadequate deliberation and flawed procedures. In more general statements, they are framed as a systemic marginalisation of subordinate actors within decision-making structures:

> To return to residents and farmers in each locality the power to decide how land is allocated, used, and designated, we call on people to enter en masse, chairs in hand, the institutions and seats of power where the future of the Earth is decided without us. We can no longer leave this power in the hands of the FNSEA and agribusiness, developers, and concreters. We will gather again at the start of next term to occupy these decision-making sites (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2021).
32

These justice dimensions are also intertwined with Earth Uprisings' self-understanding as a project of radical transformation. Across the materials, the movement advances an explicit programme for structural change that goes beyond opposing inequality and precarity, including calls to dismantle major polluting industries, collectivise land, and reconfigure structures of ownership and control. While the level of detail varies, these proposals are generally framed through an anti-capitalist vocabulary centred on shared resources and the commons:

> We—collectives, associations, farmers, and territories in struggle—share this desire to move beyond divisions. We have another model to propose: one grounded in cooperation; in defending the living world; in defending land and peasant farming; and in the right to cultivate a garden even without a property title. Access to land in the city also means giving the most precarious, those who can't afford to escape to the countryside on a whim, the means to grow and harvest vegetables (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-k).

33

Taken together, these dimensions travel along the equivalential chain, articulating struggles within a shared claim-making repertoire. Within this repertoire, EJ operates as a dominant semantic of contestation, while also underpinning a political roadmap for radical, systemic transformation.

## Where struggles happen

34

Earth Uprisings deploys another articulatory strategy: the linking of geographically dispersed sites of struggle. Mobilisations are grounded in locally situated grievances and staged at locations framed as sites of environmental destruction and injustice, most often in peri-urban and rural areas. This articulation is structured through rounds of mobilisation, referred to as “seasons”, which coordinate actions across multiple locations in France. Each action addresses a specific local issue and is developed in collaboration with groups already active on the ground (fig. 3, 4, 5 and 6). Seasons are introduced through official statements and promoted through videos that compile footage from different campaigns. Through this multi-scalar communication strategy, Earth Uprisings presents heterogeneous local struggles as part of a broader, unified movement. In doing so, it constructs a symbolic geography of struggles, in which each place functions both as a physical site and as a node within a larger political constellation:

> If the actions of past resistors can serve as a compass for Earth Uprisings, guiding us forward, it is in building a resistance network. (...) Let us imagine a network that brings together a diverse range of sensibilities and political cultures around shared goals and targets. A network capable of deploying strategies and carrying out coordinated actions across France (Niamanouch, 2023, pp. 127-128).

35

The emphasis on specific sites and livelihoods is accompanied by a parallel concretisation of targets. In Earth Uprisings' discourse, sites of conflict are rendered materially identifiable and visible through infrastructures such as factories, pipelines, or water reservoirs. These objects function as targets of mobilisation and intervention, making conflict legible in spatial terms and enabling forms of struggle oriented towards direct action, including the physical disruption or dismantling of infrastructure. Across the materials analysed, such targets are associated with a range of adversaries, which vary across protest contexts: large corporations, government-aligned farmers' unions, regional authorities, among others. This plurality mirrors the
diversity of actors and places represented in Earth Uprisings' campaigns. At the same time, adversaries are rarely treated as merely local. As with demands articulated at once in concrete and general terms, opponents are frequently presented as particular expressions of broader systemic injustices. In several instances, the French state is named explicitly as a direct agent of these injustices¹⁴. More often, it is described as the overarching framework that enables them, positioning the state less as a participant among others than as the institutional architecture that enables and shields the whole adversarial bloc:

> Whatever one may think of it, or expect from it, the State is giving free rein to the market-driven devastation of the land ("la terre"). It is actively orchestrating the circumvention of the very land and environmental regulations it once established (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2021).

Across the campaigns, a consistent rhetorical strategy of polarisation is evident. The adversarial camp is depicted as a force indifferent to life in the places where it intervenes, guided by an abstract, profit-driven logic. This narrative appears in expressions such as “institutions and industries that poison the land” (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2021b), “weapons of mass destruction against life” (Robles, 2023), and “the armed wing of agro-industry” (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.). Earth Uprisings, by contrast, presents itself as an alliance in which local environments and communities are tightly intertwined¹⁵.

36

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. Poster for an action in Besançon, eastern France.</figcaption></figure>

Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-g.
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Poster for an action in La Prévalaye, western France.</figcaption></figure>

Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-g.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. Poster for an action in Le Puy-en-Velay, south-central France.</figcaption></figure>

Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.-g.
37 Through these campaigns, Earth Uprisings also positions itself against what it frames as the French state's universalism. Its insistence on the embodied, lived dimension of places, set against centralised power, resonates both with longer-standing currents in French radical environmentalism and with more recent protest cycles in France, such as the Yellow Vests. The discourse also presents the spatial organisation of struggle as prefigurative, that is, as a way of enacting alternative relationships to space in the present. Space is articulated as inhabited, experienced, and capable of self-government, in opposition to an abstract and commodifying spatiality attributed to capitalism and the French state. Central to this framing is a construction of protester subjectivity as that of the dweller, i.e. someone who acts from attachment to the places they inhabit and seek to defend:

> If we needed a principle, we could put it like this: the people who live in a place should decide how life there is organised. Those whose lives depend on their relationships to the land or to machines, to their neighbours or to their co-workers, should decide how those relationships are regulated—not those who exploit or manage them from afar. All power to the people!¹⁶ Isn't that the best environmental slogan? (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2024, p. 229).

38 The antagonism is thus organised between a universalised we the people and a corresponding they. The former is assembled from multiple defended sites and their dwellers (and, in that sense, may be read as resistant to universal abstraction). The latter is composed of forces represented as destroying environments and livelihoods (and, in that sense, as agents of abstraction and dispossession).

## What holds it together

39 The availability of signifiers that can operate as unifying banners is a key condition for movements to consolidate and expand. When diverse demands and sites of struggle converge, a practical and symbolic problem emerges: can a shared symbol or idea stand in for them collectively? In the case of Earth Uprisings, the analysis suggests that such a signifier may be found in the French term la terre. The term appears prominently across the group's statements, interviews, internal documents, and propaganda. It also names the collective itself (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*), allowing it to function as a symbolic container for the alliance the movement seeks to hold together.

