This collection derives from an ongoing experiment in thinking through and with the potential epistemic insurgency presented by our loose collective's working terminology, “Black ecologies.” This term moves from the resonances between the editors’ own research in New Orleans, Puerto Rico, and Virginia, respectively. Each of us considers from our different vantages the ecological consequences of slavery and its afterlives in the enduring regime of extractivism and disposability shaping Black communities in the Diaspora. This resonance has inspired us to collaborate in various formations, including a virtual dialogue about the environment for the People's Strike organization in July 2021, the Black Ecologies series at Black Perspectives, the virtual gathering hosted by the Black Ecologies Initiative at Arizona State University in Spring 2022, “Making Livable Worlds” (following co-editor Hilda Lloréns’ monograph title), and a zine publication, which have together added further integrity, meaning, and possibilities for thinking with this formulation outside a restrictive or proprietary vision for its potential.

In curating these articles, we ask what this formulation might do for further transforming the intellectual terrain currently codified through the string of euphemisms (climate change, Anthropocene, “green,” etc.) associated with hegemonic environmentalism centered in Universities. We argue, following Kathryn Yusoff (2019) and others, that these liberalist discourses isolate the various climatic catastrophes we face from their broader historical production, as well as the geological sedimentation of the anti-Black social-environmental order we inherited. As Axelle Karera notes, “the insidious problem of the Anthropocene is the generalized—perhaps even calculated—unwillingness to account for past and current imperial injustices, coupled with a rampant inability to imagine alternative futures outside an apocalyptic state of emergency that is mostly inspired by a narrative of vitality, and in which disposable life or ‘life-death’ remains largely unaccounted for” (2019: 33). The construction of what Francoise Vergès’ (2017) term the “racial capitalocene” as well as the histories of abolition seeking its demise have not yet been fully interpreted through their foundational role as a dialectic of environmental destruction and environmental insurgency. Hegemonic modes of environmentalist inquiry tend to efface the critical insights, world-making, and world-sustaining practices of global Black communities—primarily Afro-diasporic—but this issue also bridges connections to communities without recent African ancestry who have articulated political and social connections to Blackness with respect to their position within racialized national and global hierarchies, such as caste, exemplifying Achille Mbembe's (2017) conceptualization of “Becoming Black of the world” (6).

“Black Ecologies” is a designation, of course, indebted to Nathan Hare's critical 1970 essay from The Black Scholar. In “Black ecology,” he called out the hypocrisy of the white-dominated environmentalist movement in the United States that at a fundamental level failed to make the connection between racist housing discrimination and the racialized maldistribution of environmental degradation. Furthermore, in the opening paragraph Hare noted that the white environmentalism movement laid out an agenda that was “reformist and evasive of the social and political revolution which black environmental correction demands” (1970: 2). Collectively, this issue critiques the twin forces of toxic earth stewardship and racial capitalism, and works to responsibly render visible the work of Black communities to create useful alternatives.

Taken together, we challenge the enduring evasion of the insights of Black histories, Black intellectual thought, Black social and political movements, and Black Studies within the theoretical and conceptual edifices of the disciplinary formations associated with “environmental humanities,” “environmental social sciences,” “environmental science,” and related fields. These frameworks tend to naturalize and ultimately forward a ceaseless horizon of extraction and disposability connected to the creation of a “discardable environment,” as well as the conditioning of “throwaway lives” (Wynter 1994: 10), by still centering efforts at decarbonization through support for so-called green technologies without a commitment to the end of capitalist regimes of extraction, accumulation, and disposability. Even if these modes of addressing climate catastrophe have an impact on the overall carbon metabolism of our society (and it's not clear they do), they are still precipitating a new round of global enclosure through mining for lithium, the outsized energetic demands for mining cryptocurrency and maintaining cloud computing, as well as other forms of extractive violence threatening the world's majority—both human and non-human—in the name of profit-driven growth.

