Settler Colonial Environmentalism
One way to understand the relationship between settlers, Indigenous peoples, and water in the Arid American West is by linking movements of “environmental justice” to “decolonization.” For decades, environmental justice scholars and activists have productively critiqued and challenged the privilege, whiteness, and heteropatriarchy of the environmental movement, calling attention to the toxic environmental conditions that are disproportionately present in and inflicted upon marginalized communities. This scholarship, as Phaedra C. Pezzullo writes, should “foreground cultural and political questions about bodies of land or ‘the environment,’ such as who has clean water, who doesn’t, and why?”[1] Expanding this work, decolonial rhetorical scholars have interrogated the nexus of Indigenous peoples and environmental injustice, drawing attention to ongoing settler environmental practices such as energy coloniality, nuclear colonialism, (unnatural) disaster militarism, and accidental colonial nostalgia.[2] These insights further challenge the environmental movement, undoing its colonial logics by centering Indigenous epistemologies, histories, and experience. In turn, this scholarship may thus inform decolonial environmental practices that attempt to break the settler-native-slave triad and are accountable to Indigenous futurity.
Inspired by the above scholars, I forward the concept of settler colonial environmentalism as environmentalism that is knowingly or unknowingly accountable to settler futures. Such practices represent genuine concerns for and protections of the settler environment that, in effect, rescue, reinforce, and reinvest in the project of settlement. The settler environmentalist may openly condemn instances of greenwashing, hold corporations accountable for environmental harms, clean polluted sites, pass environmental regulations—but at the same time reinvest in the settler state’s conceptual and structural framework of the settler-native-slave triad. They may deploy settler epistemologies, histories, and experience to challenge the exhaustion of environments, but support ongoing territorial dispossession, excessive production of Indigenous land, and slavery in its contemporary forms (i.e. settler prisons). Put more simply, the settler will take water from Indigenous peoples to irrigate slave plantations or, today, farms maintained by prison inmates. But the settler environmentalist will make sure that this water for settler production flows efficiently and indefinitely. For these settlers, the deep-seated dichotomous hierarchies of colonial-capitalism are available to deploy within environmental discourses, enabling them to justify their environmental privileges that depend upon the ongoing exploitation of particular bodies of land and bodies of people. Such practices, in sum, may neutralize environmental threats to settler life, from polluted water to dustbowls to even superstorms, but only so that territory remains valuable to settlers—for at least a while longer.
[1] Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice, Book, Whole (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 14.
[2] Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (September 3, 2018): 535–60; Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 39–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802632103; Marouf Arif Hasian Jr and S. Marek Muller, “Decolonizing Conservationist Hero Narratives: A Critical Genealogy of William T. Hornaday and Colonial Conservation Rhetorics,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 27, no. 4 (August 8, 2019): 284–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2019.1624543.
