Since the fifteenth century, there has been an ongoing war against Earth. Ours is a coordinated, voracious, global political economy that depends upon the capitalist resource extraction of land, rivers, the seas, and, in particular, racialized human bodies and nonhuman life forms. It is a war against Earth and its peoples,5.1.1 a for-profit5.1.2 death drive that leaves monoculture, biodiversity diminishment, and extinction in its wake.5.1.3 anti-blackness and anti-Indigeneity are at the center of this planetary war. 

When we think about environmental impact, we must not occlude the Western civilizational paradigm that rages against the racialized other or disguise the fact that “humanity” is not universally implicated in the demise of our planet’s nonrenewable resources. As Sylvia Wynter5.1.4 and Anibal Quijano5.1.5 have both analyzed, European colonialism reorganized the world of the living into racialized classifications of death and disposability. Indeed, the ideology used to dehumanize the other is inseparable from that which continually separates the human from the nonhuman.5.1.6 As we face this damage such colonial ideologies and material practices have done, questions of accountability become central to imagining a post-extractive future.

Elsewhere I have argued that the nomenclature of the Anthropocene is inadequate,5.1.7 and other Anthropocene Curriculum contributors—along the Mississippi River5.1.8 and at the State of Nature in India conference5.1.9—have also noted that the term reproduces the problem it names, both by universalizing its effects and by hiding the history and ongoing consequences of colonialism. Here, I ask: How do we confront the paradigm of the war against Earth that is the colonial Anthropocene without reproducing whiteness and Eurocentricity as its organizing logic? In specifying the problem at the heart of environmental destruction, too often its colonial underpinnings go unnamed. It’s important to specifically point to critical knowledge production as often a white, colonial, and extractive enterprise that does not acknowledge the foundational violence embedded within the Anthropocene.5.1.10  

For instance, in a recent conversation that remembered the oeuvre of writer Barry Lopez, Margaret Atwood and Rebecca Solnit offered homage to an Anglo-American canon of writers without considering that there is another way to imagine the history of environmental justice writing.5.1.11 In these renarrations of environmental heroines, Rachel Carson is counted among the environmental greats, while the Maya Kʼicheʼ activist Rigoberta Menchú (from Guatemala), also an American environmental writer and activist, is completely absented.5.1.12 Where knowledge production is concerned, the Anglophone canon of environmental activist writing leaves out whole peoples and modes of thought. Social movements in Brazil,5.1.13 India,5.1.14 and South Africa,5.1.15 as well as BIPOC communities within the United States,5.1.16 have been at the frontline of climate change and extractive wars but are simply ghosts in the history of global environmentalism. 

Other ways to marginalize those who are “the first line of defense” in the war against Earth are played out, too. The righteous activism of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is hailed as triumphant and she is positioned as a planetary beacon of courage, even as children in the global south have long put their bodies in dangerous confrontation with the state.5.1.17 For instance, Yasunidos, a social movement in eastern Ecuador to preserve the biodiverse Indigenous territories of the Yasuní, is filled with young and militant activists who work toward policy change through direct action, media activism, and coalitional work, yet this example is little known beyond its immediate context in South America.5.1.18 

Further, the war against Earth is historically and currently represented by the archive, the dominant media, and the state, as if there were only minor and episodic instances of local and planetary forms of resistance and refusal. Yet, anti-colonial insurgency against territories of extraction and struggle is the normative condition of the Third World, leading up to and following the Bandung Conference. In fact, the history of social movements can be told, as I discuss in my book The Extractive Zone, through the ways that communities in the global south, and in Latin America in particular, have long fended off primitive accumulation. They have done so by putting their bodies in direct line of the attack from state and corporate entities.

In my work with artists, filmmakers, performers, activists, and scholars, I have found a range of what Paolo Freire refers to as “critically hopeful responses” to the colonial Anthropocene.5.1.19 To me, those that describe the “lateness” of our responses to environmental collapse refer to the inability of whiteness and the capitalist project to surrender to the otherwise, or that rich and dynamic space of intermixing and grounded, collaborative practices that is nonextractive. Such responses begin from global south, Black, and Indigenous perspectives and consider the dynamics of state terror, racism, and cultural memory. In my key contribution accompanying this pathway, an intimate letter to Madre Tierra, Pachamama, I explore accounting for the past and accountability in the present as immersion in Earth’s archive of wreckage. Recognition of the importance of play, pleasure, and joy—as well as a deep commitment to dismantling—are powerful decolonial modes of encountering, accounting for, and undoing the paradigm of the war against Earth.