Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron
Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron
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Pollution is Colonialism

Author: Max Liboiron

Narrator: Donna Postel

Unabridged: 5 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/23/2022


Synopsis

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.

About Max Liboiron

Max Liboiron is associate professor of geography at Memorial University. They are the author of Pollution is Colonialism.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Justyn on August 02, 2021

This is the best academic book I've ever read and also the first written review I've left on this website. Thank you, Max Liboiron.......more

Goodreads review by Jacob on August 17, 2021

Max Liboiron writes: "Indigenous Land relations, delicious as they may be for “thinking with” or “drawing upon,” are not for consumption or appropriation by settlers. In earlier drafts of this chapter, I had framed the discussion around the thesis that “Plastics Are Kin,” but I changed this after con......more

Goodreads review by Ally on June 10, 2023

Pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism, but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land. That is, pollution is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations, rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of violence. These colonial relatio......more

Goodreads review by CG on December 23, 2021

Having read this book as part of a university assignment (a book review of a book of our choice), I felt very called out (in an important way). Every sticky tab I placed and quote I circled felt part of the 'extractive reading' that was referenced as a type of colonial practice. Not only that, but I......more

Goodreads review by Lauren on February 02, 2023

This was a dense read that I didn’t agree with many times, but that challenged my thought processes and inspired me to seek further challenges to those thoughts. This is why I think it’s a 4star book. The idea of avoiding “extractive reading” and the concept of doing fully anti colonial science (inc......more