Global South scholars have long documented and theorised their communities’ struggles against the ecological degradation, toxic contamination, and climate change–related extreme weather events which result from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Building on that existing work, contributors to this collection extend and deepen understandings of the material entanglements of race and ecology in our contemporary conjuncture. Speaking from various scales and locations, including the Caribbean, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Palestine, the authors reflect on those sites while also collectively recovering and amplifying lineages of thought on ecology from across the South. As the contributions collected here show, the traps set by global structures of race also direct mainstream climate solutions back towards the expropriation, premature death, or prevention of birth of peoples of colour by various means, from militarised conservation to eugenic populationism. Confronting the racial logics of both ecological harm and its supposed solutions is therefore a key task of this collection. As a collective, however, the issue’s contributors also carve out paths to reparation and structural change which form the contours of an anti-racist ecology for our times.
In the years following the physical end to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the island was beset with a series of infrastructure projects. One of these was the ‘Port City’, a project funded by the Government of China. The project has raised significant environmental concerns, from the detrimental impact of rock extraction on biodiversity and marine life, to the effect on the livelihoods of the fishing community due to the depletion of fish as a result of the mining of sand from the sea bottom. Visibly present in the protest action against this are religious actors, especially habited Roman Catholic nuns. This article, as part of an ongoing project that looks at environmentalism in faith-based communities, examines the impetus that drives such visibly religious persons to take part in direct action. The article does this to note how theologies that are ‘on and of the ground’, that is anti-colonial theological framings are central to the political theologies driving concerns regarding environmental justice. In doing this, the article is also arguing for a more central place for International Relations and Politics to be studying and engaging with anti-colonial theological voices, what I call theologies of ‘rage’.
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