Max Liboiron (2021). Attached below:

counting for nearly 40 percent of plastic production in Europe' and 33 percent in Canada.* The next largest categories are building and construction, at just over 20 percent, and automotive at 8 percent.' Stouffer's desire looks like proph- ecy. (Spoiler: It isn't. It's colonialism, but more on that in a moment.) Before Stouffer's call for disposability and before German and US military Introduction powers invested significant finances and research infrastructure into perfect- ing plastics as a wartime material in the 1940s, plastic was described as an envi ronmental good. Mimicking first ivory and then other animal-based materials such as shellac and tortoiseshell, plastic was an artisan substance that showcased technological ingenuity and skill while providing "the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; it will no longer be neces- sary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." The idea of disposability and mass production for plastics is relatively new, developing half a century after plastics were invented. Most plastic produc- In 1956, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of the US magazine Modern Packaging, ad- tion graphs start their timelines after 1950, ignoring the nineteenth- and early dressed attendees at the Society of the Plastics Industry meeting in New York City: "The future of plastics is in the trash can. .. . It [is] time for the plastics industry to stop thinking about 'reuse' packages and concentrate on single use. 3 PlasticsEurope, "Plastics," 12. These numbers include thermoplastics and polyurethanes as For the package that is used once and thrown away, like a tin can or a paper car- well as thermosets, adhesives, coatings, and sealants, but they do not include PET, PA, PP, ton, represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday and polyacryl-fibers. Note that PET and PP are some of the most common plastics found recurring market measured by the billions of units." Stouffer was speaking at a in marine environments. Downloaded from http:/read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/911116/9781478021445-001.pdf by NC STATE UNIV user on 07 February 2024 time when reuse, making do, and thrift were key practices reinforced by two US 4 Deloitte and Cheminfo Services, "Economic Study of the Canadian Plastic Industry, Mar- wars. Consumer markets were saturating. Disposability was one tactic within a kets, and Waste," 6. 5 PlasticsEurope, "Plastics," 12. suite of efforts to move goods through, rather than merely into, consumer house- 6 While historian Jeffrey Meikle (unmarked, see below) provides much archival evidence holds. Today, packaging is the single largest category of plastic production, ac- on how plastics were written about as a replacement for animal products, it is not clear whether there were "actual" material shortages or not, nor is it clear whether plastics played a role in alleviating that shortage (or not). Regardless, this idea was still core to 1 Hello, Reader! Thank you for being here. These footnotes are a place of nuance and poli- the early reputation of plastics. Meikle, American Plastic. For an alternative, see Friedel, tics, where the protocols of gratitude and recognition play out (sometimes also called cita- Pioneer Plastic, 60-64. Thank you, Rebecca Altman (settler), for not only sharing this tion), where warnings and care work are carried out (including calling certain readers aside insight but also consistently prioritizing the work of others in such a way that you reach for a chat or a joke), and where I contextualize, expand, and emplace work. The footnotes out as a co-thinker when people (like me) reproduce an academic truism that needs some support the text above, representing the shoulders on which I stand and the relations I empirical work. Thank you for your collegiality, for the way you celebrate other people's want to build. They are part of doing good relations within a text, through a text. Since a work with genuine enthusiasm and care, and for your careful chemical storytelling. Folks, main goal of Pollution Is Colonialism is to show how methodology is a way of being in the see Altman, "Time-Bombing the Future"; Altman, "American Petro-Topia"; and Altman, world and that ways of being are tied up in obligation, these footnotes are one way to enact 'Letter to America." that argument. Thank you to Duke University Press for these footnotes. Pioneer and plastic appear together quite a bit in both historical and present-day texts. For this first footnote of the introduction, we have a simple citation: Stouffer, "Plastics While I will talk about plastic production's assumption of terra nullius, I won't dwell on its Packaging," 1-3. Don't worry. They'll get better. relationships to pioneering frontierism, except to say that the use of pioneer to mean inno- 2 Packard, Waste Makers; Strasser, Waste and Want; M. Liboiron, "Modern Waste as vation simultaneously normalizes frontierism and the forms of erasure, dispossession, and Strategy." death frontierism requires to make its terra nullius.10 twentieth-century histories of plastics since these materials did not exist as the mass-produced substances we know today.* Plastics have been otherwise. In 1960, only four years after Stouffer's address, a British ornithology jour- nal published an account of the \"confounding\" discovery ofa rubber band in a puffin's stomach.' It would be among the first of hundreds of published reports of wildlife ingesting plastics, including the ones I publish as an environmental scientist. How did plastics become such a ubiquitous pollutant? There are ques- tions that should precede that question: What do you mean by pollutant? How did pollutants come to make sense in the first place? It turns out that the con- cept of environmental pollution as we understand it today is also new. Only twenty years before Stouffer launched the future of plastics into the trash can, the now-dominant and even standard understanding of modern en- vironmental pollution was articulated on the Ohio River. Two engineers in the brand-new field of sanitation engineering named Earle B. Phelps and H. W. Streeter (both unmarked)" created a scientific and mathematical model of the See, e.g,, PlasticsEurope, \"Plastics,\" 12. Bennett, \"Rubber Bands in a Puffin's Stomach,' 222. It is common to introduce Indigenous authors with their nation/affiliation, while settler and white scholars almost always remain unmarked, like \"Lloyd Stouffer.\" This unmark- ing is one act among many that re-centres settlers and whiteness as an unexceptional norm, while deviations have to be marked and named. Simone de Beauvoir (French) called this positionality both \"positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general.\" Not cool. This led me to a methodological dilemma. Do I mark everyone? No one? I thought about just leaving it, because this is difficult and even uncomfortable to figure out, but since this is a methods text I figured I should shit or get off the pot. Feminist standpoint theory and even truth and reconciliation processes maintain that social location and the different collectives we are part of matter to relations, obligations, ethics, and knowledge. Settlers have a different place in reconciliation than Indigenous people, than Black people who were stolen from their Land. As la paperson (diasporic settler of colour) writes, \"'Settler' is not an identity; it is the idealized juridical space of exceptional rights granted to normative settler citizens and the idealized excep- tionalism by which the settler state exerts its sovereignty. The 'settler' is a site of exception from which whiteness emerges. ... [T]he anthropocentric normal is written in its image.\" This assumed positive and neutral \"normal\" right is enacted in the lack of introduction of settlers as settlers, as if settler presence on Land, especially Indigenous Land, is the stable and unremarkable norm, What allows settlers to consistently and unthinkingly not intro- duce their relations to Land and colonial systems is settlerism. See paperson, A Third Uni- versity Is Possible, 10; and Beauvoir, Second Sex. In light of this complex terrain, my imperfect methodological decision has been to identify all authors the way they identify themselves (thank you to everyone who does this!) the first time they appear in a chapter. If an author does not introduce themselves Introduction + 3 z0z Asemuqe4 0 Uo Jesn AINA SLVLS ON Aq jpd'L00-SPrLZ08/> 18/6/91 LL Le4pdseideyo/yoaq/syooqnpa'sseidnaynp pesu/:diy Woy papeqjumaq IL 12 conditions and rates under which water (or at least that bit of the Ohio River) could purify itself of organic pollutants." After running tests that accounted for different temperatures, velocities of water, concentrations of pollutants, and other variables, they wrote that self-purification is a \"measurable phenomenon governed by definite laws and proceeding according to certain fundamental physical and biochemical reactions. Because of the fundamental character of these reactions and laws, it is fairly evident that the principles underlying the phenomenon [of self-purification] as a whole are applicable to virtually all pol- luted streams.\"\" The Streeter-Phelps equation, as it came to be known, not only became a hallmark of water pollution science and regulation but also contained within it their theory of pollution: that a moment existed when water could not purify itself and that moment could be measured, predicted, and properly called pol- lution. Self-purification became known as assimilative capacity, a term of art or their land relations, I mark them as \"unmarked. I do this rather than marking settlers as settlers because of the advice of Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), who encour- ages people to look at structures of the settler state rather than focusing on naming indi- vidual settlers, which reenacts the logics of eugenicist and racist impulses to properly and finally categorize people properly. TallBear, Callison, and Harp. \"Ep. 198.\" I take up this method so we, as users of texts, can understand where authors are speak- ing from, what ground they stand on, whom their obligations are to, what forms of sover- eignty are being leveraged, what structures of privilege the settler state affords, and how we are related so that our obligations to one another as speaker and listener, writer and audi- ence, can be specific enough to enact obligations to one another, a key goal of this text. How has colonialism affected us differently? Introducing yourself is part of ethics and obliga- tion, not punishment. Following Marisa Duarte's (Yaqui) example in Network Sovereignty, I simply introduce people in this way by using parentheses after the first time their name is mentioned. Duarte, Network Sovereignty. Organic pollutants can also be industrial pollutants. Organic in this case does not mean naturally occurringeven arsenic, radon, and methylmercury, while \"naturally occurring\" compounds, do not occur in the tonnages and associated scales of toxicity without indus- trial infrastructure. Streeter and Phelps, Study of the Pollution and Natural Purification of the Obio River, 59. Cognate terms that describe thresholds of harm used in different countries and contexts include carrying capacity, critical load, allowable threshold, and maximum permissible dose. Versions of the term in specific scientific disciplines include reference dose (RED), no ob- servable adverse effect level (NO AEL), lowest observable adverse effect level (LOAEL), lethal dose so percent (LD50), median effective concentration (EC50), maximum acceptable concen- tration (MAC), and derived minimal effect level (D MEL) (which is a truly tricky measure fora level of exposure for which the risk levels of a nonthreshold carcinogen become 4+ Introduction 15 16 in both environmental science and policy making that refers to \"the amount of waste material that may be discharged into a receiving water without causing deleterious ecological effects.\" State-based environmental regulations in most of the world since the 1930s are premised on the logic of assimilative capacity, in which a bodywater, human, or otherwisecan handle a certain amount of contaminant before scientifically detectable harm occurs. I call this the thresh- old theory of pollution. Plastics do not assimilate in the way that Streeter and Phelps's organic pol- lution assimilated in the Ohio River. As I pull little pieces of burned plastic out of a dovekie"' gizzard in my marine science lab, the Civic Laboratory for Envi- ronmental Action Research (CLEAR), the threshold theory of pollution and the future of plastics as waste look like bad relations. I don't mean the individu- alized bad relations of littering (which does not produce much waste compared to other flows of plastic into the ocean, especially here in Newfoundland and Labrador, a land of fishing gear and untreated sewage) ot the bad relations of capitalism where growth and profit are put before environmental costs (though those are certainly horrible relations). I mean the bad relations of a scientific theory that allows some amount of pollution to occur and its accompanying en- titlement to Land to assimilate that pollution." I mean colonialism. The structures that allow plastics' global distribution and full integration into ecosystems and everyday human lives are based on colonial land relations, the assumed access by settler and colonial projects to Indigenous lands for set- tler and colonial goals. At the same time, the ways in which plastics pollute un- evenly, do not follow threshold theories of harm, and act as both hosts for life and sources of harm have made plastics an ideal case to change dominant colo- nial concepts of pollution by teaching us about relations and obligations that \"tolerable,\" thus creating a social threshold where there are no toxicological thresholds). Each has different specifics, but the same theory lies behind them. More on this in chapter 1. Novotny and Krenkel, \"Waste Assimilative Capacity Model? 604. A dovekie is also called a bully bird, little auk, or Alle alle, depending on who's talking. They look like tiny puffins without the fancy beak, and you can see them flying over the water in lines. Some people in Newfoundland and Labrador eat them, but the bones are tiny, thin, and hard to pick out. This argument also appears in CLEAR and EDAction, \"Pollution Is Colonialism,' and is expanded beautifully in Shadaan and Murphy, \"Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals as In- dustrial and Settler Colonial Structures.\" Also see Ngata and Liboiron, \"Maori Plastic Pol- lution Expertise.