Is the place already occupied

The ecology of the Yellow Vests can be captured by observing both the way they appropriate space and habitats and their—often distant—relationship to institutionalized political ecology. It can also be approached by studying the various ways by which they are locally invested, here understood as a scale that is best made up of their common values, and where attachments take form. Scrutinizing the participation of Yellow vests in local environmental struggles on eco-frontiers allows to seize grips—in the pragmatic sense of affordances provided by problematic situations, which help trigger and deploy critical capabilities and processes towards social transformation—by which the Yellow vests amplify these struggles and are transformed by them in return. Building on the results of a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry, this article explores the determined and precarious ways by which the movement’s protagonists engage in these fronts. Seen from the vantage point of the beaches and the fields of Finistere (France), the Yellow vests movement finds in the protest against the spatial and symbolic ascendency of productionist farming, in the critique of the management of water and energy resources and in the attachments to seashores, new and situated grips to relate social injustice and environmental inequalities.