Launch of “To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human”: A Catalyst for an African Environmentalism

Environmental Humanities South [EHS], together with the HSRC Press, recently celebrated the launch of the book: “To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human”. The book is a curated translation of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomy work and situates the revolutionary as a key thinker for building a decolonial environmentalism on the continent.

 The editors, Dr Anselmo Matusse (EHS), Prof Lesley Green (EHS) and Prof Carlos Lopes (Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, UCT) gathered at Exclusive Books, Cavendish on the 20th of May 2026 for a panel discussion on the book and its significance in a moment of climate crisis, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss.

The editor’s note that Cabral was concerned with “bridging rifts between the soil and humans, science, policymakers, and farmers”[1], a sentiment reflected in the diversity of the audience present. Among the audience were scholars, policy experts, and local farmers eager to engage with Cabral’s work.

Reflecting on the use of the book for a wide audience, Dr Matusse noted:

“With this book, people will have an opportunity to be able to think about how to connect with the soil. About how our belief systems, economies, and ways of living are deeply connected to soil.”

Cabral’s Relevance for Environmentalism Today

Prof Carlos Lopes originally curated Cabral’s agronomy work into a Portuguese compilation in the late 1980’s. His intent was to highlight the academic rigour, methodological innovation and agronomic side of Cabral that many hadn’t encountered. 

Revisiting the work for its translation into English, Prof Lopes reflected that Cabral still had much to say about the many of the mainstream environmental debates of today.  Governments and policy makers are grappling with how to balance human and planetary well-being with social issues such as poverty, inequality, and unemployment taking the political front seat and environmental concerns an afterthought. Cabral’s intervention is that social transformation cannot be separated from environmental (or soil) stewardship, as Prof Lopes noted:

“[Cabral] places the debate about agriculture right at the centre of the transformation of people’s lives. In his writings the message is… if you don’t consider the soil as important you are not defending the human…”

Prof Lesley Green expanded the importance of Cabral’s work to the Critical Zone Sciences, noting how scholars are pursuing models that take account of the biogeochemical flows of matter in a landscape, yet Cabral was “thinking about landscapes as process” 75 years ago.

Prof Green is the director of the Critical Zones Africa (CZA) research consortium, a project that aims to rethink local landscape governance by attending to flows of matter (soil, water, nutrients, species, people) as inseparable. To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human provides an African reference point for Critical Zone scholarship on the continent, which seeks to weave the rifts between politics and pedology; the ‘social’ and ‘natural’. As Green highlighted:  

“What [Cabral] was bringing together was an understanding of the relationship between macro political structures and mycorrhizal functions.”

Prof Green noted that it is in this weaving of humans and soils together that Cabral’s writings in the book cut through the “development vs environment bifurcation… that has really crippled environmentalism on this continent”. She continued:

“The ideas that created the problem are not going to solve it and Cabral was right in there, taking on the mindset of modernity and coloniality to come up with the ideas and insights that will help us resolve these issues.”

From the Continent for the Continent 

What marks To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human as critical text for building an African environmentalism is not only its relevance to the pressing debates of today but its grounding in the lived realities of the continent.

While Cabral was writing and collecting samples 75 years ago, many of the problems he identified remain rooted in Africa’s landscapes. Particularly, those resulting from export orientated, intensive, agriculture that strips the soil or nutrients and stability.

The book makes a clear case for African soil sovereignty and the need to work with local metabolisms, ecologies, and people to build landscapes that are resilient against changing environmental conditions and resistant to exploitative neo-colonial economies.  

Reflecting on the Cabral’s grounding on the continent, Dr Matusse noted: 

“If there is one thing that really moved me as a scholar was his insistence on focusing on experience, on the lived realities of the continent. To theorise from them, rather than to input models.”

To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human is available online and in store.

[1] Matusse, Lopes, Green (2026:9)

References:

Matusse, A, Lopes, C & Green, L (Eds) (2026) "To Defend the Earth Is to Defend the Human": Amilcar Cabral on Soil, Society and Freedom. Pretoria: AISA Press

Acknowledgements:

The book project was funded by the Science for Africa Foundation (SFA) via the Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science in Africa (DELTAS Africa II) programme [Grant Number: Del:22-010] with support from  Wellcome Trust and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office which is part of the EDCPT2 programme supported by the European Union.