A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand

Ferdinand calls on us to embrace holistic methods of inquiry and responses to crises grounded in the interdependencies that constitute all of us – plants, human and other animals, the soil, the ocean – while recognizing that racism has deposited white supremacy at the very heart of our notions of the human.

When I initially agreed to write a short foreword for this book, I was thinking about my first visit to Martinique in December 2019, when I learned about the devastating impact of the pesticide chlordecone on the populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe. I still feel the shock I experienced when I wondered why I had not previously known about this calamitous intersection of racial capitalism and systematic assaults on the environment, including its human expressions. Ironically, the banana plant, which chlordecone was designed to protect from weevils, is one of the few products in the food chain that has not been polluted. This is a part of the world with which I have long experienced a deep spiritual kinship through its literature – especially Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé – and its popular visual art, as I had the good fortune of meeting Euzhan Palcy in Paris shortly after the 1983 release of La Rue Cases-Nègres [Sugar Cane Alley], and I was interested in expanding my awareness about the environmental crisis that is taking place there. As soon as I began to read Decolonial Ecology, I quickly realized that, as important as it may be to learn more about one of the world’s least recognized ecological disasters, Malcom Ferdinand’s research, in closely and complexly engaging with the conditions of the Caribbean and the Americas, radically reframes the way we have been primed to theorize and engage in active protest against assaults on the environment more broadly.

I also found myself overtaken by waves of self-criticism regarding earlier encounters with ways of understanding intersections between antiracism and environmental consciousness. Many years ago, in the immediate aftermath of my own trial and after the successful conclusion of a massive global campaign for my freedom, I helped to establish the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization that continued to advocate for political prisoners and to engage in popular education campaigns about the connections between state violence and structural racism. One of our leaders, now deceased, was a phenomenal organizer named Damu Smith. When he chaired the Washington, DC, chapter of the Alliance, he pushed us early on to incorporate into our efforts what we now refer to as environmental justice. We were largely concerned with contesting political repression and with identifying the persistence of white supremacy and structural racism, especially with respect to the criminal legal system. I continue to regret that we did not then reevaluate the theoretical framework we employed for the understanding of the long history of racial and political repression in the US. Certainly we acknowledged colonialism and slavery as the foundational historical oppressions that enabled the trajectories leading, for example, to the incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. But our sense of the damage spawned by colonialism and slavery was not nearly as capacious as it would have been if we had grasped the gravity of the connections Damu was urging us to make.

      Eventually Damu Smith became one of the founders of the environmental justice movement, to which Malcom Ferdinand refers. On Earth Day, 2001, he spoke at a protest outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, organized by Greenpeace:

      All of us have scores of chemicals in our bodies, in our tissues, in our blood, that come from a host of polluting industries and industrial processes under way throughout the planet. Particularly in the United States and other industrialized countries, we have industries like vinyl and plastic and petrochemical industries that are emitting dangerous toxins that are harming human health and causing many people to die …. We are being poisoned and killed against our will. … While everybody on the planet is suffering from toxic contamination, there are some communities that have been targeted, who as a result of that targeting based on race and income are getting a disproportionate share of the planet’s and the nation’s pollution. People of color, African-American, Latino, Native American, Asian, and poor white folk are getting a disproportionate share of the nation’s pollution. As a result the disease and death in those communities is higher. We have got to oppose and challenge environmental racism. (April 18, 2001: Earth Day protest in Washington organized by Greenpeace)

      It is also interesting to note that the term “environmental racism” was coined by Dr Benjamin Chavis, who had been imprisoned in connection with the case of the Wilmington Ten from North Carolina and was freed as a result of an international campaign, supported especially in France, spearheaded by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. In 1982, he described environmental racism as “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of colour from the leadership of the ecology movements” (www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/what-is-environmental-racism-pollution-covid-systemic/).

Environmental racism was and continues to be a crucial concept, one which advances our understandings of the strategic location of dumps and toxic waste sites and other practices that devalue the lives of Black, indigenous and Latinx people. Ferdinand’s work, however, unmasks the logic that impels us to conceptualize assaults on the environment and racist violence as discontinuous and in need of a kind of articulation that preserves the discreteness of the two phenomena to the extent that, when we bring them together in the concept of environmental racism, we tend to misapprehend their deep and fundamental interrelatedness. He asks us not only to acknowledge the part that racism plays in defining who is more vulnerable to environmental pollution but also – and more fundamentally – how racism, and specifically colonialism and slavery, helped to construct a world grounded on environmental destruction. In other words, the racism does not simply enter the picture as a factor determining the way environmental hazards are disparately experienced by human beings but, rather, it creates the very conditions of possibility for sustained assaults on the environment, including on the human and non-human animals, whose lives are always already devalued by racism, patriarchy, and speciesism.

The poisoning of the water supply of Flint, Michigan, in 2014,¹ which resulted from the austerity-motivated switch to the Flint River for the city’s water, was clearly linked to capitalist industrialization on land historically stewarded by the Ojibwe. The trajectory that led from the production of carriages to the emergence of the automobile industry with no regard to the deleterious environmental changes included, among other developments, the pollution of the Flint River, especially by General Motors, which is why the river had not been previously considered as a source of water. However, under conditions of austerity, the switch from the Detroit River to the Flint River unleashed a cascade of issues, including the dislodging of lead from the pipes transporting water to the Flint community, where the majority of residents are Black and where over 40 percent live below the poverty line. Revealingly, even before the impact of the lead on the children of Flint was acknowledged, General Motors petitioned to switch back to the Detroit River because the existing supply was corroding engine parts and thus placing the profitability of the company in jeopardy. Apparently it was more important to save the automobile engines than the precious lives of Black children, whose fate recapitulated the violence directed at the Ojibwe people, who were the original inhabitants of the area where the city of Flint is located.

      Flint should have been a lesson to the US and to the world that, when Black children’s lives are jeopardized by the logic of contemporary capitalism, there are so many more humans, animals, plants, water, and soil that are cavalierly relegated to the realm of collateral consequences, a term that is also used to reflect the far-reaching ravages of what we have come to call the prison industrial complex. Not long after the Flint calamity, the protests on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation demanding a halt to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline revealed that it had been redirected through the reservation in order to avoid contaminating the water of Bismarck, the capital city of North Dakota, overtly signaling that indigenous lives are inherently less valuable than white lives.

      Malcom Ferdinand insists that we not understand such slogans as Indigenous Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter as simple rallying cries that, while certainly