Colonialism, Development, and the Environment

Colonialism, Development, and the Environment
Author: Pallavi V. Das
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2016-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137494581

This study explores the confluence of economy and ecology in British India, showing that Britain initiated economic development strategies in India in order to efficiently extract resources from it. It looks specifically at how state railway construction and forest conservation efforts took on a cyclical, almost symbiotic relationship.

Pollution Is Colonialism

Pollution Is Colonialism
Author: Max Liboiron
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2021-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021446

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

Decolonial Ecology

Decolonial Ecology
Author: Malcom Ferdinand
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509546243

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.

Green Imperialism

Green Imperialism
Author: Richard H. Grove
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1996-03-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521565134

The first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, especially its colonial and global aspects.

Seeds of Control

Seeds of Control
Author: David Fedman
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295747471

Conservation as a tool of colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into supply chains that grew in tandem with Japan’s imperial sphere. These mechanisms of resource control were only fortified after 1937, when the peninsula and its forests were mobilized for total war. In this wide-ranging study David Fedman explores Japanese imperialism through the lens of forest conservation in colonial Korea—a project of environmental rule that outlived the empire itself. Holding up for scrutiny the notion of conservation, Seeds of Control examines the roots of Japanese ideas about the Korean landscape, as well as the consequences and aftermath of Japanese approaches to Korea’s “greenification.” Drawing from sources in Japanese and Korean, Fedman writes colonized lands into Japanese environmental history, revealing a largely untold story of green imperialism in Asia.

Ecological Imperialism

Ecological Imperialism
Author: Alfred W. Crosby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107569877

A fascinating study of the important role of biology in European expansion, from 900 to 1900.

This Fissured Land

This Fissured Land
Author: Madhav Gadgil
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1993-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520082960

"A masterful study. . . . It does for ecological history what the writings of Marx and Engels did for the study of class relations and social production."—Michael Adas, Rutgers University

As Long as Grass Grows

As Long as Grass Grows
Author: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807073792

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.

Changes in the Land

Changes in the Land
Author: William Cronon
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 142992828X

The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

Landscapes of Injustice

Landscapes of Injustice
Author: Jordan Stanger-Ross
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2020-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228003075

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.