Decolonial Ecology

Download or read book Decolonial Ecology written by Malcom Ferdinand and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities and, on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular. In this important new book, Malcom Ferdinand challenges this double fracture, thinking from the Caribbean world. Here, the slave ship reveals the inequalities that continue during the storm: some are shackled inside the hold and even thrown overboard at the first gusts of wind. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work in the Caribbean, Ferdinand conceptualizes a decolonial ecology that holds protecting the environment together with the political struggles against (post)colonial domination, structural racism, and misogynistic practices. Facing the storm, this book is an invitation to build a world-ship where humans and non-humans can live together on a bridge of justice and shape a common world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental humanities and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as anyone interested in ecology, slavery, and (de)colonization.

Download or read book Rock | Water | Life written by Lesley Green and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

Download or read book Time and Social Theory written by Barbara Adam and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.

Download or read book Ariel's Ecology written by Monique Allewaert and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

Download or read book Savage Ecology written by Jairus Victor Grove and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

Download or read book The Politics of Decolonial Investigations written by Walter D. Mignolo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Download or read book Agroecology Now! written by Colin Ray Anderson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book develops a framework for advancing agroecology transformations focusing on power, politics and governance. It explores the potential of agroecology as a sustainable and socially just alternative to today’s dominant food regime. Agroecology is an ecological approach to farming that addresses climate change and biodiversity loss while contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals. Agroecology transformations represent a challenge to the power of corporations in controlling food system and a rejection of the industrial food systems that are at the root of many social and ecological ills. In this book the authors analyse the conditions that enable and disable agroecology’s potential and present six ‘domains of transformation’ where it comes into conflict with the dominant food system. They argue that food sovereignty, community-self organization and a shift to bottom-up governance are critical for the transformation to a socially just and ecologically viable food system. This book will be a valuable resource to researchers, students, policy makers and professionals across multidisciplinary areas including in the fields of food politics, international development, sustainability and resilience.