Chapter 12 ‘Post-colonial’ ecojustice
‘[T]here is no rush by African literary and cultural critics to adopt ecocriticism or the literature of the environment as they are promulgated from
many of the world's metropolitan centers’ (William Slaymaker). Even writers ‘for whom “environmental” issues are central, such as the Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare, are still valued more in relation to more familiar social political issues’.1 A history often of war, dispossession, and colonial and neocolonial exploitation offers little space for an ecocriticism that has sometimes looked like the professionalised
hobby of a western leisure class.
Nevertheless, it is in the so-called developing world that environmental disputes are at their most intense, most fraught
with political, ethical and religious overtones and even violence. In contexts where international capitalism pits itself directly against traditional land use or where people may find themselves in the way of their own government's
infrastructure schemes, fundamental questions are often immediately at issue about modes of life, human identity and social
justice.
Environmentalism as neocolonialism?
In the encounter between ‘post-colonial’ thinking and ecocriticism to date, it is ecocriticism that first seems the more in
need of revision. For, to many people, modern environmentalism can look like another form of colonialism. Critics will often
now distance themselves in uneasy ways from the way reform environmentalism has become part of a system of global managerialism, closely related to institutions like the IMF or the World Bank, with its Global Environmental Facility. For example, the setting aside of a large area as a ‘national park’ may
be part of the deal for reducing a country's debt, one also requiring the ‘liberalising’ of internal markets, that is, their
increased penetration by international capitalism, forcing people into the money economy, with the effect of replacing small rural communities by urban shanty towns.
This is the story of the Batwa of south-western Uganda, expelled from the dense montane forests where their ancestors had lived unobtrusively for thousands of years and often
now living in shacks on the Bwindi park border. ‘In one more generation their forest-based culture – songs, rituals, traditions
and stories – will be gone.’2
Big international non-governmental environmental organisations (BINGOs) have become objects of suspicion. Mark Dowie gives a sample of their appropriating jargon:
The rationale for ‘internal displacements’, as these evictions are officially called, usually involves a perceived threat to the biological diversity of a large geographical area, variously designated by one or more of the BINGOs as an ‘ecological hotspot’, an ‘ecoregion’, a ‘vulnerable ecosystem’, a ‘biological corridor’, or a ‘living landscape’.3
Such criticisms have led to an increased recognition among non-governmental organisations themselves that the boundaries between
conservation, colonialism and the depredations of international capitalism may often be uncomfortably blurred and uncertain.
Environmental debate is nevertheless part of the faltering creation of a planetary public sphere. Since the 1980s, for instance,
the world has witnessed a weird alliance between first-world environmentalists and fourth-world people fighting to defend
their indigenous way of life. Celebrities such as the pop star Sting are filmed flying into the Amazon region to meet representatives of native Indian tribes. The Indians even become a kind of icon, circulating in all sorts of commercial images.
This seeming convergence of interests between northern urban environmentalists and southern indigenous Indians has worked
to the benefit of both. Environmentalists gain new legitimacy by presenting themselves as defenders of indigenous rights,
while the Indians, in the word of a Rainforest Foundation spokesperson, have discovered that ‘the rainforest card is stronger
than the indigenous card’.4 The Indians exploit the symbolic capital inherent in their identity, or, to be more precise, the idealised image of that
identity circulating in affluent societies.
Such alliances form a kind of ‘middle ground’ in Richard White’s sense:
Diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often exceeding, misunderstandings. People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and practices of those they deal with, but from those misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.5
In North America, a well-known figure of such ‘middle ground’ is the so-called ‘ecological Indian’: people of indigenous American descent assert their own cultural distinctiveness in the very terms in
which they have been idealised by some western environmentalists.6 The public recognition thus achieved may be offset, however, by the way that the cultural pronouncements of a Native American
poet such as the Muscogee Creek Joy Harjo can end up sounding disconcertingly similar to the standard romantic line in environmental diagnosis in the developed world, with the blame falling on ‘alienation’ from the land and
the compartmentalising reductiveness of western rationality.7
Is there yet a specifically environmental post-colonial criticism?
