As we approach Earth Day, people in the United States and all over the world take steps to become more environmentally conscious. For some, this is an everyday motivation. For others, Earth Day is the one day a year when they are cautious of their environmental impacts. While the global climate crisis takes center stage for nations trying to combat climate change and lessen their carbon footprints, other countries are cutting corners to continue to grow the fossil fuel industry. At the root of this paradox is a deep-seated history of colonialism.

Associate Prof. Prakash Kashwan (ENVS) released a new book on Jan. 23, exploring the colonial roots of the climate crisis. Kashwan and his sociologist colleague, Aseem Hasnain, worked in tandem to publish “Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action,” which explores narratives surrounding environmental initiatives and their implications. 

The book, which took five years to create, was originally inspired by an op-ed that Kashwan published in The Conversation that explored the racist roots of American environmentalism. The article details the racial prejudices embedded in the climate institutions of the United States, such as the Sierra Club, that have perpetuated racist ideologies all across the world. Kashwan examines how prominent figures in conservation such as Jane Goodall are sensationalized and their saviorism poses risk to the climate justice movement.

The op-ed received mixed reviews. Kashwan told The Justice in a March 31 interview that “the piece went wild and it got me so many invitations like National Public Radio, they did an extended interview, and so many other sorts of progressive podcasts,” which ultimately inspired him to pursue the book project. Kashwan also received a slew of backlash from critics who disagreed with his arguments about the institutional manifestations of American environmentalism. “I got a lot of sort of hate mail,” he said. “People sort of claimed that I was calling environmentalists racists, all environmentalists racists. People read selectively and, you know, they don't have the context.”

Kashwan began the book project with the intention of providing context for his argument, making it easier for people to understand and creating nuance in the conversation about the legacies of colonialism and racism within environmentalism. “We've spent so much time just trying to simplify the language without losing the content,” he said. “The response that [the op-ed] got both in terms of how popular it became, but also in terms of how some of the reactions were very antagonistic and sometimes even abusive, and I thought it was important to sort of address this topic, so we dived into it and five years later we had the book.”

Enlisting the help of his co-author, who shares the same alma mater, at the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Kashwan and Hasnain approached the topic from two different perspectives: one of an environmentalist informed by the political economy, and the other of a sociologist.

What does it mean to de-center the legacies of colonialism in the environmental movement? This is a complicated question with an even more complicated answer. To Kashwan, decolonizing environmentalism entails “connecting the [legacies] of colonization to environmental policies and concentration of power and wealth, not just in the hands of corporations but also in the hands of large environmental groups.”

The book critiques Eurocentric ideas about the economy. It breaks down and challenges the narrative that development and human wellbeing are solely about economic growth. According to the book, “Decolonizing environmentalism requires reimagining the environment and environmental problems beyond the narrow confines of Eurocentrism.” Kashwan and Hasnain analyze how power imbalances created by affluence in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries have led to falsities that the Global South is to blame for the degradation of the Earth’s climate. He continued, “decolonizing environmentalism means that we get rid of this idea of these brave, mostly white, mostly men, of course, there are some very exemplary women as well, but these kinds of heroic individuals who will save us.”

By decentering the Western thinking as the driving force behind contemporary climate activism, Kashwan’s book seeks to reshape the narrative about the around global environmental and climate movements. According to him, international institutions play a direct role in perpetuating these false narratives. He said, “You have the international institutions like the World Bank, and they're all being driven from here [Westernized countries]. They impose these agendas on the developing countries.” These institutions can cut off social welfare schemes on the pretext of fiscal austerity.

Kashwan argues that addressing some of the most daunting environmental challenges requires fundamental transformation in the institutions of national and global economy. “We wanted to connect the idea of heroic environmentalism to the other side of the coin, which we call the mundane day-to-day, everyday environmentalism, where you recycle your stuff, you ride a bike and you plant a trees, and we said, these two actually sort of complement one another in a way that leaves a big hole in the [environmental] movement.”

How do we fill this gap? Many environmentalists have suggested that the biggest changes should be made at the individual level, but Kashwan suggests an equal emphasis on structural reforms. “Individual heroic environmentalism has so many problems,” he said. “The thing that we sort of emphasize is that it reduces environmental problems to a level of simplicity that actually distorts what it takes to fix environmental problems, which is all of our structures of the economy and then, of course, the culture of consumption and the way we think about it.”

The perspective that Kashwan takes on in his research is the same as the one he embraces in the classroom. He told The Justice, “my own agenda is that when I teach environmental and climate justice I don't go with the idea that justice is such a self-evidently important agenda. The discussions in the classroom don't have to be driven by this kind of utopian thought.”

Kashwan’s classes speak to the importance of recognizing that there are disproportionate environmental impacts on marginalized communities such as racial and ethnic groups. Kashwan explained that he pushes his students to think outside the binary scale of science on one side and utopia on the other, forcing them to meet these ideas in the middle. Each of the topics that Kashwan grappled with in his interview with The Justice are also very relevant in his lectures and discussions.

Despite the dark history of environmental movements, Kashwan offers hope for the future in the fight against climate change. “There's still quite a bit of energy, both in the political system at the state level, where we have seen many governors challenging and trying to stand their ground, but also in terms of labor unions and environmental justice movements. There are all of these different movements who have quite a big sort of powerful energy,” he said.

In his book and in his interview with The Justice, Kashwan remained true to one idea: you cannot fight the climate crisis by thinking that you’re always one step ahead of nature, especially with mounting evidence that carbon emissions have doubled in the atmosphere since the 1990s. In order to combat climate change, people must be willing to decolonize environmentalism.