Extract: Ekow Eshun on the Ties Between Colonialism and the Climate Crisis

The climate crisis is not a new phenomenon, but the conversations around its history are shifting. While the commonly held theory that the current crisis began in earnest in 1950, it fails to consider the historic roots of the issue. It also fails to provide an accurate understanding of the impact of the colossal shifts caused by the climate crisis, by assuming every community affected is on the same playing field.

Written by Ekow Eshun, Black Earth Rising presents works by artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity that address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World. Complex and intertwined concepts are explored: forced migration and slavery, the environmental consequences of colonialism, the occupation of Native lands, the urban plight of Black and Brown communities, and how cultural practices and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples can change our perspectives of the natural world.

In this extract, Eshun lays bare the colonial past of the New World and its direct and long-lasting impact on the environment. The ways in which colonialists dramatically changed the ecosystems they inhabited, and the Black and Brown communities who still suffer the consequences are worthy of consideration and understanding.

On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the present-day Bahamas on an island that he named San Salvador. Believing he was in Asia, Columbus spent the next few months looking for the bountiful trading routes in silks, spices and gold described by earlier travellers to the continent. The backers of his voyage included a group of merchant bankers and the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, and he was anxious to make a financial return on their behalf. Yet, as time passed and the hoped-for trade opportunities with Indigenous peoples failed to appear, Columbus took a different approach to profit-making. Instead of trade, he turned to domination. The Indigenous peoples were ‘fearful and timid … guileless and honest.’

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The construction thereafter of a permanent Spanish settlement in the Dominican Republic opened the way for the European colonization of the Americas. It also precipitated the cross-continental transfer of flora and fauna, and people and ideas, known as the Columbian Exchange. The arrangement was asymmetric. On the one hand it delivered potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and other crops to Europe. On the other, it dramatically altered the environment, population and social make-up of the Caribbean, to a degree hitherto unseen in human history.

Among the dozens of fruits and vegetables introduced to the islands were many now regarded as quintessentially Caribbean, such as yam, mango, banana, breadfruit, coconut and sugarcane. But Europeans also brought with them many less appealing imports, such as smallpox, measles, typhus, malaria, chicken pox and bubonic plague – diseases that ravaged island populations with no immunity to them. To the toll from epidemics was added brutal oppression. Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and South America were taken from their lands, forced into slavery, and made to labour in silver and gold mines and on plantations. Their status was reduced to that of an exploitable commodity, interchangeable in value with the goods they were made to toil over.

Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival, the Taino people of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), who may have numbered up to 8 million, had been virtually wiped out. Rising demand for plantation crops like sugar and coffee also spurred the development of the transatlantic slave trade, as Africans were forcibly shipped across the ocean to replace declining local populations. Death by disease and oppressive labour conditions only continued to rise. By 1600, in the period now known to some scholars by the bleak title of the Great Dying, the Indigenous population of the Americas had dropped from 60 million to 6 million.

With no local communities to tend them, millions of hectares of farmland were left abandoned, reverting to natural vegetation. The impact of such huge and sudden reforestation, across lands equivalent to the size of France, led to the largest fall in atmospheric CO2 levels anytime in the last 2,000 years and may also have caused a drop in global temperatures, coinciding as it did with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age that occurred between the 14th and 19th centuries. From this point onward, the fate of humans and the planet was inextricably linked.

In 2000, the theory that the planet had decisively entered a Human Age began to gain popular currency, with the coinage of the term ‘the Anthropocene’. The concept denotes a period beginning in 1950, when human activity began to have a dramatic impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, from rampant species extinction to the widespread toxicity and imbalance caused by synthetic materials, fertilizers and pesticides.

Yet notwithstanding its popular adoption, the notion of the Anthropocene remains a conceptually flawed one. When I say this, I am not referring to the ‘epic row’ among climate scientists about whether or not it is technically accurate to speak of a human epoch. Rather, I am concurring with critics of the term who argue that, by framing itself as a universal condition affecting all of humanity to the same degree, the concept flattens the unequal ways in which different societies experience climate change. It takes no account, for instance, of the fact that, while the industrialized nations of the Global North are responsible for 92% of all excess global emissions, it is the poorer populations of the Global South who disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental degradation. Despite standing for a viewpoint that is narrowly Western and white, writes the theorist Sylvia Wynter, the Anthropocene ‘overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself’. In so doing, it reduces those who are non-Western and non-white to the status of the non-human.

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In the context of this book, I want to highlight the notion of the Plantationocene, which foregrounds the historical connections and continued impact of colonialism, slavery and the plantation system on humanity and the planet. Rather than 1950, the Plantationocene traces the roots of climate crisis back to the 15th century and the creation of the vast agricultural estates that were a defining physical feature of European annexation of the New World. With the plantation system came transatlantic slavery, as well as the large-scale land clearing and extensive deforestation that significantly altered local ecosystems.

More than an agricultural structure, then, the plantation was a system of power and control that triggered the mass migration of peoples and the establishment of global networks of goods and capital. Centuries after its development, the plantation continues to shape a modern world based on the extraction of natural resources and radical economic and social inequalities between the Global North and South. We live in its shadow still.

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This is the subject matter of Black Earth Rising. This book explores how contemporary artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Indigenous origin are considering questions of history, power, climate change, and social and environmental justice. And how, in the process, they are creating artworks of powerful insight and resonant beauty.

Words by Ekow Eshun.

Black Earth Rising is available to pre-order now.