Swamp on Fire: Cultural and Ecological Resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp

• In Event: Settler Ecologies, “Natural Resources,” and Unruly Responses to Extraction

Abstract

At the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, Euroamericans draped their agricultural fantasies over what they perceived as a “desert wasteland.” Employing enslaved and free laborers to realize their visions, settlers extracted water and timber from the wetland. Yet they soon learned the swamp responded to their actions. While fires have always ignited in the Great Dismal Swamp (in fact, creating the swamp’s key feature, Lake Drummond, 4000 years ago), logging entrepreneurs accelerated their occurrence. With over 200 miles of ditches laid by predominantly black workers beneath 1763 and 1974, the dried swamp caught fire several times, destroying settler fantasies and threatening a biodiverse ecosystem. The peat that lurks beneath the swamp forest fueled inflammable conditions when lightning struck or timber equipment exploded. The swamp’s ecological conditions therefore required logging companies to pivot their operations out of the swamp, as they eventually “gifted” the swamp to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as national wildlife refuge in the 1970s.

In this presentation, Meldon foregrounds the swamp as a character, shaping and reacting to the legacies of settler colonialism. Drawing from environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth and Black geographies scholar Tiffany Lethabo King, Meldon explores the transgressive “nature” of unruly beings– humans, wetlands, and otherwise– that resist ecological and cultural subjugation. That the swamp has remained, despite the enduring threats of extraction, drainage, and development, has allowed the wetland to serve as a space of “Black and Native livingness.” Its enduring presence has enabled African American and Nansemond descendants to subvert the violent erasure of imperialism and commemorate community survival.

Author

• Perri Meldon, Boston University