Community-Based Ecological Resistance Movements

Community-based ecological resistance movements emerge within struggles against environmental degradation that disturbs the symbiotic relationship between community and environment. These movements are devoted to the prevention of community life from environmentally harmful activities and to the investigation of means to mobilize local capabilities in resisting these activities. The awareness that the community lives with and within the environment is the key factor in the political mobilization of community members. The constitutive elements of these movements—such as the aim, perceived threat, organizational structure, activists, and activists' demands, targets, resistance strategies, and tactics—are articulated into a political project to protect community-environment interactions in a particular locality. With this political project, community-based ecological resistance movements differ from various types of environmental movements, such as single-issue local movements, nature conservationist movements, and mainstream environmental movements.

The characteristic aim of community-based ecological resistance movements is to protect and sustain the symbiotic relationship between community and the [Page 379]constitutive environment. As community members do not see their community and the particular environment they engage with as separate entities, the political demand around which they mobilize is to save both rather than one or the other. Ecological resistance generally communicates through a language of communal self-determination concerned with the socio-natural reproduction of the community. The counterhegemonic discourse articulates a denotative narrative based on legal community rights expressed as an integral part of the community. So, when a small indigenous community in a rural and impoverished region wages its struggle against a multinational logging activity giving rise to environmental conflicts, the discursive aim is readily knitted around ancestral rights and tribal customs. But, in another place, an urban community of middle-class inhabitants living in a highly complex social context and facing the threat of a harmful industrial activity integrates civic rights discourse with the similar aim of defending their way of life.

The environment is not conceived as raw materials and sinks in the service of capital accumulation, as in developmentalist claims manifesting themselves in harmful industrial activities. Instead, activists' claim about the same environment is based on its significance for the spiritual, cultural, social, and economic life of their communities. Thus, a general discursive justification for establishing a resistance strategy lies in the dependence of community existence on various aspects of the environment. It is a strategy for self-defense. In all resistance cases, ecologically unsound activities or projects are regarded as having detrimental effects on the integrity of community life inseparable from the quality of the environment. The perceived threat is a threat to this integrity. It is not merely the actual forms of air, water, and land pollution or that of the destruction of flora and fauna that pave the way for a reflexive and reactive movement of a community;community activism also arises in response to the potential ecological threats of proposed projects. A perceived threat, as such, prompts a spontaneous direct resistance movement aimed at defending and protecting the community's well-being.

Environment-related claims are of paramount importance in mobilizing communities against a threat, but environmental orientation does not thoroughly determine these movements, as is the case where anthropocentric or ecocentric thought shapes the identity of environmental movements. Because human-environment interactions are addressed in a relational/coexistential manner, activists of community-based ecological resistance movements have to reject dualist views emphasizing that nature and humankind are on two different planes. They use and transform the natural world for the necessities of community life, but they do not treat nature in an instrumentalist manner;instead, they show respect and care for nature.

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