40 Highly polysemic, la terre can denote farmland, soil, the planet Earth, and a range of territorial imaginaries. That semantic breadth enables it to function as a nodal point through which heterogeneous demands can be articulated as equivalent¹⁷. The materials analysed range across highly situated local conflicts—resisting urban expansion, opposing road projects, blocking extractive industries—yet they repeatedly reframe such struggles as connected expressions of a broader problem. La terre makes that equivalence possible without being stabilised into any single meaning, operating simultaneously as the object under threat, the terrain of conflict, and the material basis on which justice claims become legible. Different actors can therefore stress different dimensions of the term while still treating it as the basis of convergence:

> We ground in the issue of la terre, because it strikes us as fundamentally cross-cutting: la terre, its use and sharing, the ways we care for it and work it— here is a key political issue. It lies at the intersection of social, environmental, and colonial concerns (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, n.d.-f).
41 At the same time, the term sharpens the political frontier. Across the materials, claims such as “defending and reclaiming the land” (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2021) are repeatedly set against actors and institutions portrayed as appropriating, commodifying, or degrading it. This political use of *la terre* draws on a longer genealogy of French environmental protest, most recently revitalised through the ZAD campaign at NDDL, where slogans such as “we are nature defending itself” linked environmental defence to territorial attachments (Bulle, 2022). In line with this tradition, *la terre* retains an embodied dimension¹⁸. It can therefore function as a unifying signifier for multiple struggles only by remaining partially indeterminate, without collapsing the specificity of particular sites into a single universal struggle. Such an interplay between abstraction and concretion enables local struggles to be articulated as equivalent while preserving their local anchorage:

> In a West intoxicated by its own Herculean power, we find ourselves captive to a groundless existence, a world where earth, water, and sky have become commodities. To survive this suffocation, it's time to anchor ourselves to the soil and wage a down-to earth struggle (une lutte terre à terre). This was the intuition that gave rise to Earth Uprisings. “Bring ecology back down to earth” (faire redescendre l’écologie sur terre), we wrote in our foundational statement of January 2021. It isn’t just a slogan, but a political line (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2024, p. 15).

> For far too long, the economy has separated us from la terre, reducing it to a market commodity. This fatal mistake is driving us toward disaster. La terre is not capital; it is life itself—the landscapes, the rhythm of the seasons. It is the very world we inhabit, now teetering on the edge of being consumed by extractivist greed. Having enclosed and privatised the commons, capitalist markets and institutions are accelerating biodiversity collapse, climate chaos, and social fragmentation (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2021).

42 Thinking in terms of the justice dimensions explored in this study, *la terre* is the object through which diverse justice claims are assembled into a project of radical transformation. Across the materials, it anchors distributive claims by framing justice around access to the material bases of life and the unequal allocation of losses in places shaped by environmental harms. It also anchors claims of recognition, insofar as the term operates as a symbol under which marginalised actors are articulated as legitimate stakeholders, rather than dismissed as “invisibles” or “non essential” (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, n.d.-k). Procedural claims are similarly organised around *la terre*, which is presented as the object over which decision-making has been monopolised. In this framing, justice entails reclaiming the power to decide “the allocation, use, and designated purpose of land” (*Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, 2021). Finally, *la terre* anchors a transformative horizon, as it also names a desired alternative order in which land is conceived as a space of radical commonality. Defending and reclaiming *la terre* thus appears both as the motive for mobilisation and as a concrete pathway towards systemic change.

Conclusion

43 This study sought to address a gap in the field of EJ studies in France by examining the specificities of EJ claim-making in the French context, through the case of Earth Uprisings. It argues that Earth Uprisings can be understood not only through an EJ lens but also in light of the radical environmentalist tradition from which it emerges. While
predecessors like the ZAD movement have occasionally been considered within the EJ framework, they have rarely been thoroughly analysed as such. Notably, Earth Uprisings and the broader tradition of radical environmentalism do not articulate their activism through an explicit justice-based framework. This required an interpretive effort that was neither artificial nor imposed from above, but instead attentive to how such frameworks are constructed within the movement's own discourse. To this end, the study adopts a poststructuralist discourse approach, which has seldom been applied in conjunction with EJ analysis. PDT, in turn, offers valuable analytical tools for exploring how Earth Uprisings weaves together EJ claims and spatial dynamics.

The analysis shows that Earth Uprisings' discourse repeatedly articulates EJ claims that map onto the four dimensions analysed here. Distributive concerns centre on land and water capture and uneven exposure to environmental harm, while recognitional claims target the devaluation of local knowledges and livelihoods. Procedural claims foreground decisions imposed by industry and government actors, as well as the marginalisation of affected groups in consultation and governance. Lastly, transformative claims, more variably, point to remedies in terms of radical commonality, land access, and dismantling harmful infrastructures. Read in the French context, the case suggests that EJ claim-making can be clearly observable even where activists do not explicitly invoke *justice* or rights-based terms. Instead, grievances are rendered legible through historically rooted discourses of dispossession, commonality, autonomy, and resistance to central government—registers that resonate with France's governance traditions and the movement's lineage of territorial struggle.

Building on these findings, the study shows that Earth Uprisings constructed a protest discourse through the *logic of equivalence*—a strategy frequently employed by social movements to unify diverse demands under a common framework. In this case, Earth Uprisings not only articulated a wide range of EJ demands but also the places of struggle themselves. Here, space is not just the setting but central to how EJ claims are articulated. Campaigns were anchored in specific sites yet coordinated through “seasons” that linked geographically dispersed conflicts into a national geography of contention. These places, though contextually distinct, were discursively unified as representing equivalent struggles, thereby reinforcing the lived experiences of local communities. Within this discourse, Earth Uprisings framed these sites and demands as forming a collective front against an *adversarial camp*, composed of actors such as corporations, government-aligned unions, and state institutions. This adversarial camp was depicted as a coalition of destructive, profit-driven forces enabled by the French state. In contrast, Earth Uprisings mobilised the empty signifier of *la terre*, whose polysemy allows it to encompass multiple dimensions of justice. *La terre* was framed as a universal yet materially grounded element, standing in stark opposition to the commodified and emptied spatiality produced by the adversarial camp.

