Eco-Abolition: Policing Environmental Injustice

Carceral and ecological harms go hand in hand. From the murder and brutalization of land defenders resisting extractivism globally (Global Witness, 2022), to the environmentally disastrous ‘boot print’ of contemporary police and military expansionism (Selwyn, 2022), to the greenwashing of new private mega-prison projects (Jewkes and Moran, 2015), to the traumatizing, sexual coercion of environmental activists by undercover police in the UK (Stephens-Griffin, 2020), it is vital that we understand struggles for ecological justice and liberation as deeply entwined with abolitionist causes. This chapter aims to do this by examining and reflecting upon the development of ‘abolition ecology’, an approach working to explore and resist racial capitalism and environmental racism as interlocking and mutually generative systems (Pulido, 2017; Heynen 2018). In so doing it examines the ‘Total Liberation’ perspective as a means of unifying diverse and disparate liberation movements under one coherent struggle for ecological and social justice. The chapter argues that in acknowledging and making visible the ecological dynamics of carcerality, we build the most solid foundations for emancipation in the future.