As we conceive it, “Black ecologies” underscores the harmful transformations of earth's geological and ecological processes in relation to the extractivist and accumulationist prerogatives of gendered racial capitalism dating to its historical emergence and continuous transformations of the earth's metabolism through the neoliberal age (Gilmore 2007; Haley 2016; Harrison 2018; Pulido 2016; Quan 2019; Robinson 1983). The industrial era quickened the violent sundering and expropriation of ecosystems and non-human life. As Clyde Woods wrote pointedly, colonial expansion and conquest enthroned a “worldview [which] saw the ecosystem in all its biodiversity as isolable and exploitable parts: forests became timber, deer became fur, water became irrigation, and people became slaves” (1998: 43). Despite varying and shifting ecclesiastical commitments, the brutal extirpation of Indigenous peoples and the reterritorialization of their infrastructures and worlds divided between competing European empires came together under a shared ideology of the West's dominion, which rendered the earth as Man's domain and therefore, as sellable and fungible property (King 2019; Marshall 2012; Williams 1993; Wynter 2003).

Following the demographic collapse of many Indigenous communities, as well as their flora and fauna relatives in the Americas, which itself registers as a geologically inaugural moment of the racial capitalocene, Europeans turned to the massive enslavement of Africans to transform the land “of nobody and nothing” into a rent paying, wealth-generating imperial complex (Marshall 2012; McKittrick, 2015; Yusoff 2019). As Walter Rodney underscored, European merchants’ extraction of Africans as enslaved rendered Africa “as a periphery of the American periphery,” where Europeans “raided rather than cultivated” (1979: 277). In their respective accounts of the transformation of Futa Djalon and the Gold Coast, Rodney (1970) and Stephanie Smallwood (2008) demonstrate that the transatlantic slave trade helped transform the geographies and ecologies of the West African coast, precipitating demographic transformation, unprecedented deforestation, and the commercialization that spurred global capitalism as we know it. The transatlantic trade itself dislocated oceanic life, unmooring it from its rhythms and spatial distribution with slave ships being followed by sharks and other deep ocean life (Mustakeem 2016; Rediker 2008).

Part of the ideological precondition of Africa's forced role as the supplier of expendable and fungible bodies as the raw materials of empire was the territorial demarcation of African inferiority. This was inscribed on African women's bodies with respect to their supposed anatomical differences emphasizing their proximity to animality, and the then speculative investment in the investigation of their reproductive capacity as potential creators of future slaves along with the simultaneous denial of African kinship (Jackson 2021; McKittrick 2006; Morgan 2004; Morgan 2021; Spillers 1987). The slave trade constituted the primal and recurring scene of what Hilda Lloréns (2021) describes as “matriarchal dispossession,” and which Malcom Ferdinand (2021) describes as the dual “matricides of the plantationocene” to underscore the conceptually and materially related expropriation of African women's reproduction and the rendering of “mother earth” itself an enslaved commodity. Faye V. Harrison (2015) has written about the unique crises faced by racialized women under a political economy of “global apartheid,” arguing that the economic viability of Afro-diasporic women and their households are disproportionately affected by ecological devastation, and grassroots organizing from women in these communities must be central to how we imagine sustainable economic and ecological futures.

Despite the ecological transformation precipitated by the slave trade in Africa as well as the violent disruption of African modes of place, Oladuah Equiano (1789) alerts us to the enduring sensibilities of African visions of place and ecology maintained across the personal and collective ecological–social catastrophes of the slave trade and in the diaspora. Equiano maps his dislocation through taste and smell, suggesting his epistemological orientation toward what we might, following Ferdinand (2021) and Ebony Golden (2022), consider a sensually immersive relation to the earth as opposed to forms of mapping premised on the dominant visual epistemology coinciding with conquest and Enlightenment's epistemological revolution (Wynter 2003). As Keith H. Basso suggests “place-making is a form of cultural activity … and so it can be grasped only in relation to the ideas and practices with which it is accomplished” (1996: 7; emphasis in original). In the case of Equiano, it is notable that he marks place and movement through references to taste and nature. Specifically, he describes his transformation from a member of a rich village “in a charming fruitful vale,” where “nature [was] prodigal of her favours” to the dispossession of the slave ship and enslavement. Although enslaved prior to boarding the ship, the places between where he was kidnapped originally up to his encounter with the coast are noted through references to familiar landscape, food, and thus, to flavors, tastes, and smells, not just as contextual of his known reality, but also fundamentally as shaping the socialities of this familiar terrain. Along the way, “in all the places where [he] was the soil was exceedingly rich; the pomkins, eadas, plantains, yams, &c. &c. were in great abundance, and of incredible size.” Equiano's recollection of this verdant landscape is punctuated by references to abundance in textures, smells, and tastes associated with an edible and sensory landscape contrasted sharply with the exacting environmental terror of the slave ship and its negation of even a basic desire to smell and taste: “I was put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing.” This alternative mode of recalling place and environment suggests the enduring Africanness of Black immersion and movement through and with the environment, one distinct from the dominant visual power associated with Enlightenment and enclosure.

