finding and pambana

and i’m tired of how it is conveniently ignored that when the europeans came to the continents of now-called latin america, africa, asia, polynesia, wherever there were Black and Brown folk, they cried out that our ways of living, building, eating, dancing, were primitive, backwards and to continue to live in those traditional ways meant punishment, even by death. large family homes made of mud and cow dung, or those out of reeds and banana leaves, were all labeled inferior by the european worldview whose discourse relied on a nature (read Black and unhuman)/culture (read white and therefore human) dichotomy. And so trees were felled and wooden single family homes where built. (This is a vast understatement). Plant-based meals supplemented by an occasional animal kill was looked down upon by glutenous european lifestyle and industrial livestock farming introduced to feed the workers of the slave system-fed industrial revolution. seeing the world as a fabric of life, full of plants and animals as members with as much of a right to life as humans, was scoffed at. treating resources like water, the sun and the earth as beautiful in their own right and essential to human well-being was systematically suppressed. these ways of living and loving on this planet were silenced and oppressed and deemed primitive. ANNNND NOWWW white environmentalism celebrates people (and only those certain people who ‘choose’, that is have the privilege to not choose, but then do) who are knocking down their wooden houses and building adobe houses, using earth ovens, talking about deep ecology and the connectedness and inherent worth of all creatures and elements, as rach says “like it’s some new shit”. and they are “enlightened”!! green imperialism……