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 “well-tended thoughts” 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. The book is currently forthcoming and available for pre-order. Please sign up to our newsletter to stay informed.

In Europe today, we have no project for the environment that is capable of resisting the policies of suffocation of an increasingly unbreathable world;
     a project initiated in working-class neighborhoods that articulates anchoring on land with freedom of movement;
     a project with its sights set on Africa, aiming to establish a broad internationalist front against global heating and the destruction of life itself;
     a project that makes the Mediterranean an autonomous space and a rallying point for mutinies from North and South alike;
     a project that views land liberation, animal liberation, and equal human dignity as fundamentally intersecting;
     a project that envisages secession in the face of increasingly threatening right-wing extremist forces;
     a project that sets sail in search of One Piece, the famous treasure in the eponymous manga that has become a symbol in working-class neighborhoods of the thirst for freedom thriving there;
     a project that addresses children, seeking their well-being and liberation.
     This is the project to pirate ecology.

Fatima Ouassak is a political scientist, essayist, editor, and storyteller. She has published the first two essays of her trilogy: The Power of Mothers (La Découverte, 2020), which won the Feminist Essay Prize, and For a Pirate Ecology (La Discovery, 2023). She is also the author of the literary narratives Rue du passage (Lattès, 2024), and Like Ali (Diable Vauvert, 2025). She is the director of Ecologies of Liberation, whose recent collection, Terres et Liberté. Manifeste antiraciste pour une écologie de la libération, was published by Les Liens Qui Libèrent in 2025. A committed activist in the fight against racism and in working-class neighborhoods, she co-founded the “Front de mères” [Mothers’ Front], a parents’ union, and “Verdragon,” a pathbreaking space for popular ecology in France.

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 has been 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.