Environmental Activists Call for End to ‘Green Colonialism’
Environmental activists and scholars have decried how transnationals are exploiting countries in the Global South through extractivism and false solutions, and only interested in making profits at the detriment of the people.
The activists and scholars documented their positions in a book titled ‘The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism: Global Justice and Ecosocial Transitions’ which was publicly presented in Lagos by Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF).
Dr Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of HOMEF explained that green colonialism is still grappling the world, especially in the Global South.
The top environmentalist said “the view of Africa as a vast landscape with limitless resources to be exploited got rigidly entrenched in the colonial mindset and drove concepts of conservation that ignored the true cause of the degradation that unfolded from their mindless exploitation and consumption.”
Dr Bassey said “climate action has become climate fiction” adding that some of the targets for climate solutions are being moved to decades ahead which means the “youths will be the one to bear the burden later in future.”
Also speaking on false solutions, Prof Breno Bringel, Brazilian activist-scholar who is also a contributor to the book, shared that “green extractivism is the name given to new extractive ventures that disrupt ecosystems and communities in order to provide resources to companies and countries for climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.”
Bringel noted that green extractivism does not address the root cause because it isolates the need for decarbonisation from the metabolism of nature.
He stressed that it is important to unmask the concept of green colonialism, the impacts in countries across the Global South and for people to also understand the hypocrisy behind it.
Miriam Lang, an activist academic and Professor of Environment and Sustainability from Ecuador, said Global Power countries have turned countries in the Global South to the dumpsite of energy transitions, with Africa becoming ‘the destination of digital trash’.
Lang recommended systemic alternatives, because according to her “the crises that we are facing is not only ecological, it is also political.”
Ronald Ngam, a Climate Justice Activist spoke about the alternatives that exist and the need for people to “start demanding reparation and the reparation does not have to be money, it can be done in form of investments and infrastructure that can benefit everybody.”
He also charged members of the public to see climate issues as everyday issue so that they are inspired to take actions that can keep their environment safe
