Green, Lesley. Rock/Water/Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa.

• Author: Skidmore-Hess, Cathy

Green, Lesley. Rock/Water/Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Lesley Green, founding director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, views herself as an "anthropocenologist," and as such she wants to examine the past and present with an understanding of the implications for the future. Writing in the context of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, she problematizes the path of white environmentalism and white "green violence" as well as drawing a distinction between science and scientism. For Green, bumper sticker slogans such as "Save the rhino, Hunt a poacher" and the South African Navy's base at Simon's Town point to colonial domination of people and landscapes. However, she also calls on those wanting to decolonize minds and the curriculum to distinguish between science and scientism, those who make unreflective claims of authority without thought to relationship between "truth claims and the authorisation of patriarchy, coloniality, capitalism, white supremacism" (105). Scientism, or rather the "boot prints left by authorized knowledge,"...