The Brazilian expression of the coloniality of nature

Abstract

The article discusses and articulates aspects of the coloniality of nature in the Brazilian context. The notion of the coloniality of nature is an interpretative key to the decolonial paradigm, fundamental to understanding how the modern idea of nature made it a dimension of the world to be subjugated and dominated and how this dynamic was a condition to ensure the supremacy of Western civilization in relation to the ‘wild world’. Initially, a brief overview of Western ideas of nature is presented, which are then contrasted with other notions of nature in which it is conceived as a domain full of intention, consciousness and agency in order to highlight the non-universality of ‘nature-object’ that prevailed in modern science, politics and economics. It also seeks to reveal how the idea of wildness, in contrast to that of civilization, attributed to nature and indigenous peoples, is central to the colonial impulse to tame ‘wild nature’, converting it into a resource to be exploited. Throughout the text, the commoditization practices of protected territories and their ‘natural resources’ and the political-economic dynamics of people’s deterritorialization are articulated to make explicit the Brazilian expression of the coloniality of nature that is historically marked by the obstinacy of the economic policy of states and corporations to fill the territories of local populations with development projects of high socio-environmental impact and, more recently, by the coordinated attack against the integrity of ecosystems and peoples’ rights through the dismantling of inspection structures and legal signs favorable to the invasions and devastation of the their territories.