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Race and climate change: Towards anti-racist ecologies
Abstract
Global South scholars have long documented and theorised their communities’ struggles against the ecological degradation, toxic contamination, and climate change–related extreme weather events which result from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Building on that existing work, contributors to this collection extend and deepen understandings of the material entanglements of race and ecology in our contemporary conjuncture. Speaking from various scales and locations, including the Caribbean, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Palestine, the authors reflect on those sites while also collectively recovering and amplifying lineages of thought on ecology from across the South. As the contributions collected here show, the traps set by global structures of race also direct mainstream climate solutions back towards the expropriation, premature death, or prevention of birth of peoples of colour by various means, from militarised conservation to eugenic populationism. Confronting the racial logics of both ecological harm and its supposed solutions is therefore a key task of this collection. As a collective, however, the issue’s contributors also carve out paths to reparation and structural change which form the contours of an anti-racist ecology for our times.
... Instead, Weiss (2016) argues it is engaged in political theatrics, causing tension between the North and South and barriers to reforms. Tilley et al. (2023) further critique the UN, highlighting that in all its climate change policies, it still fails to recognise environmentally displaced people (or climate refugees); questioning its (wealthy) member state's priority for border security (Long, 2024). ...
... Instead of reforming corporate behaviour, CSR has evolved to become an avenue for the Global North or capitalist society to make money. For example, market-driven offsetting GHG emissions (Tilley et al., 2023) and returns on "green" assets, see climate change a "profitable opportunity, revealing a pattern of capitalist dominance" (Long, 2024, p. 5). Until global and national governance systems do something to enforce accountability for CSR, voluntary efforts will remain an ineffective mode of imposing accountability on corporates for their contribution to climate change (see Vallentin, 2012). ...
... A sign of ineffective accountability that aims to use supply-side systems to capitalise on less developed nations through control and power over resources (Alawattage and Azure, 2021). If Australia were to truly be accountable for climate justice, it would recognise the racism in its nationalist immigration policies and open the border for climate refugees or environmental/climate-induced migration (see Long, 2024;Perkiss and Moerman, 2018;Tilley et al., 2023). ...
Purpose
Severe inequality from climate change exists between the Global North and Global South. The North significantly contributes to climate change yet retreats to protect itself against its harmful impacts. Conversely, members of the Global South bear the brunt of the climate crisis with limited protection against its destructive effects. Climate justice aims to address this inequality. This paper explores the effects of climate change reforms and policies that have been established to foster accountability and climate justice.
Design/methodology/approach
This research follows a qualitative exploratory case study method. It draws on a supply- and demand-led approach and local accounts to analyse the (in)effectiveness with which six national and international reforms and policies have achieved accountability for climate justice. The research analysed a variety of empirical documents including contemporary research, reports, academic literature, non-government and government documents and policies, media releases and Pacific Islander accounts.
Findings
Climate change reforms and policies, which come together to form supply-side accountability, have largely failed to engender accountability in the Global North for the impacts of climate change. Nor have they mitigated climate change to any tangible extent at all. This has created a system of modern-day climate apartheid. Improving accountability and remediating climate injustices going forward will require a focus on demand-led instruments and accountability, which includes the voice of citizens.
Originality/value
This paper responds to AAAJ’s special issue call for examining accounting and accountability with regard to environmental and climate racism. Limited research to date explores the issue of climate apartheid and climate justice and its relationship with accountability. This research attempts to fill that gap.
... Even as anthropogenic climate change increasingly manifests as devastating weather and more insidious gradual changes to socioecological systems (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2022), powerful actors and wider society wedded to the current political-economic assemblage resist the need for transformational change (Stoddard et al. 2021). Indigenous and other subaltern groups have led the centuries-long confrontation against the logics, imperatives, and extractivist ideologies that undergird settler colonialism and capitalism, which created and continue to fuel climate injustices (Simpson 2017, Estes 2019, Ajl 2021, Tilley et al. 2023, Sakshi 2024. Others might not have as much at stake but seek 'climate justice' through advocacy. ...
