Pollution Is Colonialism

Paperback, 224 pages

English language

Published May 6, 2021 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-4780-1413-3

(1 review)

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations.

Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is …

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations.

Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

2 editions

Fionnáin reviewed Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron

Toward Anticolonial Science

4 stars

Max Liboiron presents the work of their research group CLEAR, in Newfoundland, with a focus on research into plastic pollution in the bodies of fish. This begins a complex journey through a history of how acceptable levels of pollution were first estimated, to how current research still uses this history despite its inaccuracy, to how this research can be improved, including ideas, thoughts and perspectives from many (not only colonial) scientific perspectives.

Liboiron is a storyteller and an adept researcher, picking the right moments to highlight issues that help emphasise the value of CLEAR's research. They are also a very witty writer, which helps take the sting from the heavier academic sections. The resultant book is hopeful but critical, and the critique is aimed at many areas, including colonial science and environmental action, among other areas. In the end, the long introduction is not really necessary, as the three strong …

Max Liboiron presents the work of their research group CLEAR, in Newfoundland, with a focus on research into plastic pollution in the bodies of fish. This begins a complex journey through a history of how acceptable levels of pollution were first estimated, to how current research still uses this history despite its inaccuracy, to how this research can be improved, including ideas, thoughts and perspectives from many (not only colonial) scientific perspectives.

Liboiron is a storyteller and an adept researcher, picking the right moments to highlight issues that help emphasise the value of CLEAR's research. They are also a very witty writer, which helps take the sting from the heavier academic sections. The resultant book is hopeful but critical, and the critique is aimed at many areas, including colonial science and environmental action, among other areas. In the end, the long introduction is not really necessary, as the three strong chapters tell the same story of plastic pollution as a colonial action, only with more gusto. If I was to try to summarise the most important idea I found in this, it is that Land is not just earth, but the complex interweaving of critters and objects that form part of its varied self (a point made in this book with a nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer's writing on the same topic). So pollution of land is also pollution in and through these other connected parts.

Pollution Is Colonialism

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