Ecological Imperialism Quotes

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

the greatest democratic socialist achievements occur through organizations that begin with the everyday praxis of unions and social movements; dismantle structures of racial, gender, sex, class, and imperial domination; welcome religious allies; renew the struggles for freedom, equality, and cooperative community; and care for the planet’s ecological health.

Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders. Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.

As God in Genesis 1 is no imperious warrior, so human beings are not conquerors of creation. The language of dominion lacks all sense of exploitation (1:26, 28). The hoarding of resources is implicitly forbidden in the account: seed-bearing plants and fruit trees are granted to animals and humans alike (1:30). Absent is any hint of the savage competition for resources. God's gift of sustenance is one of abundance, not scarcity, to be shared, not hoarded.

European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.

Animals must move across land to survive—for water, for food, for minerals. Existence depends upon some kind of movement: you move, or the land kills you where you stand. —Imperial Ecological Survey of Arrakis, ancient records

We are not like Moses—we cannot call forth water from stone…not at an economical rate, anyway. —Imperial Ecological Survey of Arrakis, ancient records (researcher uncredited)

and braying multitudes of wild asses. The

For to make holes in the earth was to rape it! The Romans had scruples about violating or disfiguring the landscape: their religio had aspects that today we would call 'ecological'. That did not prevent their undertaking large-scale works, but always with the approval of the gods.

On a planet with 300 million species and 7 billion humans, one man determining the future is a dangerous idea. It is dangerous for the Earth, because the anthropocentric, reductionist, and mechanistic assumptions by which Gates is guided are at the root of the ecological crisis that has brought us to the brink.

Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.

Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness ere typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to ergional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.