Ecocide, War, and the Rebuilding of Relational Worlds

 

Over the past decade, conflicts have dominated global affairs, generating immense suffering and ecological devastation. The climate crisis itself has become a major driver of conflict, compounding inequality, resource scarcity, and instability. According to the United Nations, of the fifteen countries most vulnerable to climate change, thirteen are currently experiencing violent conflict. These converging crises deepen cultural erasure through environmental destruction and direct assaults on heritage. The accelerating convergence of ecological devastation and cultural annihilation has given rise to growing recognition of ecocide and genocide as interlinked crimes. This is a call to those engaged in climate justice to confront uncomfortable truths — to rethink assumptions, strategies, and moral responsibilities.

Since the Paris Accords of 2016, climate realities have shifted profoundly. The 1.5°C target has not been met and is now sliding inexorably toward a 2.0°C threshold, bringing dangerous new conditions for life on Earth.

The failure to limit warming within 1.5°C is not a technical shortfall but a moral rupture. It exposes the colonial and extractive capitalist systems that have long displaced environmental harm onto the world’s poorest and most marginalised — the same communities whose cosmologies and ecological practices embody the relational ethics that could have prevented such collapse. Within global governance frameworks, terms like net zero and green transition conceal the persistence of corrupted power, allowing the Global North to maintain consumption patterns through dispossession and exploitation. They also obscure domestic destruction caused by extractive industries — fires, floods, pollution, and the degeneration of air, water, and ocean life.

Indigenous worldviews reject the separation of humanity from the living Earth. They affirm a relational understanding of existence in which land, water, and atmosphere are kin — sentient and sustaining partners in the web of life. From this perspective, ecocide is not only the destruction of ecosystems but the basis of cultural violence: a breaking of the bonds that sustain life itself. A call for renewed climate activism is grounded in relational ethics — a reorientation toward reciprocity, humility, and care for the more-than-human world.

The age of climate denial has given way to moral denial — one that recognises crisis yet resists transformation. The challenge is not only to cut emissions but to confront and transform the economic logics that produced them.

Conflict and war are not merely signs of ecocide but its engines, producing around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. They deepen extractivism, legitimise environmental destruction in the name of security, and drain resources needed for planetary repair. The climate crisis is no longer an environmental problem alone; it is a total condition — geopolitical, ethical, and existential — demanding that we reconsider how life, justice, and belonging are imagined and lived.

Across the world, the link between war, culture, and environmental devastation is painfully clear.

In Gaza the UN recognised genocide has unfolded through siege, bombardment, and famine — eradicating not only thousands of human lives but the cultural lifeworld of Gaza itself: its archives, universities, mosques, markets, olive groves, and collective memory. The destruction of libraries, museums, and family homes severs Palestinians from their ancestral continuity, enacting both cultural and ecological annihilation. UNESCO has verified damage to over 114 heritage sites since the Hamas attack in October 7 2023, including 13 religious sites, 81 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 7 archaeological sites, 3 repositories of movable cultural property and 1 museum. In Gaza, destruction of life is inseparable from the erasure of culture — archives, art, universities, olive groves, and sacred sites destroyed alongside human lives, cutting Palestinians from their land and history.

In Sudan (Darfur and Al-Fashir), the targeted extermination of non-Arab groups — the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa — erases languages, crafts, communal land systems, and ecological stewardship. Villages are razed, wells poisoned, farmlands abandoned. The killing of Darfuri peoples destroys both culture and ecology, as land and water become weapons.

In Tigray (Ethiopia), starvation, sexual violence, and displacement have shattered social and agrarian life. Monasteries, churches, and manuscript traditions — some over a millennium old — have been looted or destroyed. The soil-based rhythms of life are broken by hunger and exile.

In Rakhine State (Myanmar), the Rohingya genocide has destroyed a coastal culture — language, crafts, and maritime livelihoods erased as villages and mangrove ecosystems burn. Statelessness has transformed an ocean-based people into landless refugees, untethered from both geography and history.

In Eastern Congo, militia violence and foreign-driven mineral extraction create a slow genocide. Forests sacred to Indigenous and local communities are mined and militarised; women’s bodies weaponised; cultural coherence dissolves under displacement. The material base of global technology — coltan, cobalt — is soaked in cultural disintegration.

In Ukraine, the Russian invasion carries culturally genocidal dimensions. The siege of Mariupol revealed the human and cultural cost of war: tens of thousands of civilian deaths, over 90% of buildings destroyed, archives and sacred sites obliterated. The bombardment of the Azovstal steel plant released toxic waste into soil and sea, contaminating ecosystems. The war targets symbolic and historical sovereignty as much as territory.

In Xinjiang (Uyghur Region, China), a state-directed program of cultural erasure includes forced assimilation, destruction of mosques and cemeteries, and bans on Uyghur language and religion. The land — once shaped by Islamic agrarian ethics and Silk Road trade — is being remade into a securitised extractive zone where culture and ecology are flattened together.

