Environmentalists must embrace the drama of belonging
BLOG: Climate Confessions
In the summer of 2022, 100 Dutch farmers parked their tractors outside of the Asylum Seekers’ Centre in Ter Apel, on the Netherlands’ north-eastern border with Germany to protest that they “no longer feel welcome” in the Netherlands. With right-ring populists being elected across the world, the action offers lessons that progressive environmentalists sorely need to hear.
— by Timothy Stacey
This piece is the first in a new series sharing insights from Ecology and Belonging, a project that draws together the ecological expertise of researchers at the Urban Futures Studio, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, and the belonging expertise of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dutch farmers’ antipathy towards the political establishment became common knowledge in the autumn of 2019, when campaign group Farmers’ Defense Force created huge traffic jams by driving 75 tractors to The Hague, the nation’s political capital. But the history of the conflict is at least decades old. As far back as the 1970s, farmers were being encouraged to rack up massive debts to expand their businesses. Now, the tide has turned and they are being told that to keep in line with EU environmental directives, they must shrink or stop.
The threat is also deeper than urbanites might recognize. Farming is not merely a business but a way of life. The vast majority of Dutch farm land is family owned. Farmers are bound to the land and animals they work with. This means that home and family are always close. But so is work. Farmers frequently find that they cannot attend extended family gatherings – let alone take long holidays.
The genius of the Ter Apel farmers was to draw on dramatic techniques to connect the threat to their way of life to a wider, global context of creeping technocracy; the top-down transformation of communities and lifeways to fall in line with environmental policy; and widespread fears that mass migration is changing Western societies beyond recognition.
Asylum Seekers’ Centres are evocative symbols of outsider status and destitution. By turning this Centre into their stage, the farmers created visual parity between their own situation and that of people who have been forced to flee their homes. Few words were required to understand their message: technocrats have for too long deemed environmental standards more important than the their own citizens’ lifeways.
The staging further foregrounded a widespread trope among nativists: that those in the political establishment care more about “outsiders” than they do their “own” people. It is common, for example, for nativist politicians to emphasize that people born “here” find it harder to get social housing than do refugees. By turning the Asylum Seekers’ Centre into their stage, the farmers made both themselves and the refugees into characters in an unfolding drama, presenting themselves as the “real” victims.
On a more profound level, the performance suggested that people must choose between traditional modes of belonging, sustainability, and care for the destitute. Farmers are synonymous with the Dutch countryside. They and their herds are pillars of the landscape, and as such, core to the national self-image. By presenting themselves outside of an Asylum Seekers’ Centre, the farmers created a clear subtext: not only their lifeways, but Dutch identity itself is under threat from environmental policy, on the one hand, and excessive immigration on the other.
Those best able to tell us what the environmental future must look like are the least equipped to talk about belonging.
The belonging bind
The Ter Apel farmers’ action was covered in all major newspapers, and widely cited by populist politicians. Their theatrical virtuosity aside, one reason that it landed so successfully is a failure on the part of liberal politicians and policymakers to take belonging seriously. The script made sense to the wider public because there was something true in it: the physical and social landscape of Western societies has radically shifted since questions of belonging were last seriously considered. Technocracy has taken over, especially when it comes to environmental policy. The result: those best able to tell us what the environmental future must look like are the least equipped to talk about belonging.
But it is not all about an elite’s failure to listen to “ordinary people”. That’s where the populist stereotype falls short. There is also a deeper moral mission at the heart of the liberal establishment that makes technocratic answers feel safe and questions of belonging deeply uncomfortable. Understanding this mission, and working with it, is crucial to finding new ways of talking about belonging.
Liberalism was forged following the wars of religion in the 17th century, and rehabilitated in the wake of 20th century wars of ideology. Against this backdrop, liberals stressed that using rational, emotion-free language is the best means to avoid conflict and exclusion. As soon as we start to draw on questions of who “we” are or what it means to be Dutch – or British or Indian – we are necessarily excluding someone. This sensibility becomes particularly prominent in a context of largescale inward migration. It is what I call the belonging bind: we become too timid to talk about belonging for fear that someone will feel excluded.
We need to get past this. When, as advocates of societal transformation, we refuse to talk about belonging, we are telling people that the world they know and love will be shattered, and that they’re alone when it comes to building a new world in its place. No wonder populism is thriving. We urgently need to consider what an alternative vision of belonging might look like.
Perhaps we should stop thinking of belonging as a noun, something that is fixed and that, once attained, remains stable – and instead think of belonging as a verb – something that we do.
In search of alternatives
Many establishment figures recognize the importance of belonging while also being aware of the dangers. The most common compromise is to offer the same symbols familiar to nativists, albeit in diluted form: a flag here; an anthem there.
But what if, rather than diluting belonging to better accommodate newcomers, it were possible to entirely reconceive belonging? Could we then find visions of belonging that were deep enough to rival nativism but also open enough to accommodate new arrivals, from the womb as well as from beyond the nation’s borders?
The Ter Apel farmers themselves went some way to answering this question. The symbolic relevance of farmers to Dutch identity reminds us that belonging is not only about ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but also about ecology. We are who we are partly because of the landscapes we collaborate with and move through. But there are some crucial caveats.
First, the idea that our landscapes shape us need not mean, as nativists suggest, that people and cultures physically co-evolve with the land, and thus can never truly belong outside of the landscapes in which they and their ancestors were born. It is possible to recognize that the landscape influences our identity without assuming that it determines our characteristics, or that those characteristics are passed on genetically.
Perhaps we should stop thinking of belonging as a noun, something that is fixed and that, once attained, remains stable – and instead think of belonging as a verb – something that we do. Considered from this perspective, belonging would be far easier to attain but also harder to truly live up to. Belonging would not be something that one does or does not inherently possess, and nor something that is bestowed upon vulnerable outsiders, but rather something that we are, all of us, always working at with our more-than-human communities.
Second, we need not assume that landscapes themselves, or for that matter who has access to them, remain fixed. Indeed, we might ask why so few people get to dictate the shape of the landscapes we are all part of. In practice, honouring the idea that we achieve belonging by engaging with landscapes might mean expanding ownership of and access to land and water by, for example, selling it into community trusts, and even inviting participation from the broader community, including refugees.
The Ter Apel action made for such a good drama because Dutch farmers are custodians of national identity. Like it or not, a small group play a big role in shaping the backdrop against which our lives unfold. But if the landscape becomes an open stage, we can all be players in a larger ecological drama.
Climate Confessions is a blog series in which Timothy Stacey reveals the “religious repertoires” associated with sustainability in various sectors. From the myths of great floods that dominate in Dutch politics to the rituals of reconnecting with other humans and the other-than-human found among activists, each month, Tim invites you into the repertoires that lurk beneath the surface, shaping sustainability in an otherwise secular world. For more formal reflections, see Tim’s peer-reviewed research: www.uu.nl/staff/TJStacey/Publications. To discuss how repertoires might transform your practice, get in touch t.j.stacey@uu.nl