How to adapt ecocritical arguments to post-colonial questions? This question has had the effect of highlighting elements in
given ecocriticism that are not so universal as they once seemed. Post-colonial critics question the way some environmental
thinkers refer simply to ‘humanity’ as the antagonist of the natural world, a view that ignores vast differences between human
groups and with a sometimes ‘peremptory conviction…that global ethical considerations should override local cultural concerns’.8 Yet the implicit demands being made on a future environmental criticism are also enormous here – to be able to engage in any culture across the world in relation to such
already difficult issues as the ethics of relating to the non-human, environmental justice, the nature and limits of anthropocentrism, duties towards future generations and so on.
At the moment ecocritics generally make headway simply by affirming a common interest between defending the natural world
and defending the cultures of local or indigenous peoples. Patrick D. Murphy, for instance, endorses the work and often non-realist technique of numerous non-western writers, each engaged with tracing the encroachments of industrialism and commodification on their part of the planet. Whether the
topic is Ishumure Michiko on an old Japanese fishing village, Linda Hogan on the Osage in Oklahoma, Edna Esacamill on a Chicano community in southern Arizona, or Karen Tei Yamashita on contemporary Brazilian forest people, Murphy traces in each text a disruption to old traditions rooted in the local or regional, where identity was based on communal
values rather than an possessive individualism, and on respect for the natural world as opposed to capitalist exploitation.9 If globalisation and neocolonialism often serve up recognisably familiar antagonists in different cultures across the world, then such environmental
criticism feeds into an emerging, international countersphere.
However, recent thinking also uncomfortably highlights not just the familiar antagonism between conservation and capitalism, but ‘a separate conflict between conservation and human rights’ (Robert Cribb),10 one that is becoming more acute. Is the frequently made identification of local interests and green politics a ‘middle ground’ disguising as many differences as it reconciles?
Colonialism as the ‘Conquest of nature’
An environmentally informed reading can both enhance and question the work of a post-colonial reading. To give a brief example,
in his Beginning Postcolonialism John McLeod offers a post-colonial reading of Rudyard Kipling's ‘The Overland Mail (foot-service to the hills)’, a poem depicting an Indian runner taking the imperial mail
from the coast up to the summer headquarters of the British Raj in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the administrators
moved to escape some of the heat of the season. The Indian landscape, McLeod observes, is described as a place of ‘Lords of
the Jungle’, tigers and robbers but otherwise curiously depopulated except as a ‘wilderness of obstacles’ for the intrepid to overcome, ‘dark, menacing, and dangerous; full of tempests and floods where
even the roads are vulnerable’.11 McLeod reads the landscape as a metaphor of colonial human relationships: the unnamed runner climbs toward his rulers and
a more benign landscape of ‘rose-oak’ and ‘fir‘ trees. He is depicted as a personification of the irresistibility of an imperial
duty, though with undertones of compulsion that blur slightly the implicit contrast between him and the ‘robber’ who retreats
from his path. Kipling's final stanza depicts the arrival of the post in the hills:
There's a speck on the hillside, a dot on the road –A jingle of bells on the footpath below –There's a scuffle above in the monkey's abode –The world is awake and the clouds are aglow.For the Great Sun himself must attend to the hail: –‘In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail!’
How does one read the last line but one, the claim, unbalanced even if tongue-in-cheek, that the sun is subservient to Queen
Victoria, empress of India? McLeod's reading overlooks this line entirely, but the poem surely becomes more puzzling here. For the poem's co-opting of
the sun contradicts the whole logic of its metaphorised landscape, its tracing of a gradual welcome ascent from the sultry
jungle into the cooler, pleasanter ‘British’ hills where ‘we exiles’ have retreated precisely to escape the sun's heat. ‘[T]he
Great Sun himself must attend to the hail’ is a statement whose complacency throws a different light over the whole text.
