I started researching South Africa’s environmental justice movements in the mid 1990s. These movements were newly formed and I was excited to observe an environmental discourse that emphasized people’s need for healthy environments—and that recognized how histories of colonizing affect both nature and people.

As South Africa attempted to leave behind decades of apartheid rule, here was an environmentalism worth promoting.

Following the research threads, I fretted over what appeared to be a lack in literary studies: why did ecocriticism, then a new field of literary study in the USA and UK, pay little attention to colonizing’s histories? and why did concern for natural environments appear largely absent from postcolonial literary studies? By contrast, environmental historians were examining fruitfully how European colonizing affected both people and nature, globally. 

So, I began exploring in conference papers ways to write a “postcolonial ecocriticism,” one that held to the belief that environmental justice movements represent a crucial form of environmentalism for modern societies anywhere. From these papers I developed a series of essays, with the first appearing in 2005.

My primary focus has been on African literature, and with questions of how to advance an Africa-centered ecocriticism, but my concern has always been to think generally, in ways that recognize modernity's power flows, past and present, and how they manifest as colonizing.

In 2006 I read Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which pushed me to rethink what I had understood as "global warming" and the "greenhouse effect."

How to adapt a postcolonial ecocriticism to what we keep learning of life on a climate-disrupted planet became my project. It is my work now.