“So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die so I can be sustainable

To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]

The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).

Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end really matters:

Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .

It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.

(accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton