Black ecological relations and methodologies

Abstract

Black environmental geographies scholarship has made significant strides in expanding the ways we understand ecologies and ecological relationships interweaving the lives of black communities across the black diaspora. In this article, I review the analytical interventions in this field that press the bounds of traditional environmental injustice framings of black ecological experiences and relations. Drawing on black studies, this literature, first, helps us to position present racial ecological landscapes within historical and long-standing logics of race, colonialism, and imperialism. Moreover, it breathes nuance and life into discourse that overrepresents black ecological relationships as lack, decay, and containers of pollution and death, with very little everyday living. Building on these interventions and understanding the dialectic relationship between death-dealing and life-affirming socio-ecological processes at work in black environmental geographies, I call attention to interdisciplinary methodological approaches that bring together black environmental geographies and critical environmental science to behold the complex enmeshment of social and biophysical relations and the entanglement of life and degradation that interweave the two.

Introduction

Hegemonic environmental imaginaries figure blackness and environmental practices or concerns writ large as disparate issues (Taylor 1989, 1997; Finney 2014). Yet, the reality of black livingness tells a different story. Black environmental geographies scholarship has made significant strides in expanding the ways we understand ecologies and ecological relationships interweaving the lives of black communities across the black diaspora. This terrain of black ecological life is expansive and complex; it consists of the innumerable ways of knowing and relating to the earth and the sky across the diaspora, including the harms and activisms that have long been described across environmental justice (EJ) studies (UCC 1987; DiChiro 1992; Bullard 1994; Cole and Foster 2001; Checker 2005; Sze 2006; Wilson et al. 2010; Taylor 2014; Davies 2018; Pellow and Vazin 2019; Vasudevan 2019; Nagra et al. 2021) since the 1980s and climate justice (CJ) (Hardy, Milligan and Heynen 2017; Ranganathan and Bratman 2019; Hendricks and Van Zandt 2021; Spears 2021; Muhanguzi et al. 2023; Perry 2023) scholarship more recently. These studies have underscored disproportionate environmental and climate hazards that marginalized communities are exposed to and the politics that make them possible. EJ scholarship has particularly focused on aspects such as pollution, waste sites, and the ways folks resist the presence of these in their communities (Bullard 1990; Pulido 2000; Cole and Foster 2001; Checker 2005; Walker 2012; Taylor 2014). CJ studies, on the other hand, highlight the ways marginalized communities experience climate change impacts more severely than their counterparts (Wilson et al. 2010; Schlosberg and Collins 2014; Rice, Long and Levenda 2021; Perry 2022). Black ecological life both includes and extends far beyond these processes of environmental harm and the litigations and activisms against them. It is important to continue the work begun by EJ scholar-activists in the 1980s and 1990s; however, as we move into the production of five decades of scholarship on this matter, we must be cautious not to essentialize black relationships to the environment to degradation nor a limited scope of activism. What do we know of black ecological life other than pollution and degradation (Bruno 2024)?

Black environmental geographies scholarship brings complication and texture to conceptualizations of black environmental relationships in two keyways. Drawing on black studies interventions, black environmental geographies literature, first, helps us position present racial ecological landscapes within historical and long-standing logics of race, colonialism, and imperialism. Second, this scholarship also breathes nuance and life into discourse that, at times, overrepresents black communities as containers of pollution and degradation, often figured as strictly urban or industrial with little everyday living.

The field of black geographies, which has always included black environmental geographies research, has long argued against the totalization of subaltern peoples and spaces as homogenous sites of blight, death, and decay (Woods 2002; McKittrick 2011, 2013, 2014; Finney 2014). This is a key contribution of black geographies: there is life and struggle to be found even within sites of domination and violence. These facets coexist, and we should not behold one without the other. Indeed, Katherine McKittrick (2006) defines black geographies as “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and site a terrain of struggle” (7). I identify black environmental geographies scholarship as black geographies work that foregrounds environmental politics, relations, and systems. In line with this broader black geographies tradition, black environmental geographies reads our ecological world through experiences of black life and the work of black novelists, intellectuals, artists, and more to help us imagine how other worlds might be possible.