\" Introduction - 5 pz0z Alenigay 0 U0 Jesn AINM SLWLS ON AQJPd'LO0-Srh}ZORLP} BLE/91 LLL G4 Pd-so}d eyo pjoaqysyooqpe'ssaudnaynp peay/:dyjy Woy pepeojumoq 18 19 tend to be obfuscated from view by environmental rhetoric and industrial infra- structures. In CLEAR, we place land relations at the centre' of our knowledge production as we monitor plastic pollution in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. As members of a marine science lab, we are dedicated to doing science dif- ferently by foregrounding anticolonial land relations. This requires critique but mostly it requires action." We've stopped using toxic chemicals to process sam- ples, which means there is a whole realm of analysis we can't do. We also use judgmental sampling rather than random sampling in our study design to fore- ground food sovereignty when we look at plastics in food webs. CLEAR does good with pollution, in practice, in place. But CLEAR is not unique: land rela- tions always already play a central role in all sciences, anticolonial and otherwise. I find that many people understand colonialism as a monolithic structure with roots exclusively in historical bad action, rather than as a set of contem- porary and evolving land relations that can be maintained by good intentions and even good deeds. The call for more recycling, for example, still assumes ac- cess to Indigenous Land for recycling centres and their pollution. Other people have nuanced understandings of colonialism and seek ways to deal with colo- nial structures in their everyday lives and research, often in spaces like the acad- emy that reproduce colonialism in uneven ways. This book is for both groups, and others besides. Overall, this is a methodological text that begins with colo- nial land relations, so that we can recognize them in familiar and comfortable places (like reading, like counting), and then considers anticolonial methods that centre and change colonial land relations in thought and action. I make three main arguments in this book. First, pollution is not a manifesta- tion or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land.\" That is, pollution is best understood as the violence of colo- Perhaps you've noticed Canadian spellings in the text even though Duke University Press is based in the United States. This is a constant, possibly annoying, reminder that these words come from a place. Spelling is method. Hale, \"Activist Research y. Cultural Critique.\" Throughout this book, you'll notice that sometimes Land is capitalized, and sometimes it isn't. I follow the lead of Styres and Zinga (Indigenous and settler, respectively), who \"cap- italize Land when we are referring to it as a proper name indicating a primary relationship rather than when used in a more general sense. For us, land (the more general term) refers to landscapes as a fixed geographical and physical space that includes earth, rocks, and wa- terways; whereas, 'Land' (the proper name) extends beyond a material fixed space. Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning, and is highly contextualized\" (300-301). Likewise, when I capitalize 6 - Introduction nial land relations rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of vio- lence, These colonial relations are reproduced through even well-intentioned en- vironmental science and activism. Second, there are ways to do pollution action, particularly environmental science, through different Land relations, and they're already happening without waiting for the decolonial horizon to appear. These methods are specific, place-based, and attend to obligations. Third, I show how methodologieswhether scientific, writerly, readerly, or otherwiseare always already part of Land relations and thus are a key site in which to enact good rela- tions (sometimes called ethics). This last point should carry to a variety of con- texts that do not focus on either pollution or the natural sciences. I use the case of plastics, increasingly understood as an environmental scourge and something to be annihilated, to refute and refuse the colonial in a good way. That is, I try to keep plastics and pollution from being conflated too readily, instead decoupling them so existing and potential relations can come to light that exceed the popular position of \"plastics are bad!\" even though plas- tics are often bad. To start, let's dig into colonialism (spoiler: it is not synony- mous with \"bad\" in general, though it is certainly bad). Colonialism Stouffer, Streeter, and Phelps all assumed access to Indigenous Land when they made their proclamations. Stouffer's declaration about the future of plastics as disposables assumed that household waste would be picked up and taken Land 1am referring to the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, ani- mals, ait, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communi- ties. When /ard is not capitalized, I am referring to the concept from a colonial worldview whereby landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere, even with great variation. For the same reason, I also capitalize Nature and Resource and, occasionally, Science. Rather than use a small N or R or S that might indicate that these words are common or universal, the capitalization signals that they are proper nouns that are highly specific to one place, time, and culture. That is, Nature is not universal or common, but unique to a specific worldview that came about at a particular time for specific reasons. Calling out proper nouns so they are also proper names is part of a tradition where using someone/thing's name is to bring it out of the shadows and engage itin power, in challenge, in recogni- tion, in kinship. That's why I don't mind looking like an academic elitist or naive literary wannabe when I capitalize. There's more on compromise in chapter 3. Styres and Zinga, \"Community-First Land-Centred Theoretical Framework,' 300-301. For other politics of capitalization in feminist sciences, see Subramaniam and Willey, \"Introduction\"; and Har- ding, Science and Social Inequality. Introduction - 7 PZ02 Menge 10 U0 J8SN AINN SLVLS ON Aq JPd'L00-SPPLZ08 Lp 1846/91 LL L64Pd1a\\delp/jooq/syooqpe'sseidnaynp peal/-dyy Woy papeojumog 20 21 22 to landfills or recycling plants that allowed plastic disposables to go \"away.\" Without this infrastructural access to Indigenous Land, there is no disposabil- ity." He assumed that Land would provide a sink, a place to store waste, so that profits could be generated through flows of waste-as-consumer-goods. This as- sumption is made easier when the Land has already been cleared of Indigenous peoples via genocide, moves to reserves, and ongoing disappearances such as those catalogued under MMIWG\" statistics. Streeter and Phelps likewise assumed access to Indigenous Land, though they were not capitalists dedicated to growth and profit. On the contrary, Phelps was a bold environmental conservationist. Unlike his contemporar- ies, he believed polluted rivers could and should be saved from, rather than abandoned to, industrial pollution by using science to keep the pollution be- There is some excellent work on the concept of waste and its \"away,\" including Davies, \"Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies\" and de Coverly et al, \"Hidden Mountain.\" I first made this argument in Teen Vogue: M. Liboiron, \"How Plastic Is a Function of Colo- nialism.\" This is not the first and will not be the last time I cite myself. There are good rea- sons to self-cite in certain ways. First, in the words of fish philosopher Zoe Todd (Mtis): \"It is cheeky to cite oneself and to return to the same stories repeatedly in Euro-western aca- deme. We are taught, as students and apprentices, that this is verboten (a well-meaning men- tor even cautioned not to waste my good stories on the wrong journal, which is generally good advice for Euro-Western scholars). ... However, Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) ['Big Thinking') reminds us that 'in Native ways, we always retell our stories, we repeat them. That's how they sink in and become embodied in students and in the people. It is through returning to the fish stories shared with me by interlocutors in Paulatuuq, and by reengag- ing the fish stories my family and friends share with me in amiskwaciwAskahikan, that I am brought back into my reciprocal relationships to people, moments, and responsibilities both in my research and in my engagement as a citizen of my home territory. By returning to the same moments time and time again, I unravel new facets of the relationships these stories contain and enliven.