Every afternoon in my grandparents’ village, a small (and shrinking) town of around 1,000 inhabitants in the province of León, Spain, twenty-eight-year-old Diego rides his bicycle down toward the wine cellars. He goes to do something almost no one does anymore: turn the cheeses he has left there to mature, which he has made from the milk of his two goats. Once he is finished, he has a simple afternoon meal: a piece of chorizo and a chunk of bread—both homemade—accompanied by a glass of his own wine, while watching the sunset to the sound of cicadas. Not long ago, every family in the town owned one of these cellars on the outskirts of the village where they made their own wine. Today, most lie in ruins, neglected and swallowed by undergrowth.
Most young people around Diego’s age left the village, seduced by the promise of progress in cities. Those who stayed can usually be found at the bar every afternoon, a place Diego rarely goes. He tells me it frustrates him to see everyone sitting there, paying more attention to their phones than to the people around them. Instead of a smartphone, he has goats, beehives, an orchard, a vegetable garden, a shepherd’s hut, a wine cellar, and an ever-growing collection of handwoven baskets. He feels nostalgic for certain communal practices that began to fade away when he was still a child: the corrillos a la fresca, when several generations gathered outside their homes in the cool of the evening; the long afternoons young people spent in the streets and countryside making rafts, building shelters, and inventing games; communal meals shared outdoors; and the collective work practices known as hacenderas. Since few people his age seem interested in any of this, he often either spends his afternoons alone or talking with older villagers. These older villagers give Diego knowledge about the old watermill, the management of free-ranging flocks of sheep and goats, beekeeping, the communal stewardship of woodland resources, cheesemaking, winemaking, and countless other practices that sustained village life only a few decades ago.
Diego is an anomaly: a young man dismissed as romantic, or “old-fashioned.” Unlike most of his generation, he has chosen not only to remain in the village, but to devote as much of his time as possible to learning and experimenting with practices that, in environmentalist circles, would be described as forms of “self-sufficiency.” Diego feels deeply rooted in the land where he was born and finds profound peace and happiness in his close, everyday relationship with the place he inhabits. But he is also lonely. He wishes he could share these interests with people his own age. Instead, he has become known as the village eccentric.
Without idealizing the past, people like Diego remind us that certain ways of living have been lost, and refuse to let them disappear without resistance. They mourn the erosion of communal ways of managing shared resources, of local knowledge tied to a particular landscape, and of everyday forms of solidarity: neighbors helping one another, recognizing themselves in one another, and experiencing life as something collective. Yet the long devaluation of rural life has meant that practices that were once sustained by entire communities have come to depend on increasingly isolated individuals.
The Longing to Belong
Diego’s kind of rootedness has long fallen on deaf ears. In rural Spain, and across much of rural Europe, shaped by decades of depopulation, young people interested in such things are largely seen as oddities, marked by some inexplicable lack of ambition that leads them to care about practices associated with a backward, uncool, and outdated past. At the same time, rootlessness has become a powerful feeling among young people. Yet the consequences of globalization, with its erosion of shared language, symbols, rituals, and collective memory, are now compounded by the socioecological crisis and an ever more uncertain future. As a result, some people feel increasingly drawn to the promise of a renewed sense of belonging: to a place, and to a community that feels familiar.
Consider, for instance, a series of images that recently went viral on Instagram in Spain. With a nostalgic, retro aesthetic, they depict children playing in the street, two elderly women chatting on a doorstep, a group of men gathered in a traditional tavern, or a woman shopping at a neighborhood market. Their captions read: “There was a time when we didn't need the internet to have fun,” “Social networks used to be called Pilar and Eulalia,” “Bars used to be bars,” “We supported local businesses,” “We didn’t have much, but we had time, the street, and friends.”
