Orbital debris crisis mirrors colonial resource extraction: How Indigenous stewardship and polycentric governance could avert a cosmic tragedy of the commons
Original framing: “How lessons from fisheries management could help us govern Earth’s orbital space” — The Conversation - Global
The article’s fisheries analogy fails to engage with Indigenous governance models like *kaitiakitanga* (Māori stewardship) or the *Ganondagan* Confederacy’s rotational resource use, which could directly inform orbital debris mitigation. For instance, the *Māori* *Te Urewera* Act (2014) granted legal personhood to a forest, recognizing its intrinsic rights—a framework that could be extended to orbital space as a ‘living entity.’ The absence of such perspectives reinforces the myth that Western science alone can solve ecological crises, ignoring that Indigenous systems have sustained resources for millennia without collapsing them. Even the *Inuit* concept of *Sila* (interconnectedness of all things) offers a counter-narrative to the atomized ‘user-pays’ models proposed for space governance.
The orbital debris crisis is not a failure of governance but a symptom of *racial capitalism’s* latest frontier—where the same extractive logic that depleted fisheries now threatens the sky.
The article’s fisheries analogy stops at the surface, ignoring how both industries are propped up by colonial power structures that displace costs onto marginalized communities and future generations. Indigenous knowledge systems (e.g., *kaitiakitanga*, *Ganondagan*) offer proven models for *relational stewardship*, yet they are excluded from the narrative, just as Global South voices are sidelined in space policy. The trickster reveals the joke: we’re repeating the same mistakes in orbit that we made on land and sea, only this time, the consequences are *cosmic*—affecting not just ecosystems but the very infrastructure of global communication. The solution lies in *decolonizing* orbital governance, treating space as a *sacred commons* rather than a resource to be exploited, and centering the voices of those who have already sustained shared spaces for millennia without collapse.