A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand
and the associated persistence of gender inequality, social misery, and the “disposable lives” that are thereby created.10 The concept of the “Anthropocene,” popularized by Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, attests to the consequences of this duality.11 It refers to the new geological era that comes after the Holocene, in which human activities have become a major force impacting the Earth’s ecosystems in a lasting way. This fracture also conceals a horizontal homogenization and hides internal hierarchizations on both sides. On the one side, the terms “planet,” “nature,” or “environment” conceal the diversity of ecosystems, geographic locations, and the non-humans that constitute them. Images of lush forests, snow-capped mountains, and nature reserves mask those of urban natures, slums, and plantations. Also masked are the internal conflicts between nature conservation movements and animal welfare movements, the animal fracture, as well as the latter’s own hierarchies in which “noble” wild animals (polar bears, whales, elephants, or pandas) and pets (dogs and cats) are placed above animals that are farmed (cows, pigs, sheep, or tuna).12 On the other side, the terms “Man” or anthropos mask the plurality of human beings, featuring men and women, rich and poor, Whites and non-Whites, Christians and non-Christians, sick and healthy.
The environmental fracture
I call “environmentalism” the set of movements and currents of thought that attempt to reverse the vertical valuation of the environmental fracture but without touching the horizontal scale of values, meaning without questioning social injustices, gender discrimination, political domination, or the hierarchy of living environments and without concern for the treatment of animals on Earth. Environmentalism therefore proceeds from an apolitical genealogy of ecology comprised of its figures, like the solitary walker, and its pantheon of thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Poivre, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, or Arne Næss.13 They are mainly White, free, solitary, upper-class men in slave-making and post-slavery societies gazing out over what is then referred to as “nature.” Despite disagreements over its definition, environmentalism remains preoccupied with “nature,” cherishing the sweet illusion that its socio-political conditions of access and its sciences might remain outside the colonial fracture.14
Since the 1960s, some ecological movements have been concerned with addressing vertical and horizontal scales of value. Ecofeminism, social ecology, and political ecology have argued for a preservation of the environment intrinsically linked to demands for gender equality, social justice, and political emancipation. Despite their rich contributions, these green interventions make little room for racial and colonial issues. The colonial and slave-making constitution of modernity is veiled by pretentious claims to the universality of socio-economic, feminist, or juridico-political theories. In the green turn of the 1970s, arts and humanities disciplines confronted the environmental fracture while at the same time sliding the colonial divide under the rug. The absence of people of color who are experts on these issues is striking. From universities to governmental and non-governmental arenas, movements critical of the environmental fracture have marked the boundaries of a predominantly White and masculine space within postcolonial, multiethnic, and multicultural countries where the maps of the Earth and the dividing lines of the world are imagined and redrawn.
On the other hand, there is a colonial fracture sustained by the racist ideologies of the West, its religious, cultural, and ethnic Eurocentrism, and its imperial desire for enrichment, the effects of which can be seen in the enslavement of the Earth’s First Peoples, the violence inflicted on non-European women, the wars of colonial conquest, the bloody uprooting of the slave trade, the suffering of colonial slavery, the many genocides and crimes against humanity. The colonial fracture separates humans and the geographical spaces of the Earth between European colonizers and non-European colonized peoples, between Whites and non-Whites, between the masters and the enslaved, between the metropole and the colonies, between the Global North and the Global South. Going back at least to the time of the Spanish Reconquista, when Muslims were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492, this fracture places the colonist, his history and his desires at the top of the hierarchy of values and subordinates the lives and lands of the colonized or formerly colonized under him.15 In the same way, this fracture renders the colonists as homogeneous, reduces them to the experience of a White man, while at the same time reducing the experience of the colonized to that of a racialized man. Throughout the complex history of colonialism, this line has been contested by both sides and has taken different forms.16 Nevertheless, it persists today, reinforced by free markets and capitalism.
The colonial fracture
From the first acts of resistance by Amerindians and the enslaved in the fifteenth century to contemporary antiracist movements and anticolonial struggles in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, this colonial fracture is being called into question, exposing the vertical valorization of the colonized by the colonist. Anticolonialism, antislavery, and antiracism together represent the actions and currents of thought deconstructing this vertical scale of values. History has shown, however, that these movements have not always challenged the horizontal scale of values that in places maintains the relationships of domination between men and women, rich and poor, urban dwellers and peasants, Christians and non-Christians, Arabs and Blacks, among the colonized as well as among the colonists. In response, movements such as Black feminism and decolonial theory shatter both vertical and horizontal value scales, linking decolonization to the emancipation of women, recognition of different sexual orientations and different religious faiths, as well as to social justice. However, the ecological issues of the world remain relegated to the background.
The double fracture of modernity refers to the thick wall between the two environmental and colonial fractures, to the real difficulty that exists in thinking them together and that in response carries out a double critique. However, this difficulty is not experienced in the same way on either side, and these two fields do not bear equal responsibility for it. On the environmentalist side, this difficulty stems from an effort to hide colonization and slavery within the genealogy of ecological thinking, producing a colonial ecology, even a Noah’s Ark ecology. With the concept of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and others promote a narrative about the Earth that erases colonial history, while the country of which Crutzen is a citizen, the kingdom of the Netherlands, is a former colonial and slaveholding empire that stretched from Suriname to Indonesia via South Africa, and now consists of six overseas territories in the Caribbean.17
In metropolitan France [France hexagonale], or the Hexagone, environmentalist movements have not made anticolonial and antiracist struggles central elements of the ecological crisis.18 These struggles remain anecdotal or are even ignored within the extensive critiques of technology (including of nuclear power) carried out by Bernard Charbonneau, Jacques Ellul, André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Edgar Morin, and Günther Anders. The damage caused by nuclear tests carried out on colonized lands, such as the 210 French tests in Algeria and those in Polynesia from 1960 to 1996, is downplayed, but so is the damage caused by the plundering of mines in Africa by Great Britain and France and by the exploitation of the subsoil of Aboriginal lands in Australia, the First Nations in Canada, the Navajos in the United States, and of the Black workers forced to extract uranium in apartheid South Africa.19 In addition to transforming the Hexagone, nuclear energy has relied on France’s colonial empire, using mines in Gabon, Niger, and Madagascar – which have long been in use throughout Françafrique – while exposing miners to uranium and radon gas.20 To disavow this colonial fact is to cover up the opposition to nuclear power that has been voiced by anticolonial movements, such as the demand for disarmament made by the Bandung Conference of 1955, or Kwame Nkrumah, Bayard Rustin, and Bill Sutherland’s pan-Africanist rejection of “nuclear imperialism” and French nuclear tests in Algeria, or Frantz Fanon’s denunciation of a nuclear arms race that maintains the Third World’s domination,