During the last year, PACA has mapped the landscape of environmental grassroots actors in Denmark that, in different degrees, show traces of what we in PACA call post-anthropocentric narratives and practices. The database contains mission descriptions, contact information and field categorizations.
Based on this web of grassroots, we will analyze and collaborate with some of these actors in order to identify and support their aims, activities, strategies, ideological assumptions, successes and barriers. The database also serves as a tool to create alliances and cooperation between actors themselves as a kind of information service and will be updated during the coming years. If you think that we’ve missed someone, please let us know. Thanks to all for agreeing to be a part of it!
What unites these groups? We understand post-anthropocentric grassroots actors as civil society, bottom-up initiatives that aim to introduce, develop, promote and expand post-anthropocentric narratives and practices. These narratives and practices are attempts to downscale or transform (but not dissolve) human interests and needs in a way that in a careful way attends to and interacts with the more-than-human world. In different ways and to different degrees, they aim protect or recreate the living conditions for human beings while valuing the natural world beyond narrow human interests.
Many of the actors usually work in contrast to or outside of the hegemonic socio-technical and political systems of infrastructures, institutions, and market structures. Examples are regenerative farms, climate activist movements, repair-cafes, local biodiversity initiatives, degrowth-networks, art and literature groups, and eco-villages. Some of them are volunteerbased and/or non-profit associations and organizations, cooperatives, start-ups, campaign groups, think tanks, social enterprises, eco-collectives and villages, social movements, networks,
As the list shows, these actors operate within a diverse set of overlapping fields, such as “Regenerative Practices”, “Economy and Consumer Lifestyle”, “Political Action & Activism” and “Community Living”. We believe that these actors are a part of an ongoing creation of a new ecological class: a wave of interests and attitudes that can potentially give rise to a unified political source that seeks to transform the dominant socio-political perspective and treatment of questions about climate change, biodiversity and the environment. To different degrees and in different ways, these actors seek to challenge and replace the hegemonic discourses and politics based on anthropocentrism, technological fetichism, intense consumption, productivism and/or the associated imperatives of economic growth and profitability.