Race and climate change: Towards anti-racist ecologies

Abstract

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.

Seeking Legal Protection for Environmental Refugees

“…Those who are in favor of the alternative expression "ecological displaced", argue that it may offer more inclusive possibilities of talking about why and how people are displaced within and across borders beyond the heavy burdens of the racialized stigma attached to the notion of the climate refugee (Hiraide, 2023). It is also the case of some UK researchers who think that environmentalism contains the sediments of colonialism, and white nationalism, as much as it contains the sediments of liberatory projects (Tilly et al, 2023).…”

Press discourses on ecological crises in the UK, Israel, and Hungary

“…These inequalities are part of wider global intersectional power structures that assign different value to human life as well as nature. They relate to the moral dimension of the politics of belonging which has come to be known as “climate justice” (Gonzalez, 2020 ; Sultana, 2022 ; Tilley et al, 2022 ).…”

Reimagining landscape: Materiality, decoloniality, and creativity

“…We acknowledge here historical systems that conceived places, plants, and the racialised Other, as interchangeable parts, encoding socio-environmental violence in multiple landscapes (see Williams and Porter, 2022). Anti-racist, anti-colonial ecologies and geographies in landscape acknowledge the violence which results from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism (see Tilley et al, 2022). This new landscape research acknowledges colonial, imperial and racial violence, which undermines the very ability of the landscape to support life (see Mitchell, 2021: 151).…”