The Wretched Earth

Abstract

We begin with the recognition that the Earth is wretched. This is not a metaphor. It is literally our ground. The Earth is wretched because its soil - that thin layer of earth at the surface of the planet upon which we depend for life - is contaminated, eroded, drained, burnt, exploded, flooded and impoverished on a worldwide scale. Our title evokes Frantz Fanon’s seminal book The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which called upon the wretched of the earth (les damnés de la terre) to rise up against imperialism in all its forms and create a new world that would depart from the hypocrisies and violence of European humanism. As Jennifer Wenzel and other scholars of postcolonial environmental humanities have pointed out, despite his profound anthropocentricism and utilitarianism with regard to the natural world, Fanon’s work is crucial for recognizing that, as he states, the land is ‘the most essential value’: ‘European opulence has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that under-developed world.’1 That fundamental insight forms part of a long line of anti-imperialist critique that includes Justus von Liebig, the nineteenthcentury German soil scientist and ‘father of the fertilizer industry’, whose work greatly influenced Marx’s writing on soil and ecology and who identified British agriculture and imperialism as a policy of robbing the nutrients and resources of the soil of other countries.