We need to unite around a common agenda.

In 2021, fossil fuels still represented more than 82% of primary energy consumption in the world. Countless industrial processes (manufacturing steel, cement, etc.) depend on fossil fuels. The energy/carbon/ecological transition is an illusion, the technological system cannot be “decarbonized”. The only realistic solution to drastically and rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce energy production. To achieve this, we must consider the gradual dismantling of infrastructures — Internet network, highway network, railway network, electrical network, telecom network, etc. — and the stopping of machines.

The main cause of the mass extermination of living beings, the artificialization of land is progressing at a breakneck pace all over the world. In France, more than 65,000 hectares are artificialized each year. This absurd dynamic will not change as long as private and public companies cover Mother Earth with impunity in concrete and asphalt. The gigantic infrastructures at the foundation of modern society require relentless extractivism in the countries of the South and an extreme artificialization of our living environments. For coexistence with other species to become possible again, the techno-industrial system must be dismantled and other ways of living on Earth must be restored. In this way, we will be able to let — and help — wildlife populations, grasslands, ancient forests, wetlands, torrents, rivers, peatlands, mangroves, etc. regenerate.

Ongoing technological developments (5G, digital industry, biotechnologies, artificial intelligence or even geoengineering) are causing a constant increase in the consumption of materials and energy by the technological system. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, digital technology “runs” on coal! To make matters worse, the technological system deprives us of control over our material conditions of existence. To free ourselves from this suicidal dependence on industrial energies (nuclear, fossil and renewable), we need to adopt “soft”, “democratic” or “low-tech” technologies (small-scale solar and/or wind energy, water mill, solar oven, heating bodies rather than spaces, and so on). This process of reappropriation will eventually allow local communities to live with dignity based on the resources present locally, within a limited geographical area.

Through its regulatory bulimia and its systematic racketeering, the State asphyxiates the people and plunges them into a demeaning dependence. Stronger regulations accompanied by new taxes will not change the ongoing disaster; quite the contrary. This idea comes from a poor understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the state and the commercial sphere, an essential characteristic of industrial capitalism. The study of ecologically sustainable democratic societies shows that most of them are societies without a state. By establishing private ownership and the commodification of land for all, by establishing all sorts of uniform rules regardless of the specificity of populations and territories, the State has encouraged the development of the industrial system. Ideally, it is necessary to program the removal of the state apparatus in order to put an end to industry. Rebuilding mutual aid systems will make it possible to gain political and material autonomy, to regain meaning, and thereby to build ecologically sustainable solutions adapted to the needs of each local community.

Faced with the current so-called “representative” political system, which maintains a technocratic aristocracy monopolizing power, parasites buying their legitimacy through an electoral masquerade at the expense of the taxpayer, we want instead to create the conditions necessary for the advent of true democracy. This will require the organization of open decision-making meetings at the local level, so that everyone can participate in the political decisions of their territory (agriculture, construction, collective life... and even self-defense!). Thus, we want to restore its political autonomy to the only level capable of making direct democracy exist in practice: the municipality.

Today, the vast majority of land is owned by a very small number of people (technological megafarms, industrial properties, private domains of billionaires, etc.). Globally, 1% of farms account for 70% of all arable land, revealing an unprecedented acceleration of land inequalities. In Europe, less than 3% of farms own more than half of the continent's agricultural land.

For France, the Terre de Liens association gives edifying figures on the catastrophic situation in the agricultural world:

· Each year, an area equivalent to the capacity to feed a city like Le Havre disappears under the concrete;

· Today, two-thirds of the land freed up by farmers who retire goes to the expansion of neighboring farms, a worrying dynamic that will accelerate with the retirement of a significant number of farmers in the coming decade;

· An area the size of a soccer field is artificialized in France every seven minutes;

· As early as the 1960s, the policies of the European Union and the French State organized a concentration of land allowing industrial agriculture and mass production to develop;

· In 20 years, 320,000 agricultural jobs have been destroyed;

· Today, half of the fruits and vegetables consumed in France are imported even though we have sufficient surface area to feed the entire population;

· Between 2010 and 2020, France lost more than 100,000 farms.

