Decolonizing Environmental Justice: Unsettling the Settler Ecology of Arboretum Through Critical Arts-Based Praxis

This article is part of ongoing decolonizing efforts in critical arts-based research to unsettle the dominance of settler-oriented environmental and place-based thinking, particularly in relation to a U.S. Northeastern university arboretum. Facing current ecological precarity, we find the framing of the conventional environmental approach problematic because it reinforces settler colonial and Anthropocene perspectives that center on extraction and proprietorship while romanticizing nature in what is purported as its pure form. In response, our environmental art approach in the context of the arboretum engages settler colonial critiquing of ecology, place making, and archiving that point to the need to attend to the land as a relational, more-than-human living environment. Our environmental approach indicates the need for unsettling the settler ecology, as it has become associated with the settlers’ projects of elimination and replacement. This approach is discussed through a graduate student’s visual experiments in The Pennsylvania State University Arboretum toward advancing environmental justice.