In this and the next video about postcolonial environmentalism,
we will introduce the theoretical and practical implications
of landscape protection schemes in postcolonial contexts.
We will first encounter the general problematic,
and then look more closely at narratives of colonial Hong Kong, in this video,
and various forms of environmental activism in postcolonial Taiwan in the next video.
The most fundamental difference between postcolonial movements and
environmental activism is a focus on socially marginalized people in the former case,
whereas environmentalism stresses the wellbeing of
whole ecosystems comprising populations of both human and non-human members.
Postcolonial intellectuals promote the dynamics of hybridity, for instance,
when redefining the rigid nationalistic concepts of race, culture,
language and histories, in order to account for
the internalized diversity of postcolonial nations.
Environmental movements are more concerned with
a particular place’s purity of soil, air, and water
– in other words, with protection and
ecological conservation, rather than hybridization and change.
Hence, the postcolonial master narrative tends to be predominantly connected to
historical (human) time, whereas environmental stories are more
frequently steered by concepts of space and deep (earth) time.
How can these different approaches be made to work hand in
hand, rather than contradict or hinder each other?
The missing link are first nations,
because indigenous people can rightly claim to possess a wealth of knowledge and
practices that enabled them to live in balance
with their natural environment for thousands of years.
In view of the environmental crisis
they began to advocate for cultural and biological diversity,
pronounce the environmental concerns and
interests of disowned and marginalized communities,
asserted their land rights and traditional ways of
land use, and formed transnational associations.
Therefore, they are now widely respected
as highly influential environmental change agents.
The International Labour Office’s 2016 Technical Note states:
“… indigenous peoples are affected in distinctive ways by
climate change as well as policies or actions aimed at addressing it.
… as change agents, indigenous peoples are essential to the success of
policies and measures directed towards mitigating and adapting to climate change,
and also to just transition policies as workers.”
Historically, European imperialism triggered
the current environmental crisis in
the colonies by means of appropriating and transforming
sustainable ecosystems across the globe in pursuit of
high-yield production, for the sake of the accumulation of wealth in the imperial centers.
As a consequence of this exploitation of colonized regions,
their landscapes deteriorated and
the indigenous people were deprived of their traditional livelihoods.
In his book on the European invasion of the Americas,
Andrew Sluyter observes that
“colonization transformed landscapes on a scale and to
a degree unprecedented since retreat of the continental ice sheets.
The European invasion rejoined two ecosystems that had for the most part been
diverging since the Pangaean supercontinent fragmented some 200 million years previous.”
When the first explorers arrived,
they perceived the indigenous cultures as uncivilized.
Based on this judgment,
it was determined that the local people did not
efficiently extract the resources afforded by nature,
and therefore were undeserving of the places’ property rights.
Assisted by military power and religious legitimation,
the colonizers occupied the foreign lands.
Investors arrived from overseas and destroyed land that had
traditionally been held sacred, to make room for their plantations,
cattle farms, and mines.
Within a short period of time,
formerly prosperous landscapes were exhausted and turned into
wasteland, while the local people were pushed into poverty,
if not entirely wiped out or driven away and scattered.
Upon this, a discourse on endangerment and loss emerged in
the developed, resource-extracting countries, which bemoaned
the disappearance of the indigenous cultures and ecologies, despite
the fact that their own pressure on these ancient worlds continued.
The affective double bind linking cultural superiority claims to feelings of
loss and guilt was called “imperialist nostalgia” by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo:
“Imperialist nostalgia thus revolves around
a paradox: a person kills someone and then mourns his or her victim.
In more attenuated form,
someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that
things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention.
At one more remove,
people destroy their environment and then worship nature.”
Colonized Asian landscapes underwent
similarly radical transformations as the American and Australian colonies.
A telling example is provided by the palm oil industry’s rainforest destruction on Borneo.
Hong Kong is a kind of exception, as the scarce indigenous population was
not dispossessed, but moderately profited from the colonial economic development.
The majority of Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong suffered severe poverty, though.
After the first Opium War,
Hong Kong was handed over to the British colonizers by a defeated Qing Empire in 1842.
Initially, the scattered settlements of farming and fishing villages in Hong Kong
proper and the surrounding islands were considered a very poor deal by the British Crown.
The indigenous population numbered less than 7,500 people in the 19th century.
It mainly consisted of southern Chinese immigrants who had
fled war and famine during the Mongol and earlier periods.
During the 1850s and early 60s, however, the Taiping rebellion,
as well as floods and droughts,
already brought large numbers of mainland Chinese refugees
to the now rapidly developing Crown colony.
The ensuing economic miracle turned Hong Kong into
a hypermodern global trade hub and
cosmopolitan jewel on the British Crown in the 20th century.
This economic success story is well known,
but the place’s environmental transformations have
only recently begun to attract academic attention.
In the case of literature,
the turn can be detected several decades earlier.
Beginning from the late 1970s, if not earlier,
local authors reflected on the way of life in
this multicultural urban environment with its blurred power structures and booming economy,
while at the same time contemplating the fate of its natural environment.
Dung Kai-cheung, Leung Ping-kwan,
and Xi Xi, for example,
poetically combined feelings of transience and
uncertainty with records of destroyed neighborhoods,
vanishing landscapes, and endangered species.
As they explore the changing meanings of the place,
their literary works intersect issues of postcolonial identity,
culture, community, and ecology.
Woman writer, Shih Shu-ch’ing,
too, focused on this intersection.
She wrote an epic Hong Kong trilogy with
a teenage immigrant girl as the main protagonist.
An innocent victim with no formal education,
the girl painfully learns to defend and assert
herself until she becomes a highly successful real estate developer.
In between, there is her abduction and sale to a Hong Kong brothel by a gang of bandits,
her rise as a courtesan, and support of her start-up business from an expat admirer.
What is particularly interesting about Shih’s three-partite family saga, is
the carefully designed intersection of human and natural histories, wherein some of
the place’s endemic plants and animal species, such as the Jezebel butterfly and
the Hong Kong Bauhinia tree, function as symbolic markers
of a local patchwork identity beyond cultural politics.
Postcolonial narratives frequently borrow aspects of identity, place attachment,
conviviality, and integration from
widely known pre-modern stories, and weave them into
their modern tales loss, drifting, and disintegration.
The ongoing popularity of these tropes in postcolonial literature hints
at the fact that today’s corporate globalism exploits
postcolonial communities in ways that reproduce
the dismantled colonial power’s approach, albeit in a new legal and political framework.