Commons in the Common Sense: Resisting Enclosures with Anti-Fracking Activists in Lancashire, UK

Abstract

ABSTRACT Placing today’s anti-fracking protests amongst previous social struggles in Lancashire, this paper explores how radical environmental movements resist a capitalist drive for cheap Nature that endangers human and extra-human reproduction. Hydraulic fracturing encroaches on parts of nature that in the common sense of people have not yet completely lost their ontology of a commons. Clean water, air, silence and accessibility are not yet ontologically detached from the conditions for healthy lives and a vibrant community. Like the peasants who revolted in early-modern England because enclosures deprived them of access to firewood and land for grazing cattle, today local communities revolt to the new enclosures that deprive them and future generations from a clean environment, necessary for a healthy life. One of the more subtle and underexposed strategies of radical environmental movements is to emphasize and (re-)create an ontological unity between nature and humanity-in-nature as a reaction to the duality of modernity. This paper’s approach, which combines the political economic history of enclosures with anthropologically inspired research on changing conceptions of nature, shows how radical environmental movements object to material conditions that result from ontological dualisms. This helps to better understand the strategies and aspirations of radical “environmental” movements.