Colonialism has a lot to answer for – it enslaved and impoverished entire nations, it plundered and misappropriated resources and plunged half the world into the kind of backwardness that it has yet to emerge from. But climate change? Is colonialism responsible for climate change as well? That seems a bit thick – until we understand the whys and wherefores.
Think about how the British exerted their will upon the Indian people. They cut down forests and drove indigenous people from their lands to create more arable land to feed their burgeoning industrial revolution back home. They decided what crop peasants would sow and harvest, often impoverishing the soil and transforming fertile land into non-arable land.
It wasn’t just deforestation that destroyed ecosystems, but other activities such as mining, which degraded land and displaced populations from their homes. The land was cleared for roads, railways, plantations, quarries, etc. Forests, Mangroves, grasslands, and wetlands were cleared or transformed to meet the narrow acquisitive agenda of the rapacious colonizing forces.
The building of dams for irrigation, the creation of waterways and the easy movement of raw materials and goods further disturbed the ecology. The British (and Indian monarchs to be honest) hunted at will and indiscriminately. This diminished animal populations and in some cases caused the extinction of entire of many animal species. This resulted in the destruction of ecosystems and we are feeling the impacts of this to date.
Colonialism is also responsible for manmade famines such as the Great Bengal Famine that directly or indirectly killed an estimated 60 million people. People died from starvation, malnutrition, malaria, population displacement, inhuman living conditions, homelessness, etc.
In French Equatorial Africa (Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Gabon of today) people were forced to work on cotton plantations. The subsistence way of living of these hunter-gatherer communities was destroyed and along with that; their habitats were destroyed as well. It is only now being recognised fully how imperialism and the colonial accumulation of resources destroyed not only indigenous economies but also ecologies.
Colonialism endangered ingenious populations in other ways – the colonisers brought with them certain diseases which the indigenous people had no natural protection against. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought with them diseases such as smallpox, flu and measles. The local populace had never been exposed to these before making these infections extremely lethal, effectively exterminating 90% of the Native American population.
Traditional farming practices were stamped out, and new and more intensive methods were imposed. Rural areas were appropriated and reassigned to various projects upon the whims and wishes of the colonisers. Often, the scorched earth policy was used – entire villages were burned down to the ground, people driven from their homes and their lands misappropriated and exploited in whichever way deemed fit.
With the widespread destruction of local flora and fauna, many natural healing herbs were lost forever, further destroying local cultures. The invading/ colonizing forces and settlers from the European nations also introduced new organisms into these ecosystems and eliminated others. Suddenly there were diseases and infestations where there had been none before. Naturally, this would negatively impact ecologies in lasting, irreversible ways – what we recognise as climate change today.
Hundreds of years of colonialism resulted in a wildly unequal world order. The unequal distribution of resources meant that some nations enjoy wealth and prosperity and development while vast swathes of other nations remain impoverished, malnourished and backward. Today, developed nations ask developing nations to make changes and sacrifices to combat climate change. However given the economic and developmental disparity between the developed and the developing world, this is both unfair and difficult to implement. There are many other ways in which the world’s imperial and colonial past resulted in climate change – in many ways, this continues today as well.
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