Many of the comments posted in response to these images (“We lived so much better with almost nothing,” “They’ve taken everything from us”) are filled with what Svetlana Boym describes as a “global epidemic of nostalgia,” a longing for more stable and predictable pasts, or what Zygmunt Bauman called retrotopias.1 Yet the political meaning of that nostalgia is by no means predetermined. There is no doubt that the political framework that has given meaning to this search for rootedness over the past decades in Spain, and across much of Europe, has largely been that of the conservative right. More often than not, rootedness has been framed through a discourse in which a virtuous “us” defends tradition against a threatening “them” determined to undermine it. According to this narrative, in Spain, respecting tradition means going to bullfights, attending Sunday mass, and preserving the traditional nuclear family. It means accepting a world defined by scarcity, loss, and decline, where our goal is to protect our culture. Within this framework, the answer to the question “Who has taken everything from us?” is the immigrant, the feminist, the environmentalist, or anyone committed to progressive politics, cultural diversity, or the ecological crisis. In this way, the far right has transformed rootedness into something bound up with closed and defensive identities.
But this is only one possible political articulation of rootedness. In The Need for Roots (1949), Simone Weil imagines an alternative, emancipatory understanding of rootedness. Weil makes the claim that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” However, for Weil, rootedness is not determined solely by birth, but by all facets of life. Moreover, there is no single form of rootedness; rather, it takes numerous and overlapping forms:
A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.2
Weil saw the urban and rural France of her time as societies adrift, uprooted, and in need of renewing a sense of active communal life in which people had a purpose and the opportunity to contribute. “Uprootedness,” she argued, can result everywhere from military conquest and economic domination, but also from social relations mediated by money and education. She criticized an impoverished educational system that paid little attention to the intrinsic value of learning, leaving young people without the historical context needed to develop a broader sense of belonging and collective destiny. If uprootedness, for Weil, is a “dangerous disease,” one capable of producing spiritual lethargy, alienation, even violence and destructiveness, rootedness becomes an indispensable condition for human flourishing.
But how does rootedness come into being? According to Weil, cultivating roots “doesn’t mean they should be fenced in. On the contrary, never was plenty of fresh air more indispensable. Rooting in and the multiplying of contacts are complementary to one another.”3 In other words, rootedness is not opposed to openness; on the contrary, it is dependent on cultural syncretism and embracing diversity.
Degrowth challenges the relentless pursuit of expansion at the expense of other territories and communities, and instead calls for an “open localism” or “cosmopolitan localism.”4 From this perspective, the loss of rootedness and the logic of endless expansion are deeply intertwined. The loss of contact with sources that sustain our lives (water, food, energy, materials) and the social relationships that make collective life possible is what makes the idea of infinite expansion—into territories with which we have no connection—possible. This disconnection blurs our perception of limits, allowing us to imagine that there can always be more. In this understanding, rootedness arises through shared ways of life and our ongoing relationship with the places we inhabit together.
Rooting Otherwise
Over the past five years, a phenomenon has emerged in Spain that mobilizes rootedness in a very different direction from the conservative one: a growing constellation of festivals, gatherings, popular congresses, pilgrimages, and celebrations dedicated to reclaiming, showcasing, transmitting, and even making cool a wide range of local traditional knowledge and practices. Over the past year alone, I have had the opportunity to attend five such events in five different regions of Spain: Festival Hacenderas (Ávila), Festival de la Memoria (Burgos), the Sentido Comunal congress in Vic (Barcelona), the Agrocuir festival (Galicia), and the pilgrimage Una Señora Fiesta (Asturias). Each, in its own way, searches for belonging aligned with progressive values in response to the loss of meaning produced by globalization, alienation, the socioecological crisis, and a growing sense of uncertainty. This search does not unfold within a closed community, but one that is porous, inclusive, and radically open to diversity and syncretism.
In June 2025, I was invited to open the Hacenderas Congress in Ávila, where I had been asked to speak about the theory of degrowth. It soon became clear to me that this congress had little in common with the academic conferences I was used to attending. Rather than lectures and panels, the four-day gathering moved from village to village where workshops took place on basket weaving, sheep’s wool processing, Leónese folk percussion and singing, straw hat making, and oral storytelling. Participants were not primarily academics, but people brought together by a shared conviction that rural life and the recovery of traditional practices offer an attractive and necessary way of inhabiting the world.
