Pro-environmentalist settler colonial logic is harming communities as climate change worsens – settlers must be more aware of their role in the harms they have created – by ignoring this, we face existential risk

In readdressing my research questions, How do colonial projects function as uninterrogated centers of global environmental injustice? and, How do the climate narrations of U.S. green billionaires obscure or illuminate the conditions of coloniality and settler colonialism?, my research has led me to understand that major players in climate change discourse, such as green billionaires, obscure coloniality as they narrate their plans for the future. They obscure reality by doing what settlers do best— convincing themselves that they are detached, unbiased, rational, objective, apolitical fountains of knowledge. Settlers speak for themselves on behalf of everyone else and produce climate narratives that instruct us to forget our presence in settler world. One of the greatest things we can learn from green billionaires’ climate narratives is that popular climate discourse, such as innovation towards a sustainable end, is a language of power that reinforces the status quo. I would go one step further to call it a language of domination and colonization. While it is so necessary that climate change be discussed and that plans be made ranging from hyper-local to truly global in scope, we should be careful that this dialogue not be a way of reproducing the same power relations that shape the world today. As Klein (2014) stated, “climate change represents a historic… we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up… It can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces” (p. 10). 77 I have long thought that understanding the nuances of climate change are far more complex and difficult to grasp than what I have begun to see as the true heart of climate mitigation. By making room for and truly sharing in dialogue with those whose voices have been quieted—Third world and indigenous communities and scholars. By investing in community and building relations through place. Yet, although I would call this approach “simple”—I would not call it easy. In studying settler colonialism theoretically, through the elite language of the academy, and knowing settler colonialism intimately, through my own embodiment of it and my awareness of forces of resistance against it, I would say that settler colonialism is nefarious, deceptive, and delusion inducing. One of the most difficult things I can imagine is the constant decoupling that is required to remove one’s sense of self and one’s daily activities from the collective settler colonial mission. One of the easiest ways to see this is in dealing with the incommensurability of decolonization as referred to by Tuck and Yang (2012). One of the best ways I believe we can approach climate change from an anticolonial stance is by abandoning words like “environment,” “nature,” “natural,” and “wild.” As odd as this may seem, this research has led me to see these words as inherently colonial inventions that, even when used with the best intensions, traps us in the contradictions that the U.S. environmental movement has long been beholden to. This is not to be mistaken for reinforcing human exceptionalism or for disregarding nonhuman life, spaces, and processes. To me, abandoning these words is the ultimate reverence to the fact that humans are never at any point in time separate from non-human existence. We are of the Earth just as much as we imagine the Earth as being of us. Words like natural and wild carry an implicit bias that forces us to imagine human life as 78 separate from the rest of life on Earth. And once we are used to seeing climate action framed around the environment it because incredibly difficult to see climate change as anything but a particular set of concerns. I believe we need to find ways of pivoting from “environment” to non-human or living and non-living beings in order to talk about the spatial relations that humans share with the non-human world rather than the natural spaces we feel inclined to protect. And this is not my own idea but is based in many indigenous epistemologies which are not only positioned in resistance to settler colonialism but also towards an understanding of ecological balance that includes humans at the same status as the non-human world. But anyone who studies the climate—however formally or informally—knows that to engage climate change is to think through plurality and to question common notions of justice to mean not just inclusion and equity but also mutual respect as manifested in shared space. One of the most important things we can do is decenter settler perspectives on climate change. And this is coming from a settler studying climate change. I truly believe that people in positions of power from the local to the global need to step aside and listen more than they talk and we need to use our positions of power and resources to create space for alternative ways of being to enter public climate discourse. Rather than invest in technological innovation so that settlers can continue to settle and to live their lifestyles based on that settlement—we need to invest in spaces, both physically and digitally, that bring people together for the simple purpose of talking about the complexities of life at this particular moment. I think it is difficult for settlers to see their own settler colonial mindset because I think even settlers get sucked into collective settlement. From my own experience of 79 being a settler in the U.S., I have found that one becomes initiated into settlement twice— when you’re born or get put in a place in which you physically occupy stolen land and again when as you slowly accept and adopt settler practices that make you believe that you are removed from everyone else and exempt from collective accountability. We are instructed, again and again and again, to forget our very presence in settler world. Settlers need to start talking about being settlers and we need to continue to call settlement out as it is being activated and mobilized. Otherwise, I don’t believe we can even get to a space in which we can talk about decolonial possibilities as anything other than metaphorical because we are still actively settling.