As climate action remains insufficient, societal actors are demanding climate justice. Self-defined climate advocates working within non-governmental and not-for-profit organisations – collectively known as third sector organisations (TSO) – are one set of such actors working towards their subjective vision of climate justice in Australia. I critically examine Australian TSO actors’ theories of change for climate justice. Although diverse, I identify a spectrum of climate justice visions from social solidarity with Indigenous Peoples to, although less prevalent, eco-centric, bordering on anti-human. Most TSO actors’ theories of change were underpinned by assumptions about the effectiveness of incremental change without necessarily challenging the existing power structures premised, as they are in Australia, on colonial capitalism. Some diagnosed barriers to change but struggled to articulate a theory of change to transcend them. When giving up is not an option, critical reflection on the root causes of climate injustice and barriers to change is necessary.
... The creation of the world market solidified this epistemic rift into enduring structures which continue to organize the actual physical matter of economy and ecology. In brief, the construction of "race" as a rift in the human structured the original metabolic rift in world ecology (Ferdinand 2022;Tilley et al. 2023). ...
Available OA here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2024.2400352#d1e101
The question of materialism – what it is, how it is studied and practised, and who takes it seriously enough – has long animated debates among Marxists and scholars of race and the colonial question. Today, our contemporary socioecological crises challenge established understandings of materialism and merit a return to these debates with the goal of collective liberation on a warming planet in mind. Taking up this task, this article builds an understanding of materialism as theory and practice working towards liberation – a theory and practice shaped variously by culture, ontology, and the experience of oppressive structural conditions. The contributions of scholarship focused on race and colonial projects and legacies particularly illuminate these multiple dimensions of materialism. Among a wealth of other insights, anticolonial Third Worldist thinkers left us with an astute diagnosis of value in the world system; Black radical scholars have revealed the ontological roots of material struggles; decolonial scholars have exposed the solidification of racial classification systems as structures; and Indigenous (Fourth World) ontologies continue to maintain a commitment to metabolic repair and reciprocity. While contemporary ecology-focused conceptual innovations – such as metabolic rift and material throughput – expand materialist analyses, approaches focused on race and the colonial question bring particular insight to the global structural elements of socioecological crises and generate a materialism oriented towards horizons of liberation for all.
... The education community also struggles to protect the environment from harm, toxic contamination, imperialism, race, and capitalism (Tilley et al. 2023). Everyone who works or learns in the education area needs to be protected physically and mentally. ...
Human rights in education are an essential area that needs to be the highest priority for improving almost the entire world, especially for the 2030 agenda. This research analyzed the human rights in education values inside the UN Economic and Social Council’s declaration goal 4 of the official document entitled “Building back better from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) while advancing the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. The data are analyzed through a critical discourse approach in qualitative design and discourse organization analysis method. There are nine main human rights in education found inside the declaration including ensuring and protecting education equality, education, and learning development acceleration, preparing and providing sufficient education funding, cultural diversity in education, providing a safe environment for physical and mental health, providing safe, modern and convenient infrastructure and teaching-learning facilities, gender equality in education, internet literacy in education, involving every country as to the world’s global meeting and cooperation of education. The focus of improvement on human rights in education is concluded to be dynamic, which is influenced by economic, welfare, politics, IT, and other integral aspects of development and depends on the world’s and a country’s needs and future desire.
... These inequalities are part of wider global intersectional power structures that assign different value to human life as well as nature. They relate to the moral dimension of the politics of belonging which has come to be known as "climate justice" (Gonzalez, 2020;Sultana, 2022;Tilley et al., 2022). ...
This article explores the relationships between political projects of belonging and approaches to environmental and climate ecological crises via comparing centre-right and centre-left newspapers in the UK, Israel and Hungary. Our theoretical framework draws on Nira Yuval-Davis's work on the politics of belonging as a way of understanding and framing the different political projects that accompany reporting on ecological issues. Focusing on selected national and international case studies on these issues at the centre of public debate during the last two decades, the paper explores and compares these relationships by examining the eco-relational, spatial, temporal and normative framing dimensions of the political projects of belonging as expressed in these articles. The findings of the analysis show that, despite different cultural and historical contexts, the most significant dividing line is not among countries but between the different political projects of belonging of the newspapers. This can be seen even when dealing with country-specific, rather than international, case studies. Overall, centre-right newspapers tend to focus on narrow nationalist interests concerning the climate crisis and do not produce discourses of urgency to resolve the crisis except when reporting on major international political agendas. They are also more inclined to focus on the economic aspects of such efforts and how they would affect the “people”. The centre-left press, on the other hand, tends to prioritise ecological issues much more; it has wider global and planetary interdependent constructions of belonging and engages in the production of discourses of urgency in an attempt to solve the crisis and avoid future catastrophes. However, even in the centre-left press, especially in the UK, a tendency to remain within a western-centric perspective was observed.
