Professor Prakash Kashwan (ENVS) focuses on the intersections of environment, development and climate change. His scholarship’s interdisciplinary focus has been developed during his time working with Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and his ongoing engagements with global environmental governance challenges.
Professor Kashwan recently authored “Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action,” a book that he feels is of “great interest to the campus community, especially on the occasion of Earth Day in the present circumstances.” The Hoot spoke with Kashwan to learn more about his book and his recently concluded time as the Program Chair (and later, Chair) of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association.
When asked about the authorship process of the book, Kashwan noted that the authorship process began during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. He added that “some of the founding members and leaders of the conservation movement also had some unsavory views and practices towards indigenous people and racial minorities.” So, Professor Kashwan wrote an op-ed focusing on those views. His core argument was that “apologizing about the racist comments and actions of individuals is fine. But there’s a whole institutional architecture that has come up around a particular way of thinking about controversy.” He added that “it was a [mostly] encouraging response, but there were some very negative reactions and some measured critiques from my colleagues in the broader environmental studies community. I think they were still missing the point about the institutions. Racism is not about individuals and their thoughts and behavior, but it’s about how you create institutions that reflect certain views.” Kashwan said that this inspired him to develop this concept into a larger book project. He also invited his co-author, Aseem Hasnain, for his expertise on sociological critiques of western modernity.
Kashwan noted that this book had the goal of “making accessible this really dense literature on decolonization … This language is almost inaccessible and sometimes unreadable to people who are not part of [the post-colonial environmental] community.” He went on, saying that he wanted to “take those arguments, apply it to environmental governance and institutions as they’ve evolved over time, and then make [the logic more easily] accessible.” He added that the primary audience for the book was college students who are “thinking about all of these questions but don’t have [this] sort of background. Oftentimes they don’t get to read this kind of literature unless they are taking a class on [environmental justice].”
When asked what a concerned college student should do as their first step towards decolonizing their environmental practice, Kashwan said that “the college education scene has become way complicated over the past 10 years or so with the debates … and confusion around ‘woke ideology.’ [There’s] this idea in the public sphere that colleges are a sort of grounds for liberal brainwashing. We always joke among faculty that ‘if we were so powerful to be able to brainwash [students], we would first force them to read the syllabus!’ But, jokes aside, what I’m really sort of interested in is thinking about how college students navigate an economics class, for example, where mainstream neoliberal economics is the thing they’re trying to sell. … On the other hand, you have people who are looking at this long history of failure of neoclassical economics, both in terms of what it was meant to do for economic policy … [and how it] has failed to stabilize the markets.” So, Kashwan said , he wonders how “a college student negotiate[s] these different kinds of knowledge systems and approaches and frameworks. The way I frame my classes, for example … is to start with the assumption that ‘we’ve got to protect the environment.’ We all agree, and then it becomes sort of an echo chamber. I try to sort of problematize that … to open up this idea of ‘how do we use different arguments and theories and frameworks to understand these complex issues.’”
Prof Kashwan concluded that “it is especially important for college climate activists to step back a little bit from this kind of tree-hugging approach to environmentalism.” He noted that “we’ve been shouting emergency for 15, 20 years now. That hasn’t meant that we have actually acted on the climate crisis. Right. So, and that’s not to say that there’s no place for that kind of activism. There’s also a difference between people who support from the outside or participate minimally versus leaders of these youth movements who are creating narratives and discourses to unpack what we are actually asking for.”
When asked to summarize the findings of his book to someone who cares about the environment, but finds themself on the outside of ongoing activism, Kashwan noted that “what we need to show to people is how the cost of climate crisis [is] being imposed on you, and [how] those costs will keep increasing unless we act collectively as a society.” Kashwan added that “the book actually argues that this faith in markets and in technology without any kind of regulatory action is rooted in this sort of European modernity where we are always ahead of the game … 30 years of climate inaction has shown us that that’s not true.”
Kashwan closed by saying that “we have been blinded by this kind of almost unlimited faith in our ability to somehow maneuver our way through this crisis. And that, we argue, is not … going to work. We are only fooling ourselves in that sense.” Prof. Prakash Kashwan, an associate professor in the Environmental Studies program at Brandeis, will be teaching “Environmental Social Science” and “Environmental and Climate Justice” in the upcoming Fall semester. He also wrote “Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico,” which was released in 2017, and has been a longstanding contributor to the ever-growing body of environmental knowledge.