For a post-colonial critic to overlook a line of such literal absurdity could be taken as symptomatic of McLeod's own mode of reading: this shares with Kipling's poem the strategy of reading landscape entirely as an expression of human relationships, even if it sees those relationships
differently.12
However, colonialism was and neocolonialism is, primarily a matter of the ‘conquest of nature’, the appropriation of local resources. Is it not the perversity of this that becomes legible in the poem's nonsensical
landscape and climate images? ‘One interpretation of the current environmental crisis is that it represents nature’s backlash
– its counterinsurgency – against the forces of human colonization’ (Eric Katz).13
Mayumi Toyosato's reading of Kiana Davenport's Hawaiian saga, Shark Dialogues (1995) is an example of how far identification with local interests and peoples also offers critics a stance of explicitly
environmental opposition. The novel traces the modern history of Hawaii and its colonisation and eventual annexation by the United States. Its central character, Pono, already of no longer purely Hawaiian descent, is a kind of seer and embodiment
of indigenous values and beliefs as these come to adapt themselves and change through the twentieth century. Davenport's saga
traces the various characters’ responses to environmental injustice as the islands turn into a destination for mass tourism
and are damaged through various agricultural, energy, military and infrastructure projects. In this process the native population
suffers social collapse, ‘unemployment, alcoholism, crime, suicide’,14 and large immigrant communities of plantation workers suffer similarly. Toyosato's concern in reading the novel is to trace
a shift ‘from race-oriented identity to cultural identity’.15 The issue finds focus in Pono's close but difficult relationship with her four granddaughters, long after their four separate
mothers have died or become alienated. The fact that each of the granddaughters is only partly Hawaiian by blood, and an adopted
grandson, Toru, a Vietnam veteran, not ethnically Hawaiian at all, proves no impediment to the identification with place and
the characters’ practice of the native values of aloha ‘
ina (‘love of the land’) and ‘ohana (‘extended family’). Extended family means, in Pono's case, a lifetime of living with, helping and forming alliances with
immigrant communities from China, the Philippines and Japan. Toyosato affirms the novel as tracing the emergence of a new and viable oppositional Hawaiian identity, based on identification with the land rather than ethnic origins. In this way, her reading offers itself
as both post-colonial and environmentalist at the same time: ‘The novel…reveals how resistance against the destruction of
the environment means resistance against the social/political marginalization, especially for nondominant cultural groups’.16 Localism and resistance to international capitalism are taken to be inherently green. In fact, a simple identification of
this kind informs most criticism striving to unify post-colonial and ecocritical stances.17
ina (‘love of the land’) and ‘ohana (‘extended family’). Extended family means, in Pono's case, a lifetime of living with, helping and forming alliances with
immigrant communities from China, the Philippines and Japan. Toyosato affirms the novel as tracing the emergence of a new and viable oppositional Hawaiian identity, based on identification with the land rather than ethnic origins. In this way, her reading offers itself
as both post-colonial and environmentalist at the same time: ‘The novel…reveals how resistance against the destruction of
the environment means resistance against the social/political marginalization, especially for nondominant cultural groups’.16 Localism and resistance to international capitalism are taken to be inherently green. In fact, a simple identification of
this kind informs most criticism striving to unify post-colonial and ecocritical stances.17Ecological or environmentalist language also acts as a ‘middle ground’ for writers in various post-colonial contexts. Bessie Head's novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) and A Question of Power (1973), explore ideas that correspond to what would later be called a bioregional project of ‘reinhabitation’ (see Chapter 13). Head imagines communities in Botswana who combine a revival of traditional wisdom with modern science in order to disengage themselves from the ideologies of modernisation transforming the larger environment. Such projects
of imaginative reinhabitation may also take the form of a rejection of models of personhood associated with modernity and
the hegemony of the West (individualism, rootlessness, pursuit of personal success, etc.).18 Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), still the novel most frequently studied in relation to environmental post-colonialism, depicts the return to his
native Navaho community of a soldier traumatised by the Second World War, and his gradual recovery through native ritual,
understanding of place and a reconfiguration of the terms of personal identity.19
Richard White's ‘middle ground’, however, was defined as a space of compromise, of partial or even illusory identifications of interests as
much as of encounter and agreement. Two broad points seem relevant to this. Firstly, when a modern ecocritic endorses some
traditional religious practice or the use of non-realist rhetorical or narrative techniques in representing ritual, as in
Ceremony or the scene of Pono's transformation into a shark in Shark Dialogues,20 it is invariably modern secular environmentalism that acts as the decisive if inconspicuous frame within which the value
of indigenous beliefs and their modes of presentation are being celebrated. The cultural authority accorded indigenous practices
is actually second-hand.21
A further issue is that, in taking over their methods of argument from kinds of oppositional politics, ecocritics have yet to evolve modes of argument able fully to engage those crucial environmental problems in which all the individual agents involved are benign or innocent – issues such as the millions of formerly impoverished people in India or China saving to buy a first car. As more people aspire to western kinds of prosperity, problems are arising for which it is not primarily a matter of opposing oppressive
structures of power, for which there are few criteria of judgement and few recognised or accepted modes of political arbitration.
