Decolonial Ecology

Malcom Ferdinand is a researcher in political ecology and environmental humanities at the CNRS and Université Paris Dauphine-PSL.

“Malcom Ferdinand brilliantly breaks away from the spider web of canonical ecological narratives and arguments. The wrongdoing of modernity is diagnosed from the decolonial Caribbean experience of coloniality. Decolonial Ecology reveals – through the power of storytelling – that the sacralization of reason, statistics, and mega-data has prevented us from realizing that ecological and colonial problems cannot be solved within the blindness of the Western modernity that created the problems.”Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations“This book is a powerful political and scholarly statement that exposes, in order to undermine, reductive enframings of modernity that themselves sustain epistemological barriers between groups that should be on the same side. Its richest contributions lie in the Caribbean-inspired, creolised deployment of political concepts, and of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Henry David Thoreau, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Ferdinand spends considerable time building the conceptual framework of “the Maroon” from the history and modern-day descendants of escaped slaves – people who rejected their oppression and had to live off the land and forge a new creolised culture and identity in the mountains – to build a fresh ecological political theory of freedom. […] The book is a provocation to those thinkers who stress the importance of thinking about the environment through the perspective of geological time, which is a temporal horizon that considers the details of events like colonialism to be insignificant on a planetary scale. Ferdinand’s work is a vehement rejection of that move, an insistence that any thought about modernity’s “crisis” must start with the racist and ecocidal violence of colonialism that created it.”Grace Garland, Environmental Politics"Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology contributes to a rich history of anti-colonial Afro-Caribbean philosophy, cements Caribbean values within the global environmental justice movement, and speaks to the struggles of marginalised people around the world as they attempt to shape a world that includes their own visions for the future."Environmental Values

• List of IllustrationsIndex of ShipsAcknowledgementsForeword – Angela DavisProloguePart 1: The Modern Tempest: Environmental Violence and Colonial RupturesChapter 1: Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a WorldChapter 2: The Matricides of the PlantationoceneChapter 3: The Hold and the NegroceneChapter 4: The Colonial HurricanePart 2: Noah’s Ark: When Environmentalism Refuses the World Chapter 5: Noah’s Ark: Boarding, or the abandonment of the worldChapter 6: Reforesting without the World (Haiti)Chapter 7: Paradise or Hell in the Nature Preserves (Puerto Rico)Chapter 8: The Masters’ Chemistry (Martinique and Guadeloupe)Chapter 9: A Colonial Ecology: At the Heart of the Double FracturePart 3: The Slave Ship: Rising Up from Modernity’s Hold in Search of a WorldChapter 10: The Slave Ship: Debarking Off-WorldChapter 11: Maroon Ecology: Fleeing the PlantationoceneChapter 12: Rousseau, Thoreau, and Civil MarronageChapter 13: A Decolonial Ecology: Rising up from the holdPart 4: A World-Ship: World-Making Beyond the Double FractureChapter 14: A World-Ship: Politics of encounterChapter 15: Forming a Body in the World: Reconnecting with a Mother-EarthChapter 16: Interspecies Alliances: The Animal Cause and The Negro CauseChapter 17: A Worldly-Ecology: On the Bridge of Justice EpilogueWorld-MakingThe Intrusion of AyitiRecovering the Sun of AfricaNotes