Climate Imperialism: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, and Global Climate Change (original) (raw)

Unraveling the colonialities of climate change and action

Journal of Political Ecology, 2024

In this introduction to the special section on the Colonialities of climate change and action we provide a conceptual mapping that can help us engage critically with existing approaches to thinking and acting in the context of climate change. We carry out this exercise inspired by Latin American decolonial and political ecology scholarship, as well as by Farhana Sultana's notion of climate coloniality. In an effort to pluralize our understanding of climate coloniality, the articles we present in the special section reflect the diversity and interconnectedness of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and activists' traditions on several continents. Beyond these contributions, we make a call to further pluralize our understanding of the colonialities of climate change and action, taking into consideration different intellectual strands of postcolonial thought, subaltern studies, and decolonization, including those that engage critically with them.

Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science

WIREs Climate Change, 2023

Historical studies of the influence of imperialism and colonialism on climate science have yet to be brought together into a critical synthesis. This advanced review offers a critical overview of the key themes of this literature with the primary intention of enabling historians and other scholars to recognize, specify, and acknowledge the roles of imperial and colonial processes in shaping scientific framings of climate. Following a brief overview of debates in older literature over the significance of imperialism and colonialism in climate sciences, the article investigates the wealth of recent scholarship that demonstrates specific and diverse connections between empires and climate science. Major features of this scholarship include: the role and the erasure of Indigenous and local knowledge; imperial climate infrastructures and visions; and climate data and theories in land empires as well as in informal empires and neocolonial settings. Through critically engaging these themes, the article seeks to help historians identify avenues for future research.

Climate Change as Ecological Colonialism: Dilemma of Innocent Victims

Climate Change is at just the once a social, cultural and an ecological issue. It is an environmental justice issue, an issue of economic and political domination, a consequence of clash between deregulated capitalism and the welfare of mankind deeply entrenched in a capitalist economic system based upon the persistent exploitation of natural resource for individual benefits. Poverty stricken peoples of least developed countries are the innocent victims of climate change. This article argues and identifies key ways that anthropological knowledge/lens can enrich and deepen contemporary understandings of climate change. From discussions allied to natural resource management practices it is construed that natural resource management practices are impacted from factors –political, economic (capitalism), domination, cultural, community and societal activities which are anthropocentric factors responsible for climate change calling for the equity and justice implications of climate change issues. As climate change is ecological colonialism at its fullest development—its critical scale—with sweeping social, cultural, economic and political implications, anthropological lens seek to respond to climate change at the local, regional, national, and global scales and are helpful in reflecting the understandings in application and seeking ways to pool resource with communities to assist them in addressing their climate change concerns. There are some other key contributions that anthropology can bring to understandings of climate change viz. awareness of cultural values and political relations that shape the production and interpretation of climate change knowledge, survival, power, ethics, morals, environmental costs and justice, militarism, war, intertwined crises of food, water, biodiversity loss and livelihood.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality

Political Geography, 2022

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

Imperialism, With and Without Cheap Nature: Climate Crises, World Wars & the Ecology of Liberation

Working Papers in World-Ecology, 2022

The World-Ecology Research Group is a collaboration of scholars at Binghamton University. We are committed to the liberation of knowledge from bourgeois hegemony. The world-ecology conversation pursues syntheses of power, profit and life in world history-including the history of the present crisis. This implies, and necessitates, a reimagination of revolutionary possibilities in the era of climate crisis. In these syntheses, questions of domination, exploitation, and accumulation are situated in and through their mutually constitutive relations with and within webs of life. We publish research-in-progress that speaks to capitalism's antagonistic relations of power, profit and life, historically and in the present crisis. We welcome contributions that engage a broadly defined world-ecology conversation, including generative disagreements. These include concept notes, theoretical reflections, and empirically-grounded assessments of capitalist development and crisis, past and present.