In this article, I review some key analytical and methodological approaches in the realm of black environmental geographies that press the bounds of traditional framings of black ecological experiences and relations. In particular, I focus on the areas of black food geographies, maroon geographies, and land, water, and place relations. Building on these interventions, I call attention to interdisciplinary methodological approaches for attending to the complex enmeshment of social and biophysical relations and the entanglement of life and degradation that interweave the two. Black environmental relationships have long applied what could be considered a scientific approach to their surrounding ecosystems. I explore the ways black geographies and various forms of environmental science can speak to each other.

Land, belonging, and futures in black environmental geographies

Nathan Hare (1970) and Sylvia Wynter (1971) provided some of the early ground for thinking through black communities and their relationships to surrounding ecologies. In the next decade, it was the work of EJ scholars like Robert Bullard, Beverly Wright, Shelia Foster, and Dorceta Taylor that launched the place-focused approaches that became common across the decades of EJ studies on black communities (Bullard 1983, 1990; Bullard and Wright 1987; Taylor 1989; Foster 1993). This scholarship provided a significant turn in analyses of black communities and their environments, particularly because it was linked to a broader social movement, the EJ movement (Cole and Foster 2001; Schlosberg 2004; Checker 2008; Gomez, Shafiei and Johnson 2011; Taylor 2016). Place-specific studies on the circumstances of black EJ communities have proliferated since (Bullard 1983; Checker 2005; Lerner 2006, 2010; Bullard and Wright 2009; Ducre 2013; Vasudevan 2019), often with focuses on waste facilities, pollutions sources, or other forms of environmental neglect. Contemporary environmental policy reform, such as siting and increased regulation, at local and national levels has been a primary concern of this literature (Schlosberg 2012; Harrison 2015; Hughes et al. 2021).

While there are mentions of the ways the recent landscape of racialized environmental politics is rooted in a plantation regime and logics of slavery (e.g., Bullard 1993, 13), this framing was not a common approach in this line of inquiry. Clyde Woods's Development Arrested (1998) created a precursor for the ways that black environmental geographies scholarship today deals with environmental burdens faced by black communities and beyond. Focused on the US South, Woods (1998, 2017) describes the arc of the region from a space violently dispossessed from Indigenous populations and dominated by the plantation regime through to contemporary ecological precarity and land relations in the region. Woods (1998, 2017) explains the ideological continuity in the political economy of the US South and the ways that maintain black ecological subordination in the region. Black agrarian geographies scholars have highlighted various industries that are mutations of their plantation precursors and perpetuate plantation logics and racialized exploitations (Williams 2018, 2020; Williams and Freshour 2022). However, abject exploitation is not the end of Woods's interventions on black life in the South. Throughout his works, Woods (1998, 2017) builds a notion of the blues epistemology that describes modes of black placemaking, relation building, and survival through this long durée of the plantation regime in the South. Wood's emphasis on the blues tradition across the South as well as the social movement work of early EJ scholars underscores the ways black environmental geographies have been grounded in the lived experiences of black communities from its onset.

Land and waterscapes of belonging and ecological intimacies

In the following sections, I review the stories of black land and water relations as ecologies of non/belonging for black peoples extending on the traditions described above. This scholarship presents us with the ways communities have etched out belonging, ecological relationality, and life across land and waterscapes. King (2019) laments the over-theorization of black peoples, in the US South and beyond, within aquatic metaphors , often on routes, but without landed roots. King (2019) argues that black peoples in the diaspora are more often linked to oceanic motifs, think the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993; Tinsley 2008), than the concept of land (outside of labor [King 2016]) and grounded belonging. However, topics of black land relations are found throughout this field. We can find stories of black farmers, gardening, food ways, land tenure, land loss, the impacts of anti-blackness on land, Afro-Indigenous communities and coalitions, and more. Importantly, water relations have not been abandoned in this field, rather various scholars have challenged this binary and call attention to the way aquatic knowledge has also been central to black placemaking and ecological life.

