Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s time to flip the game upside down and end that very green colonialism by requiring a southernization of the north — forcing the latter to reduce its consumption of energy and other resources to meet that of the Global South.
Each situation is adjudicated according to whatever opposition has been mustered and whatever degree of engagement the state chooses as well as the anticipated value of the proposed project. Thus, in concept and practice, the original votes in the UN for Free, Prior and Informed Consent were toothless.
If Bangladesh sinks – when Bangladesh sinks – it won’t be an abstract environmental loss, but the last breath of a people that started dying the minute the British landed on Indian soil.
In addition to a global-north induced climate crisis, the scale of Pakistan’s floods has been exacerbated by hydrological infrastructures built over centuries by western imperialism and allied local elites.
So don’t go by the book. Go by the garden. Learn what is there and how it fits into its community. Then fit yourself into that community.
Looking around at the energy crisis, the drift to the extreme right and the mounting climate disasters that the world is facing, the common thread of colonial exploitation may not be obvious
In a world where crises come in global form – whether it is the climate crisis, economic crisis or another pandemic – the idea that we can simply ship our problems away to some distant outpost is no longer a sustainable belief, if it ever was.
Will degrowth as a discourse and movement extend coloniality, by aiming to make just one world out of the many that form the earth’s pluriverse?
But if these findings are anything to go by, we need to reevaluate the dominant narrative about long-term poverty trends. The notion that extreme poverty is the baseline state of humanity falls apart, and it becomes clear that the story is more complicated.
Not accounting for the historical processes and legacies of colonialism in the construction of inequalities both within and across countries is a fatal flaw in Piketty’s analysis and undercuts the possibility of constructing a politics that could address the problems of our time.
Yes, confronting the climate crisis will require a switch from ‘dirty’ to ‘clean’ power. But it also demands a radical reconfiguration of environmental power dynamics.
We tend to ignore the racist history of trade when looking at trade issues. It’s complicated, uncomfortable and more convenient to gloss over it. The truth is the racism that underpinned colonialism and slavery continues within our global supply chains today.
