Race and climate change: Towards anti-racist ecologies

Abstract

Global South scholars have long documented and theorised their communities’ struggles against the ecological degradation, toxic contamination, and climate change–related extreme weather events which result from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Building on that existing work, contributors to this collection extend and deepen understandings of the material entanglements of race and ecology in our contemporary conjuncture. Speaking from various scales and locations, including the Caribbean, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Palestine, the authors reflect on those sites while also collectively recovering and amplifying lineages of thought on ecology from across the South. As the contributions collected here show, the traps set by global structures of race also direct mainstream climate solutions back towards the expropriation, premature death, or prevention of birth of peoples of colour by various means, from militarised conservation to eugenic populationism. Confronting the racial logics of both ecological harm and its supposed solutions is therefore a key task of this collection. As a collective, however, the issue’s contributors also carve out paths to reparation and structural change which form the contours of an anti-racist ecology for our times.