Andrea Brock - Why were German police pepper spraying toilet seats in the Hambach forest?

EXALT Podcast

This month we are delighted to be joined by Andrea Brock, who is a political ecologist at University of Sussex. Andrea works with forest defenders and environmental movements looking at the responses from state and corporate actors to ecological dissent. Andrea shares with us the trajectory of her research career which was influenced by being brought up in the German Rhineland in proximity to the world’s largest open-cast lignite mine. She shares with us her insights into the actions of the mining company and the greenwashing acrobatics that are put in place to distract from the ecological destruction that is taking place as a result of these mining projects. She gives insight into the repression that had been levied against land defenders in the ancient Hambach Forest which has been under threat from mine operator RWE. In addition, the relationships between different types policing and ecocide are explored and how this influences the domination of non-human and human species.

Her research is based in the European context and examines how the logics of repression play out and ecological defenders are criminalized in Europe.

Want to learn more about Andrea Brock’s work? https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p322495-andrea-brock

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Brock, A., & Dunlap, A. (2018). Normalising corporate counterinsurgency: Engineering consent, managing resistance and greening destruction around the Hambach coal mine and beyond. Political geography, 62, 33-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.018.

Dunlap, A., & Brock, A. (Eds.). (2022). Enforcing ecocide: Power, policing & planetary militarization. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99646-8