We will focus on the implications of perceiving land, water, and the living world as resources to be exploited, and as a place for dumping our waste, and the implications this attitude has on a planetary scale. 

Three authors address the relationship to the land, to the Earth and its inhabitants, in the context of what is understood as ‘colonial’ attitudes and practices which transform living beings and ancient lands into ‘resources’, ‘utilities’, ‘services’, ‘waste-lands’… We will examine the cultural and sociopolitical conditions that make these transformations possible, as well as their implications and consequences. You can read the texts in whatever order you are interested in: Amitav Ghosh offers a historical perspective, Max Liboiron more theoretical perspective in the tradition of critical and post-colonial studies, and Malcom Ferdinand possibly the most visceral one, where you will see that there are clear continuities of practices of exploitation, subjugation, and destruction – in this case use of pesticides on banana plantations on the historical background of slavery in the Caribbean – despite the proclaimed discontinuity. Hopefully a rich picture will emerge – or perhaps rather a mirror in which we may examine our own practices and attitudes, including our (‘Western’) versions of environmentalism.

Amitav Ghosh documents the story of the nutmeg, a valuable spice commodity, a desire for which transformed – and destroyed – the ecology of islands, as well as the human worlds intertwined with the trees in the violent process of colonization, empire building, and mass murder. By depriving the living world of the right to exist in their own way, and recognizing landscapes and diverse form of life as having its own purposes beyond their utility for humans, we render them inert, material deprived of meaning, a resource to be utilized.

Max Liboiron examines the relationship to land/Land as a resource and dumping ground, while at the same time destroying their human and non-human inhabitants and their ways of being in the world, as one of the defining features of colonialism. Examining also the role of science and its participation on the extractive economy, with the focus on chemical pollution, invites us to reflect also on the role of knowledge in these processes, and the ways in which knowledge is gained.

Finally, with Malcolm Ferdinand we will try to imagine what the world looks like from different places, in this case the Caribbean islands which have been transformed into plantations for exports and worked on by the slaves and their descendants, the role of agricultural chemicals that poison the soil, and the cruel injustice this creates between those who work the land and those who benefit from their labour while ‘externalizing’ the cost for their nutrition and health on the lives and landscapes in faraway places. This texts makes us examine the trajectories of injustice and the complicity on the ecological and human destruction we inadvertently share.

readings

Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg’s Curse

Chapter 6 – Bonds of Earth (73-84)

Chapter 8 – Fossilized Forests (99-104)

Chapter 9 – Choke Points (105-120)

Chapter 10 – Father of All Things (121-131)

Max Liboiron. Pollution is Colonialism

Chapter 1 – Land, Nature, Resource, Property (39-79)

Malcom Ferdinand. Decolonial Ecology. Thinking from the Caribbean World

Chapter 8 – The Master’s Chemistry. Martinique and Guadaloupe. (106-113)

questions for discussion

How would you describe your own relationships to the land?

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “Our lands were where responsibility to the world is enacted”. How do you understand your responsibility to the place where you live and work?

According to Max Liboiron, thinking of land as a resource “eclipses other possible relations with Land now and in the future”, and “the Land can not support other relations, activities, or futures that might interfere with future use”. Can you think of examples of these transformations?

How did science established its strong position? How do the various kinds of sciences, and questions permissible to ask, appear? Is not majority of scientific research based on the colonial approach?

Drawing on Max Liboiron’s distinction between ‘land’ and ‘Land’, how can a cross-cultural exchange of information on the principles of “Land” be carried out without exercising colonialism?

The issue of labour transforming the land, which only through work gains a value, was/is used as a justification for appropriations and transformation of land. Does this make sense to you? Why or why not?

Another influential approach in Western philosophy, consequentialist ethics, argues for maximising utility. How do we define ‘utility’? Is not this thinking a source of many ecological problems? Is it possible defend the utilitarian approach in the context of ecological crises, and if so, on what grounds? 

What are the alternatives to seeing Land as a resource, a property, a ‘sink’, a ‘service’? What would this shift into a different understanding, such as land as a community of life, require from us? 

Malcolm Ferdinand outlines the ways in which (literally) toxic culture of plantations is perpetuated in the French Antilles. How would you say the landscapes and economies of your countries have been transformed over the year? Did answering to the demands of the market make your country more dependent on the resources from other countries? Were your country to return to supplying itself, would it be possible to reverse the changes to its environment?