Contemporary EJ scholarship encompasses a wide range of approaches, from work that emphasises institutions and fairer procedures to critical perspectives that foreground structural power and the state's contradictory role as a producer of injustice. The Earth Uprisings case aligns with the latter orientation. Confronted with an antagonistic bloc led by the central government, its discourse frames decision-making as structurally captured and therefore makes territorial autonomy and direct action integral to justice claims. While these dynamics are shaped by France's specific history of centralisation and struggles over the centre-periphery relation, they also resonate with EJ research in
other contexts where movements frame the state as a co-producer of harm and thus orient justice claims toward autonomy, and confrontation (e.g. Özkaynak et al., 2015; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Temper, 2019).

47

This exploration of the Earth Uprisings case seeks to expand and enrich the understanding of EJ activism in France, contributing to a field that remains relatively underexplored. The combination of PDT with an EJ perspective may not be entirely unprecedented, but it represents a relatively uncommon and productive dialogue. While the articulation between EJ and PDT would merit a more extensive theoretical and methodological discussion than the scope of this article allows, this study offers an empirical attempt to foster such a dialogue—an approach increasingly encouraged by PDT scholars (e.g. De Cleen et al., 2021). Future studies may continue and develop this line of inquiry. In an effort to strike a balance—employing the EJ framework without reducing PDT to a mere set of analytical tools—this study proposes a poststructural understanding of EJ, which has in itself a long-standing tradition. Such an approach structures the research around the historically and contextually specific dimensions of the case, seeking to understand how historically rooted forms of activism inform contemporary EJ struggles.

48

Because the analysis relies on movement-produced texts, it only captures how Earth Uprisings publicly constructs its claims rather than how they are received, negotiated internally, or counter-framed by state and industry actors. Triangulation through other data, such as interviews, participant observation, and analysis of opponent discourse, would help assess more deeply how these articulations circulate and with what effects. Further research, in addition, could deepen and refine the findings presented here, whether focused on Earth Uprisings specifically or on other French environmental movements. Following the work of Hajer and Versteeg (2005) and Mert (2019), this study responds to the call for discourse analysis to engage with the “new sites of politics” (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005, p. 183). In this instance, the emerging sites of EJ. In the case of Earth Uprisings, this required a dual analytical focus: looking back to the radical environmentalist context from which the movement originated, and at the same time, examining how it constitutes a new site of contention by expanding formerly localised struggles. The evolving dynamics of this form of environmental conflict in France warrant observation.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGUILERA T. (2021), « "Contre la métropole et son monde" : mouvements d'occupation et ZAD en France au XXIᵉ siècle », in FRINAULT T., LE BART C. & NEVEU É. (dir.), *Nouvelle sociologie politique de la France*, Paris, Armand Colin, pp. 215-227, https://doi.org/10.3917/arco.frina.2021.01.0215

ANGUELOVSKI I. & MARTÍNEZ ALIER J. (2014), “The ‘environmentalism of the poor’ revisited: Territory and place in disconnected glocal struggles”, *Ecological Economics*, 102, pp. 167-176, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.04.005
AYRES J. M. & BOSIA M. J. (2011), “Beyond global summitry: Food sovereignty as localized resistance to globalization”, *Globalizations*, 8, 1, pp. 47–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.544203

BÄCKSTRAND K. (2015), “Civil society”, in PATTBERG P. & ZELLI F. (dirs.), *Encyclopedia of global environmental governance and politics*, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, pp. 185–191.

BANERJEE D. & STEINBERG S. L. (2015), “Exploring spatial and cultural discourses in environmental justice movements: A study of two communities”, *Journal of Rural Studies*, 39, pp. 41–50, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.03.005

BASSINES NON MERCI (s.d.), « Bassines Non Merci – No Bassaran ! », *Bassines Non Merci*, https://www.bassinesnonmerci.fr/ (consulté le 1 janvier 2026).

BLANCHON D., MOREAU S. & VEYRET Y. (2009), « Comprendre et construire la justice environnementale », *Annales de Géographie*, 665-666, 1, pp. 35-60, https://doi.org/10.3917/ag.665.0035

BOELENS R., ESCOBAR A., BAKKER K., HOMMES L., SWYNGEDOUW E., HOGENBOOM B. & WANTZEN K. M. (2022), “Riverhood: Political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice”, *The Journal of Peasant Studies*, 50, 3, pp. 1125–1156, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120810

BORGIAS S. L. & BERRY K. A. (2024), “Navigating diverse visions of water justice within unlikely alliances”, *Water Alternatives*, 17, 3, pp. 607–627.

BOUET B. (2019), *Reconnaissance de l'autochtonie et déclinisme environnemental au sein des Parcs nationaux français : l'exemple du Parc national de La Réunion*, thèse de doctorat en sociologie, Bordeaux, Université de Bordeaux.

BOWEN W. (2002), “An analytical review of environmental justice research: What do we really know?”, *Environmental Management*, 29, 1, pp. 3–15, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-001-0037-8

BRUNEAU I. (2007), *La Confédération paysanne : s'engager à « juste » distance*, thèse de doctorat en science politique (Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2006), notice en ligne, *Ruralia*, 20, http://journals.openedition.org/ruralia/1712

BRUNEAU I. (2015), “The Confédération Paysanne and the political field: A conflicted history”, in STRIJKER D., VOERMAN G. & TERLUIN I. (Eds.), *Rural protest groups and populist political parties*, Wageningen, Wageningen Academic Publishers, pp. 101–126, https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-807-0_5

CELERMAJER D., SCHLOSBERG D., RICKARDS L., STEWART-HARAWIRA M., THALER M., TSCHAKERT P., VERLIE B. & WINTER C. (2021), “Multispecies justice: Theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics”, *Environmental Politics*, 30, 1-2, pp. 119–140, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1827608

CHATTERTON P., FEATHERSTONE D. & ROUTLEDGE P. (2013), “Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the commons, and solidarity”, *Antipode*, 45, 3, pp. 602–620, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01025.x

COOLSAET B. (Ed.) (2020), *Environmental Justice: Key Issues*, London, Routledge.

