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COLONIZATION & CLIMATE CHANGE
Imtiaz A. Hussain
We cannot always blame 20th Century automobiles alone for the enormous ozone-
depleting climate-change crisis: true fossil-fuel has been damaging, leaving irreversible imprints.
Apparently so too has colonization, an issue of emerging interest given recent scholarship. Two
paradigms may be changing in that scholarship: shifting from being drowned by consequential
concerns to sifting possible causes; and peeping into the historical past for more causal factors
behind today’s climate-change crisis than the recent past. Today’s climate change crisis is
commonly traced to ozone depletion, ice-melting, ocean-level increments, and so forth, or such
visible agents as fossil-fuel usages, largely as a posteriori gestures, that is, after a disaster or two.
A deeper historical view exposing more subtle shifts should concern us no less.
Colonial studies have long been carried out, often involving a baggage of sorts:
colonizing powers giving more positively-inclined interpretations than those from the colonized
societies/peoples, particularly in projecting the economic consequences (of taking raw materials
and species while dumping manufactured products). In some of these, we often get unwitting
references to inflicted environmental damage, but rarely, if ever, pushed to the point of climate-
change concerns. Lauren Kent may be among those changing this sedate status quo. In an article
this month on CNN, he reported how the first climate-change threat in modern history may have
happened during the first 100-years of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonization of
the Americas. Christopher Columbus’s (Cristóbal Colón’s, in Spanish) 1492 landing has served
as a useful starting point of that process. But by 1610, Kent reported findings of a carbon dioxide
gap in the atmosphere, resulting in colder temperatures (“European colonizers killed so many
Native Americans that it changed the global climate, researchers say,” CNN, February 2, 2019).
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How did this happen? The researchers point to a University College, London estimate of
about 56 million natives being killed by the Europeans, in turn, jeopardizing agriculture: not only
did farmlands turn into forests, but forestry-growth actually consumed the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide. This “Little Ice Age” from the early 17th Century, as Mark Maslin from the research
group concludes, could only have happened “because of the genocide of millions of people,” the
“first major change,” he said, “in the Earth’s greenhouse gases.”
A similar pattern across Africa or Asia would have been demographically and
climatologically catastrophic. Still, the impact of environmental consciousness spawned by the
recent ozone depletion levels may have actually benefited future generations: non-fossil fuel (or
renewable) energy supplies have been incrementally innovated, tested, and in some cases
marketed, such as solar energy, electricity-driven cars, wind-power, and the like. In turn,
constraints of sorts have been impacted upon petroleum exporting countries. Notice how Saudi
Arabia’s so-called “reforms” were partly driven by the growing needs of a post-petroleum future,
which now seems more visible than even at the last turn of the century. Even the Venezuelan
political crisis may have a petroleum connection: diminishing returns (or profits) may have sped
up the scramble among politicians and the military leaders to hoard as much of public money as
they presently can. The situation is aggravated by the United States, one of its key oil-importers,
now turning heavily to domestically produced shale-oil, so much so in fact, that imports by the
world’s largest consumer may be plunging too rapidly for exporters to adjust.
Conflict itself has also been articulated as another colonial cause of the current
greenhouse crisis. If not actually killed by the Europeans, many groups of people (tribes, for
example) were so relocated within the colonized zone as to guarantee conflict with recipient
societies. Behind the relocation was the plan to identify borders more rationally amid the
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scramble across Africa of many European powers from the end of the 19th Century (and to a
lesser but equally intense scramble across the Middle East to take land from the Ottoman Turks).
No wonder the African map looks like a dressing-room’s locker-boxes, with boundaries more
horizontal and vertical than how human settlements jaggedly evolve: only the United States
looks more artificial in its boundaries between “states.” Cowboys and settlements took care of
the indigenous people in North America, but in Africa, multitudes of tribes were converted into
artificial countries, by and large, producing not just the several conflicts we see on television
today, but also four-centuries of them recorded in historical annals.
Ecological damage was huge, but so gradual in its formation that it remains largely
unknown against the automobile-driven impositions of recent times. That was not all: uprooted
people impose as much socio-economic borders as they do environmental, creating fragile
political systems, dependent economies, and an evaporating social fabric against the exact
opposite consequences inside former colonial powers. Thus today’s widening gaps did not
simply arise because of the plethora of dictators across Africa, Asia, and Latin America fattening
their bank accounts from the public coffers: they were themselves the product of colonial
practices and the ecological impacts these had.
Alex Randall of the U.K.-based Climate and Migration Coalition, whose research
informed the above argument, believes colonization and climate change constitute a “toxic
combination” (New Internationalist, August 18, 2016). We get exposed to how concurrent
migratory patterns may also be violence-laced, even more so, a sociological threat: not only will
scarce resources find more competitors with every migrant group from negatively impacted
“greenhouse threatened” zones, breeding increasing conflicts, but the inevitable growth of this
mobile population can only make more arable land increasingly arid. Dynamics such as these
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have escaped instant remedial action for too long as to eventually generate another early-21 st
Century “Little Ice Age,” only this time far larger than “little”: migrants have tended to swarm to
either relatively developed locations (such as cities, particularly for Syrians and Africans in
Europe), or those still in the developing locations (as with the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. They
have been fleeing either ecologically deprived zones, or, as with the Rohingyas, verdant areas
being readied for industrial or infrastructural usage. Future generations have a far more onerous
fate awaiting them than we in the 20th and 21st centuries.
One underlying reason why future burdens will not diminish may be because of the
cultural collapse. Defined as how an individual interacts with the environment, culture faces too
much flux today to permit stable human responses. This flux has brought many more
technological changes than can be adequately absorbed by society, with the static thereby
becoming more mobile, from technology to people, to industries and products, all the more so for
indigenous people. A study of Australia’s Arabana flock shows the crucial connection with
traditional land for such people: it is what bestowed them their tastes and temperament, actions
and thoughts; and therefore once removed from that land, they become alienated from both the
“historical context” and the “environmental management governance,” the latter belonging to an
environment they are not familiar with, but the former as if snatched away from them (Melissa
Nursey-Bray and Robert Palmer, “Country, climate change adaptation and colonization,”
Heliyan, vol. 4, no. 3, March 2018).
History not only speaks amid the multitude cries we currently face (from forest-fires to
coastal erosion, not to mention polar vortex and desertification), but also throws colonization in a
new twist, both reminding us (a) our actions several hundred years ago still have enormous
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impact on our ecology; and (b) our contrived solutions, like the Arabanian “environmental
management governance,” will themselves breed deeper future footprints.
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