Imperialism is the root cause of the climate crisis and produces ongoing warfare via slow violence

Global climate change has been called the single greatest threat to human civilization. It threatens to kill or displace millions or even billions of people and will irrevocably change the lives of practically every human being on the planet. This topic has deservedly received much critical attention. The effects of imperialism and colonialism on climate change, however, is a topic that has not received adequate scrutiny. As Amitav Ghosh (2016) states: “[i]n accounts of the Anthropocene, and of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns…. However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism” (p. 87). This lack of attention is not restricted to just environmental critics, as Rob Nixon (2011) points out in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, “postcolonial literary critics had, in turn, shown scant interest in environmental concerns” (p. 236). Dating back to the rise of coal during the Industrial Revolution, empire has been a significant factor in the rise of fossil fuels. This is no less true today as, for example, petro-imperialism remains a contributing factor in American foreign policy from Venezuela in Latin America to the Middle East. These complicated connections between conservation and empire also make it difficult to reconcile the disparate fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. This paper will build on the work of Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Naomi Klein, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley to discuss how empire and imperialism have contributed to and continue to shape the ever-looming threat of climate crisis. Global climate change reinforces disparate economic, social, and racial conditions that developed, fostered, and thrived throughout the long history of colonization, inscribing climate change as a new, slow form of imperialism that is retracing the pathways that colonialism and globalism have already formed. Ultimately, it may only be by considering climate change through a postcolonial lens and utilizing indigenous resistance that the damage of this new form of climate imperialism can be halted. There has already been significant work done to bridge the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. In the introduction to their edited collected, DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) argue for a “sustained dialogue…between postcolonial and ecocritical studies” (p. 24) and go on to highlight several reasons why these fields have been kept disparate and the necessity for bringing them together. They contend that: “an ecological frame is vital to understanding how geography has been and still is radically altered by colonialism”; that postcolonialists are adept at “disentangling the hierarchies” formed through colonial binarism; furthermore that postcolonial studies prioritizes sustainability and “the health of the physical world”; and that “the field of postcolonial studies has long been engaged with questions of agency and representation of the nonspeaking or subaltern subject” (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, pp. 24-25). Chakrabarty (2012) expands upon these arguments to claim that postcolonialism complicates the configuration of the Anthropocene “of humans as constitutively one — a species, a collectivity whose commitment to fossil fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that civilization itself” to include “the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies” (p. 2, 14). This is significant because anthropological differences necessitate deconstructing humanity into groups with varying political, economic, and social power, especially given “the uneven impacts of climate change” (Chakrabarty, 2012, p.14). Chakrabarty’s argument that within the study of global climate change humanity cannot be subsumed into a monolithic group lays the theoretical framework for this article. Different cultural groups have contributed to ecological destruction to varying degrees and the impact of climate change will indeed be distributed unevenly. However, I am further arguing for the necessity of postcolonial and anticolonial work within any study of climate change because its impacts will be distributed not just unequally, but in a direct echoing of colonial pathways. Global climate change is a form of slow violence. Slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). This includes the current climate crisis due to “the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” which rank among the examples of slow violence (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). What separates slow violence from other forms of violence is that it "is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). It becomes imperative to view climate change in these parameters when you consider the already recognized victims of climate change: Obviously, elsewhere in the world there are already victims of climate change. 300,000 deaths according to the U.N. 300,000 people in the Horn of Africa, in Bangladesh, India, Vietnam... But those deaths are due to the exacerbation of already existing problems. Drought, malnutrition, floods. Nothing seemingly 'climatic.' Furthermore, the victims of climate change die slowly, one after another—no drama, no media coverage—scattered over the whole year over the whole planet. If only they had the good sense all to die on the same day, like the victims of the 2004 tsunami. That would catch our attention. Those everyday deaths don't have the same weight as a large death toll on a single day... Little lives. In little boxes. And we don't notice a thing. (Squarzoni, 2014, pp. 250-1) Squarzoni is describing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people but is supremely concerned with the fact that these deaths are taking place on a temporal scale that is too long for most of us to adequately grasp. If the deaths were instantaneous, they would become the spectacle that marks traditional forms of violence. However, these first victims of climate change are the victims of a slow violence, which marks them as invisible. Despite the temporal differences between a quick violence, like military conflicts and forms of enslavement typical of colonization, and the slow violence of allowing the causes of global climate change to go largely unchallenged, climate change will nevertheless follow the same route and processes of imperialism.