Terrestrial peoples: instituting our common attachments
Sophie Gosselin, Université de Tours
In the context of climate change and with the multiplication of socio-environmental crises, many communities of residents are choosing to equip themselves with institutional processes that allow them to guarantee the conditions of a living and sustainable territory, or in other words, to dwell in a shared living space. These commons, or conditions for the renewal of life and habitability on the Earth, open up other ways of doing politics. These differ from those accepted since the avent of Modernity that entail a contractualization solely between humans for the purpose of sustaining a human social and economic life based on extractivism, resourcism and patriarchal and racial domination. These dynamics of re-dwelling imagine institutions where invisibilized humans and other non-humans can resurface in the political and democratic landscape to nourish common attachments in bioregions, and in the form of new alliances (transgender, trans-specific, trans-generational and trans-national). From these new alliances, communities of inhabitants have been instituted as terrestrial peoples, composed of multiple relationships linked to their living environments: river-people, mountain-people, archipelago-people, forest-people...