Decolonial Ecology

Historical development

The position has deep roots in anti-colonial thought, in Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. It also draws on the “environmentalism of the poor” documented by Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier, and on Arturo Escobar’s critique of development in Encountering Development (1995). Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power” (2000) and the Latin American decolonial school supplied the theory. Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements across the Americas supplied the practice.

Kathryn Yusoff argued in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018) that the story of the Anthropocene erases the racial history of extraction. Ferdinand’s book, Françoise Vergès’s writing on the “racial Capitalocene” and Macarena Gómez-Barris’s The Extractive Zone (2017) consolidated the field. It now spans geography, philosophy, literature and activism.

Principal claims

• Colonisation and ecological destruction are a single process. The plantation is the model for the modern relationship with nature.
• Mainstream environmentalism’s silence about race, slavery and empire is built into its structure. It is a “fracture”, not an oversight.
• The knowledge and practices of colonised peoples are sources of ecological alternatives. They are not obstacles to development.
• Conservation, development and climate policy that are not decolonial carry colonial relations forward.
• An adequate response means transforming the economic and political order colonialism built, including property, borders and the global division of labour.

Policy implications

Decolonial ecologists call for reparations and repayment of ecological debt, the return of land and of territorial control, and an end to removing people for conservation. They want climate finance treated as justice and not as aid, support for agroecology and for the territories of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, and the dismantling of economies built on extraction. Colonised peoples should be represented in environmental decisions at every level.

Internal disagreements

Decolonial, postcolonial and Marxist thinkers disagree about whether capitalism or coloniality comes first. They disagree about the nation-state, which decolonial thinkers distrust but postcolonial states rely on, and about the usefulness of international law. A further question is how to turn criticism into practice inside institutions.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics argue that decolonial ecology diagnoses well but offers little policy. They say it can treat colonialism as the explanation for everything, that its rejection of modernity leaves it little to build with, and that it romanticises the colonised. Some Indigenous scholars object to being folded into a general “decolonial” category.

Supporters answer that the environmental movement’s own history bears the critique out, from wilderness parks that excluded local people to carbon offsets on Indigenous land.

Relationships to other traditions

Decolonial ecology is the theoretical centre of the family of Indigenous, postcolonial and global South traditions. It draws on political ecology and the environmentalism of the poor, and supports Indigenous environmental sovereignty, land back and the fight against extraction. It shares the distributive commitments of environmental justice, climate justice and the idea of ecological debt, and meets Buen Vivir and ecofeminism on common ground. It opposes fortress conservation, planetary stewardship imposed from above, and any environmentalism that treats the colonial past as closed.