Stories of black land relations and foodways

Notions of black land relations are often predicated on the non-belongingness tied to blackness and black spatial relations. Black geographies scholars argue that blackness, in its denial of humanity, is often understood as aspatial, ungeographic, and without cartographic capacity (McKittrick 2006a, 2011; Bledsoe 2019). However, scholars writing on black environmental geographies underscore the long existence of black land relations and unpack their complexity. This nuance is particularly apparent in writing on black agrarian and food geographies. Scholars in this arena have continued to foreground the expertise, insights, and experiences of black peoples across the globe to stress the multiplicity of land relations. While the plantation and enslaved labor is certainly an important context for theorizing black food and agrarian geographies, this is certainly not the totality of it.

Elevating the work of black farmers, activists, and faith organizations, McCutcheon (2013, 2015, 2019, 2021) highlights the ways various black communities across the US South have procured land and tended such land in efforts to provide not only food, but also housing, safe spaces of belonging, and ultimately work toward black liberation. In this same vein, Freshour and Williams (2023) chart the ways anti-capitalist, abolitionist organizers, and movements have long co-existed and co-evolved as a constant opposition to the plantations’ ecological and social legacies in the Mississippi Delta apparent in food, agrarian, and carceral systems. While these scholars provide a flavor for black food movements throughout time across the US South, Reese (2019) takes readers on a deep dive into how black community members in Washington D.C. make everyday life and self-reliance within an anti-black foodscape through gardening and other forms of food provision, refusing the dominant narrative of absolute lack often associated with black food access. Scholars of black food and agrarian geographies recognize the trauma and neglect in the reality of black food access and precarity of land tenure, but they expand on this to stress modes of healing, survival, and provision in spite of all (Ramírez 2015; Jones 2019). There is a land connection that requires labor but moves beyond a totalization of land relations as exploitation. There are land relations as growth, land relations as self-reliance, land relations as memory, and land relations as freedom.

These theoretical interventions are built on the black geographies methodological practice of foregrounding oft overlooked stories and archives of black livingness (McKittrick 2006a, 2011). These texts draw on archival and document analyses as well as ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies to bring us stories of social movements and modes of insisting on black land relations and life even within social and political economic systems often opposing black land tenure and liberation. Reese (2019) explains that she ended up revising research questions in her ethnographic work in response to black community members sharing their own thoughts and concerns on black food geographies. Reese states that early conversations with community members “changed what [she] was listening for” (Reese 2019, 3). Reese teaches us that this sort of responsiveness, humility, and reflexivity in research methods may allow us to undo and mitigate the disciplinary trappings that have perpetuated a limited scope of black life. She goes on to say, “if I got out of the way, Black people would tell their stories how and when they wanted. It was not my job to dictate which stories should be told, but if I let them, Black storytelling would lead me places that I had not planned to go” (Reese 2019, 3). This demonstrates McKittrick's assertion that such epistemologies reveal struggle and new knowledge systems (McKittrick 2011). They shed light on black spatial and ecological knowledges that are often overlooked and dismissed in research related to these communities.

Mapping marronage and waters of belonging

Modes of finding, creating, and maintaining spaces of freedom, even in realms of domination and violence, are a theme of black environmental geographies. Building off the work of Sylvia Wynter (1971), McKittrick (2013) points out that “the plot illustrates a social order that is developed within the context of a dehumanizing system as it spatializes what would be considered impossible under slavery: the actual growth of narratives, food, and cultural practices that materialize the deep connections between blackness and the earth and foster values that challenge systemic violence.” The notion of the plot epitomizes the insurgent and maroon geographies that have been a pronounced intervention of black environmental geographies scholarship. Writing on maroon geographies not only highlights the ecological knowledges, relationships, and changes associated with those communities who had escaped enslavement and other forms of anti-black violence, but also how life and ecological relations are remembered and etched out today in the midst of the many afterlives of slavery. These communities often took to undesirable, “unruly,” or “refuse” environments, such as dense forests, swamps, and other wetlands, for safety to escape slavery and create new spaces of belonging (W. J. Wright 2020; Winston 2021; Purifoy 2023).

