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Worldeater Series: Colonialism caused planetary systems collapse

Samantha Suppiah
POSSIBLE FUTURES
3 min readOct 28, 2024

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The sustainability industry is built to sustain a colonial world order. What have been, and continue to be, the narratives, mechanisms and systems that establish and advance colonial sustainability?

Colonial ecocide

In 2022, after decades of Global South lobbying, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formally named colonialism as a historic and ongoing driver of the climate crisis. Colonialism is described by the IPCC as a longstanding strategy of land dispossession where deforestation, desertification, aridification and planting colonising vegetation renders the land on which indigenous peoples occupy uninhabitable and volatile.

Ecocide, or environmental destruction, is a favoured methodology for colonisation, as it is highly effective in

  1. Eliminating or displacing indigenous inhabitants by reducing habitability, creating local markets for cheap and desperate labour through genocide and ethnocide,
  2. Repurposing territories (ecological, human and mineral resources; geographic positions) for the economic profit and political leverage of colonisers,
  3. Justifying a development narrative of “bringing rationality, advancement and progress” to what is deemed as “unproductive and empty…

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POSSIBLE FUTURES
POSSIBLE FUTURES

Published in POSSIBLE FUTURES

a global south decolonial collective disarming colonial narratives

Samantha Suppiah
Samantha Suppiah

Written by Samantha Suppiah

Southeast Asian trickster. Design strategist for decolonial sustainability & regeneration. www.possiblefutures.earth/crew#samantha

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