Epistemological Justice: Decoloniality, Climate Change, and Ecological Conditions for Future Generations*

Felipe Milanez,1 Mary Menton2 and Jurema Machado de A. Souza3

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on the work of contemporary Brazilian indigenous artists and philosophers who have developed an Amerindian critique of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency. Based on research co-produced by the Another Sky research project, poetry, performance, and orality are discussed as routes of an emergent epistemological turn in the face of the inevitable challenges that lie ahead. Through indigenous thought expressed in aesthetic manifestations, we discuss critical analysis of the current situation, as well as imaginaries of future social and ecological conditions needed for climate justice, epistemiological justice, and protection of life in the broadest sense.

Keywords

Indigenous art, epistemological justice, climate emergency, decolonial practices, political ecology, Brazil.

1 Introduction

The idea that we share the same planet and must take care of common resources for the good of all because we belong to one humanity, is new in the history of ideas, and remains an incomplete notion. However, the climate emergency has amplified our notions of kin and belonging, namely that a potentially catastrophic change of ecosystems caused by part of humanity, or by a system created within it, has begun to put at risk the survival not only of this species, but of thousands of others. Being together, and co-habiting the planet, has therefore become a fundamental philosophical question, above all related to the differences amongst and existence of humans. Even so, the field of international relations is still limited in facilitating urgent discussion of the ‘Humanity Club’, as the Brazilian indigenous leader Ailton Krenak ironically calls it (2020a: 15). In the lead-up to the Conference of the Parties (COP)26 in Glasgow in November 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report that not only reaffirmed the prior scientific consensus that rapid and intensifying climate change has been caused by human activities, but also documented sustained changes to all elements of the global climate system. Continuing changes, the panel concludes, are both inevitable and irreversible, with political and regulatory action to date grossly insufficient to keep global average temperatures from reaching 2 degrees Celsius above ‘pre-industrial levels’ (IPCC 2021: 5). In her speech opening the event, Txai Suruí, a young indigenous activist, inspired by Krenak’s Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2020a), told the audience: ‘Indigenous people are on the front line of the climate emergency, and we must be at the center of the decisions happening here. We have ideas to postpone the end of the world’ (Suruí 2021).

Even though the severity of the effects of global warming for human and non-human communities are well known, high‑level policy discussions about responding seem ever more detached from an increasingly obvious choice: reject the systemic logics and practices that have brought us to this point of no return or continue down a pathway of accelerating and intensifying intersecting forms of social and environmental injustice and ecocide. We argue that, in the context of climate change politics and broader struggles for environmental justice, critically engaging with the politics of knowledge practices and understanding people’s struggles for epistemological justice are important entry points for opening up analyses, making sense of the current juncture, and envisioning what is needed to build truly transformed, emancipatory, and plural social-ecological trajectories in the face of the inevitable challenges that lie ahead.

It often seems that the (depoliticised) environmentalisms and politics of capitalist society dictate that human relations to the Earth and non-human nature cannot be framed beyond abstract thresholds, financial incentives, ‘risk’ calculations, spectacles of ‘sustainable’ industrial exploitation and ‘solutionism’ that in practice work like a techno-bureaucratic ‘shell game’ (Huff and Brock 2017; Hulme 2021). These politics are supported through a scientific ‘grand narrative’ in the form of a new geological epoch, the so-named Anthropocene (Crutzen 2006; Armiero and De Angelis 2017), an idea that works through framings of change in policy and media to universalise and naturalise the destructive domination of the Earth by an undifferentiated and homogenous ‘humanity’, and to reify antiquated notions of inherent society–nature boundaries. Whilst not denying the profound capacity of humans to transform their lived environments, critical scholars have approached the Anthropocene framing and debates with caution, exploring the current juncture through alternative lenses informed by different theoretical assumptions and forms of evidence.

For example, notions of the Capitalocene4 (Moore 2017), Wasteocene5 (Armiero and De Angelis 2017), Plantationocene6 and Chthulucene7 (Haraway 2015), among others, have been useful to emphasise the historical and material changes associated with relations and technologies of globalisation through which extractive, colonial, racialised, and patriarchal capitalisms were instituted across the world. This work, broadly, aims to re-politicise, to de-naturalise, and ‘to challenge the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the Anthropocene beyond geological strata and planetary boundaries’ (Armiero and De Angelis 2017: 347). Exploring such concepts can bring temporal depth and awareness of continuities to our understandings of climate change and environmental politics. Contrary to an abrupt and recent ‘rupture’ or acute-onset ‘global crisis’, we can see sedimented logics and practices of social and ecological domination shaping historical changes as well as contours of the current moment, and we can think ahead to how these might continue to shape future conditions.

