Decolonizing Nature Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

Independent of human meaning, intentionality, and causality, things possess their own circuitry, modes of reproduction, and mutually formed chemistries - but how to track, translate, and understand them outside of anthropocentric priorities?

I propose that to decolonize nature would broadly entail the following: dissolving the subject-object relation in the social and natural environment; ending the conditions of mastery and appropriation that determine the connection between the two; and stopping the multiple levels of violence that enforce these relations.

European colonialism, in this regard, treated both land and human nature as resources for capitalist industry, subjecting Indigenous peoples to "a complex mix of brute exploitation, paternalistic exhortation and racist disdain," In other words, land and people, nature and the colonized, were subjected to the same Cartesian logic of mastery and appropriation that Serres brings out in his study.

Political ecology recognizes that the ways we regard nature carry deep implications and often unacknowledged ramifications for how we organize society, assign responsibility for environmental change, and assess social impact.

(...) decolonizing nature entails transcending human-centered exceptionalism, no longer placing ourselves at the center of the universe and viewing nature as a source of endless bounty. Fields of inquiry that have recently investigated the terms of such a move include speculative realism, new materialism, ecosophical activism, object- oriented ontology, elementary politics, and post-humanism, each variously proposing innovative methodologies of post-anthropocentric analysis.

perhaps the best approach is to ecologize the economy instead of economizing the environment.

industrial domination and biotechnological reinvention of nature grow and lead to environmental disasters caused by climate change, even as corporate and state powers attempt to keep the invisible drivers hidden

Separating “nature" from human activities is no longer possible, since the environment, as we've seen, has become ever intertwined with economic speculation and legal regulations-which becomes all the more clear as the industrial domination and biotechnological reinvention of nature grow and lead to environmental disasters caused by climate change, even as corporate and state powers attempt to keep the invisible drivers hidden.

The post-natural condition doesn't mean, of course, that there isn't an ecosystem filled with diverse life-forms; rather, it warns against objectifying “nature" as separate and external, because living and nonliving things are all embedded within a "mesh" of social, political and economic relations.

I am convinced that art, given its long histories of experimentation, imaginative invention, and radical thinking, can play a central transformative role here. In its most ambitious and far-ranging sense, art holds the promise of initiating exactly these kinds of creative perceptional and philosophical shifts, offering new ways of comprehending ourselves and our relation to the world differently than the destructive traditions of colonizing nature.

Unlike nonrenewable energy and its ecosystem despoilment, biogenetic capitalism transforms life itself into a prospective infinite source of growth via biotechnology and financial speculation, representing further incursions of neoliberalism, now directed at colonizing the primordial genetic elements and temporalities (including financializing the futures) of our material existence.

Climate change is the best motivation for a "Great Transition", which will require a systemic shift in reorganizing social, political, and economic life, in order to bring us to bigger harmony with the world around us, including human and nonhuman life-forms. In other words, we cannot address climate justice adequately without also targeting the corruption of democratic practice by corporate lobbying, or the underfunding and failure of public transportation systems, or Indigenous rights violations by industrial extractivism, or police violence and the militarization of borders.