Ethnocide and the Environment
Check out a podcast featuring the connection between the destruction of culture and the destruction of the land and waterways in the Chesapeake Bay.
Last fall, I wanted to examine the connection between the destruction of the environment and the destruction of culture for a class podcast assignment at The George Washington University.
I had taken a class with Barrett, or Professor Pitner, a little over a year before this assignment and remembered discussing ecocide, or the severe and widespread destruction of the environment. Shortly after the class finished, I received an email about his book, “The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture.” I think he had briefly mentioned ethnocide in class, and I was interested in learning more about the part ecocide can play in ethnocide.
I worked with a small group to find people to share, in real terms, how dangerous human-driven environmental destruction can be in relation to culture. We focused on the Chesapeake Bay region to provide a local example and focused on the Piscataway people, the first caretakers of the waterways in the area.
We created “(In)vironmental Justice,” the podcast taking a look (in)side the effects of climate change. Our episode about the destruction of the earth and culture was recently published on Planet Forward, a sustainability reporting outlet. Check it out here.
Anjela Barnes, who was the vice president of the Accokeek Foundation at the time of production, gives her perspective as a Piscataway woman in the episode. She talks about the ways her culture has been and will continue to be destroyed because of the pollution and destruction of the environment.
“I’ll just keep pointing back to colonization — at that point in [the] 1600s when Captain John Smith was exploring the Chesapeake region and kind of discovered these lands, that is where things changed from a relational perspective of people and plants and animals and the land and water to a commodity,” she says in the episode.
My group mates and I also talked to Barrett to get a better understanding of what the destruction of culture while keeping the people looks like and how we can combat it.
“So there’s a clear track record that if you normalize the destruction of a people’s culture, which clearly is going to then connect to the destruction of the environment because your culture comes from the environment — if you destroy all that stuff, you’re going to destroy everything,” Barrett says in the episode.
The episode also features perspectives from Stop Ecocide International and the Potomac Riverkeeper Network.
The solutions we discovered through producing the episode are to stop destroying the environment and to build a world where we create and celebrate culture.
“It’s not just native peoples — it’s humans,” Anjela says in the episode. “We’re all a part of nature, biologically speaking, and the care and the giving back is very much a part of our culture. We use the word stewards as caretakers of the land and the waters because it is providing and caring for us.”
The warning rings very clear at the end of the episode. If we don’t change things, the Chesapeake Bay will no longer exist and that will have a detrimental effect on the cultures that rely on it.
“(In)vironmental Justice” is hosted by Jing-Ning Hsu and Adam Esrig. Alejandra Puente also contributed to the production of the podcast.
It was written, produced and edited by Hannah Loder.