Environmental Justice and Black Colonial History

We are here to represent Black Earth, a BIPoC only, and majority Black run environmental justice collective based in Berlin.

Anti-colonial struggles are inextricably linked to the fight for environmental justice. The colonization of the land has always gone hand in hand with environmental destruction: the destruction of ecologies. Forests were cut and the soil dug up to make way for plantations and mines. The colonizers established plantations on all colonized continents – to produce tobacco, rubber, cocoa, cotton, sugar cane that would build the European capitalist system. We always say, that you cannot harm the environment without harming people… .By that we mean two things:

1. when the soil is destroyed and the rivers are poisened, the people living off the land and depending on the water are poisended as well!

2. the exploitation of resources also requires the exploitation of the labour of people!

In 1482, four years after the portugese colonizers first settled in Alamansa on the southcoast of what we today call Ghana, they build Elmina dungeon. Thousands of Africans from nations as far up as Mali were kidnapped from the continent of Africa to work on the plantations in the Americas.

Uniting our struggles

We are more. We are more resistent and more likely to survive, if we unite our Black and Indigenous struggles, like the so called maroons when our ancestors got together against the same racist oppressors. We come from a centuries old ancestral line of resistance. We rise because of those who have already been fought for us. To name and honour some of our origins within Black Earth collective: Ga, Ashanti, Yoruba, Ibibio, Kikuyu, Anum… . Our friends* and allies are among others from Walmapu and Filastin.

We as BIPoC with our various backgrounds are the vast majority of people living on this planet. More than 80% of the world population is NOT white. It is only the white supremacist idea that is ruling and we have to abolish this. We are more. We need to unite against environmental destruction, exploitation of resources and exploitation of our own people. Therefore we demand the END of deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, animal factories and the CONTINUING and BEGINNING of a sustainable BIPoC self organization in agriculture, politics and communities. If you want to know more, find us at the banner saying “the future is Black, queer and plantbased”