Can you think of any strategies that could be used to clear ecosystems from the agrochemicals? Do you know if the USA has any solutions to remove CLD in Guadeloupe, since several American states were also polluted. 

How does the ‘permission to pollute’ relate to the harm principle, articulated by John Stewart Mill, as a keystone of liberal philosophy? What is missing from this principle? 

Malcom Ferdinand suggests that we should expand our understanding of pollution. Our governance systems seem to be mainly preoccupied with technical aspects of pollutants – and equally technical, geo-chemical solutions. However, the problem of pollution has some systemic underpinnings that need to be considered as well. What would those be? What systemic pushes are there to continue polluting?

Malcolm Ferdinand writes: “The plantationcene reduced the world to a market of consumable resources… human and non-human inhabitants find themselves enslaved to technologies that are used to transform the Earth” How do you understand the notion of being ‘enslaved to technologies’, which are more often represented as liberating, desirable, useful? 

Can you identify any analogies between treatment of human ‘body’ and treatment of ‘land’ in our cultural practices? How does the medical epistemology, based on death and inert matter (dissection, experimentation), reflects this? And how is this reflected in the economical thinking, where ‘productivity’ is a key value, both in regard to the land, and to that of humans?

How can we attempt to return meaning to life and land, beyond their economic considerations?

Amitav Ghosh states that in order to relate to indigenous understanding of ecosystems we first must come to see the Earth as a living being, as Gaia: “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth – Gaia”. Can you think of small ways you practice doing this in your daily lives? 

Immanuel Kant has distinguished between ‘value’ and ‘dignity’, ‘means’ and ‘ends’, categories that structure our ethical systems. How do these reflect our cultural assumptions about the nature of the world and human place in it?

If life on Earth was no longer an option and you were offered to join a small group of people who are leaving the dying Earth and colonising Mars, would you accept? What if the only way to succeed in this endeavour was to take radioactive elements crucial to generating heat/energy exchange process for survival including necessity of other harmful chemical with you? Would you take part in polluting another planet right from the beginning?

In 19th century Darwin and other educated Westerners shared the belief, that the certain human groups are doomed to extension because of natural processes, Darwin thought of the selection as a basic premise as well as a mechanism of evolution. Do you think is that view on the human beings truth? Do you also think – as certain educated people in Victorian era – that some races, some types of human, are doomed to extension?

If, according to these theories, there are races and species doomed to extinction – what do you think are the crucial attributes of a man who is going to push himself in the winning branch of the human evolution? (Isn’t it crazy – thinking about the ability to gain power to execute as a crucial quality selected itself through history of any humankind attributed to supposedly inevitable outcome of evolution.)

Can you mention any examples in history, where violence, conquer and enslavement lead to spread the race (nation, group of people) or offer some advantages to the selected ones? 

Now let’s talk about the situations you mentioned again. Did the action cause harm to anybody – I mean people or animals or plants? 

Do you think, that we, as descendants of the successful humankind, inherited also the selected qualities – the (in many times unconscious) desire to become supreme, so not become the man who is going to be doomed to extinction? (Maybe the answers to these questions will explain why all nations or races and other groups yearning for more and more wealth and power.)

Why the concept of evolution as a knowledge that humans are linked to other life-forms by close ties of kinship do not lead us to sense and realisation of familial fellow feeling? To help each other? To care about the problems and pain of others, animals including? 

additional resources

Interview with Malcom Ferdinand on chlordecone and environmental justice (text)

Malcom Ferdinand. A Decolonial Ecology: Voices from the Hold of Modernity (lecture video)

Interview with Amitav Gosh on The Great Derangement. Cultures of Energy Podcast (audio)

Interview with Max Liboiron and Michelle Murphy. Why Pollution is as much about colonialism as chemicals. For the Wild Podcast (audio/text)

Interview with Max Liboiron. Reorienting Within a World of Plastic. For the Wild Podcast (audio/text)

Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism (book)

Matthias de Groof. Under the White Mask. Art’s troubled colonial legacy. (video)

Robin Wall Kimmerer. You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction (interview)

Rob Nixon. Slow Violence. The Environmentalism of the Poor (book)

Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers. Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (book)

Ulbe Bosma. The World of Sugar. How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (book)

Sven Beckert, Ulbe Bosma. Ever more land and labour (text)

Interview with Ulbe Bosma on The World of Sugar. BBC Podcast (audio)

Ulbe Bosma. How the world got hooked on sugar. Time Magazine (text)