This deadly agro-industrial model and this terribly unfair division of land do not suit us. Land is a common good, and as such, it must remain free of access to those who want to make use of it for the benefit of society. This is why we need to better distribute access to land in order to be able to develop peasant agriculture, pastoralism, permaculture, garden forests, and in the appropriate areas, simply let natural forests regenerate. By diversifying land use and the resulting livelihoods, populations will be in a position to ensure their food security independently. It is also an opportunity to encourage everyone to reconnect with nature, in particular through learning about edible wild plants, or even the rediscovery of traditional low-tech hunting and fishing techniques (trapping, bow hunting, angling, etc.).

To remedy the Bullshits Jobs useless and empty of meaning locking many of our contemporaries into a mind-numbing routine, in order to put an end to insane extractivism and industrial slavery in the countries of the South (practices at the base of the modern way of life), we defend the reappropriation of our material conditions of existence: food, housing, clothing, heat, travel, tools to work, etc. Everything that can be done without industry, what corresponds to real human and societal needs (subsistence), will have to be developed and reorganized at local level. Regenerating crafts and peasantry within municipalities should thus make it possible to relocate and democratize production, autonomy and mutual assistance to replace the current dependence on the technological system. The reappropriation by the populations of the North of their living conditions should facilitate the liberation of the populations of the South from technological imperialism.

Several million inhabitants concentrated in urban jails will quickly exhaust local resources and will never be able to reach food autonomy. The metropolis must import everything, causing the rapid exhaustion of its periphery. Urban housing is therefore ecocidal in essence. Moreover, direct democracy is only viable on a small scale necessary for community members to exchange and deliberate face to face. We refuse to support this way of living on Earth and to suggest, like many utopians, that we could reform the city and transform it. There is nothing enviable about living crammed into an extremely artificial universe, designed and built for a single species — Homo industrialis. We therefore invite our peers to desert the “barbaric metropolises” right now (Guillaume Faburel). Our ambition is to become the catalysts of this process. There is no shortage of space outside the urban concrete: collectively occupying vacant homes, restoring abandoned farms, redeveloping traditional rural housing, there are numerous rehousing solutions. Add to this a number: according to INSEE, the agricultural area used — mainly by large farmers practicing industrial and commercial agriculture — represents 45% of the area from France. There is no shortage of space. It is enough for everyone to settle in an ecological habitat on a piece of land to be regenerated for the positive impact of humans on living beings to quickly become a reality: from desert monoculture to the lush permaculture garden, there is only one farmer.

Burn-out, depression, obesity, diabetes, cancer, myopia, asthma, allergies, dementia, cardiovascular diseases and other civilization diseases are on the rise constantly. Homo industrialis is sick. Sick of its separation from nature, sick of industrial junk food, sick of the impact of screens, waves, pesticides, sick finally of social atomization and wage exploitation in jobs devoid of meaning. Dismantling the technological system means starting a radical transformation that can then only be beneficial to the species as a whole. It means stimulating the adoption of lifestyles that promote good physical health (walking, daily physical effort, outdoor work) and mental health (an end of advertising, the technological interference of human relationships and digital stupidity). Even more, it means abolishing industrial monopolies on food and health. Instead, we could develop new forms of autonomous medicine, reconnect with ancestral knowledge and ecologically and socially relevant care traditions, and above all ensure the accessibility of healthy, organic and nutritious food for all.

Contrary to the discourse of the religion of Progress, the development of the technological system has from the beginning faced significant popular resistance. In Europe, mechanization has often been greeted with distrust by workers, artisans, and even small capitalists (see François Jarrige). Historically, the ideal of a lifestyle centered on comfort, i.e. free from any form of constraint, fatigue or effort, is an aristocratic/bourgeois ideal — therefore a parasitic ideal — that has nothing to do with the aspirations of the working class and peasant world. As power always imposes a narrative that serves its own interests, this popular story has been erased from the mainstream discourse. Elsewhere in the world, many traditional societies reject modern technology and comforts for moral reasons, or simply because their culture is enough to fulfill them.

The reappropriation and teaching of this little-known popular and peasant history, as well as the promotion of low-tech societies that are much more egalitarian and democratic, are the pillars of a culture of resistance worthy of the name. Countless activities can contribute to feeding it: learning to live in nature in order to create new human cultures free from dependence on the technological system; teaching children concrete things that are stimulating for the senses and useful for their future (maintaining a vegetable garden, preparing food, recognizing food, recognizing plants, building a cabin, making objects, etc.) in fulfilling environments (outdoor, forest, permacole garden, etc.).