COOLSAET B. & DELDRÈVE V. (2024), “Exploring environmental justice in France: evidence, movements, and ideas”, *Environmental Politics*, 33, 5, pp. 757–777, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2293434
COWELL R., BRISTOW G. & MUNDAY M. (2011), "Acceptance, acceptability and environmental justice: The role of community benefits in wind energy development", *Journal of Environmental Planning and Management*, 54, 4, pp. 539-557, https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2010.521047

DE CLEEN B., GOYVAERTS J., CARPENTIER N., GLYNOS J., STAVRAKAKIS Y. & TRIVUNDŽA I. T. (2021), “An introduction to the special issue on ‘Discourse theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice’”, *Journal of Language and Politics*, 20, 1, pp. 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20077.dec

DE CLEEN B., GLYNOS J., GOYVAERTS J. & STAVRAKAKIS Y. (2024), “Discourse theory and the turn to practice: Lessons from the populist moment”, *Journal of Language and Politics*, 24, 1, pp. 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24200.dec

DE GLINIASTY J. (2024, January 8), « L'annulation de la dissolution des Soulèvements de la Terre : Quand la cause environnementale sert aussi celle du Conseil d'État », *La Revue des droits de l'homme*, https://doi.org/10.4000/revdh.19028

DELDRÈVE V. et METIN J. (2019), « Quels cadres d'action collective contre les boues et poussières rouges d'Altéo-Gardanne ? Les apports de l'Environmental Justice », *VertigO*, 19, 1, https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.24863

DELDRÈVE V., LEWIS N., MOREAU S. & REYNOLDS K. (2019), « Les nouveaux chantiers de la justice environnementale », *VertigO - La revue électronique en sciences de l'environnement*, 19, 1, https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.24863

DESCOLA P. & CHARBONNIER P. (2024), *La composition des mondes*, Paris, Flammarion.

DEVINE-WRIGHT P. (2013), “Explaining ‘NIMBY’ Objections to a Power Line: The Role of Personal, Place Attachment and Project-Related Factors”, *Environment and Behavior*, 45, 6, pp. 761-781, https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916512440435

DI CHIRO G. (1997), “Local actions, global visions: Remaking environmental expertise”, *Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies*, 18, 2, pp. 203–231, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346975

DONDEYNE C. & LEVAIN A. (2021), « La place est-elle prise ? Contributions des Gilets jaunes aux luttes socio-environnementales locales. Pistes d'analyse à partir du cas finistérien », *Écologie et politique*, 1, pp. 67-82.

DRENT J. (2023), “A return to the grandmother of modern activism: The myth of the Larzac struggle as the symbol of French collective action”, *Moving the Social*, 70, pp. 73–97, https://doi.org/10.46586/mts.70.2023.73-97

DUNLAP A. (2020), “Bureaucratic land grabbing for infrastructural colonization: Renewable energy, L’Amassada, and resistance in southern France”, *Human Geography*, 13, 2, pp. 109–126, https://doi.org/10.1177/1942778620918041

FABER D., LEVY B. & SCHLEGEL C. (2021), “Not all people are polluted equally in capitalist society: An eco-socialist commentary on liberal environmental justice theory”, *Capitalism Nature Socialism*, 32, 4, pp. 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2021.2009640

FLOREZ M., BAUDELLE G. & HARDOUIN M. (2022), “Notre-Dame-des-Landes or redefining the relationship to space through the territorial embeddedness of a struggle”, *Antipode*, 54, 3, pp. 772–799, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12809

FRANCE NATURE ENVIRONNEMENT OCCITANIE PYRÉNÉES (2025, 23 avril), « Les Déroutantes », *FNE Occitanie Pyrénées*, https://www.fne-op.fr/2025/04/23/les-deroutantes/
FRANQUEMAGNE G. (2007), "From Larzac to the altermondialist mobilisation: Space in environmental movements", *Environmental Politics*, **16**, 5, pp. 826-843, Abingdon, Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701634216

FRASER N. (2020), “From redistribution to recognition?: Dilemmas of justice in a ‘postsocialist’ age”, in ALEXANDER J. C. et SEIDMAN S. (dirs.), *The new social theory reader*, pp. 188–196, London, Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003060963-30

GILDEA R. & TOMPKINS A. (2015), “The transnational in the local: The Larzac Plateau as a site of transnational activism since 1970”, *Journal of Contemporary History*, **50**, 3, pp. 581–605, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009414557909

GILIO-WHITAKER D. (2019), *As long as grass grows: The Indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock*, Boston, Beacon Press.

GLADKOVA E. (2024), “Environmental (in)justice and the post-political”, *Environment and Planning C*, **43**, 1, pp. 130–145, https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241259571 (Original work published 2025).

GLYNOS J. & HOWARTH D. R. (2007), *Logics of critical explanation in social and political theory*, Taylor & Francis Group.

GLYNOS J., HOWARTH D., NORVAL A. & SPEED E. (2009), *Discourse analysis: Varieties and methods (NCRM/014)*, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Essex.

GRIGGS S. & HOWARTH D. (2004), “A transformative political campaign? The new rhetoric of protest against airport expansion in the UK”, *Journal of Political Ideologies*, **9**, 2, pp. 181–201, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310410001691208

GRIGGS S. & HOWARTH D. (2023), *Contesting aviation expansion: Depoliticisation, technologies of government and post-aviation futures*, Bristol University Press, https://doi.org/10.4669/9781447344292

HAERINGER N. (2023), « *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* : Une remise en cause radicale du système agro-alimentaire », *Multitudes*, **92**, 3, pp. 118–121, https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.092.0118

HAJER M. & VERSTEEG W. (2005), “A decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: Achievements, challenges, perspectives”, *Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning*, **7**, 3, pp. 175–184, https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080500339646

HÉRAT A. & DELDRÈVE V. (2021), « Attachement aux espaces de nature et engagements. L'évolution d'un quartier aux portes du Parc national des Calanques », in DELDRÈVE V., CANDAU J. & NOÛS C. (dir.), *Effort environnemental et équité. Les politiques publiques de l'eau et de la biodiversité en France*, PIE Peter Lang.