... Scholars from a range of disciplines, from history to sociology, geography, or legal studies to philosophy, have adopted versions of the concept (Bhattacharyya, 2018;Gilmore, 2022;Go, 2021;Hudson, 2017;Leroy and Jenkins, 2021;Omstedt, 2021;Virdee, 2019;Pulido, 2017). Importantly, the concept and methodology has been fruitfully deployed within environmental studies (Onís, 2021;Perry, 2021a;Pulido, 2017;Sealey-Huggins, 2021;Tilley et al., 2022). The reasons for this reappreciation are manifold, but relate to both the explanatory power of racial capitalism, as well as to the limitations of analyses which neglect to consider the structuring role of 'race' in underpinning capitalist social relations. ...
European colonialism in the Pacific brought racial taxonomies and hierarchies to the shores of West Papua and the wider Melanesian region. Since this formal colonial era, the peoples of West Papua have been subject to shifting discourses and structures of racism under both Dutch and Indonesian rule, and in relation to the influence of extractive international capital. This article first traces the economic function of racism in the West Papuan context and documents how racist discourses have worked in the service of the material expropriation of Papuan value. The analysis then covers how racist modes of extraction, in turn, have served to open up gold and copper mining frontiers, followed closely by plantation frontiers – expanding the extractive industries which destroy and contaminate Papuan socioecologies. The article documents the creation of these sacrificial socioecologies, manifest in the deadly impact of mines and plantations. The effects of these extractive formations range from mass displacement and vast areas of biodiversity loss caused by tailings waste, to deforestation and further ecosystem degradation caused by plantation expansion. The central argument here is that racism works in a highly potent way to cheapen lives and nature, to expand the frontiers of capitalist value extraction, and to ruin socioecological life in the West Papua context.
Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.
Geographers have been engaging with landscape since the beginning of the modern discipline of geography. A series of concurrent turns have taken place in human geography in recent years that are influencing the ways in which geographers approach landscape. We take forward new material, decolonial, and creative shifts in the discipline to reimagine landscape. Landscape is a geographical concept that has historically excluded a range of other voices and perspectives. To build a radically inclusive agenda for landscape research in geography, we put forward a generative conceptualisation of landscape that brings together (i) materiality; (ii) decoloniality; and (iii) creativity.
In climate politics, understanding and contesting the meaning of vulnerability has proved extremely difficult. On the one hand, it is an increasingly formalised term that means something very specific scientifically and methodologically within the climate change institutions. On the other hand, vulnerability is part of a colonial discursive framework of risk. In this article, I show how contestations into the scientific project have not sufficiently worked to address the colonial geographic imaginaries that underlie the discursive framework of vulnerability. I suggest that bringing together the work of critical adaptation studies (CAS) with critical feminist and decolonial scholarship, such as the counternarratives of the Pacific,offers a way to resist the victimising politics of disposability and also rethink vulnerability as a concept of resistance, relationality and reflexivity.
Based on an analysis of 22 European far-right parties, we identify an emergent discourse in environmental politics, which we conceptualise as ‘ecobordering’. This discourse seeks to blame immigration for national environmental degradation, which draws on colonial and racialised imaginaries of nature in order to rationalise further border restrictions and ‘protect’ the ‘nativist stewardship’ of national nature. As such, ecobordering seeks to obscure the primary driving causes of the ecological crisis in the entrenched production and consumption practices of Global North economies, whilst simultaneously shifting blame on to migration from the Global South where ecological degradation has been most profound. In an era of increasing climate migration, ecobordering thereby portrays effects as causes and further normalises racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe.
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.
FULL TEXT PDF: https://www.farhanasultana.com
Against the background of climate scepticism and raging anti-immigrant sentiments across Europe, the politics of climate change and the politics of migration are fraught with tension. The two converge over discussions about ‘climate refugees’. But what merit does the term ‘climate refugee’ have, and are there potential problems associated with it? This article pays attention to how racialised discourses underwrite the concept of climate refugees in ways that further exclude already marginalised populations. In place of ‘climate refugees’, it proposes ‘ecological displacement’ as a notion which stresses how and why people are displaced within or across borders. While, indeed, anthropogenic climate change is a real threat to the livelihoods of humans (among other species), it is not the only environmental driver of displacement. By using the term ‘ecology’, this article argues that we allow for a description which encompasses other potential displacement drivers beyond climate change, such as volcanic eruptions, landslides, and political violence. Citing ‘displacement’ makes the term available to populations who are displaced by damaged ecologies both within and across borders, in and outside of Europe. The notion of ‘ecological displacement’ and ‘ecologically displaced people’ tries to rehumanise those carrying the heaviest social and climate burdens on a burning planet.