In the Continental Americas, especially in the early Spanish conquest, enslaved African and Indigenous peoples were forced to transform landscapes into mining extractive complexes for silver and gold production, serving as the raw material of the extension of the Spanish empire through a process wedding Blackness to branding and baptism (Bryant 2014; Galeano 1971). In the Caribbean (ranging from the Chesapeake to the southernmost parts of the Caribbean Basin proper)—which possessed few of the precious metals coveted by the Spanish—the French, English, and Dutch picked off poorly maintained Spanish and Portuguese possessions (as well as peripheral zones) to their galleon trade, including Virginia. This inaugurated the plantation complex that forced enslaved Africans to clear the land and institute industrial-scale monocultural production of commodity crops, most significantly sugar, as well as indigo, rice, tobacco, and cotton, with disastrous effects for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa, as well as the ecosystems of all of these places. Saint-Domingue, Barbados, and other European colonies in this region were rapidly deforested to make way for plantations that were simultaneously ecocidal, and which doubled as the first modern work/death camps, where enslaved Africans were expendable and disposable. Notably, however, as Alex Moulton (2022) shows, runaway slaves or maroons in places like Jamaica with more dense forest cover and larger land mass effectively preserved the biodiversity of the interior by integrating themselves into the forest and blocking fearful would-be colonists from settling these habitats and expropriating them, illustrating that from the outset of the plantation's geographic consolidation, Black people carved out spaces of ecological subversion with continued ramifications in the present. Justin Dunnavant (2021) analyzes how enslaved Africans adopted parallel strategies in his archaeological work in St. Croix, exploring maritime marronage and the creation of an oceanic cartography of Black fugitivity in this landscape.

Although the Haitian Revolution (along with regular uprisings by the enslaved across the mining–plantation complex both before and after 1804) threatened to unmake an Atlantic world based on slavery—thereby endangering the fundamental engine of the racial capitalocene—the rise of cotton, and its industrial production in the expropriated territories of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Caddo renewed the vigor of the plantation enclosure in the US context. This drove the radical displacement of the enslaved descendants of Africans from the coastal regions of earlier Anglo settlement to the “Old Southwest” territories and the transformation of swamps and forests into cotton fields serving as the basis for the coal-fired industrial modernity of Britain. Ultimately, these events funded the rapacious conquest of the African continent and encircling of the globe in imperial re-territorialization with reverberations through the neoliberal age.

Far from retreating, the racist-ecocidal violence foundational to modernity, naturalized in the various lives of Malthusian thought, is entrenched in the enduring legacies and relations of gendered racial capitalism and have reproduced and defined an ongoing dynamic in which African and African diasporic communities continue to suffer the legacies of toxic stewardship coupled with the radical disposability of human communities, the ecosystems that sustain them, and in which they are inextricably enmeshed. In Burkina Faso, Brazil, La Guajira, Colombia, Colón, Panama, Haiti, the Southeast of Puerto Rico, Nova Scotia, Tidewater, Virginia, Black Belt Alabama, South Africa, in rural North Carolina, and beyond, Black communities continue to live in sites of violent extraction, endure toxic dumping, face rising sea level and drought, and the ecological consequences of military occupation (Bullard 1990; McCommons 2020; Pierre 2022; Pulido 2016; Purifoy and Seamster 2020). The rapid intensification of global climate catastrophe in the so-called overlapping oil and nuclear ages cannot be divorced from expropriative violence and anti-Black disposability, as well as the failure to contain these logics to Blackness proper (Ahuja 2021). From the uranium mines of the Congo to the devastated oil fields of the Niger Delta and “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, the logics of anti-Black ecocide borne in the slave trade continue to drive the extractive engine of global racial capitalism, enclosure, violence, disposability, and death.

