Western environmentalism’s nonhuman focus relegates the global poor to moral depravity

Evidence

The segregation of the political from the environmental, the ecological from the dehumanizing colonial, remains at the core of proposed modernist solutions, a segregation patently evident in nearly all Western environmental movements. These continue to speak of “saving the planet” but they consistently overlook the forces that were responsible, in equal measure and dialectically, for both environmental destruction and dehumanization. In speaking of one dimension, all the others must be included, either directly or by necessary implication. As the African diaspora scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson incisively remarks, the “appeals to move ‘beyond the human’ may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this [very] movement purports to disrupt.” In foregrounding the nonhuman as the proper site of analysis, environmental studies tend to relegate the human, especially the global poor, to the status of moral depravity. Linking the human and the nonhuman on a structural continuum permits a narrative that actively interrupts “the creation of deficient and inferior surplus populations that are distinguished by their monocultural, criminal, patriarchal, homophobic, and anti-environmental dispositions.” The categories of human and nonhuman must therefore indiscriminately collapse into each other. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of Western universalism and to the ‘saving the planet’ framing discussed throughout the author’s broader argument against modernity as a solution to its own crises. — connects to: Affluent environmentalists and poor residents read the same symbolic act oppositely; Universalising environmental ethics is ethnocentric, not a mark of human progress — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 641; Deep ecology is misanthropic and hostile to the environmentalism of the poor. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 903