Environmental re-turns: Palestinian ecologies as worldmaking practices

In this commentary, we propose the notion of environmental returns as a counterpoint to a recent proposition of an ‘environmental turn’ in contemporary Palestinian art and activism published in this journal. We argue that the adoption of an environmental turn collapses different political sensibilities and ecological registers, intensifying the erasure of Palestinian voices rather than amplifying them. We contend that this turn is indicative of a wider tendency to confine Palestinian experiences into a single narrative, one which constrains plural and diverse ecological practices and relations in order to claim authority over them. The environmental turn elides material and everyday struggles for survival in favour of purely metaphorical or symbolic readings of Palestinian ecologies. Therefore, we problematise the linear temporal logics and long-standing power relations of knowledge production that enable the authoritative marking of Palestine's beginnings and ends. In contrast, we propose the notion of ‘environmental returns’ as plural, dynamic, and unfolding relations amid repeated Nakbas . Inspired by Rana Barakat's notion of ‘ongoing return’, we highlight three interconnected dimensions of Palestinian creative ecologies that the environmental turn occludes: (1) a refusal to acquiesce to colonial territorial logics as a frame of reference; (2) decolonial interventions that trouble settler colonialism's control over time and (3) materiality as deeply entangled with the imaginative and the metaphorical. By foregrounding environmental returns, we aim to contribute to a critical environmental justice agenda that centres Palestinian voices, calling on critical scholars to amplify these voices without flattening them.