HOBERG G. (2021), *The Resistance Dilemma: Place-Based Movements and the Climate Crisis*, The MIT Press, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13668.001.0001

HOBSON K. (2006), “Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network”, *Geoforum*, **37**, 5, pp. 671–681, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.08.004

JAMAL T. & HALES R. (2016), “Performative justice: New directions in environmental and social justice”, *Geoforum*, **76*, pp. 176–180, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.09.014

KITSCHELT H. P. (1986), “Political opportunity structures and political protest: Anti-nuclear movements in four democracies”, *British Journal of Political Science*, **16**, 1, pp. 57–85, http://www.jstor.org/stable/193981
KOUVÉLAKIS S. (2023, April 4), « *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* : Composition et stratégie de l'action de masse [The Earth uprisings: Composition and strategy of mass action] », *Contretemps*, https://www.contretemps.eu/soulevements-terre-entretien-ecologie-bassines-sainte-soline/

LACLAU E. & MOUFFE C. (2014), *Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics*, 8, Verso.

LAPUENTE TIANA P. (2024), *What grows everywhere: Earth uprisings and the transformation of French environmental activism*, Master's thesis, Stockholm University, https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-234012

LATOUR B. (2017), *Où atterrir ? : comment s'orienter en politique*, Paris, La Découverte.

LECERF N. (2024), *Recherche identitaire d'un mouvement écologiste : Le cas d'un comité local des Soulèvements de la Terre*, Master's thesis, Université catholique de Louvain, http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/thesis:45845

LECUYER L., WHITE R. M., SCHMOOK B., LEMAY V. & CALMÉ S. (2018), “The construction of feelings of justice in environmental management: An empirical study of multiple biodiversity conflicts in Calakmul, Mexico”, *Journal of Environmental Management*, 213, pp. 363–373, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.02.050

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2021, January 24), « Appel à reprendre les terres et à bloquer les industries qui les dévorent », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/appel

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2023-a), *On ne dissout pas un soulèvement : 40 voix pour les Soulèvements de la Terre*, Éditions du Seuil.

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2023-b, March 29), *Sainte-Soline : 30 000 personnes contre les méga-bassines - 25 mars 2023* [Video], YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYoLm4u0enI

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2023-c, May 4), *Ce qui repousse partout ! Appel des Soulèvements de la Terre face à la menace de dissolution* [Video], YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KJACzsgm54

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2023-d), « Agro-industrie, accaparement, béton, barrons leur la route ! », *Terrestres*, https://www.terrestres.org/2023/03/23/agro-industrie-accaparement-beton-barrons-leur-la-route/

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (2024), *Premières secousses*, La Fabrique éditions.

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-a), *What grows back everywhere can't be dissolved - A few words, links and videos about Earth uprisings in France*, (consulté le 22 décembre 2024), https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/what-grows-back-everywhere-cant-be-dissolved-a-few-about-earth-uprisings-in-france

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-b), « Programme complet – Printemps-Été 2021 », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/programme-saison-1

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-c), « Saison 2 – Automne/Hiver 2021-2022 – (R)appel », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/rappel-saison2

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-d), « Saison 3 – *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* enfoncent le clou ! – Printemps-Été 2022 – (R)appel », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/rappel-saison3

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-e), « Appel – Saison 4 », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/appel-saison-4
LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-f), « Les comités passent à l'action » (consulté le 13
décembre 2024), https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/comites/les-comites-passent-a-l-action

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-g), « Les visuels de la campagne ! », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/visuels

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-h), « Bloquer l'industrie de la construction », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* (consulté le 22 décembre 2025), URL non indiqué dans la référence fournie.

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-i), « Manifestation nationale pour l'arrêt immédiat des chantiers de “méga-bassines”, et autres projets d'accaparement de l'eau », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* (consulté le 22 décembre 2025), URL non indiqué dans la référence fournie.

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-j), « Lutter contre l'agro-industrie ? », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/en-eu (consulté le 22 décembre 2025).

LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (n.d.-k), « Aux Vaîtes et aux Lentillères, défendre les terres », *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/vaites27mars

LIGUE POUR LA PROTECTION DES OISEAUX (LPO) (2021, 27 octobre), « Manifestation nationale pour l'arrêt immédiat des chantiers de “méga-bassines” », LPO, https://www.lpo.fr/qui-sommes-nous/toutes-nos-actualites/articles/actus-2021/manifestation-nationale-pour-l-arret-immediat-des-chantiers-de-mega-bassines

LINDGAARD J. (dir.) (2020), *Éloge des mauvaises herbes : Ce que nous devons à la ZAD*, Paris, Les Liens qui libèrent.

MARTIN M. & ISLAR M. (2021), “The ‘end of the world’ vs. the ‘end of the month’: Understanding social resistance to sustainability transition agendas, a lesson from the Yellow Vests in France”, *Sustainability Science*, 16, pp. 601–614, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00877-9

MARTINEZ-ALIER J. (2008), « Conflits écologiques et langage de valorisation », *Écologie et politique*, 35, 1, pp. 97–107.

MASSEY D. (1994, new ed.), *Space, Place, and Gender*, University of Minnesota Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttw2z

MASSEY D. (1996), “Politicising space and place”, *Scottish Geographical Magazine*, 112, 2, pp. 117–123, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702549608554458

MERT A. (2019), “The trees in Gezi Park: Environmental policy as the focus of democratic protests”, *Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning*, 21, 5, pp. 593–607, https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2016.1202106

MEYER J. M. (2024), “‘The people’ and climate justice: Reconceptualizing populism and pluralism within climate politics”, *Polity*, 56, 2, pp. 199–354, https://doi.org/10.1086/729277

MORENA E. (2014), “Words speak louder than actions: The ‘peasant’ dimension of the Confédération Paysanne’s alternative to industrial farming”, *The Journal of Peasant Studies*, 42, 1, pp. 45–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.969716

NIAMANOUCH K. (2023), « Résistance », in LES SOULÈVEMENTS DE LA TERRE (dir.), *On ne dissout pas un soulèvement : 40 voix pour les Soulèvements de la Terre*, Éditions du Seuil, pp. 125–128.

