Decolonial Ecology offers a framework of what could be. It is, in many ways, a book to live by, connecting theoretical notions of environmental justice with realities both historical and forward-facing, from the ways that the slave trade has facilitated environmental damage to the possibilities of unifying social justice movements to create a better future. Ferdinand weaves together many metaphors, each of which represent different dimensions of the colonial makings that limit today’s mainstream narratives of anthropogenic climate change. These metaphors draw upon previous work, from Charles Mills to Rob Nixon, to connect colonialism, racism, and ecological destruction.
First, Ferdinand illustrates the ideas of mainstream ecology, in which the Anthropocene is conceptualized as a movement that is independent of other injustices. As Charles Mills writes in “Black Trash,” this movement attempts to be apolitical, obscuring the structures of domination that have led to our current reality. Ferdinand makes it explicit that a framework of decolonial ecology paints a different picture where the destruction that mankind has wreaked on the Earth is not by a homogenous notion of man, but rather a specific group. He uses the terminology of the Plantationocene and the Negrocene, rather than the Anthropocene, to capture the inextricable link between slavery and the environment. He characterizes the slave trade as not only a crime against humanity but also an ecocide, a crime that has harmed the planet and its capacity to have humans. Ferdinand lumps the environmental landscape with social and political ones, characterizing racism as the dominant paradigm that enables the abusive engineering of these spaces.
Ferdinand uses the metaphor of Noah’s ark to describe the world that such “environmentalists” aspire to achieve. They dream of a world that supposedly once was, invoking notions of safety, paradise, and refuge for a select few. Ferdinand problematizes this “ideology of wilderness” against the backdrop of natural catastrophes. The environmental destruction in Puerto Rico is emblematic of this “new Western civilizing mission, a modern rendition of the White man’s burden,” to protect enclaves of paradise. This paradise is imagined to have incredible biodiversity that must be saved from “careless and faceless hands.” And while this version of environmentalism aims to protect these reserves at any cost, it completely neglects the populations outside the carefully-drawn boundaries of these reserves and obscures the fact that such notions of paradise are only made necessary by the violence enacted by the same forces of colonialism—the same actors pretend to aim to fix the problem that they themselves have created, all the while othering and displacing the indigenous inhabitants of the areas that are most devastated by environmental injustice. This calls upon Mills’ assertion that Westerners treated indigenous people as part of the local flora and fauna, and thus unworthy of human rights.
Ferdinand also describes the free use of toxic substances that have been used to control nature, and their users' utter lack of concern for the ways that these substances devastate local communities. Such acts result in a slow, multidimensional violence that slowly destroys the landscape and thus the lives of its inhabitants. This idea builds on Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which discusses the ways that ecological destruction disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities in ways that are at once so slow that they are undetectable and so vast that they cannot be fully captured, from the “indiscriminate casualties” caused by DDT to the limbless “jellyfish babies” borne decades after nuclear devastation to the lasting fallout of the chemical weapons used during the Vietnam War. Moreover, this violence often occurs so slowly that it often becomes decoupled and de-attributed from the original cause of environmental damage. Nixon explores the powers behind the forced removals of impoverished populations from their homes, and laments the lack of scholarship discussing the relationship between the foreign policies of Western powers (specifically, American-led neoliberal economic policies) and ecological destruction. Ferdinand’s work perhaps begins to bridge that gap, as Decolonial Ecology also discusses the economic incentives that have put such structures in place: for example, banana farming continues, despite the contamination it engenders, because it yields more profit to corporations than sustainable forms of agriculture. Ferdinand terms this colonial heterotopia, an imaginary that permits horrors—ones that would be unfathomable in the centered spaces—to occur at those deemed as the margins. This form of “Noah’s Ark” environmentalism only prolongs the subjugation of the enslaved.
Ferdinand contrasts the Noah’s Ark to the slave ship by invoking the politics of the hold. He describes how Negroes were forced onto these ships, viewed never as subjects but instead as objects: “the enslaved are kept offside of responsibility, as regards both the land and the colonial world. Hold politics produces off-ground individuals.” This fracture continues to be seen in the spatial isolation continued in the patterns of geographical segregation that percolate the United States today, which Charles Mills weaves into the notion of the racial contract and “a geography of aversion.”
Ferdinand is careful to distinguish the Negro as distinct from the mere idea of a racial Capitalocene, referring to “those who were and are in the hold of the modern world: the off-world.” Ferdinand articulates how it is the “productive work of the Negro, directed at expanding colonial inhabitation” that has caused changes in the Earth’s ecology and environment. He likens this productive power to another form of energy comparable to oil, gas, coal, and wood, illustrating at once the sheer magnitude of the industry of slavery and the amount of world-defining work that was made possible by this labor. To further understand the connection of slave ships to natural systems, we can look to Paulla A. Ebron’s “Slave ships were incubators for infectious diseases”, an article that discusses the relationships between humans and non-humans on slave ships, and the ways in which diseases were spread in the hold of ships.
The slave ship and Noah’s ark seem to be vastly different on the surface: Noah’s ark is named in relation to its exterior, while the slave ship is defined by its contents. Yet Ferdinand draws surprising similarities between the politics of Noah’s ark and those of the slave ship: both impose an alienation of its residents from their cultures, ecosystems, and worlds. In lieu of these vessels, Ferdinand advocates for the creation of a world-ship. In contrast to the hold, the world-ship is Ferdinand’s possibility for another world, for subverting the hold of the modern world as we know it—that is, the one that has been created by colonization—and of the Anthropocene. Rather than a return to some hypothetical past, the creation of the world-ship is instead a question of encounter, of opening up new relationships between populations both human and non-human. While the double fracture of colonialism has created divides between movements for ecology, animals, feminism, etc., Ferdiannd draws surprising parallels between these causes. For example, he writes about the connection between the enslavement of animals and the animalization of enslaved Black people, as well as other people of color and women.We are prey in concrete jungles, subject to the hunting, caging, and violence that one associates with the extermination of animals. Against this backdrop, Ferdinand portrays the existence of alliances between humans and our non-human counterparts, such as the ways that the venomous snake, in the dangers that it posed to the European settlers, became the protectors of the colonized people in Martinique. This is a stark contrast to Nixon’s venomous animal metaphors, comparing the giant investment bank Goldman Sachs to a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Ebron takes a more nuanced approach, using the example of the mosquito to simultaneously vectorize disease and exemplify the necessity and possibility of adjusting to new living conditions.
Ferdinand argues for the necessity of worldly transformations: moving away from Eurocentrism, incorporating the perspectives of women and people of color, and centering the importance of decolonization, quoting sociologist Nathan Hare that “the real solution to the environmental crisis is the decolonization of the black race.” These transformations can be embodied starting with our consumption choices in food, clothing, transportation, etc. While these choices are not novel, Ferdinand’s ardent insistence on world-making gives these suggestions a renewed sense of purpose, such that the reader sees these actions not only as ways to lessen our individual carbon footprints but as powerful actions toward building a more just world.