How Forests Protest – Posthumanist Social Movement Action within Forest Occupations in Germany’s Climate Justice Movement

Taking Eduardo Kohn’s challenging investigation on ‘how forests think’ as a point of departure, this contribution seeks to present and analyse how social movement actors give meaning to and conceptualise their protest action as part of complex human/non-human relationships within forest occupations in Germany.

Forest occupations have been a central strategy within Germany’s climate justice movement, dating back to protests against deforestation for the expansion of the Frankfurt airport in the late 1980s. In recent years, the number and locations of forest occupations have increased significantly, successfully highlighting the ecologically disastrous consequences of expanding motorways, coal mines, and gravel pits in Germany. In these contexts, climate justice movement actors not only create protest communities within the occupations (the so-called barrios) but also form intimate relationships with their non-human surroundings.

This contribution seeks to put the concepts, meanings, and practices that these actors develop in relation to the forest in dialogue with posthumanist and social movement theory. It draws on ethnographic material from an ongoing participatory action research project within forest occupations in Germany. For example, when building treehouses, squatters avoid harming the forest, using only deadwood and ropes (instead of nails or screws) as construction material. In making sense of their actions, they frequently challenge anthropocentric understandings of human/nature divisions and claim to be part of ‘nature defending itself’. By presenting these and other examples, this presentation will suggest that forest occupations represent an expression of posthumanist social movement action, where forests protest ‘through us’ against their destruction.