Environmental justice is only the beginning

WE ARE NOT IN A HEALTHY relationship with the natural world. Perhaps that much has finally become clear to the settler cultures in the West. Record-setting wildfires and a drought with little end in sight are physical warning signs of how toxic our relationship with our non-human relatives has become. These symptoms demand immediate evaluation and treatment. But in order to come up with the necessary solutions, the people and elected leaders of the West, and of the United States, and of the world, must accept a simple truth: None of this was inevitable. These conditions are the product of a series of choices rooted in the genocide, displacement and political marginalization of the land’s original peoples.

Manifest destiny and technology-intensive modernity, amplified by the incentive of capital, have resulted in gross mismanagement and, in many cases, total destruction of forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, wetlands, watersheds, ocean and desert biomes and countless other ecosystems — all within a few short centuries of European arrival. It is the direct result of the wars that settlers have waged against not only Indigenous people but the lands those people long inhabited.