June 5, 2016 - 12:47
Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (University Press of Kansas, 2007):
race slavery brought its victims into a problematic relationshp to the Aemrican landscape....that analysis of the conneciton between racial oppression and blacks' relationship to the environment has had a persistent presence in black politics, manifesting itself most recently in the environmental justic movement..."an extension of hte first protext against being uprooted from our homeland and brought to a strange land" (187).
to dismantle contemporary systems of domination..."we have to understand the link, the correlation, the relationshp between exploitation of the land and the exploitation of the people. The two are inseparable"....black environmental activism looks different from our usual picture of mainstream environmental politics; it has been aimed neither at preserving unique wilderness areas nor at resource conservation on a national scale....it has been local in scope and focused on access to open space and public service, pollution abatement, and local public healh issues (188).
in addition to lacking environmental amenities, poor and minority communities have borne a disproportionate share of environmental hazards (189).
land sovereignty is at the heart of the movement [of environmental justice] (190).
it is the calling of human beings to "finish Creation"....humans are called to be stewards, co-partners with God...in modifying the natural world to be more suitable to human needs....in order for humans to realize the full benefits of their stewardship function, they must first realize social justice...racial oppression has impaired effective stewardship in a number of ways..undermined the voluntariness of agricultural labor...degraded the status of agricultural labor...continued to alienate blacks from the land (191).
link slave labor to the environmental degradation that accompanied this intensive form of commercial agricultural...connection between the oppression of labor and the abuse of the land....more recent cases...exploitation may make the workers less careful and create in them ambivalence toward the land: a sense of alientation from land and comunity (193).
this tradition of black environmental throught...as a source of normative environmental theory...may be..problematic...we may worry that it fails to give us a sufficiently critical perspective on our relationship to the natural world...the black environmental tradition developed as a repsonse to two major problems: the system of race slavery...and the claims of scientific racists. The first severely restricted the ability of black American to...modify and interpret the landscape. The second legitimated racial oppression and promoted an environmental determinism...In response...black theorists have focused on the improtance of creative agency....But that focus creates what appear to be three obstacles to developing a useful environmental ethic out of this tradition: anthropocentrism, resistance to any sort of environmetnal determism, and a rejection of the individualistic perspective characteristic of Americna preservationism (194).
One's proper relationsihp to the natural environment is...best understood as response rather than mastery...a response...to a natural world that ongoing cultural practices have already funded with meaning....True black agrarianism derives from Christian agrarianism....conceived as (195) theocentric: ....the natural world is God's creation, and its moral value derives...from its source and its prupose...to witness God's glory and power (196).
One important theme in Amerian preservationism is the claim that wilderness is valuable because it allow individauls to escape from social conventions, demands, and oppressions....But in the black tradition, civil freedom is a precondition for natural freedom. Freedom means primarily the freedom to make a home and comunity, and to participate in a vital culture....It also, of course, means the freedom to leave home, to start over somewhere else. But these are all the actions of citizens...seeking a more meaningful relationshp to a land over which they already have collective dominion...racial and class identities are implicated in the individual's relationship to nature...this approach offers little insight into how an individual's contact with the natural world can liberate one from those very social structures that make it available...communig with nature didn't give [Du Bois] relief from social oppression; it instead led him to reflect on the oppressive social structures he had to negotiate in order to achieve contact with the natural world (199).
black environmental thought offers a critical normative perspective....we have inherited a world scarred by history. Slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, its physical features, its patterns of possession and dispossession (200).
our common task: to redeem an dto possess a land cursed by inustice--to make of our shared world "a more fitting home" for human lives (201).