Ecologies of Development: Ecophilosophies and Indigenous Action on the Tana River

Abstract This article argues for a reorientation of African environmental history that incorporates localized ecophilosophies, racial ecologies, and environmental justice, and posits that doing so allows us to challenge the sociocultural and ecological implications of colonial and postcolonial environmental development more rigorously in East Africa. Focusing on Kenya, I argue that environmental justice-oriented histories of economic development elevate the subjectivities, cosmologies, and experiences of rural Kenyan populations rather than reducing the environment and its resources to their instrumental qualities On the Tana River, pastoral and riverine groups such as the Pokomo and Orma suffered and challenged the exigencies of water extraction in specific ways tied to their existing relationships with the local environment. By looking at the ways rural communities in arid regions framed their environmental relationships, we can begin to appreciate the specific modalities and cosmologies through which they resisted the imposition of cash crop agriculture and water development. The article demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach utilizing Black ecologies and environmental justice frameworks that restores vitality to the rural experience of imperialism and offers more rigorous critiques of global development dogmas under racial capitalism, particularly surrounding the omnipresent threat of ecocide driven by dispossession, resource extraction, toxicity, and climate change.