While much of the work on black agrarian and food geographies has been focused on the United States, maroon geographies sheds light on the constellation of black ecological experiences in other sites of the black diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean and South America. Moulton (2022) describes the deep knowledge of the Jamaican forests that maroon communities possessed and the ways they protected themselves and their environments in these forests. Moulton explains how colonial fear of these maroon groups left an ecological imprint as areas of the forest were left intact where maroon communities challenged white settler colonialists’ access to these ecologies. Thusly, this imprint on the ecological landscape of Jamaica demonstrates the placemaking and cartographic production of black ecological life that black environmental geographies highlights. Bledsoe (2017) discusses the ways environmental protection, as well as land redistribution, have been key to maroon communities, or quilombos, in Brazil and the United States. Reminiscent of Wood's presentation of the continuities from enslavement to present-day extractive industries in the US South (1998, 2017), Bledsoe (2019) explain the ways extractive industries, undergirded by the state, perpetuate environmental harms against black communities in Brazil. Yet, these communities draw on various modes of resistance to maintain life in hostile spaces.

A deep familiarity of wetlands and waterscapes has long been integral to marronage across the diaspora. Dunnavant (2021) highlights that much of the discourse around marronage has been focused on land and terrestrial knowledge. Dunnavant (2021) interjects in this discourse the depth of maritime knowledge required in marronage as well. Dunnavant utilizes oceanic mapping, including ocean current data, to foreground seascapes in these journeys for liberation, with particular attention to St. Croix, Puerto Rico, and various other sites in the Caribbean. Dunnavant's oceanic research does important work in bridging us back to the ocean. Maroon geographies literature illuminates the ways black ecological life is neither strictly an ocean nor land phenomena, but all of these at once. These scholars have argued for revised conceptions of black relationships to land (Moulton 2021), water (Dunnavant 2021; Roane 2022), and where the two meet (King 2019; Vickers 2023). Black environmental geographies literature highlights the ways black ecological relationships are expansive and complex. Intimate knowledges of various ecologies have been deployed to maintain black life and seek liberation.

A key methodological contribution of various pieces on marronage is unveiling the cartographic possibilities in representations of black ecologies. The plot and sites of marronage challenge the totalizing of landscapes normatively understood as spaces of extraction and domination. I am struck by the innovative application of mapping in the realm of maroon geographies as multiple scholars share cartographic depictions of fugitive black ecological life often unavailable or hidden in traditional archives, underscoring black populations as geographic actors (Bledsoe 2017; Hyman 2021; Moulton 2022). Hyman's (2021) important work on enslaved peoples’ routes in the Great Dismal Swamp stresses the elusive nature of this sort of mapping work. Hyman reminds us that rendering landscapes through GIS methodologies often calls for an erasure of the nuance and complexity that marronage elicits. Significant archival digging, counter-reading, ground-truthing, and more were required to produce these cartographic renderings that unveil the ways black communities have deployed ecological and navigational knowledges across terrestrial, aquatic, and the in-between to make place, grow networks, and seek liberation (Hyman 2021).

Environmental precarity and place futurity

Literature on environmental precarity and injustice within black environmental geographies unpacks political and social processes that shape the landscape of environmental injustices, but also underscores the importance of connection to place and questions of futurity within the context of environmental and climate precarity. In many ways, black environmental geographies in this vein intersects and overlaps with scholarship on black ecologies. Black ecologies literature stresses the urgency of environmental precarity for black communities around the globe (Hosbey, Lloréns and Roane 2022), while also painting a picture of histories and present of black ecological life forged despite these environmental harms (Roane and Hosbey 2019; Lloréns 2021b; Hosbey, Lloréns and Roane 2022). Roane and Hosbey (2019) explain that black ecologies are sites of harm, yet also hold insurgent knowledge that can help “conceive of futures outside of destruction” (np). Below I describe how some scholars are thinking through the existence and futurity of black places and black livingness as climate change, pollution, and other environmental harms shape black displacement.

