Lesley Green: Rock | Water | Life. Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa

HUMA Book Lunch

Author: Lesley Green (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 

Introduction: In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an eco-political approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyses conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonising science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans. 

See the book: Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa (Duke University Press, 2020).

Read book foreword and introduction
Open-access chapters, see licencing details on page.
 

About the author: Lesley Green is a Professor of Anthropology and Co-Founder of Environmental Humanities South (EHS) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She currently serves as EHS Director, leading its curriculum innovation to develop transdisciplinary African environmental scholarship. Now in its ninth year, EHS has hosted students from nineteen African countries and supports the emergence of an African ecopolitics.

A former Fulbright Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Mandela Fellow at Harvard; Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian, and Cheney Fellow at the University of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment, her research focusses on justice-based environmental governance sciences in Southern Africa. A particular interest is in the relationship between science and democracy in the Global South.

She is the editor of Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC, 2013), co-author of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World (Arizona, 2013), and author of Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa (Duke / Wits, 2020). A forthcoming collection titled Contested Ecologies 2: African Ecopolitics of Dignity and Desire (co-edited by Lesley Green, Frank Matose, Anselmo Matusse and Nikiwe Solomon) will be out in 2023/2024.