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Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one's brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Better yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine-if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours-and justify my conduct as natural law. If I am not my brother's keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

— A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Many in the movement against the airport did not fear the magical formula of fabulation, "act as if". The performative art of invoking desirable fictions was perfected when the movement began casting the immutable collective belief: there would never be an airport. There were many ways this belief was formulated, but two key tactics were a declaration of a six-point vision for the future of the zad, and the disobedient construction of substantial buildings, envisioned as a longterm mainstay of community. A vision for the zone after the cancellation of the airport was formalized in 2015 following a long period of discussion within the movement. It came in the punchy six-point declaration of how the bocage and the life that inhabits it would organize in a post-airport future. Key was that those who had cared for and saved the bocage would be able to stay, thus keeping a diversity of ways of living and farming, organized in an assembly where those living on the land would gather to decide the modalities of its use. Entitled "Because there will never be an airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes," the 6 points were distributed as posters and flyers, and were repeated through media and at rallies. They became powerful imaginative anchors for collectively believing in a future other than the airport.

— We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself by Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay Jordan

In the anti-roads movement, there was a twin strategy of what we called 'fluffy' disobedience in the daytime, blocking the bulldozers often with local residents support, and at night secretly sabotaging the machines, called "pixieing" after mischievous fairies. It worked: despite losing many key battles, the war was won, and 600 planned roads were canceled.

— We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself by Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay Jordan