In such cases, it is clearly insufficient to address environmentalist arguments only by pointing out the neocolonial overtones
of some policies or actions, or by admonishing readers to factor ‘cultural difference into both the historical and contemporary
ecological and bioethical debates’.22 Major environmental problems can fall outside the schemas of oppositional post-colonial thinking altogether.
A reading: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004)
As yet little work exists that addresses such tensions. An exception is discussion of Amitav Ghosh's recent novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), set in the Sundarbans, the vast archipelago of islands in the delta of the Ganges in Bengal, on India's border with Bangladesh. The area is internationally renowned as a protected wetland, and is especially famous as a preserve for the threatened
Bengal tiger. Rajender Kaur maps out the social-political co-ordinates of the various characters.23 These are, principally, Piya, a visiting American biologist of Bengali descent, a woman travelling alone whose concern is
primarily with the native river dolphins of the Ganges delta; Fokir, a native fisherman, maintaining his livelihood amid the
policed restrictions of a national park; Nilima, a local activist who has independently built up a thriving health centre,
and Kanai, her nephew and visitor, a prosperous middle-class businessman from New Delhi whose money comes from running translation
agencies. In some ways the novel appears to be a kind of political parable, ending with the American biologist deciding to
stay, teaming up with the local health activist to make dolphin conservation a grass-roots activity, one sensitive to the
needs of the local community. This is after her having been saved from death in a typhoon by the self-sacrificing figure of
the fisherman whose martyrdom, problematically, seems somehow necessary to the final reconciliation of global environmentalism
and local politics. Piya comes to learn, ‘As for myself I know that I don't want to do the kind of work that places the burden
of conservation on those who can least afford it. If I was to take on a project here I’d want it to be done in consultation
with the fishermen who live in these parts.’24 A possible marriage is even on the cards between the biologist Piya and Kanai.
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin sum up the problem with the green parable so far described:
Piya's astute decision at the end to become a ‘rooted cosmopolitan’ rather than a ‘footloose expert’ is only possible because the local people have no particular problem with dolphins. The much more intractable problem of the tiger (and its sanctuary) on which the novel is premised is displaced by the relatively easy dolphin ‘solution’, and neither a practical nor a philosophical management of the problem is offered.25
The Bengal tiger is unusually aggressive and kills 20–80 people in the Sundarbans each year.26 Kaur's reading is that the tiger reservation, established by Indira Gandhi to win international prestige for India, remains an example of the insensitivity of neocolonial environmental
schemes that override the concerns of local people. The novel also focusses on the violent removal from the reserve in the
1970s of refugees from the war which led to the foundation of Bangladesh. Kaur sees Ghosh's novel overall as looking to ‘a new ecocritical paradigm where global entrepreneur and cetologist
can become conscientious collaborators with local underclasses towards mutually beneficial goals’ (137). Yet Kaur also evades
the conflict between the human population of the Sundarbans and man-eating tigers on the endangered species list. The hideous
problem is not really engaged in his statement that, by seeing the tiger as a magnificent but amoral force of nature like
a typhoon, the novel somehow ‘goes beyond taking sides in the conservation debate over the Bengal tiger’ (136).
