The colonization of nature, emerging from the Enlightenment principles of Cartesian dualism between human and nonhuman worlds, situated the nonhuman world as objectified, passive, and separate, and “elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional experiental relations among people, plants and animals." Destructive and utilitarian, idealized and exoticized nature has been colonized in concepts as well as in practice. It entailed a multifarious, complex, and at times contradictory pattern of bureaucratic rationalization, scientific and technological mastery, military domination, integration within the expanding capitalist economy, and legal systematization in order to manage and maximize the the possibilities of resource exploitation.
- T. J. Demos (2016): Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin, p. 14.
