By Paul Homewood
At least the author of this book has an excuse – she is out to make money.
But shame on the Guardian’s Environment Correspondent, Damien Gayle, for taking it seriously:
I don’t think you need to read the silly article, as you can probably guess what it says.
In essence the book claims that “climate breakdown” really began when Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas.
The article goes on:
“Climate breakdown, she says, is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism, conceived in the suffering millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans endured at the altar of capital accumulation.
The climate crisis is, put simply, also a racial crisis, and it is only once we come to terms with this, Goffe says, and what it means for the ways we relate to the world and each other today, that we can hope to find a solution.
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
Somehow she manages to fill 384 pages of this codswallop.
The indisputable conclusion is that the author thinks we were all better off living 700 years ago, without all of the benefits modern society has brought.
Try selling that to those millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans.