It’s Time to Acknowledge White-Washed Environmentalism
In the UK, the environmental sector is the second ‘most-white’. In recent years, the environmental movement has emerged as a white middle-class movement, despite the biggest contributors to climate change being Western society. Over the last few decades, people in the global south have been fighting for their voices to be heard in this movement, because even though the global south contributes the least to the destruction of our planet, it is this part of the world that is disproportionately affected. Colonialism relied on the stealing of natural resources of colonised countries and the removal of peoples from vast areas of land to conquest landscapes for colonial powers to use as their own. Damaging the environment was a key tool in the ‘conquering of the third world’ game that Western Superpowers played for centuries. The legacies of colonialism still live on today in how our environment is lived in, managed and protected, particularly in former colonised states. In an ...