International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2022

Sketch of a decolonial environmentalism: challenging the colonial conception of Nature through the biocultural perspective

(Abstract)

Lori Gallegos

In this article, I am critical of decolonial theory’s negligence of the issues of nature and the environment. I work to remedy this problem by providing a decolonial analysis of the operative colonial conception nature. I argue that one of the reasons that efforts to curb human-caused environmental devastation have been ineffective is that the two popular approaches to environmentalist activism - the global warming and sustainability approaches - do not necessarily pose a challenge to the way in which we currently conceptualize nature, nor do they entail a robust ethical view. Then, I propose one potential avenue for developing an alternative, decolonial approach to nature, drawing from environmental philosopher Ricardo Rozzi’s notion of the biocultural perspective, which emphasizes the dynamic relationship between human ways of life and the diversity of non-human life.