Transcript published in May 2021 on the Lieux Communs website, of the issue Sound Offensive broadcast simultaneously on Libertarian Radio. Significant changes have been placed in square brackets. To address the Newslang Contemporary, the terms “decolonial” and “indigenist” have been transcribed as “(de)colonial” and “(anti)indigenist” in order to restore their original meaning – the question is addressed during the broadcast.

Please refer to the resource page “Beware of (de)colonial ecology!”, regularly updated, to find the sources of the elements advanced here, and many more.

This show was obviously so disliked by the Politburo of Radio Libertaire that it banned Lieux Communs from the airwaves, after having previously suspended "Offensive sonore" for six months (it ceased its activities a year and a half later).

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Quentin  : In reality, (de)colonial ecology is very simple to understand: it is only the so-called (de)colonial or (anti)indigenist theses, that is to say racialist or communitarian and Islamist, which are applied to the field of ecology. It is quite simple, so you just have to have followed French political life a little bit for the last ten years or so and you can see more or less what it is about. It will obviously require a little more attention but overall the principle is quite clear. So, there has been a rise in power for a few years, particularly for the last two years, since the municipal elections and we will see why, there is a growing affirmation of this ecology in most activist groups, in official ecology too and in universities. All this is a cause for concern because there is both a void on the ecologist side and an increasingly important affirmation on the side of the (de)colonial, (anti)indigenist movement, etc.
We wanted to approach things throughout the conversation around four points: first the actors (1) and then the birth or the way in which this thing was able to assert itself (2), then the theses which are defended which we will discuss a little (3) and finally, if we have time at the end, discuss political ecology as it exists and which makes such infiltration possible (4).

1 – The actors of (de)colonial ecology

So if I start with the actors, we can roughly classify them into four main types of actors, starting with the (de)colonial activists themselves.

(De)colonial and (anti)indigenist activists

We know them, they often wear several hats and for example Fatima Ouassak who had the honor of having an entire article devoted to her in the March issue of "La Décroissance" - an article that can also be found on the internet - where she was given a rather brilliant costume. Maybe you want to talk about it a little, Cyrille?

Cyrille  : She is an indigenous activist, as they say, she was part of the Parti of Inatives of the Rrepublic (PIR) – which was called the Mmovement of Inatives of the Republic at the time – she started her career in that, I don’t know exactly what her role was. Then she created a collective called the Ffront of Meras officially known for campaigning for vegetarian meals in schools. Officially, it was about ecology, but if you dig a little deeper into her interviews, you can see that it's also strongly because she doesn't want her children to eat anything other than lawful. So all this is a bit mixed up with her because she thinks that true halal is not really possible in France, so you have to eat vegetarian. So she will mix these speeches a bit but above all she plays a lot on the ambiguity especially when we see her links, etc. She is, for example, the partner of Youssef Brakni from the "Adama committee" and very involved against "Islamophobia", etc. These are activists who claim to be anti-racist and victims of discrimination, who will put forward religion. This is really what we also find in Fatima Ouassak with this double discourse claiming that Arabs do not have the right to talk about ecology and would be sent back to their religion while she is the one who talks about it constantly... It is a victim discourse that we find in a lot of racialist or Islamist positions that put forward a religious agenda and at the same time when we question we are told that we are being racist so we prevent people from talking about ecology, etc. In reality, she doesn't really talk about ecology: she mainly talks about anti-Muslim "racism" or "Islamophobia", etc. Depending on the interviews, it changes, depending on the context, and we see that her speech is very well-honed, which allows her to be invited to a lot of ecology forums to talk about the link between ecology and "neighborhoods", etc. She then presents herself as an ecologist and then in other forums she will be much more direct...
His collective is Ffront of Mothers, but I know that now she is evolving in groups closer toEcry Éecology Les Vore (EELV).

Quentin  : Indeed, she has been widely invited to EELV, speaks at universities, she is interviewed by Mediapart, which she is very close to, she also went toFrancid-Cculture, she was interviewed by Le Mwhere, etc. So it really has an audience or, as we say today, a fairly large media surface area while its discourse, as you have very well underlined, is very poor. In fact ecology is a pretext and we will see that this is really the case for all (de)colonial ecology: ecology is a pretext to impose themes that are completely foreign to it.

Rimso  : What needs to be clarified for listeners who may not know is that one of the relays of these thoughts is the editions La Ddiscovery because this lady published there, even if her thinking is quite poor. The friend of " La Dgrowth " who wrote an article about this woman puts quotes from her book in it Lthe power of mothers (2020) which was accepted by this great Parisian publisher that is theDiscovery, anyway. They have this fear of cutting themselves off from the popular spaces that will fight against police violence in their neighborhoods, etc. because she also has a whole delirium around "we are exterminating our children" and "the power of mothers who protect their children from immigration", "white society is racist", etc. It's her stock in trade.

Cyrille  : Yes, it's a completely paranoid speech. That is to say, for some listeners who live in the suburbs, she says that when you're a mother in the suburbs you're afraid that your child won't come back, that he'll be killed by the police... Frankly, having lived in troubled neighborhoods for a very long time, you're afraid of something else, when you have children, than the police... But in fact, in environments like FFrance Culture This kind of speech goes down very well. But hey, it's really borderline medical, it's an unbelievable paranoia.

Quentin  : There is a chance that she will be nominated as a candidate for the legislative elections by EELV, so she still has a future – until this show in any case…

Cyrille  : (Laughs) We see that the article in La Décroissance has no impact, that we are not going to change things because we are still in a system where as soon as there is criticism of this type of person, it is necessarily issued by people from the extreme right or Islamophobes, that is to say that no criticism is possible with regard to these personalities.

Quentin  : Of course, there is a very quick closing. I also wanted to talk about a second character: Nabil Ennasri. Now he is another type, he is more calm and he still has a slightly higher intellectual level, he is a real political scientist very close to the Muslim Brotherhood and he has multiple contacts. He is notably at the IESH of Château Chinon which is an Islamist training center, he has written several books and seems to specialize in ecology – so Muslim ecology, Islamic ecology. He also has the right to a fairly large audience: interviewed in Muslim media, of course, but also in Reporterre, where there are several articles by him, notably the day after Islamic attacks to explain that the Muslim religion is ecological, that is the ambition of these articles… He wrote a book Les SSeven major challenges [Essay aimed at the Muslim community in France, Sana éditions, 2014] in which the last of the challenges is devoted entirely to ecology. And then he is co-founder and president of theUnion FFrench of Cconsumers Musulmans (UFCM) with a close friend of Tariq Ramadan and another from the CCIF, so he is really at the heart of the French Islamist nebula. They are in the process of creating a label organic halal since the organic label – it's very recent – ​​cannot be awarded because of ritual slaughter, the animal suffering it involves, so they decided to create an office that allows products to be labeled with their own label. Within the Islamist nebula of the Muslim Brotherhood, we have the development of a theme around ecology that is very strong and which is more than just greenwashing, which is really a constant concern.