Although these critical diagnostics may be novel to Western scientists, bottom-up critiques date from the very beginning of European expansion. The invasion, conquest, and colonisation of the Americas were marked by disputes and different forms of resistances (including epistemic) critical of extraction of natural resources, and in defence of ecological conditions. It has been widely documented by sixteenth-century chroniclers (cronistas) how indigenous leaders and shamans opposed logging and mining only for the purpose of accumulation. Their opposition continued throughout the whole history of wars and imposition of colonisation. From a Tupinambá shaman, or more recently, a Yanomami shaman perspective, as we will present below, they challenge the idea of development based on cannibalising and extracting from the Earth.

We base our analysis on the findings from a research project called Another Sky, as part of an international research network known as ‘Sustainable’ Development and Atmospheres of Violence: Experiences of Environmental Defenders, which materialised along with another project, Mapping Indigenous Rights Abuses in Northeast Brazil, and an emergency research plan to investigate the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic among indigenous peoples, combining art and mapping of environmental conflicts. In an interdisciplinary movement and in a network, we use three research methodologies from political ecology, and the environmental humanities: (i) reports of the experiences of defenders, (ii) cartographies of conflicts made by indigenous researchers and students, and (iii) works by indigenous artists about the effects of the pandemic, associated to the ecological conflicts experienced by the communities. We realised that from these territories of art and war emerge different forms of resistance, narratives, constructions, and reconstructions of worlds torn by conquest, colonialism, and capitalism. And combining the complexity of the contemporary indigenous struggles through art and war, we look into the epistemological challenges posed on hegemonic standards about the climate emergency. We argue that the challenge of systemic change or climate collapse, if framed from a decolonial perspective, would lead not only to a reconfiguration of the economy and the decline of capitalism, but in building a completely different framework of existence, of our relationship with Earth and natural resources (Krenak 2020a), and of forces of reproduction (Barca 2020), instead of a patriarchal economy of extraction.

2 Aid, allyship, and radical change

Fantastical dreams of modernity, and endless growth and expansion, including into space and other planets, continue to raise more attention and funding than warnings of the devastating consequences of industrial extraction on livelihoods and landscapes (Coelho et al. 2021), or atrocities carried out against poor people in the name of biodiversity conservation (Duffy 2014). But ignoring other voices that raise alarms is definitively not new. The Western epistemological preoccupation with the production of knowledge or ‘truth’ based on authority and consensus systematically marginalises different points of view and experiences. In the past century or so, as a result of colonialism, this has been reproduced in the political fields too, shaping conventions that implicitly govern what and whose knowledge matter in identifying and explaining problems, who gets invited in and heard in debates about response, and whose priorities should be considered when visioning outcomes of different courses of action.

Despite this broader trend of failing to consider non-Western knowledge systems within global spheres of decision-making, the humanitarian aid and international development sectors tend to tout the importance of ‘locally led’ and ‘bottom-up’ solutions to the climate crisis and other challenges. This has led to an increasing number of projects that focus on ‘co-production’ and ‘participation’ with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) playing a central role brokering relationships between donors and governments on the one hand and local communities and social movements on the other. While many positive collaborations exist, NGOs can also effectively act to further government and company interests whilst undermining grass‑roots social movements and infringing on local peoples’ rights (Dunlap and Correa Arce 2021; Menton and Gilbert 2021). The recent increased focus within the mainstream environmental movement towards applauding indigenous peoples as allies in the fight against climate change (UNFCCC 2021; WWF 2020), in particular due to their role in halting deforestation (Baragwanath and Bayi 2020; Fellows et al. 2021), can be ineffective in bringing about such change if the ‘allyship’ is oversimplified and rebottled in a neoliberal logic of ‘carbon offsets’ and ‘net-zero’ deforestation targets. Indeed, these mainstreaming processes risk deradicalising the revolutionary anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggles at the heart of grass-roots social movements' defence of the land, the earth, and life in the broadest sense. Ultimately, climate justice is inextricably linked to, and directly dependent upon, social justice and other forms of justice (see Sultana 2021).

