Settler logics are ripe in environmentalist literature and debate – mainstream environmental logic ignores people of color and indigenous communities!

Mainstream environmentalism has historically been a white, settler space. The term settler “denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands, but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial power relations into their consciousness” (Flowers 2015: 33). The term recognizes different people’s responsibilities and culpability/complicity in the colonial project. There is debate over the use of “settler,” as it can collapse the different histories and responsibilities that differently positioned non-Indigenous people carry (Byrd 2011; Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008). We agree that specificity is critical to communicating about the different responsibilities and differential access to power and privilege settlers have. At the same time, like Sherene Razack (2015) and Jaskiran Dhillon (2015), we stress that any move to account for that complexity must not eclipse “what it means to live in a settler colonial state, [where] people of color and white settlers alike must confront our collective illegitimacy and determine how to live without participating in and sustaining the disappearance of Indigenous peoples” (Razack 2015: 27). In this article, we theorize the complexity of how settler environmentalists might navigate racialization and colonialism in order to do solidarity, especially in a movement that has been so thoroughly marked by (and critiqued for) whiteness. Mainstream environmentalism, which in itself encompasses work ranging from raising awareness about ocean acidification to participating in a tree sit, includes settlers of color, and they/we are implicated in the settler colonial project as well, though differently. However, the existence of diversity does not preclude the domination of white culture (Ward 2008). Our goal in using particular terminology is to stress the role that whiteness plays in the mainstream environmental movement, understood through the logics of racialization and settler colonialism simultaneously. We are not trying to erase or collapse social relations or experiences. Throughout this article, we are thinking about the ways in which racialization is enacted and resisted—and enacted through resistance—within a white, colonial movement. So how do settlers do environmentalism differently? How might we engage in decolonial, antiracist solidarity? Coming out of our long history of a racist and racializing movement and immersed in dominant social relations, how might mainstream environmentalists rethink our movement and our participation in solidarity? We arrive at this work as activists who worked in the environmental and global justice movements for more than a decade before coming to academic research. As scholars, we have been surprised at the lack of literature that acknowledges the whiteness of the mainstream environmental movement head-on, since this is a widely understood critique in the movement. As settler activists,3 our experience in movements drives our questions, as we seek to understand how activists, and environmentalists in particular, can learn to do solidarity in the context of racialized, colonial social relations. We take up this work not to be unsympathetically critical but to contribute to greater awareness of the ways in which solidarity frameworks can reinscribe racialized and colonial dynamics even as they seek to overcome them.