OLLITRAULT S. (2021), « Notre Dame des Landes, du Larzac au Zadisme », in VAN LANG A. & LOMERTEAU B. (dir.), *L'abandon de l'aéroport de Notre Dame des Landes. Quels enseignements ?*, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 211–236, https://hal.science/hal-03354698
ÖZEN H. (2009), “Located locally, disseminated nationally: The Bergama movement”, *Environmental Politics*, **18**, 3, pp. 408–423, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010902823766

ÖZKAYNAK B., AYDIN C. İ., ERTÖR-AKYAZI P. & ERTÖR I. (2015), “The Gezi Park Resistance from an Environmental Justice and Social Metabolism Perspective”, *Capitalism Nature Socialism*, **26**, 1, pp. 99–114, London, Routledge, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2014.999102

PAILLOUX A.-L. (2015), “Deferred Development Zone (ZAD) versus ‘Zone to be protected’: Analysis of a struggle for autonomy in/of rural space”, *Justice Spatiale / Spatial Justice*, 7, http://www.jssj.org/article/zone-damenagement-differe-contre-zone-a-defendre-analyse-dune-lutte-pour-lautonomie-dansde-lespace-rural/

PELLOW D. N. (2018), *What is critical environmental justice?*, Polity Press.

REPORTERRE (2025, 28 avril), « A69, la lutte continue contre les patriarches et les baronnies », *Reporterre*, https://reporterre.net/A69-la-lutte-continue-contre-les-patriarches-et-les-baronnies

ROBINEAU C. (2020), « Pour une sociologie des écologistes radicaux : Quelques éléments programmatiques », *e-cadernos CES*, 34, https://doi.org/10.4000/eces.5494

ROOTES C. (1999), “Political opportunity structures – Promise, problems and prospects”, *La Lettre de la Maison Française d'Oxford*, 10, pp. 71–93, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02553717

ROOTES C. (dir.) (2004), “The transformation of environmental activism: An introduction”, in *Environmental protest in Western Europe (Comparative politics)*, Oxford University Press, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/0199252068.003.0001

ROOTES C. (2007), “Acting locally: The character, contexts and significance of local environmental mobilisations”, *Environmental Politics*, **16**, 5, pp. 722–741, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701640460

ROSOL M. (2014), “On resistance in the post-political city: Conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver”, *Space and Polity*, **18**, 1, pp. 70–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.879785

SCHAEFER R. T. (2008), “Environmental justice”, in *Encyclopedia of race, ethnicity, and society*, 3, pp. 443–445, SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412963879

SCHILL E. (2024), *The rise of a green scare? Analysing the French government's discourse on the Soulèvements de la Terre and ecoterrorism*, Master's thesis, Lund University, http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9156952

SCHLOSBERG D. (2004), “Reconceiving environmental justice: Global movements and political theories”, *Environmental Politics*, **13**, 3, pp. 517–540, https://doi.org/10.1080/0964401042000229025

SCHLOSBERG D. (2013), “Theorising environmental justice: The expanding sphere of a discourse”, *Environmental Politics*, **22**, 1, pp. 37–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.755387

SCHLOSBERG D. & COLES R. (2015), “The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements”, *Contemporary Political Theory*, 15, https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.34

SCHLOSBERG D., RICKARDS L., PEARSE R., DELLA BOSCA H. & MORAES O. (2024), “Critical environmental justice in contemporary scholarship and movements: Consensus and plurality of the discourse”, *Environmental Politics*, pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2362573

SCHÜLER S. (2017), “The Zone à Défendre of Notre-Dame-des-Landes”, in *France: An ambivalent space for social critique, Urbanities*, 7, 1, https://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/5-Sonja-Schuler.pdf
SÉBASTIEN L., MILANESI J. & PELENC J. (2019), « Résister aux projets d'aménagement, politiser les territoires », *VertigO - La revue électronique en sciences de l'environnement*, 19, 1, https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.24269

SÉNAC R. (2021), *Radicales et fluides. Les mobilisations contemporaines*, Presses de Sciences Po.

SNIKERSPROGE I. (2022), “Capitalism, subsistence farming, and the (new) peasantry from the perspective of the French neorural movement”, *Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment*, 44, 1, pp. 53–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12290

STANLEY A. (2009), “Just space or spatial justice? Difference, discourse, and environmental justice”, *Local Environment*, 14, 10, pp. 999–1014, https://doi.org/10.1080/13549830903277417

STOKOWSKI P. A. (2002), “Languages of place and discourses of power: Constructing new senses of place”, *Journal of Leisure Research*, 34, 4, pp. 368–382, https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.2002.11949977

STOP MINES 23 (s.d.), « Le site du Collectif Stop Mines 23 », *Stop Mines 23*, https://stopmines23.fr/ (consulté le 1 janvier 2026).

SVARSTAD A. & BENJAMINSEN T. A. (2020), “Reading radical environmental justice through a political ecology lens”, *Geoforum*, 108, pp. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.11.007

SWYNGEDOUW E. & nor Local N. G. (1997), “‘Glocalization’ and the politics of scale”, *Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local*, pp. 137–166, New York, Guilford.

SWYNGEDOUW E. (2004), “Globalisation or ‘glocalisation’? Networks, territories and rescaling”, *Cambridge Review of International Affairs*, 17, 1, pp. 25–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0955757042000203632

TEMPER L. (2015), *Environmentalism of the dispossessed: Mapping ecologies of resistance*, Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/tesis/2014/hdl_10803_285389/lt1de1.pdf

TEMPER L. (2019), “Blocking pipelines, unsettling environmental justice: From rights of nature to responsibility to territory”, *Local Environment*, 24, 2, London, Routledge, pp. 94–112.

TERRAL P.-M. (2011), *Larzac : De la lutte paysanne à l'altermondialisme*, Toulouse.

