Question 1
The authors posit that struggles to avert global warming should challenge colonialism so that they are fully effective since political discourses are shaped by environmental directives concerned with global warming. They contend that the environmental threats of a circumstance are those that exist outside of it and that colonialism, capitalism, and the destruction of the environment are inseparably bound together. The writers feel that the hope of anti-colonialism shapes an environment which cannot be dominated and that necessarily challenges dislocations and aims at compensations. Therefore, challenging colonialism will thus deal with all aspects of sovereignty as deciding who the decision-makers are and the rationale for that choice (Hern et al. 16).
The writers claim that domination of the non-human environment by human beings is founded on the domination that human beings have on other human beings and they thus think that any climate control must be embedded in social change (Hern et al. 19). They suggest that the political aspects upon which decolonizing claims can be recognized as the similar political aspects required for a confrontation of global warming. Since decolonization claims are inseparably intertwined with ecology, the probability of a political perspective directs people to a rebuilt comprehension of a new meaning of the sweetness of life that is centred on a refurbished way of living in the ecology. Therefore, they feel that a truly ecological community/society is that which is founded on non-exploitative and non-dominating relations with land and the environment at large. Therefore for such a society to exist, decolonization should take place to solve traditional environmental justice (Hern et al. 26). Colonization is based on not just the exploitation of humans and land but every part of the environment and making arbitrary decisions of other things without their consent to solve all the issues surrounding climate change, there needs to be a reconstruction of colonialism that governs relations ethically.
Question 2: The lives of people working in Tar Sands
The authors have used the works and lives of the people who are making ends meet by engaging in environmentally destructive practices to illustrate the challenges that their supposition for solving climate change faces. The humans working there have families to support, bills to pay, among other basic necessities of life. Therefore, they feel that they are justified to be exploiting the environment although a peek into the thoughts of these people clearly tells them that what they are doing is wrong. Therefore, the author’s initial notion of social change for environmental and non-human conservancy that seeks to break the need to exploit the environment in order to meet the basic necessities of life is supported by the hard life of the people there (Hern et al. 93–94).
The authors use the dependence on the lives of people living in Fort Mac, apparently destroying the environment, to show the impasse between acting and culpability in environmental preservation aimed at curbing climate change (Hern et al. 106–07). The incorporation of lives and stories of Fort Mac workers in the oil industry aids the authors in their analysis of how tradition and change relate. Their critical analysis of how the yoke of colonialism informs the thinking of people in terms of progress and development and which has locked people in a very limited series of possibilities to choose from is then illustrated by the lives of the people working in the oil industry (Hern et al. 112). The authors have used this as an avenue with which their assertion of a social change which will reconstruct the social relation in order to salvage the ever-changing climate is based upon. This is especially in their analysis of how the people they interviewed perceived the environmental discourses as necessary but with no prospects of being achieved. The lives of those people then form the authors’ notion of a necessary societal reconstruction that recognizes the importance of non-human environmental aspects (Hern et al. 114).