"I ran from it and was still in it": Maroon Ecology in a Neoliberal World

This paper examines the burgeoning field of maroon ecologies: environmental thinking about and with those people who escaped from slavery and built alternative societies apart from the plantation regime. Rather than representing yet another back-to-the-land approach to ecology, marronage is a useful paradigm for resisting conceptions of freedom grounded in property. This paper first considers how Lockean understandings of the relationship between property and labor result in a conception of freedom as self-ownership—which also transform humanity’s relationship to the other-than-human world. The second section then considers how marronage’s relationship to land—especially the provision grounds and wild landscapes—interact to form an alternative sociality to that imposed by capitalism’s property regime. Finally, the paper considers the challenge of thinking marronage in the context of neoliberalism. How can maroon ecology—an imaginary shaped by the act of escape—help us in a moment in which neoliberal capitalism seems virtually omnipresent?