Most environmental thinking is ripping off or erasing Indigenous and/or non-western peoples and cosmologies in one way or another and it’s tiring to watch this be so normalized in western scholarship. If you don’t have Indigenous people on your environmental panel, it is violence

Indigenous peoples represent 5% of earth’s human population but protect 80% of earth’s biodiversity (UN). Indigenous environmental defenders are frequently murdered for work protecting lands/waters/atmospheres. Indigenous cosmologies/onto-epistemologies are vital, radical.
Indigenous peoples exist in every human inhabited continent. Indigenous peoples represent what Mbuto Milando called ‘the 4th world’ (of non-dominant cosmologies) which Secwepemc thinker George Manuel theorized about. This UN definition is helpful (& inclusive, not exclusive):
The focus on dominance is helpful in identifying local+international power structures — Indigenous groups represent non-dominant cosmologies, onto-epistemologies that relate to lands/waters/atmospheres. But remember that Indigenous peoples dispossessed carry cosmologies with them
So also remember that work that @MaiaLButler does with Edwidge Danticat’s concept of ‘floating homelands’ is important node of thinking about Indigenous cosmologies, the 4th world. Non-dominant knowledge about being in/relating to the earth includes those dispossessed from
home.
In summary: if environmental work doesn’t consider intersections of power, white supremacy, imperialism, capital, colonialism, patriarchy — & if it recreates Indigenous/4th world/non-dominant cosmologies without credit, it’s eco-fascism & furthers genocide of Indigenous societies
For further thinking, please check out the work of Yvonne Sherwood, who works with Milando and Manuel’s concept of the 4th world. And check out Indigenous scholars/activists working in global south, too!

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x