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  • Green Like Me?
  • Matthew Klingle (bio)
Kimberly K. Smith. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. x + 257 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

Creation stories are at the heart of every movement. American environmentalism is no exception to the rule. The wilderness cause began with John Muir’s quixotic fight to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from inundation, and future Americans may remember that Al Gore’s slide show launched the crusade against global warming.

Even those environmentalists who define themselves in opposition to the green mainstream have their tales, too. In 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina, a predominantly rural African American community, rose up against a proposed industrial landfill. Five years later, in 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published Toxic Waste and Race in the United States, the nascent movement’s foundational text, which gave the movement its name: environmental justice.

Of course, creation stories are often simple stories. The business of historians is to complicate or overturn them. And this is what makes Kimberly Smith’s thoughtful new book an important contribution to environmental history, if not American history in general. As she argues, black thinkers had long made the environment central in their politics and writings because “much of what they say about racial oppression makes sense only against a background of claims about humans’ proper relationship to the natural world” (p. ix–x). But whites and blacks did not share the same nature. The saints in the conventional conservationist and environmentalist stories—Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Marjory Stoneman Douglas—looked to the countryside to protect imperiled resources and fence off scenic places. In contrast, their black equals—Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver—labored to build parks, reduce pollution, and promote public health in the cities and rural regions home to black Americans. As Smith sees it, the antecedents to environmental justice hide in plain sight, masked by both racism and the centrality of political liberation in black thought itself. [End Page 294]

By focusing on ideas, Smith’s book is a throwback of sorts. Environmental history’s beginnings were in intellectual history, albeit the postwar version forged in the fires that produced American Studies. This is a study of minds cast into nature and not physical nature itself. It is not necessarily a problem. Rather, it is an analytic strength. As she explains, prevailing definitions of environmental thought that privilege wilderness and ecological integrity tend to mute other voices and perspectives. “We may not discover a black Thoreau,” she wisely concludes, “nor should we expect to” (p. 3–4). But she hopes to find something that might inform how all Americans have lived with nature in mind.

Smith sets out a difficult task for herself because, when blacks talked about nature, they were talking about race. In thinking through both, they tended to use similar language as whites even as they put it to different uses. One problem was audience. Unlike most white environmental thinkers, black theorists spoke to many different listeners: whites rich and poor, urban blacks, rural blacks, and others in the black intelligentsia. It was a tricky balancing act requiring multiple translations. Further complicating this dynamic was that blacks were not just second-class politically. The engines of modernity that early conservationists accused of befouling the national landscape generated little prosperity for blacks whose exploited labor drove industrialization. As Smith notes, there was little yearning for wilderness or even the pastoral in this tradition because land for blacks was an instrument of their alienation and dispossession. Put another way, if white Americans wanted to restrain the machine in the garden, blacks wanted to own the garden and the machine, too.

Finding a garden of their own proved elusive at first since Africans originally came to America in chains. Bondage did not axiomatically separate slaves from nature because slavery, as an institution and as a practice, varied widely from place to place and over time. Slaves did more than just harvest staple crops. They cleared forests from Georgia and Carolina hilltops to feed sawmills and turpentine stills, drained swamps in...

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