It also affects whether we see the world and its inhabitants as living or dead-alive. This is perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the idea that (European) Man is the sole mover and shaker in a natural world that lives by predictable, mechanistic laws. When it emerged, this distinction relegated colonized people to a kind of permanent stasis within chronos, the same agency-less category as their lands and all the other life within them. This conception not only justified colonists’ exploitation of these “resources” but also set the stage for both the climate crisis and the racial
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