Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recognizes that Africa will experience among the worst impacts of the climate crisis due to its lower adaptive capacity in world-ecology. Recognizing the climate crisis as essentially weaponized through structural violence, an examination of it through the lens of the Apartheidocene (Leguizamon Grant, forthcoming, 2021), makes it easier for us to both trace these dynamics and consider how to stop the violence. Whether we are looking at France, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti, or other locations of Diaspora with large Africana populations, we recognize specific ways in which anti-black violence is orchestrated – both historically and contemporarily as a pattern in the climate crisis. Black lives have historically faced the inhospitable climate of racism expressed through colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and hetero-patriarchy. We see all of these as manifestation of an ecologically imperialist form of world-ecological organization. By renaming the climate crisis as the Apartheidocene, we focus our examination on metabolic flows in world-ecology and the specific ways in which Black space and Black ecology as theorized by Nathan Hare (1970) is relevant in the context of the climate crisis. We propose options for action that eradicate the pattern of anti-black violence and move all of us along substantive just transition pathways by 2050 to exit the Apartheidocene and enter new world-ecological norm of ecological democracy by 2050.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Human Impacts and Responsibility
KEYWORDS
Apartheidocene, Climate Apartheid, Ecological Imperialism, Africa, Climate Apartheid, Anti-Black Violence