Black ecologies incorporates a means of describing the historically sedimented and enduring geological marginality that African and African diasporic people face. This framework indexes the impacts of the twin global processes of racialization and dispossession as experienced by Black populations, the regions/territories in which they live, and the landscapes on which they depend for sustenance. For us, the ecological struggles experienced by non-Afro descendant people who are racialized as “Black” such as the people of Melanesia (Swan 2022) are encompassed within this framework. In thinking through the aligned forces of capitalist extraction, ecological degradation, and hyper-exploitation of social difference, we recognize the important work of scholars, poets, and activists who extend the analytic connection between racism and casteism, primarily inspired by the work of Dalit Panthers Namdeo Dhasal, Arjun Dangle, and V. J. Pawar. In this volume, we build on the insights of scholars who have articulated these axes of oppression (Pandey 2013; Vengde 2019) to think through what a political and intellectual dialogue between “Black and Dalit ecologies” might look like. We recognize this as an exchange akin to the complex translation work of diaspora (Edwards 2003) rather than a simple conflation of caste and the structural positioning of African descent in global political ecology (Burden-Stelly 2020).

Black ecologies provides a conceptual framework for thinking about the radical epistemological interventions and practices born of African and African diasporic ingenuity and cultivation in relation to the matters of geographic and environmental vulnerability. The world-making and life-sustaining coordinates of Black ecologies are wisely encapsulated in Zora Neale Hurston's description of a visit to Mr. Lewis’ plot: “In spite of the recent illness and the fact that his well had fallen ill, I found Cudjo Lewis full of gleaming, good will. His garden was planted. There was deep shade under his China-berry tree and all was well” (18). As Alice Walker emphasizes in the Foreword to Barracoon, “we also had to struggle to protect our humanity, to experience joy of life, in spite of everything evil we had witnessed or to which we have been subjected” (Plant 2018: x).

From various analytic and conceptual frameworks, Chelsea Frazier (2016), Jarvis McInnis (2019), James Padilioni Jr. (2019), J. T. Roane and Justin Hosbey (2019), Ashanté Reese (2019), Christina Sharpe (2016), and Monica White (2018) have all emphasized the significance of Black expressive and visual cultures to Black intellectual life and the everyday practices of Black world-making. Their scholarship encompasses alternative and sometimes insurgent epistemologies for theorizing transformative relationships to dominant geographies of exclusion, exploitation, and matters of ecology. To that end, Hilda Lloréns (2020) argues that Black communities who live in different geographic locations create mobile ecologies that give expression to mutual aid, collective possibility, and a fugitive Black commons (García-Quijano 2020; Roane 2018). This conception of Black ecologies as sites of possibility for alternative relationships holds bearing on future visions of robust sustainability, reciprocity, Blackness and (non)humanness, and ecological stewardship, despite their consistent demotion as heterodox, folk, or pathological.

This special issue draws out the histories and ongoing realities of Black ecologies as a dialectic formation between global extractivism and disposability on the one hand and the generative epistemological, expressive, social, political, economic, and ecological formations built by Black worldmakers on the other. It opens with James Padilioni Jr.'s engagement with Zora Neale Hurston's funerary ecological-thought, and in particular, her attempts to build a novel “necrogeography.”

