Pirate Ecology

In Europe today, we lack an ecological project capable of resisting the policies of suffocation in an increasingly unbreathable world;
     a project initiated in working-class neighborhoods, which would articulate enfinement with the land and freedom of movement;
     a project with its sights set on Africa, aiming to establish a broad internationalist front against global warming and the destruction of life itself;
     a project that would make the Mediterranean an autonomous space and a rallying point for mutinies from North and South alike;
     a project that would see land liberation, animal liberation and equal human dignity as fundamentally linked;
     a project that assumes secession in the face of increasingly threatening right-wing extremist forces;
     a project that would set sail in search of One Piece, the famous treasure from the manga of the same name, which has become a symbol in working-class neighborhoods of the thirst for freedom that thrives there;
     a project that would put itself at the level of children and seek their well-being and liberation.
     This project is that of pirate ecology.

Fatima Ouassak's book, Pirate Ecology—So we can be free! is the third release of Pensées soignées, K. Verlag's new series of works-in-translation dedicated to relaying how intellectuals and activists in the non-Anglophone world are thinking about care and caring about thought. By proliferating new concepts, models, and tools, the series aims to address the tragedies of our diminished and imperiled historical moment.     

Fatima Ouassak is a French essayist, speaker, public policy consultant, and environmentalist, feminist and anti-racist activist of Moroccan origin. She is co-founder of the Front de Mères collective, a parents' union in working-class neighborhoods. Her book La puissance des méres (The Power of Mothers) received the Prix de l‘essai féministe Causette in 2021. Pour une écologie pirate, et nous serons libres was originally published by Editions La Découverte in 2023.

Arturo Escobar is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, ecosocial transitions, and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with the PhD Program in Environmental Sciences at Universidad del Valle, Cali. Over the past thirty years, he has worked closely with Afro-descendant, environmental, and feminist organizations in Colombia. His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2nd ed. 2011). His most recent books are Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018), Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (2020), and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma (2024). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2021.

Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and teaches translation at Smith College, in Massachusetts, USA. She has translated some fifteen books into English, of which seven by philosopher Catherine Malabou, including Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, recipient of a 2022 French Voices Award. She has a longstanding interest in Haitian Studies and in Translation Studies, in which she has published scholarly articles on feminist, decolonial, and eco translation. She is on the advisory board of the Nida FUSP Centre for Advanced Research in Translation and is a member of the Global Eco-Translation Network.