ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the historical and contemporary perceptions and constructions of Africa within the global environmental narrative, particularly as concerns the debate on environmental crises. It explores the extent to which the continent and its peoples have engaged the politics that pertain to these crises. The principal contention is that Africa has been central in the framing of global environmental issues, especially as concerns the politics of causes, consequences, and solutions to environmental problems that are perceived to bear global implications. The period of focus is the twentieth century into the present, a time of unprecedented globalization of modern environmental issues. During this period, environmental concerns have largely been a manifestation of broader political, military, economic, and social trajectories that shaped European and American societies during momentous times, including imperial expansion, colonization, the Great Depression, the two World Wars, the Cold War, and decolonization as well as increased use of technology and science after 1945.
