Extractive Logic of the Coloniality of Nature: Feeling-Thinking Through Agroecology as a Decolonial Project

Abstract

ABSTRACT The following paper intends to discuss the effects of colonial power on nature, especially on the understanding of agriculture from the dialogue between decolonial approach and agroecology. It addresses the potential of agroecology within decolonial activities mainly in three scenarios: (i) the epistemological, as an alternative to scientific rationality; (ii) the political, as an alternative to the hegemony imposed by racial and patriarchal criteria; and (iii) the ontological, as an alternative to the dualist, individualist and atomizing of modernity. The main thesis is that the notions about “nature” and “environment”, which are associated with agricultural practices and capitalist-type practices, are consequences of power relations that are inscribed in the modernity- coloniality relationship and can be understood as epistemological and ontological assumptions based on an extractive logic. Finally, the importance of political work (or defiance) is discussed from the perspective of relationality and the pluri-verse in which agroecology can be a transformative option of decoloniality.