Colonial Ecology and the Myth of Green Objectivity

As a science, ecology is often regarded as a neutral field of study and a universal approach to the ecological crisis.

However, this discipline emerged in the Western world, within specific intellectual traditions, and is therefore inextricably linked to the political and social currents of its time, including colonialism and supremacy.

This legacy persists as mainstream ecology promotes depoliticized and technical solutions that avoid naming the military-industrial growth system that replicates inherited colonial patterns of power, resource plunder, racial capitalism, global inequality, and environmental destruction.

Thus, Western ecology has become vulnerable to corporate hijack and the AI “green’ myth, eventually serving the interests of those who accelerate the ecological collapse.

A Troubled History of Racism and Western Saviorism

Ecology is Western Science. It is conceptualized in Western language and paradigms. It is embedded in the Western historical, anthropological, scientific, social, and political frameworks.

First, the etymology is Greek and means the “study” of the “household” (referring here to “nature”). Studying already puts a distance between the one who studies and holds the knowledge and the object of study.

In older traditions, people interacted naturally with their environment, feeling interconnected, interdependent, and thus, responsible stewards of their natural environment.

The demographics of the founders of ecology are mainly white European and American males in the late 19th and 20th centuries. To name a few: German biologist Ernst Haeckel, Danish botanist Eugen Warming, and American ecologist Stephen Forbes.

Therefore, is ecology really a neutral, objective, universal science? What biases could it implicitly have just from its historical roots?

Western ecology denies the rich and diverse other forms of ecological knowledge systems.

It dismisses several millennia of pre-colonial indigenous deep understanding, care, and regeneration practices of their environment. Scholar Native American Lyla June demonstrates how indigenous nations of “Turtle Island” (“North America”) have developed land management strategies for the benefit of all life.

The stance of early ecologists is linked to the colonial myth of “land without people” played out in the Americas, Palestine, Africa, Australia, etc., that European colonizers supposedly “discovered” or “explored” and then “managed” according to their science!

Ecology circles are directly related to conservation movements with whom they worked closely on the ground and often shared social values and ideologies.

An influential part of early conservationists was deeply racist and held open white supremacist views based on eugenic roots. American conservationist Madison Grant, along with the head of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry F. Osborn, biologists Charles Davenport and David S. Jordan, campaigned in the early 20th century for the preservation of “pure” wilderness for the Nordic race.

Primary forests are fetishized, wilderness is romanticized, but in their pristine state, without the presence of humans, especially without the locals. As related by scholars Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore, even the father of the national parks in the United States, John Muir, was not immune to racist views. Robbins and Moore found out that Muir removed native people and erased their history in the areas he worked hard to preserve.

Overpopulation became a central focus of ecologists such as Fairfield Osborn Jr. and William Vogt in the 1940s and Paul Ehrlich in the late 1960s, who called for the forced sterilization of the population of poor nations, limiting foreign aid to “overpopulated” countries, and restricting immigration to the Global North.

Without going as far as these extreme forms of annihilation, local communities are still displaced, harmed, and deprived of their livelihood for the purpose of creating wildlife reserves, still failing to protect biodiversity because of Eurocentric views and a top-down approach.

Some mainstream conservation NGOs work within this model. As an example, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was pointed out in 2019 by BuzzFeed News journalists for multiple instances of human rights abuses of indigenous people in protected areas by eco-guards funded and supported by WWF, in many places in Africa, Nepal, and India.

According to the international human rights organization Minority Rights Group in 2020, despite knowing about these alleged abuses and even after conducting an internal investigation, WWF did not address the situation and did not conform to the international human rights norms inscribed in its own policies.

Deep Ecology in the Colonial Lineage

Deep ecology was born in the 1970s in Europe as a movement to counteract anthropocentrism (the idea that the human species is the most important living being on Earth).

Deep ecology considers all life and living beings equally, not for their benefit for humans, not as an essential part of the survival of our species, but for their intrinsic worth. But this theory and the practice of this kind of belief did not start with deep ecology.

There is a tendency in the dominant Western culture to locate the birth of “new” ideas in the West. In this case, deep ecology still refers to the lineage of Eastern traditions, but only to support the claim that it is a universal philosophy.

Indian historian and environmentalist Ramachandra Guha argues that deep ecology is a monolithic and simplistic view that obscures the real causes of the ecological crisis, which are overconsumption and militarism.

Guha deconstructs the invocation to Eastern legacy as a selective and pejorative view where the Eastern ecological wisdom is considered prescientific and backward, while the reason and scientific approach would be the field of only Western scholars.

This attitude is not new and dates from the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment.

British ecologist Stephan Harding mentions the influence of French philosopher René Descartes, who established that the mind is the essence of humanity, leading to the split between mind and body, mind and matter, and the mechanistic worldview that sees nature as dead matter and only a reservoir of resources.

Not accidentally, the Cartesian framework thrived during European colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade, offering a justification for settler colonialism and racial supremacy.

European colonizers considered themselves the holders of universal knowledge (the “mind”), while colonized people were seen as “primitive”, reduced to physical labor (the “body”).

