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Decolonial Ecology is a current of political ecology which positions itself against imperialism, extractivism, speciesism, and western neocolonialism. The boundaries of decolonial ecology as an academic discipline remain unclear, but clearly overlap with the decolonial stream of Feminist Political Ecology and other non-ecological streams of decolonial though. One key contribution is the book Decolonial Ecology by scholar Malcom Ferdinand.

Decolonial Ecology centres the stories and knowledges of colonised peoples. By doing so, it explores the historical and contemporary connections between colonial relations and ecological destruction. It is considered an important contribution to political thought because it provides a framework to build alliances between decolonial and ecological struggles.

Key concepts

In the book Decolonial Ecology, Malcom Ferdinand offers several new concepts:

Colonial inhabitation

Ferdinand proposes the term colonial inhabitation to illustrate how a single worldview, first embodied in the colonial era, persists and can be found at the root of several socio-political issues today. Key characteristics of this worldview include the perceived superiority of the white, able-bodied, European male; a sense of entitlement; and a brutal disregard for those 'othered'. Colonial inhabitation is proposed as the philosophical root of the destruction and domination of land, non-human nature (including biodiversity and soil), and ‘othered’ human beings (primarily women, indigenous peoples, and the enslaved). He highlights institutions and material actions which result from and perpetuate this worldview. The term subverts colonist vocabulary; in the Caribbean, various documents of colonial law show that settler-colonists saw only themselves as true ‘inhabitants’.

Those communities whose lives pre-dated colonist arrival were subject to ‘othercide’ – both a material destruction of life (cf. femicide, genocide, ecocide) and an ontological attack on other-ness (universalizing all cultures and ways of being into a single hierarchical view of the world).

Colonial and environmental double fracture

Malcom Ferdinand introduces the concept of the colonial and environmental double fracture to describe a separation between the analysis of and opposition to colonial and ecological injustices. Ferdinand argues that there is generally either a concern with social injustices related to a colonial fracture or with ecological destructions stemming from an environmental fracture but that the two colonial and environmental fractures are rarely thought about and opposed at the same time. He exemplifies this by pointing to the division and to the lack of alliances between anti-racist and ecological movements in the USA and Europe.

• The colonial fracture refers to the valorization, hierarchization, and discrimination between humans based on constructed categories of social difference such as race, class, and gender. The colonial fracture has its origins in the onset of colonialism because racist ideologies were foundational to colonial conquests and used as a justification for the genocides and oppression of Indigenous, Black, and Peoples of Color by white European colonialists. The colonial fracture today materializes, among others, in structural racism, patriarchal violence, classism and ableism.

• The environmental fracture rests on modernity's dualistic separation between Nature and Society. Human-centered ideologies place humans over nature and reduce non-human animals and ecosystems to exploitable resources, which fuels their exploitation and destruction.

Ferdinand argues that the ignorance of the interconnections between the environmental and colonial fractures is a major driver of ongoing social-ecological destruction because it hinders overcoming the colonial inhabitation of the Earth:

"Yet, by leaving aside the colonial question, ecologists and green activists overlook the fact that both historical colonization and contemporary structural racism are at the center of destructive ways of inhabiting the Earth. Leaving aside the environmental and animal questions, antiracist and postcolonial movements miss the forms of violence that exacerbate the domination of the enslaved, the colonized, and racialized women."

— Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, (2022, p.115)

Plantationocene and Negrocene

Ferdinand criticizes the hegemonic concept of the Anthropocene and proposes two different concepts to define the current geological era: The Plantationocene and the Negrocene.

The concept of the Plantationocene was created by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway. The Plantationocene applies the logic of plantations to understand the structure of the world and its principles of inhabitation. In this sense, how the logic of plantations has organized modern economies, the environment, and relationships between humans and non-human species. By taking the plantations as a core theoretical framework, Ferdinand maps out the material, economic, historical, geographical, and political dimensions of the plantations and how it dominates the world today. In that sense, it recognizes the colonial and slave-making relations, the relentless exploitation, extractivism and contamination of people, non-human species, and the environment by and for the benefit of, a minority of people. Hence, it acknowledges the history that the concept of the Anthropocene neglects.

Similarly, the Negrocene is a concept for the current geological era that puts colonial slavery as a form of colonial inhabitation at its centre of analysis. Ferdinand uses the term ´Negro´ for all the humans and non-human species whose existence has been denied, whose vital energy has been exploited and who were forced to inhabit the world according to the desires of a few people. Hence, the Negrocene understands the productive work of the ´Negro´ that was used for the expansion of the colonial inhabitation of the world, to be the fundamental geomorphic force of this geological era. This concept gives attention to the unjust power relations and the domination of a minority over the majority. Importantly, it rewrites history from the perspective of the `Negro´ and their anti-slavery resistances. Hence, it goes against the Anthropocene's false universalisation and homogenization of all humans as equally responsible for the current socio-ecological crisis.