Few environmental texts confront such issues as starkly as Holmes Rolston's ‘Feeding People versus Saving Nature’. Stressing that the right of the poor is to a more equitable distribution
of the wealth that already exists, Rolston expresses a frightening challenge, ‘one ought not always to feed people first,
but rather one ought sometimes to save nature’.27
The environmental crisis must multiply problems such as this, with no acceptable resolution (who on earth is ‘one’ in Rolston's
sentence?). If the very ‘eco-fascism’ feared by western liberals is already a fact in some post-colonial states, how many ecocritics would yet feel
comfortable working for increased human access to the world's national parks? If environmentalists now expect the poor in
other parts of the world to forgo treating natural resources in the same way that the West has done, then ‘it is difficult to see how anything other than a redistribution of assets could solve the problem’ (Mark A. Michael).28
Eighth quandary: overpopulation
In the 1960s and 1970s the exponential growth in the human population became the often leading concern of environmental movements.
The human population is still soaring today, moving from about 6 billion in 2000 towards a projected 9 billion by 2060, a trend ecologists would see in any other species as leading inevitably to a crash. Phrases like
‘population explosion’ were associated with the often apocalyptic arguments of Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1971)29 or the Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth (1972).30
In literature the topic often took the form of science fiction scenarios in which various futures were depicted in terms of an intolerable lack of personal space and loss
of identity among anonymous herds. In J. G. Ballard's short story ‘Billennium’ (1961), for instance, characters live in a city of 30 million people, each confined
to a cubicle of four square metres.31
However, in later decades overpopulation became far less prominent in environmentalist contexts. Arguments tended to focus
more on issues of distributive justice. The social and economic pressures that lead to overpopulation were understood to be
the insecurities of poverty, to be addressed by programmes to increase basic welfare, and the oppression of women, to be addressed
by reforms giving them genuine power over their own lives.
Such arguments, however, can sometimes have their own evasions. It would be just too convenient to assume that population
pressures on the environment will ease simply if more people live like many inhabitants of Europe or North America. The sharper
focus has been less on numbers of people so much as on the kinds of pressure different groups put on resources, an argument
that puts the onus firmly on the squanderings of the so-called developed world.32
Overall, the issue of overpopulation highlights perhaps more glaringly than any other the inherent clash between a broadly
liberal politics and environmental realities. Since measures to do with curbing population concern sexual behaviour and family
life, they immediately breach perceived boundaries of what is private and what is public. Those ecologists who start to develop
at a public meeting fairly obvious points about curbing human population growth are even liable to find themselves shouted
down. A recent letter in Wildlife magazine claims: ‘All this talk of reducing carbon emissions is just avoiding the real issue: the increasing human population’ (David Walker, Wildlife, November 2009, 115).
In an interview Donna Haraway observes, as a biologist, ‘in the face of a planet that's got well over 6 billion people now’,
the carrying capacity of this planet probably isn't that. And I don't care how many times you talk about the regressive nature of anti-natalist ideologies and population control ideologies. All true, but without serious population reduction we aren't going to make it as a species, and neither are thousands or millions of other species…So you can hate the Chinese for the one-child policy and also think they are right [Laughing].33
As an issue provoking even this sophisticated environmental thinker to acknowledged contradiction and awkward laugher, overpopulation
still seems to present unavoidable but also unacceptable choices.
One issue may be this: if full environmental justice requires that a duty to future generations and to non-human life informs
contemporary decision-making, then the conception of those ‘rights’ held by living people must shift accordingly, perhaps informed by consideration of how the predominantly western
concept of ‘human rights’ itself evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘in low-level population-density and
low-technology societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land and other resources’, in a world, that is, that has now
been consumed (Dale Jamieson).34