everything needs to be started over again: The type of exports needs to be changed, not just their destination; the soil needs researching as well as the subsoil, the rivers and why not the sun.61
In response to global capitalism and postcolonial agreements that maintain these destructive ways of inhabiting the Earth and continue the domination of the formerly colonized and racialized by way of military and financial coercion, the African-American sociologist Nathan Hare declared in 1970: “the real solution to the environmental crisis is the decolonization of the black race.”62 Similarly, in 1986 in Paris, Thomas Sankara denounced the “colonial plunder [that] has decimated our forests without the slightest restorative thought for our tomorrows.”63 Sankara then declared evocatively, “this struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fires to our forests and our savannas.”64
This is also what the participants of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit affirmed in Washington in 1991, linking the protection of Mother-Earth to decolonial and antiracist demands.65 The Kenyan biologist Wangari Maathai, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her ecological and feminist commitments in the Green Belt movement, recalls the wounds inflicted upon the Earth by colonial companies that were supported by Christian followers who devalued the practices of indigenous peoples such as the Kikuyu of Kenya, practices that are now recognized for their role in protecting biodiversity.66 In this, decolonial ecology is inspired by a range of environmentalist movements in the Caribbean. From Assaupamar in Martinique, to Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, to the Papaya peasant movement in Haiti, to the struggles of the Saramaka people in Suriname to save their forest, to the Afro-Colombian feminist and ecological movement led by Francia Márquez, a body of people are articulating a way of preserving the environment in the pursuit of a world free from its (post)colonial inequalities and power relations passed on since the time of slavery. These were the terms Márquez used when she accepted the 2018 Goldman Prize for the Environment:
I am part of a process, of a history of struggle and resistance. It began when my ancestors were brought to Colombia as slaves. I am part of the struggle against structural racism, part of the ongoing fight for freedom and justice, part of those people who hold onto hope for a better life, part of those women who use their maternal love to take care of their land as a place where life thrives. I am one of those people who raise their voices to stop the destruction of rivers, forests, and wetlands.67
Decolonial ecology is a centuries-old cry for justice and an appeal for a world.
A world-ship: the world as a horizon for ecology
The third proposition is to posit the world as ecology’s starting point and horizon. In this, I follow the intuitions of Hannah Arendt, André Gorz, and Étienne Tassin, for whom nature, its defence, and the ecological crisis involve the world above all.68 The “world” is to be distinguished from the “Earth” or the “globe,” with which the world is often confused. The world would seem to be given from the outset, with the physical interdependence of the globe and the ecosystems of the Earth taken as proof. But, unlike the Earth, the world is not self-evident. Our existence on Earth would be very bleak if it were not also part of multiple social and political relationships with others, human and non-human. If the Earth and its ecosystemic equilibriums constitute the conditions for the possibility of collective life, the world in question is of a different nature, as Arendt says:
the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another.69
This in-between, made up of actions and words, is not reducible to its material scenes, to the intimate circles of communities, or to the economic exchanges of the markets. What is at stake for the collective experience of the world in stock markets and other transactional arenas of global finance or global economies is quite different from what is at stake in demonstrations that aim to protect democracy or take place in the parliamentary spaces of debate. Globalization and worldization are therefore two different, even opposing, processes. The first is the totalizing extension and standardizing repetition of an unequal economy on a global scale, one which destroys cultures, social worlds, and the environment. The second is an opening, through the political action of a living together, of the infinite horizon of encounters and sharing.70 The problem arises when public scenes, where laws and ways of living together are imagined, are usurped by the capitalist interests of the free market, by lobbyists in particular. The ecological crisis is also the manifestation of what Gorz refers to as the “colonization of the life-world”71 and what, in his ecosophy, Félix Guattari called “Integrated World Capitalism,”72 referring to the processes by which the financial interests of certain companies and groups such as Monsanto-Bayer or Total dictate to the rest of the world ways of inhabiting the Earth that are violent and unequal.
Certainly, the importance of the concrete aspects of ecological degradation has led some theoretical approaches to focus solely on the economic and material dimensions of the ecological crisis – nature being included in the material – and led to the continued confusion of the globe with the world. In this vein, Jason Moore’s brilliant analyses of “world-ecology,” inspired by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, the analyses of political ecology by eco-Marxists, and those of global environmental history paradoxically suffer from the same ills that they denounce: they take the material sphere of physical economic forces impacting the Earth as the main focus for understanding the world.73 Undoubtedly, this global understanding of the ecological crisis in terms of humans’ ecological footprints, “unequal ecological exchange,”74 or “global limits”75 reveals the inequalities between those who consume the equivalent of three or four planets and those who live on almost nothing. And yet, the power of words and political actions are set aside in favor of what can be measured. What remains is what cannot be quantified: suffering, hopes, struggles, victories, refusals, and desires.
This proposition echoes the call of anthropologists and sociologists to focus on other forms of world-making carried out by First Peoples who do not share the modern environmental fracture.76 However, my suggestion that the world be posited as ecology’s horizon is not exactly a call to adopt specific techniques in relation to the environment, ecosystems, spirits, and human beings. Starting from the constitutive plurality of humans and non-humans on Earth, of different cultures, taking the world as the object of ecology brings back to the fore the question of the political composition between these pluralities, and therefore the question of acting together as well. This political approach to the world, in the Greek sense of polis, removes ecology from the single question of the oikos (economic and environmental) because, even if the Earth is indeed strewn with houses, fertile spaces for life and exchanges with it, the Earth is not, however, our home. If these ecumenes are fundamental, then the Earth cannot be adequately represented as one single global oikos. This reduces the Earth solely to the framework of property issues (whose house is it?), cast in the image of the imperial drive to capture and monopolize “territories,” “resources,” and power (who controls it?), like in ancient Greece where a citizen man enslaves the men, women, and children of the household and repels foreigners. This falls back into a violent territorial and root-identity thinking that Édouard Glissant denounced, a way of thinking that still presents the Earth as a colonial and slave-making oikos, and still maintains the colonial ecology model.77
Earth is the world’s womb, its matrix.78 From this perspective, ecology is a confrontation with plurality, with others different than myself, leading to the foundation of a common world. It is from the cosmopolitical foundation of a world between humans, and with non-humans, that the Earth can become not only what we share but what we have “in common without owning it.”79Arendt’s proposed world horizon is enriched in two different
