Chapter 5 - Decolonizing Ecology: Chinua Achebe’s New Forms of Unease

Summary

“Decolonizing Ecology,” addresses environmental recovery efforts after WWII leading up to the explosion of environmental movements in the 1960s. With a pivot to rhetoric of “recovery” and “regeneration,” nature protection gained national validation with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy. Coinciding with this inward turn, however, the formation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ensured the United Kingdom’s continued involvement in foreign lands. I look to Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel No Longer at Ease to complicate the unevenness of environmental recovery in relation to decolonization. Through a juxtaposition of main character Obiajulu, whose name means “the mind at last is at rest,” and Mr. Green, a 1950s counterpoint to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz, I explore modernism’s environmental legacy in regard to the end of colonialism and a newly emerging “green imperialism” that seeks to manage natural spaces on a global scale.