Pollution Is Colonialism

Max Liboiron begins with a definition sharper than the title’s apparent metaphor. Colonialism is a present land relation that assumes access to Indigenous land for settlement, extraction, research, or waste; pollution enacts that relation when an outside actor claims the capacity of land and bodies to absorb harm without consent. The argument is not simply that pollution resembles colonialism, nor that capitalism is irrelevant, but that contamination is materially organized through an entitlement to Indigenous land.

The first chapter follows the political work done by ordinary scientific terms such as land, nature, resource, and property. Calling something a “resource” can make taking it appear self-evident, while treating land as an empty surface erases existing relations and obligations. Liboiron, who is Métis, contrasts this logic of access with an account of land as a set of specific, reciprocal relations; the ethical question becomes not whether research has good intentions, but what relations its methods reproduce.

Plastic pollution provides the book’s central case because its science requires choices about scale, sampling, thresholds, and acceptable harm. Instruments never capture everything, and regulators commonly manage pollution by deciding how much damage is permissible. Liboiron shows that scale is political: what a method cannot see may disappear from evidence, while chronic, dispersed injury can be normalized because it does not fit a dramatic event or a convenient unit of measurement.

The practical center of the book is CLEAR, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research in Newfoundland and Labrador. Its work on marine plastics becomes an experiment in anticolonial science: research questions, sampling practices, authorship, pay, hierarchy, accessibility, and obligations to place are all treated as methodological decisions. A laboratory cannot claim justice merely because it studies an environmental problem; its everyday organization must also be accountable.

Liboiron does not offer purity. The concept of “compromise” names the reality that researchers work inside institutions, technologies, funding systems, and colonial infrastructures they cannot simply exit. The task is to identify which relations a project will refuse, which it cannot yet avoid, and to whom those compromises must be explained. This makes anticolonial method an ongoing practice of specificity and accountability rather than a badge acquired by following a checklist.

The feminist contribution is especially strong here. Science appears not as detached discovery but as embodied labor structured by authority, care, dependency, and credit. Questions about who cleans equipment, who is safe in the field, whose knowledge defines the problem, who controls data, and who benefits from publication belong inside research design. Changing representation without changing these relations leaves the colonial method largely intact.

The book is dense, situated, and deliberately not universal. CLEAR’s practices emerge from particular relations in Newfoundland and Labrador and from Liboiron’s Métis commitments; readers cannot extract Indigenous concepts and install them elsewhere as generic “best practices.” Nor is this a complete regulatory program for ending plastic production or toxic exposure. Its challenge is prior and deeper: even benevolent environmental work can repeat the entitlement it claims to oppose.

Read Pollution Is Colonialism by auditing one research or advocacy project from question to consequence. Ask whose land is entered, who granted permission, what the instrument excludes, whose labor maintains the evidence, who owns the data, and whether the affected community can refuse or redirect the work. The point is not to produce a morally spotless study, but to make every compromise visible enough that accountability can change the relation.