"Disaster Decolonization: A Statement from the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice in the Era of COVID-19, Disaster Capitalism, and Heterosexist Racial Violence"
Written 2020
Summary:
We argue that the only solution to climate change and healing the Earth is to dismantle the 500+ years of capitalist heteropatriarchal colonialism that has created a disaster in the so-called U.S. and the globe: the long disaster of climate colonialism requires the antidote of disaster decolonization.
Disaster decolonization is an art and practice of rebellious persistence and regeneration despite the long disaster of colonialism, extraction, capitalism and imperialism. It is the method of alignment amongst long-term intergenerational resistance struggles and present-day tactics towards a long-term material, cosmological, and epistemic building of the next world and in-defense of Indigenous worlds. Disaster decolonization opens up the opportunity to reject reformist strategies in order to channel collective energy towards long-term autonomous and land-based practices that create and sustain life-driven cycles. It nurtures many seeds across calendars and geographies that refuse to allow concrete to disrupt ancient cycles of seasonal rebirth where, in spite of intensifying industrialization and colonial-driven disasters across time and space, these seeds align their resistance to the violent opportunism that aims to exploit them.
We focus on climate change as a symptom of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist structures that cannot be solved within settler governments, nor with reformist policies like the still-capitalist Green New Deal. We critique the Green New Deal as a solution to climate change and analyze COVID-19, #BLM uprisings and #LandBack as important contexts to see decolonization and rematriation of indigenous lands and waters as necessary life-saving movements. We end with suggested tools for conviviality for building autonomous and feminist relationship-building practices within decolonial and abolition movements.
Full Manifesto Forthcoming
Preliminary writings on "Disaster Decolonization":
Decolonizing the Disaster: Defending Land & Life During Covid-19, by CIEJ member Dr. Amrah Salomón
A challenge to Green New Deal Activists: We Need to Reject "Sustainable" Technologies That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation on Indigenous Peoples, by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice
New Gold Rush, Same Genocide, by CIEJ member Dr. Amrah Salomón
Summary:
We argue that the only solution to climate change and healing the Earth is to dismantle the 500+ years of capitalist heteropatriarchal colonialism that has created a disaster in the so-called U.S. and the globe: the long disaster of climate colonialism requires the antidote of disaster decolonization.
Disaster decolonization is an art and practice of rebellious persistence and regeneration despite the long disaster of colonialism, extraction, capitalism and imperialism. It is the method of alignment amongst long-term intergenerational resistance struggles and present-day tactics towards a long-term material, cosmological, and epistemic building of the next world and in-defense of Indigenous worlds. Disaster decolonization opens up the opportunity to reject reformist strategies in order to channel collective energy towards long-term autonomous and land-based practices that create and sustain life-driven cycles. It nurtures many seeds across calendars and geographies that refuse to allow concrete to disrupt ancient cycles of seasonal rebirth where, in spite of intensifying industrialization and colonial-driven disasters across time and space, these seeds align their resistance to the violent opportunism that aims to exploit them.
We focus on climate change as a symptom of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist structures that cannot be solved within settler governments, nor with reformist policies like the still-capitalist Green New Deal. We critique the Green New Deal as a solution to climate change and analyze COVID-19, #BLM uprisings and #LandBack as important contexts to see decolonization and rematriation of indigenous lands and waters as necessary life-saving movements. We end with suggested tools for conviviality for building autonomous and feminist relationship-building practices within decolonial and abolition movements.
Full Manifesto Forthcoming
Preliminary writings on "Disaster Decolonization":
Decolonizing the Disaster: Defending Land & Life During Covid-19, by CIEJ member Dr. Amrah Salomón
A challenge to Green New Deal Activists: We Need to Reject "Sustainable" Technologies That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation on Indigenous Peoples, by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice
New Gold Rush, Same Genocide, by CIEJ member Dr. Amrah Salomón
