African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (review)

Smith’s goal in writing this book was to bring African-American voices into the history of American environmental thought.¹ Hence, she had to expand the traditional boundaries of environmental thought beyond concern about wilderness, parks, wildlife, and pollution, and include democratic agrarianism, scientific racism, and pragmatism. Smith focuses on such leading black intellectual and political writers as Martin Delany, Henry Bibb, Booker T. Washington, and especially W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, placing them in conversation with mainstream white intellectuals and with each other. In this body of thought she locates the roots of the environmental-justice movement that emerged in the 1980s. Smith consciously excludes other contributing elements to black environmental thought, particularly popular ideas and folk culture, as well as religion, magic, songs, stories, and the actual engagement of farmers and hunters with the natural world. Intending only to lay the groundwork for future study, she acknowledges that much remains to be done to recover black environmental thought completely.

Throughout the history that Smith traces, African Americans subordinated nature and the environment to greater goals of freedom and racial equality. To nineteenth-century theorists, slavery and post-Emancipation racial oppression distorted and perverted blacks’ relationship to the land, to the detriment of both land and people. They mixed goals of racial justice with the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of land possession. Because white writers at the end of the century excused the discrimination and segregation of African Americans on the grounds of a putative primitive closeness to nature and distance from civilization, black writers felt pressure to distance themselves from nature at the very time when environmental writers from John Muir to Theodore Roosevelt were trying to get closer to it. By the early twentieth century, pragmatism and primitivism in art suggested that experience, not racial attributes, shaped the human relationship to the environment, thus granting a greater role to culture. Smith brings her analysis to a culmination in the Harlem Renaissance analysis of the urban environment, which she sees as a bridge to the environmental-justice movement.

The book has many strengths. Smith helpfully identifies many themes of nature and the environment in the works of major African-American writers; her analysis of DuBois’ writings in particular is insightful and informative. This short book will indeed form, as the subtitle suggests, “foundations” for future study. The long gap between Harlem Renaissance writers and the environmental-justice movement, however, will need to be filled and the contributions of most aspects of literature and popular culture added. The book raises the question, however, of whether redefining the subfield of environmental thought to include agrarianism, scientific racism, and urbanism renders it too broad to be meaningful.

In a larger sense, Smith’s redefinition returns to Clarence Glacken’s foundational conception of the concerns of environmental thought in Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, 1967): “These three ideas—of a designed earth, of the influence of the environment on man [sic], and of man as the modifier of the environment—were . . . modified and enriched by other theories relating to culture growth and to the nature of the earth” (5). By building on Glacken’s broad definition of environmental thought, Smith shows that it need not be only a “white thing.”