*Available open access at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02633957221075323
In this article we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice. We urge instead for an honest reckoning with the root problem of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the system of global extraction which enacts environmental harm and reproductive injustice. Finally, we call for an anti-imperialist eco-socialist move towards equal exchange on a world scale to end the flow of undervalued resources from the South and to limit the contaminating activities these enable. We also stress that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the overt eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years.
Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary,market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.
This paper interrogates the extent to which imaginaries of climate and ecological breakdown attend to the memories, knowledges, and experiences of communities already impacted by histories of racism, colonialism, and poverty. Drawing on insights from Black studies and decolonial thinking, the article reflects on how the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change can be mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and social dispossession. Specific emphasis is given to Rio de Janeiro, notably its port area, a geographical space where future-oriented narratives remain oblivious to the city’s history of anti-Black violence and Indigenous genocide. In parallel, the paper looks at the recently built Museum of Tomorrow and its public representations of the Anthropocene. Overall, the article contends that pluralising accounts of the Anthropocene might offer alternative epistemic entry points for understanding and interrupting the mounting ecological catastrophe.
While the uneven causes and impacts of climate change are widely known, it is also becoming evident that many elements of the response to the climate crisis are also reinforcing discrimination, segregation, and displacement among marginalized peoples. This is entrenching a system of climate apartheid, one that is evidenced by uneven vulnerabilities to the climate crisis, as well as inequitable implementation of climate-oriented infrastructures, policies, and programs. These efforts often secure privileged populations while harming, excluding, and criminalizing populations whose lives have been made precarious by climate change. Like previous incarnations of state-sponsored “separateness,” climate apartheid is rooted in processes of colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy that render some populations expendable. In this paper, we show how these interlocking historical structures of oppression facilitate a response to climate change that is systematically promoting spatial, socio-economic, and ecological segregation in many mainstream attempts to safeguard economic and socio-political structures amidst global ecological catastrophe. We then offer frameworks and interventions intended to introduce meaningful pathways forward for climate justice that seek to render all life indispensable.
This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’ Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.
This article examines the relationship among climate change, racial subordination, and the capitalist world economy through the framework of racial capitalism. It argues that climate change is a logical consequence of an economic system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy. Climate change imposes disproportionate burdens on racialized communities all over the world, many of whom will be expelled from their homes in record numbers as the climate emergency intensifies. International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism, and is now being deployed to address climate change-induced displacement. This article evaluates the emerging legal and policy responses to climate displacement, and proposes alternative approaches based on the perspectives of states and peoples facing imminent displacement, including their demand for self-determination. Climate change is not an isolated crisis, but a symptom of an economic (dis)order that jeopardizes the future of life on this planet. Through a race-conscious analysis of climate change grounded in political economy, this article seeks to engage scholars in a variety of disciplines in order to develop more robust critiques of the laws, institutions, and ideologies that maintain racial capitalism and pose an existential threat to humanity.
South Africa now has the unfortunate reputation as one of the more hostile destinations in the world for African migrants. The violence that took place in 2008 and 2015, as well as the hate crimes that occur with everyday regularity, present a pressing human rights concern. This violence and hate crimes were previously considered as mere sentiments of hatred or negative attitudes towards foreigners. This research provides a different way of understanding xenophobia. It suggests that xenophobia can best be understood as series of
crimes against foreign nationals - which are violent in nature leading to physical beating, killing and the looting of goods as well as destroy of property owned by foreign nationals. As with anyone, foreigner nationals living in South Africa should have unhindered access to the socio-economic and cultural facilities available in the communities in which they live. This would make them feel part of the community.
Keywords: Xenophobia, Human Security, Safety and Security, and foreign nationals.
[The article is available to download free with Open Access here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2017.136801]
Treating the threat of climate change in the Caribbean as a case study instructive for responses globally, this article examines the social and political relations of climate change. It argues for an analysis taking into account the ways in which the histories of imperialism and colonialism have shaped contemporary global ‘development’ pathways. The article charts how Caribbean vulnerability to temperature rises of more than 1.5°C of warming comprise an existential threat structured by contemporary social relations that are imperialist in character. Hope can be taken from a politics of climate justice which acknowledges the climate debts owed to the region.
