Settler colonialism separates: Lesley Green, ‘Terranology: Integrating science and social sciences in the critical zone’, in Jennifer Eadie, Stephen Muecke (eds), Living in Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia, Routledge, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism separates: Lesley Green, ‘Terranology: Integrating science and social sciences in the critical zone’, in Jennifer Eadie, Stephen Muecke (eds), Living in Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia, Routledge, 2025

14Dec25

Abstract: Settler colonialism instantiated not only new regimes of property relations that privilege mastery and ownership but also a suite of concepts that define humans apart from land and Earth processes. Addressing the legacy of settler colonialism warrants addressing not only the historical legacy of political and economic arrangements but also the conceptual legacies that continue to insert, into scholarship, the fiction of human independence of the conditions of local habitability. Building on the call of Danowski and De Castro (2016) to refigure the concept of the human which universalises the illusion of people’s separation from nature, their concept of the “Terran” invites an integrative science of local habitability based on material flows, exchanges, and relations. Critical zone sciences, I suggest, frame the terms of such a science that avoids reducing the world to calculative reason sans context.

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