A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand

A Decolonial Ecology - Malcom Ferdinand


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to the environmental crisis is the decolonization of the black race.”62 Similarly, in 1986 in Paris, Thomas Sankara denounced the “colonial plunder [that] has decimated our forests without the slightest restorative thought for our tomorrows.”63 Sankara then declared evocatively, “this struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fires to our forests and our savannas.”64

      This is also what the participants of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit affirmed in Washington in 1991, linking the protection of Mother-Earth to decolonial and antiracist demands.65 The Kenyan biologist Wangari Maathai, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her ecological and feminist commitments in the Green Belt movement, recalls the wounds inflicted upon the Earth by colonial companies that were supported by Christian followers who devalued the practices of indigenous peoples such as the Kikuyu of Kenya, practices that are now recognized for their role in protecting biodiversity.66 In this, decolonial ecology is inspired by a range of environmentalist movements in the Caribbean. From Assaupamar in Martinique, to Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, to the Papaya peasant movement in Haiti, to the struggles of the Saramaka people in Suriname to save their forest, to the Afro-Colombian feminist and ecological movement led by Francia Márquez, a body of people are articulating a way of preserving the environment in the pursuit of a world free from its (post)colonial inequalities and power relations passed on since the time of slavery. These were the terms Márquez used when she accepted the 2018 Goldman Prize for the Environment:

      I am part of a process, of a history of struggle and resistance. It began when my ancestors were brought to Colombia as slaves. I am part of the struggle against structural racism, part of the ongoing fight for freedom and justice, part of those people who hold onto hope for a better life, part of those women who use their maternal love to take care of their land as a place where life thrives. I am one of those people who raise their voices to stop the destruction of rivers, forests, and wetlands.67

      Decolonial ecology is a centuries-old cry for justice and an appeal for a world.

      the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another.69

      Certainly, the importance of the concrete aspects of ecological degradation has led some theoretical approaches to focus solely on the economic and material dimensions of the ecological crisis – nature being included in the material – and led to the continued confusion of the globe with the world. In this vein, Jason Moore’s brilliant analyses of “world-ecology,” inspired by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, the analyses of political ecology by eco-Marxists, and those of global environmental history paradoxically suffer from the same ills that they denounce: they take the material sphere of physical economic forces impacting the Earth as the main focus for understanding the world.73 Undoubtedly, this global understanding of the ecological crisis in terms of humans’ ecological footprints, “unequal ecological exchange,”74 or “global limits”75 reveals the inequalities between those who consume the equivalent of three or four planets and those who live on almost nothing. And yet, the power of words and political actions are set aside in favor of what can be measured. What remains is what cannot be quantified: suffering, hopes, struggles, victories, refusals, and desires.

      Earth is the world’s womb, its matrix.78 From this perspective, ecology is a confrontation with plurality, with others different than myself, leading to the foundation of a common world. It is from the cosmopolitical foundation of a world between humans, and with non-humans, that the Earth can become not only what we share but what we have “in common without owning it.”79Arendt’s proposed world horizon is enriched in two different ways with which she was not originally concerned. It is creolized and marked by the recognition of the Caribbean experiences of colonialism and slavery, and it is extended by the political recognition of the presence of non-humans, giving rise to a world between humans and with non-humans. If nature and the Earth are not identical to the world, here, the world includes nature, the Earth, non-humans, and humans, all the while recognizing different cosmogonies, qualities, and ways of being in relation to one another.


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