A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand

Prologue A Colonial and Environmental Double Fracture: The Caribbean at the Heart of the Modern Tempest

      Of course, we’re only straws tossed on the raging sea … but all’s not lost, gentlemen. We just have to try to get to the eye of the storm.

      Aimé Césaire

       A Tempest ¹

A modern tempest

An angry red covers the sky, the waves are rough, the water is rising, the birds are panicking. Swirling winds wrap around the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems, the enslavement of non-humans, as well as wars, social inequality, racial discrimination, and the domination of women. The sixth mass extinction of species is underway, chemical pollution is percolating into aquifers and umbilical cords, climate change is accelerating, and global justice remains iniquitous. Violence spreads through the crew, chained bodies are thrown overboard, sinking into the marine abyss, while brown hands search for hope. The skies thunder loudly: the world-ship is in the midst of a modern tempest. In the face of this storm, which finds horizons hidden behind the clouds, vision blurred by the salty waters, and cries covered up by unjust gusts, what course can be taken?

      This book seeks to chart a new course through the conceptual sea of the Caribbean. For the Europeans of the sixteenth century, the word “Caribbean,” being the name of the first inhabitants of the archipelago, meant savages and cannibals.² Like the character Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Caribbean” would refer to an entity devoid of reason. The inspection of this entity by waves of European colonization and their sciences would bring forth economic profits and objective knowledge. This colonial perspective persists today in the touristic representation of the Caribbean as a place where one can take a break on the beach without people and offside to the world. To think ecology from the perspective of the Caribbean world is a reversal of this touristic perspective, driven by the conviction that Caribbean men and women speak, act, and think about the world and inhabit the Earth.³

Many rushed to Noah’s Ark when the ecological flood was announced, with little concern for those abandoned at the dock or those enslaved within the ship. In the face of the ecological storm, saving “humanity” or “civilization” would require leaving the world ashore. This desolating perspective is revealed by the slave ship Zong off the coast of Jamaica in 1781, painted by William Turner and found on the cover of this book. At the mere thought of the storm, some are chained below deck and others are thrown overboard. Environmental collapse does not impact everyone equally and does not negate the varied social and political collapse already underway. A double fracture lingers between those who fear the ecological tempest on the horizon and those who were denied the bridge of justice long before the first gusts of wind. As the eye of the storm, the Caribbean makes it necessary to understand the storm from the perspective of modernity’s hold. Through the Caribbean’s Creole imaginary of resistance and its experiences of (post)colonial struggles, the Caribbean allows for a conceptualization of the ecological crisis that is embedded within the search for a world free of its slavery, its social violence, and its political injustice: a decolonial ecology. This decolonial ecology is a path charted aboard the world-ship towards the horizon of a common world, towards what I call a worldly-ecology. Three philosophical propositions guide the way.

Noah’s ark or the colonial and environmental double fracture

      The first proposition is based on the observation of modernity’s colonial and environmental double fracture. This fracture separates the colonial history of the world from its environmental history. This can be seen in the divide between environmental and ecological movements, on the one hand, and postcolonial and antiracist movements, on the other, where both express themselves in the streets and in the universities without speaking to each other. This fracture is also revealed on a daily basis by the striking absence of Blacks and other people of color in the arenas of environmental discourse production, as well as in the theoretical tools used to conceptualize the ecological crisis. With the terms “Black people,” “Red people,” “Arabs,” or “Whites,” far from the a priori essentialization of nineteenth-century scientific anthropology, I am referring to the construction of the racist hierarchy of the West that resulted in many peoples on Earth having the condition of being associated with a race, culminating in the invention of Whites above non-Whites.⁴ Because of this asymmetry, I refer to those others, non-Whites, by the term “racialized,” for it is their humanity that has been and is being contested by these racial ontologies, and it is they who de facto suffer a discriminatory essentialization.⁵ Even though this hierarchy is a socio-political construction that no longer has any scientific value, it should not in turn lead to the denial of the ensuing social and experiential realities (for example, by refusing to name them) or the denial of their violence, including when those realities and violence take place within environmental discourses, practices, and policies.⁶

In the United States, a 2014 study showed that minorities remain under-represented in governmental and non-governmental environmental organizations, with the highest positions held predominately by White, educated, middle-class men.⁷ A similar situation exists in France. Racialized people who have come as part of colonial and postcolonial migration and who collect the cities’ garbage, clean public squares and institutions, drive buses, trams, and subway trains, the ones who serve hot meals in university dining halls, deliver mail, care for the sick in hospitals, those whose welcoming smiles at the entrance of establishments are a guarantee of security, are the same ones who are usually excluded from the university, governmental, and non-governmental arenas that focus on the state of the environment. As a result, environmental specialists regularly speak at conferences as if all these people, their stories, their suffering, and their struggles remain inconsequential to the way we think about the Earth. This leads to the absurdity that the planet’s preservation is thought about and implemented in the absence of those “without whom,” as Aimé Césaire writes, “the earth would not be the earth.”⁸ Either this fracture is completely hidden behind the fallacious argument that non-White peoples do not care about the environment, or it is restricted to a subject that is deemed secondary to the “real” purpose of ecology. My proposition here is that this double fracture be positioned as a central problem of the ecological crisis, thereby radically transforming its conceptual and political implications.

On the one hand, the environmental fracture follows from modernity’s “great divide,” those dualistic oppositions that separate nature and culture, environment and society, establishing a vertical scale of values that places “Man” above nature.⁹ This fracture is revealed through the technical, scientific, and economic modernizations of the mastery of nature, the effects of which can be measured by the