“If the Earth belongs to all of us,
there’s no reason why anyone who wants to
shouldn’t be able to visit it.”
– Achille Mbembe
Walls and reinforced barriers are mushrooming all over the world in response to the growing tide of nationalism. When the Iron Curtain fell in the early 1990s, it seemed that a borderless world had arrived. But since then, and particularly in recent years, a rising tide of sometimes xenophobic nationalism has seen many nations erect walls along their borders, and reinforce and militarize previously fimsy border fences – often in apparent violation of international environmental laws. Elisabeth Vallet at the University of Quebec in Canada stated that 74 border walls now exist across the globe, six times the number at the end of the Cold War, extending for more than 32,000km. From the swamps of Africa to the mountains of SouthEast Asia, and from the US-Mexico border to the steppes of Central Asia, many of these barriers are appearing in remote regions that have until now been the preserves of nature. These barriers pose a growing threat to wildlife – blocking migrations and threatening millions of species that will need to move to keep up with a changing climate. A study by Titley and colleagues concluded that by 2070 climate change will mean that some 35% of mammals globally will have
more than half of their climate niches in countries in which they are not currently found. So, without the ability to cross borders, they face annihilation. In addition to this great threat due to the disintegration of the planet Earth, the question of who belongs to the planet and who should be kept out is increasingly present.
In the continent of Europe where it seems that borders are going toward total disappearance, we are facing the total opposite. Hence, the main focus of our research is the Białowieza Forest, which is located between Poland and Belarus, where a wall was recently built on the borderline by the Polish government, dividing the forest in half. The aim was to repel refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere being channelled to the border by the Belarus government. The creation of such a political and ecological barrier as a result of the construction of the wall will cause, among others, functional and spatial isolation. Thus, some inequalities begin with the demands to be alive on Earth, not specially to be a citizen of a particular nation-state. What will be the future of democracy in a context such as this? In “The Common Root” through a narrative spatial representation, we explore two extreme positions: absurdity and hopelessness as conditions faced by both nonhumans and humans. Absurdity shown through the construction of a wildly unreasonable bridge for wild animals to cross after the wall was built, and the hopelessness depicted in the underworld as a place beyond the eyes of the law that offers a path for an escape. If indeed we all are rightful inhabitants of this Earth that is our common root, we must enact the capacity to participate in the vital flows that constitute us all. It would mean imagining a new generation of rights that are beyond the nation-state. For instance, the universal right to mobility.