Colonial progress destroys cultural ecosystems as thoroughly as ecological ones

Evidence

Long-standing cultures, continuously evolving over centuries, if not millennia, are ecosystems that maintain webs of intricate and intertwined relationships between the human and the environmental, between the communal and the cosmological. The infliction of “progress” on such cultures yielded and continues to yield the same results that this theology has produced in the natural environment and its ecology. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 256

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s ecosystem framing to human cultural ecologies — trees as infrastructure and culture as ecology share the same collapse mechanism under extraction.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘progress’ theology produces identical devastation in cultural and natural ecologies collapses two regimes often treated separately; worth sitting with.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘intercultural ecology’ — treating culture as a biome with the same fragility and recovery dynamics as forests.
• XREF: connects to: Forced removal severed the Potawatomi from their named nut trees and homelands — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 55; Habitat restoration and colonial progress both impose narrow ideas of good — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 311; Colonial megafauna conservation displaced people while ignoring subsistence land degradation — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 391 (+1 more)