Cyrille  : It's sincere.

Quentin  : In any case, it is very strategic, it is not just a passing fancy, it is something that is likely to continue over time. The other actors, we know them a little better, it is Danielle Obono from the La FFrance (In)submitted (LFI) or Esther Benbassa of EELV who are also invited quite often to gatherings of environmental activists, in which in fact they systematically force the link between ecology and their own concerns, which are racism, discrimination, immigrant neighborhoods, etc.

Environmental activists

The second category is that of environmental activists as we know them. Here we saw the (anti)indigenist and Islamist activists, but environmental activists are very porous to all these themes because, as we said at the beginning of the program, the (anti)indigenist and Islamist circles are relatively restricted sociologically speaking, but there is a fairly extraordinary receptivity on the side of the most motivated activists, the activists of the left, of EELV or of others a little more radical. In particular I am thinking of Génération Climat which held a demonstration a year ago during the summer alongside the "Adama committee" - the Adama mafia - like the collective Aalternative, too. There is also the PEPS, the Parti for a Éecology Ppopular and Ssocial, which really gives great visibility, platforms, to all indigenous and Islamist speeches. There is Reporterre also, it is more surprising but the online review of Hervé Kempf, which is very good in itself, is really a sounding board for all these remarks of (anti)indigenist and racialist ecologists. They too are running after the people and find in these remarks the impression of being in connection with the reality of the common people. E Rebellion, also, their activists are becoming very receptive to these speeches.

Official ecology

Third category, I would put the official environmentalists. So we saw EELV, all the town halls that were conquered in 2019 that are in the process of implementing very conciliatory policies towards Islamists, (anti)indigenists, communitarian activists. And they are also invited quite regularly to summer universities, in magazines, interviews, etc. We also recently saw Greta Thunberg, therefore the prophetess of young environmentalists, affirm that the cause of ecological damage was that we lived in a colonial, racist and paternalistic world – so she absolutely endorsed the theses of (de)colonial ecology. All this is also starting to have an echo in the columns of Mwhere, the evening daily, and shows that (de)colonial ecology is not simply a delirium of a few radical activists but that it responds to something and in particular, in my opinion, to a great void on the side of the "ecology" institution.

Rimso  : In the sphere of activists and the ecological press there is also the historic monthly S !lence through some of its editors who were sensitive to this, to all these ideologies, we could say the " Wokeculture ", so this ideology that would like to defend the cause of minorities. They are receptive to these questions and have already made an entire file on it and these are downright historical titles. When it is young people who arrive, they try to be as "clean" as possible and do a kind of leftism where it would be necessary to fight all the causes of oppression that minorities suffer. Why not? but in this case we will see later in the show that the speech is not necessarily very good

Cyrille  : I would like to come back to Aalternative. S !lenceIt is a mail order magazine which has a fairly strong audience among environmentalists but Aalternative, it's more of an organized forum, a kind of catch-all fair so I think that a few (de)colonials who came and proposed this, it's accepted like a lot of files on alternative medicine, on Esperanto, on stuff, subjects that are not necessarily political ecology but which will be accepted. It's without a backbone and since political ecology is so weak, it can't necessarily see the limits and they accept a bit of all that, everything will be accepted in this type of organization or journal. It's to moderate a bit...

Rimso  : I think there is still a real conflict. For S !slowness, It's an editor on the editorial board like Guillaume Gamblin who is all in to pushing these things, unlike other magazines like "La Décroissance" where their journalists and editors have been able to come out with very interesting things in recent weeks but who are called all sorts of names and when you see the reactions that can be had if you search a bit on the internet regarding the latest writings from La Décroissance, it doesn't work. So there are still differences within the press organs.

Cyrille  : Yes, of course. For example, "La Décroissance" has a fairly clear wording: we read a few issues of the newspaper, we understand what type of idea we are dealing with, but if we go to a typical demonstration Aalternative, we can come across various things, for example homeopathy and next to it we will find very Islamo-leftist things, next to it we will find a very different stand... In fact it is a bit of a catch-all where decolonial ecological type organizations can integrate very easily.

The academic and publishing world

Quentin  : After the (de)colonial activists, the green activists and official ecology, I would talk about the academic and publishing world. We talked about it a little with some editions LaDdiscovery who notably publish two authors who have left their mark on me: Pierre Charbonnier,Abondage and Freedom [2019] which is very painful to read, very academic, a lot of boring references and which, in conclusion, endorses the drift towards (de)colonial ecology under the pretext – we will talk about it again – of getting out of the dichotomy between humans and nature, of opening up to other cultures, to other views of the world, etc., of breaking the Western worldview. And R. Keucheyan who wrote La Nature is a the land of fight I believe [LNature is a battlefield (2014)], where he states that the victims of environmental damage are only "racialized people"... This really goes in the direction of decolonial discourse. And then on the side of the Threshold, which is still an extremely important institution, we have the collection "Anthropocene" directed by Christophe Bonneuil who himself has a very (de)colonial inclination. Last year he published Malcom Ferdinand There’s nothing quite like a Édecolonial ecology, a book that has had a huge impact in the press – the activist press, the official press, the environmentalist press – and which is a sort of breviary of (de)colonial ecology with the underlying principle that ecological problems are solely due to the West and more precisely were born with colonization.
This is roughly the theme and the theses that are defended in this academic and editorial world – academic because the latter, Mr. Ferdinand is a research director at the CNRS and P. Charbonnier too [R. Keucheyan too]. So here we see that the movement of “(de)colonial” ecology, in quotation marks – we will discuss the terms, I think – is still something that has a relative importance and all this dates back [roughly] three years, so it is still quite significant growth. It is not simply a small group, it goes from EELV to Mwhere visit us at the Seuil, La Ddiscovery, etc.

Rimso  : To make it concrete for the listeners, the problem is that all these people recode social criticism on purely ethnic things and that is what poses a problem and creates dead ends in thought.

Cyrille  : Perhaps we can move on to the “genesis” part of (de)colonial ecology?

