Perched on a tree!

Text of the flyer handed out during the action on September the 2nd 2011:

While you walk the streets, nose glued to the floor, we’re climbing the trees so that, for a second, you raise your eyes to the sky ... We occupy this park to share with you a moment of dialogue and encounter.

For several years, a movement has been emerging against the proposed Notre Dame des Landes airport, which has taken form in a wave of occupation. At the heart of the 1600 hectares of confiscated agricultural land, endangered groves and forests on borrowed time, we’re creating places to live collectively. Tree houses, gardens, farms, caravans, straw buildings and reoccuppied houses are all pockets of resistance to the airport. The ZAD, differing development zone in the planning jargon, has become a zone to defend for those who have decided to move here to live.

The construction of the airport is part of a larger project : that of the Nantes Saint Nazaire Metropolis.Everywhere, the city is transformed and densified. Building sites multiply, like the SOGEA opposite the park. These are all lucrative markets for construction companies such as Vinci, whose sole concern is short-term profit, whatever the social and ecological consequences. The developers plan massive urbanization while the public has no control over the projects that transform the surrounding landscape into a desert of concrete. The construction of an airport at Notre Dame des Landes will move or reduce the noise-pollution zone around Nantes Atlantique airport. The welfare of the inhabitants of the noise zone is a crass argument wielded by Jean Marc Ayrault for electoral reasons. In fact, the move of the noise-pollution zone will allow a complete transformation of urban space : multiplication of building sites, increasing rents, segmentation of the city into a showcase downtown under cctv and affordable neighbourhoods relegated to the outskirts.

Airports, tips, motorways, incinerators, nuclear power plants, factories, all things that no one wants in their backyard, but the system continues to promote lifestyles that make us dependent on such infrastructure. The fight against the airport is not just a local struggle led by those who refuse to be surrounded constantly by aircraft. The airport, like all industrial infrastructure, is part of the global destruction of our planet. So what are we going to do?

Resistance through occupation allows experimentation with new ways of living and organising, outside of the straightjacket of the state and the market. The places occupied in the ZAD are all grains of sand embedded in the concrete machine. But the repressive state at the service of Vinci, seeks and will seek by every means to cement over the ZAD, and is planning our eviction. On the 6th and 15th of September in St. Nazaire and then Nantes, will be held the trials of the homes facing eviction.Visit us, meet us on the ZAD, support us on September 15th at the trial in Nantes, or just chat with us in this park.

The whole world is an area to defend!

Lets not expect the state to do it for us!