Colonialist logic like the affirmative exacerbates climate change

Climate change is perhaps the most familiar example of anthropogenic interference with earth system processes in an era that has become known as the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a term introduced by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to refer to a new geological epoch of unprecedented human breach of planetary boundaries essential to the flourishing of human and nonhuman life.43 The authors attribute the emergence of the Anthropocene to the destructive technologies developed by humanity and seek “to guide [hu]mankind towards, global, sustainable, environmental management” 44 At heart of the Anthropocene is the anthropos, the human whose economic activity is exceeding ecosystem limits. Portraying the Anthropocene as a crisis to which all humans have contributed obscures the fact that only a small minority of humankind caused the problem – primarily persons who are White, affluent, and located predominantly in the Global North.45 Scholars in a variety of disciplines have criticized this undifferentiated view of humanity, and have emphasized the underlying social and economic drivers of anthropogenic earth system disruption, including colonial conquest, imperial dispossession, and the imposition of a global capitalist order that systematically abuses nature and exploits large segments of the world’s population.46 Some scholars proposed the notion of the Capitalocene to better address the role of capitalism as the underlying cause of contemporary social and ecological crises.47Others have emphasized the role of racism and colonial violence as the means through which humans and nature are objectified and exploited.48 An analysis of climate change through a race-conscious decolonial lens reveals the ways that race is inscribed in the history of capitalism and in the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green energy economy. The domination of nature and the dispossession and exploitation of racialized human beings are deeply interconnected. First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and White supremacy.49 The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata.50 Indeed, the genocide of the Indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly fifty million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded.51 The removal by forests of enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere caused a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores.52 Due to the magnitude of this early human modification of the environment, some scholars have proposed 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene.53 This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of enslaved Africans to extract gold, silver, and copper in the Americas and to produce the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution.54 “Plantation agriculture and cotton in particular were key to the emergence of the industrial power of England first and quickly much of the rest of Europe.” 55 The slave plantation colonies of the Americas supplied not only food and industrial inputs but also markets for British manufactured goods.56 Between 1600 and 1800, slaves in the Americas comprised less than 1 percent of the world’s population, but produced the commodities that dominated world trade.57 Slavery, genocide, and colonialism were thus central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution, the birth of carbon capitalism, and the beginning of the Anthropocene.58 These systems of domination relied on lethal force as well as the ideology of White supremacy.59 Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism.60 The extraction, processing, transportation, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in both the Global North and the Global South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands to the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards.61 Thus, local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are an integral part of the struggle for climate justice. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions, such as the Middle East, that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petrostates, and the resulting death, destruction, and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are among the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice.62 When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the Global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the USA from certain predominantly Muslim countries.63 Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-White.64 They reside in geographic locations (such as lowlying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculture-dependent nations) disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification, and rising sea levels.65 In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions.66 The North’s “under-development” of the Global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney67 and Eduardo Galeano68 has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties.69 These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to healthcare, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of the resources necessary for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery.70 Fifth, racialized communities in the Global South are being displaced not only by climate change, military interventions, and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. For example, wind farms are being developed in Oaxaca, Mexico on Indigenous lands to provide energy to Walmart, Coca-Cola, Heineken, and Cemex (a Mexican cement manufacturer) without public debate; adequate compensation; free, prior, and informed consent; equitable sharing of benefits with local communities; and mechanisms to provide compensation for damage and loss of land.71 In Canada, a controversial proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Peace River threatens to displace Indigenous peoples and replicate the sacrifice zones of carbon capitalism – but this time in the name of “green energy.” 72 In Brazil and throughout the Global South, forest conservation schemes developed through the climate regime’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program are interfering with the rights of local and Indigenous communities to harvest plants, timber, or fish in their ancestral territories.73 Lastly, the legislation in the United States74 and the European Union75 requiring the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has diverted land from food to fuel production, increased food prices, and incentivized large-scale land transactions in the Global South that destroy forests and displace rural dwellers in order to make way for large plantations to cultivate biofuel feedstocks (such as oil palm).76 These mandates remain in place even though the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of many biofuels exceed those of the fossil fuels they replace.77 Finally, racialized persons displaced by poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation face death, detention, and deportation when they attempt to migrate to the Global North.78 The Trump administration has portrayed the Central American families seeking refuge in the United States as “an unstoppable invasion of social parasites and criminals,” 79 and has threatened to close the US–Mexican border.80 The US government has criminally prosecuted migrants, separated migrant children from their families, and confined thousands of migrant children in kennel-like, ice-cold cells.81 European states are adopting increasingly aggressive measures to deter the entry of African and Middle Eastern migrants, who are depicted as violent, patriarchal, and likely to commit act of terrorism.82 These policies have resulted in the death of thousands of migrants at sea as smugglers select more dangerous routes and less seaworthy vessels to avoid detection.83 Finally, Australia continues to indefinitely detain migrants and refugees in offshore processing centers located in Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea under conditions that Amnesty International has denounced as “a human rights catastrophe.” 84 In Europe, the United States, and other settler-colonial nations, the population is generally divided “between those whose movement is a manifestation of liberty, and should therefore be maximized, and those whose freedom is a problem, and should therefore be tightly regulated.” 85 While corporations freely roam the world, racialized bodies are policed, detained, incarcerated, and deported. Ironically, even though the mobility of the affluent (including air travel) contributes disproportionately to climate change,86 it is the mobility of the non-White poor that states restrict.87 Climate change is anticipated to displace between twenty-five million and one billion people by 2050. 88 The North’s exclusionary immigration policies do not bode well for climate displaced racialized communities. An analysis of climate change grounded in the coloniality of power reveals a key thread that unites these abuses – the abyssal line dividing those deemed human from those deemed nonhuman/subhuman. While everyone is vulnerable to climate change, those who occupy the sacrifice zones of racial capitalism are particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as subhuman and disposable. Racialization justifies and naturalizes violence and dispossession – in war zones, in resource extraction zones, in the green energy economy, and in the refugee camps and migrant detention centers of the Global North. As Naomi Klein observes: A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalize these monstrous decisions.89