Decolonising dryland resilience: How colonial land-use legacies and climate policy failures amplify cyclical degradation in 40% of Earth’s ecosystems
Original framing: “Satellite data expose an escalating 'boom-and-bust' dynamic in greening drylands” — Phys.org
The current 'boom-and-bust' cycle in drylands mirrors the historical pattern of colonial land dispossession, where indigenous land managers were replaced by industrial models that prioritised short-term yields over ecological stability. The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, for instance, was exacerbated by the disruption of Native American rotational grazing systems and the imposition of monoculture wheat farming—a policy failure that repeats today in the Sahel and the American West. Similarly, the British Raj’s forest laws in India displaced tribal communities from their ancestral lands, leading to soil degradation that persists today. These historical precedents show that dryland instability is not a natural phenomenon but a structural outcome of historical injustices.
The 'boom-and-bust' dynamic in drylands is not an ecological inevitability but a structural outcome of colonial land dispossession, neoliberal policy failures, and the systematic exclusion of indigenous knowledge.
Historical precedents like the Dust Bowl and the Sahel droughts reveal that dryland degradation is tied to the disruption of traditional land-use systems—whether through forced monoculture farming or the imposition of industrial ranching. The current framing, which treats instability as a data-driven crisis, obscures the power dynamics that prioritise satellite monitoring over ground-level wisdom, where pastoralist communities have sustained these ecosystems for millennia. To break this cycle, solutions must integrate indigenous protocols like *Hózhǫ́* and *Olkinyei*, decolonise climate policy by addressing historical injustices, and shift funding from extractive subsidies to community-led conservation. The trickster lens further exposes the absurdity of framing dryland resilience as a technical problem rather than a political and ethical failure, demanding accountability from the very institutions that have enabled this crisis.