The climate crisis is intensifying rapidly since the past few decades, forcing environmentalists to make important decisions to bring the issue at the center of public and policy discourse of global politics.
The powerful countries of the world often extend an enthusiastic support to projects of ecological restoration and renewable energy development but behind this seemingly transformative ethos are sinister agendas of furthering territorial control and uprooting indigenous people from their lands.
When you start appropriating ecological narratives and practices that support global colonial structures under the guise of sustainability, that is when green colonialism is born.
Israel: Reforestation and the Politics of Erasure
One of the most notable examples of green colonialism is Israel. In 1948 when Israel illegally established itself as a country, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) funded a reforestation campaign. In an attempt to make the ‘desert’ bloom, they embarked on a campaign of planting more than 250 million trees across the land.
The trees were planted after they usurped the land by forcefully displacing hundreds and thousands of Palestinians during Nakba and occupying their ancestral lands in order to establish an apartheid state. In this case, reforestation wasn’t just done to beautify the land rather it was done to completely erase the Palestinian trace and history.
So many non-native plant species such as eucalyptus and Aleppo pines were introduced which were highly inflammable and a poor fit for the Mediterranean climate of Palestine. These plans became glowing symbols of historical revisionism and places which held so much trauma and suffering of Palestinians became recreational sites for Israeli settlers.
But while doing all that they forgot that mother nature isn’t as forgiving and a colonizer can never take care of the land the way a native does. The consequences of reforestation were catastrophic and in 2021, Israel suffered the worst kind of wildfires further aggravated by the foreign inflammable plants. And now in May 2025 again, Israel is combating the same issue.
East Africa: Fortress Conservation and Displacement
If we look at East Africa, the British legacy of colonialism never left In East Africa and even today it’s conservation policy is being shaped by the colonial legacy of Britain. They created national parks on the model of ‘fortress conservation’ but they did so by evicting the native Maasai people in order to create void for tourism and wildlife.
Wherever there has been colonization of any land, we witness a similar pattern where environmental protection and indigenous presence cannot co-exit peacefully in the colonizers blueprint. The irony is that these heinous plans are often aided and abetted by International conservation NGOs and foreign governments who on the outside claim to be the bearer of human rights and green policies.
Local communities of the Maasai people and many other pastoralist groups also, who were inhabiting these places for ages end up suffering the most as they are denied access to the lands that belonged to their ancestors. While it is true that these conservation areas bring in a substantial amount of revenue in the name of ecotourism, the displaced indigenous people never receive an equitable share in that and the revenue ends up in the colonizers pockets instead.
Towards Decolonial Environmentalism
These are just two cases discussed in this article but similar patterns of oppression have been witnessed in many other countries too like Norway (oppression of Indigenous Sami people), India (targeting Adivasi people and taking away indigenous lands in regions like Rajasthan and Odisha) and Canada.
From India to Israel, Canada and Artics regions, we have witnessed how all these initiatives taken in the name of conserving environment come at the cost of indigenous peoples rights. No one anywhere in the world is safe from the power dynamics of these colonizers whether they come in the form of a foreign entity, or in cases like India, their own government.
Green colonialism highlights this very issue how these environmental discourses are often used to mask atrocious injustices, violence, displacement of natives and historical erasure of indigenous communities.
We must change the narrative and make systems more inclusionary where the perpetrators of historical erasure are held accountable and any policy that does not align with the interests and sovereignty of indigenous people must be dropped. Only by acknowledging and remedying the dark legacy of green colonialism can we move towards making our environmental systems actually sustainable and equitable.
Zoha Khan
Zoha Khan is a student of International Relations at School of Politics & IR (SPIR), QAU, Islamabad.
