Climate Coloniality Flashcards
Climate Colonialism
The re-embodiment of how, why, and whos is at fault, the climate being colonized and forced to alter, rebelling and resisting the assault upon it.
Problem with current framing of CC:
It does not avoid death of millions because they do not matter.
Climate solutions perpetuating colonialism:
Land grabs, extraction, displacement, and disposession
Example of covert Fossil Fuel manipulation:
Largest delegation during COP26, through denial, delay deflections and dispossessions
Important issues not addressed at COP26:
Hyper-consumptions, fossil fuel dependency, growth models…
What should COP be?
Opportunities to challenge the system, to utter necessary words for people to hear, to collectivise young/old activists, different posistions, create new openings, possibilities of alliances.
Subaltern
Colonial populations socially, poltically, and geographically excluded from hierarchy of power of imperial colonies.
What is Colonization?
A process of being made to feel less than, told what the truths are, valued differently over time an place, dehumanized through epidermalization of inferiority and created as radicalised other.
How structural racism operates:
Unequal ways through colonial and imperial violence by material and epistemology.
How does CC interact with Colonialism?
Reproduces hauntings of colonialism/imperialism, through climate impacts in the post-colony, laying bare past and ongoing coloniality, governing/structuring our lives, co-constitutive of processes of colonialism, imperialism, and international development.
The Ennui of Coloniality:
Being and not being, belonging and not belonging, capaciousness, giving in and resisting
Climate colonial processes:
Pollution, toxic waste, mining, disasters, desertification, deforestation, land erosion…
Role of Extractivism if Climate Coloniality:
Propagated by global capital and state-sanctioned interventions, creates geopolitical climate necropolitics.
Why is Anthropocene Problematic:
Undifferentiated human impact on the planet, negates CBDR
Legacy of Colonialism?
Ecological unequal exchange, domination of developing world through development policies, financial control from imperial powers and instituitions, climate solutions creating sacrifice zones and resource extraction, internaional climate negotionas/targets controlling development in impoverished countries.
Hegemony fossil fuel capitalism?
Development ideologies, westernization, desire for hyper-consumption
Problem with market-based technocratic interventions and green capitalism:
Unequal negotiating power in trade treaties, bilaterla and multilateral agreements, development interventions, climate finance etc.
How does Carbon Colonialism play out?
Greenwashing by expansion of rare earth mineral grabs, deep ocean floor mining, enclosures of commons, local communities/ecosystem destruction for singular gains.
Exampel of a consequence of necropolitics:
State-sanctioned violence, with climate migration despite internationally limiting immigration policies from other states.
Climate apartheid:
Socio-spatial differentiation of who pays disproportiante price of climate breakdown, is made expendable, and who is spared for now.
Who experiences climate apartheid?
Those at an intersectionality of race, gender, and class exposed to ecological harms/toxic environments.
Important way to differentiate emissions:
Luxury vs survival emissions
Consequence of history of climate class struggle:
Developing nations resource exports to developed: incapable of mitigation, lack of clean water/sanitation access, inadequate social safety nets.
How is this climate apartheid reproduced locally?
Intersectionality gendered; capture/colonization womens bodies, subjugation through eurocentric gendered norms, disposability of racialized bodies in sacrifice zones, and controlling women through overpopulation narratives.
Examples of co production of racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism:
COVID-19 and Climate change intersectionality.
Major consequences of climate coloniality:
Limit terms of global debate, hegemonises knowledge of and about climate change, what actions are possible.
Cognitive Coloniality
A manipulation to eliminate other forms of knowledge/value.
How is lacking cognitive justice and epistemic decolonization perpetuated?
Reinforcement of climate coloniality with Western hegemonization of climate narratives, financing, and solutions
Epistemic Racism
Discrimination of knowledge and values based on race
Example of Epistemic Racism:
Internalised in Eurocentric knowledge production, hegemonising climate narratives, financing, solutions
How is extractvism linked to colonialism maintained?
Circuits of development interventions, Foreign Direct Investments, economic growth flows, and transnational capitalis, at expense of racialized and gendered poor.
Approaching decolonization:
Resist ways colonized others made to feel and thinks and being epistemologically and ontologically deficient, and declonizing epistemological understandings and relationships to the Earth, ie problematizing what it means to be human and its praxis.
Specific Example of Carbon Colonialism:
Israels ‘Jewish National Fund’ turn the desert green to plant 250 million trees since 1901, many non-native, greenwashing, with private landowners lawfully not selling land to non-jews.
Example of Green Colonialism in Americas:
Wilderness turned into conservation parks, to prevent Indigenous people from accessing ancestral territories to hunt and fish, Brazillian land-grabbing by conservation organisations
Israeli response to division of West Bank seperation barrier:
Environment Minister: ‘seperation harmful to landscape, floral and fauna/ecological corridors and draianage of creeks, i do not want to stop/delay building of fnece, but I am disturbed by environmental damage involved.
- Created passages for animals, and ecological corridors
Takeaway from Green Colonialism:
Not to ask suffering people to shelve poverty, war, systemic racism, but to recognise its interconnectedness.
Importance of Human Rights opposed to Land Rights:
Shifting territories: eroding coastlines, rising seas, coral reefs that sustain cultures.
Sacrifice Zones:
Appalahcia mountains: coal mine blasting, requires othering to sacrifice entire geographies.
Example of Sacrifice Zones:
Niger Delta, Exxon-valdez oil spill every year, executing community leaders, alberta tar sands shredding treaties denouncing indigenous rights.
Example of Cultural Genocide:
One one night community of Attawapiskat 11 people attempted suicide in 2000.
Why is Homo Economicus proble?,
Homogenises human culture letting their created systems off the hook
Examples of geography-induced war:
Drone strikes targets direcly on/close to 200 mm aridity line, where oil and water scarcity abundnace (bombs follow oil and drones follow drought)
