Wellfleet Public Library

This talk looks at how fossil fuels made our modern world, and how their extraction, use, and emissions draw on and reproduce colonial patterns. Europe's colonization of Latin America, and then of much of Africa and Asia, fueled its Industrial Revolution. Latin America was one of the first colonized and the first to become independent, but its post- colonial status was also neocolonial (economically dependent on the United States and Europe) and settler colonial (as mostly Euro- descended elites dominated politics and the economy while marginalizing Indigenous and Afro- descended populations). After WWll what historians call the "Great Acceleration" sent global resource use skyrocketing with new assaults on Indigenous lands even as direct colonialism mostly ended. Climate colonialism evolved in the 1990s with what some called the "fourth conquest" of globalization, neoliberalism, neo-extractivism, and climate crisis. Global movements for Indigenous rights, and Latin America concepts of buen vivir, plurinationalism, and the rights of nature offered new ways to imagine what a just transition away from colonialism and fossil fuels could look like.