Description
This paper examines the enduring contamination of soils and water by chlordecone, a toxic pesticide banned in France but used extensively in the French West Indies between 1972 and 1993, as a manifestation of slow violence and environmental coloniality. Drawing on archival research, governmental reports, and secondary environmental studies, it situates chlordecone within the wider framework of environmental governance and extractive capitalism. The paper argues that the persistent ecological degradation and public health crisis represent a form of postcolonial environmental injustice, where racialised and economically marginalised communities bear the long-term consequences of decisions rooted in colonial exploitation and metropolitan indifference.
Through an interpretive qualitative approach, the study explores how the ongoing contamination exemplifies the temporal and spatial displacement of harm characteristic of slow violence, while also exposing the structural continuities between plantation economies and modern agro-industrial systems. The analysis highlights how governmental and corporate responses have perpetuated asymmetries of knowledge, responsibility, and remediation, reinforcing a colonial hierarchy of life and environmental worth. By framing the chlordecone crisis as both ecological and epistemic violence, the paper calls for renewed recognition of environmental reparations as part of decolonial environmental justice and suggests that understanding such “slow disasters” is critical to dismantling the epistemic and policy frameworks that normalise ongoing harm in postcolonial ecologies.
