The Ecology of Black Liberation

It is hard to be Black. It is harder still when you choose not to numb yourself to the world but to take it all in. The pain that exists within this body is already acute, yet the pain that exists within the world-body is still magnitudes greater. As tempting as it may be, however, it is best not to be numb. Pain is a warning, a signal for danger, and those who do not feel pain cannot sense the arrival of hurt and of death before it is too late. Therefore I have no choice; I must feel. And as I am not separate from the world, I must feel Her pain too; Her aches are my aches, Her hurt is my hurt and our death is one.

What do we suppose liberation to be? Liberation from poverty, from misogyny, from homophobia or racism? What good is it to be liberated into a dead world, one that does not support life of any class, gender, sexuality or race? I suspect that for many, liberation is equivalent to equality, a levelling of the political/social/economic playing field within our society. As I get older, however, I become more and more sympathetic to the view that Malcolm X espoused in his Nation of Islam days: the “world” of western civilization is fucked, and there’s no hope for anyone integrating into it, equally or not. To be “liberated” is to liberate yourself from a doomed society and to build your own. My attraction to this mindset, however, is tempered by the growing twenty-first century truth that there is no longer any place left to build: if indeed our current global, capitalist civilization has not covered every inch of the world itself then its shadow surely does. Fate, now, is collective; the destiny of all life is forever intertwined.

If you’ll forgive the apparent digression, I need now to talk about trees. Trees are, after all, essential to Black liberation (as are all ‘things’ essential to life); to put it another way, the fates of Black people are tied directly to the fates of trees. To do violence to them is, in a very real way, to do violence to me, my family and my community. To think otherwise is to operate under the basic misconception that Nature and people are somehow independent, separate entities.

I recently read an academic study titled “Deforestation and World Population Sustainability: a Quantitative Analysis.” It emphasized, first, the importance of trees to the earth’s life and civilizations: they prove indispensable to our existence through the production of oxygen and the cleansing of the atmosphere, maintenance of the soil, regulation of our water cycle and, a key factor given our contemporary crisis, the regulation of our planet’s climate by keeping its carbon in them instead of in our atmosphere, where it would accelerate the already lethal pace of planetary warming. “Trees and forests are our best atmosphere cleaners” the authors wrote, “and, due to the key role that they play in the terrestrial ecosystem, it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on the Earth without them. In this sense, the debate on climate change will be almost obsolete in case of a global deforestation of the planet.” Obsolete, note, because we’d all be among the dying or dead.

The authors of the study then used multiple variables, such as the world human population, the amount of earth covered by forest, the growth rate of the human species, the rate at which we extract resources from the environment, the projected rate of technological improvement in resource extraction, the renewability of those resources and those resources carrying capacity to calculate the survivability our current society. They gave us twenty to forty years before “catastrophic collapse” spelled the end of human civilization and perhaps of the human species itself, with an “optimistic” 10% chance of human society continuing if we can begin in earnest to expand our civilization into the solar system and harvest its resources.

We all know, however, that if the wealthiest and most industrialized nations began to expand their societies into space, that Black people are going to have a hell of a hard time getting there. Of course, it’s hard to accurately predict the future. Any model of the times to come that depends on future human behavior or expected rates of technical progress is inherently fallible. We may very well survive much longer than that. There is also the alternative, however: considering that we are not only harming our forests, but the soil, the oceans, our atmosphere and indeed the entire biosphere itself, perhaps their calculations of civilization’s end times are not too far off. Perhaps they’ll come sooner. Who knows? The future itself is an unknown.

Yet, what we can perhaps say with certainty is that the possibility for total extinction, or at the very least the extinction of human civilization, is now very real. We are not discussing an end of a civilization, or of a society, but of human society itself. Forever. It is an existential threat that the “wretched of the earth”, the poor and the marginalized, cannot afford to ignore. We do not, after all, deserve this fate. We did not bring the world to this point.

But do Black revolutionaries have time to discuss it? Is it not best to leave such things to those who have the privilege to worry about the global environment and not whether a police officer will kill them at a traffic stop, or after barging into their home in the middle of the night based on bad intel? I would argue that, in regards to this threat and any other, white people can and will not save us. Have you seen the news on climate change? White people cannot save themselves- they cannot even agree amongst themselves if the threat exists.

Yet the global working classes (even those who carry the label of “white”), the marginalized and the colonized, do not have the privilege of these debates. Wealth will not insulate us from the worst. We have seen Katrina, and how its effects upon communities were proportionate to their wealth and racial make-up, and we should understand that Katrina is just the first sign of what's to come. Already, the air we breathe, the food we consume and the water we drink have a detrimental relationship with the life-spans of the urban poor; the very earth is weaponized against us. For the moment She has only fired warning shots and her real rage is barely apparent. It is, however, on the horizon. Who will feel it worst, I wonder?

The authors of the study offer us some hope aside from Star-Trek like voyages into space. According to them, we live in an “economical” society, which tends to value the welfare of a few privileged components over that of the entire system. Extrapolating a bit, it is indeed clear that not only do we see “humanity” as somehow separable from nature, but that the wealthy and powerful in particular have conceptualized themselves as a group apart from the rest of us, well, peasants as well. What is needed, according to the study’s authors, is a transformation into a society that values the whole as much as the parts and that works for the sake of the all instead of the few. Such a society does not make false dichotomies between people and nature, or between the proletariat and the nation, or even between nations themselves. We are all integrated into a single system in which each part supports the existence of all the others, and to understand one person in their fullness is to, by necessity, see the whole.

I am for, and will always be for, the existence and welfare of the Black community. I would just like to point out that without a healthy planet there are no communities, Black or white, and that Black liberation without planetary liberation is nonexistent. We live and die with our mother; we live and die, in fact, with trees. Which is a wonder, because I’m willing to bet that most of the diaspora in industrialized nations, living our lives so characterized by atomization and isolation, walk by them every day without a second thought. Your true body, though, does not end with your body. I challenge you: the next time you walk down a park, a block or a city street, notice the trees. They are you. One being, one fate.

Link to quoted study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6.pdf