« Environmental justice against settler colonialism: Sakshi, ‘Denying Indigenous Environmental Justice: Experiences from Australia, Brazil, and Canada’, Fourth World Journal, 20, 2, 2021, pp. 115-130
Settler colonialism against the ‘more than human’: Irus Braverman, ‘Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021 »

The metaphors we settle by: April Anson, ‘”Master Metaphor”: Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 8, 1, 2020, pp. 60-81

15Mar21

Excerpt: On October 27, 2016, Ammon Bundy and other members of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF) were acquitted of all charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. While at Malheur, CCF’s occupiers declared the rule of law unconstitutional, a state-of-emergency summons supported by right-wing militia groups invoking apocalyptic fears of white genocide. In contrast, on the same day of the acquittal verdict and with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota—an area secured by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and by the state of emergency that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council declared in August 2016. Though many decried the unequal consequences of each occupation, the disparity was not an isolated occurrence, nor is it limited to rural or reservation boundaries. Rather, its incongruence continues a racialized distinction fundamental to the state of emergency itself. The state of emergency’s implicit inequality is entrenched in apocalyptic appeals that rely on its logic, reinforcing the ongoing emergency of settler colonial capitalism even when they aim to disturb it.


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