Sierra Club Books, 1994); Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice (London: Routledge, 2018); David V. Carruthers (ed.), Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); David McDonald, Environmental Justice in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2002); David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).57 57 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley (eds), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2015); Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2009); Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environment: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Campbell and Niblett, The Caribbean; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
58 58 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 2004); Benjamin Chavis, Jr., Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: Commission for Racial Justice Public Data Access, 1987); Larry Lohman, “Green Orientalism,” The Ecologist 23/6 (1993): 202–4; Robert H. Nelson, “Environmental Colonialism: ‘Saving’ Africa from Africans,” Independent Review 8/1 (2003): 65–86.
59 59 Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew, trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook (Oxford: Heinemann, [1944] 1978).
60 60 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 43; translation slightly modified.
61 61 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 56–7.
62 62 Nathan Hare, “Black Ecology,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 1/6 (1970): 2–8, at p. 8.
63 63 Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, ed. Michael Prairie (New York: Pathfinder, 2007), p. 258; translation modified.
64 64 Ibid., p. 259.
65 65 “Principles of Environmental Justice,” www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
66 66 Wangari Maathai, Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (New York: Doubleday, 2010), pp. 20–1 and 50.
67 67 Francia Márquez, acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, San Francisco, 25 April 2018.
68 68 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 137; André Gorz, Ecologica, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2018), p. 50; Étienne Tassin, “Propositions philosophiques pour une compréhension cosmopolitique de l’écologie,” conference proceedings from “Penser l’écologie politique: sciences sociales et interdisciplinarité” at the University of Paris-Diderot, 13–14 January 2014, pp. 180–3; www.fondationecolo.org/blog/ActesEcologiePolitique1.
69 69 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 182–3.
70 70 Étienne Tassin, Un monde commun: pour une cosmo-politique des conflits (Paris: Seuil, 2003), pp. 215–35.
71 71 Gorz, Ecologica, p. 47.
72 72 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 32.
73 73 Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, and Juan Martinez-Alier (eds), Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (New York: Alta Mira Press, 2007); Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).
74 74 Paul K. Gellert, Scott R. Frey, and Harry F. Dahms, “Introduction to Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World-Systems Research 23/2 (2017): 226–35.
75 75 Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–5; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347/6223 (2015).
76 76 Philippe Descola, La Composition des mondes: entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015).
77 77 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
78 78 Translator’s note: Matrice is the French word for both womb and matrix. While English has largely lost the connection between womb and matrix in everyday usage, the single French word is derived from the Latin matrix. The Latin word, which comes from the word for mother (mater), originally meant “pregnant animal” and “uterus” in Late Latin. The sense with which it is used here is not intended to be exclusively gendered or to refer only to the human womb, and so I have translated the term as “womb, matrix” following Betsy Wing’s translation of the same term in Glissant.
79 79 Hannah Arendt, “Public Rights and Private Interests: In Response to Charles Frankel,” in Michael Mooney and Florian Stuber (eds), Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 103–8.
80 80 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation – an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3/3 (2003): 257–337.
81 81 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 93.
82 82 Paget, Caliban’s Reason.
83 83 Translator’s note: “Matricial” is the adjectival form of the French matrice. While not a neologism in English, the term is uncommon and not normally used in the sense intended here. The reader should understand it in the double sense of “womb, matrix,” mentioned above.
1 Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World
Conquérant (1776–7)
On May 21st, 1776, the Conquérant, a 300-ton ship, began its journey from Nantes, heading for West Africa. From August to October, while surveying the Gulf of Guinea, the Conquérant inspected and chose the materials-bodies for its building site. Among the 400 pieces packed into the hold and the steerage, only 338 survived the bloody swell of the middle passage, reaching Port-au-Prince on January 9th, 1777. After removing the weeds, the forest, and the Red Amerindians, the Conquérant joined the Negro joists together into the frame of a colonial inhabitation of the Earth.
The current ecological storm is bringing to light the harm and the problems associated with certain ways of inhabiting the Earth that are inherent to
