This Land Is My Land
Decolonizing Environmentalism
art by @collagebyg
Ownership is a key pillar of the American dream. Ownership of land, especially, is fraught with political and ideological importance. After all, there cannot be a picket fence without land to stake it in.
It is impossible to separate this western mindset from our modern ideas about how land works and who should be in charge. As a young nation, birthed from colonial ashes, land ownership was so deeply ingrained into society it was even a prerequisite to being a voter. For most of us, the concept of owning land is simply rational.
This idea is a social construct that runs especially deep in western culture. When looked at critically and globally, though, the idea that private interests have any right to the Earth is anything but natural. The phrase “playing God” may seem cliche, but it’s apt when describing our individualist culture which prizes humanity as unique and special, while our own mortality is taboo. Overall, it’s the false idea that we can control and manipulate the forces of nature to our bidding. After all, the American flag stands on the surface of the moon. We can edit genes and clone organisms. We manipulate the Earth’s systems to suit our needs. All these facts that we know to be true stem from the unfounded premise that Earth belongs to us.
Our society is synthetic. Many of us live a long drive away from what we might call nature. For these people, our thoughts about food end with the grocery store. If they do extend, it’s to how we can harness the land we consider ours to produce more for us. Subjugate animals, to produce more for us. How can we manipulate the environment, separate from our human experience, to serve it? We’ve created lives for ourselves that force the environment to bend to our will, because we believe we cannot live in harmony with it.
That’s not to say our advancements in technology are inherently bad. They’ve allowed quality of life to improve greatly. However, we’ve divorced our concept of self from the concept of the environment when, in reality, we are animals like any other. We can never own the Earth — it owns us. And as much as we’d like to think we’ve dominated it, that is a dangerous lie. We aren’t separate from the environment. We are one. Our success or failure in protecting it will determine our fate as a species. That is set in stone.
This is by no means an original concept. Indigenous peoples around the world have always recognized their place as protectors of the land, friends, not enemies or owners. According to Cultural Survival, an Indigenous rights advocacy group, “Many indigenous groups refer to their unique relationship with their particular traditional territory as ‘I belong to this land,’ as opposed to the classic Western articulation, ‘this land belongs to me.’” Historically, people of color have understood the idea that we are one with our Earth, not opposing forces. Our perspective on the environment in the U.S. is colonized, as are our ideas about how to help it.
We often hear the narrative that, by nature, humans are greedy, selfish, and evil, and this is why “humans” ruined the “environment.” This narrative is harmful in more ways than one. Firstly, it expresses the notion that we are somehow something other than our environment, which is a damaging and unproductive paradigm. More importantly, it ignores the place colonization has at the core of modern history, and shifts blame from white supremacist notions of how society should look onto humanity as a whole. The truth: humans didn’t destroy the environment - white supremacy did.
So what do we do? There’s no shortage of ideas, most of which revolve around adding something helpful to our environment without taking anything away. Finding new ways to extract carbon from the air, or from the sea, how to engineer meat in a lab, or convert our masses of waste into energy. These “solutions” all have something in common: they require no change to most of our ways of life. That is why they are popular.
When we say we want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, we forget there’s already a system for that — photosynthesis. We once lived fulfilling lives that worked in harmony with this built-in system instead of against it. By forgetting, we feed into a narrative of white saviorism and supremacy, and ignore the fact that people were living meaningful, sustainable lives before colonizers arrived on the continent. This narrative is contingent on the idea that mainstream western life is the ideal, and refuses to compromise. That’s not to say we need to undo hundreds of years of industrial and civic development, but real solutions will require real lifestyle changes, even if they are inconvenient or uncomfortable for privileged westerners.
This is why Indigenous voices must be centered in our discussions toward solutions, alongside other people of color. Especially in our conversations about climate change and environmentalism, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) need to be centered because they are hurt the most by its impact. For example, due to institutional housing policies, communities of color and lower-income communities are more likely to be exposed to pollution and toxins. These underfunded communities also face safety risks in the wake of natural disasters that are increasing due to climate change. Additionally, less-developed countries, which tend to be home to primarily POC, contribute the least to climate change, but because of their location, less-secure infrastructure, and access to resources, are the most vulnerable. Their labor, frequently that of women of color, is exploited by developed countries to fuel excessive consumption habits, those that decimate our environment. And, for many Indigenous communities, land that is sacred and resources that are culturally important are being destroyed in the name of capitalism.
Intersectionality isn’t just the best way forward for the environmental justice movement - it is the only way forward. According to National Geographic, Indigenous people represent only five percent of the world population (this statistic has a brutal history of its own) yet protect 80 percent of biodiversity. It is simply irresponsible to ignore these all-important efforts, to fail to support their work. It is simply irresponsible to ignore the fact that BIPOC Americans are dying because of our mistreatment of the one and only Earth, or to scoff at countries who do not have the ability to take on this crisis alone while their pleas for help slip below the surface of rising sea levels. Our generation and those to come will not escape this crisis alive without massive personal and systemic changes to our way of life. We need to listen to BIPOC leaders in the environmental justice movement, support the work they are already doing, and center their voices in conversations about new solutions. Most of all, we need to understand that Earth isn’t, and never was, ours to own. We belong to this land.
Sources:
http://greenaction.org/what-is-environmental-justice/