Instead, climate justice movements must reflect how indigenous imaginings of different futures influence present-day actions that can inform climate action (Whyte 2017). Whyte (2020: 5) highlights how ‘[a] narrow focus on averting some ecological tipping point is a major concern for some indigenous peoples because we know that the needed relational qualities for coordinated response are missing’. Further, he asks: 'Will this just be another situation… where a call to urgency is used to justify solutions that ultimately harm indigenous peoples? That’s how colonial power has been wielded in the past, that is, by using real or perceived urgencies to mask or justify privilege, harm, and injustice' (ibid.: 5).

For example, wildlife conservation has historically been used as justification for excluding local communities from their ancestral lands (Kashwan et al. 2021) and REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries) has been linked to land grabs and rights abuses (Asiyanbi and Lund 2020).

As Ailton Krenak has said in his recent book, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, we cannot remain a humanity refusing to recognise the relationship with Earth: 'This humanity refuses to recognize that the river, now in a coma, is also our grandfather; that the mountains mined in Africa or South America and transformed into merchandise elsewhere are also the grandfather, grandmother, mother, brother of some other constellation of human beings that want to go on sharing the communal home we call Earth' (Krenak 2020a: 36).

This false dichotomy between natural and human, present-day and ancestral peoples, is therefore also a key driver of the climate crisis, and returning to notions of respect, relationships, and accountability are central to fighting against it.

3 Ecology and the decolonial turn

Political ecologies emerging from the global South provide new perspectives following the decolonial turn in the social sciences. These works both promote the dismantling of the colonial system of knowledge and looking for dimensions of knowledge that have been systematically silenced, marginalised, or destroyed. From a decolonial perspective, the violence of the conquest and colonisation in Abya Yala,8 was not only physical – involving genocide and ecocide – but also involved epistemic and ontological dimensions, related to knowledge and existence, respectively. For example, in examining the effects of racism in the aftermath of conquest of Abya Yala following the path of Anibal Quijano and the coloniality of power (Quijano and Ennis 2000), Grosfoguel (2016) finds that the implementation of extractivism – the system of extracting living and non-living materials from nature to generate outflow of material wealth in the form of natural resources – required both epistemic and ontological extraction. Grosfoguel (2016: 126) describes this as a process of ‘thing-ification’, the result of a discursive cutting away that allows for the separation and extraction of forms of knowledge, forms of human existence, and forms of non-human life from their situated histories and social and ecological relations to create ‘objects’ that can be instrumentalised. In practice, this involved the historical dehumanisation of indigenous peoples and the desacralisation of place, which in turn enabled the transformation of territories into resource frontiers to be extracted and people into bodies to be exploited through forced labour.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) argues that decolonisation must not only be a discourse but also an affirmative practice. In the following, we show some examples of decolonisation from the perspective of the environment beyond eurocentric perspectives: decolonising the relationship with Earth and what is so-called nature is necessary not only to adapt, but to build new forms of existence, and to create new worlds. In the sixteenth century, French Calvinist Jean de Léry noted that a Tupinambá elder once said: 'I see now that you Mairs (French people) are great fools; must you labor so hard to cross the sea, on which (as you told us) you endured so many hardships, just to amass riches for your children or for those who will survive you? Will not the earth that nourishes you suffice to nourish them? We have kinsmen and children, whom, as you see, we love and cherish; but because we are certain that after our death the earth which has nourished us will nourish them, we rest easy and do not trouble ourselves further about it' (Léry 1990: 102).

The same is also reflective of a book by the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, where he describes the ‘Xawara’, the deadly disease emerging from the destruction of the planet that will kill humans and collapse the sky until it falls over our heads. He says: ‘We are different from the white people and our thought is other’ (Kopenawa and Albert 2013). So as with the Tupinambá elder five centuries ago, the shaman says that all they leave to future generations are the forests: 'When I am no longer, you will burn my possessions and you will live in your turn in this forest that I am leaving for you. You will hunt and clear gardens to feed your children and grandchildren on this land. Only the forest will never die!' (ibid.: 330).

The forest that nourishes the present societies should be preserved to nourish future generations.