Imagine being able to visit a lush, lakeside garden-cemetery in Florida planted with “Magnolias, bay, oaks, palm, pines, camphor, hibiscus, crotons, oleanders . . . ” to pay respects to “illustrious Negro dead,” such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and many other towering Black figures. Collectively, their grave sites would materialize the enormous pantheon of Black diasporic culture and knowledge makers. Padilioni's evocative article engages Zora Neale Hurston's unrealized dream of creating such a wondrous resting place and offers a timely review of the scholarly genealogy of Black necrogeography and deathscapes. Hurston felt strongly that a lack of a “garden of memory” causes “our people to forget” and allows the “spirits of the dead to evaporate” (1945: 2). This imagined necroscape was to be a “place of ravishing beauty” (1945: 1) and, as Padilioni asserts, a place for the cultivation of “hope for flourishing life and sustainable futures.” Significantly, Padilioni's article reminds us of death's religious meanings along with the multiplicity of cultural significations that death exercises on the living. Padilioni critically underscores the significance of the “horticultural” practices of rootmaking, rootworking, root grafting, and their important diasporic lesson: “While rootedness is not a given of nature, neither is uprootedness.”

Ashanté M. Reese and Symone A. Johnson provide a critical interrogation of mutual aid in a context in which, they astutely argue, mutual aid is at risk of being incorporated within the existing non-profit infrastructure and de-radicalized as it is remolded within the rubrics of charity. They historicize otherwise-efforts to develop the capacity to extend mutuality emerging from African-originating spiritual practices and into the everyday ways Black communities create the possibilities for surviving and thriving in the face of the lingering past in the present through the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also engage in ethnographic analysis of their own experiences in Chicago and Austin, emphasizing the power of the prefigurative in mutual aid efforts that inspire feelings of mutuality and immersion together in the world rather than the top-down distribution of resources in the charitable framework that affirms the social hierarchy instead of challenging and transforming it.

Amani C. Morrison's article, “Black Spatial Affordances and the Residential Ecologies of the Great Migration,” riffs off of psychological ecologist James J. Gibson's affordance theory, positing Black spatial affordance as a framework for understanding the quotidian ways that Black communities navigate geographies calcified by antiblackness, residential segregation, and pollution. Morrison analyzes both literary history and social science literature to outline Black spatial affordance in Great Migration-era Chicago. This article works to map out the less spectacular, less heroic, yet creative and innovative ways that Black migrants navigated physical environments designed to engineer structural racism.

Brittany Meché's article generativity reconsiders the significance of aridity as an alternative opening for Black ecologies outside the preponderance of descriptions and metaphors of the diaspora linked to the oceanic or other watery environments. The article begins with a trenchant critique of colonial and neocolonial understandings of the Sahel through the paradigmatic formulation used since the early twentieth century to render it intelligible wasteland vis-à-vis imperial projects reducing land and inhabitability to the possibilities for extraction and especially of growing and exporting profitable commodity crops. Next Meché returns to Africanfuturist texts and film to elaborate a complex relationality between the present and the future in arid contexts. Through these engagements Meché does not render a simplistic reversal from uninhabitable to habitable, but rather examines a complex relation between the dystopic and the utopic, human and nonhuman, as well as other possibilities for habitation and collectivity in the arid reaches of the continent and by extension the diaspora.

Mukul Sharma's review article, “Caste, Environment Justice, and Intersectionality of Dalit–Black Ecologies,” explores the connections between anti-racist and anti-caste political organizing around environmental injustice in the United States and India. Sharma deftly analyzes the key convergences and sites of departure for the political and economic struggles of Dalits and Black Americans in a way that does not collapse the structural forces of “Anti-Black racism” and “Casteism.” The article, instead, puts forward fruitful questions for how to analyze the paired structures of capitalist extraction, environmental degradation, and the exploitation of racialized social difference from the vantage point of “Dalit ecologies.”

Indulata Prasad's “Towards Dalit Ecologies: A Review,” explores the implications of India's caste system on dominant articulations of environmental justice in India. Dalit communities are disproportionately affected by ecological devastation and pollution, and this article centers Dalit articulations of “eco-casteism” and proposes the term, “Dalit ecologies,” in a critical dialogue with “Black ecologies.” Dalit ecologies critique the social inequities that require Dalit exclusion from natural resources and place Dalit communities in close proximity to pollution and waste, but also outline the ways that the social construction of “nature” becomes “caste-ized.” This article analyzes literary and oral narratives that outline Dalit subjectivities and agency under regimes of extraction and ecocide.