\" Todd, \"Refracting the State,' 61; Little Bear, \"Big Thinking.\" Maarsi, Zoe Todd, for the work you do reorienting academics to good relations and manners. I ad- mire the pedagogy your work uses to shore up unlearning and learning in the academy. Second, I still happen to agree with myself on this point. That doesn't always happen. As I learn, I change my mind. Citing myself in specific ways marks where theories, ideas, and concepts continue to hold after they've come in continued contact with the world. Self-citation and self-quoting says, \"Hey, this still works!\" because so often it doesn't. I talk to many young researchers who are worried about setting their thoughts to paper because they might later change their minds. I hope you do! You will never get it right or done if you are thinking and growing. Publishing marks where you are on that path at that mo- ment. Self-citing extends that path. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 8 . Introduction 23 24 25 26 low a threshold from which the rivers could recover.\" But his theory of self- purification-cum-assimilative-capacity also assumed access to Indigenous Land. Phelps not only accessed Indigenous Land along the Ohio River to do his sci- ence; he also routinized state access by advocating for all rivers on all lands to be governedcarefully! precisely !as proper sinks for pollution. Whether moti- vated by profit and growth or environmental conservation, both approaches to waste and wasting are premised on an assumed entitlement to Indigenous Land. That's colonialism. While there are different types of colonialismsettler colonialism, extractive colonialism, internal colonialism, external colonialism, neoimperialismthey have some things in common. Colonialism is a way to describe relationships characterized by conquest and genocide that grant colonialists and settlers \"on- going state access to land and resources that contradictorily provide the mate- rial and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other.\" Colonialism is more than the intent, identities, heritages, and values of settlers and their ancestors. It's about genocide and access.\" Emphasizing the role of access to Indigenous Land for colonialism, Edward Said (Palestinian)** writes: To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depop- ulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual Tarr, \"Industrial Wastes and Public Health? 1060. Also see Phelps's own words in Phelps, \"Discussion.\" Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 7. In her important work bringing Indigenous studies and Black studies together in The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King makes a strong case that analytical frames originating in White settler colonial studies that foreground land, rather than genocide and conquest, as the defining feature of colonialism miss intersectionality and grounds for coalition pol- itics between Black and Indigenous peoples. She writes, \"Genocideand the making of the Native body as less than human, or fleshremains the focus and distinguishing fea- ture of settler colonialism,' and thar \"an actual discussion of Native genocide is displaced by a focus on White settlers' relationship to land rather than their parasitic and genocidal relationship to Indigenous and Black peoples\" (56, 68). Yes, yes, yes. also think that Land relations, and thus the emplacement of more-than-human relations, are one of the key- stones to doing anticolonial work as a Mtis scientist. So I focus on Land here, and the in- heritance of scientific land relations, knowing that this is shorthand for genocide. Also see Trask, From a Native Daughter; and Trask, \"The Color of Violence.\" This self-identification is in Said, \"Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.\" Introduction - 9 pz0z Aueniqe4 0 U0 J8SN AINN SLWLS ON Aq JPd"L 00-SPrlZ08 Zh 18/6/91 LL LE4Pdsajdeys/jooq/syoaqpe'sseudneynp' peei//:dyyy Woly papeojumog 27 28 geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. At the moment when a coincidence occurs between real control and power, the idea of what a given place was (could be, might become), and an actual placeat that moment the struggle for empire is launched. This coincidence is the logic both for Westerners taking possession of land and, during decolonization, for resisting natives reclaiming it.\" Let's take a moment to focus on that bit about Westerners. Western culture the heritage of social norms, beliefs, ethical values, political systems, epistemol- ogies, technologies, and legal structures and traditions heavily influenced by various forms of Christianity and Judaism that have some origin in Ancient Greece and which heavily influenced societies in Europe and beyondis not synonymous with colonialism. Western culture certainly has its imperialistic and colonial impulses, histories, and ideas of what is good and right, but these are different things from colonialism. When I hear a researcher ask, \"Isn't do- ing research ethics paperwork colonial?,' they are conflating Western and co- lonial. Remember: treaties are paperwork. If paperwork is used to possess land and secure settler and colonial futures, then, yes, it's colonial. But there is also anticolonial, Western-style paperwork that accomplishes the opposite, like the forms required by Indigenous research ethics boards. Colonialism, first, fore- most, and always, is about Land, including the circumvention of ethics paper- work so researchers can have unfettered and unaccountable access to field sites (a.k.a. homelands), archives, samples, and data.\" The focus on Landwhar it could be, what it might become, what it is fordoes not always mean accessing Land as property for settlement, though it often does. It can also mean access to Land-based cultural designs and cultur- ally appropriated symbols for fashion. It can mean access to Indigenous Land for scientific research. It can mean using Land as a Resource, a practice that may generate pollution through pipelines, landfills, and recycling plants, or as a sink to store or process waste. It can mean imagining a clean, healthy, and pollution-free future and conducting beach cleanups on Indigenous Land with- out permission or consent. It means imagining things for land in ways that align with colonial and settler goals, even when those goals are well intentioned. Es- pecially when they are well intentioned. Which means it's time to talk about environmentalism. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 93. E.g., Lawford and Coburn, \"Research, Ethnic Fraud, and the Academy.\" 10 + Introduction tainly has a large share of such agents. Colonial land relations are inherited Environmentalism and Colonialism as common sense, even as good ideas. Many environmental historians have Environmentalism does not usually address colonialism and often reproduces shifted their understanding of the origins of environmentalism well before it. Philosopher Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi),29 Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville back-to-the-land and save-the-(access-to-)land movements of the 1960s and Confederated Tribes),30 and many others? have pointed out that environment 1970s. Instead they highlight earlier imperial archiving, cultivation, and control tal solutions to pollution such as hydroelectric dams, 32 consumer responsibility, measures necessary for the flourishing of empire around the globe, both within and appeals to the commons' assume access to Indigenous Land and its ability and outside of what is lately called North America. 