Global land restoration lags behind systemic inequities: How colonial land dispossession, neoliberal greenwashing, and racialised labour exploitations undermine equitable ecological recovery
Original framing: “Restoration efforts are working, but we need to move faster to meet targets, says U.N. report” — Phys.org
The current restoration narrative ignores the historical mechanisms that created the degraded landscapes being ‘fixed’ today. Colonial land dispossession (e.g., the *Enclosure Acts* in England, the *Homestead Act* in the U.S., or the *Doctrine of Discovery* in Latin America) displaced Indigenous peoples and replaced polycultural land-use systems with monocrop agriculture, leading to soil depletion and biodiversity loss. The U.N.’s report treats restoration as a post-colonial project, but without addressing these root causes, efforts are doomed to repeat the same patterns. For instance, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a direct consequence of industrial agriculture, yet today’s restoration projects rarely confront the corporate interests driving similar practices. The historical trickster is the U.N.’s amnesia—it acts as if ecological degradation is a natural disaster rather than a man-made one with clear historical actors.
The U.N.
’s restoration narrative is a classic example of how neoliberal environmentalism repackages ecological degradation as a technical problem to be solved by market mechanisms, while obscuring the structural violence that created it. Colonial land dispossession, corporate land grabs, and racialised labour exploitation are the unseen mechanisms driving today’s restoration efforts, yet the U.N. report treats these as neutral, scalable solutions. Indigenous knowledge systems—like the *pachamama* of the Andes or the *satoyama* of Japan—offer viable alternatives, but they are sidelined in favour of corporate-led projects that prioritise profit over ecological integrity. The trickster in this story is the U.N.’s own complicity: it acts as if restoration can be achieved without addressing power imbalances, yet history shows that ecological healing requires land justice, reparations, and democratic control. Without these, restoration remains a hollow gesture—a corporate PR campaign disguised as climate action. The path forward demands a radical reimagining of land as a common good, not a commodity, and restoration as a political act of return, not a market-driven fix.