"To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History (review)

The emergence of environmental history as a distinct field during the last few decades—essentially as a post–Earth Day discipline—has produced a rich array of research. This scholarship has often been politically charged, even passionate. While the field has expanded to encompass regions beyond the United States and to examine environmental issues of Native Americans and women, comparatively little has been written about African Americans. So it is that "To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a welcome addition to the literature.

Arranged chronologically, most of the fourteen chapters are concerned with the twentieth century, although a handful cover topics in the nineteenth century and the antebellum South. Mart Stewart and Scott Giltner both address African Americans and their relationship to the environment under slavery. Stewart focuses on the agricultural contributions of slaves, showing how, in an explicitly repressive institution, people found positive expressions of freedom in the landscape. Hunting and fishing, both in ser-vice to white elites and as subsistence living, are explored in the Giltner chapter. The defiance of authority and the ingenuity of slave customs are interwoven in the rich environmental tapestry that both authors present.

Progressive reform and agricultural extension services within the realm of African-American women's gardening are problematized by coeditor Dianne Glave. She argues that productivity rather than proper femininity defined their labor, both in the home and the garden. In "Turpentine Negro," Cassandra Johnson and Josh McDaniel expose the harsh realities of life in the forest, living in camps under the repressive system of debt peonage. The view of living in nature as "the hard life" and moving to the city as "a step up" is a theme repeated in a number of contributions.

Another common theme concerns the difficulties experienced by African Americans seeking to enjoy the amenities of urban parklands and suburbia's green landscape. Colin Fisher's chapter begins with the incident that started the Chicago race riot of 1919—a boy drowning after being hit by a rock when his raft floated into a "whites only" part of Lake Michigan. Fisher ties this incident to a fear of nature by some urban African Americans: while they viewed outdoor leisure and green spaces as an antidote to the ills of urban living, their access was stifled by racist attitudes. This narrative is repeated in Christopher Sellers's intimate oral history of one immigrant family's path from the Virgin Islands, to New York City, to an effort to capture the dream of suburban homeownership on Long Island. His oral history documents a family traveling to Levittown after the 1948 Supreme Court decision banning racially restrictive covenants, only to be told that the development was for whites only.

Both Stoll and Glave address the important role of the church in African-American environmental history. The church funded some of the first environmental-justice research in the late twentieth century, and still plays an advocacy role in environmental-justice activism contra that of many white churches, which not only tend to ignore the topic, but in the case of some evangelical sects even oppose the Green movement on the basis of its alliance with liberal politics. In the final chapter of the book, Carl Anthony characterizes African-American environmentalism as a concern for an ecology of life. He explains that "the hidden narrative of race . . . has to do with the fragmentation and disruption of personal and community life, and therefore the quest for wholeness" (p. 205).

While this is a very different version of environmental history than narratives about the destruction of forests, the loss of species, the uprooting of indigenous cultures, and the settlement of the West, it is a history that is uniquely American and that also provides an opening for "other," more community-encompassing environmental histories to be written.