COLONIALITY IN CONSERVATION: Politicising the Ecology of the Utrecht University Botanic Gardens

Abstract

In the context of rapid global biodiversity loss, botanic gardens have adopted a novel governance role to safeguard biodiversity, while recent calls for decolonisation have urged academic institutions to address their colonial heritage. Environmentalist spaces continuously obscure coloniality and slavery from the history of ecological thinking, even though modernity that has produced the ecological crisis is built on the condition of coloniality. This thesis explores severed relationship between environmentalism and anticolonialism that has been instilled by the modernity/coloniality project through a case study of the Utrecht University Botanic Gardens (UBG), which has a long history intertwined with the Dutch colonial enterprise. Using a combination of in-depth interviews, participatory observations, and document analysis, the daily operations of the UBG were outlined against a background of part of the UBG’s colonial involvement, researched through secondary historical sources. The research found that environmental problems are depoliticised in the UBG, while they do challenge some parts of the modernist worldview that values human life over nature. These findings contribute to the discussion on the relationship between ecology and decoloniality in a Dutch context. Furthermore, they highlight the need for the UBG and similar institutions to engage with the ways in which their institutions and methods are built on colonialism. If they do not, they will continue to contribute to a colonial ecology that perpetuates the oppression of humans and non-humans.