EJ scholarship emphasizes legal or policy remedies to unjust distributions of environmental benefits and burdens (Cole and Foster 2001; Walker 2012). However, scholars have stressed the state-centric solutions are not a panacea for EJ, and often environmental injustice is a form of state complicit anti-black violence (Pulido, Kohl and Cotton 2016; Pellow 2017; Bruno 2024). Several scholars have made important interventions underscoring the many ways racial capitalist political economic systems across the globe facilitate and perpetuate the extraction of resources, livelihoods, relations, and lives from communities across the black diaspora (Checker 2008; Pulido 2016; Vasudevan 2019; W. J. Wright 2021; Perry 2023; Perry and Sealey-Huggins 2023). Black geographies resists a totalized framing of these communities to abjection. There is a developing vein of scholarship in black environmental geographies putting forth compelling framings that help us understand complex relationships to place (McKittrick 2011) within toxic surroundings and political economic systems (Ducre 2013; Barron 2017; Brand 2018; Moulton 2021).

Purifoy (2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2023) has produced a body of work that rethinks black places and towns in the context of environmental injustice. First, Purifoy highlights the legal mechanisms deployed to produce and maintain many forms of environmental harms, particularly at local levels in the US South (Seamster and Purifoy 2020; Purifoy 2021a). For example, Purifoy (2021c) explains the ways the Pinehurst, NC municipality utilized colonial land and water management practices to withhold water and land resources while directing waste and pollution to the local black communities through extraterritorial jurisdiction management processes. Yet, importantly, Purifoy simultaneously acknowledges the ongoing nature of black placemaking and maintenance that coexisit and survive within such unjust circumstances. They explain these communities often draw on heir properties approaches among many other practices that illustrate “family-centered land relations” as mechanisms of place maintenance over generations even as they continuously face environmental and political precarities. (Purifoy 2021b; 2021c, 2022). Underscoring this complexity of Black placemaking and environmental precarity, Purifoy states, “…the distance between shortened Black lives [from toxicity and climate change] and dead Black places is farther than might be imagined. Black places are parables of the threats of industrialisation, technology, and white ideals of progress, and they are parables of adaptation, interdependence, and supportability” (Purifoy 2021b, 830). Black environmental geographies scholarship, in particular with examples focused on the Caribbean, calls attention to the many mechanisms communities use to maintain life and intimate ecological, community, and place relations in the midst of climate and environmental precarity (Perry 2020; Lloréns 2021b; García-Quijano et al. 2023; Lara et al. 2023).

Scholarship on black sense of place and ecological relationships draws not only from archival analysis, ethnography, and other qualitative methodological approaches, but also various forms of cultural expression, literary analyses, and Afro-Indigenous epistemologies. Black geographies , from its inception, has insisted that non-hegemonic ways of knowing and relating to place are delineated in subaltern populations’ songs, poems, art, essays, and much more produced even as they are living within the realm of degradation and hostility (Woods 1998, 2017; McKittrick 2006a; Lipsitz 2011). These forms of cultural expression might reveal “how black people represent the world around them, how they represent ‘place’ in a world that has profited from black dis-placement, and how black geographic representation is recast through a struggle, rather than a complacency, with space and place” or a black sense of place (McKittrick 2006a, 29). Scholars writing on black environmental geographies exemplify this interdisciplinarity, drawing on songs to unearth other ways on knowing place and space (Woods 1998, 2017), poems on black livingness and death (Heynen 2020; W. J. Wright 2021), novels and visual art that urge us to speculate and imagine new worlds (Vasudevan and Kearney 2016; Lloréns 2021a; Purifoy 2021b; Reese 2023), and the work, writings, and lives of black intellectuals and activists (McCutcheon 2019, 2021; W. J. Wright 2021). In addition to this analytical work, artistic makings on black ecological experiences and entanglements shine as novel ways in thinking about the complex, and at times contradictory, aspects of black ecological life that often defy disciplinary bounds (Jones 2022).