The epistemic dialogue between the Yanomami shaman and the Tupinambá elder, from five centuries apart, seems closer than they are. It can be seen in the discourse of the magic entity Kaapora, as seen in the work of Olinda Yawar Tupinambá, Equilíbrio/Equilibrium, as a message coming from the forest to humans:

'There is a balance among all of us, and no species was ever capable of breaking it on its own. Until now. For the planet, you are just a baby that just arrived here. There is nothing special about you. But the changes that led you to adapt led you to develop the ability to break this important balance. You call this ability intelligence, although I do not necessarily agree. This intelligence should be warning you of the fragility of the continuity of your lives. But it seems that you are not really that intelligent after all. The arrogance that you use as a filter to see the world around you, led most of you to believe that you are right about everything, to never question your acts. This does not indicate intelligence' (Yawar Tupinambá 20219).

The words spoken in Yawar Tupinambá’s film come from the entity she performs called Kaapora, that in one moment, interferes in the spheres of the coloniality of thought as questioning its existences as non-real: ‘For most of you, even I am only folkloric, a creature invented by people that you see as primitive and backwards’ (ibid.). Yawar Tupinambá challenges colonial hierarchical thoughts around structure that historically have inferiorised shamans’ knowledge – compared to children – and treated them ‘as incomplete beings incapable of understanding the world, who must be protected by your civilization until they become the insensitive and arrogant adults that you are’ (ibid.).

Although seen as infantile, naïve, the cry from the forest coming from a spiritual deity or translated by shamans can mobilise communities living with environments and who defend them in global environmental justice movements (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). Struggles for ecological conditions of life have a cosmopolitical10 dimension, but also a very material perspective of political contestation. The reproduction of life and the care of the territory are inseparable in the perspective of life in a broader sense. The opposite is not only a disrespect to nature or an aggression towards the other, but a threat to the existence of the destroyers themselves as well. Kaapora announces that turning the planet uninhabitable and producing the extinction of different species will also lead to the extermination of humans. It consists in forests that are ‘stolen’, she says to produce soybeans, in a chain of destruction to feed confined animals that suffer in order to feed humans. The ‘predatory civilization’ has the power to terminate what she calls ‘this planetary calm’ (Yawar Tupinambá 2021) – the equilibrium. It is also said in the discourse of Kaapora as documented by Yawar Tupinambá in her film:

'This [Covid-19] pandemic, like the others, comes from your hostility towards other living beings. It came from bats with which you should not have contact, but you went to their home to destroy it. The same forest that is home to many bats is also home to an infinity of other viruses, which will remain quiet if you don’t go there and destroy the forest. But you have not learned from your mistakes, and the forests continue to be torn down and burned to serve unscrupulous men who want to transform the forests into numbers in banks. They are the same men who see the Indigenous as an impediment, and the destruction of these peoples as a collateral effect. By the way, these peoples have been the best behaved among you, and the lands under their care are the best preserved on the planet' (ibid.).

4 Art and Another Sky

The artist Denilson Baniwa, from the Baniwa nation in the Upper Rio Negro in the Amazon, describes from where the novelty for a new world can emerge:

All colonial territory
Is ancestry land, first of all
When all scum is scraped off
Plastic, asphalt, metal
Untold stories in History
Oxygen fills the blood.
Those who have always been from here know
São Paulo has always been
Indigenous land.
(Denilson Baniwa 2020, reproduced with permission)11

This beautiful poem was written by Denilson Baniwa just months before the pandemic outbreak, during an intervention12 in the most distinguished avenue of São Paulo, Paulista Avenue. It was reminding everyone that those rich buildings framing the landscape were built on colonial territory over sacred indigenous land. What remains after the ashes of colonialism are removed from the surface can be not a thing from the past, but new lifeworlds emerging to hold up the sky. Poetry is a powerful tool to help us to situate ourselves in life and in context, to reinterpret the world.

