About me
I grew up on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and səlilwətaɬ (Tseil-Waututh) lands (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) during a time of intense conflicts over eco-political issues such as logging, resource extraction and climate change. Growing up in this context imbued me with a deep and lasting desire to understand the links between politics, violence and ecosystems.
Later, working in areas directly affected by conflict, colonization and international intervention honed my understanding of how violence circulates through ecosystems and political structures - and the complex, inventive strategies that communities use to resist it.
Since the early 2010s, working as a research professor in the field of global political ecology has allowed me to bring these themes together by leading international projects, teams and networks focused on on complex problems of multi-scale violence and ecological harms.
My thinking is nurtured by and indebted to ongoing collaborations with members of Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled and 2SLGBTQIA+ and other marginalized communities. As a multiply-disabled person, I am also deeply inspired by and grateful for intersectional movements for disability justice.
My work is also shaped by a long-standing artistic, craft and creative writing practice, including collaborative projects and initiatives.
My way of working
I love and value difference in all of its forms.
My work confronts the forces and structures that eliminate difference. It affirms the rich plurality of ecosystems, ways of knowing and modes of co-existence.
As a global political ecologist and futurist, I work across multiple disciplines, including international and global studies, environmental politics, political theory and philosophy, futures studies, geography and the arts.
I believe that brilliance, knowledge, wisdom and leadership come from all kinds of sources - human and nonhuman. For this reason, I aim to work respectfully across multiple knowledge systems, and to affirm their unique and irreplaceable value.
My approach deeply values and affirms lived experience, along with communal, creative, embodied and other ways of making knowledge. This includes my own lived experience, and the collective knowledge of disabled/Crip and queer communities I am part of.
Throughout my career, creative and applied forms of theory-building - including artistic and land-based practice - have been integral to how I think and work.
Global political ecology
As a global political ecologist, I analyze how politics and ecosystems shape each other on multiple scales, from the cellular to the global (and beyond). My work analyzes how power and violence move through ecosystems, affecting radically different bodies, relationships, communities and modes of (co-)existence in unequal ways.
I also examine how political decisions, actions, movements and norms shape eco- systemic conditions - and vice-versa.
My work in global political ecology addresses questions such as:
How do interlocking forms of violence and oppression drive ecological disruptions such as plant and animal extinctions, climate change, or pollution?
How can we best understand and address violence that affects humans AND nonhumans, including whole ecosystems and/or earth systems?
What ideas, concepts, principles and values can nurture plurality in eco-political systems?
What practices, skills and kinds of knowledge can address complex eco-political crises?
in particular, how do marginalized ways of making, sharing and practicing knowledge address eco-political crises and create conditions for thriving?
What kinds of future eco-political conditions are possible?
Futuring from the edges
Futuring is the practice of imagining, creating, yearning and moving together through time towards different conditions. Everyone engages in futuring in various forms and scales - from preparing food to caring for ecosystems to leading global political movements.
Futuring takes place across multiple life forms and ecosystems, bringing together radically different bodies, minds, materials, technologies and energies.
In a moment of converging crises and extreme uncertainty, mainstream futuring processes are dominated by powerful actors such as governments, high-net-worth individuals, corporations and influential academics. The futures they desire would deepen existing forms of inequality and intensify existing structures of violence. Whether in the form of forecasting and foresight, genetic engineering and space colonization or techno-capitalism, these modes of futuring do not make space for most of earth’s ecosystems and life forms - including most humans.
Futuring from the edges - a major part of my current research - aims to do the opposite. It draws its values, inspiration and aspirations from communities that are marginalized by existing systems of power and privilege - the lively edges where practical skill, creative adaptation and dedicated dreaming produce and sustain worlds (ancient and/or emerging).
Deeply ecological in nature, these forms of futuring build solidarities from shared experiences of structural violence, commitment to continuity, embracing adaptation, and longing for the transformation of oppressive conditions. Rather than privileging one particular model of ‘the’ future, futuring from the edges nurtures multiple possible futures in which difference can thrive.
Photo by Stan Williams, 2018
Anti-oppression
The conditions we live in - ecological, political, social, technological, economic and more - are founded on and sustained by various forms of oppression that work at multiple scales of space and time.
Thinkers, movement leaders, artists and world-makers in globally-marginalized communities have long identified global structures of power, coercion and elimination as direct threats to co-existence and thriving on earth. Currently, global structures of oppression produce harms that range from the unequal effects of climate change and pandemics to environmental policies that rely on extraction and land grabbing, to the planning of futures that involve eugenics and new forms of colonization.
For me, working in an anti-oppressive way means striving to:
recognize oppression and the many, constantly-changing forms it takes - including how different forms of oppression shape and amplify one another
foreground the dynamic relationships between power, violence and ecosystems
continually learn about and directly challenge the forms of oppression in which I am complicit and from which I benefit, and those which negatively affect me and the communities I am part of
contribute to building solidarity across groups experiencing (multiple forms of) oppression,
co-create other social, political and ecological arrangements, ways of connecting, and future conditions rooted in principles of co-existence and respect for difference.
The CRAACHE+ framework:
For analyzing diverse contexts of eco-political crises, harms, and violence, I developed the acronym CRAACHE+. It stands for:
Colonialism
Racism
Ableism
Anthropocentrism
Capitalism
Heteropatriarchy
Eugenics
+ (emerging and other forms of oppression)
Instead of analyzing one, two or three of these elements at a time, the CRAACHE+ framework helps me to hold in focus the many interlocking logics of oppression that converge in each situation of eco-political crisis, violence and/or harm. The ‘+’ holds open the possibility of other and/or emerging forms of oppression.
The acronym ‘CRAACHE+’ (pronounced ‘crash-plus’ in English) echoes the forms of collapse caused by these interlocking forms of oppression. However, the order of the letters does not suggest that any of them is more important than any other, and their sequence can change to better reflect each context where they converge. You can read more about this framework in my article “Generative Decay: towards a Politics of and for Earth” International Relations, Vol. 38, No. 3.