In the Anthropocene we humans have become a geological force, a “force of nature” – and a self-defeating one. But this crisis in climate and extinction was first kindled by coal-fired colonialism and its ethos of extraction and elimination.

Here in Australia the historical coincidence of colonialism and coal sticks out like a porcupine at a nudists’ colony. Watts’s coal-fired steam engine was invented just two years before the first fleet arrived in Sydney Cove. Coal mining began near Nobbys Head in Newcastle in the 1790s, with the first coal shipment leaving now the world’s largest coal export port in 1799.

This period also saw the march of the Australian frontiers on little cloven hooves, shepherded by settler shock troops dealing death and disease. Fleeces from these rapidly expanding pastures supplied the Lancashire wool mills, just as the steam-powered loom began to replace the hand loom. The use of coal on a commercial scale from the late 18th century powered an explosion in manufacturing between 1760 and 1840. Coal-fired industrialisation and colonial expansion were a voracious twin-headed beast.

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By 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons had already declared coal “the factor in everything we do”. Steam (powered by “black gold” now extracted from Bengali, Trinidad, Vancouver, Borneo, Tasmania, Nankin, Natal and the southern tip of Africa) was extolled as:

The acknowledged new element of advancement, by which this age is distinguished from all which have preceded it. By its magic power distance is set at naught; and the productions of the antipodes are brought rapidly together. Coal, therefore, must henceforth be the motor and the meter of all commercial nations. Without it no modern people can become great, either in manufactures or in the naval art of war.”

By 1896 a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, forewarned of what we now call the greenhouse effect: the large-scale burning of fossil fuels would permeate the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat within it, warming the planet. But the imperial economy of Britain was already hooked – and on the road to cooked.

The answers to sustainable, collective prosperity were known before industrialisation

Coal literally stoked the engines of colonial invasion. Then “wastelands” described lands that were thought to be wasted by their inhabitants because they were left uncultivated – abundant lands that should instead be laid to waste, as it transpires, to shore up the wealth of an elite class of British capitalists. The same class of land-owning white men who closed off nearly seven million acres of commons and open fields through the Enclosure acts – the 0.6% of the population who by 1872 owned 98.5% of the agricultural land of Britain.

Climate change has a deep history ineluctably and now fatally entwined with our own. From the fossilised carbon we burn to the carbon-based economies emerging from about 1800 to the laying to waste of Indigenous lands, the death spiral of coal-fired colonialism is widening to take us all in. But on the frontlines, yet again, are Indigenous peoples.

First Nation peoples are losing their homes to rising seas. Torres Strait Islanders are lodging a complaint with the United Nations human rights committee against the Australian government, alleging climate inaction. Inuit have been evacuated from the Alaskan coastal village of Shishmaref. In the autonomous region of Guna Yala, Panama families are being displaced by sea level rise. Sami reindeer herders in the Arctic circle are facing “tjuokke”, the locking away of lichen pastures under a unseasonable sheet of ice, disrupting their nomadic livelihoods.

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Some of the western fossil fuel conglomerates who stand to profit from exploration on these newly uninhabitable homelands – such as Royal Dutch Shell – rose to corporate “supermajor” status by erasing Indigenous sovereignty. Shell developed an oilfield in Sumatra in the 1890s and today plans to start exploratory drilling for oil in the Chukchi sea off the coast of Alaska at Point Hope, the Inupiat’s ancestral lands.

Naomi Klein has called these homelands “sacrifice zones” on the “disposable peripheries” of western capitalism. These are “carbon frontiers”. They represent the ongoing plunder by fossil fuel corporations of Indigenous lands increasingly vacated because of the disruptions of exacerbated storms, sea-level rise, salinisation, extinction, drought and bushfire. This latest phase of “neocolonial plunder” through fossil fuel conglomerates entrenches the environmental racism of colonialism. Climate change is colonialism’s final frontier. So land rights are at the forefront of climate justice.

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We could sense these tectonic ruptures beneath our feet from the white man’s attachment to carbon in the last federal election campaign. The success of the LNP’s ute alert – that Bill Shorten’s electric cars would take away the working man’s freedom of movement and weekends – incited nervy white men to feel under siege by the decarbonising economy in unedifying displays of self-preservation. Our prime minister fondles a lump of coal on the frontbench and urges us not to be afraid of it. Coal is not a stranded asset, he yawps at us, but the foundation of Australian prosperity.

But the answers to sustainable, collective prosperity were known before industrialisation, by the First Nation peoples its coal-fired engines displaced. Emptied of these people and their distinct ways of knowing our wastelands – ostensibly wasted land since actually laid to waste – are encroaching everywhere.

The first order of climate justice would be wresting these lands from the Coaliphate and returning them to their custodians to be restored through their intimately localised knowledge of sustainability and resource management. This is how we could avert the climate crisis, this ominous planetary deadening that coal-fired colonialism precipitated and preordained.

• Liz Conor is a senior research fellow in history at La Trobe University. She is the author of Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWAP, 2016)