As incoming coeditors, Dolly Jørgensen and I wrote that decolonizing the journal was one of our priorities.1 In this editorial, I outline in greater detail how we understand decolonizing Environmental Humanities as a conceptual, political, and institutional imperative. Origin stories matter. The origins of this journal rest in the acknowledgment by its founding editors, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, that in Australia studying nature and environment was impossible without a reckoning with coloniality. Nature and environment were—scientifically, ideologically, materially—colonial creations, and this marks a point of departure for the environmental humanities. “Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story,” as Kathryn Yusoff puts it.2 This fact implies that more just, sustainable, and flourishing forms of human-nature relations must involve decolonizing nature.
Powerful strands of contemporary decolonial thought have emerged from the Americas. Decolonial anthropology in Latin America has proposed the pluriverse as a means for ontological politics without One Nature but with many naturecultures. Decolonial thought aims to redress the ontological occupation of modernity by underscoring the continued importance of, for example, Earth Beings in antimining politics or the connections of flesh and earth.3 In this “world of many worlds” we witness multiple forms of inhabiting and thinking the earth beyond modern schemas and note the earth politics that flow from this.4 Elsewhere in the Americas, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated Braiding Sweetgrass takes up the challenge of learning and teaching the grammar of animacy, while Malcolm Ferdinand stitches across what he calls the “double fracture” between colonial history and environmental history by putting Caribbean ecology and Maroon experience at the heart of Plantationocene history.5
These perspectives challenge the environmental humanities. They have helped push the field’s appreciation of the multiple ways humans and nonhumans relate. But they must be approached carefully. There is a long history of framing Indigenous peoples as tragic victims of violent pasts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as enchanted figures of progressive politics whose wisdom offers epochal hope for surviving the Anthropocene.6 Neither does justice to the historical and geographical specificities of Indigenous struggles for self-determination and livable futures: Indigenous worlds are not a resource for white self-reflection, and their elaboration cannot be divorced from the need to address the colonial violence of extractive capitalism. Kyle Whyte challenges those who would be allies to Indigenous people and politics to confront the dreams of their own ancestors.7 Whyte reminds those of us birthed in settler-colonial societies that our ancestors would have dreamed of a world of Indigenous annihilation and Black subjugation; this fantasy was designed to bequeath privileges to their own ancestors. Whyte argues that one cannot disavow one’s “ancestral fantasies” and easily switch to a position of innocent allyship:
Some seem to believe that merely attending an Indigenous ceremony and mobilization, such as a the #NoDAPL movement [Dakota Access Pipeline protests], or making social media postings, or doing academic research as a professor, or romanticizing Indigenous wisdom, actually work to transform the levers of colonial power that maintain anti-Indigenous oppression. To believe this, one must assume that the nexus of colonialism, capitalism and industrialization is not as entrenched as it is, which creates the illusion that performing supportive but ineffectual action is enough to merit and justify one’s feeling innocent.8
This is a serious challenge to decolonial thought in the environmental humanities. In the spiral time of inherited histories many of us do not stand on innocent ground, literally or figuratively. My own ancestors—to response to Kyle Whyte’s provocation—were Protestant farmers moved to the north of Ireland to displace the Gaelic Irish. As well as partaking in the collective fantasy of Indigenous and Black dehumanization, they were presumably also very keen on Catholic subjugation. The history of Irish racialization and brutal suppression of anticolonial struggles continues as a live issue shaping natures, commodities, lives, landscapes, and geopolitics.9 I inherit the benefits of white, Protestant, colonial dominion in Ireland, though I am also marked by the anticolonial and paramilitary violence and state securitization of space that formed the context of my childhood during the Troubles. To be clear, I do not mean to imply any equivalence of experience or victimhood, nor to suggest that acknowledging the complexities of colonial positionalities should in any way downplay historic and ongoing racialized violence—far from it. Rather, I note my positionality and some of the ambiguities of our subject positions to suggest that lines of solidarity and allyship can exceed identity politics, emerging from, for example, the unfinished revolution of decolonial politics in Ireland and its fractured colonial subjects.10
This brings me to a major goal for Environmental Humanities’ decolonizing agenda. That is simply to state that approaches to decolonizing nature and environment need to attend to the situated positions and situated histories in which we—collectively and each separately—find ourselves. Decolonial work in Environmental Humanities, at a minimum, must take difference and different inherited histories seriously. This is, of course, a basic tenet of feminist epistemology: knowledge is situated in its production, circulation, and reception.11 Patricia Noxolo references Black Indigenous scholars, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and puts it directly: “Decolonisation begins from the scholarship of black and indigenous peoples and should be led by that scholarship.”12 Clearly, Indigenous, Black, or Latinx thought does not require white validation. We hope that tricky forms of allyship and radical relationality can emerge in the pages of this journal around decolonizing thought and decolonizing nature.
