Decolonial Conservation

 Hi, everyone. I'm Fidel Parks and I'm doing my Honours in Gender Studies in environmental feminisms and decolonial/indigenous conservation. My knowledge of and interest in the topics are fairly recent in that I was only exposed to them last year, at the end of my undergrad. I did my Bachelors of Science in Biology and Gender Studies. It was in a conservation biology course where I was taught both about the colonial history and the indigenous future of conservation and in a gender course where I was taught about the importance of gendered approaches in climate justice and thus the importance of environmental feminisms. While these courses overlapped slightly in content, they differed extremely in approach. Biology didn't care much for indigenous conservation beyond name-dropping and a few anecdotes whereas Gender Studies' focus on how women were more heavily affected didn't extend far enough to really explain in what ways participation in conservation, indigenous or otherwise, was gendered.

My interdisciplinary education is actually a large motivator behind why I was interested in this course. Spending three years listening to biology, mathematics and statistics professors, especially at UCT where those departments have a preference for male professors and an even stronger preference for White professors, while learning to critically analyse things through an intersectional gendered lens made me particularly aware of the racialised and gendered biases of these professors as well as the way that they were teaching science. Even just being one of nine students of colour in a class of 27 with no professors of colour results in experiences worth discussing. Thus this course caught my eye because it offers a place to explore the ways in which race and gender can and do influence science, especially because science is notorious for claiming that it's an objective field of study and that those factors are irrelevant.

The book I chose to read for this course is Max Liboiron's (2021) Pollution is Colonialism, in large part because of its link to my thesis on indigenous conservation. So far, I've completed the first of four chapters, namely the introduction. Because I'd imagine it would be more interesting to discuss the epistemological backings of the book than the actual conservation talk in person, I will use this space to offer my perspective and commentary on the science of the book. For context however, the main argument of the book is that colonialism is about control, specifically control over land and resources, and pollution, both in its creation and the current methods of removing it, further perpetuate colonial mindsets and harms. The creation is colonial in the sense that it's almost always a desecration of what once was or currently is indigenous land and the removal is colonial because the current methods only work because they assume that indigenous lands and resources are automatically available for the taking as needed, for things like recycling plants.

The first thing I would like to discuss is Liboiron's concept of the plastic threshold, discussed on pages 4 and 5. It is in reference to the Streeter-Phelps equation and assimilative capacity. Essentially what's being discussed is how much plastic can be in a person or body of water without causing harm. This is done with the logic that these things are able to clean themselves to a certain extent. What this reminds me of, however, are the two colonial conservation dichotomies of nature: Wilderness Preservation versus Resource Management. The former views nature as fragile and seeks to preserve its original diversity by limiting human intervention whereas the latter views nature as resilient and seeks to use the resources of nature without overexploitation by limiting human access. These two approaches have a few overlapping colonial paradigms that made them ultimately ineffective. The first is that they falsely assume that nature is static, and not constantly changing and adapting to a myriad of external factors. The second is that they view humans as separate entities to nature instead of a part of it. This links to the conversation around the plastic threshold because while there probably is an upper limit to the amount of plastic that a human or body of water can contain, that's just the correct answer to the wrong question. What should instead be considered is what happens to a system after a long period of storing small amounts of plastic? It will likely adapt to include those plastics, thus increasing its threshold, and with the current system, thus being allowed to store increasing amounts of plastic within it.

The second thing I found interesting is Liboiron's promotion of hydroelectric dams as a step forward from fossil fuels. While hydroelectric dams are very efficient at producing electricity and have relatively low pollutant outputs (the main enemy of the book), they are actually socially and ecologically horrible in most of the same ways that all dams are. They displace communities, mess with water quality and disrupt the local river ecology and interactions. This isn't unique to hydroelectricity because solar power is known for making the area overly hot and completely uninhabitable. The renewable energy source with the least green-on-green conflict is wind power because its main drawback, excessively killing large raptors, can be greatly diminished if planned for accordingly. The best approach however is to stop looking for a one-size-fits-all solution because it's that overworking that results in major environmental disaster, and thus a combination of various types of renewable energy should be employed.

Liboiron speaks on it and I think it is important to echo as a conclusion to all of this. Their discussion of pollution is in part to highlight how negative pollution is but more importantly it is a small aspect in the broader conversation of decolonial and indigenous conservation. The epistemological issues I will discuss in class are applicable to other topics on decolonialism, decoloniality and decolonial conservation.