Coastal Conservation as Black Terraqueous Dispossession

• In Event: Disaster, Conservation, and Sovereignty

Description for Program

The current formulation of environmentalism is part of a white spatial imagination, where Black life is absent, and the spoils of a “rewilded” natural world are enjoyed as a space of white reprieve and scientific experimentation. This work builds upon and returns to the assertions made originally by Nathan Hare in foregrounding the inconsistencies within environmentalism and Black life – that Black people and the ecological movement stand in opposition (Hare 1970). I argue that the roots of what has become ecological science, and the development of modern environmental thought are predicated on anti-black violence. The science of ecology and the resulting preservation of Sapelo Island as mostly conservation land owned by the state of Georgia is a form of coercive conservation (Peluso 1993). This paper will trace the formulation of saltmarsh ecology on Sapelo Island, evaluating ecological sciences, and the resulting white environmental ethic. This orientation to ecology remains a project of dispossession - connected to a lineage of plantation land and Southern white leisure - through to the current moment as a living laboratory. This work will seek to answer the questions – How does the biophysical afterlife of slavery persist in the saltmarsh? How does the science of ecology and the resulting environmental conservation ethic fuel Black coastal dispossession? In thinking with Jennifer James’s notions of Black women and earth as inseparable terminologies, subject to the same embodied and physical violence’s I also ask, How do Black women as keepers of ecological knowledge specifically, generate insurgent geographies and forage multispecies kinship despite these threats of loss? (James 2023)(Bruno 2022)(Moulton and Salo 2022) What must be interrogated are ways in which ecological science is also accountable to the simultaneous Black ecological and heritage dispossession that the field supposedly seeks to mitigate.

Author

• Adrian Cato, Emory University