Pollution is Colonialism

By: Max Liboiron

Narrated by: Donna Postel

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land.

Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

©2021 Duke University Press (P)2022 Tantor

It's good.

methodology, narrative, and critique braided together (sometimes neatly, sometimes not). Liboiron's arguments flow from a more than worthy bibliography and their personal insights are instructive. this is a must read for any scholar working in indigenous or environmental studies... in in the academy, generally... or elsewhere.
i have yet to locate a companion pdf, though, and I'm afraid there isn't one. if true, that's my only reservation on the audiobook and my reason for four instead of five stars on content metrics.

Very important

I heard about this book through science communicator Cara Santa Maria. I appreciate Max’s dedication to doing science that is for the people. It’s already changed the way I think about things I do at work.