Debates in political economy have shifted from resource extraction as a means of accumulation under capitalism to consider how workers, indigenous peoples, Black and other marginalized communities are dispossessed through climate devastation and breakdown. Yet political economy has almost remained silent about the ways in which commodification in faraway places in the Global South, in particular the Caribbean that constituted plantation economies. These spaces comprised the most important resources for colonial powers (e.g. sugar, oil, coffee, and cotton, copper among others) to accumulate capital. Natural spaces served as extractive landscapes for accumulation by metropolitan centers of power are today responsible for more than 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and became precursors for environment destruction, overexploitation, and resource overuse. These problems all contribute today to the uneven effects of climate breakdown and source of various climate injustices.

• Bullard, R. D. (1993) ‘The Threat of Environmental Racism’, Natural Resources & Environment, 7(3), pp. 23–56.

Wynter, S. (1994) ‘1492: A New World View” in eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World New. Pp. 5-57.

1. What is the history of political economy and the environment from a Global South perspective?