The months of June, July, and August 2020 were marked by extreme violence of the Covid-19 virus against indigenous peoples (Menton et al. 2021). Denilson Baniwa lost one of his masters, Feliciano Lana, taking away ‘a multitude of experiences and knowledge with him’ (Baniwa 2020). The great indigenous environmental leader from the Kayapó-Mebegokrê, Paulinho Payakan, also died in June. Aritana Yawalapiti, the great chief of the Upper Xingu, the most famous indigenous reserve in Brazil (demarcated in 1961), passed away in August. With the death of each elder, a library of knowledge burned. The libraries burned daily. But many survived, and many peoples found protection by isolating in the forest, protected by the forests and the spirits of the forests. Among them was an important Xavante chief, Jurandir Siridiwê, who used sacred plants to heal guided by a shaman in a traditional camp in the forest, the zomori. Ailton Krenak, indigenous leader from the Krenak nation and a common friend of Siridiwê – also one of the brightest intellectuals in Brazil – dedicated a poem to the ones, like Siridiwê, who were able to survive the painful infection. He called it ‘Another Sky’, as a metaphor to mobilise collective action for the future, and to bring hope over the horizon for future generations ‘[b]ecause it never knew the goodness that the sky holds from up high’ (Krenak 2020b):

It truly disappeared 🎋 it was always
hidden
in the folds of time,
unescapable like lightning on a dark night
it descends to earth bringing pain and madness
Hiding in these folds
It sleeps like the work
of a spirit who fails
Because it never knew the goodness that the
sky holds from up high 🍁
(ibid., reproduced with permission)

Native art is rising in attention after centuries of systemic silencing and erasure, of genocide but also epistemicide.13 Brazil is on the verge of a dramatic moment, fuelled by economic crisis, political authoritarianism, rising racism and intolerance, amidst an ecological disaster and the cruel environmental destruction of deforestation, ranching, and mining-accelerated extractivism. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the savannah (Cerrado), and Pantanal (swamp) are at high rates, all while river basins have been collapsed by mega extraction of mining.

This powerful and creative native art, or, as the outstanding indigenous artist Jaider Esbell called it, 'contemporary indigenous art', is pure anti-colonial and deeply embedded in an ontological system of life calling for a re-existence with other beings on Earth. Esbell, from the Macuxi nation, passed away in November 2021. He questioned the premises of Western art, and self-designated himself not only as an artist, but that what he was doing was deeply political in all terms: 'Indigenous art for us is essentially in daily life, in the community, in the collectivity, in the practices, which transcend a manual or oral skill. It presupposes a whole compound of life, where the greatest art is this harmonious living with the environment, that which the West has already separated as nature' (Esbell interview, cited in Oliveira and Setz 2021).

Inspired by these reflections, we look into indigenous art to offer an analytical perspective of the decolonial epistemic perspective for environmental justice.

Culture and art constitute a powerful system to defeat colonialism and to rebuild worlds destroyed by the rage of exploitation of ecology and humans – or to recreate worlds after the end of the worlds, as Ailton Krenak prefers to name the political projects of existence after the genocide/ecocide wars of conquest. In this sense, the Another Sky research project tried to bridge indigenous arts with training indigenous students on mapping indigenous rights abuses.14 A cartography of this relation between extractive violence and ecological resistance shows that native territories are territories of war against conquest, of anti-colonial resistance, of reclaiming lands, of re‑occupations, of creation and recreation of worlds, and of art.

From the scum of colonialism, ravaged lands of extraction and sacrifice zones and peoples, art emerges to build another sky with the enchanted and non-human lifeworld, especially plants and trees. Planting trees for future generations and dancing for the planet have become revolutionary practices to dismantle the Colonialocene.15 How can life exist without the sacred Watu river (Rio Doce) for the Krenak nation, or the Opará (San Francisco river) for the Tuxá and Pankararu?

Although the pandemic confinement and lockdowns produced depression and anxiety in Western societies, many indigenous peoples who still had their territories protected were able to take refuge with the forest to protect their collective from the virus. Either they have the forest and rivers to nourish and protect, physically and spiritually, or colonialism had already built the walls of confinement and separation.

Indigenous peoples learned how to survive in confinement. That is how Ailton Krenak describes the situation of his people when they were reached by the pandemic. His people lived in a square of indigenous land surrounded by cattle ranches, and crossed by the sacred river Watu, who was assassinated (as the Krenak believe), by the crime of the mega mining Vale dam break of 2015, publicly known as the Mariana disaster (Santos and Milanez 2017). An entire nation living in deforested land, with the sacred water source contaminated, when even the silence has been kidnapped by the trains from Vale taking iron ore to the coast and 'honking' every hour. Therefore, indigenous peoples have had tragic experiences of genocide and the ends of their worlds. However, some have also managed to survive genocide and rebuild worlds. Art has emerged as a powerful system to mobilise community and spirituality, such as through shamanic songs and dances to protect bodies, and call for healing the Earth. Native art, struggle, and epistemology are positioning their critics towards the making of the Anthropocene that brought us to the current climate emergency. As Krenak says: 'It is as if the idea of our art biennials, of our galleries, were all in the past, overcome by time, by the urgency of a new mentality [of us humans learning to step gently on Earth], stepping gently on Earth, deeply marked by our footprints, which put us on the threshold of this Anthropocene' (Krenak 2020c, with author interpretation).

