Black Figures in Environmental History
Black figures played a job within the early years of environmentalism, before it even had a reputation.
Yesterday was the beginning of Black History Month. Last 12 months, I posted in regards to the contributions made by Black climate scientists. This 12 months, I need to return earlier in history to focus on the environmental contributions of three Black figures in much earlier times.
The earliest of those figures was Solomon Brown, who was born in 1829 and the primary Black worker of the Smithsonian. In his early years, he helped defend museum collections against a Smithsonian director who wanted the Smithsonian to be solely a research institute. In greater than a half century on the Smithsonian, he prepared maps and drawings for lectures, served as an unofficial curator, and worked for the Smithsonian’s International Exchange service. He acquired a broad knowledge of natural history and lectured often throughout the D.C. area on topics equivalent to “The Social Habits of Insects.” Because the federal government increasingly got here within the grip of Jim Crow across the turn of the century, Brown was shamefully mistreated and demoted.
One of the best-known of the early black environmentalists is remembered today for other reasons, but his environmental views are sometimes neglected. George Washington Carver was born into slavery but became the primary Black student at Iowa State after which its first Black faculty member. He’s best remembered today for founding the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and for his research to ascertain peanuts as a beneficial money crop for Black farmers. Contrary to myth, nonetheless, he didn’t invent peanut butter.
In his Masters thesis Carver argued that “now not must man act simply as an aid to nature in improving plants, each edible and inedible, man must take the initiative in using nature to supply sustainable food systems that can help to alleviate hunger, encourage local participation and activism, and to safeguard and control our local food and water systems.” Much of his work involved what we now call regenerative agriculture. His work on peanuts was a part of this effort, because legumes like peanuts fertilize the soil. His work was embedded in a broader philosophy in regards to the interconnectness of the world and the fantastic thing about nature.
Charles Young was also born into slavery. As the primary Black colonel within the US Army, Young was assigned to Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. Young became the primary Black Park Superintendent, at a time when the military was charged with protecting the parks from poaching and illegal logging and ranching.
Colonel Young really helpful that the federal government expand the parks and negotiated with neighboring landowners to amass their property. The Park Service credits him with establishing “that it was critical to each the parks and personal landowners to settle contentious property rights issues, paving a foundation for later land acquisition.”
Young was a staunch advocate of conserving these parks. He wrote that “a journey through this park and the Sierra Forest Reserve to Mount Whitney country will persuade even the least thoughtful man of the needfulness of preserving these mountains just as they’re, with their clothing of trees, shrubs, rocks, and vines.” Like other early conservationists, he emphasized the human advantages of preservation, given the importance of those lands for water storage.
Even today, the foremost environmental organizations are struggling to deal with their history of white dominance. Blacks have a turn into more forceful presence in environmental issues, starting with the early leaders of the environmental justice movement. Yet the role of those much earlier figures is a reminder that the human relationship with nature is a priority that rightfully belongs to all of society.
