The alternative is to remove the US and European IP systems to allow for smaller, regional IP systems to take their place and foster growth and innovation. These regional systems would work together but have their own way of doing things to minimize marginalization within each system. This will allow for all people to freely be able to secure their ideas and inventions.

A truly just and sustainable environmental ethics can only be achieved if we strive for an overarching ethics of liberation based on an ecology of knowledge that explores the knowledge of ecologies. As Shiva (1993: 61–62) argues, a truly cosmopolitan world culture would consist of many local cultures existing together, mutually and respectfully exchanging and learning from one another. De Sousa Santos (2007: 39) infers that this objective can only be realised if we shift beyond the level of the logos predicated on the universal positivistic Western philosophical and scientific tradition and explore the exterior force of the natura naturans. Making this decolonial turn involves analysing human–nature relations through the lenses of the excluded “others” that are able to speak from where they are, or as Kwasi Wiredu states, from the locative ‘there’ using their own languages and drawing from lived experiences and histories that have wilfully been ignored, appropriated without recognition and erased from 1492 to the present. What is required is not a repudiation of modern science and Western environmental ethical discourse, but a decortication of the Euro- American viewpoint, removing the blindness, prejudice, violence and injustice that inform its epistemic and philosophical tradition. Indigenous people should be free to employ ‘border thinking’, applying their own knowledge whilst extracting ideas and practices from Western knowledge to understand their own contexts, without adopting the perspective that informs them.