Abstract
As higher education expands, its horizons narrow. The “neoliberal university” has been a work in progress already for decades (e.g., Slaughter and Rhoades 2000). Accompanying this transformation has been the proliferation of texts, courses, and resources regarding research methods, research methodology, research ethics, and all manner of research-related practice. As universities “compete” in national and global rankings, standardization according to “best” practices predicated on universalist assumptions of “science,” and their propagation by “leading” authorities, mean that conspicuous emphasis on research methods is de rigueur. Data generation, mining, handling, and storage increasingly take precedence over content and context, especially in the social sciences.
The discipline of economics is in many respects a pioneer of this “desocialization and dehistoricization” (Milionakis and Fine 2009: 1) of social science. Its well-documented “physics envy” places method and statistical technique above consideration of time and place. The reduction of human beings to atomized, rational utility-maximizing actors devoid of history, culture or community was already a concern for John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory warned against “The pitfalls of a pseudo-mathematical method, which can make no progress except by making everything a function of a single variable and assuming that all the partial differentials vanish” (Keynes, quoted in Rotheim 1989-1990: 320). Unfortunately, the spuriousness of the precision is no obstacle to the provision of ready “answers” to policymakers seeking quick fixes that can be defended on the basis of scientific rigor (Mayer 1993) and facilitates the colonization of other disciplines’ subject matter (Milionakis and Fine 2009: 297).
Nevertheless, the “big data revolution” (Huberty 2015) has had unexpected consequences, both within and even beyond the European Union, as a result of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2016. This was the result of growing regulatory concern over data harvesting by Big Tech, and a tenaciously fought legal battle over “the right to be forgotten” (Foroohar 2019). Now personal data collection and retention are subject to the consent of the persons concerned. This has focused greater attention on the ethics of data generation and management (Goddard 2017; Meijering et al. 2020), albeit within the dominant universalist paradigm.
A fundamentally more far-reaching, thoroughgoing analysis of research practice is provided by Max Liboiron in Pollution Is Colonialism. Despite its bold and intriguingly straightforward title, the book is far from a simple application of a conquest analogy to industrialization’s ecological impact. Instead, a contribution ostensibly to the field of science and technology studies (STS) is a truly radical contemplation of science from an anticolonial perspective, drawing mainly from (North American) Indigenous and feminist traditions: “methodology is a way of being in the world. . . ways of being are tied up in obligations” (1). Liboiron is founder and head of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), which researches plastics pollution in traditional Indigenous fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland. The everyday work of CLEAR affords Liboiron the opportunity to share deeply considered reflections on the nature of scientific inquiry, the ethics of data collection and use, and on what it means to be anticolonial in practice.
Anticolonialism guides all activity at CLEAR, in contradistinction to the usually unconsciously normative universalism of dominant science. It is the deliberate decision to employ methods that “do not reproduce settler and colonial entitlement to Land and Indigenous cultures, concepts, knowledges, . . . and lifeworlds.” It is the pursuit of “good land relations, broadly defined” (27). Anticolonialism is founded upon an ontology of land relations: “In CLEAR, we place land relations at the center of our knowledge production. . . land relations always already play a central role in all sciences, anticolonial and otherwise” (6). Relations, in turn, (should) lead to consideration of obligations, “a cosmology of relationality-as-accountability” (120). Ignorance of such obligations, even when acting with the best of intentions (as with much environmentalism), is to reproduce colonialism: When I write about plastics and science, it is more than a case study: I’m talking about my food, other lab members’ food (and often their families’ histories and livelihoods), and the food, relatives, and heritage of Indigenous, settler, and other people in the province. I am beholden to all of them—these are my specific obligations as a scientist who works on plastics in wild food webs in Newfoundland and Labrador. (30)
This ethics of obligation applies to “fieldwork,” itself a dirty word, implying “an outside, a Natural wilderness, a terra nullius ready for scientific discovery by settler academics, when in fact these places are homelands, homes, and houses” (68n101). Instead, CLEAR collects data subject to community peer review: “researchers are not entitled to conduct research on someone else’s L/land.. . . Land is always part of a community, whether there are humans present or not” (140). This has a particular poignancy in Newfoundland, where “the Beothuk were completely murdered by white settlers during the conquest.. . . No one speaks on behalf of the Beothuk, so permission can never be granted. This inability to follow basic protocol in the face of genocide is a problem, and frankly one of the goals and achievements of genocide” (116n14). The discussion of community peer review is typical of the care with which every aspect of practice is tested for consistency with anticolonialism and the connected principle of good relations, in contradistinction to their opposite: “I cannot overemphasize how assumed access to land is foundational to so many settler relations” (68).
This has practical implications at various levels: “Environmentalism does not usually address colonialism, and often reproduces it” (11). Liboiron raises the issue of cultural genocide as a “particular mechanism of genocide” (107n103), whereby “the languages, practices, knowledge, and thus relations with Land are killed to the point that they are no longer reproduced by successive generations” (107). When the Mohawk community in Akwesasne was advised to avoid eating fish contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), some continued to eat the fish because if they did not an entire culture would disintegrate (Hoover 2013). In Newfoundland, scientific fisheries management ignored the fact that “a change in scale from sustenance to industrial fishing is a change in relations that matter.” This resulted in overfishing, cod fishery collapse, and a 1992 moratorium on cod fishing that “criminalized sustenance fishing, which was central to ways of life and living in the province.. . . Cod matters here, and fisheries science killed cod” (139).
