Relationships with the Environment - Justice Le Tran Alexander

In the book, African American Environmental Thought, the black tradition of environmental thought is not the only intellectual tradition of environmental discourse, but one that offers valuable insight into questions of the interrelations between race and the environment. The black tradition rejects the idea that the natural environment is determinant of the value of culture challenging the environmental determinism embedded in mainstream American environmental thought. African American thinkers like Du Bois have referenced the realities of enslavement, segregation, dispossession, and environmental racism as leading elements guiding how Black communities engage with the land. This approach reframes the discourse as a socially and politically constructed experience. The benefits I see in pursuing this perspective are deep because I feel that we need to interrogate how inequalities in land access, labor, and environmental risk have structured Black life and American ecology. However, this does not mean a separation of thought, rather an examination of how underrepresented environmental interactions can inform the pursuit of environmental studies.

Looking closer at relationships with the land developed during slavery the exploitation of land and labor becomes evident. Plantation agriculture in the American South was a tandem arrangement of forced labor and control of nature. Controlling the land and making it productive was paramount for economic, political, and social status. Control of this land meant also controlling the labor force which worked the land---primarily being slaves. Slaves on these plantations found that they were intimately tied to their environments by force---not by choice. Similar to how the progression of society is increasingly narrowed into a mechanism of productivity mirroring a living organism; the work on a plantation was characterized in terms of property management with enslaved individuals expected to work like cogs within a machine. These are the types of exposures which can help broaden the conversation on environmental relationships. 

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