[The article is available to download free with Open Access here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2017.136801]
[A more updated version of this paper is also in researchgate with a PDF] 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.
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The global development project faces newly evident challenges in the combination of energy, climate and food crises. Their interrelationships create a powerful moment in world history in which analysts and practitioners grope for solutions, limited by the narrow market episteme. This contribution argues that official development, in advocating green market solutions, recycles the problem as solution—a problem rooted in the geopolitics of an unsustainable global ‘metabolic rift’ and a discourse of global ecology reinforcing international power relations through monetary valuation, and deepening the North's ‘ecological debt’.
This article suggests that one way of leaving behind the gravitational pull of essential and hierarchical conceptualizations of race is to follow climate science in digging deeper into the prehistory of human evolution and physiological differentiation. We begin by outlining the value of Paul Gilroy’s (2000) post-racial imaginary, set out in Between Camps, as one that is future-oriented: a post-race that relies upon an after-race escape from biologism while assuming a given Homo sapien oneness. In distinction, our post-racial analytic is a move towards a deep time of ‘pre-race’ from which any subsequent human unity is conceived as precarious, contingent and achieved. This post-racial pre-race deploys the combined provocations of anti-racist scholarship, climate science and paleoanthropology to empty race of its violent hierarchies by going deeper into, rather than away from, biology and its attendant vital relations.
If the predictions are correct, climate change will force millions of people from their homes, threatening a future of humanitarian crises, political violence, and strife. In The Other of Climate Change, Andrew Baldwin intervenes in the international political debate about climate change and human migration to tell a different story. He argues that international attempts to govern those who stand to be displaced by climate change are as much or more to do with resuscitating European humanism at a moment in which geophysical phenomena like climate change and the Anthropocene threaten to extinguish the human altogether. Through detailed interpretations of the figure of the climate migrant/refugee, Baldwin traces the contours of an emerging form of planetary racial rule – racial futurism - unfolding in the context of the climate change crisis. He shows how racial futurism takes shape as a political response to the crisis of humanism that is said to lay at the heart of the climate change crisis. Along the way, he examines numerous themes that are at the forefront of contemporary thinking about climate change and politics, including the political, humanism, sovereignty, neoliberalism, the international, and race. Ultimately, the book is a plea for scholars, activists, and policymakers to take seriously the way race and racism are bound up with the political discourse on climate change and migration and to ask what this means for the wider political debate about climate change and the future.
In the years following the physical end to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the island was beset with a series of infrastructure projects. One of these was the ‘Port City’, a project funded by the Government of China. The project has raised significant environmental concerns, from the detrimental impact of rock extraction on biodiversity and marine life, to the effect on the livelihoods of the fishing community due to the depletion of fish as a result of the mining of sand from the sea bottom. Visibly present in the protest action against this are religious actors, especially habited Roman Catholic nuns. This article, as part of an ongoing project that looks at environmentalism in faith-based communities, examines the impetus that drives such visibly religious persons to take part in direct action. The article does this to note how theologies that are ‘on and of the ground’, that is anti-colonial theological framings are central to the political theologies driving concerns regarding environmental justice. In doing this, the article is also arguing for a more central place for International Relations and Politics to be studying and engaging with anti-colonial theological voices, what I call theologies of ‘rage’.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Israeli green colonialism, denoting the apartheid state’s misappropriation of environmentalism to eliminate the Indigenous people of Palestine and usurp its resources. I focus on the violence of ‘protected areas’, encompassing national parks, forests, and nature reserves. This article argues that Israel primarily establishes them to (1) justify land grab; (2) prevent the return of Palestinian refugees; (3) dehistoricise, Judaise, and Europeanise Palestine, erasing Palestinian identity and suppressing resistance to Israeli oppression; and (4) greenwash its apartheid image. I situate Israeli green colonialism within the broader histories of Western environmentalism – particularly its perpetuation of the human–nature binary – and Zionism. Furthermore, I identify various means through which Palestinians and their land resist this phenomenon. I also explore Palestinian environmentalism, which is influenced by the concepts of a’wna (collaboration), sumud (steadfastness), and a’wda (return), in addition to the Islamic concept of tawhid (unity). I offer it as an alternative environmentalism, which is holistic, anti-racist, feminist, socialist, and nonlinear, while rejecting the trope of the ecological savage. Overall, the intrinsic link between all humans, and them and the environment must be recognised, to realise a just and sustainable society, in Palestine and beyond.
