Future Imaginaries for When the World Feels Like Heartbreak

- Heather Davis

The history of the United States (and Canada) reveals that ecological disaster is premised on the twin-fold processes of accumulation by dispossession and chattel slavery that was at the heart of the settler colonial project. In other words, the kinds of environmentally destructive processes that we are bearing the burden of now are not new phenomenon. Nor are they incidental to the larger frameworks of genocide, slavery, and the fact that, as Amitav Ghosh makes clear, “the poor nations of the world are not poor because they were indolent or unwilling; their poverty is itself an effect of the inequities created by the carbon economy; it is a result of systems that were set up by brute force to ensure that poor nations remained always at a disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power” (110). It is not simply an unlucky coincidence that Indigenous, black, poor and other marginalised peoples bear the brunt of environmental harm. Rather, as Kyle Whyte has argued, settler colonialism has always relied upon the complete transformation of the biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. Indigenous genocide and the implementation of slavery on plantations invo