Climate, Race and Colonialism

Module Title:  Climate, Race and Colonialism

Module Leader: Dr Tobias Mueller

Overview:

The causes and impacts of the climate crisis are deeply shaped by histories of colonialism. Former colonial metropoles are responsible for the vast majority of historic carbon emissions while formerly colonized countries across the Global South are already the most severely affected, with swathes of their territories predicted to become uninhabitable. However, the connections run deeper: not only had colonialism itself terraforming effects such as ecological and genocidal devastation resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, Africa and Asia. Often the same minerals continue to be extracted by the same companies as during formal colonialism, which continue to degrade ecosystems and livelihoods. Across the globe, indigenous peoples and those racialized as black and brown are frequently both those most affected by floods, heatwaves and forced migration, and those most vocally resisting the expansion of fossil fuel and other forms of extractivism. This intimate link between climate collapse and patterns of colonial dispossession has been called climate colonialism or climate coloniality.

This course interrogates the multidimensional connections between the climate crisis, race and colonialism. We will engage a diverse set of texts from politics, sociology, anthropology and human geography that explore decolonial, intersectional, ecofeminist, indigenous, eco-socialist and reparationist, but also reactionary and ecomodernist perspectives. Topics include the debate around understanding the Anthropocene as Capitalocene and Plantationocene, the gendered dimensions of capitalist extractivism, indigenous resistance and ecological liberation movements, and the struggle for comprehensive climate reparations. We will explore how environmentalism has been complicit in colonial dispossession, how movements seek to confront climate colonialism today and what forms of pluriversal knowledges and future solidarities are emerging in face of climate breakdown.