2 – The genesis of (de)colonial ecology

Quentin  : It will be quick, I had just noted a few points to explain temporality as they say.

The 2019 municipal elections and the decline of the left

Quite clearly there is a starting point which is 2019: most of the web pages, most of the issues of magazines, most of the conferences, remarks, etc. date from 2019, more rarely before. 2019 is obviously the municipal elections where it is EELV which has a relative success – relative because essentially due to abstention – and sweeps most of the big cities of France. From there a call for air is created, because EELV is an essentially empty apparatus, it has always been a stepping stone for the oligarchs, and we see, moreover, there, week after week the affairs in all the town halls led by the Greens, the completely stupid or at best clumsy remarks of the municipal councils or mayors, it is quite catastrophic. And this void is obviously a breath of fresh air, it attracts all the people who are fascinated by power and this is obviously the case for (anti)indigenous people, Islamists, racialists. In any case, that is one explanation.

Cyrille  : Isn't this the same kind of call for air that there was at the time of the emergence of La République En Marche (LREM)? Isn't it the same kind of thing?

Quentin  : Yes, that's absolutely it. The same goes for LFI; a few years ago, they were a hit, they all rushed there. In fact, I have the impression that it's a movement that acts somewhat unconsciously on the scorched earth strategy: wherever they go, they destroy what they invest in. We can see this very clearly with LFI by J.-L. Mélenchon: it wasn't very brilliant already – it's very adulterated leftism – but now they're sinking, sabotaging themselves by making statements that are worthy of the Inatives de la Rrepublic from 2005. The left has been burned and now it's the turn of the green world, in a way...

Cyrille  : But so you analyze this more as an infiltration than as a transformation of EELV, or rather of the environmentalists themselves?

The ecological void in the face of the rise of (anti)indigenism

Quentin  : I think there are both. Because here I spoke of a reason that was quite circumstantial but more fundamentally there is a rise in power, I said it in the introduction, of (anti)indigenist and Islamist movements. It is obvious: there is a radicalization of discourse, radicalization of activists, there is also a demographic increase – so it is also mathematical –, there is the situation which is deteriorating in the suburbs. There is really a surge of something with, in the background, what is happening in the United States, so a real dynamic in progress. And on the side of the ecologists it is exactly the opposite: we are in inertia. On the side of ecology, basically, for 40 years, there is nothing new. Neither socially; there is no real popular base, we know that the electoral base of the ecologists is the urban bobos of the big metropolises, in large part, while ecological concerns interest many more people, but in electoral terms it is very very poor. In political terms, it is a disaster: there is no real project for society on the side of the ecologists, there are developments, there are reforms to be made, etc. but there is no global vision, no real project for society. And intellectually, it is completely useless: there is no real progress, when we see the substance of the doctrine, everything was said in the 1970s, basically, there is really nothing new since. And this inertia of the Greens is facing an environmental catastrophe - and social catastrophe for that matter - which is deepening.
So the inertia of the greens in the face of an (anti)indigenist and (de)colonial dynamic: this encounter is therefore not only infiltration, it is, I think, a metamorphosis, like the extreme left has become entirely racialist in ten years: between 2010 when the discourse was very marginal and today, we see that the entire left has converted to this discourse. I think that is what is happening on the side of the ecologists.

Rimso  : I would also like to point out that for the left, we have to go back to the alter-globalization movement, the European Social Forums where Mr. Tariq Ramadan had been invited and little criticized – some people will disrupt the conferences – they had managed to infiltrate there. Then there was also at that time, in the years 2003, the second war in Iraq where certain alliances of the anti-war committees in England and also in France were not very clear with [their alliances] to fight the "evil American". So these are also bridges that existed and which, afterwards, were perhaps ratified because activists formed a slightly more robust group like the Inatives of the Rrepublic to have influence.

Cyrille  : That time is the time of Ssocialisme ParEn Bas who are really linked to Trotskyist groups that had, at least theoretically, called for an alliance between Islamists and leftists. And in their group, we find people like Danielle Obono, people that we now find in these movements. So it's true that it goes back a long way.

Quentin  : You are absolutely right to point that out, Rimso: given that the ecologists are essentially left-wing or leftist, they have recovered all this Islamo-leftism. They are the communicating vessels, in a way. All the Islamo-leftism that really developed between 2000 and today is now passing to the ecological world. We also remember José Bové who went to Gaza: there was also on the ecological side, at that time, a tropism towards Islamism, the proto-indigenism that was incubating, etc. We had anti-Western, anti-modernity, anti-Europe discourses, etc. This is a terrain on which obviously indigenous discourses can only develop.

3 – The theses of (de)colonial ecology

Cyrille  : We can perhaps go directly into the theses of (de)colonial ecology, because we are going around in circles, but we have not yet defined them. Here you are talking more about what we call Third Worldism: when we talked about supporting Palestine, it is often more or less the same movements that are in Third Worldism. The basic idea is really to hope that Third World countries rebel against the "evil West" that continues colonization via neo-colonization - we can also accredit some of the observations they make but it is rather the way in which they instrumentalize Third World countries by mythologizing struggles, particularly Palestinian ones, that can cause divergences. When you are revolutionary and libertarian, for example, you cannot be Third Worldist, for me it is contradictory. How can it be mixed, for example, with (de)colonial ecology?

(De)colonial ecology is a betrayal of anti-colonialism

Quentin  : I think we need to go a little bit further. In reality, ecology from the beginning is décolonial, in the exact sense of the term. From the beginning, the world of environmentalists has campaigned for decolonization because political ecology is a search for adequacy between a society and an environment, a natural environment in the broad sense, an ecosystem, an environment, and this is only possible if there is self-determination on the part of the people: it is not possible for a people who are dominated by another, who are exploited, who do not have their own practices, who are obliged to obtain a yield, obliged to submit to land development work, etc. So from the beginning there is a criticism of colonization that is very strong and a hope that is placed in decolonizations: we think - I am talking about the 1960s and 70s - we hope that the newly decolonized nations will manage to find another path of development than the Western path. So there is a truth in (de)colonial ecology but ecology has always been, at least in recent history it has been decolonial, immediately.

