Pollution Is Colonialism

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Max: Yeah. So I’ve been working in this province of Newfoundland and Labrador for seven years, and it took me four years to get invited to Labrador, which is a mainly an Inuit and Innu and part of the province. And that was because I had to do my homework and I had to show up in a good way until they invited me without me bugging them or asking them. And that also involved a lot of problems where I brought Métis and First Nation ideas of Indigenousness. And yeah, those are not the same as Inuit. Holy crap, are they not the same, right? So. Yeah, and that took five years, but our work is so good and so tight now because I took the time and I did that, what Murphy was talking about, I would call homework, right? Doing your homework. Indigenous protestors at a 2014 rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Photo: Stephen Melkisethian

Anticolonial science is one name for a specific set of accountabilities that have been articulated by many, many Indigenous thinkers, activists, philosophers, scholars, and lawyers. For example, accountability to fish as kin in some Indigenous legal frameworks means that you have to kill fish well and take care of their environments. That includes as a scientist. So, as a scientist that researches plastics in fish, I only use fish that have already been killed for food and I don't use chemicals in our research that are known to cause harm in aquatic environments. At the same time, I publish my methods so they are replicable and transparent, and validate my findings using statistics and peer review. You can be--must be--accountable to overlapping communities with different ideas of ethics and good science. Pollution Is Colonialism] should be required reading for researchers who are working in any type of laboratory setting.... I also believe that a more general audience will find this work interesting and thought provoking.” — Jacqueline Stagner, International Journal of Environmental StudiesA 2021 study published in Nature highlighted that research is less likely to investigate climate change impacts in the Global South, even though those 78 low-income countries are facing the worst impacts. They are also the least responsible for climate-warming emissions; the entire continent of Africa accounts for the lowest share of greenhouse gas emissions at 3.8 percent. In contrast, the U.S. and European Union are responsible for 19 percent and 13 percent of global emissions, respectively. This kind of work reaches across a lot of disciplines. Science and Technology Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Discard Studies make sense together because they all understand the world in terms of power relations, including how some things come to seem normal, even natural, while other things are discarded, erased, dispossessed, or become unimaginable. But the book also stretches across natural science and social sciences. Because it draws from such a diverse set of conversations, I did a lot of work to avoid jargon and tell good jokes, explain my terms since the same word means different things in different disciplines, and talk across rather than down to different audiences, even when those audiences might disagree on points. Although the book will likely be of particular interest to the fields of social studies of science and Indigenous studies, Liboiron offers an open invitation for readers from broader audiences to engage, reflect on and change the colonial relations, technologies and infrastructures operating in their own lives. This offer is especially timely in the context of growing antiracist social justice movements globally.” — Liam Fox, Social & Cultural Geography

The Introduction sets the scene of the book, which is mainly in a Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada. The research focuses on plastics pollution and how scientists map its impact on wildlife. One of the driving arguments of the book is that pollution is not simply a symptom of colonialism, but rather a medium of and for colonialism, colonial relations, and appropriation of L/land (the capitalized L does here indicate that the understanding of Land is context-specific, rather than land as a universal word). 2 Liboiron places colonialism in relation to both environmentalism and capitalism, showing that although capitalism and colonialism often enjoy one another’s company, this is not always the case. And in the same way, environmentalism can also enact colonial relations even when research or activism is done with good intentions. Finally, Liboiron explains that the work at CLEAR is not decolonial but anticolonial i n practice. This with the argument that decolonial science can be a colonial practice in that ideas and relations continue to be appropriated (p.26). The last point of the Introduction is to stress further the importance of specificity when discussing plastics (as there are numerous variants), the We, and otherwise. Without specificity, it is not possible to clearly state what one wants to say, to whom, and from what position one seeks to make this claim. The Indigenous way of life does not match this idea of Western-imposed private property and cash crop farming that the colonizers had implemented by force,” said Assali. Shoreline research with big ocean. Credit: Bojan Furst What is, according to you, a ‘good’ science? What sort of ethics would it bring to the table and who decides these ethics? Is there a collective responsibility that needs to be employed? Illustration of a laughing owl, a New Zealand species that went extinct around 1914 due to loss of habitat. Image: John Gerrard Keulemans If you don't do what you call systematic thinking, you only ever play in the sandbox the dominant system as already laid out. You can tweak the system, but you can't change it. The example in the book is regulated pollution levels. It would seem like a good thing to regulate industry so it doesn't pollute more that is allowed, more than causes irreparable harm to the environment. This is based on the idea that land and bodies can absorb, metabolize, dilute, or purify some amount of pollution. But this needs land. It assumes settler entitlement to Indigenous land (and often people's bodies in the case of body burdens) for industry production. Even the environmental science that so much of our activism and certainly our state laws are premised on also assume access to land for settler and colonial (and industry) goals, needs, and desires. That is, it's based on colonial land relations. I'm saying that something good in one way can still also be colonialVS: You said the university uses these stories or this data or this info, and their kind of way to better their stature or their positions. But Murphy, you’ve also written about leveraging data for anti-colonial purposes. So can you explain what do you mean by that? Gwich’in Council International, Arctic Athabaskan Council, Climate Action Network Canada – Réseau action climat Canada, Ecology North, Pembina Institute. (2008). “ The Inuvik Declaration on Arctic Climate Change and Global Action .” Max Liboiron: The best compliment is at conferences when people mistake us for each other. And I’m like, “Yes, that is methodologically appropriate.” Although if you actually want to talk to Murphy, they’re like over there. Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines. (2017). “ Aamjiwnaang Water Gathering and Toxic Tour 2017 .

MM: We don’t imagine that we are going to fix the relationship between colonialism and fossil fuel violence in like a week or a year or a lifetime. So it’s also super important that besides the research itself, the other project is how to be together in a good way. To make capitalism and colonialism synonymous, or to conflate environmentalism and anticolonialism, misses these complex relations... Because of this nuance and its repercussions for political action, political scientist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has called for scholars to shift their analysis away from capitalist relations (production, proletarianization) to colonial relations (dispossession, Land acquisition, access to Land)” Max: So I have a big section in my book, and I know Murphy has a lot of experience in this too, which is that if you skip over colonialism, then you think things that are good and well-intentioned are automatically not colonial. But if you say do a beach clean up and you go on to Indigenous land and you clean that beach without permission, that’s not Indigenous access to Indigenous land for non-Indigenous schools, even though it’s benevolent, and that is colonialism. So there are the things that count as good and well-intentioned and benevolent and environmentalism are frequently, almost ubiquitously also colonial. Like hydroelectric power. Well, that’s actually putting methylmercury into Inuit fish around here or right? There’s all of these sort of environmental goods that are also colonial bads. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

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I cannot remember the last time I read a scholarly book more compelling, persuasive, enjoyable, helpful, or important than Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron. . . . When you read it, you will have a honed sense of how you fit into the urgent collective work of unmaking colonial worlds, and an invigorated sense of how to get started.” — Eugenia Zuroski, ISLE According to a Deutsche Welle report, this happened to a migratory group of Indigenous people in Malaysia known as the Bajau Laut of Eastern Sabah. In 2004, their main fishing areas were turned into the Tun Sakaran Marine Park. Five years later, fishing was banned and the tribal community lost access to its main sources of food and income. “Pollution is colonialism”