As Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and many subsequent disasters have made clear, black people in the US and in the wider Africa Diaspora are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Yet these communities are often marginalized within discussions centering earth’s metabolic transformation, flattened as victims of toxic dumping or rising water, scapegoated as abusers of the environment, or neglected as having no stakes in questions of the present or environmental future. Moreover, the narrowed frame of environmental science or policy as the only sites generating practicable solutions isolate matters of climate from their historical, social, geographic, and political production, further obscuring the contradictions driving us toward biophysical collapse.
Black Ecologies as a vital subfield emerged as a rejoinder in this context. Building on terminology coined by Nathan Hare (1970) the field of Black geographies as articulated by Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittric’s “Black geographies,” the imperatives of environmental justice described by Robert Bullard, and the opening generated by Françoise Verges more recent description of the “racial capitalocene” this field has emerged especially in the aftermath of COVID’s devastation to outline the historical emergence and enduring relations of racialized disposability in its intimacy with ecocide as well as the power and possibilities of alternative practical, epistemological, social, and ontological entry points generated from within African diasporic life, thought, and practice. These are the matters we will examine in this course.