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Book Review
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
It takes dozens of dedicated reviewers uncounted hours to provide the reviews published in Environmental History. It is a service greatly valued by our readership, and one that continues to serve long after an issue's publication. Many thanks to those who contributed reviews in 2006, and to those who help behind the scenes, especially our managing editor and personnel at the Forest History Society.
The reviews in this issue reflect the growing diversity of research in environmental history. This issue's reviews begin with four books on African American environmental history and environmental justice. Geographically, the reviewed books move from the U.S. South to the Caribbean, South America, Australia, and Europe. Topics range from hurricanes to climate change to oil, and from the U.S. Forest Service to the EPA to conservationists. While the reviews are diverse, there remains an interconnectedness linking one review to the next.
MELISSA WIEDENFELD
| "To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History. Edited by Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. xiii + 271. Notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.
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| "'To Love the Wind and the Rain' builds upon the first wave of the historiography of African Americans and the environment" that began in the 1970s, according to its editors, Dianne Glave and Mark Stoll (p. 5). This work displaces age-old colonialist studies in which blacks are ideologically described as savages who inhabited the wild(erness). These scholars introduce an expressive African American cultural identity that places blacks in the subject position, and narrates how blacks have historically conceived, perceived, imagined, and utilized their environmental space (rural and urban), as well as how they have continued to survive in it. |
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Fittingly, Mart Stewart's essay situates this new research within the larger field of environmental history by asserting, "first of all, ... slavery in North America shaped the history of the environment" (p. 10). Stewart links the emergence of black political behavior and subversive acts of resistance during slavery to a uniquely African American environmental ethos by stressing the enslaved's art of "negotiation" and purports how African Americans redefined the language of the environment and its meanings. "'[W]ilderness' was ... a site of healing, a highway to kinship, a place where a decisive edge of resources could be added to meager plantation rations" (p. 19). Scott Giltner details how and why enslaved Africans' survivor tendencies trumped slavocratic laws, which mandated food rations. Blacks fed themselves by hunting and fishing and growing their own herbs and vegetables, as slave narratives testify. |
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Dianne Glave and Elizabeth Blum extend Giltner's study to early twentieth-century freedwomen, who combined their interpretations of "African and African American traditions in cosmology" with practical and aesthetic gardening techniques learned from Home Demonstration Service agents that simultaneously perpetuated their promotion of "maternalism" through the beautification of homes and neighborhoods and justified their involvement in environmental reforms (pp. 44, 81–82). |
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Evidence that blacks have constantly negotiated for use of and control over the land (for agency) flows through this entire series of essays, and so does evidence of white insistence on controlling blacks, despite their intimate knowledge of the land and proven mastery over it. Accordingly, Cassandra Johnson and Josh McDaniel indicate that the paper and pulp industry of the 1940s and 1950s "typified the hierarchical social organization under slavery, sharecropping, and turpentine camps" (p. 60). |
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Colin Fisher and Christopher Sellers identify problems of "white resistance, informal segregation, and racism" which followed blacks who migrated from the South to midwestern industrial cities, and into northern and southwestern rural fields of seasonal labor. For a few, the North offered home ownership and "possibilities of reconnection with land and air." Prejudice, however, made this dream a hard-won reality (pp. 100–108). In the Midwest, black organizations shuttled children beyond city limits to commune with nature, because "opportunities for restorative outdoor recreation" within the city put blacks in direct confrontation with the city park system that blatantly served neighborhoods disparately (pp. 74–75). Black southern transplants quickly became disabused of the notion that racism only existed in the South. Gregory Bush's essay focuses on the loss of recreational space and how "cultural memory" of Miami's once all-black Virginia Key Beach would re-empower the locals to "refocus the city's notions of the public purpose of parks" as also sacred and historical black sites (pp. 165, 180–82). |
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Stoll, Eileen McGurty and Glave speak to the declining political activism of historically black churches, which threatens to erode the discourse of environmental justice that articulates blacks' protest against "environmental racism"—lead poisoning, contaminated soil, industrial pollutants, waste dumps, and other "toxic threats to their communities" (pp. 153–58, 161–63). |
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This book ends as it begins with "Reflections on the Purposes and Meanings of African American Environmental History." Carl Anthony unflinchingly bears witness to the environmental consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, which displaced Africans to extract natural resources so that European empires would expand and prosper. Given this history, Anthony questions why the United States still rejects "a vision of community that embraces African Americans as central to the life of the human community" (p. 205). |
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To Love the Wind and Rain fulfills it promise as an entrée for anyone new to the study of African American environmental history. The authors stretch our conception of environmental history, and our multi-dimensional understanding of African American life and culture by locating the transmission of a distinctly African American identity in nature. Structurally, the book's diverse authorship—from community activists to scholars—accounts for a loose chronological arrangement of thematically interpretative essays. Still, all fourteen chapters are readable and suitable for classroom use across disciplines. The book is amply documented; twenty-five pages of notes and a twenty-page selected bibliography accompany the chapters. |
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Angela M. Leonard is a Hedgebrook Fellow in the Department of History at Loyola College in Maryland. She studies monuments, sacred sites, and the collective memory of African descendant communities and has published articles in Religion and Education, Sites of Ethnicity, and the Oxford Companion to Black British History. |
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