For indigenous movements in Brazil, the fight for territorial integrity and against the colonial powers of conquest is intricately interwoven with the fight to protect the forests, the waters, and life in the broadest sense. The protection of the forests, the waters, and the land is all part of a fight against the colonial capitalist systems of production and exploitation that have created the climate crisis. As Sonia Guajajara said in her speech at the Climate March at COP25 in 2019, indigenous women from all over Brazil ‘fight to build “living well” for all societies and for environmental equilibrium. We are going to continue to fight and we want to fight together with you because the fight for Mother Earth is the mother of all fights’ (Guajajara 2019). From Sonia Guajajara in 2019, to Txai Suruí in 2021, indigenous women have been struggling to intervene directly – and not through ‘representations’ or ‘allies’ – in the core spaces of dialogues and decision-making at COPs and other climate political meetings. The fight against climate change is a fight for the Earth and against the wider intersecting injustices that indigenous people face under a capitalist system that values growth and consumption over life itself.

5 Concluding reflections

The revolutionary anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggles reflected in indigenous art and social movements in Brazil highlight the links between social, epistemological, and other forms of justice and the struggle for climate justice. Jaider Esbell once said that ‘indigenous art awakens a conscience that Brazil does not have of itself’ (Esbell 2021, see Oliveira and Setz 2021). Esbell sadly passed away in November 2021, a great loss to the whole world, having lived his art as a testament to inspire new generations to make life more beautiful. We believe indigenous art can provide this same awakening of conscience worldwide in a movement for epistemic decolonisation and building of new ecological conditions for future generations. In this article, we have questioned eurocentric scientific perspectives and capitalist mitigation measures and offered a broader view on the dimensions of the ecological, civilisational, and climate crises. Instead, indigenous epistemologies and the emergent contemporary indigenous art movement in Brazil provide ways to promote new relations with Earth and existence, questioning the Western division between humans and nature.

Notes

* This IDS Bulletin was funded and produced as part of the IDS Strategic Research Initiative on Climate and Environmental Justice.

1 Felipe Milanez, Assistant Professor, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.

2 Mary Menton, independent researcher, UK.

3 Jurema Machado de A. Souza, Assistant Professor, Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Brazil.

4 Capitalocene: ‘a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life’ (Moore 2017: 606).

5 Wasteocene: understood as toxic ecologies, constructed by contaminating substances and also of narratives.

6 Plantationocene: highlights the effects of colonialism, capitalism, and racial hierarchies.

7 Chthulucene: links human and non-human in a multispecies approach of the making of the new epoch.

8 Abya Yala has different meanings in the Kuna nation language, such as ‘land of life’, ‘land in full maturity’, and refers to the continent later named as the New World, or America, by Europeans. Abya Yala has been used as a self-designation of the continent by native peoples as a counterpoint to America. In the same way, Brazil was named Pindorama by the Tupiniquim during the Portuguese conquest and invasion.

9 Quotations from Yawar Tupinambá (2021) were translated into English for this article by Jeffrey Hoff.

10 A concept from the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, where non‑human entities are engaged as agents in the political and social dissensus.

11 Pereira and Souza (2022): Todo território colonial/Antes de tudo é ancestral / Quando raspadas toda escória / Plástico, asfalto, metal / Histórias não contadas na História / O sangue oxigena / Quem sempre foi daqui sabe / SP sempre foi / Terra Indígena.

12 In the context of performance art.

13 A term coined by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos referring to the destruction of existing knowledge.

14 See Another Sky project website.

15 Colonialocene: the epoch which is defined by the ecological effects of European colonialism.

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© 2022 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2022.140

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited, any modifications or adaptations are indicated, and the work is not used for commercial purposes. The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK.

This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 53 No. 4 December 2022 ‘Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice’.