Possibilities for black diasporic ecological sciences

The black environmental geographies literature delineated above spans social science, humanities, literary studies, and even artistic approaches. Defying disciplinary bounds has been key to black geographies methodologies and theorizations. Sharpe (2016) argues for us to be “undisciplined,” positing that work on blackness and black communities within the confines of a discipline often does violence to knowledge gained in other spaces, such as experiencing everyday life within blackness. Black geographies scholars argue that remaining within the confines of disciplinary traditions reinforces the narrow conceptions that essentialize blackness to lack and decay (Woods 2007; McKittrick 2016; Sharpe 2016). McKittrick (2016) states, “the act of disciplining of thought (the process of habitually delimiting what we know about blackness according to colonial perimeters) stabilizes race and perpetuates anti-blackness” (4, emphasis in original).

Abolition ecologies is one area integrating political ecology into the realm of black geographies. This scholarship, building on Gilmore's (2022) abolition geography interventions, calls on traditional political ecology to seriously question historical underpinnings of the everyday workings of environmental and climate injustices, particularly by incorporating antiracist, postcolonial, and Indigenous theories (Heynen 2016). Heynen and Ybarra (2021) argue for coalitional land-based politics that have the ability to undo the interconnected colonial and white supremacist processes that constitute environmental injustices around the globe, and their entanglements with placemaking practices. As it relates to black environmental geographies, abolition ecology research has dealt significantly with climate change impacts on black communities in the southeastern United States. These scholars point out the ways mitigation and adaptation policies perpetuate black dispossession and sideline black voices and ecological relations (Hardy, Milligan and Heynen 2017). They argue that centering black activists and intellectuals on these matters will allow for more expansive and generative understandings of black land relations, ecological knowledges, and visions of the future (Heynen 2020; Derickson 2022). On this same accord, scholars have argued for a restoration, remediation, and retheorizing of the Anthropocene that foregrounds black knowledges, livingness, and connections to place (Barron 2017; Davis et al. 2019; Barra 2023).

Black ecological life contains a multitude of ecological knowledges, intimacies, and non-normative scientific methodologies. These flow within and outside the bounds of what may be considered Afro-descendent and Afro-Indigenous traditional ecological knowledges. Moreover, black environmental knowledges and strategies are frequently deployed in making survival possible in these liminal sites of lack, non/belonging, and environmental precarity. The long existence of black farmers, healing strategies, climate adaptations, surviving on the edges, the refuse, the “un”inhabitable all require adept ecological knowledges. Knowledges practiced across the diaspora. Knowledges often acquired beyond traditional scholarly or “scientific” avenues. Furthermore, many social aspects affecting black life reverberate in the land, water, air, plant life, and wildlife surrounding these communities (Bruno 2023). These facets underscore the pertinence of environmental science questions to black geographies. I am not arguing for the wholesale incorporation of Afro-descendent ecological knowledge into the discipline of geography or environmental science. Rather, I am asking us to wonder how the integration of black environmental geographies and critical environmental sciences might not only produce scholarship that identifies the ways racism and colonialism have and continue to shape ecological systems and sciences, but also to challenge, expand, and enhance an environmental science for a more just and sustainable world. However, as of yet, scholarship on black environmental geographies has largely consisted of social science and humanities approaches.

While abolition ecologies pushes political ecology to take racial and colonial histories more seriously, critical physical geography argues that political ecology falls short on its engagement with “ecology.” Critical physical geography is the primary space in geography that is arguing for a deeper integration of environmental science and critical human geography (Lave et al. 2014; Lave, Biermann and Lane 2018; Beray-Armond 2022), along with other scholars in fields, such as ecology, anthropology, and geology. There are several scholars working at the intersection of Indigenous studies and environmental science stressing the importance of questioning the coloniality in environmental science, presenting anti- and decolonial ways to conduct environmental science, and stressing the ways colonialism has altered Indigenous lands and lifeways while also foregrounding adaptations in good relations (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018; Jennings 2020; Liboiron 2021a, 2021b; Farrell et al. 2022; Hird et al. 2023; Jennings et al. 2023; Leonard et al. 2023).

