Introduction

The HoriZone Ecovillage was a camp in place 1–9 July 2005, to support protest actions at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, that ran 6–8 July that year. This rural convergence site occupied two fields, totalling approximately 30 acres, behind the football stadium on the outskirts of Stirling. In this chapter I situate the creation of the Ecovillage in the context of a much longer history of social movement activism, as represented by the participant action and writing of Starhawk, the US ecofeminist activist and non-violent direct action (NVDA) trainer. In an open letter to the people of Stirling, in part an apology for damage caused by other protesters associated with the camp, residents of the HoriZone Ecovillage (with Starhawk as their contact person) laid out the prefigurative dimensions of their contribution:

Participating in HoriZone was not Starhawk’s first experience of protest camps. She has written repeatedly about the transformative impact of her participation in the Abalone Alliance, whose 1981 encampment and blockade of Diablo Canyon, California, aimed to prevent the commissioning of the nuclear power plant sited there. According to Barbara Epstein: ‘The Abalone’s most important contribution to the direct action movement was the internal culture it created – a commitment to non-violence combined with a utopian vision of a radically democratic society in which everyone’s views would have equal weight and all relationships would be strictly egalitarian’. She calls this culture ‘the politics of prefigurative revolution’ (Epstein, 1991: 91–3).