Worldly-Ecology

Worldly-Ecology is about re-imagining, re-constructing and re-composing the world, by healing the double fracture of modernity. Worldly-Ecology offers a new relational ontology that re-conceptualizes human inhabitation, and its relation to non-human beings. It creates a composition of the world in which the transgenerational pluralities of human, and non-human entities, are recognized. It considers the inter-connectedness and relationality between all beings, and accounts for their situation within the colonial and imperial history. Worldly-Ecology's aim is to create a bridge of justice that brings together humans and non-humans and allows interspecies alliances. This bridge connects both the past and future and advocates for transgenerational environmental and social justice. Three types of construction efforts are part of Worldly-Ecology: the struggles of the world's indigenous peoples, the demands for reparations for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, and the demands for the restitution of art objects and human body parts that were stolen from the African continent by European Imperial powers. This bridge of justice requires a complete decolonization of institutions in the Global North (i.e. museums, universities, state, religious institutions). Worldly-Ecology seeks out such a decolonization through ontological, aesthetical and political shifts.

However, the field of decolonial ecology is also informed by concepts from other disciplines, including:

Ecological unequal exchange

Emerging from ecological economics, ecological unequal exchange (EUE) as a theory conceptualises the inequities hidden in trade flows between countries. As a method, EUE illustrates how some countries benefit from a net appropriation of commodities (such as wood, human labour, or land) from others. By quantifying these inequalities, EUE can strengthen analyses of (neo-)colonial relations, and thus relates heavily to decolonial ecology.

Ecological debt represents the accumulation of this EUE over history. EUE builds on unequal exchange, which typically expresses these inequalities in financial terms.

Environmental racism

The term environmental racism was coined in the USA within the civil rights movement in the 1980s. Environmental racism describes that environmental burdens such as the locations of incinerators, toxic landfills and industrial plants are disproportionately placed upon communities of Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Within the environmental justice movement, the term environmental racism has been broadened to include global dimensions of environmental injustice in the form of imperial extractivism and unequal ecological exchange.

Environmental Racism is related to the field of decolonial (political) ecology because it emphasizes that the distribution of environmental burdens are not random and not distributed through "neutral" decisions but are linked to colonial histories and social-economic structures that discriminate on the basis of race, class and gender.

Decolonial ecology and praxis

Social movements and struggles that center interconnections between ecological, social, and spiritual deteriorations in their theory of change can be linked to the field of decolonial ecology. In practice, this means that the destruction of ecosystems and social injustices are, ideally, opposed as one and the same problem.

In his book, Decolonial Ecology, Ferdinand proposes that there are four overarching types of struggles that can be identified in relation to decolonial ecology.

1. As the first archetype, Ferdinand highlights struggles led by Indigenous Peoples such as the French Guiana mobilizing against the Montagne d'Or mine project or the Native American resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Indigenous peoples are deeply connected to the territories they inhabit, which is why their opposition to environmental destruction is always also a fight for cultural identities, alternative cosmologies and the right to self-determination.
2. Secondly, Ferdinand highlights anti-racist movements that are fighting for the emancipation of all racialized people from the legacies of the slave trade and racist ideologies. The intersection between structural racism and environmental destruction is particularly relevant to the field of decolonial ecology. The civil rights movement in the USA, for instance, gave rise to the environmental justice movement based on the recognition that structural racism and environmental pollution intersect to distribute environmental burdens and benefits along racialized lines.
3. Thirdly, Ferdinand links struggles that are informed by a feminist political ecology to the field of decolonial ecology. Movements such as the Chipko movement in India and the Green Belt Movement founded in Kenya, have in common that they expose links between colonialism, racism, the patriarchy and the destruction of ecosystems, which is why they are related to decolonial ecology.
4. Lastly, Ferdinand argues that while certain political-ecological injustices are specific to indigenous peoples, racialized individuals, and women, there are also situations in which other groups can practice decolonial ecology. He gives the example of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France or the Hambacher Forst in Germany. Ferdinand argues that both protests oppose the colonialization of the local living environment by the state and corporations for a monetary benefit at the cost of local inhabitants. They are thereby opposing the continuation of the colonial inhabitation of the Earth that centers around the reduction of people and ecosystems to resources at the cost of destroying local as well as global commons.

The Environmental Justice Atlas Project is a database that includes environmental justice struggles around the world that can be explored from a decolonial (political) ecology perspective according to the degree to which they combine social and ecological perspectives in their activities and demands.

Critiques

The global applicability of Ferdinand’s ideas, particularly for those who lie outside the scope of European imperialism, remains unclear. Similarly, the tension between technology’s role in creating ecological issues in the material world, and providing capacity to build alliances towards a worldly ecology, remains unresolved. It has been highlighted that the contribution of capitalism to contemporary socio-political and ecological struggles are under-emphasised in Ferdinand’s work.