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.