Disclaimer: The views expressed are that of the individual author. All rights are reserved to the original authors of the materials consulted, which are identified in the footnotes below.
By Cassandra Dennis
Credit: Dominick Reuter/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Trump’s Executive Order to formally withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, an international plan to strengthen the global response to the climate emergency, epitomises the outgoing administration’s legacy as a prime contributor to environmental degradation through its negligent and destructive attitude to the biosphere. [1] Alongside this Order, throughout four years in office, the Trump administration successfully performed eighty-four environmental deregulations, with a further twenty attempted rollbacks still in progress. [2] The majority of these reversals centred on weakening Obama-era limits on planet-warming emissions of carbon dioxide and mercury from vehicles and powerplants, and dismantling protections on wildlife in order to open up land for the leasing of gas and oil. [3] These successive attempts to reverse major environmental policy were accompanied by outright climate denial, with the outgoing President demonstrating scepticism towards “man-made climate change,” deeming the entire concept a “hoax” orchestrated by China. [4]
The crisis of environmental degradation in the United States begins with the violent appropriation of nature during the colonial era. The emergence of the triangular trade in the fifteenth-century involved the exchange of manufactured European goods for slaves from Africa, who were transported to the Americas to grow cotton and tobacco for Europe, a process which marked the origins of globalisation and the creation of a single global economic structure. [5] To facilitate this process of exchange, colonial powers subjected landscapes to control and exploitation, with grasslands, wetlands and rainforests being cleared to build railways, roads and plantations. [6] The production of sugar, the most lucrative cash crop to be exploited by the European colonial project, was imposed through deforestation, with woodlands being cleared up to become deserts. [7] Colonisation was accompanied by ecocide, as colonising powers deemed the climate a passive force awaiting appropriation and exploitation, to be rendered profitable and yielding to the demands of the industry.
Colonialism enacted ecocide in tandem with ethnocide; as nature was reconfigured or destroyed to become profitable, local populations were either eradicated or viewed as workforces to be subjugated by colonists. [8] The residual effects of the colonial project remain perceptible today and exacerbate the impact of the climate emergency on indigenous communities. Dispossession, genocide and the forcible relocation of indigenous populations during the colonial period have resulted in their isolation from centralised decision-making processes, with post-colonial European powers governing global climate policy. [9] Whilst indigenous communities are most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, the industrialisation of developmental policy and lack of environmental protection laws by powerful governments most equipped to mitigate the effects of climate change remain the salient causes of the crisis. [10]
The climate policy of the Trump regime evokes the memory of the colonial era in a number of ways. As the process sought the expansion of territories and dominion through the violent subjugation of nature to colonial authority, the climate became a project for colonial powers to engineer and make profitable. In February 2020, the outgoing administration announced that it would resume coal leasing on public lands. [11] This was followed by the publication of a proposal in September which would facilitate more oil and gas development on national forests. [12] These successive rollbacks in environmental protection laws with the aim of economic advancement exist in parallel to the commodification and subsequent exploitation of the climate throughout the colonial period. The myth of the Arctic as terra nullius, a barren wasteland awaiting discovery and domination, for example, allowed colonisers to justify the clearance of native habitats and inhabitants for the growth of the industry. [13] The fiction of natural landscapes as passive and open for conquest is residual in the subconscious of the United States government; regulations on offshore gas and oil exploration and drilling operations in the Arctic are currently under revision, with the Interior Department considering the full rescission of these provisions. [14]
The colonial process relied on a belief in nature as passive, eternal, and separate from humankind in order to enact economic violence through the appropriation of natural resources. This fictive distinction between humanity and nature, in which humankind has dominion over the inactive force of nature, is what gives national governing bodies a mandate to perform negligent climate policy in favour of economic advancement. Whilst the seeming abundance of new landscapes to conquer enabled colonial powers to follow a model of exhausting and abandoning the land before finding new territories to conquer, post-colonial conceptions of the finitude of land and natural resources means that global governing bodies can no longer afford this attitude of neglect as climate chaos descends. Sustainability was irrelevant when colonial powers saw nature as eternal, with more land constantly available to acquire and conquer. Today, the deconstruction of this myth is necessary for adequate environmental protections in the shadow of the climate emergency’s existential threat.
Sources:
Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention Climate Change (adopted 22 April 2016, entered into force 4 November 2016) <https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement>
Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis, The Trump Administration Is Reversing More Than 100 Environmental Rules Here’s the Full List (The New York Times, 10 November 2020) <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html> accessed 27 November 2020
Ibid.
Louise Boyle, What are Trump’s plans to fight climate change? (The Independent, 29 October 2020) <https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/trump-climate-change-plans-believe-global-warming-fracking-green-new-deal-b1208399.html> accessed 27 November 2020
Robin McKie, 'How our colonial past altered the ecobalance of an entire planet' (The Guardian, 10 June 2018) <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/10/colonialism-changed-earth-geology-claim-scientists> accessed 27 November 2020
Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik, To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past (Open Democracy, 8 October 2018) <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/to-fix-climate-crisis-we-must-acknowledge-our-imperial-past/> accessed 27 November 2020
Ibid.
Ibid.
Will Bunce, The colonisation of thought in contemporary climate change governance models (E-International Relations, 1 August 2019) <https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/01/the-colonisation-of-thought-in-contemporary-climate-change-governance-models/> accessed 27 November 2020
Ibid.
Rachel Frazin, Trump administration resuming coal leasing on public lands (The Hill, 26 February 2020) <https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/484854-trump-administration-resuming-coal-leasing-on-public-lands> accessed 27 November 2020
Laura Lundquist, Trump administration to streamline oil and gas drilling in national forests (Missoula Current, 2 September 2020) <https://missoulacurrent.com/outdoors/2020/09/drilling-national-forests/> accessed 27 November 2020
Ibid n(6).
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Revisions to the Requirements for Exploratory Drilling on the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf (Official Website of the United States Government, 1 July 2020)<https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202004&RIN=1082-AA01> accessed 27 November 2020
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