Empire of Extraction: The Enduring Environmental Legacy of Colonialism
Written by Elisa Garbil – 12.06.2025
From Nauru to Nigeria, the scars of imperialism are written into the land, the waters, and the air. Understanding these histories is critical in order to address the environmental crises of today properly.
The great empires of the colonial era didn’t just redraw the political map, they permanently altered Earth’s ecosystems. While colonialism is often examined through political, cultural, or economic lenses, its environmental impacts remain vastly under-discussed. Yet colonial rule established the global patterns of resource exploitation, land degradation, and ecological inequity that still shape the world today. Listen to Dr. Olivia Mason!
Across continents and centuries, European and later American colonial regimes extracted raw materials with little regard for environmental sustainability or indigenous stewardship. Colonies were never meant to be self-sustaining societies. They were resource frontiers, meant to enrich the metropoles. The ecological consequences were, and remain, profound.
Ecological Exploitation as Policy
From the outset, colonialism relied on intensive extraction: forests cleared, rivers diverted, soils mined. In places like Nauru, this logic was taken to the extreme. The tiny Pacific island, once a tropical paradise, was gutted by phosphate mining initiated under German rule and later expanded by the British and Australians. By independence in 1968, more than 80% of Nauru was a barren, mined-out wasteland. The ecological devastation left the post-colonial government with few economic alternatives but to continue the very practices that had caused the destruction.
In South America, the Spanish conquest of the Andes brought a different but equally destructive form of exploitation. Silver mining in Potosí required enormous quantities of timber, water, and mercury. The surrounding forests were razed, indigenous communities displaced, and waterways polluted with toxic metals. The mercury-laden runoff from these operations ultimately flowed into the Amazon Basin, turning one of the world’s most biodiverse regions into a conduit for industrial poison.
Displacement and Environmental Collapse
Colonialism wasn’t just about resource extraction; it also reshaped human relationships with the land. In Madagascar, French colonisers seized fertile lowlands for coffee plantations and forced local communities into marginal highland areas. There, traditional slash-and-burn farming, formerly sustainable, became ecologically destructive due to overuse and poor soil conditions. What was once a resilient agricultural practice became a source of deforestation and erosion, driven not by tradition but by displacement and survival.
A similar dynamic unfolded in North America during the U.S. government’s westward expansion. Under the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the Great Plains were declared empty wilderness, despite being home to millions of bison and indigenous peoples. The mass slaughter of bison not only devastated ecosystems but served a political purpose: erasing Native American subsistence systems. In their place, the U.S. established water-intensive farming practices dependent on the Ogallala Aquifer, now critically depleted after more than a century of overuse.
Post-Colonial Fragility and Corporate Exploitation
The environmental damage did not stop with independence. Colonial borders often lumped together disparate regions, languages, and ecosystems into single administrative units. These ‘experience-distant states’, built around foreign bureaucracies rather than local realities, struggled to govern their natural resources effectively.
In Nigeria, Shell began drilling in the Niger Delta shortly before independence. Today, the region is one of the most oil-contaminated places on Earth. Mangrove swamps have been replaced by oil pipelines and flare stacks. Spills and gas flaring continue largely unchecked, damaging health, agriculture, and biodiversity. The Nigerian state, structurally dependent on oil revenues, has been unable, or unwilling, to hold companies accountable. In Angola, the same story unfolded around diamonds and oil, where corporate interests flourished amid weak post-colonial governance.
These patterns are not aberrations; they are the continuation of colonial logics of extraction, facilitated by global capital rather than imperial armies.
Elisa Garbil
Colonialism and the Climate Crisis
The climate crisis, too, has colonial roots. The industrial revolutions that propelled European empires were built on fossil fuel combustion, largely supplied by resources extracted from the colonies. Steamships powered by coal connected global markets. Forests were cleared for plantations. Entire economies were reorganised to serve the energy and commodity needs of Europe and North America.
Today, the Global North remains disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Yet it is the Global South, home to most former colonies, that faces the gravest climate risks. Rising seas threaten low-lying islands like Nauru. Droughts and crop failures destabilise African and South Asian nations still grappling with poverty, conflict, and fragile governance, all worsened by their colonial pasts.
Silencing Indigenous Knowledge
Colonialism also disrupted centuries of indigenous ecological wisdom. In many colonies, local knowledge systems were dismissed as primitive, while European scientific models were imposed through land laws, conservation regimes, and agricultural reforms. In Jordan, for example, British colonial administrators reshaped land use and heritage management to align with Western ideals, sidelining Bedouin traditions and knowledge systems that had sustained the arid landscape for generations.
Today’s environmental governance structures often still operate within those colonial frameworks, making them ill-equipped to address local needs or incorporate traditional stewardship practices.
Toward Environmental Justice
Acknowledging the environmental legacy of colonialism is not about historical guilt, it is about present-day responsibility. Repairing ecological damage requires more than conservation funding or technological fixes. It demands systemic change: reparation of environmental debts, meaningful inclusion of indigenous and local communities in decision-making, and a rethinking of development models that still echo imperialist priorities.
As the world faces converging climate and ecological crises, ignoring the colonial roots of these problems only deepens the injustice. If sustainability is to be truly global, it must be historically grounded. Colonialism didn’t just redraw borders, it rearranged ecosystems, erased cultures, and left billions vulnerable to environmental collapse. That legacy is not finished. But it can still be reckoned with.
