Rock Water Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa

by Lesley Green

Overview

In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478004615
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	30 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lesley Green is founding director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, editor of Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, and coauthor of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology.

Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Table of Contents

Foreword. Isabelle Stengers  xi
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. Different Questions, Different Answers  1
Part I | Pasts Present  23
1 | Rock. Cape Town's Natures: ||Hu-!gais, Heerengracht, Hoerikwaggo™  25
2 | Water. Fracking the Karoo: /Kə'ru/kə-ROO; from a Khoikhoi Word, Possibly Garo—"Desert" 60
Part II | Present Futures  77
3 | Life. #ScienceMustFall and an ABC of Namaqualand Plant Medicine: On Asking Cosmopolitical Qeustions  81
4 | Rock. "Resistance Is Fertile!": On Being Sons and Daughters of Soil  106
Part III | Futures Imperfect  133
5 | Life. What Is It to Be a Baboon When "Baboon!" Is a National Insult?  138
6 | Water. Ocean Regime Shift  171
Coda. Composing Ecopolitics  201
Notes  233
Bibliography  269
Index  291

What People are Saying About This

Donna J. Haraway

“In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green identifies questions and materials where new ways of Earth governance and African well-being are acutely at stake: wounded contemporary soils, which bind multispecies human and nonhuman worlds; cement, one the planet's biggest contributors to global warming; carbon, which both joins and threatens Gaian critters and their ecologies and economies; and oil and uranium. Each materiality is rooted in geophysical complexities and in sub-Saharan African thought and cosmologies. Green's book is important to anyone who cares about the centrality of African environmental matters in their situated complexity. Green searches powerfully for decolonizing ways to live on a damaged planet. Haunted by ongoing colonial practices, this necessary book is also full of openings for what that can and must still be crafted together, differently.”

Editorial Reviews

“In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green identifies questions and materials where new ways of Earth governance and African well-being are acutely at stake: wounded contemporary soils, which bind multispecies human and nonhuman worlds; cement, one the planet's biggest contributors to global warming; carbon, which both joins and threatens Gaian critters and their ecologies and economies; and oil and uranium. Each materiality is rooted in geophysical complexities and in sub-Saharan African thought and cosmologies. Green's book is important to anyone who cares about the centrality of African environmental matters in their situated complexity. Green searches powerfully for decolonizing ways to live on a damaged planet. Haunted by ongoing colonial practices, this necessary book is also full of openings for what can and must still be crafted together, differently.”

-- Donna J. Haraway

“So many writings on the ecological crisis remain grounded in the opposition between ‘the pragmatic cold analytical eye’ and ‘the romantic warm emotional heart,’ unaware that this binary is at the very heart of the crisis they are analyzing. This book is driven by a fresh participatory ethics that leaves this binary behind to introduce a caring relation that is analytically sharp and an affective engagement that is systematically incisive.”

-- Ghassan Hage, author of Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

"A thoughtful text on the intersections of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa. . . . [Green] provides a complex, nuanced contribution to the fields of environmental and decolonial studies.  Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty. General readers."

-- J. Werner Choice

“Lesley Green’s fascinating, timely, and lucidly argued Rock |Water |Life…is urgently needed and should be required reading for all environmental managers in South Africa and beyond.”

-- Jules Skotnes-Brown Journal of Southern African Studies

"Lesley Green provides a richly layered response ot the growing outrage in South Africa against inherited colonial regimes of knowledge and its socioecological ravages. The book is a passionate manifesto of how decolonising one's claims to supreme knowledge is profoundly tied to one's material politics, indeed, how one relates to rock, water, and life."

-- Chandana Anusha Contributions to Indian Sociology

“Poetic and complex, Rock/Water/Life evidences a love of South Africa’s environments and peoples. . . . As much political manifesto as scholarship, it calls upon us to rethink the questions we ask and create a more just ecopolitical system.”

-- Cathy Skidmore-Hess Journal of Global South Studies

“Rock | Water | Life is a foray into the past armed with anti-colonial theorists and science and technology studies scholars as her way finders. . . . Green urgently searches for the tools that would allow for a new relationship with nature.”

-- Emily Brownell African Studies Review

“The appearance of Rock | Water | Life is to be welcomed as South Africa confronts environmental and other challenges on an unprecedented scale.”

-- Jane Carruthers Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa

“Lesley Green’s Rock | Water | Life is a remarkable text, and one that can be read in many ways. It is at once a deeply personal reflection on a planet in crisis, and a scholarly call to new ways of thinking. . . . Green herself is so conscious of what it at stake.”

-- Jess Auerbach Postcolonial Studies

“[Rock | Water | Life] makes utterly clear the crises we face (and already experience), if we do not undertake to step out of the mental prisons and all too real gulags bequeathed to us by modernity and colonialism. It is a compelling read, but the compulsion is not simply rhetorical just as the location is not simply South Africa—it is profoundly ethical wherever we are settled.”

-- Graham Ward South African Journal of Science

"Green proposes an integrative way forward to deal with the misapplication of science. The book’s refreshing perspective includes drawing on important African postcolonial thinkers to encourage imaginative approaches to toxic landscapes. . . . The book includes important work on naming the racial divide in South African ecological issues, and the traumatic histories that led to this situation."

-- Ruth Sacks H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews

From the Publisher