Both examples exemplify colonialism in practice: “an assumed entitlement to Indigenous Land” (9). This encompasses access to Land for the purpose of settlement, access to “Land-based cultural designs and culturally appropriated symbols for fashion,” access to Land for scientific research, using Land as a Resource, and “imagining things for land in ways that align with colonial and settler goals, even when those goals are well-intentioned” (10). Land as a Resource even involves its transformation into a “standing reserve” by which the future “is reserved for settler goals, colonized in advance” (65). Colonialism is the erasure of place-based obligations, and often of the people and Land subject to these. “Land” itself is so capitalized to denote its status as “a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships,” as opposed to “land,” which is “a fixed geographical and physical space” (6n19). The capitalized “Resource” denotes land as “useful to particular (here, settler and colonial) ends” (62).
Yet, as Liboiron acknowledges: “It can be hard to see your obligations, especially when they are counter to your desires” (143). This requires humility, here defined as recognition of our connectedness to others and our inability to “do anything without these many others” (30). This connectedness is itself place-based, given the specificity of relations and their attendant obligations (32). The situatedness of relations means that they are “not properties of things so much as what make things.” Ideas and practices, including those featured here, “will not always travel well, generalize well, make sense elsewhere” (29). Dominant science’s presumption of universality often encounters empirical, localized resistance for this very reason.
Liboiron distinguishes between Western science and dominant science, as not all Western science is dominant (20n77). The fate of Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) attests to that, overridden as it was by the dualism and universalism of René Descartes’s rationalist philosophy: “For Vico, unlike rational precepts and their universalist claims, myths are thoroughly historical.. . . Vico’s reflections spelled out a comprehensive understanding of myth’s significance as a source of knowledge about human existence” (Renger 2014: 38–39). Cartesian logic’s “naturalization of separation allows the scientific logic of variables to make sense—variables are ways to treat elements of an environment as discrete, autonomous actors” (48). Such decontextualization is intrinsic to dominant science’s fueling of “a militant universalism” (54).
Conventional economics, unsurprisingly for a discipline inherently envious of what it projects as “scientific” (Nelson 2020), is a particularly egregious example of colonialism. It supplies an insidious technology of appropriation and justification of that via its reduction of Land to Resource, whether as a source of value to be extracted, or as a sink—a legitimated receptacle of pollution—among other exploitative possibilities. Either way, such treatment “transform[s] it from a complex set of relations to one consisting of only a few relevant factors,” amounting to what Inuk scholar and activist Jackie Price has vividly described as “metaphysical flattening” (47). In this respect, mainstream economics has successfully emulated its imaginary model of science, often in the most devastating and lethal ways (Murphy 2017).
In what I consider to be the only weakness of this book, Liboiron somewhat warily refers to Marxism, citing Sandy Grande to the effect that Marxists share with capitalists the view of land as Resource (13; see also Grande 2015: 31). While Marx himself is viewed here as having made an important insight with respect to primitive accumulation as “foundational to the possibility of capitalism” (13), there is a logical distinction between that and colonialism as evidenced by the historical existence of noncapitalist empires, including those declaring themselves ideologically aligned with Marx and his work. The environmental despoliation of Soviet industrialization can hardly be gainsaid, even if that is commonly regarded as a “failure of Marxist thought,” as opposed to a certain tradition of Marxist thought (Hornborg 2001: 13, 125).
The conflation of Marx and Marxism with settler ethics is common in much postcolonial discourse, and can even mirror the eurocentrism it condemns. Countering this, Harry Harootunian has conducted painstaking exegesis of Marx’s work that accounts for the “unevenness” of capitalist development despite capitalism’s universalizing imperative. It is a comprehensive refutation of both the “Cold War caricature of Marx that relies on Second International ‘stage theory’ supplemented with Stalinist revisions based on the itinerary of development extracted from European history,” and the ironic acceptance of that Eurocentric caricature by postcolonialist writers (Harootunian 2017: 231).
This concept of “unevenness” in capitalist development also applies to the understanding of pollution and its effects. Indeed, it is a “defining feature of pollution” (78). Such recurrent analogues between a Marxism capable of explaining capitalism’s inability to erase history despite its best efforts, and an anticolonialist philosophy and methodology of science, suggest a greater affinity than admitted by Liboiron. It is certainly suggestive of potentially very fruitful collaborative possibilities, subject to proper recognition of land relations and the associated implications for the obligations that these entail.
Liboiron’s prose style may disturb the reader unaccustomed to recurrent, brusque colloquialism in scientific publications. However, I found the adjustment easy to make and thoroughly rewarding. This is praxis writ large (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, Brown, and McLaren 2018). Political economy, radical or otherwise, will greatly benefit from the widest dissemination and careful study of this book. Along the way, readers will learn important aspects of pollution science and plastics, which defy the intrinsically colonialist “assimilative capacity” or threshold model of pollution management that has prevailed for almost a century. Learning to live with the damage “civilization” has done to the world while mitigating it to the best of our ability, consistent with good land relations, will necessitate comprehensively radical transformation of ways of thinking and living for us in the overdeveloped world, to use Paul Gilroy’s phrase (Gilroy 2004). The envisioning of a post-capitalist political economy, to be remotely plausible, will have to rediscover what the metaphysical flattening of dominant science and the panoply of ideological supports purporting to be common sense have attempted to erase. It will certainly have to do much better than mine the seabed for metals integral to “the green transition” (Ahuja 2023). It is imperative that we recognize our planet as Land, rather than Resource, and act accordingly. Good relations demand nothing less.