Cyrille  : There is a difference between being against colonization and being (de)colonial…

(De)colonial ecology is colonial and consumerist

Quentin  : So, here we come, in my opinion, to the heart of the matter, that is to say that we are in thearnwater of (de)colonial ecology. For all the people we talked about here, for all these movements, we are not talking about ecology or decolonization. Fatima Ouassak doesn't give a damn about ecology, she doesn't care about it, Nabil Ennasri doesn't either, I think, deep down he doesn't care about it: it is not a question for them of reducing consumption [or demography], it is not a question of reorganizing societies with a view to sobriety, nor of direct democracy, that seems quite clear to me. And above all it is not decolonial in the sense that decolonizations have already taken place. This is something that is valid for the entire (de)colonial, (anti)indigenist, racialist, etc. movement. These countries have been independent for at least half a century, Algeria has been independent for 60 years – this is something that we never hear. If there is an ecology to be done from an Algerian point of view, it is to be done en AAlgeriaIt is in Algeria or in other decolonized countries that we must succeed in reorienting development towards something other than the environmental devastation that we know and this is not at all, obviously, the direction that the decolonized countries are taking and especially not Algeria.
So there is a scam which is total: the (de)colonial ecologists, its activists, are consumerists and Colons. Because if we go back to the meaning of the words, an indigenous person is someone who lives in the country of his ancestors. We are the indigenous people, we are the indigenous people. This was already pointed out in 2005 with the call for Inatives of theRrepublic, The contradiction had been formulated in particular by JC Michéa who had written a page on it which was very clear and it was absolutely obvious. A native is therefore someone who lives in the country of his ancestors and a colonist is someone who comes to a foreign country and wants to impose his culture there. So we have here attitudes which are not decolonial but colonial and an absolute inversion of the meaning of words, which we see everywhere; pseudo-anti-racists like Houria Bouteldja, etc., we are realizing, finally the general public is realizing, that these are racist – said racialists but they are racist. The (anti)indigenous are not indigenous, the (de)colonials are not decolonial. In fact, they are people who are driven – one could discuss the reasons – by a clothes from the West, it is beginning to be known and also, now, white people. And ecology is in fact a pretext to infiltrate the environment and, in fact, destroy the discourse, destroy the institution.

Daman  : Do the (de)colonials not respond to this by saying that there has been no real decolonization and that due to geopolitical and economic interests France, for example, has kept a certain world of interests and plays on the internal politics of decolonized African countries and that, as a result, many people have had no choice but to emigrate to France?

(De)colonial ecology is a crazy discourse

Quentin  : You are absolutely right, that is their systematic response. But if you stop and think about it for a moment, it doesn't hold up for a second - here I refer you to a text on Lieux Ccommon, “Immigration, ecology and degrowth”, where I talk about that, precisely. If Algeria, taking Algeria as an example, is not truly independent, it must become so. So the Algerians must manage to free themselves from France – but it is not in France that they will do that. An Ivorian from Ivory Coast, if he considers that Ivory Coast is still the property of France, Ivory Coast must finally become independent, so the Ivorians must fight in Ivory Coast to reclaim their country, and not come to France and make money, that is not coherent. Or, another option, these are people who immigrated here to sabotage France so that it would collapse and their country could regain independence – but, in these cases, they are caught in a contradiction: if they are here as “anti-France” activists, in quotes, they cannot complain about racism, it is impossible. Basically, I think that these stories of (anti)indigenism, of (de)colonialism, etc. are a madness, it is a speech of crazy is completely crazy: if you want your country to be independent you have to stay in your country and fight for its independence, there is no other possibility. During the German occupation the French did not go to Germany to liberate France – it does not make sense it is absurd. If you see the revolution in Tunisia in 2011 it was Tunisians in Tunisia who made the revolution it was not Tunisians in France. You see the movement of Hirak In Algeria today it is the Algerians of Algeria who are making the Hirak, these are not the Algerians in France.

Rimso  : These questions are complicated. Since we were talking about Ivory Coast, when some presidents really wanted to oppose things like the CFA Franc, or things like that, they were liquidated, but it's true that the fight is on the ground. Especially since the French, or others, it's not necessarily them, if you make this dichotomy Whites / non-Whites, West / not West, who are rotting Africa today. There is a whiff of Françafrique just as there is Chinese capitalism that comes to grab ports and land everywhere. On the Whites / non-Whites we can also cite the countries that emit the most CO2 per capita: they are countries of the Persian Gulf. So there is also something: this West, these Whites who dominate the world and who enslave on an ecological level, it only holds up halfway if we really look at these purely ecological questions.

(De)colonial ecology is fascinated by the West

Quentin  : You're right, it's obvious that when we talk about colonization, it's completely crazy to talk about colonizing France when that's the attitude we see today from Turkey, China or Russia, which is never mentioned. Tibet is never mentioned, it's not question of Tibet in France whereas when I was an activist, twenty years ago, there were still movements for the liberation of Tibet – we don't hear about it at all anymore so it's a process of colonization. We hear about the Uighurs, obviously since they are Muslims so that pleases a lot of people. There is a focus on the West, only. This is a bias that is completely crazy within the (de)colonial discourse and that makes no sense.
Houria Bouteldja's speeches are as if she were nostalgic for the colonial era, as if she had come here to place herself exactly in the situation of the colonized. But in Algeria people are not colonized and if there is an ecology to develop in Algeria it is to develop en AAlgeria. All the agroecology experiments that are taking place in the Maghreb, for example, are being carried out by people from the Maghreb and who are there – I am thinking of Tunisia where there are many initiatives that are trying to reform the rural world and it is a long-term job, a day-to-day job, it is a job that requires strong local involvement and it is not from France that we are going to do it. In the radical sense, political ecology is the search for adequacy between a society and its environment and from this point of view, the discourse of (de)colonial ecology has not no senses

Cyrille  : We can also question the terms because in fact there was an "anti-colonialism" until the 1960s during the real decolonizations that took place, it was not yet finished. Then, there was the "decolonial" which, when you look, comes from Latin America. The PIR often refers to the invasion of Latin America by Europe but they forget the Ottoman Empire, etc., they idealize a perfect world and only see the arrival of the White Man who massacres, who colonizes, etc. So we are in a myth that is also completely delusional and that is obvious. That's what you were saying Rimso about the petromonarchies that pollute enormously. There is also Greta Thunberg's vision for whom it is the White Man who is bad, as if by removing the White Man we would remove everything that poses a problem, pollution, etc.