What is the relevance of the concept of wilderness today? For some, the recognition of a troubled history of wilderness regarding people of color does not challenge its pertinence in facing the ecological crisis. However, the author contends that the wilderness concept is problematic because of its inability to recognize other conceptualizations of the Earth held by Indigenous and Black peoples in the Americas and the Caribbean. As a case in point, the author critically engages with a failed attempt to accommodate Black enslaved experiences into a wilderness perspective made by Andreas Malm in a 2018 paper titled “In Wildness Lies the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature.” Paradoxically, in suggesting that fugitive slaves’ experiences of “wild” spaces can point to a Marxist theory of wilderness, Malm ignores the concerns of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, including their theorizing voices, their ecology, and their demands for justice. Wilderness is portrayed as emancipatory on the condition that the enslaved and the colonized remain silenced. In response, the author argues that it was not “wilderness” but the ingenious relationships Maroons nurtured with these woods that created the possibility of a world: in marronage lies the search of a world.
Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local.
Caribbean populations face increased displacement, dispossession and debt burdens due to shocks related to climate change. As the major neighbouring power that is the most significant historical contributor to global warming, the United States has persistently deflected from this responsibility. Instead, its climate plans are weaponized to target potential climate refugees who constitute a ‘national security threat’ and are faced with risks of premature death. These policies also aim to create green capitalist peripheries following racial capitalist logics. The paper contends that US climate interventions and policies increase the likelihood of Black dispossession within Caribbean societies. These policies commit to supporting so-called ‘left-behind’ white communities in need of a ‘just transition’, while Caribbean racialized subjects are not as equally deserving. To explain this, the paper examines major climate policies, in particular the recent Congressional Climate Action Plan of the US House of Representatives and President Biden’s climate proposals. It juxtaposes policy claims against political actions and racial capitalist historiography of the United States, especially its past treatment of climate refugees from the Caribbean. This analysis shows the persistent ways in which US climate policies advance organized abandonment and a neocolonial relationship predicated on an unjust system of racial capitalism.
Not so long ago, many spoke of a ‘post-racial’ era, claiming that advances made by people of colour showed that racial divisions were becoming a thing of the past. But the hollowness of such claims has been exposed by the rise of Trump and Brexit, both of which have revealed deep seated white resentment, and have been attended by a resurgence in hate crime and overt racial hatred on both sides of the Atlantic.
At a time when progress towards equality is not only stalling, but being actively reversed, how should anti-racist scholars respond? This collection carries on James Baldwin’s legacy of bearing witness to racial violence in its many forms. Its authors address how we got to this particular moment, arguing that it can only be truly understood by placing it within the wider historical and structural contexts that normalise racism and white supremacy. Its chapters engage with a wide range of contemporary issues and debates, from the whiteness of the recent women’s marches, to anti-racist education, to the question of Black resistance and intersectionality. Mapping out the problems we face, and the solutions we need, the book considers how anti-racist scholarship and activism can overcome the setbacks posed by the resurgence of white supremacy.
[Available open access here: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/103485/]
In this Afterword, I reflect on the themes of race and coloniality in political ecology highlighted by this Symposium. I draw upon and place in conversation scholarly work on Latin America to demonstrate how, notwithstanding disparate social‐historical contexts, Indigenous and Black communities encounter strikingly similar struggles for land and territorial control across the Americas. I build my comments from a fusion of postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist thinking to bolster the importance of intimate and inseparable entanglements between people’s lands and their bodies within political ecological analyses. In the following, I shape this commentary into three co‐constitutive discussions: first, that political ecologies of race are hemispheric; second, that race and coloniality condition the lives of Indigenous and Black peoples relationally in the Americas; and third, that these multiple and mutually constituted ideologies, namely intersectional forms of power, shaping land and land control are profoundly material and embodied.
This article explores the relationships among place, knowing, and being in environmental histories. Grounding ourselves in the work of Indigenous scholars from North America and the Pacific, we propose a method of listening and attuning that can attend to the dislocation and abstraction often found in work addressing ecocide and environmental violence. Against the ubiquity of the case‐study approach, we propose a method we call “kin study,” which invites more embedded, expansive, material, and respectful relations to people and lands. This article frames the issues and then proposes, though a dialogue, how kin studies may be constituted and applied in studying environmental histories of the Pacific and Western Canada.
