A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand

environmentalist movements have missed possible alliances with anticolonial critiques of technology.

      Certainly, there were some bridges that were built in light of René Dumont’s commitments to the peasants of the Third World, Robert Jaulin and Serge Moscovici’s denunciations of the ethnocides of the Amerindians and their collaboration with the group “Survivre et vivre” [Survive and live], which led to a critique of the scientific imperialism that serves the West and the rare support of overseas citizens.²² Today, Serge Latouche is one of the few people in France who has placed the decolonial demand at the heart of ecological issues.²³ Despite these rare examples, colonized others have not had important speaking roles within the French environmentalist movement, cast away with “their” history to a distant beyond that is reinforced by the illusion of a North/South dichotomy. The result is a sympathy-without-connection [sympathie-sans-lien] where the concerns of others that are “over there” are recognized without acknowledging the material, economic, and political connections to the “here.” It is taken as self-evident that the history of environmental pollution and the environmentalist movements “in France” does not include its former colonies and overseas territories,²⁴ that the history of ecological thinking continues to be conceived of without any Black thinkers,²⁵ that the word “antiracism” is not part of the ecological vocabulary,²⁶ and, above all, that these absences do not pose any problems. With expressions such as “climate refugees” and “environmental migrants,” green activists appear to be discovering the migratory phenomenon in a panic, while they make a tabula rasa out of France’s historical colonial and postcolonial migrations from the Antilles, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. So, it remains a cognitive and political embarrassment to recognize that French overseas territories are home to 80 percent of France’s national biodiversity and 97 percent of its maritime exclusive economic zone, without addressing the fact that the inhabitants there are kept in poverty and on the margins of France’s political and imaginary representations.²⁷ Aside from such sympathies-without-connection, the encounter between environmentalist movements and thought of the Hexagone with the colonial history of France and its “other citizens” has not yet taken place.²⁸

As Kathryn Yusoff notes, this invisibilization results in a “White Anthropocene,” the geology of which erases the histories of non-Whites, and a Western imaginary of the “ecological crisis” that erases colonial experiences.²⁹ A colonial arrogance persists on the part of present-day “collapsologists” when they talks about a new collapse while concealing the connections that exist to modern colonization, slavery, and racism, the genocides of indigenous peoples, and the destruction of their environments.³⁰ In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond describes the postcolonial societies of Haiti and Rwanda through a condescending exoticism that places them in a distant off-world [hors-monde] and that does not include any scientists or thinkers from these countries.³¹ These people, who are “more African in appearance” according to Diamond, are reduced to the role of victims who lack knowledge.³² The colonial constitution of the world and the resulting inequalities are passed over in silence.³³ The Anthropocene’s claim to universality seems to be sufficient to dismiss critics of the West’s discriminatory universalism.³⁴ Could it really be that a global enterprise, which from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was predicated upon the exploitation of humans and non-humans, including the decimation of millions of indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, the forced transportation of millions of Africans, and centuries-long slavery, has no material or philosophical relationship with ecological thinking today? Are the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene new expressions of the “White man’s burden” to save “Humanity” from itself?³⁵ Fracture.

On the other side, the racialized and the subalterns who are met with repeated refusals of the world feel this double fracture every day in their flesh and in their stories. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “veil” expanded upon by Paul Gilroy’s “double consciousness of modernity,” Enrique Dussel’s “underside of modernity,” and the “White masks” on Fanon’s Black skin or Glen Coulthard’s Red skin are only different ways of describing this violence.³⁶ From 1492 to today, we must bear in mind the incommensurable resistance and struggles on the part of colonized and enslaved men and women in demanding humane treatment, to engage in a profession, to preserve their families, to participate in public life, to practice their arts, their languages, to pray to their gods, and to sit at the same world table. Yet those who carry the weight of the world see their struggles, like the Haitian Revolution, silenced.³⁷ In these pursuits of dignity – those that focus primarily on issues of identity, equality, sovereignty, and justice – environmental issues are perceived as an extension of colonial domination that fortifies the holds, exacerbates the suffering of racialized people, the poor, and women, and sustains colonial silence.

      A dangerous alternative emerges. Either this legitimate mistrust of environmentalism leads to the neglect of the dangers of environmental devastations of the Earth. Ecological struggles would then be a matter of “white utopia,” or at the very least unimportant when faced with the immense task of reclaiming dignity.³⁸ Or, paradoxically, in their laudable calls for ecological sensitivity, postcolonial thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will have discarded their critical theoretical tools and adopted the same environmentalist terms, scales, and historicities, such as, for example, “global subject,” “whole Earth,” and “humanity in general.”³⁹ The durability of the psychological, socio-political, and ecosystemic violence and toxicity of the “ruins of empires” is concealed.⁴⁰ Likewise, one underestimates the colonial ecology of racial ontologies that always links the racialized and the colonized to those psychic, physical, and socio-political spaces that are the world’s holds. This is true whether it is a matter of the spaces of legal and political non-representation (the enslaved), the spaces of non-being (the Negro), the spaces of the absence of logos, history, or culture (the savage), the spaces of the non-human (the animal), the spaces of the inhuman (the monster, the beast), the spaces of the non-living (camps and necropolises), or, if it is a matter of geographical locations (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Oceania), of habitat zones (ghettos, suburbs) or of ecosystems subject to capitalist production (slave ships, tropical plantations, factories, mines, prisons). In turn, the importance of ecological and non-human concerns within (post)colonial struggles for equality and dignity remain understated. Fracture.

Here is the double fracture. One either questions the environmental fracture on the condition that the silence of modernity’s colonial fracture, its misogynistic slavery, and its racisms are maintained, or one deconstructs the colonial fracture on the condition that its ecological issues are abandoned. Yet, by leaving aside the colonial question, ecologists and green activists overlook the fact that both historical colonization and contemporary structural racism are at the center of destructive ways of inhabiting the Earth. Leaving aside the environmental and animal questions, antiracist and postcolonial movements miss the forms of violence that exacerbate the domination of the enslaved, the colonized, and racialized women. As a result of this double fracture, Noah’s Ark is established as an appropriate political metaphor for the Earth and the world in the face of the ecological tempest, locking the cries for a common world at the bottom of modernity’s hold.

The slave ship or modernity’s hold

      In order to heal this double fracture, my second proposition takes the Caribbean world as the scene of ecological thinking. Why the Caribbean? Firstly, because it was here that the Old World and the New World were first knotted together in an attempt to make the Earth and the world into one and the same totality. Eye of modernity’s hurricane, the Caribbean is that center where the sunny lull was wrongly confused for paradise, the fixed point of a global acceleration sucking up African villages, Amerindian societies, and European sails. This “Caribbean world” therefore concentrates experiences of the world that range from colonial and enslaving histories to the underside of modernity, histories which are not limited to the geographical boundaries of the Caribbean basin. This gesture is a response to the absence of these Caribbean experiences within those ecological discourses that nevertheless claim to question the same