Black Geographies/Ecologies

WHAT THIS WORK IS

Black geographies and Black ecologies are ways of understanding how Black communities relate to land, water, and environment as people who shape, survive, and remake the places they live in. From plantation soil to coastal flooding to toxic industry — and ask what Black communities have always known about the land that mainstream science and policy have ignored.

Black communities across the U.S. South and the greater African diaspora are often the first to experience the brunt of climate change — food apartheid, polluted water, and air. But they are also the ones who have generated knowledge about how to read, respond to, and survive those changes for generations. Black ecologies names that knowledge and treats it as real evidence, not folklore.

This way of thinking also shows something simpler but just as important: race is written into the landscape itself. This same way of seeing extends beyond Black communities alone. Indigenous land stewards, migrant and refugee communities, Asian diasporic communities, and many other cultural communities carry parallel knowledge — built through their own histories of displacement, survival, and care for land and water. Black geographies and ecologies gave me the framework to notice this. The work now follows wherever that knowledge lives.

My role in this field is to put a camera and a microphone where the theory lives and that turns this scholarship into something people can see and hear. This work began in the U.S. South, and it's expanding toward the Caribbean and the wider Black Atlantic, and toward the Indigenous, migrant, refugee, and diasporic communities of the Global South whose survival, memory, and care for land share this same root.