In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific
research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that
even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals environmental science and activism
are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution
the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous particularly Métis
concepts of land ethics and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory
for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)-an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland
Canada-to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of
colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative lively and
passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler
and colonial goals. In this way their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is
not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of
being in the world.
