What do Indigenous perspectives tell us about interlocking Earth crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, and food injustice, and ways to respond to these? How can work on climate, food and sustainability center Indigenous knowledges in ways that foreground Indigenous peoples’ decolonial struggles for land defense and land rematriation, biocultural diversity restoration, and the restitution of land-based sovereignty–including food sovereignty?
Leonardo E Figueroa Helland (PhD) (he/him/le’e) is Chair and Associate Professor of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management graduate (MS) program at The New School university (Lenapehoking/Manahatta/New York City). He leads the Indigeneity, Decolonization and Just Sustainability Section of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. A decolonizing scholar of mestizo (mixed-blood) heritage (Indigenous Mesoamerican and Euro-American), his work underlines the centrality of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization in addressing planetary crises, achieving climate justice and materializing systemic change. He does so by articulating radical Indigenous approaches with other counterhegemonic liberatory perspectives to envision and enact decolonial sovereign (including food sovereign) futures against and beyond imperialist, settler colonial, neocolonial, patriarchal, anthropocentric, capitalist and state-centric orders. His articles appear, inter alia, in the following journals: the NYU Environmental Law Journal (ELJ); Journal of World Systems Research; Perspectives on Global Development and Technology; Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Journal of Critical Education and Policy Studies (JCEPS); and UNESCO Journal of Higher Education and Society/Educación Superior y Sociedad (ESS). His chapters appear in the following volumes: Social Movements and World-System Transformation; Inhabiting the Earth: Anarchist Political Ecology for Landscapes of Emancipation; Contesting Extinctions: Critical Relationality, Regenerative Futures; and forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Historical Sociology; as well as in Grassroots Resistances, Alternatives and Solutions to the 21st Century Climate and Global Ecological Crises: Voices from the Global South. He has recently edited two special numbers of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology on the theme of “Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement”. His current projects include two books. The first one to be prospectively titled Indigenous Resurgence and Earth Crisis: Decolonizing Pathways to Liberation and Regeneration (book project under contract at Routledge). The second one is tentatively titled The Indigenous Shape of Worlds to Come: Decolonial Futures beyond Resistance (book project to be prospectively published by Daraja Press).
