A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand
Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew, trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook (Oxford: Heinemann, [1944] 1978).
60 60 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 43; translation slightly modified.
61 61 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 56–7.
62 62 Nathan Hare, “Black Ecology,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 1/6 (1970): 2–8, at p. 8.
63 63 Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, ed. Michael Prairie (New York: Pathfinder, 2007), p. 258; translation modified.
64 64 Ibid., p. 259.
65 65 “Principles of Environmental Justice,” www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
66 66 Wangari Maathai, Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (New York: Doubleday, 2010), pp. 20–1 and 50.
67 67 Francia Márquez, acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, San Francisco, 25 April 2018.
68 68 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 137; André Gorz, Ecologica, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2018), p. 50; Étienne Tassin, “Propositions philosophiques pour une compréhension cosmopolitique de l’écologie,” conference proceedings from “Penser l’écologie politique: sciences sociales et interdisciplinarité” at the University of Paris-Diderot, 13–14 January 2014, pp. 180–3; www.fondationecolo.org/blog/ActesEcologiePolitique1.
69 69 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 182–3.
70 70 Étienne Tassin, Un monde commun: pour une cosmo-politique des conflits (Paris: Seuil, 2003), pp. 215–35.
71 71 Gorz, Ecologica, p. 47.
72 72 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 32.
73 73 Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, and Juan Martinez-Alier (eds), Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (New York: Alta Mira Press, 2007); Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).
74 74 Paul K. Gellert, Scott R. Frey, and Harry F. Dahms, “Introduction to Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World-Systems Research 23/2 (2017): 226–35.
75 75 Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–5; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347/6223 (2015).
76 76 Philippe Descola, La Composition des mondes: entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015).
77 77 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
78 78 Translator’s note: Matrice is the French word for both womb and matrix. While English has largely lost the connection between womb and matrix in everyday usage, the single French word is derived from the Latin matrix. The Latin word, which comes from the word for mother (mater), originally meant “pregnant animal” and “uterus” in Late Latin. The sense with which it is used here is not intended to be exclusively gendered or to refer only to the human womb, and so I have translated the term as “womb, matrix” following Betsy Wing’s translation of the same term in Glissant.
79 79 Hannah Arendt, “Public Rights and Private Interests: In Response to Charles Frankel,” in Michael Mooney and Florian Stuber (eds), Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 103–8.
80 80 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation – an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3/3 (2003): 257–337.
81 81 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 93.
82 82 Paget, Caliban’s Reason.
83 83 Translator’s note: “Matricial” is the adjectival form of the French matrice. While not a neologism in English, the term is uncommon and not normally used in the sense intended here. The reader should understand it in the double sense of “womb, matrix,” mentioned above.
1 Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World
Conquérant (1776–7)
On May 21st, 1776, the Conquérant, a 300-ton ship, began its journey from Nantes, heading for West Africa. From August to October, while surveying the Gulf of Guinea, the Conquérant inspected and chose the materials-bodies for its building site. Among the 400 pieces packed into the hold and the steerage, only 338 survived the bloody swell of the middle passage, reaching Port-au-Prince on January 9th, 1777. After removing the weeds, the forest, and the Red Amerindians, the Conquérant joined the Negro joists together into the frame of a colonial inhabitation of the Earth.
The current ecological storm is bringing to light the harm and the problems associated with certain ways of inhabiting the Earth that are inherent to modernity. A long-term [longue durée] perspective is required to understand these problems. One must return to modernity’s founding moments and processes, which have contributed to today’s ecological, social, and political situation. This is why it is important to go back as early as 1492, to the founding moment of the European colonization of the Americas. However, it has to be said that this event remains a prisoner to the modern world’s double colonial and environmental fracture. On the one side, anticolonial critique condemns the conquests, the genocide of Amerindian peoples, the violence against Amerindian and Black women, the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of millions of Black people.1 On the other side, environmental criticism highlights the extent of ecosystem destruction and the loss of biodiversity that has been caused by the European colonization of the Americas.2 This double fracture erases the continuities that saw humans and non-humans confused as “resources” feeding the same colonial project, the same conception of the Earth and the world. I propose that this double fracture be healed by returning to colonization’s principal action: the act of inhabiting.
The European colonization of the Americas violently implemented a particular way of inhabiting the Earth that I call colonial inhabitation. Although European colonization is plural in terms of its nations, peoples, and kingdoms, its politics, practices, and different periods, colonial inhabitation draws a common thread, which I will describe here with a particular focus on the French experience. The deeds creating French companies, such as the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, which financed and founded the exploitation of the Caribbean islands, explicitly stated the intention to render these islands inhabited:
We, the undersigned, acknowledge and declare that We have made and do hereby make a faithful association between Us … to render inhabited and populate the islands of Saint-Christophe [present day Saint Kitts and Nevis] and Barbados, and others at the entrance of Peru, from the eleventh to the eighteenth degree of the equinoctial line, which are not possessed by Christian princes, both for the purpose of instructing the inhabitants of said islands in the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion, and for the purpose of trading and negotiating in said islands for money and merchandise which may be collected and drawn from the said islands and surrounding areas, and brought to Le Havre to the exclusion of all others ….3
This inhabiting might seem obvious at first glance. The ones who inhabit