In their investigation of placemaking and farming in arid environments in New Mexico and Mexico's Black Pacific, Maya L. Shamsid-Deen and Jayson M. Porter visibilize “historically silenced communities.” To do so, the authors successfully employ a biogeographic method composed of “botanical, geospatial, and political analyses” to counter the prevailing racist historical and sociocultural tropes that devalue Black environmental knowledge and placemaking practices. To make a life under the harsh conditions imposed by regional aridity, Black farmers invented, learned, and taught others dry-land farming techniques, the harvesting and managing of rainfall, the working with the soil to provide and retain moisture, and the planting of drought-adapted plants, among others. The reader will spot many parallels to today's Black farming conditions. For instance, Shamsid-Deen and Porter explain how at various historical moments industrial monoculture “cycled Black zones of refuge in and out of exploitation.” Furthermore, they exhort readers to heed the borderless lessons Costa Chica, Guerrero and Blackdom, New Mexico provide in our currently “drying and warming” world under “anthropogenic climate change.” The article highlights the tremendous ingenuity, drive to live self-sustaining lives, and agency, coupled with deep ecological knowledge of arid terrains possessed by Black residents in Costa Chica and Blackdom. Effort, perseverance, and a resolute disposition were a required part of the toolkit to make a go in, and to cultivate, these harsh environments. Shamsid-Deen and Porter's review aptly demonstrates that residents were willing to struggle against environmental and sociopolitical hardships to achieve a semblance of autonomy and liberation.

Danielle M. Purifoy's “Trees Don't Make the Forest: Remote Control Plantations and Black Forest Ecologies in Rural Alabama” offers a comprehensive engagement about the histories of Black forestland ecologies and relations, as well as the “freedom praxes of Black communities,” in relation to the absentee owned and managed, or “remote control,” timber mono-crop plantations that take up 23 million acres of land in Alabama. The article keenly illustrates how the clearing of native pine forests to make way for extractive plantation practices brutalized the land, the non-human animals that made a home in this habitat, as well as Indigenous and Black people who lived and still live there today. “The fate of forests and Black people in the US South are deeply intertwined.” Purifoy explains that Black people lived “close to the ground” and they persisted in creating forest ecologies that sustained them through the cultivation of foodstuff, fishing, and foraging. Furthermore, their livingness has meant their successful creation of “homeplace” for safety, collective sustenance, multi-generational interdependence, spiritual practices, and the passing down of traditions and cultural identity. Purifoy concludes by warning that in the present, the significant climate impacts of timber plantations on Black communities are troubling because this brutally extractive model “leave communities more vulnerable to toxic pollution and climate change” and “with fewer of the natural resources on which they often depend to live.”

Alex A. Moulton and Inge Salo's “Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism” provides an incisive review of the field of Black Geographies and the emerging related field of Black Ecologies. Situating these modes of thought within the Black Radical Tradition, Moulton and Salo outline how these discourses can be read as a form of insurgent ecocriticism that refuses the liberal “blindness” to structural analyses of race and antiblackness in dominant forms of literary ecocriticism. The article concludes by providing a framework for Global Black ecocritical scholarship that would expand the scope of Black geographies and ecologies.

As the articles in this collection illustrate, our conception of “Global Black Ecologies” spans Africa, the Americas, and beyond. This collective framework indexes the world-making and insurgent potentialities produced by Black communities across diverse geographies and landscapes. We recognize that this is not an exhaustive volume with respect to those unique yet interrelated Black ecologies. However, we hope that the curation of these articles will inspire and sustain individual and collective efforts to resist antiblackness, environmental racism, and ecocidal capitalism, while simultaneously passing on the cultural traditions, ecological and world-sustaining knowledge, and zones of refuge that allow us to imagine and produce beauty and joy in our environments.