Police march into the Standing Rock camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to disrupt a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline on October 10, 2016. (Photo: Ellen Davidson)
The actions taken recently by law enforcement at the Dakota Access pipeline site have made it plain that the climate crisis cannot be adequately addressed until we come to terms with the history that climate change and the policing of communities of color share. That history requires us both to understand climate change as powered in great measure by the pursuit of policies and practices done to people of color, and to see our radically altered global atmosphere itself as part of the felt experience of people of color, and of continued repression and exploitation.
Like the racist policing we witnessed at the Dakota Access pipeline (and have been witnessing throughout the nation), climate change was, as feminist philosopher Chris J. Cuomo reminds us, “manufactured in a crucible of inequality.” Specifically, it is “a product of the industrial and the fossil-fuel eras, historical forces powered by exploitation, colonialism and nearly limitless instrumental use of ‘nature.'”
In other words, the processes by which the colonial powers created their wealth and warmed the planet were, as legal scholar Carmen G. Gonzalez notes, inextricable from the oppressive practices they used to both transform the “subsistence economies” of the Global South “into economic satellites of Europe,” and to dominate and exploit people of color around the globe.
Though we live now in a postcolonial world, it is nevertheless true, as Leonardo Helland and Tim Lindgren argue, that “long-standing patterns and forms of power” continue to be “reproduced throughout the world as an ongoing consequence of colonization.” After all, the “structures” that were “put in place” over the course of “450 years did not evaporate with … decolonization.” We “continue to live under the ‘colonial power matrix,'” to which the repressive policing of people…