Drain the Swamp, Redeem the Land: the Religious Ecologies of Drainage in the Florida Everglades

• In Event: In the Swamps and the Fields, in the Toilets and the Churches: Where Environmental and Religious Histories Meet

Abstract

Among scholars of the modern United States, the fields of environmental and religious history have run on separate tracks. This panel, composed of scholars of religion whose work engages with environmental history, represents an effort to learn across those boundaries. The work represented on this panel finds environmental histories playing unexpected roles in religious practices, and religious histories playing unexpected roles in environmental extraction and speculation. Through case studies that range from the American South to the American West, and from themes of Christian socialist farming to sanitation, the papers presented here consider the moral claims that have shaped resource extraction and speculation alongside a range of explicitly religious and nominally secular environmental projects.

Isaiah Ellis’s paper examines the debates around swamp drainage in early-twentieth century South Florida. He argues that Christian narratives of redemption and civilization undergirded the plans and methods of engineers preoccupied with swampy terrain as wasted land redeemable through infrastructure development. Jonathan Ebel’s paper draws on a new book examining Resettlement Administration camps in California as sites of moral reform, focusing here on toilets and human waste as a place of conflict between reformers and migrants. Alison Greene’s study of a Christian socialist labor experiment and a Black farmers’ cooperative in eastern North Carolina attempts an interspecies religious history, here focusing on rattlesnakes and water snakes. Finally, Amanda Baugh argues that the Catholicism that the Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) shared shaped their successful work to keep a state prison out of their neighborhood and their subsequent environmental justice activism. Together, these papers cover a broad range of land and waterscapes across the twentieth century United States, focusing on the moral claims—often, though not always Christian—that shaped human relationships to one another and to the physical spaces they claimed or inhabited.

Author

• Isaiah Ellis, University of Toronto