One of the workshop leaders was Edilberto, a young shepherd from La Cabrera (León), who described what it means to be the last transhumant shepherd in his village while encouraging others to take up the profession. Alongside his work as a shepherd, he has revived the village’s Entroido carnival, which was once abandoned but has since become the subject of a documentary film.5 Members of the Rural University of Cerrato, meanwhile, spoke of recovering what they called the “sovereignty of joy,” recounting their efforts to restore an abandoned dance hall, café, shop, and cinema in a village with only seventy inhabitants, and transform the building into a community cultural center. Throughout the congress, participants also shared experiences of reviving the hacenderas, traditional forms of collective labor through which neighbors maintained roads, springs, and other commons for centuries. In Ávila, this practice is known by the expression “a hombro de vecino,” (“shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor”).
A few weeks later I traveled to Quecedo de Valdivielso, in the Merindades region of Burgos, a village of only twenty-eight inhabitants, where I encountered the creation of the Escuela de los Pueblos (“School of the Villages/Peoples”): a rural university devoted to practical knowledge such as shepherding and agroecology alongside theories such as food sovereignty and degrowth. The majority of those attending the school’s inaugural Festival of Memory were not urban visitors like myself but local residents of all ages. The initiative is being led by a group of young people who settled in the area several years ago and have become deeply integrated into the local community. The school will follow seasonal rather than academic rhythms. As the organizers explained, the aim is “to solve the problems of the future by looking for answers in the past and in the territory we inhabit.”
Over the following year, I encountered similar initiatives in different Spanish territories that follow a similar understanding in their promotion of rootedness. Agrocuir, held every summer in the Galician town of Monterroso, is a festival that combines the atmosphere of the traditional romería (pilgrimage) with the celebration of queer identities in rural contexts. Alongside spontaneous foliadas (festive gatherings) in the streets, visitors attended workshops on endangered forms of knowledge like the Silbo Gomero, the whistled language once used by shepherds in the Canary Islands to communicate across long distances, which participants discussed might be repurposed today during demonstrations and direct actions. Since its founding in 2015, Agrocuir has become a reference point for queer youth across rural Spain, inspiring similar festivals in Murcia, Cantabria, and Extremadura.
The same spirit also animated the Sentido Comunal congress, held in Catalonia in January 2026, which explicitly connected degrowth with popular communal traditions. Participants explored the political potential of oral traditions, forms of self-government such as the concejo abierto (centuries-old open village assemblies that operate through direct democracy), vernacular architecture, craftsmanship, gastronomy, and popular celebrations. A few months later, in the Asturian hamlet of Vegarrionda, I attended Una Señora Fiesta, which is driven by one of the leading figures of Spain’s neo-trad music scene, Rodrigo Cuevas, as a response to rural depopulation. There, traditions such as the filandón, evening gatherings where neighbors once spun wool while exchanging stories and songs, were revived alongside popular music, communal meals, and traditional games in an openly queer environment.
Taken together, these experiences point to the cultural plurality that continues to survive across many rural regions of Europe, where gastronomy, agricultural knowledge, artisanal production, dialects, forms of reciprocity, popular celebrations, and institutions of self-government remain deeply local and distinctive. They recover traditional knowledge neither as something backwards to overcome nor as folklore to be preserved in museums, but as resources for imagining new forms of collective life and territorial autonomy.
Until recently, someone like Diego might have found the closest political expression of his attachment to place in conservative or reactionary discourses. Initiatives such as the ones I’ve visited are beginning to change that. They offer a different political horizon for rootedness, in which the local territory is understood as the material basis for sustaining life, and a sense of belonging to a community is compatible with being open and diverse. Through these new ways of enacting rootedness, community can become, in Weil’s words, a repository of “certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”6
See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv; and Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), 40.
Weil, The Need for Roots, 49.
Filka Sekulova and Francois Schneider, “Open Localism,” in Degrowth Conference Leipzig 2014 (2014).
El Último De Arganeo, dir. David Vázquez Vázquez, 2023.
Weil, The Need for Roots, 40.
