Ecologies, repair, justice

There is an urgency to face the precipice of ecological devastation, take a leap into the fractures of a broken Earth, and experiment with more sustainable and just ways of living. And yet, in spite of incessant calls to attend to multiple fronts of emergency, major obstacles remain. One of them, as many analyses of the hope-shattering failures of COP26 and previous climate agreements have shown (Kutney, 2014; Rosen, 2015; Spash, 2016; Arora and Mishra, 2021), is the recognition of the inescapable entanglements of ecological care with care for people. No justice, no ecological peace. Attempting a modest contribution to efforts addressing this situation, Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by trying to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair and to remediate both damaged ecologies and persistent inequities in ways that support resurgence against more than human injustice. This book takes up this task from a diversity of theoretical and political fronts, unpacking some of the workings at stake in the conceptual coupling of the ecological with reparation.

The intellectual and political grounds upon which this book has grown are nurtured by a surge of thinking about new multifaceted and generative meanings for ecology. Encompassing traditional scientific meanings, fostering ‘the ecological’ has come to signify an embodied understanding of the highly specific and worldly environmental, socio-political and mental connections that situate different beings, human and non-human (Guattari, 1995) – or, perhaps, in more abstract conceptual undertakings, connections between multiple forms of matter and experience within interdependent environments (Hoerl and Burton, 2017; see also Kingsland, 2005; Herzogenrath, 2009; Morton, 2010; Wall, 2014; Papadopoulos, 2022). Exploring a sense of general ecology has promoted the decentring of the human and confronted human exceptionalism, yet increasingly too the revival of ecological thought has been challenged by perspectives that insist that all more than human affairs exist precariously and are marked by situated histories of social, gendered, racial, colonial and spatial conflicts (Nightingale, 2011; Wright, 2018). In other words, there is no such thing as a neutral ecology for people and nonhumans; ecological interventions pose issues of justice at their core, even when these are difficult to apprehend from where one stands (Plumwood, 2008).

Dimitris and Maria: We would like to thank you again, Sam, for contributing your text ‘Land in Our Names: Building an Anti-racist Food Movement’ to this book and accepting to follow up with an interview. We reached out to you for an intervention because we felt your voice and the work of LION are absolutely necessary for this book. We are immensely grateful for your time as we know how precious and precarious activist time is. To start maybe we would like to ask a bit more about LION about the organization, how you work, and about your plans.

Sam: So Land in Our Names is a collective of BPOC. We are an antiracist, land justice collective using a reparative justice framework to achieve land reparations, and increased access and support for BPOC to land and farming and nature more generally. An example of what we have been doing recently is a micro-grant programme (up to £1000) providing support to BPOC who want to get into growing or already do it as a hobby, or who want to follow related courses or have projects, who want to set up projects and so on. We also organize events about gardening or growing, skill sharing or just healing spaces where BPOC come together, connect with each other to learn in London, the city where most of us are based. We have also done a lot of research around access to food growing as a livelihood. Our eventual goal is to get some land to set up a BPOC land cooperative, a land cooperative, where we’re growing food, creating a space for people to rest and heal, that’s in the works. We’re quite young, we’ve only been around for two years and we’re doing quite a lot of stuff all the time, and have changed formations a lot, but, yeah, it’s great.

Dimitris and Maria: We have been following LION’s work and different interventions about your vision and have felt inspired and challenged to think and act. We strongly felt we couldn’t speak about ecological reparation in Britain today without including the voices, ideas and struggles you stand for. So maybe right away we’d like to ask if, and how, the notion of “ecological reparation” that we are trying to explore in this project resonates with you and your work.