Maroon Ecology: Land, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice

Abstract

ResumenLos cimarrones surgieron de campañas armadas de auto‐emancipación en contra de la esclavitud en las américas, siendo Jamaica la que albergó comunidades de cimarrones que ahora están organizados como formas de gobierno interculturales. La etnogénesis y lucha de los cimarrones dió lugar a una ética ambiental en donde las características de los ecosistemas locales están profundamente conectados con la memoria histórica colectiva y con la vida espiritual. Los cimarrones de Accompong de Jamaica acoplan dentro de su estructura social una visión única de la protección ambiental enraizado en sus conexiones ancestrales a la tierra. Aquí lo describimos como Ecología Cimarrona. Es esta ética que inspira su lucha contra la industria extractiva, cuyas acciones, desde el punto de vista de los cimarrones, son perjudiciales para la integridad de su tierra y su autonomía. La Ecología Cimarrona se diferencia del ambientalismo Jamaicano dominante al demandar soberanía y una redistribución soberanía como parte de la protección ambiental. Esta práctica sitúa la Ecología Cimarrona dentro del movimiento global por la justicia ambiental. Este último caso del legado de resistencia de Accompong coloca a los cimarrones como actores clave dentro de las politicas ambientales y de desarrollo del Caribe. [Cimarrones, desarrollo, extracción de recursos, justicia ambiental, soberanía]

The colour of seawater: colour perception and environmental change in Dominican seascapes★

“…Assumptions about Afro-Caribbean communities and their inability to be responsible stewards of vulnerable ecosystems abound in the Caribbean, where cosmopolitan environmentalism (Braverman 2015;Lorimer 2015) often understands rural communities as in need of intervention (Connell 2020;Holmes 2010;Price 2006). While marine conservation programmes and policies have been long in the making in the Caribbean (Crawford 2020;Elias 2019), their recent success and flurry of activity at regional and local scales have been attributed to the rise of what Amelia Moore (2019) terms 'global change science' .…”

Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest

“…Hooper's discussion renders the places occupied and used by Black people, particularly the Maroons, as ecologically worthless and inconsequential except to the extent that they are a technical problem for colonial forest management. Bringing this discussion into conversation with Black Geographies valorization of Black ecological knowledge and socio-spatial agency, we might see these "worthless growths" as part of a Maroon ecology (Connell, 2020;Favini, 2018). The value of the yams, gingers, bushes, and fruit trees and the ecological labor that explains their proliferation, while dismissed by Hooper, provide an opening for grasping the expansive natures of Black arboricultural activity.…”

“…Reading the Maroons into environmental history, clarifies what I call the arboreal side-effects of marronage as central to the Black ecologies of Jamaica. The anticolonial ecologies cultivated by the Maroons in resistance to colonialism have been little examined (Besson, 2002;Connell, 2020;Favini, 2018). This is part of a broader gap in the literature on Caribbean conservation and environmental history where Black Caribbean people are concerned.…”

“…As a mode of reading, Black Geographies clarifies these presences and absences and their epistemological value (McKittrick, 2006). It is worth noting that the paper is not intended to vindicate Maroons or Black Caribbean people where deforestation is concerned (see Evelyn and Camirand, 2003; Eyre, 1987, 1989; Timms et al, 2013; Weis, 2001), nor weigh in on the persistence of debates about yam sticks and deforestation in contemporary conservation (see Barker, 1998; Barker and Beckford, 2006; Beckford and Barker, 2003; Beckford et al, 2011). The argument the paper takes up is in another domain; the paper centers the arboreal effects of marronage as a way of historically situating the spatial effects of Maroon and Black place-making and ecologies.…”

The history of natural history and race: Decolonizing human dimensions of ecology

“…Other long-standing communities existed across the Americas, with especially well-known examples in Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil (the quilombos), and the western hemisphere's largest maroon population, in Suriname and French Guiana. Scholars today are studying the "Black ecologies" of marronage: the ecological knowledge that allowed people to survive the difficult conditions that enabled their freedom, and which today can continue to foster both freedom and environmental protection (Connell, 2020;Hosbey & Roane, 2021;Malm, 2018;Roane, 2018;Torre, 2018). People living in these maroon communities not only needed knowledge to survive in such rugged, undeveloped terrain, but also needed forms of ecological knowledge that allowed them to maintain these environments, to maintain their remoteness (Hosbey & Roane, 2021).…”