Pollution Is Colonialism Audiobook

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism.

It points out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land.

Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

Liboiron’s creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, the methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

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“Demonstrates how science can and should be informed by Indigenous ethics and ways of understanding relations…Both a handbook on method and a call to rethink how we live our lives on occupied land.”

— Smithsonian Magazine