How Has Ecological Imperialism Persisted? A Marxian Critique of the Western Climate Consensus

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2022

Ecological imperialism refers to the historical and contemporary exercise of power by the North over the South that leads to ecologically destructive consequences of which the South is usually the victim. Using this power, wealthy countries in the Global North are capable of steering mainstream discourse on global environmental issues in directions that benefit and privilege themselves at the expense of the Global South. Analysis should thus be applied not only to ecological imperialism in the pure economic sense, but also to the uneven power relations in the political and ideological arena that serve to reproduce ecological imperialism in an overarching sense. This article, inspired by the concept of ecological imperialism developed in the Marxian tradition, explores how researchers and global institutions in the Global North frame the narratives of climate change culpability through selective presentation of emission statistics that tends to minimize the accountability of the North while inflating that of the Global South. Such narratives also contain the Malthusian perception that economic development and population growth in the Global South, above all, should be taken as major threats to climate change solutions. This type of reasoning again serves to justify and maintain the current hierarchical global system and reinforce ecological imperialism.

Redressing Historical Responsibility for the Unjust Precarities of Climate Change in the Present

Redressing Historical Responsibility for the Unjust Precarities of Climate Change in the Present, 2020

In this chapter we show that industrialized states of the Global North are responsible for harms arising from the unreasonable emission of greenhouse gases throughout history and this gives rise to obligations for redress in the present. Their emissions well before and after states adopted the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have existential consequences for states in the Global South, for oppressed peoples in settler colonial states, for the environment, and for humankind. Industrialized states appropriated atmospheric space beyond their fair share. They benefitted from these harmful acts unjustly to the detriment of others. Moreover, their fossil fuel-driven pursuit of colonial industry, and continuing dominance in the finance and trade regimes, have left marginalized peoples and states with limited avenues to pursue sustainable modes of production and consumption that would foster their wellbeing. These practices, and more, effect racial and regional subjugation, at once and indivisibly, through the global political economy and the climate system, and they demand repair. The “no harm” rule in international law grounds state responsibility for such historical emissions. The responsibility of industrialized states of the Global North is enlivened by their failure to exercise due diligence to prevent significant harm to other states and the global environment. As a result, these states must stop their harmful acts, ensure they do not repeat them, and pay compensation. Although international law provides one avenue of recourse for addressing historical responsibility under the no harm rule, it cannot properly address all past and ongoing harms caused by historical emissions. This chapter therefore situates a doctrinal analysis within broader debates in international law about reparations for historical injustices. After applying the no harm rule to questions of historical responsibility for climate change, we draw on critical traditions, including critical race theories and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), to undertake an immanent critique of the internal contradictions within international legal doctrines that impede full repair for historical injustices. International law has mechanisms that prevent repair for historical injustices owing to the power that states, corporations and institutions of the Global North have to define the law. Further, even successful legal proceedings might not transform structural injustices that are tied up with historical emissions and which climate change reinforces. Therefore we argue that customary international law must be supplemented by a new legal frame that advances climate justice by decolonizing international law through “reparations”.

Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leaders are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. As a Potawatomi scholar-activist working on issues Indigenous people face with the U.S. settler state, I perceive at least three key themes reflected across the field that suggest distinct approaches to inquiries into climate change: 1. Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism. 2. Renewing Indigenous knowledges, such as traditional ecological knowledge, can bring together Indigenous communities to strengthen their own self-determined planning for climate change. 3. Indigenous peoples often imagine climate change futures from their perspectives (a) as societies with deep collective histories of having to be well-organized to adapt environmental change and (b) as societies who must reckon with the disruptions of historic and ongoing practices of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. In engaging these themes, I will claim, at the end, that Indigenous studies offer critical, decolonizing approaches to how to address climate change. The approaches arise from how our ways of imagining the future guide our present actions. The article is forthcoming in English Language Notes.

Trickster carbon: stories, science, and postcolonial interventions for climate justice

Journal of Political Ecology, 2017

This article proposes the idea of the trickster figure as a way to account for the shifting material, and cultural properties of carbon in the cultural politics of climate change. Combining scientific understandings of allotropy in chemistry – describing the property of certain elements to manifest in various highly diverse forms – and the insights of Caribbean trickster stories, trickster carbon enables novel understandings of the multiple workings and effects of carbon as a material and cultural element. Rather than granting 'carbon' a singular seemingly-scientific meaning or reducing carbon to a singular problem that master human agents can ever definitively trap or sequester, this notion allows us to view carbon's unique ability to shape-shift in a variety of contexts and for myriad agendas. Understanding carbon in this way provides more than simply a theoretical or imaginative 'romp'; rather, this lens enables both a critique of the ways in which carbon is m...