In West Papua (Indonesia), a slow-motion genocide intertwines with ecocide: rainforest destruction, mining, and militarisation dismantle Indigenous lifeworlds. Sacred mountains and rivers are turned into extraction sites, dislocating spiritual geography and communal continuity.

These are not accidents but deliberate strategies sustaining growth fantasies and the wealth of a tiny global elite. Their influence is visible in the destruction of the ecosystems that support life itself.

In the Amazon Basin (Brazil), which accounts for over 40% of global rainforest loss, fires surged again in 2024, driven by illegal logging, cattle ranching, soy expansion, and mining. Indigenous territories like those of the Yanomami and Munduruku are increasingly threatened. The Amazon tipping point — where rainforest shifts to savanna — is approaching.

In Bolivia, deforestation rose by over 50% between 2023 and 2024, largely from soy and beef production. Fires have erased vast tracts of Chiquitano dry forest and Amazon rainforest.

In Peru and Colombia, illegal gold mining, coca cultivation, and smallholder agriculture drive forest loss. In Peru’s Madre de Dios region, mercury pollution devastates ecosystems and Indigenous health.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s second-largest rainforest is rapidly cleared for charcoal, logging, and agriculture, now ranking second globally in primary forest loss. Mining for cobalt, copper, and coltan has expanded within forest zones, displacing communities and threatening wildlife.

Across Central Africa (Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon), commercial logging and palm oil plantations are fragmenting forests and endangering species such as gorillas and forest elephants.

In Indonesia, deforestation, once slowed by moratoria, is rising again due to palm oil expansion and peatland fires intensified by El Niño. In Malaysia, logging for palm oil and rubber continues, particularly in Sarawak and Sabah, displacing Indigenous peoples.

In Papua New Guinea and West Papua, vast tracts of old-growth forest are being sold for logging, palm oil, and carbon-offset projects. Indigenous resistance remains strong but faces repression.

Other hotspots include Madagascar, where over 40% of rainforest has been lost, and Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala), where cattle ranching, logging, and land grabs invade Indigenous territories like the Moskitia.

Each of these conflicts shows how war and extraction converge into a single planetary logic — one that renders life, meaning, and environment subject to the rule of militarised capital. Ecocide thus becomes more than the destruction of nature: it is the erasure of interconnected worlds, the fabric of life itself, — languages, rituals, kinships, and cosmologies that once sustained balance between human and more-than-human life.

This devastation cannot be repaired through technology or carbon accounting alone. What is required is an ontological shift — a recovery of international relational ethics long maintained by Indigenous and other subjugated traditions, which see Earth not as resource but as kin; not as territory but as relationship.

The failure to meet the 1.5°C target and the rise of cultural and ecological genocide share the same root: a masculinist, colonial cosmology that glorifies domination and abstracts value from living interdependence.

To speak of climate justice now is to move beyond mitigation toward repair, adaptation, and renewal — to recognise that ecological survival depends on cultural survival, and that healing the planet requires restoring the diverse, sacred relationships that modernity has sought to erase. The task is no longer to “save” the Earth from crisis, but to challenge the imperial worldview that produced crisis as its organising principle.

Within this global condition, domination and resistance can be understood along a cultural spectrum — between forces that violently commodify and those that cultivate life. A gangster culture operates through militarisation, extraction, and control, separating life from relation to make it exploitable. By contrast, a relational culture embodies care, reciprocity, and interdependence — the ethics found in Indigenous, matriarchal, and ecological traditions. It resists by remembering and by holding open the possibility of life beyond domination.

The wars, genocides, and ecological collapses we now witness are the violent convulsions of a failing world order struggling to preserve itself. To inhabit the Indigenous spectrum is not to seek perfection but to practise the slow, radical work of re-worlding.

This is the task before the global climate movement: to restore relational sovereignty, rebuild kinship with human and more-than-human beings, and reclaim the natural world as a living practice of justice. Climate action must move beyond metrics and mitigation to become an act of re-worlding — healing the broken relationships between people, planet, and spirit.

Let this be the call: to ground international cultural policy in reciprocity, to place care and community before capital, and to remember that justice is not achieved through domination but through growing the network of climate activists. Climate justice will not be realised through technological innovation or political negotiation alone, but through people-centred cultural and ethical action that re-centres interdependence as the basis of life. Only by restoring these living relations — between Earth and human, between past and future, between justice and nature — can we move beyond the rhetoric of survival toward the possibility of shared continuance.

The parallels between Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Xinjiang, and Tigray reveal a shared logic: the use of environmental destruction to dismantle cultural continuity and suppress ancestral rights. In all cases, ecological devastation is not collateral damage but a deliberate strategy to erase ways of living that resist extractive domination. Yet they also reveal a shared resilience — the determination to protect and restore the living fabric of culture and ecology. These struggles form part of a broader global movement for climate justice — one that demands accountability for ecocide and cultural genocide, and affirms the right of all peoples to sustain life, love, land, and heritage in the face of militarised and extractive powers.