Green Colonialism

The devastation of Indigenous Life won't end until we scale down the human enterprise.

Indigenous people view both themselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family that share ancestry and origins. — Enrique Salmon, Anthropologist.

While the Western philosophical system is underpinned by the idea that humans are separate from nature and in dominion over it, Indigenous philosophical systems tend to conceive of humans as a part of nature, and in relationship with nature. — The Indigenous Rights of Nature Movement

INDIGENOUS CULTURES manifest kinship with the greater community of life, inclusive of animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms. Yet typical news accounts about indigenous rights divorce Indigenous Peoples from other Indigenous Life. The reason almost certainly has to do with the undue influence of extreme anthropocentrism that characterizes Western and now global civilization.

I’d like to take a moment to consider an article on indigenous rights published this week in The Guardian. Its focus is “green colonialism.” However, like many others of its kind, the article fails to acknowledge the full scope of destruction to the Greater Indigenous World, inclusive of all native life.

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Author Jenni Monet frames the problem of indigenous exploitation as an entirely people’s issue involving resources and territories. Unintentionally or not, this decouples Indigenous Peoples from the rest of life, and aligns them with an alien Western way of thinking of humans as separate from nature and with dominion over it.

Monet points out the heavily financed rush to renewable energy as it impacts Indigenous Peoples. Less evident is green colonialism’s close ties to what’s deceptively called sustainable development—namely, expansion of the global economy while purporting to stem the worst of a climate crisis that could bring down the whole shebang. Sustainable development in practice now demands mass-scale mining, power grid construction, clearing of land for solar and wind developments, and industrialization of the oceans. In effect, the Indigenous World is again being ravaged, this time by a neocolonialism that currently adds to, rather than replaces, that caused by fossil fuels.

Jenni Monet and those she quotes understand the “climate conundrum”(sacrificing Indigenous Life on the altar of “clean” energy development to protect the climate and draw down the need for fossil fuels). But do they comprehend the impossibility of deploying alternative energy sources on an industrial scale without great harm to Indigenous Cultures and Indigenous Life (sensu lato)?

Applauded in the article is Deb Haaland, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior and the nation’s chief natural resources administrator. She strives to fully involve Indigenous Peoples in environmental decision making. Haaland is, after all, the first Native American Cabinet member in U.S. history and an outspoken advocate for indigenous rights.

But here’s the catch: Secretary Haaland promotes de facto industrial colonization of land and water for renewable energy because, she believes, the climate crisis is “the most urgent issue of our lifetime.” At the same time, she also supports oil and gas development. For example, within a matter of recent weeks, Haaland approved massive fossil fuel projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

In her own defense, Haaland notes that many Native groups support oil extraction for economic reasons, and that harm from the Alaska decision will be offset by renewable energy projects, including a plan to produce “solar power from the deserts of Arizona to communities all over the West.’’ This just goes to show how people serving the corporate state can rationalize anything, even at great expense to values that are dear to them.

I don’t mean to villainize Deb Halland or suggest she’s a hypocrite. Rather, I want to point out how easy it is for people, including those of indigenous heritage, to be subsumed by green colonialism. (To be fair, Secretary Haaland and the Biden Administration are better environmentally than their political opponents, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Why world leaders and most of the media fail to acknowledge the connection between continued expansion of the human enterprise and the destruction of the living world is beyond me. The wave of colonialism that initially ravaged the Americas was driven by a population explosion from afar, the acceleration of technology, and the quest for limitless wealth. These factors are precisely the same ones driving “green” colonialism today. They’re tearing apart the last of the Indigenous World, the people and the more-than-humans among them. Yet no one in power has the guts to rein them in.

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You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life. —Habakkuk 2:10