Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

One. “Toil and Soil”: Authorizing Work and Enslavement

25 Work left unfinished has consequences. Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature” (1995) ’Tis like the loss of Paradise, Or Eden’s garden left in gloom, Where grief affords us no device; Such is thy lot, my native home . . . How can I from my seat remove And leave my ever devoted home, And the dear garden which I love, The beauty of my native home? George Moses Horton, “The Southern Refugee” (1865) To hear, and write at candor’s earnest call That I may answer if mankind shall ask, In truth—this be my aim, this be my further task. Albery A. Whitman, Rape of Florida (1884) ONE O “Toil and Soil” Authorizing Work and Enslavement Call: Work and American Ecological Narrative Public awareness about global climate change increased precipitously as a result of the imaginative and intellectual work of former U.S. vice president Al Gore. The book and documentary film An Inconvenient Truth garnered international acclaim and awards, stimulating individuals and organizations to take specific actions to reduce their ecological footprint. However, both the book and the film reflect a strain of environmentalism informed by a limited triumvirate of Ws: wilderness, the West, and whiteness . For instance, in the book’s section “Across the Wilderness,” Gore 26 Chapter One writes, “When I returned from Vietnam in 1971, my wife, Tipper, and I bought a tent, a Coleman stove, a lantern, and two backpacks. Then we threw them in the trunk of our Chevrolet Impala and drove across the country, from Nashville to California, and back again, camping out all along the way” (158). The next year they traveled to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in the Impala; in later years, they took their children on similar trips. Gore’s narrative of traversing the United States in a fossil-fuel-powered automobile includes no mention of carbon emissions. Rather, the reader is invited to imagine the country’s physical beauty and to understand concurrently a presumed environmental benefit of these trips. Gore and his family enact one of America’s celebrated environmental activities: white families journeying westward through America’s grand wilderness. Inherent in this narrative of traveling to distant wilderness in a polluting vehicle is the idea that leisure heightened by appreciation of landscape outweighs the cost of the pollution that such trips produce. Yet, while explicitly inscribing a sense of national and ecological belonging, the trip’s narrative implicitly reflects experiences limited primarily to those who enjoy the unencumbered travel that white privilege often affords. The book and film also support the importance of direct encounter with America’s distant wilderness by explaining that it is a treasure that we can offer as a legacy to following generations. That many Americans may never see it does not matter. As part of the conclusion of the film, Gore marshals a sense of shared heritage to curb global climate change by assuring audiences of America’s significant accomplishment in the face of difficult work. A montage of images reminds audiences of achievements such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and victory in World War II. He tries to convince his audience that they have the fortitude to do the hard work necessary to change the planet’s future. However, one part of America’s work must be listening to uncelebrated ecological narratives from the past to help us with the present. These voices—to be heard in a multitude of forms, texts, and archives—simultaneously express diverse ecological experiences and expand from the conceptual frame of American environmentalism to an ecological frame informed not just by the three Ws, but by work and enslavement as well. Reflecting on the absence of work within the frame of U.S. environmentalism , Richard White explains, “Environmentalists so often seem self-righteous, privileged, and arrogant because they so readily consent “Toil and Soil” 27 to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay, or live” (173). In White’s view, American environmentalism has been foolishly ignoring work as a useful context for progressive change. Seeing work as something that we stop doing to enjoy the leisurely experience of nature has not been enough to advance environmentalists’ causes; it merely supports the notion that “the original human...