(De)colonial ecology is blind to the non-West

Rimso  : There are some very important things to say about this. In the latest article by Mr. Raoul Anvélot from “La Décroissance” it is said that colonization is above all capitalistic and technical and due to industrial society. Who, in our latitudes, benefited from colonization and the benefits of colonization on an economic level? It was not necessarily the average Joe in French society at the beginning – by ricochet, yes, but it was a colonization from which the capitalists benefited and not only the French capitalists, in Africa there was also the Lebanese bourgeoisie. In our latitudes, there is a colonization that destroyed the entire peasant class and which is therefore still wreaking havoc today on an ecological level due to our way of life in France. Currently, yes, we benefit from it as a developed country with a nuclear bomb, a power that is better placed on the markets, we could say that it is all French inhabitants, whether they are (de)colonial activists or ourselves, we benefit from our privileged place in global consumption, whatever, more or less, the differences in society, the gap with the richest, they are the ones who can consume more and are the most protected from a certain pollution, but…

Quentin  : …although [European] nuclear waste is buried in France…

Cyrille  : There are still third world countries that are used as trash cans, at least that's what people say, I don't know if it's true...

Quentin  : That's absolutely true, but it's a question of social class on a global scale; it's obvious that it's the poorest classes who generally collect the waste of industrial society, that's absolutely obvious, but in all countries and on all scales. If there is an oligarchy here, it's absolutely obscene in the Emirates, obscene in Russia, China, etc. There is an ethnocentrism in the discourses that betrays this fascination with the West and it's typically the discourse of a colonized person for whom the West is responsible for everything, owes everything and can do everything, as if, deep down, the West was going to solve ecological problems or as if it was enough to overthrow the West for everything to go better. Obviously that's not it at all, at all... If we really want to discuss consumerism, it's obvious that the developed countries that are now China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc. are over-consumers – and particularly the West, but we must be clear: this is a horizon that is desired, unfortunately, by most of the inhabitants of the planet, and particularly immigrants. When we immigrate, and particularly in the West, in Europe and in France, it is to increase our standard of living: we are not going to immigrate to France to decrease. And, very strangely, there is never any question of decrease for (de)colonial ecology, and this is not surprising at all: they are the hypocrites of ecology.

Cyrille  : There are still collectives that are degrowth and (de)colonial, they exist… Well, small collectives, after all it’s maybe just one person behind a website…

Quentin  : I saw a Twitter account, yes, but it was completely incoherent, it went in all directions, it was support for "Adama" and for degrowth... But you only have to take a look around the cities where many of us come from: consumption there is ostentatious, it's quite obscene. If you're not up to par in terms of clothes or smartphones, etc., or if you don't have the ambition that rap videos convey and praise with a nice car and chicks and money, you're nothing, you don't exist. That's what we need to talk about: this "popular" culture, in quotes, the "immigrant" culture, which is a culture of social climbers, a culture of upstarts that doesn't correspond at all to the claims of (de)colonial ecology.

(De)colonial ecology despises the working classes

Cyrille  : That's really a difference between, precisely, the bobos of the city centers who, perhaps, for some, most of the time are just about appearance but who tend towards real ecology, bicycles, etc., and the suburbs actually do not have the same desires at all. This is also the case for the working classes in general; they dream more of supermarkets, of consumption than of degrowth.

Rimso  : There, it raises the question of a place that values ​​you in society, what symbolic place you have in society. It is easier for an urban man or woman with a good job, cultural capital, which is valued and which is valued, to make thoughtful choices in terms of ecology and lifestyles or places of ethical consumption and everything you want, than when we are in relegated areas where the only thing that makes you visible is to have a very nice car whether it is a farmer's son, a suburbanite's son or a factory worker.

Quentin  : Yes, but that's a bit easy because you're saying that when you're poor you can only want to be rich. We're still on Rfarewell Llibertarian, We have two centuries of workers' movements behind us that were something other than a movement of poor people who wanted to become rich. It was a movement of very poor people, much poorer than most of today's suburbs - sorry: that all the French suburbs today: they were slums at the time, and the workers' movement nevertheless established an imaginary of social equality and not just imagined it, it implemented it: mutual societies, the principle of mutualization, date from there, the principle of pensions, the principle of social security, they created workers' cooperatives and they invented self-management, municipal libraries; that was the workers' movement, it is not at all what we see today in the suburbs. So to say that degrowth is a movement of privileged rich people is partly true, but we cannot say symmetrically that it is impossible when you are poor, it is not historically true and it leads to nothing because it means that we will only really be able to degrowth when everyone is rich - which is a contradiction in terms.

Cyrille  : I think that the bobo culture of city centers is not decreasing…

Quentin  : I totally agree with you: it's also hypocrisy, it's about appearances, it's like Bourdieu said, a social distinction, it's a way of not resembling the masses and of towering over them. I totally agree with that.

Cyrille  : To paraphrase Rimso: it's sexy and chic in rich neighborhoods to have ripped jeans, it's much less chic in poor neighborhoods where people can have ripped jeans, but not for the style...

Quentin  : In reality, environmentalists are only sensitive to all this nonsense because they are not actually in contact with the population. There is a divorce between the environmental discourse that exists today and the reality of the people, particularly the French people. You said that rural France, the Yellow Vests wanted consumption and you are partly right, but I believe that they also have a fairly close contact with nature. It is surprising that we live in a society that talks so much about ecology and that is destroying the rural population, in particular. The rural population is the part of the population that is most in contact with nature – farmers, hunters, fishermen, green space workers, foresters, etc., all these people are in very direct contact with the natural element but are dismissed from the environmental discourse, electorally, sociologically, intellectually. There is something on this subject that we really need to explore further and which makes me say that ecology as it exists today in France is entirely ideological, it is a ecologisme, it is a virtual construction that has nothing to do with, deep down, the aspirations that exist within the people. I am not saying that the Yellow Vests are for degrowth – it is very clear, we have made broadcasts on this, it is one of the criticisms that I would make of this movement, it is absolutely obvious: it is attached to a standard of living [1]. But it also contributes to the whole evolution of a society in which they no longer recognize themselves at all, in particular the fact that the emphasis is placed on the "poor", in quotes, of the suburbs, the "poor", in quotes, immigrants, etc., and all this (de)colonial discourse in which we are immersed and which is very painful. The Yellow Vests was also a movement in reaction to that, and I think that the ecologists missed at that time a reconnection with the people and to compensate for that, I'll end on this, well they open the doors wide to the (de)colonials and the (anti)indigenists who claim to embody the working-class neighborhoods...

Cyrille  : It was a bit complicated for environmentalists since it was ultimately a tax that was supposed to be ecological that triggered the movement. That's what we said at the time: it's as if we were putting the responsibility on them by telling them: "it's your fault". Most of the Yellow Vests are still quite poor, we were taxing them to tell them that ecology is a bit your fault so we're going to make you pay more for fuel.