While there are few, there are indeed some scholars bringing together environmental sciences and black geographies (Yusoff 2018; Franklin et al. 2020; Hanks et al. 2021; Bruno 2023; Denson et al. 2023; Pierre, Whalen and Davis 2024). Some are calling attention to the ways racial capitalism and colonialism, in their many iterations, have impacted broader global environmental systems as well as place-specific ecological functions in black communities. Consider ecologists Pierre, Whalen and Davis (2024) who are investigating plantation legacies in soil and plant life in St. Croix, archeologist Flewellen (2019) examining notes of Afro-Crucian life in the archeological record, or my own work considering the legacy of anti-black environmental injustice in trees of the US South (Bruno 2023).

Importantly, there are also projects within and beyond the academy doing this sort of interdisciplinary science to expand mitigation and adaption efforts within liberation and life-giving frameworks. I think of the ocean restoration and climate mitigation work of the group Diving with a Purpose who simultaneously works to preserve black maritime heritage and reinvigorate oceanic relations for black communities through their citizen science (Denson et al. 2023). Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a renowned writer and poet, reframes intricate marine science knowledge, particularly about marine mammals, through a lens of black feminism to impart lessons of survival, mothering, community care, more-than-human relations, and more (Gumbs 2020).

A greater number of contributions from across the diaspora would enhance the generative nature of this interdisciplinary approach. Black studies scholars have contested the oversaturation of Global North/America-centered perspectives on black life for some time (M. M. Wright 2015). This imbalance particularly stands out as the Global South in many ways built the field of political ecologyl in that the environmental lives and experiences of various communities in the Global South are the bases of studies that launched the field (Watts 1983; Blaikie 1985; Hecht and Cockburn 1989). Moreover, this region of the world holds the highest stakes in our current climate crisis (Pulido 2022). Yet, critical environmental science coming out of these regions remains at the periphery or is tucked away as area or development studies, and thusly not relevant to broader, particularly Western, approaches to science and ecological world knowing (Jazeel 2016; Macharia 2016). Nonetheless, there are in fact exciting critical integrations of black geographies and environmental science building in the Global South (Esterhuysen and Knight 2018; García-Quijano et al. 2023; Nascimento 2024; Zangalli Jr 2024). While there are a few exciting examples of critical and feminist political ecology focused on various sites throughout the continent of Africa (Ajibade 2017; Appel 2019; Muhanguzi et al. 2023; Murrey and Mollett 2023), environmental science through a black or Indigenous geographies frameworks from the African continent remains at a lower profile in the field of geography. Environmental studies that foregrounds black life across the diaspora has the potential to strengthen transnational modes of environmental resistance and agency and more closely attend to the complexity of black ecological life lived in the many corners of the diaspora.

Conclusions

Black environmental geographies draws on a myriad of methodologies, analytical frameworks, and disciplines to provide insights into environmental harms and precarity, but also the place, community, kin/ancestors, and ecological caretaking ethics and practices across the black diaspora. This generative and boundary-pushing scholarship and all the communities, past and present, who have cultivated and imparted knowledge to these scholars have breathed life and complexity into discourse on black ecological life. As is often acknowledged in black geographies and black studies, the expansiveness of black life is impossible to encapsulate in academic writings, yet these scholars endeavor to push the bounds of the limited scopes of black ecological relations and experiences.

Black geographies has highlighted the ways communities are in fact geographic actors, and we have only started to explain the vast complexity of this. Literature on black environmental geographies uplifts black land and water relations, marronage, placemaking practices, and the envisioning of black futurity in the face of environmental and climate precarity. This demonstrates the ways these communities are not only geographic actors, but also ecological actors and caretakers. The interconnectedness and intimacy of such communities with surrounding ecological processes gestures toward the need to integrate and read environmental sciences in these spaces through a black geographies lens. As black environmental geographies scholars have indicated, these modes of forging and imagining ecological life and futurity are integral to our collective need for new world building and re-envisioning of planetary caretaking. May these approaches chart paths for undoing destructive socio-environmental structures and processes and rebuilding in ways that center liberation and life for the human and more than human world.