A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand
consequences of colonization in the Caribbean and North America, the consequences of global warming, and contemporary environmental politics, the Caribbean is most often seen as the place for experimenting with concepts that come from somewhere else.41 The colonial gaze is maintained by the scholar who departs from the Global North and carries in his suitcase concepts that are to be experimented with in a non-scholarly Caribbean, before he leaves again with the fruits of this new knowledge, now capable of prescribing the way forward. Such an approach hides the imperial conditions that allowed, in the Caribbean and other colonial spaces, the development of sciences such as botany, the emergence of forest conservation management,42 and the genesis of the concept of biodiversity,43 and ignores the other forms of knowledge concerning the environment and the body that were already there.44 Above all, one would miss those Caribbean ecologists who go “beyond sand and sun” by holding together social justice, antiracism, and ecosystem preservation.45
A contrario, I embrace the Caribbean world as a scene of ecological thinking. Thinking ecology from the perspective of the Caribbean world proposes an epistemic shift in the conceptualizations of the world and the Earth at the heart of ecology, meaning that there is a change of scene from which discourses and knowledge are produced. Instead of the scene of a free, educated, and well-to-do White man wandering the countryside of Georgia like John Muir, or in the forest of Montmorency like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or around Walden’s pond like Henry David Thoreau, I suggest another scene that took place historically at the same time: one of violence inflicted upon men and women in slavery, dominated socially and politically inside the holds of slave ships. North–South power relations, racisms, historical and modern slavery, the resentments, fears, and hopes that constitute the experience of the world, are placed at the heart of the ship where the ecological tempest is seen and confronted.
Within a binary understanding of modernity, one that opposes nature and culture, colonists and indigenous people, this proposition instead highlights the experiences of modernity’s third terms.46 I am referring to those who were dismissed when, in the sixteenth century, the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, famous in the Valladolid controversy of 1550, defended the Amerindians against the Spanish conquerors with an appeal that was accompanied by repeated suggestions to “stock up” in Africa and develop triangular trade.47 Neither modern nor indigenous, more than 12.5 million Africans were uprooted from their lands from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Hundreds of millions of people were enslaved and kept for centuries in an off-ground [hors-sol] relationship to the Americas.48 Over and above the social conditions of the colonial enslaved, they were also considered “Negroes,” object-beings of a political and scientific racism that indexes them to an inextricable immanence with nature or to an unsurpassable pathological irresponsibility. However, the so-called Negroes also developed relationships with nature, ecumenes, ways of relating to non-humans, and ways of representing the world to themselves. It so happens that these ideas and practices were marked by slavery, by the experience of transshipment in the Atlantic slave trade, and by political and social discrimination for several centuries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.49 Yes, there is also an ecology of the enslaved, of those transshipped in the European trade, an ecology that maintains continuities with the indigenous African and Amerindian communities but is not reducible to either of them.50 An ecology that was forged in modernity’s hold: a decolonial ecology.
Decolonial ecology articulates the confrontation of contemporary ecological issues through an emancipation from the colonial fracture, by rising up from the slave ship’s hold. The urgency of the struggle against both global warming and the pollution of the Earth is intertwined with the urgency of political, epistemic, scientific, legal, and philosophical struggles to dismantle the colonial structures of living together and the ways of inhabiting the Earth that still maintain the domination of racialized people, particularly women, in modernity’s hold. This decolonial ecology is inspired by the decolonial thinking that was begun by a group of Latin American researchers and activists, such as Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Catherine Walks, and Walter Mignolo, who were and are working to dismantle an understanding of power, knowledge, and Being that has been inherited from colonial modernity and its racial categories. They emphasize those other ways of thinking that emerge from “the spaces that have been silenced, repressed, demonized, devaluated by the triumphant chant of self-promoting modern epistemology, politics, and economy and its internal dissensions.”51
The decolonial ecology that I am proposing is different from this current of thought because the central focus is on the experiences of the third terms of modernity and the slave ship, the fundamental experiences of those Black Africans now in the Caribbean who were uprooted from Africa and enslaved.52 This gesture is linked to Africana philosophy, which allows the thinking to resurface, history, and philosophies of Africans and African Americans and is represented by the work of Valentin Mudimbé, Cheikh Anta Diop, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Lewis Gordon, and Norman Ajari.53 Decolonial ecology aims to restore Black people’s dignity in the wake of the battles waged by Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé, by Toussaint Louverture and Rosa Parks, by Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, by Frantz Fanon and Christiane Taubira. Finally, thinking from within the slave ship’s hold is also a matter of gender. The separation that often took place inside the hold, where men are placed on one side and women and children on the other, underlines the different forms of oppression these third terms experience. Decolonial ecology fully agrees with feminist and, singularly, Black feminist critiques that show the intricacies of gendered domination within the racist constitutions of nation-states, critical work such as that of Elsa Dorlin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Eleni Varikas, bell hooks, and Angela Y. Davis.54
This is not an ecology that is to be applied to people of color and formerly colonized territories, like an additional shelf on a bookcase that is already established, as has been proposed by some.55 Decolonial ecology shatters the environmentalist framework for understanding the ecological crisis by including from the outset this confrontation with the world’s colonial fracture and by pointing to another genesis of ecological concern. In this way, I agree with the advances of the environmental justice movements56 and postcolonial ecocriticism.57 The concepts of “environmental racism,” “environmental colonialism,” “ecological imperialism,” and “green orientalism” describe how environmental pollution and degradation, as well as certain preservation politics, reinforce domination over the poor and racialized.58 The critique of the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems is then intimately tied to the critique of colonial and postcolonial dominations and to demands for equality. It is just such an ecologico-political struggle that the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain staged in his 1944 Gouverneurs de la rosée (translated into English by Langston Hughes as Masters of the Dew).59 In 1950, Aimé Césaire exposed the wrongdoing colonialism carried out against the colonized and “natural economies”:
They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines. I am talking about natural economies, harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population that have been disrupted, about food crops destroyed, about malnutrition permanently introduced, about agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.60
In 1961, Fanon already associated the process of political decolonization with a radical change in the ways we inhabit the Earth, with a new inquiry about our relationship to the environment, opening the door to other forms of energy, including solar energy:
The colonial regime has hammered its channels into place and the risk of not maintaining them would be catastrophic. Perhaps everything needs to be started over again: The type of exports needs to be changed, not just their destination; the soil needs researching as well as the subsoil, the rivers and why not the sun.61
In response to global capitalism and postcolonial agreements that maintain these destructive ways of inhabiting the Earth and continue the domination of the formerly colonized and racialized by way of military and financial coercion,