THIANN-BO MOREL M. (2019), « Tensions entre justice environnementale et justice sociale en société postcoloniale : Le cas du risque requin », *VertigO - La revue électronique en sciences de l'environnement*, 19, 1, https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.24299

TORRE A. & BOURDIN S. (2021), “The French territorial reform of the regions: Objectives, risks and challenges for some forgotten territories”, *International Journal of Public Administration*, 46, 11, pp. 761–772, https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2021.2018456

URKIDI L. (2010), “A glocal environmental movement against gold mining: Pascua–Lama in Chile”, *Ecological Economics*, 70, 2, pp. 219–227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.05.004

VALVERDE M. (2017), “From persons and their acts to webs of relationships: Some theoretical resources for environmental justice”, *Crime, Law and Social Change*, 68, 5, pp. 547–562, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-017-9702-6

VELICU I. & KAIKA M. (2017), “Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement”, *Geoforum*, 84, pp. 305–315, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.10.012
VERDIER M. (2018), *La perspective de l'autonomie : La critique radicale de la représentation et la formation du commun dans l'expérience de l'occupation de la ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes*, Doctoral dissertation, Université de Nanterre - Paris-X, https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01881226

WALKER G. & BULKELEY H. (2006), "Editorial – Geographies of environmental justice", *Geoforum*, 37, 5, pp. 655–659, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.12.002

## NOTES

1. In this study, the terms “environmental movements” and “radical environmentalism” are understood in line with Bäckstrand’s (2015, p. 186) definition of environmental movements. Bäckstrand categorises environmental movements as fundamentally anti-systemic and confrontational. Such an approach excludes civil society actors more closely aligned with professionalised or institutional environments, principally NGOs. In the context of this study, this approach helps to establish a distinction between anti-systemic groups and other environmental actors whose strategies tend to be less confrontational. While this distinction is analytically useful, it is important to note that, in practice, groups from across the spectrum of radical environmental movements—including Earth Uprisings—have collaborated with a wide range of actors, including NGOs and political parties.

2. It is important to note, however, that beyond the radical environmentalist tradition on which this study focuses, a growing body of literature—both implicitly and explicitly aligned with EJ—examines forms of social contestation in France. This includes analyses of community mobilisation and its relationship to geographical inequalities (e.g., Deldrève & Metin, 2019), as well as postcolonial perspectives on conflicts between mainland France and its overseas territories, such as La Réunion (Bouet, 2019; Thiann-Bo Morel, 2019) and Guadeloupe (Lambert et al., 2019). In addition, recent studies of the Yellow Vests movement have highlighted the role of tensions between urban centres and peripheral areas, with the movement's narratives and strategies often aligning closely with EJ concerns (Dondeyne & Levain, 2021; Faburel et al., 2021; Levain et al., 2022; Martin & Islar, 2021).

3. Throughout the study, the term “place” refers to locations imbued with individual and collective meanings, shaped by power relations, historical memory, and emotional attachments (Massey, 1994; Massey, 1996; Stokowski, 2002). In EJ protests specifically, places have been analysed as symbolic and culturally meaningful locations, closely intertwined with the narratives and dynamics of the protest itself (Devine-Wright, 2013; Anguelovski & Martínez Alier, 2014; Hoberg, 2021).

4. For an overview of the development of EJ studies, see, for example, Schlosberg (2013) and Coolsaet (2020).

5. EJ cases have been explored with PDT-related approaches, such as post-political studies (Rosol, 2014; Gladkova, 2024), and PDT has occasionally been utilised in research on climate justice activism (Chatterton et al., 2013; Meyer, 2024). In other cases, EJ has been acknowledged as a characteristic of certain protests examined by PDT scholars (e.g., Griggs & Howarth, 2023, p. 152), though without deeper exploration of the potential common ground between the two approaches.

6. This study draws on an analysis of 75 public-facing materials, including statements, publications, and audiovisual materials released by Earth Uprisings. It encompasses official statements from a variety of contexts, written publications, and interviews with different members of the organisation. In addition, audiovisual content—primarily videos produced by Earth Uprisings—was transcribed and incorporated into the analysis. The diversity of data sources enables triangulation, allowing each type of material to be examined within the broader
discursive context of Earth Uprisings' campaigns. All sources were selected from publicly accessible platforms to reflect the organisation's public-facing discourse. Data analysis was carried out using qualitative coding in NVivo software. The French excerpts quoted in this article have been translated by the author.

7. There is an ongoing debate within the PDT literature about how its rich theoretical framework can be applied empirically. Because PDT is not easily reduced to a purely instrumental research tool, scholars have often integrated it cautiously with other approaches, which has contributed to perceptions of PDT as somewhat rigid. In recent years, however, PDT scholars have placed increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary dialogue as a condition for the framework's continued development (De Cleen et al., 2024). This has involved calls to articulate PDT with other methods and theories (Glynos & Howarth, 2007, pp. 207–208; Glynos et al., 2009, p. 36). At the same time, they stress the importance of preserving PDT's theoretical integrity, insisting that it remains a “theoretically ambitious” project rather than merely a technical method for discourse analysis (De Cleen et al., 2021, p. 29).

8. Authors such as Gladkova (2025) have questioned the feasibility of EJ dimensions like recognition and participation, arguing that existing hegemonic political-economic institutions are unable to meaningfully incorporate these demands without co-opting them in ways that undermine their transformative potential. According to this view, without deep systemic change, such justice claims are likely to fail. While this study does not engage directly with Gladkova's critique, it treats these EJ dimensions as distinct types of demands, without making assumptions about their practical feasibility.

9. While France has historically followed a centralised territorial and administrative model, this structure has undergone significant reforms in recent decades. Regional and municipal governments now exercise powers that were once concentrated in Paris, as explored by Torre and Bourdin (2021). Nevertheless, France remains more centralised than many of its European neighbours. Moreover, centralisation continues beyond formal administration, particularly in the concentration of capital, investment, and strategic economic decisions.

10. The acronym ZAD (Zone à Défendre) is a play on the French administrative term Zone d'Aménagement Différée (“Deferred Development Area”), which refers to land designated for future development projects.