3 They argue that the colo- to produce value for settler and colonial desires and futures. Environmentalism nial scientists who attempted to mitigate and halt environmental destruction often "propagate[s] and maintain[s] the dispossession of [IIndigenous peoples in colonies so that the colonies might flourish are "the pioneers of modern en- for the common good of the world."34 vironmentalism,"? where "environmentalism is police action, inseparable from For example, in September 2015, a US-based environmental NGO called western conceptions and attitudes" of how to best organize and govern land the Ocean Conservancy released a report looking for solutions to marine plas- (more on this in chapter 1). tic pollution that recommended that countries in Southeast Asia work with The way that environmental crises and their solutions maintain rather than foreign-funded industries to build incinerators to burn plastic waste.'S This rec- change existing power structures is central to the scholarship of anthropologist ommendation follows a long line of colonial acts in the name of plastics, from Joseph Masco (settler), who points out that "crisis," environmental and other- accessing Indigenous Land to extracting oil and gas (and occasionally corn) for wise, has "become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a feedstock; to producing disposable plastics that use land to store, contain, and means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of vi- assimilate the waste; to pointing the finger at local "foreign" and Indigenous Downloaded from http:/read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/91 1116/9781478021445-001.pdf by NC S olence across militarisms, economy, and the environment."" Rather than using peoples for "mismanaging" waste imported from industrial and colonial cen- crisis as a relational model that puts certain things beyond dispute in the imper- tres; and then gaining access to that Land to solve their uncivilized approach to ative to act at all costs, I focus on colonial land relations within environment waste (mis)management. 36 tal narratives and action as a way to acknowledge and address this usually un- This is not to say that the Ocean Conservancy is evil, or even aware of its marked power dynamic. colonial mindset. Colonialism doesn't come from asshat goons, though it cer- 9 Whyte, "Dakota Access Pipeline." 37 Here, I am drawing on Foucault's (unmarked) articulation of power as regimes of truth o Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows. that allow some things to make sense, to circulate, and to act as truth, while others do not. I paperson, "Ghetto Land Pedagogy"; Osborne, "Fixing Carbon, Losing Ground"; Os- See Foucault, Discipline and Punish. However, following Michelle Murphy (Metis), I build borne, Bellante, and vonHedemann, Indigenous Peoples and REDD +. on this work "unfaithfully," as "Foucault's own work on neoliberal economics refuses to 32 Nunatsiavut Government, "Make Muskrat Right." engage with colonial and postcolonial histories, the elaboration of the racial state, and 3 Fortier, Unsettling the Commons. drops sex as a central analytic." Murphy, Economization of Life, 149. $4 Byrd, Transit of Empire, xix. 38 Anker, Imperial Ecology; Komeie, "Colonial Environmentalism." 35 Ocean Conservancy, "Stemming the Tide." 9 Grove, "Origins of Environmentalism," 12. I think Grove and I see eye to eye on the term 6 The term mismanaged waste has gained traction since a scientific publication estimating pioneer here. the amount of plastics entering the oceans used the category of mismanaged waste to es- V user on 07 February 2024 40 Barton, Empire Forestry, 6. timate plastic leakage from land to the ocean. The problem is that everyone whose waste 41 Masco, "Crisis in Crisis," $65. Also see Masco, "Bad Weather." Joe Masco, thank you not management did not look like the United States was automatically labelled mismanaged. only for your excellent, careful, original, and insightful work on the links between environ- The term signals that the infrastructure in question isn't quite Civilized enough. A de- mental and military crises, but, more importantly (to me and as a model in the academy), tailed critique of this study and its colonial premises is in chapters I and 2. For commu- for your genuine generosity, solid and obvious forms of support, forceful and inspiring yet nity and grassroots pushback to this report, see GAIA Coalition, "Open Letter to Ocean gentle curiosity, and feminist, caring ways that you invest in emerging intellectuals. Thank Conservancy." you, Joe, for taking time and care to be part of this book's life (and mine!). Introduction . II 12 . Introduction42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Capitalism and Colonialism To change colonial land relations and enact other types of Land relations re- quires specificity. This is so we don't accidentally think that the opposite of co- lonialism is environmentalism or, similarly, that we don't conflate colonialism with other forms of extraction, such as capitalism. Colonialism and capitalism might be happy bedfellows and indeed longtime lovers, but they are not the same thing. Political economist Karl Marx (unmarked) argues that primitive accumula- tion (the stealing of land) is foundational to the possibility of capitalismit's how someone gets more capital than someone else in the first place, which you need to jump-start a system where only a few people own the means of produc- tion.\" You can't make and hoard capital without stealing Land first. We have case studies of how aspects of capitalist production and technologies allow specific forms of colonialism and dispossession to take root and spread.' Likewise, excel- lent research describes the sweet trifecta of capitalism, colonialism, and pollution, The treadmill of industrial and capitalist production is ever in need of more Land to contain its pollution,\" leading to the argument that \"contamination and re- source dispossession [are] necessary and inherent factors of capitalism.\" Yet colonial quests for Land are different than capitalist goals for capital, even if pollution has a role in attaining each goal. Socioeconomic systems other than capitalism also create environmental pollution and waste,** but what is more important for understanding the relationship between capitalism and co- lonialism is that many different economic systems depend on access to Indige- nous Land. As Sandy Grande (Quechua) has argued, \"Both Marxists and cap- italists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good ofall.\"\"\" Eve Tuck (Unangax) and Wayne Yang (diaspora settler of col- our) have pointed out, \"Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g., Chinese colonialism in Tibet).\"* Colonialism is not one kind of Marx, \"The Modern Theory of Colonisation? chap. 33 in Capital, vol. 1. Denoon, Settler Capitalism; Pasternak, \"How Capitalism Will Save Colonialism.\" Voyles, Wastelanding. Oftias, \"Invisible Harms, Invisible Profits,' 436. Gille, From the Cult of Waste; Kao, \"City Recycled\"; Scheinberg and Mol, \"Multiple Mo- dernities.\" We need a lot more research in this area. Grande, Red Pedagogy, 31. Tuck and Yang, \"Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,' 4. Introduction + 13 e072 Metuqes 10 UO J88N AINN ALWLS ON Aq Pd". 00-SPr1Z08Lr L8L6/91 LL LAPd~eydeup/yooq/syooqpe sseidnaynp' peei//: diy Woy pepeojumoq 49 5 51 thing with one set of techniques that always align with capitalism. Marxism, so- cialism, anticapitalism, capitalism, and other economic systems can, though cer- tainly don't have to, enact colonial relations to Land as a usable Resource that produces value for settler and colonizer goals, regardless of how and by whom that value is produced. Colonialism, capitalism, and environmentalism do not have settled relation- ships or forms.