Beyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships

This discussion of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) argues that Ferdinand maps the double fracture constituting modernity haunting its socioecologies—one fracture characterized by racialized social inequality, the other by intersecting ecological crises. Thinking at the crosscurrents of political ecology, landscape history, postcolonial theory, and political philosophy, Ferdinand advances the case for a decolonial ecology to repair the ongoing destruction of a world-ship caught in modernity’s tempest. Reading the 2024 Hurricane season through Ferdinand problematizes the geographies of climate catastrophe. This essay considers “the climate haven” and imaginaries of spaceships to rescue humanity from an imperiled Earth as betraying the racial politics of sociecological safety in the Anthropocene, the colonial grammars of security by settling frontiers, and the techno-utopianism of uncritical futurity. As such, the climate haven and spaceships are arks that are inevitably shoaled by the forms of life they attempt to corral into the steerage and hold.