This logic justified dehumanization, various forms of violence from discrimination to slavery and ethnic cleansing, exploitation, and the erasure of other than Western knowledge systems. It continues to shape our world today.

By focusing on the Anthropocene (the current era where humanity triggered climate change and altered the planet’s balance), deep ecology frames the ecological crisis as a collective human failure rather than a product of a specific system (based on capitalism, neocolonialism, resource plunder, systemic inequalities, supremacy etc.) that benefits a category of nations over others, and a category of people over others.

Western Ecology’s “Neutrality” in Politics

As a result, Western ecology has depoliticized its modus operandi. In doing so, it stripped the ecological collapse of its political, social, and historical contexts and avoided addressing its root causes.

Industrialized countries are the ones with the highest consumption of the world’s resources, excess emissions, ignoring the planetary impacts and limits, generating irreversible environmental harm, and systematically burdening marginalized people in the Global South and in their own countries.

As the industrial growth system expands, it needs to secure access to land, resources, and cheap labor, often in former colonies, without paying real value to maximize its profits. It needs to keep the Global South dependent and ruled by strong local allies, prevent sovereignty, and eventually enforce control through military power.

Contemporary conflicts and ethnic wars are colonial legacies that shape and map the lands according to the use of resources. Power-over is exerted through a global governance inherited from historical patterns of power and strengthened by the alliance of transnational corporations and political order. Inequalities deepened and spread within the layers of hierarchy (race, class, gender, ideology, religion, and extreme nationalism, etc.).

Any form of activism or resistance is neutralized, which explains the rise of fascism, the locking of machine propaganda, and the development of digital mass surveillance.

Interestingly, Western ecology chooses “neutrality” regarding politics and geopolitics, focusing on “technical” or “managerial” solutions that do not challenge the dominant system and even exacerbate the harm. Depoliticized ecology serves powerful interests by maintaining business as usual, the global power balance, and decision-making in the hands of elites, states, corporations, and NGOs.

Palestine, Sudan, and Congo are blatant examples of the political cowardice of many mainstream environmental NGOs over racial colonial violence intersecting with ecological destruction.

It is worth mentioning that there are some exceptions, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Since the acceleration of the genocide in Gaza in 2023, international pressure and repression have increased towards institutions and academics speaking about Palestine, as exposed in the March 2025 statement of the movement of scholars, Third World Approaches to International Law.

Palestinian scholar Imad Asmar suggests that the global silence and profound double standards (of universal human rights and application of international law) over Gaza reveal the systemic political failure rather than a lack of concern within the environmental community.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that the climate breakdown is driven by the pattern of land and resource appropriation, the reliance of the global capitalist system on cheap labor and resources from the “Periphery” (the Global South). Therefore, Jason Hickel affirms that the liberation of Palestine is not allowed by the powerful countries because it would trigger a crisis for the Global North and threaten this 500-year-old system.

Corporate Hijack of Ecology

Eco-capitalism has been claiming to align profit with ecological goals, to produce renewable energy, to innovate techno-solutions, and to reduce emissions via efficient market mechanisms. But it failed to mention greenwashing, land grabbing, and mineral extraction with its violent slave labor and sacrificed zones.

Professor of Strategy Aneel Karnani argues that sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have been co-opted by the business world for their own strategic interests, and often at the expense of environmental preservation. He explains that if it’s not profitable and not subject to binding rules, it is an illusion to believe that corporations would commit to costly, genuine social and ecological welfare; the reason is as simple as their fiduciary duty to their shareholders.

Karnani presents corporate lobbying and the resulting deregulation as a profound failure of governance and pleads for strengthening democratic institutions to resist this capture.

More than the incompatibility and profound contradictions between the capitalist agenda and the Earth system, many suspect the commodification of mainstream ecology. An illustration is the takeover of the world’s food system by Agri-chemical business giants.

Indian scholar and environmental activist Vandana Shiva has been a long-time advocate against the corporate grip on the entire food supply chain, the control of seed supply through patents and genetic engineering, leading to severe ecological and human harm and loss of food freedom.

Privatization of water is another example of a modern-colonial concept. Scholars Neves-Silva, Gomes, and Heller noted that it has been driven by institutions like the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s, supported by many governments, emphasizing efficiency and quality of private management versus public, with the high risk of rendering affordable and safe water inaccessible for vulnerable people.

Also, Dutch researcher Rianne Riemens raises awareness on how AI is shaping our ecological future, selling the myth that AI is indispensable to solve the climate crisis, and masking the growing demand for energy, land, and water.

Riemens warns against “Big Tech prioritizing its own growth over democracy, justice, and planetary boundaries”.

As a conclusion, elitist and depoliticized ecology has not only failed to address the root causes of the ecological breakdown, but it has also helped postcolonial capitalist powers build up authoritarianism and take control of essential elements of life, such as water, food, and freedom.

A genuine ecology is decolonial. A genuine ecology is political. A genuine ecology is inseparable from struggles over power, justice, and livelihoods. Alternative ecological approaches exist and include intersectional ecology centered around care and reciprocity, challenging the neocolonial projects, empowering local communities, embracing the plurality of worldviews, and restoring right relationship with the planet.