Quentin  : That ecology is becoming a discourse of social domination and with (de)colonial and (anti)indigenist ecology, an ethnic and religious domination, that is really what I see, as big as a house, coming at us.

4 – The errors of contemporary political ecology

Rimso  : I would like us to ask the question of the end of the peasantry because currently there are no more peasants, those who are in the countryside, there is a whole imaginary to recreate on the peasantry. All of this is exploited by the industrial chain of distribution of adulterated foodstuffs with all the nuisances that there are and it is rather either very large farms that are doing quite well, big bosses who exploit workers, sometimes and even often immigrants - and in times of Covid we see the tears of the bosses saying that we will not be able to harvest and that the fruits will rot on the trees because we no longer have cheap labor coming from Eastern Europe or the Maghreb... In short, it is complicated, we are in a society where there is a ransacking of a whole part of the population which creates ecological imbalances and enormous pollution and we have lost a little the question of the imagination that we were talking about earlier, consumerism whether in the suburbs or even in the most remote areas the dream of making tuning or the car, etc. and it is very very very present, unfortunately.

Disconnection from the people and their nature

Quentin: You're right Rimso, the countryside is almost completely industrialized, but there are still a little over half a million farmers today and there are still many who try to make it a human adventure with real relationships with animals, species, livestock systems, agricultural systems, the agrosystem. There is also a whole movement of neo-rurality. So it's something that is not entirely destroyed. I think in any case that what is also in the process of being destroyed is a culture that is specific: I was recently in contact with agricultural circles in the provinces, in the regions as they say, and I am struck by the fact that it is only rap and suburban postures that rub off on young people. It has become a model for more than thirty years now: the model of the young person is the "young person from the suburbs", in quotation marks, with the look, with the behavior, with the sexism... It is very surprising, but colonization is here. When Serge Latouche talks to us about "decolonizing the imagination" - and we see that the term is an open door to (de)colonial ecology, it's a very strange expression - this decolonization would first have to be played out on this scale, that is to say that young people from the regions stop taking themselves for young people from the suburbs and that they have a symbolic existence. They don't exist anywhere. A young person today in the collective imagination is a young person from the suburbs, a young person from an immigrant background, it's very strange. Young people from rural areas or the periphery or peri-urban areas, from rural areas who still make up more than 60% of the contingent of young people under 25, have no existence, how can I say, symbolic, have no resources, they are invisible: hence the Yellow Vests who emerged in particular during the movement of the same name [1]. So there is a rurality which is not completely dead, I think, and which, in any case, is completely neglected by the ecological discourse which aims almost solely to hold a moralizing and guilt-inducing discourse with farmers but also with fishermen and foresters, etc. [2]. There is a sociological break but it is also political, and it is in this abyss, in my opinion, that the discourses of (de)colonial ecology infiltrate, completely losing their bearings, going into abstractions that absolutely do not help to resolve anything, do not resolve any problem. On the contrary, they only deepen them.

Cyrille: This is where we come into the roots of environmentalism, of (de)colonial ecology, which are found in several beliefs that environmentalism itself has put forward.

Mono-causal explanation

Quentin: Yes, I think we need to have this intellectual movement – ​​which I find interesting – [which consists of] starting from the dead ends we are in, and going back up the thread: how did we get here? For example, it is very simple, well, it is now a little clearer than a few years ago, about the Left: how was Islamo-leftism born? We can do its genealogy, we talked about it a little; the proletariat that disappoints; we are looking for a substitute proletariat: Third-Worldism; etc. [3]. We should do the same thing about ecology: how can political ecology, as it has existed for fifty years, today be so porous to the stupid discourses of (de)colonial ecology? I think that one of the fundamental causes is that political ecology as it exists has developed in the leftist matrix, in the left-wing matrix, that is to say with the same flaws, the same reflexes, the same automatisms [4] and in particular in the belief in an ultimate factor, in an element that would embody Evil. For example, capitalism, we have seen on the left for a long time the word that obsesses is: "capitalism", and to all the questions that we ask, we have as an answer: "the problem is capitalism". On the side of the ecologists we have other variations of the discourses: it can be industrial society and then all the ecological problems come from industrial society; or else from development, from techno science; or from technology and then all the problems are attributable to a single factor, unique: technology. I think that is a religious posture: we seek the incarnation of an Evil under a single figure and once this figure is eliminated a miracle solution will appear, also unique. That is to say that once capitalism is overthrown, we will live in communism, it will be Paradise on earth; once industrial society is surpassed we will live in peaceful relations with nature; once the question of technology is "settled" in quotation marks - I don't know what that means - we will have a secure ecological future; etc. These, I think, are positions that are inherited from the left [5] and which in the ecological field are not at all, at all adapted.

Cyrille  : It is the idea of ​​the Great Evening, that is to say that there will be a moment when everything will change and everything will be better. This is what we find in millenarian ideologies, etc.

Historical blindness

Quentin  : Absolutely. When we take a step back, and this has been happening for about twenty years, we realize that throughout history ecological problems have been almost constant [6]. Not only in the West before colonization, of course, but also in other civilizations: we know about the massive deforestation that took place in China around the 11th and 12th centuries, it was monumental. We know of empires that collapsed because they devastated their natural environment…

Cyrille  : …I was thinking about Egypt…

Quentin  : Of course, but even the entire Mediterranean basin, for example: today we praise the merits of the garrigue and the maquis, typically Mediterranean landscapes, but in fact they are the scars of forests that were previously and that were ravaged by the Greeks and the Romans and the Persians and the Assyrians… The Mesopotamian basin, therefore present-day Iraq, was a plain of extraordinary fertility – this is where the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, etc. were born – and it was largely desertified and today these are plains that are very infertile. When we go back in history, it would even seem that this kind of catastrophe existed before the Neolithic: we know that when human beings landed in Australia, the ancestors of the Aborigines caused the disappearance of local species that were extremely important and this happened forty thousand years ago… When Homo sapiens arrived on the American continent, twelve or thirteen thousand years ago – so the ancestors of the Amerindians – exactly the same thing happened: a mind-blowing massacre and we find fossils of animals that have completely disappeared over a few centimeters showing that for 2-3 thousand years, there were systematic massacres [7]. This is a response that is, in my opinion, very pertinent to (de)colonial ecology, which claims [or implies] that before colonization, peoples had harmonious relationships, of concord, of communion with nature: this is partly false. It is partly true; there were very intimate and very balanced relationships [with nature] in Europe or in the Maghreb, in China, in India, etc. and there were also massacres, destruction and [environmental] devastation. The history of the environment is extraordinarily complex and it is difficult to give lessons. The best thing is to have a posture of humility and to try to sort things out. I am not defending capitalism, nor industrial society, nor techno-science, etc. What I am saying is that we cannot reduce the problem of ecology to a single factor by implicitly promising a single solution behind it.