Recently, much scholarship has been dedicated to exploring China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A majority of this work has focused on global dimensions of the BRI, typically considering notions of a changing geopolitical landscape or South‐South Cooperation. However, these grand narratives often displace local realities, especially in the arenas of local political conflict and environmental degradation. Using examples from Sri Lanka, we question whether existing BRI narratives adequately and critically consider local politics of place and environmental degradation in a time of global climate change, two unstable fault lines which could hinder China's implementation of the BRI. In this short commentary, we employ the notion of the blank figure, which draws attention to both absences and presence of undetermined factors, that suggest existing narratives fail to adequately consider potential ruptures that may compound effects of mega‐infrastructure and associated environmental degradation. Given this, much more localised research concerning the BRI is needed.
Agricultural and reproductive technologies ostensibly represent opposing poles within discourses on population growth: one aims to ‘feed the world,’ while the other seeks to limit the number of mouths there are to feed. There is, however, an urgent need to critically interrogate new discourses linking population size with climate change and promoting agricultural and reproductive technologies as a means to address associated problems. This article analyses the specific discourses produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in relation to these ‘population technologies’ and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture in particular. Drawing on concepts and approaches developed by Black, postcolonial and Marxist feminists including intersectionality, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and reproductive and environmental justice, we explore how within these discourses, the ‘geo-populationism’ of the BMGF’s climate-smart agriculture initiatives, like the ‘demo-populationism’ of its family planning interventions, mobilises neoliberal notions of empowerment, productivity and innovation. Not only do these populationist discourses reinforce neoliberal framings and policies which extend existing regimes of racialised and gendered socio-spatial inequality, but they also underwrite global capital accumulation through new science and technologies. The BMGF’s representations of its climate-smart agriculture initiatives offer the opportunity to understand how threats of climate change are mobilised to reanimate and repackage the Malthusian disequilibrium between human fertility and agricultural productivity. Drawing upon our readings of these discourses, we critically propose the concept of ‘necro-populationism’ to refer to processes that target racialised and gendered populations for dispossession, toxification, slow death and embodied violence, even while direct accountability for the effects of these changes is dispersed. We also identify a need for further research which will not only trace the ways in which the BMGF’s global policies are materialised, spatialised, reproduced and reoriented by multiple actors in local contexts, but will also recognise and affirm the diverse forms through which these ‘necro-populationist’ processes are disavowed and resisted.
Despite recognition of the gender dimensions of climate change, there is little attention to racism in climate justice perspectives. In response, this article advocates developing an ecologically informed intersectional approach designed to disclose the ways racism contributes to the construction of illegible lives in the domain of climate policies and practices. Differential impacts of climate change, while an important dimension, is ultimately inadequate to understanding and responding to both climate justice and environmental racism. What is required is a rich understanding of the histories and lineages of the deep incorporation of racism and environmental exploitation. To catalyze such an approach to climate justice, this article develops an analysis of three instances of the intermingling of racism and environmental exploitation: climate adaptation practices in Lagos, Nigeria; the enmeshment of race and coal mining in the post–Civil War United States; and the infusing of precarity and rainforest destruction in Brazil.
This paper outlines continuity and change in official spatial practices in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by weaving together two narratives. The first is the story of the transformation of Sri Lanka’s first textile mill, also a crucible of working-class struggles and the Left movement, into the country’s largest luxury residential and commercial enclave. The second is an account of the struggle for housing and land rights of a community of former mill workers and their descendants. The paper highlights the importance of histories of particular places and communities in illuminating processes and politics of planned urban transformation. It underlines the importance of grasping the dynamics of official spatial practices through the lived experiences of those most exposed to these practices as opposed to understanding them through mainframes such as planning or aggregated citywide impacts. The paper concludes by critically positioning the current spatial practices of the Urban Development Authority in a post-war context and considering their political implications and the possibilities of framing resistance and alternatives.
In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that it has not succeeded in actually improving the environments of vulnerable communities. One reason for this is because we are not conceptualizing the problem correctly. I build my argument by first emphasizing the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pollution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If, in fact, environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism, then this suggests that activists and researchers should view the state as a site of contestation, rather than as an ally or neutral force.
The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not (only) with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do.
CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003) 257-337
Speech: Goldman environmental prize
- B Cáceres
Climate apartheid is the coming police violence crisis
- O O Táíwò
Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial? Verso
- F Verges