11. Examples of local associations and collectives that have organised mobilisations alongside Earth Uprisings include Bassines Non Merci (Bassines Non Merci, n.d.), the LPO—Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO, 2021), La Voie est Libre (Reporterre, 2025), Collectif Stop Mines (Stop Mines 23, n.d.), and Les Sans Bitume (France Nature Environnement Occitanie Pyrénées, n.d.). These are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Dozens of local groups have collaborated with Earth Uprisings, with involvement ranging from co-signing and public statements to sustained participation in on-site protests. In many cases, local groups were already organising mobilisations, and Earth Uprisings participated as an additional coordinating and amplifying actor.

12. The relationship between local activism and broader scales in EJ protests has been extensively examined, particularly through the concept of glocal (Swyngedouw, 1997; Swyngedouw, 2004; Urkidi, 2010; Anguelovski & Martínez Alier, 2014). As Temper (2014) notes, “[e]nvironmental justice conflicts are by definition glocal” (p. 22), reflecting both the global dynamics that underpin environmental inequalities and the ways in which local movements scale up and build translocal alliances. Earth Uprisings—along with earlier radical environmental movements—exemplify this dimension. While the present study does not directly draw on this body of literature, its relevance is acknowledged.

13. Composition is sometimes evoked as a “polyphony” (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2023-a, p. 58; Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2024, p. 247).
14. The identification of the French state as the main antagonist became increasingly pronounced, reflecting the growing antagonism of the government towards Earth Uprisings. This escalating tension culminated in the government's decision to issue a dissolution order against the group. From the foundation of Earth Uprisings to this contentious episode—which ended with the ban being overturned—the French state played an increasingly prominent role in shaping the group's actions and discourse. A detailed account of this process can be found in Lapuente Tiana (2024).

15. This implies an adoption of a narrative inherited from previous radical environmental activism. ZAD campaigns promoted a narrative that identified activists with the defence of the territories and natural environments in which the struggles took place. For example, the campaign at Notre-Dame-des-Landes adopted slogans such as “We are nature defending itself!”, which were later reused in the narratives and slogans of Earth Uprisings (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, 2024).

16. Originally in English.

17. Due to the difficulty of conveying the varied meanings of the term *la terre* in English, this study translates it in different ways depending on the context. For example, the group's name (*les Soulèvements de la Terre*) is rendered as “Earth Uprisings”, while in other instances—where *la terre* refers more specifically to territory or agricultural land—the term “land” has been used instead.

18. The semantic work performed by *la terre* in French radical environmentalism also resonates with strands of French ecological thought associated with Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola, which emphasise interdependence between human and non-human beings and contest the idea of “nature” as an external domain (Latour, 2017; Charbonnier et al., 2017; Descola & Charbonnier, 2024). Read in this light, *la terre* can name a shared condition of co-dependence and a locus of conflict over ways of inhabiting, without implying a single, unified definition across these traditions. These vocabularies intersect in arenas close to Earth Uprisings, notably around the review Terrestres (Lindgaard, 2020).

ABSTRACTS

In recent years, environmental justice scholarship focused on France has significantly expanded, addressing diverse issues across multiple geographical contexts. Despite this growth, existing research has largely overlooked France's tradition of radical environmentalism, which has historically integrated local environmental concerns with a range of social justice claims. Although such movements often frame grievances using concepts other than justice and rights-based terminology, their demands closely align with an environmental justice framework. This study addresses that gap by examining Earth Uprisings (Les Soulèvements de la Terre), a radical environmental group established in 2021 that connects site-based struggles across France. Drawing on Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and EJ's distributive, recognitional, procedural, and transformative dimensions, the analysis examines movement statements, organisational documents, and audiovisual materials, to explore how Earth Uprisings articulates justice claims. The findings indicate that Earth Uprisings constructs an environmental justice discourse by connecting diverse demands and linking geographically dispersed sites of contention, integrating local actions within a broader national-scale movement. This discursive linkage is symbolised by the French term *la terre*, articulated in opposition to the spatial logic of an adversarial coalition comprising large industries, state-aligned unions, and governmental actors. The case highlights
an understudied, spatially anchored lineage of French radical environmentalism and demonstrates the analytical value of bringing EJ and poststructuralist discourse approaches into closer dialogue.

Ces dernières années, la recherche sur la justice environnementale axée sur la France s'est considérablement élargie, abordant des questions diverses dans de multiples contextes géographiques. Malgré cette croissance, les recherches existantes ont largement négligé la tradition française d'environnementalisme radical, qui a historiquement intégré les préoccupations environnementales locales avec une série de revendications de justice sociale. Bien que ces mouvements formulent souvent leurs griefs en utilisant des concepts autres que la justice et la terminologie fondée sur les droits, leurs revendications s'alignent étroitement sur un cadre de justice environnementale. Cette étude comble cette lacune en examinant *Les Soulèvements de la Terre*, un groupe environnemental radical créé en 2021 qui relie les luttes sur le site à travers la France. S'appuyant sur la théorie poststructuraliste du discours et les dimensions distributives, de reconnaissance, procédurales et transformatrices d'EJ, l'analyse examine les déclarations du mouvement, les documents organisationnels et les supports audiovisuels, afin d'explorer comment *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* formule les revendications de justice. Les résultats indiquent que *Les Soulèvements de la Terre* construit un discours sur la justice environnementale en reliant des revendications diverses et en liant des lieux de discorde géographiquement dispersés, intégrant les actions locales dans un mouvement national plus large. Ce lien discursif est symbolisé par le terme *la terre*, articulé en opposition à la logique spatiale d'une coalition adversaire composée de grandes industries, de syndicats alignés sur l'État et d'acteurs gouvernementaux. Ceci met en lumière une vision peu étudiée et ancrée spatialement de l'environnementalisme radical français et démontre la valeur analytique d'un rapprochement entre les perspectives du discours EJ et poststructuraliste.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** Soulèvements de la Terre, justice environnementale, environnementalisme radical, France, discours poststructuraliste, luttes locales, activisme basé sur le lieu

**Keywords:** Earth Uprisings, environmental justice, radical environmentalism, France, poststructuralist discourse theory, local struggles, place-based activism

## AUTHOR

PABLO LAPUENTE TIANA

Stockholm University
ORCID 0009-0006-9218-5808
p.lapuente.tiana@gmail.com