Lack of prospects

Cyrille  : Especially since what we can notice in the (de)colonial ideology is that it is only negative, there are no thinkers, there is no philosophy that comes from Africa [for example]: it is only people who criticize colonization, slavery, etc. but there is no positive thinking in the sense that there is very little alternative to the Western system. Moreover, all the ideological springs generally come from American universities, there is no development of autonomous thoughts so it would be a bad start to recreate a society that would put ecology and humanity at the center after (de)colonial revolutions… We can hardly see the alternative…

Quentin  : The situation is the same with regard to Islamo-leftism. We can compare Islamo-leftism, for example, to the complacency towards the USSR or other regimes of Pol Pot, the FLN, Castro, etc.; it is a complacency towards a totalitarianism [8]. But at least behind it there was the ideal of a utopian socialist society. The parallel with Islamo-leftism stops there because here there is nothing positive: there is no model Muslim society, it is absurd, it does not make anyone dream and otherwise we would simply go, we would go and live there… It is not the case. And there, indeed, you are right, we find ourselves with (de)colonial ecology in the same situation: it is a criticism and even a hatred of the West and even of Whites, it is madness, it is a hatred without a solution. It seems that the solution is in annihilation… But once everything is annihilated, we do not see what could replace it… But I believe that it is this blind hatred that gives them such energy.

Primitivism

So that being said and if we talk about true decolonial ecology then the criticism cannot be applied. We see developing in the ecological milieu a primitivism – which is also very old – that is to say the dream of returning to a pre-modern society with cosmogonies of the type of Amazonian Indians, bush Africans, etc. In particular after the book by Philippe Descola Part-of the nature and culture [Gallimard 2005], a very interesting book, there are a lot of ecologists like Reporterre, who began to dream of adopting the mythology of the Achuars; it is an animist Amazonian tribe in which there is no separation between nature and humans, where everything is blurred, the relationships with the natural elements are equivalent to relationships between people of a family, siblings or cousins, etc. There, we have an alternative, but it is completely metaphysical, it is absolutely inapplicable [9]. So the ecologists have come to dream of this.

Cyrille  : It is the exit from rationality

Getting rid of modernity

Quentin  : Completely, absolutely. This is an exit from modernity. And so the (de)colonial ecology that we are talking about today uses this primitivist tropism to, in an implicit way, make the West dream of a beyond modernity [10]. But it is absolutely empty; there is nothing at all, it is a dead end, I think that, very deeply, it is a dead end, in particular because here we are talking about political ecology, and ecology as a science and politics as the domain of thought require a separation between nature and the human being. Maybe we will talk about it another day but these are philosophical notions that are important in my opinion. Take for example the case of China where there is no real separation between nature and society, at least in a fairly approximate way, there is a Taoism where there is an alternation between two principles, the Yin and Yang that you know, man and woman, darkness and light, etc. It makes ecologists dream a lot, another cosmogony, another ontology, as anthropologists say, where nature and society are not opposed. But the problem is that, from the moment there is no longer any opposition between nature and society, ethical questions will not arise in the same way; for example this week the creation by a Franco-Chinese team, I believe, of a half-human, half-animal embryo was announced...

Cyrille  : … a chimera…

Quentin  : … absolutely, what we call a chimera. We are very shocked; it is something we do not want at all, that there is genetic manipulation on the living. But behind this attitude, which is ours, there is a divide between the natural and the artificial. This divide, in the Chinese cosmogony, is very largely attenuated; there is no problem, for a Chinese, to create hybrid beings as much in robotics as in genetics. But, on this, the ecologists do not speak, obviously… It is very complicated, these are stories that are really complex and we cannot say that the West must manage to get out of modernity to adhere to a Chinese, Indian, Achuar cosmogony or I don't know what. It is absurd.

Evanescence of politics

Rimso  : Everything you say there makes me think of a myth, it's a bit like a return to magical thoughts, a psychological state where we are all looking for Paradise on Earth, Eden, even if they are actually established for some; it can be religion for example, for Islamist thought or other, where we dream of territories where people would go and which would be magnificent... It's true that it doesn't hold up at all to transform our daily lives, our relationships... What is important to me is that if we want to question important things in our relationship to ecology and society, we have to tackle the modes of production; because if the question of work and how we produce things is not raised, we can always try to make different micro-consumptions, try to fight excess, etc. but we should forge a philosophy that also allows us to put in place our means of subsistence, as we used to say. We don't want to live in societies where, I think, less than 5% of the population feeds everyone else; inevitably there is industrial massification and all the nuisances that go with it. On the question of work, we can ask ourselves the question: how should we organize ourselves to produce? Because if we refuse that certain tasks are hyper-specific, that we extract I don't know how many kilos of tons of metals in certain places to run industries, planes, armies, telephones, flat screen televisions, and all that, it's polluting, it's dangerous... Maybe someone should ask themselves: am I ready to put myself in their shoes? There, we say to ourselves that there is a hierarchy of work, that's how it is, it's the others who will take it, I don't care, I continue to stuff myself... But obviously we also have to make the question of how we organize ourselves desirable and are we ready to do, to think about it? What are we ready to do as work, or not? And what are we ready to make others suffer in order to benefit from it in our consumption?

Quentin  : You are absolutely right. You are actually referring to the societal project. Ecology is political in essence, in the way we understand it here: an ecological policy would require the development of a societal project. But we are extremely far from that, indeed. The way we produce, and who produces and how, but also the way we decide. This is a bit of the question I ask the degrowth advocates; I am not against degrowth but they remain in an economic register – growth/degrowth – and I very rarely read political considerations on who produces and how and for whom and who decides and how and at what time and according to what protocol [11]. That is to say, there is no question of direct democracy, or very little, or it is very implicit and the same thing for production. The problem is that ecology – this is what I was saying before – is very marked by the left-wing imagination and we should manage to get out of it because the left, the Marxist left, postulates that politics does not exist, in fact. For a Marxist, there is only economics and politics is only secondary [in relation] to economics; therefore the question of the society of tomorrow does not have to be asked. There are very few writings by Marx that speak of communist society, it is very allegorical, very elliptical and it is the same thing in most movements of the 20th century; we rarely read comments on [what will be] the society of tomorrow. I think that ecology should reconnect with politics in the noble sense, that is to say the question "what society do we want?" " and try to describe it, not describe a utopia, but try to find some bearings, at least, and I think that today we are at such a level of disembodiment, of abstraction that we arrive at (de)colonial ecology which talks nonsense. I agree with you; I am for a return to very political questions.

The problem is that when we start discussing this again in a left-wing imagination, we end up with the old leftist divisions which, in fact, have never been overcome between the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, the post-Maoists, the insurrectionists, etc. so we fall back into the old politics [12]. This is a dead end of our times and one in which ecology is mired up to its shoulders.

A new religious mythology

To come back to what you were saying at the very beginning; you are also entirely right – if I understood correctly – when you talk about religious imagination. Basically, political ecology is a carbon copy of the leftist imagination which is itself, basically, a carbon copy of the Judeo-Christian imagination and therefore in which we have a chosen people – the proletariat –, a Paradise, a Bible – LeCapital –, a God – an evil God who calls himself the Capital, precisely, so capitalism as the incarnation of the Devil, etc. And we are, today, even more in a religious imagination when we talk about ecology: we talk about the Garden of Eden, we talk about the Flood, we talk about the Apocalypse, we are really swimming in myths, contemporary myths with the Judeo-Christian guilt on which (de)colonial ecology and the (anti)indigenous play to the full – it is the Whites who are guilty, " you bit the apple, ETC. so you are bad, you must atone your mistake ! ", it is repentance, etc. That is not politics, here, we are in psychotherapy, the bad psychotherapy…

Perhaps to also follow up on something a little more specific: the term "Anthropocene" is very popular and there are many variations on it, the "Capitalocene", the "Colonisanocene", the "Technocene", the "Thanatocene", etc. and there we are really, for me, in speculation that leads nowhere. The Anthropocene, I think that the listeners are aware, is the idea that for the last century or two, we have entered an industrial society where human beings have an impact on the functioning of the planet. The problem is that we deduce from this that before we had no impact and that is false. The use of the term alone, in my opinion, denotes a view that is false: since Homo sapiens exists – and Homo sapiens, it's three hundred thousand years - it has a massive impact on its environment, it has deforested monumentally, it has created mass extinctions of species, it even seems that it has changed the climate two or three times... There is a history between the environment and Man and in that the term Anthropocene seems to me to reduce the problem to the question of the West. So, here too, we see that the term that emanates from the Western ecological environment prepares for the offensive of (de)colonial ecology. That's why I think that (de)colonial ecology unfortunately has a future; the terrain of political ecology as it exists today is very devastated, it is very poor, very ideological, even religious, and it leads to nothing.

Cyrille  : I have the impression that it goes back even further: it reminds me of all these stories of the nursing mother, etc. In ecology we find a lot of myths, so it is not necessarily anti-rationalist but there are still founding myths that refer to the image of the noble savage. That is to say that there would be a moment in humanity where we were good, by nature and society corrupts us and this society is the capitalist system and it is the West.

Quentin  : Yes, absolutely. But this Rousseauist myth is also present in the libertarian imagination; there is some of that in the anarchist imagination which would like it to be enough to overthrow the systems of oppression, the hierarchies, the dominations, [religions], etc. and there would be an agreement between our mutual desires, it would be enough to discuss a little and then everything would be settled… That is an imagination which bathed the workers’ movement which was very naive. Unfortunately, we realize that that is not how it works: the human being is not made beforehand – was not designed if ever it was designed by something! – to live in harmony neither between humans, nor between man and nature. If ever there are agreements, if ever there are punctual harmonies, if ever there is an establishment of equitable relations, it is systematically a creation, a cultural creation – and it is still necessary to want it. You are absolutely right to say that we swim in full myths as soon as we talk about ecology, but as soon as we talk about politics too. And I believe that thought, an objective of thought, the objective same of thought is to arrive at getting out of myths and not once and for all, because we live with them, but to arrive at thinking is to arrive and to think outside of myths...

Cyrille  : … demystify…

Quentin  : Yes, occasionally, but at some point, managing to think outside of myths, outside of religion, outside of solutions that date back several millennia [13]…And we struggle with that…

Between techno-scientific, managerial and leftist ecology

Rimso  : I also wanted to clarify, regarding ecological ideologies, the myths that they can convey; some say that we must return to ecology, to the foundation of ecology which is a science, ecological science. And then, be careful, I am also critical of rationalism as it can be carried out, with all this scientistic side. I think that we must find our line of flight and discuss politics and discourse on what we want in society without falling or falling back into ecology as a science or mystical ecology.

Quentin : Yes, we are at the intersection of several ecologies. I think there are three traps in political ecology. First, there is the techno-scientism that you just talked about, believing that science will solve everything. Then there is managerial ecology, that is to say, basically, we don't change anything except a few laws, we put wind turbines in addition to nuclear power plants, we protect small birds, etc. And then leftist ecology which is in the process, I believe, of becoming (de)colonial ecology [14]. I think that these are three dead ends indeed and that there would be a huge project that would have to be reopened: the thought of political ecology. It is a project that is huge but that it is urgent to open because we are going to have a "mix" of the three: we are going to have the techno-scientists through the geo-engineering projects where we try to model the major cycles of the biosphere by sending particles in the atmosphere in particular to filter the sun's rays in order to limit climate change, to sequester carbon using artificial processes, etc.; we are going to have the managerial ecology since there is no risk of having an emancipatory revolution or at least it is off to a bad start; and then we are going to have the (de)colonial ecology since these are global dynamics that are being put in place and that the West is clearly declining. So we risk ending up with a regime that will take the worst of these political ecologies [15] ...

Cyrille : Maybe we can conclude on that. Unless you have anything to add…

Daman  : Quentin, maybe you can remind me of one or two articles, links or works…

Quentin : I can refer to the page “Beware of (de)colonial ecology!” and to the articles of “La Décroissance” in the two issues of March and April, which are very good.

Cyrille : The April issue was an issue against (de)colonial ecology, more or less, with a long article inside. There is also the brochure of Common Places which is called Pandemic, ecology and politics.

Quentin : And on this page “Beware of (de)colonial ecology!” We have tried to synthesize most of the things that have been said here in terms of sociological descriptions of the infiltration of (de)colonial ecology in ecological circles, with references to some texts.