Absolutely, climate change is an existential threat caused by colonialism.
Settlers introduced new methods of farming; some displaced Indigenous peoples and their methods of managing the land.” This hunger for natural resources drove deforestation and environmental change in colonized lands, from the Americas and the Caribbean to Asia, Africa and Oceania. Colonization ruptured many ecosystems, bringing in new organisms while eliminating others. The Europeans brought many diseases with them that decimated African, South American, Caribbean, Asian, and Native American populations. Even Aboriginal Australians!
As in previous invasions and colonization's around the world the British First Fleet arrived in Australia 1788 carrying new and deadly epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, measles and smallpox.
African history is just as rich as European history in fact it is actually 90 percent of ALL human history, full of great societies (like Kemet, Sumer, Akan, Dahomey, Punt, Mali or Benin), great people, and profound events that changed the course of the continent. From this we can say that it is important to promote and teach this lost history so that all may finally move forward from the atrocities of the past and learn to see each other not as black or white, but as humanity and realize that we have more in common than different. Race relations seem to be deteriorating in this country as forces fight to hide the truths revealed by history unvarnished by political aims to denigrate and disenfranchise certain populations, which is quite unfortunate as it threatens the advancement of out society as a whole.
In 2000, the term “Anthropocene” — ‘anthropo’ for human and ‘cene’ for new — gained prominence. It highlights how human activities dominate the Earth’s land, atmosphere, and oceans, significantly impacting its climate and natural ecosystems. To date, researchers have mentioned the Anthropocene Epoch as the latest geological period in more than 1,300 scientific papers. While the scientific community has been debating over which year the Anthropocene Epoch began, several Indigenous and Black scholars have shot back against the term.
The problem, these scholars say, is that the term assumes the climate crisis is caused by universal human nature, rather than the actions of a minority of colonialists, capitalists, and patriarchs. And the implication that the Earth was stable until around 1950, when the ‘Anthropocene’ supposedly began, denies the history of people who have been exploited by those systems for centuries. Indigenous scholars have further addressed how the term stands for colonialist ideologies that sever the deep ties and interconnections between humans, plants, animals, and the soil.
“Instead of treating the Earth like a precious entity that gives us life, Western colonial legacies operate within a paradigm that assumes they can extract its natural resources as much as they want, and the Earth will regenerate itself,”
...said Hadeel Assali, a lecturer and postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Science and Society, a Columbia Climate School affiliate.
Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is initially at first suffering the brunt of its effects. BIPOC People across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships. For some, it can be disconcerting to hear terms such as "racism" and "white supremacy" used in discussions about climate change. Climate change is often understood as ONLY an environmental issue, one that we are all in together, and therefore not something that could be in any way construed as racist. The Irony is that the global pheomelanin dominant population is less than 9 percent and falling fast and this is directly related to climate and the petro pharmaceutical industries that spawned it. So yes Climate change is an existential threat but not necessarily to the global south who have the lusury of time and numerical population advantages.
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