\" For instance, colonialist states and powers have at times sided with environmental conservation over capitalist gains. Historians have docu- mented how, as Richard Grove (unmarked) puts it, \"Paradoxically, the colonial state in its pioneering conservationist role provided a forum for controls on the unhindered operations of capital for short-term gain which, it might be argued, brought about a contradiction to what is normally supposed to have made up the common currency of imperial expansion. Ultimately, the long-term security of the state, which any ecological crisis threatened to undermine, counted for far more than the interests of private capital bent on the destruction of the en- vironment.'** To make capitalism and colonialism synonymous, or to conflate environmentalism and anticolonialism, misses these complex relations. Because of this nuance and its repercussions for political action, political sci- entist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has called for scholars to shift their analysis away from capitalist relations (production, proletarianization) to colo- nial relations (dispossession, Land acquisition, access to Land): \"Like capital, colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not a 'thing, but rather the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it. When stated this way, it should be clear that shift- ing our position to highlight the ongoing effects of colonial dispossession in no way displaces questions of distributive justice or class struggle; rather, it simply situates these questions more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-colonial present.\" Conflating colonialism with capitalism misses crucial relations, which Coulthard argues include white supremacy and patriarchy. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Geonpul, Feminist geographers like J. K. Gibson-Graham (unmarked) have done excellent work showing how capitalism is not only diverse in its manifestations, but also patchy and in- complete. They argue that to describe capitalism as a total and complete system is to give it power it does not necessarily have. Gibson-Graham, \"End of Capitalism\"; Gibson- Graham, \"Rethinking the Economy.\" Grove, \"Origins of Environmentalism,' 12; emphasis added. This is an appropriate use of the term pioneering. Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 15. 14 + Introduction 52 33 Quandamooka First Nation) has shown that it misses racial formations and rac- ism.\" For thinkers such as Tuck and Yang, the \"homogenization of various ex- periences of oppression as colonialism' that is, conflating imperialism, racism, capitalism, exclusion, and general bad behaviour with colonialism accom- plishes \"a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of so- cial change.\"* Differentiation and specificity matter to ensure that actions address prob- lems, and the conflation of colonialism with other ills ensures the erasure of horizons of meaningful action that can attend specifically to assumed settler and colonial entitlement and access to Land. In the case of pollution, a focus on capitalism misses relations that make Land available for pollution in the first place. It can miss the necessary place of stolen Land in colonizers' and settlers' ability to create sinks for pollution as well as stolen Land's place in alternative economies (via a communal commons) and environmental conservation (via methylmercury-producing hydroelectric dams). Pollution, scientific ways to know pollution, and actions to mitigate pol- lution are not examples of, symptoms or metaphors for, or unintentional by- products of colonialism, but rather are essential parts of the interlocking log- ics (brain), mechanisms (hands and teeth), and structures (heart and bones) Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive. Thank you, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, for the po- litical and intellectual move of foregrounding identity and culture as the primary grounds from which to make claims and change. I think this is a key lesson for activism: \"Patriar- chal white nation-states and universities insist on producing cultural difference in order to manage the existence and claims of Indigenous people. In this way the production of knowledge about cultural specificity is complicit with state requirements for manageable forms of difference that are racially configured through whiteness.\" Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive, xvii. Tuck and Yang, \"Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,\" 17, 3. I wish to express a deep grat- itude for your work, Eve Tuck, and especially for \"Suspending Damage,\" which has pro- foundly shaped my research, including the way this book was framed and written. Tuck's open letter is, in many ways, directly responsible for turning my work from being about plastic to being about colonialism. It is part of a shift that took place in my scientific work from attempting to create an accounting of chemical harms by counting plastic to artic- ulating food sovereignty (details on this method are in chapter 3). I re-read \"Suspending Damage\" and \"Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor\" at least once a season, as an event to sit with the text, rather than as a source to pull things from (a reading technique I strength- ened after reading some of your tweets on extractive reading practices). Your work has eas- ily been some of the most formative in my intellectual and ethical journey. Thank you, Eve Tuck, for your brilliance, pedagogy, and ethics. Introduction 15 pz0z Kuemige4 20 U0 J8sn AINN ALWLS ON Aq Jpd"| 00-SPP1ZOBLP LBZ6/91 LL L64Pd-13) deys/4ooq/syooq;npa'ssaidnaynp pea//-dy Woy pepeojuMog 54 55 56 57 58 of colonialism that allow colonialism to produce and reproduce its effects in Canada, the United States, and beyond. Colonialism is not just about taking Land, though it certainly includes taking Land. Stealing is a manifestation, a symptom, a mechanism, and even a goal of colonialism. But those are the teeth of colonialism, and I want to look at its bones. Stealing Land and dispossessing people are events with temporal edges, but ongoing Land theft requires mainte- nance and infrastructure that are not as discrete, given that \"colonization is a continuing process, not simply a historical event.'* Colonialism is a set of spe- cific, structured, interlocking, and overlapping relations that allow these events to occur, make sense, and even seem right (to some).'\" I will argue throughout this text that these relationstheir types, durations, effects, and maintenance are also enacted by pollution and pollution science. Otherwises and Alterlives When I first began researching plastic pollution around 2008, I thought that plastics had the immense potential to blow concepts of pollution out of the wa- ter,* since they defy so many scientific and popular truisms, You can't \"clean up\" There are different colonialisms, imperialisms, and indigeneities because these things are place- and time-based. When I speak in general terms, statements are rooted in relations from Newfoundland and Labrador and early teachings in Alberta, Canada. They will not make global sense (more on the difference between universalism and generalization of knowledge in chapter 3). For an example of interlocking infrastructures at multiple scales that maintain Land theft (even as they fail!), see Pasternak, Grounded Authority. This text is particularly good for dis- cussions of how Indigenous jurisdiction and Land are consistently usurped in place, partic- ularly by the state through mechanisms of financialization and \"accountability.