Inherited Worlds of Environmental Anticolonialism c. 1890-1950

Prevailing approaches to anticolonial political thought have focused on the high politics of anticolonial statesmen, whose actions came to an end during the neoliberal counterrevolution in the 1970s. The end of the anticolonial moment coincided with the emergence of the global environmental movement and global consciousness of the earth’s finitude. This dominant historical lens has led to a treatment of anticolonial and environmental political thought as chronologically – and hence conceptually – distinct phenomena. This paper turns to vital environmental anticolonial movements and thinkers who challenge this prevailing framework, unearthing from their writings a distinctive account of political freedom that urgently speaks to the dilemmas of today. I treat both anthropocentric environmental degradation and anticolonial political action as mutually reinforcing events that gave rise to an otherwise neglected discourse about the meaning of unfreedom in the wake of impending environmental collapse. Bringing together the political thought of two early mid-20th century non-elite anticolonial actors Bermudian Black Power grassroots organizer, environmental scientist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego and Garveyist activist Audley Moore, both of whom were contemporaries, I show how congruences across these two seemingly “minor” political actors and contexts highlighted a nascent idea of futural repair that took seriously what I call the already present and impending “structural master” of environmental degradation that acted in tandem with, but distinct from, economic domination on its own. This paper tracks the inherited environmental worlds of Kamarakafego and Moore by providing a historical reconstruction of British and French agricultural colonial projects and the ways in which those porjects were inspired by and in part inspired American agricultural mass agricultural projects that laid way for the displacement and dispossession of both Black and Indigenous communities at the turn of the 20th century. Drawing on archival resources, I show how Kamarakafego’s environmental agenda focused on how movements for anticolonial self-determination across the Caribbean, Australia, Latin America and Africa could center solutions for moving beyond ecologically extractivist practices to propped up popular plans for independence both before and during the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1970s. Moore’s organizing work in the National Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Observance Committee (NEPCOC), meanwhile, underscored her commitment to imagining reparations through the prism of land tenure as well as monetary payouts. Moore’s work on reparations when it comes to land tenure underscores, I argue, a commitment to a “land back” approach to dealing with the consequences of the continuing unfreedom brought on by environmental degradation and its sibling counterpart, economic domination.