Decolonial ecology: thinking from the Caribbean world

The concept of ‘crisis’ features prominently in many scholarly and popular enframings of modernity, and indeed there are seemingly many crises to choose from. Which is most important for understanding this moment and articulating a politics out of it? Malcom Ferdinand focuses on two prominent enframings of modernity’s crisis. First, the ecological and climate crisis, to which those broadly termed ‘environmentalists’ are committed; second, the crisis of racialized inequality, to which those who are concerned with ‘social justice’ are committed.

Both perspectives can articulate a critique of colonialism. From the perspective of the ecological crisis, colonialism began the process of wrecking the Earth by instrumentalising the non-human world; from the perspective of the inequality crisis, colonialism began the process of wrecking human societies by violently constructing the inferiority of all non-European ontologies. Yet, aside from a few productive crossovers (including the environmental justice movement in the 1980s and the scholarly traditions of political ecology and environmental history), these perspectives themselves remain separate.

It is this separation – treating environmental destruction and social injustice as two different problems – that Ferdinand’s book categorically rejects. In its place, Ferdinand defends an explicitly hybridized conceptualization of these perspectives: a decolonial ecology. Moreover, he shows that this conceptual and political alliance was always already there in the history of colonialism generally, and especially evident in the social and ecological history of the Caribbean.

The Caribbean is Ferdinand’s birthplace (specifically, the island of Martinique, which remains an overseas territory of France), it is the site of some of the most ghastly scenes of the slave trade, and it is one of the regions most affected by climate disasters today, particularly in the form of tropical storms. Thus, to think from the Caribbean – per the subtitle of the book – is to very quickly realise that the political and philosophical act of pulling apart the social from the ecological is an illusion that does not stand up to historical scrutiny, nor does it contain a viable path out of colonialism’s legacy of crisis.

The book proceeds in four parts, beginning with a layered description of modernity’s crises. Dispensing with ‘the Anthropocene’ – a depoliticised term which (re)commits the ontological violence of colonialism by superimposing a universal ‘we’ on all peoples – Ferdinand argues for the conceptual merits of ‘Plantationocene’ and ‘Negrocene’. These imaginaries foreground modernity’s founding moments: the brutal conquests of colonisers; the clearing of vegetation, animals, and people; the abducting, transportation, and enslavement of millions of people; the extreme suffering of enslaved women; the enrichment of a powerful few; the demand for food and goods from a distant metropole.

By supplying a wealth of historical examples, including the names of specific slave ships and the nature of their cargo, Ferdinand demands that we view ‘modernity’ from the hold of a slave ship. Once we do, and we look around at the human and non-human resources entombed therein, nameless, alienated, and monetised, we start to get the measure of the damage wreaked by the colonial inhabitation of earth. From the imaginary of the slave ship’s hold, we can no longer sustain a separation between social and ecological justice. This evocative rhetorical device, which Ferdinand returns to repeatedly, is a powerful contribution to the effort to think of the world in pluralistic ways, forging bonds of solidarity between humans and non-humans.

With this historical and metaphorical grounding established, the next two parts are dedicated to exposing why neither an ecological nor an antiracist problematique is sufficient on their own. Importantly, Ferdinand does not find both ‘sides’ to be equally guilty of sustaining the separation, what he calls the double fracture between them. On the contrary, he finds a particular environmentalist imaginary, the one that ignores differences between humans in favour of saving ‘nature’, guilty of a racism that is itself culpably apolitical and, ultimately, ecologically destructive. Ferdinand is also critical, though less so, of activist and scholarly movements for the liberation of slaves, Black people, and women, that fail to include the liberation of the nonhuman world in their demands for justice. When the oppressed’s goal is to become the master over the Earth, such that the Earth remains enslaved, the basic political dynamics of the plantation do not go away.

Finally, in part four, Ferdinand shows that integrating an ecological with a social critique, and rooting it in a clear-eyed reading of colonialism and the slave trade, transforms that critique. It becomes a decolonial ecological critique with no patience for solutions that fail to also transform fundamentally our ecological and social ways of living together in the world. Building on the maritime images throughout the book, Ferdinand’s positive proposal is to build a world-ship capable of world-making, in the Arendtian sense of coming together and encountering one another in the moment of political possibility. The aspirational image of the world-ship is imbued with a call for human justice that is conditional on a concomitant call for the end of nonhuman exploitation. It demands reparation for the past in order to sail towards a pluralistic horizon of possibility.

This book is a powerful political and scholarly statement that exposes, in order to undermine, reductive enframings of modernity that themselves sustain epistemological barriers between groups that should be on the same side. Its richest contributions lie in the Caribbean-inspired, creolised deployment of political concepts, and of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Henry David Thoreau, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Ferdinand spends considerable time building the conceptual framework of ‘the Maroon’ from the history and modern-day descendants of escaped slaves – people who rejected their oppression and had to live off the land and forge a new creolised culture and identity in the mountains – to build a fresh ecological political theory of freedom.

Questions remain about the role that technology would play in the world-ship, whether its mediating role stands in the way, or is a facilitator, of the politics of encounter that Ferdinand espouses. While he admirably takes the material world as-is for a starting point, that starting point arguably under-accounts for the reality of a technologically mediated economic, political, and social sphere, which would surely play a significant role in the politics of encounter required for transformative cross-cultural and cross-species world-making.

In terms of style, some may find the imagistic language occasionally heavy-going, but it stands in Ferdinand’s favour that it is proffered without apology. His description of the project is itself a metaphor: this is ‘sutural writing’ (22) to heal the fracture between these two perspectives of the world, stitching them together into a singular critique and horizon of possibility. This is a work heavy in metaphor that is at the same time resolutely supported by evidence: extensive archival research and the author’s own ethnographic fieldwork in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and others.

The book is a provocation to those thinkers who stress the importance of thinking about the environment through the perspective of geological time, which is a temporal horizon that considers the details of events like colonialism to be insignificant on a planetary scale. Ferdinand’s work is a vehement rejection of that move, an insistence that any thought about modernity’s ‘crisis’ must start with the racist and ecocidal violence of colonialism that created it.