\" It is also an excellent text for studying/punching up, for showing how Canadian state sovereignty and jurisdiction consistently fall short and are patchy, even though they are often assumed to be solidly in place. Thank you, Shiri Pasternak (settler), for your excellent work. Anguksuar, \"Postcolonial Perspective.\" Also see the more oft-cited Wolfe, Settler Colonialism. Sandy Grande writes about the animating beliefs and logics that underpin colonial societies that serve as the basis for common sense. These core beliefs are as follows: (1) belief in prog- ress as change and change as progress; (2) belief in the effective separateness of faith and rea- son; (3) belief in the essential quality of the universe and of \"reality\" as impersonal, secular, material, mechanistic, and relativistic; (4) subscription to ontological individualism; and (5) beliefin human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of nature. While this text focuses on the third and fifth beliefs, and particularly how they manifest in pollution sci- ence, all five are part of how land is understood and related to. Grande, Red Pedagogy, 69. Pun! 16 + Introduction pZ0z Auemuge4 10 U0 JesN AINN ALWLS ON Aq Jpd"| 00-SbPLZ0BLb LBZ6/91 LL L64pd-12) dey/yo0q/syooq;npe'ssaidnaynp peau//-dy Woy pepeojMog plastics because they exist in geological time, and cleaning just shuffles them in siderable and sustained public, scientific, and policy attention to plastic pollu- space as they endure in time." You can't recycle them out of the way, because it tion, most pollution science and activism have not shifted this way (with a few means ever more will be produced," and there is no "away" at any rate. " Many notable exceptions6). of the chemicals associated with plastics, called endocrine disruptors, defy As feminist scholar Susan Leigh Star (unmarked) reminds us, "It might have thresholds and exceed the adage that the "danger is in the dose" or the "solution been otherwise." In fact, it has been. There are and have been other defini- to pollution is dilution" because they cause harm at trace quantities already pres- tions of and relations to pollution. Not all pollution is colonial, but the idea of ent in the environment and bodies. 62 Plastics and their chemicals defy contain- modern environmental pollution certainly is (more on this in chapter 1). Be- ment, a hallmark approach to industrial waste management, as they blow, flow, and off-gas so that their pollutants are ubiquitous in every environment tested. 63 Downloaded from http:/r Last but hardly least, their long temporality means their future effects are largely Downloaded from http:/read.dukeup than-human world." Kenney, "Fables of Response-Ability," 7; emphasis in original. Also unknown," making uncertain the guarantee of settler futures. I thought these see work by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (unmarked), Donna Haraway (unmarked), Alexis traits would provide pollution science and activism with the case they needed to Shotwell (unmarked), Karen Barad (unmarked), Lucy Suchman (unmarked), Kim Fortun move beyond thresholds of allowable harm, beyond disposability, and beyond (unmarked), Aryn Martin (unmarked), Natasha Myers (settler), Michelle Murphy (Me- the access to Land that both thresholds and "away" require.65 But despite con- tis), Shawn Wilson (Cree), Dwayne Donald (Cree), Zoe Todd (Metis), Kim TallBear Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Sara Tolbert (unmarked), and Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) on accountability and responsibility in relations. 66 Settler scientists such as Chelsea Rochman (unmarked), Laura Vandenberg (unmarked), 9 Gray-Cosgrove, Liboiron, and Lepawsky, "Challenges of Temporality." and Fred vom Saal (unmarked), among others, have all written about the chemical hazards 50 MacBride, "Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?" Thank you, Saman- of plastics and their associated chemicals and the way science, industry, and policy ought tha MacBride (unmarked). You are one of the smartest, most careful, most multiscalar and to relate to one another. They work within dominant science to shift the conversation. I'll interdisciplinary thinkers I have had the pleasure to know intellectually (and personally!) speak more about some of their work in chapter 2. See, e.g., Rochman et al., "Policy"; Van- when it comes to waste streams and recycling in the United States. You are a role model denberg et al., "Regulatory Decisions on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals"; vom Saal and for how you put your intelligence to work as the director of research at the New York City Hughes, "Extensive New Literature." Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) Department of Sanitation. If I had to teach only one text on waste, it would be yours: is also exemplary for its insistence in looking upstream at industry and political alliances MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered. Thank you, Samantha MacBride, for all the forms of for the source of marine plastics and has folded critiques of capitalism and colonialism work you do and particularly how you do it. into its work. GAIA has also proposed some shifts in scientific methods of monitoring ma- 61 Davies, "Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies"; Bullard, Dumping in Dixie. rine plastics, which I discuss in chapter 2. See GAIA, "Plastics Exposed." 62 E.g., Vandenberg, "Low-Dose Effects of Hormones and Endocrine Disruptors." 67 Star, "Power, Technology, and the Phenomenology of Conventions," $3. 63 Bergman et al., "Impact of Endocrine Disruption," A104; vom Saal et al., "Chapel Hill 58 I use the term modern pollution to mean post-miasma theories of environmental pollution -pdf/91 11 16/9781478021445-001.pdf by NC STATE UNIV user on 07 February 2024 Bisphenol A Expert Panel Consensus Statement," 131. based on quantitative science, threshold limits, and industrial capture. In Risk and Blame, 64 You may have noticed that temporal estimates of plastics breaking down (one thousand white primitivist anthropologist Mary Douglas (British) differentiates between cultural years for this kind of plastic, ten thousand for this other kind) exceed the amount of time notions of pollution and "technical" senses: "There is a strict technical sense, as when we that plastics have existed. Most of these estimates are modeled from data created in labs (in speak of river or air pollution, when the physical adulteration of an earlier state can be pre- UV-saturated, vibrating, acidic set-ups that rarely mimic actually existing environmental cisely measured. The technical sense rests upon a clear notion of the prepolluted condi- conditions) and are based on the idea that the rate of weakening polymer bonds will pro- tion. A river that flows over muddy ground may be always thick; but if that is taken as its ceed on a regular curve. They do not anticipate the effects of metabolites or the molecular natural state, it is not necessarily said to be polluted. The technical sense of pollution is chains that polymers might break into. They cannot anticipate how future environmental not morally loaded but depends upon measures of change. The other sense of pollution is 7 February 2024 relations will absorb, adapt to, and otherwise influence these rates of breakdown or the ef- a contagious state, harmful, caused by outside intervention, but mysterious in its origins." fects of many types of plastics in diverse environments over long periods. Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36. But one of my primary arguments is that this "technical" 65 This is what feminist STS scholars such as Martha Kenney (unmarked) and others might sense of pollution is indeed morally loaded with the values and goals of colonialism and call response-ability: "cultivating the capacity for response. Recent works in feminist science that there is therefore no real difference between Douglas's categories. I nevertheless use studies have proposed response-ability as a term that might whet our imaginations for the term modern environmental pollution to highlight, as Douglas does, the recent origins more relational ethics and politics enacted in everyday practices of living in our more- and culturally specific aspects of scientific definitions of pollution. Introduction . 17 18 . Introduction23 24 25 26 low a threshold from which the rivers could recover. But his theory of self- purification-cum-assimilative-capacity also assumed access to Indigenous Land. Phelps not only accessed Indigenous Land along the Ohio River to do his sci- ence; he also routinized state access by advocating for all rivers on all lands to be governed carefully! precisely! as proper sinks for pollution. Whether moti- vated by profit and growth or environmental conservation, both approaches to waste and wasting are premised on an assumed entitlement to Indigenous Land. That's colonialism. While there are different types of colonialismsettler colonialism, extractive colonialism, internal colonialism, external colonialism, neoimperialismthey have some things in common. Colonialism is a way to describe relationships characterized by conquest and genocide that grant colonialists and settlers \"on- going state access to land and resources that contradictorily provide the mate- tial and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other.\"* Colonialism is more than the intent, identities, heritages, and values of settlers and their ancestors. It's about genocide and access.\" Emphasizing the role of access to Indigenous Land for colonialism, Edward Said (Palestinian)\"* writes: To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depop- ulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual Tarr, \"Industrial Wastes and Public Health? 1060. Also see Phelps's own words in Phelps, \"Discussion.\" Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 7. In her important work bringing Indigenous studies and Black studies together in The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King makes a strong case that analytical frames originating in White settler colonial studies that foreground land, rather than genocide and conquest, as the defining feature of colonialism miss intersectionality and grounds for coalition pol- itics between Black and Indigenous peoples. She writes, \"Genocideand the making of the Native body as less than human, or fleshremains the focus and distinguishing fea- ture of settler colonialism,' and that \"an actual discussion of Native genocide is displaced by a focus on White settlers' relationship to land rather than their parasitic and genocidal relationship to Indigenous and Black peoples\" (56, 68). Yes, yes, yes. also think that Land relations, and thus the emplacement of more-than-human relations, are one of the key- stones to doing anticolonial work as a Mtis scientist. So I focus on Land here, and the in- heritance of scientific land relations, knowing that this is shorthand for genocide. Also see Trask, From a Native Daughter; and Trask, \"The Color of Violence.\" This self-identification is in Said, \"Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.\" Introduction + 9 djy Woy pepeojumog z0z Aseniga 40 UO 488M AINN ALWLS ON Aq jPd"L 00-SPrLZ082% 1826/91 LL 6A Pdsa\\deyspyooq/syooqnpe'ssaidnaxnp pe 27 28 geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. At the moment when a coincidence occurs between real control and power, the idea of what a given place was (could be, might become), and an actual placeat that moment the struggle for empire is launched. This coincidence is the logic both for Westerners taking possession of land and, during decolonization, for resisting natives reclaiming it.\" Let's take a moment to focus on that bit about Westerners. Western culrure the heritage of social norms, beliefs, ethical values, political systems, epistemol- ogies, technologies, and legal structures and traditions heavily influenced by various forms of Christianity and Judaism that have some origin in Ancient Greece and which heavily influenced societies in Europe and beyondis not synonymous with colonialism. Western culture certainly has its imperialistic and colonial impulses, histories, and ideas of what is good and right, but these are different things from colonialism. When I hear a researcher ask, \"Isn't do- ing research ethics paperwork colonial?,' they are conflating Western and co- lonial. Remember: treaties are paperwork. If paperwork is used to possess land and secure settler and colonial futures, then, yes, it's colonial. But there is also anticolonial, Western-style paperwork that accomplishes the opposite, like the forms required by Indigenous research ethics boards. Colonialism, first, fore- most, and always, is about Land, including the circumvention of ethics paper- work so researchers can have unfettered and unaccountable access to field sites (a.k.a. homelands), archives, samples, and data.\" The focus on Landwhat it could be, what it might become, what it is fordoes not always mean accessing Land as property for settlement, though it often does. It can also mean access to Land-based cultural designs and cultur- ally appropriated symbols for fashion. It can mean access to Indigenous Land for scientific research. It can mean using Land as a Resource, a practice that may generate pollution through pipelines, landfills, and recycling plants, or as a sink to store or process waste. It can mean imagining a clean, healthy, and pollution-free future and conducting beach cleanups on Indigenous Land with- out permission or consent. It means imagining things for land in ways that align with colonial and settler goals, even when those goals are well intentioned. Es- pecially when they are well intentioned. Which means it's time to talk about environmentalism. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 93. E.g., Lawford and Coburn, \"Research, Ethnic Fraud, and the Academy.\" 10 + Introduction 20% Aleniqe4 0 UO 485N AINN ALWLS ON Aq JP4"L 00-SPLZOB Zr L8Z6/91 FE Lea pd-eideyapjooq/syooqynpe ssaidneynp: peal//:dyy Woy pepeojumog tainly has a large share of such agents. Colonial land relations are inherited Environmentalism and Colonialism as common sense, even as good ideas." Many environmental historians have Environmentalism does not usually address colonialism and often reproduces shifted their understanding of the origins of environmentalism well before it. Philosopher Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi),29 Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville back-to-the-land and save-the-(access-to-)land movements of the 1960s and Confederated Tribes), 30 and many others' have pointed out that environment 1970s. Instead they highlight earlier imperial archiving, cultivation, and control tal solutions to pollution such as hydroelectric dams," consumer responsibility, measures necessary for the flourishing of empire around the globe, both within and appeals to the commons' assume access to Indigenous Land and its ability and outside of what is lately called North America.3 They argue that the colo- to produce value for settler and colonial desires and futures. Environmentalism nial scientists who attempted to mitigate and halt environmental destruction often "propagate[s] and maintain[