Fog fills the valley, yellow leaves tumble through the air. Looking out the tiny tree house windows we remember warm summer nights filled with campfire smoke, music, and escapes to the lake or mountain tops in search of solitude.
For more than half a year we have been inhabiting Avgrunnsdalen (“valley of the Abyss”) in the middle of a Norwegian forest called Hurummarka to defend it against the construction of Europe’s biggest military explosives factory by Chemring Nobel. We established the Aktivt Forsvart Sone (AFS) Avgrunnsdalen ("Actively Defended Zone Avgrunnsdalen") and despite the many (poor) attempts of Asker municipality to evict us and demolish our house, despite some locals who are angry about our barricades blocking a road and the hunting grounds beyond, and despite a full-blown police raid in October, we are still here.
But what does it mean to inhabit? Inhabiting means not just occupying a space passively, appropriating it, and waiting til the cops or authorities kick you out. It doesn’t mean to hop around from one action to the next, and to stay just long enough to get a cool instagram picture, some media attention, or some feeling of self-fulfillment. It means to build relationships in a space and to a space, to its history, its ecology, and to the people around. It means to make a space a home; to live in it and to make it alive. And hell, does Avgrunnsdalen live!
The valley lives through the crates full of carrots and pumpkins we get from local farmers in exchange for some help in the fields. Its alive through purple tongues of the self-made blueberry jam. Its alive through the baskets full of picked mushrooms, through friends arriving with big backpacks and never leaving again, through hammering a treehouse together and through learning about each other and about our common enemy.
The valley lives through locals visiting almost every day, sometimes just passing by with a peace sign or a thumbs up. Other times staying an afternoon to share their sadness and frustrations with us, to discuss further steps, or to get ready for a demonstration together. Once, an elderly norwegian couple drove by our info point, stopped silently, but friendly, and almost threw some lemonade and cookies at the three masked-up people standing there, just before saying “fuck the police” with a big smile and driving on. We had locals donating a shed full of wood, playing the gong with us around the bonfire on full moon nights, and assembling a book of our poems and art pieces to gather donations for us. Once, a 70-year old man passed by with homemade waffles only to tell us that to him we are like this plant called “Myk Kråkefot” – which looks stingy from afar, but is soft when you’re close, is extremely resistant and spreads flammable powder. Avgrunnsdalen lives because locals wrote successful complaints to the municipality to halt the process of demolishing our house. It lives, because members of the local citizens initiative took a stance and chose diversity and solidarity with us, over dogmatic and leadership focused career activism.
One day, just after the police raid that cost us some barricades, suddenly a boat appeared high up in the trees, sailing triumphantly through the autumn winds. The mono-pod on the roof of our cabin and that one tree houses that is closer to a mansion certainly caused some to stand in awe and others to shake their heads. Avgrunnsdalen even got its own song called “Cabin in the woods” in the first few weeks. The valley also became the site of an autonomously organized midsummer camp with around 100 visitors, full of discussions around anti-militarism, anti-colonialism, solidarity, and stories of local resistance, of concerts, performances, and film-screenings.
Conflicts are part of inhabiting. We learned, that structures must grow out of context and out of the need of the people living in a space, there is no one way to do a forest defense, no concepts that can be transferred from one context to another. We learned that debates with local supporters about sex-work can be quite heated, and that it can be a lot to navigate between local relationships and our barricades architecture. We learned to be accountable to each other and for our actions. To be prepared.
Avgrunnsdalen lived so hard, it resisted against the ground excavation works that Multiconsult and Asker municipality wanted to do in the valley as another step towards Chemring’s factory. We caused substantial economic damage, delay, and bad publicity for Chemring – without anyone getting into trouble. By inhabiting Avgrunnsdalen, we have shown the beauty and resilience of struggle through solidarity, autonomy, diversity, real community, and mutual aid – as opposed to asking for permission or following an out-dated choreography for activists.
All of this, while the poisoned pond next to our house is heavy with led and other leftovers from around 100 years of explosives testing. While there is a toxic waste dumpsite nearby, leaking into a stream, into the fjord. While Chemring’s products, manufactured just 20 minutes away in Saetre, continue to be part of US manufactured weapons that kill people. While Chemring gets yet another exemption to exceed its nitrogen pollution permits for the Oslofjord.
Many of the rocks in Avgrunnsdalen are red, like the blood on the hands of those who would like to see this war factory be built. Maybe they drank too much from the poisoned pond – led can affect ones ability to learn and manage emotions.
Inhabiting Avgrunnsdalen means to witness the almost unbearable poetry of this contrast between life at its fullest, and the murders through greed that surround us permanently. Can you imagine a death factory to be built in the same place that your friends were dancing for hours to a hyper-DIY punk concert in the rain and mud? I can’t without my heart crushing to pieces.
This is what inhabiting means. It means rooting in a place and in its people around. It means remembering every day why you are there, and in that remembering, building structures and relationships everyday, even though it might be the last day – or maybe because it could be the last day. It means that it becomes hard to leave, and even harder to be chased away. And that it hurts to imagine someone destroying everything we built together.
Of course we knew that this home might not last for ever, maybe we didn’t even expect it to last for so long. But this (un)certainty is the whole premise for creating this home.
Inhabiting Avgrunnsdalen has always meant not least one thing: To make everybody who watches understand, that the construction of an explosives factory always means the destruction of homes and worlds – locally AND in faraway places. The AFS Avgrunnsdalen has always been, among many other things, a way of translating the impact that Chemring’s bombs have elsewhere, into the peaceful, orderly, and “sustainable” – or let me say - naive and ignorant Norwegian bubble.
This is what they silence when only talking about us as criminals, occupants, exotic activists, or jobless youth.
The geese fly back south, the opposite way as to when we moved here. We also move the opposite way. Everything we have carried and built outside in anticipation of the midsummer camp, we move it back in, as if a circle closes. May the next circle begin with a long and dark Norwegian winter in which we continue to grow our rebellious bonds despite the harsh environment for autonomous organizing up here.
This letter is to you, the forest defender from around the world with many stories to tell. But maybe more importantly, it is to you, the activist, artist, academic, human living in Norway who still feels something when looking at our war-wrecked world. Who has not (yet) been numbed by your countries’ wealth or your state sponsored NGO’s non-nonviolent civil disobedience theater.
War starts right in front of our eyes. Lets stop it here! Come to Avgrunnsdalen to share your knowledge, to learn and experience a life in resistance, and to defend Hurummarka together. Let’s take control over our lives, take down the states and fight for what you love.
For more information on how to join the struggle visit our website, send us a mail, or just come by!
Love and Rage,
Knus Krigsmaskinen!
THANK YOU GINKO FOR THE GREAT PICTURES