“Sacré Mormont”: Disciplinary constellations and rhetorical contestations around nature in the context of accelerated urbanization

Abstract

This article investigates how contemporary environmental conflicts reconfigure relationships between urbanity, nature, and religion in contexts of accelerated and extended urbanization. Focusing on the 2020–2021 occupation of the Mormont hill in French-speaking Switzerland, it argues that imaginaries of nature are co-produced through spatial transformation, social practice, and discursive contestation rather than existing outside urban life. The study draws on long-term research on eco-spiritual actors, combined with ethnographic observation, media analysis, and activist publications. Mobilizing the “more-than-human” approach as a critical lens, the article identifies three competing discourses shaping the meaning of the Mormont. First, a dominant economic framing constructs the hill as a resource embedded in extractivist and growth-oriented logics. Second, a conservationist discourse, grounded in legal and scientific expertise, emphasizes biodiversity protection while remaining largely within institutional frameworks. Third, an eco-activist discourse reconfigures the hill as a more-than-human entity, articulated through affective, ethical, and spiritual practices. Particular attention is given to this latter perspective, showing how activists mobilize ritualized practices, relational ethics, and references to imagined Celtic pasts to produce what can be described as “subtle green spirituality.” The analysis demonstrates that the “more-than-human” operates not as a stable theoretical category but as a contested and situational construct, shaped by the intersection of scientific, political, and spiritual forms of knowledge. By tracing these rhetorical contestations, the article contributes to cultural studies debates on the post-secular and post-human turns, highlighting the need for critical reflexivity regarding claims to non-anthropocentric perspectives. More broadly, the Mormont case illustrates how environmental activism functions as a site for the production of new cosmologies, in which processes of re-enchantment and critiques of extractivism converge, reshaping notions of agency, responsibility, and the place of humans within increasingly urbanized environments.