The decolonial imperative can also be broadened. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, there are multiple planetarities: not just the Moderns and their others, but also late modernizers, non-European Moderns, and more besides. We humans are, he writes, “decisively not-one.”13 This not-oneness means ongoing “jostling” of de-, post-, and anticolonial thought.14 Decolonial environments take many forms. Consider, for instance, India’s Zero-Budget Natural Farming initiative. This is one of the largest peasant movements in the world. It takes the form of anticolonial and anticapitalist farming ecology, but expressed through nationalist, ethnic, and religious exclusivity, and so is not straightforwardly progressive.15 Critical evaluations of decolonial ecologies are required, not simply their blanket celebration. We might also take note that historically the main force opposing coloniality was nationalism. Nationalism, in all its guises, became a productive vehicle for anticolonial struggle because the imperial state had so successfully constrained other ways of articulating collective identity or economic solidarity.16 As Priyamvada Gopal has shown, being denied prospects for alternative economic forms left Black and Brown bodies exposed to capitalist exploitation even long after the abolition of slavery, and greatly diminished the capacities of critics of empire to realize their utopian dreams.17 Even the abolitionist state was always at pains to control liberty to defend capital. Environmental Humanities might then also take into account forms of anticolonial praxis that have taken place within Western polities, or structures of “mastery” that animated anticolonial entanglements.18
Environmental Humanities can also consider how alternative ontologies of natureculture and counter–ways of being have always inhabited modernity.19 This might include the hidden histories of Indigenous knowledge in Enlightenment science. Or it might include alter-Enlightenments, such as the experiments in government and economy conducted by pirates and matriarchal Malagasy coastal communities in Madagascar, experiments that prefigured European ideas of freedom and liberty.20 Indeed, the environmental humanities field can take note of revisionist scholarship showing how political ideals, such as equality among all, were not invented ex nihilo in Europe, but traveled there from colonial encounters with Indigenous thinkers.21 Thus, as well as underscoring the need for critical scrutiny, along with elaboration of and alignment with Indigenous and Black thought, one of the demands of Environmental Humanities’ decolonial imperative is to continue to provincialize and decompose the power of One World colonial thinking from within.
Like many institutions globally, my own, the University of Bristol, is reckoning with its imperial past. The toppling of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, United Kingdom, in June 2020 prompted a long-overdue renaming of many buildings across the city. Yet from my office window I still look out on the neo-Gothic Wills Memorial Building—named after the tobacco baron Henry Overton Wills, whose wealth was built on the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans and their descendants.22 And like many institutions which might acknowledge their inhabitation of unceded land, or rename buildings or remove statues or put in place strategies for decolonizing their curricula, structural problems persist: Bristol’s Black population remains underrepresented in the student body, Black and Brown students continue to face abuse and discrimination, and inequality pay gaps exist across higher education employment. Historic constructions of racial ontologies continue to do harm. One key role for Environmental Humanities is to try to address historic and ongoing epistemic violence as it threads through institutions producing knowledge in the present.
The journal and our authors, editors, reviewers, and readers must also confront the difficult fact that academic publishing is not innocent. In our commitment to open-access publishing, Environmental Humanities certainly stands against the commercialization and privatization of knowledge by for-profit corporate publishers.23 But the very apparatus of attributable authorship and copyright remain inseparable from an ideology of individualism and ownership. Articles must pass through peer review and must conform to standards such as defining their contribution to interdisciplinary knowledge through citation: this excludes forms of knowledge that cannot be cast in such a way. It also places barriers to scholars who lack the privileges of institutional support, whether through library access, informal guidance, experience, training, time, or money. It squeezes out heterodox knowledges of all kinds and confers legitimacy and authority according to exclusive criteria. The real danger here is that attending to decolonial thought and anticolonial environments may end up just reinforcing universities’ position as elite knowledge institutions or even dulling transformative critique by transmuting it to the codified format of an academic journal. These are the tensions within which Environmental Humanities operates. We will continue to try and play with and loosen these strictures; we have, for instance, launched the Environmental Humanities in Practice section, a home for non- and para-academic accounts of environmental humanities practice, and we continue to welcome proposals for nontraditional publications and suggestions for doing things differently. We hope that Environmental Humanities can play its part in decomposing conditions of colonial domination and affirm the journal’s commitment to taking difference and different histories seriously. This task is a collective one for all our authors, reviewers, and readers.
Notes
McVeigh and Rolston, “Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh.” I understand the notion of inheriting history through Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto.
Noxolo, “Introduction: Decolonising Geographical Knowledge,” 318, emphasis in original; Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa.”
See, e.g., Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs.
Environmental Humanities is funded and managed by a collaborative partnership between Arizona State University, United States; Concordia University, Canada; Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia; University of California, Los Angeles, United States; and University of Connecticut, United States.
