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

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Among scholars of the modern United States, the fields of environmental and religious history have run on separate tracks. Yet in an era of climate crisis and denialism, the need for collaboration between environmental historians and historians of religions is clear. This panel, composed of scholars of religion whose work engages with environmental history, represents an effort to learn across those boundaries. Panelists consider the moral claims that undergirded resource extraction and speculation alongside a range of explicitly religious and nominally secular environmental projects.

Isaiah Ellis’s paper, drawing from a larger project on religion and road-building, examines the debates around swamp drainage in South Florida in the early twentieth century. Ellis argues that Christian narratives of redemption and civilization undergirded an approach to swampy terrain as wasted land redeemable by roadbuilding. 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.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Drain the Swamp, Redeem the Land: the Religious Ecologies of Drainage in the Florida Everglades - Isaiah Ellis, University of Toronto

• Purifying Environments: Managing Waste and Building Morality in New Deal California - Jonathan Ebel, University of Illinois

• Snakes in the Corn: Christianity and Interspecies Relationships in a Jim Crow Swamp - Alison Collis Greene, Emory University

Chair

• David Vail, University of Nebraska, Kearney