Coloniality leads to ecological collapse and extinction

The coloniality of nature can be traced back to the single most significant turning point in history, the colonisation of the Americas in 1492. Industrialisation in Europe precipitated colonial expansion into the New World in search of exotic places providing a cornucopia of natural resources and fertile lands to fuel a bourgeoning capitalist system (Guha and Martinez-Allier 1997: 82). The colonisation of the Americas not only marked the creation of the modern world system based on imperial designs rep- resenting a coloniality of power, it was justified on the pretext of a civilising mission, to save the souls of savages and to tame “wild” lands—what Rudyard Kipling referred to as the ‘white man’s burden’ (Beinart 2000: 270). On the pretence of spreading civility, ethics and justice, the colonial encounter sardonically led to the massacring of indigenes. The modernising and “civilising” mission of Europeans was defined by a suspension of ethics. As people without a soul, a history and reason belonging strictly to the anthropos, the unleashing of brutality and diversion from morals was an accepted practice—they needed to be rescued from their nothingness:

The paradox of 1492 is posited in the increasingly sharp conflict which interprets it as a “glorious achievement”, a heroic deed of discovery, “a triumph of the Christian West” on one hand, and on the other hand, as a brutal invasion and conquest which led to the genocidal extinction of large numbers of indigenes as well as set in train the now looming prospect of an ecological catastrophe (Wynter 1991: 258).

Crucially, this genocide of indigenes was made possible not only through material violence, but with the assistance of what Crosby (2004:162), in his groundbreaking work on ecological imperialism, refers to as a ‘portmanteau biota’. In addition to guns, Europeans brought pathogens and alien plant and animal species to the New World. With the establishment of empire, they attempted to create ‘neo-Europes’, taking with them plants and domesticated animals to other regions of the world which were nostalgic remnants of the landscape and ecology they had left behind in Europe. The effects were devastating: unknown diseases such as smallpox-decimated indigenous populations who had no immunity (Crosby 2004: 200). Besides destroying people, this ‘portmanteau biota’ coupled with the avarice of settler communities steeped in a modern economy that commoditised nature and saw landscape as private property, also resulted in an ecocide. Alien invasive species threatened to wipe out a significant number of indigenous flora and fauna, erasing the “memory” that the landscape and ecologies had of themselves, in some instances leading to mass extinctions of certain species.

Most pertinently, the colonial encounter laid the foundations for a coloniality of nature that survived colonisation and continues to shape current discourses on environmental ethics that are disingenuous and intensify (rather than ameliorate) the oppression of people and nature. Colonisation was accompanied by a particular imagination of primitive people and wilderness in the New World that itself was a construct, ironically informed by myth, instead of scientific facts. The colonial imagination of nature in peripheral regions such as Africa viewed it as being virgin lands and pristine wilderness untouched by humans—informed by what J. M. Blaut referred to as a ‘diffusionist myth of emptiness’ (Maldonado-Torres 2004: 37). This imagination culminated in a colonial conservation discourse that vilified indigenous peoples as destroyers of nature and portrayed white settlers as defenders of it (Beinart 2000: 271). Conservation thinking was therefore informed by an authoritarian racial discourse. This reflected the hubris of zero point, a particular arrogance unique to the superiority of colonial science based on a proclaimed neutrality and epistemic authority. Colonial scientists, upon witnessing indigenous people utilising fire for hunting and agricultural purposes, based their judgements on scientific discourses on the use of fire and its impact on ecology from the European experience. As Pyne (1997: 25) argues, the use of fire by peasant communities in Europe was a heretical practice, which was seen to deplete soil nutrients and encourage desertification and species extinction.