Many commentators have linked the operations and ideologies of colonisation to climate breakdown. Amitav Ghosh argues that the mindset that led to the violent exploitation of Indigenous knowledge, land, labour, and resources was also a way of thinking that defined nature as an inert reservoir existing to be emptied. “These elite orthodoxies,” he writes, “were the product not just of the subjugation of human ‘brutes and savages’, but also of an entire range of nonhuman beings – trees, animals, and landscapes.” This logic of extraction has damaged lands and peoples since at least 1492, when white European cultural, political, and monetary elites began to systematically devastate the Americas, and extended across vast swathes of the world.
Driving divisions across land, natural resources, species, gender, ethnicity, and race, with the goal of generating and maximising profit, colonialism is at once a social and spatial technique. Colonialism employs architecture and infrastructures as an instrument of dispossession, accumulation, and control. Spatial practices have long reinforced colonial power relations: designing enclosures, castles, stowage, barracoons, plantations, segregated cities, offshored factories, autonomous trade zones, and detention centres, as well as places of privilege that all disavow their unjust construction. To design such spaces, architects have specified and used materials and labour from plundered lands, entailing devastation on local and planetary scales.
Climate injustice and climate breakdown share three interlocking causes— colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism— and architecture has served all three. As the theorist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, Kyle Whyte argues, these causes recur like déjà-vu as successive generations of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples lose lands, livelihoods, and lives to so-called development and its devastations to climate. Echoing Whyte’s long view of injustice, many people have criticised a universalising tendency to describe environmental change as a humanmade problem (the Anthropocene) without specifying which humans (which Anthropos) exploit other humans, species, and ecosystems, and when such violence began. In this spirit, Kathryn Yusoff shifts the perspective. Instead of humans, she uses the spatial practice of plantations to define this era, thereby identifying continuities between early modes of imperial violence and present environmental injustice.
Colonisation, and its direct impact on climate, persists to this day under various guises. In addition to the continued expropriation of indigenous lands and resources by global capital and nation states (as well as international waters, Antarctica, the moon…), a growing decarbonisation industry brokers deals whereby the Global North offsets its emissions by planting monoculture forests to absorb carbon dioxide in the Global South, at the cost of biodiversity and indigenous land rights. To make matters worse, many countries only consider domestic production in their emissions data but import many products from overseas, thereby outsourcing carbon responsibility. The construction sector offshores much of its intensive industrial processes to poorer regions with fewer environmental and labour protections. Meanwhile, electric vehicles – celebrated in the Global North for their low emissions – depend on extracting lithium, cobalt, and other rare minerals from vulnerable lands using(often child) labour in regions such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and China. Given such injustices, considering colonial histories and contemporary racial justice in discussions of architecture and climate breakdown is paramount.
This expanded understanding of climate builds upon anti-colonial environmentalism within African, Caribbean, and Pacific-region liberation movements. Working in Portuguese-controlled Guinea in the 1950s, the agronomist Amílcar Cabral drew from Marxism to develop a revolutionary anti-colonial project that understood imperialism as a combined attack on ecosystems and communities. Such initiatives powerfully recuperated the word ‘colony’, recalling its etymology in farm and cultivation, by caring for soil and myriad other habitats and homes.
Cultivating spaces and societies care-fully challenges Euro-Western definitions of humanity which, as the theorist Sylvia Wynter writes, exclude all but homo economicus, or profit-driven man. It also challenges human exceptionalism’s binary logic that separates nature from human for profit. According to physicist and activist Vandana Shiva, in nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life. Cultivating places whose material construction and social uses enable this inclusive sense of vitality is what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls designing for transformative environmental justice.
Anti-colonial environmental movements have similarly cautioned against understanding climate breakdown only in the present tense, emphasising the afterlife of 500 years of settler and exploitation colonialism. The scholar Christina Sharpe writes that “wake work”— a labour of mourning and struggle— characterises contemporary life “in the wake” of slavery and its infamous ships, where “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present”. Facing climate breakdown in ways geared for climate justice, it follows, requires countering a climate of antiblackness, which is one of the reasons why decarbonisation has to be developed hand in hand with decolonisation.
Annotated bibliography
Amitav Ghosh. Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (London: John Murray, 2021).
This is a brilliant tracing of the intersection of colonial domination with climate breakdown. Starting with the tale of the Dutch East India Company’s ruthless exploitation of Indonesian nutmeg, with accompanying genocide and ecocide, Ghosh weaves a rich history of how Eurocentric attitudes lead to viewing nature, planetary resources, and Indigenous communities through a violently extractive lens. Drawing on his experience as a fiction writer, Ghosh calls for indigenous voices and the stories of the beyond-human to be recovered if we are to avoid planetary catastrophe.
Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014).
This compendium of writings by and about the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter gathers important insights into her theories for the interlinked workings of race, place, and time that make up what it means to be human. Drawing from science, history, literature, and Black studies, Wynter unpicks how colonialism created an exclusive category of man that denied Black membership and drove Black dispossession. The book includes a dialogue between its editor, Katherine McKittrick, and Wynter that explores the influence of writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire on Wynter’s anti-colonial thinking.
Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).
First published in 1972, the historian of colonialism and Black Power and Pan-African activist Walter Rodney’s political, economic, and historical analysis of colonialism and its afterlives provides a damning indictment of Europe’s exploitation of Africa under the guise of development. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, the book lays out how Europe strategically kept Africa economically dependent as a method for extracting African labour and natural resources to profit European metropoles. The book has informed scholarship and activism worldwide, fighting global inequality. Just eight years after publishing this book, and shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, Rodney was assassinated. He was only 38.
Vandana Shiva. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2005).
In this book, the scientist and activist Vandana Shiva defines Earth Democracy as a set of practices based on principles of inclusion, nonviolence, reclaiming the commons, and freely sharing the earth’s resources. She tracks such practices in recent feminist and decolonial environmental movements, celebrating their strength in the face of fundamentalism, racism, femicide, and climate breakdown — all of which are symptoms, she argues, of predatory capitalism. Tracing capitalism’s practices of privatisation to 16th century enclosures of the British commons, Shiva demonstrates how shared lands and resources, and the people who care for them, are imperilled without democratic and earth-based solidarities.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
In As We Have Always Done, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explores Indigenous theorising, writing, organising, and thinking as a powerful form of resistance against extractive capitalism and its settler colonial mindset. In the ongoing contexts of tar sands drilling and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, Simpson argues that assimilation within a cultural melting-pot is no longer viable when so many lands and lives are at stake. Her book foregrounds Indigenous ways of knowing and living as a fundamental alternative to the destructive operations of settler colonialist states and their capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist logics.
Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).In this powerful book of barely 100 pages, the geographer Kathryn Yusoff argues that “no geology is neutral” but instead reveals traces of extractive processes driving capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism. Whereas some thinkers have dated our Anthropocene age to the beginning Industrial Revolution, or even later, to accelerations of consumption in the 1960s, Yusoff follows decolonial and black feminist scholars in tracing its origins to colonialism and slavery. It was colonialism, she argues, that developed an inhumane grammar separating some humans from others, and from nature itself, in the name of capital. Facing climate breakdown today, therefore, requires facing up to its colonial causes.