BLACK EARTH WISDOM

Essays exploring the relationship between people of color and nature.

Penniman, author of Farming While Black and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, shares her conversations with 16 Black environmentalists. “The voices and expertise of Black, Brown, and Indigenous environmentalists, amplified by all those who have eschewed white supremacy, must be heeded if we are to halt and reverse planetary calamity,” writes the author in the introduction. “Ecological humility is part of the cultural heritage of Black people.” The author weaves together the experiences and stories of this diverse group of individuals with respect to their relationships with “Mother Earth” and their perspectives on how to listen to her better. “Embedded in the theory of the supremacy of white people over other races,” writes Penniman, “is the theory of human supremacy over nature.” Among the topics she discusses in her joint conversation with Lauret Edith Savoy, Rue Mapp, and Audrey Peterman are the contention that national parks have been historically unwelcoming to Blacks and that the land used to create the park system was stolen from Native Americans. Regarding the enslavement of African Americans, Penniman contends that Blacks have “confused the subjugation our ancestors experienced on the land with the land herself.” With Greg Watson and Pandora Thomas, she discusses ancestral grandmothers braiding seeds into their hair before boarding the trans-Atlantic slave ships, the value of traditional African diets, and the loss of connection to ancestral foodways. With Alice Walker and Joshua Bennett, the author discusses the role of Black eco-literature as a vital avenue to record and remind people of color of their history. Walker writes about hearing the Earth stories of various African American and Black members of her community, and while she was also interested in biblical stories, she believes they “further enslaved us in a belief system that took us a greater distance from our earthbound wisdom.” Ross Gay provides the foreword.

A powerful and passionate collection of instructive perspectives on nature.