1st Edition

Race, Nature, and the Environment

Edited By Katie Meehan Copyright 2025
228 Pages
by Routledge

228 Pages
by Routledge

228 Pages
by Routledge

What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? This book assembles diverse voices and approaches in geographic thinking on race and racialization during an era of climate crisis, toxic legacies, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. The volume... Read more

 

Introduction: Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography

Katie Meehan, Mabel Denzin Gergan, Sharlene Mollett and Laura Pulido

 

Part I: Afterlife and Abolition Ecologies

 

1. Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery

Tianna Bruno

 

2. Unfixing Space: Toward Anti-Caste Philosophies of Nature

Thomas Crowley

 

Part II: Of Land, Life, and Struggle

 

3. Toward “Total Freedom”: Black Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta

Carrie Freshour and Brian Williams

 

 

4. Nature, Agriculture, and Black Space-Making in Serra dos Tapes, Brazil

Gabriela Rodrigues Gois

 

5. Black Towns and (Legal) Marronage

Danielle Purifoy

 

Part III: Uneven Green Development

 

6. Making the City of Lakes: Whiteness, Nature, and Urban Development in Minneapolis

Rebecca H. Walker, Hannah Ramer, Kate D. Derickson and Bonnie L. Keeler

 

7. Birds, Dogs, and Racism: Conflicts over Care in New York’s Central Park

Anne Bonds and Ryan Holifield

 

Part IV: Unruly Waters

 

8. Water Infrastructure as Intrusion: Race, Exclusion, and Nostalgic Futures in North Carolina

Cassandra L. Workman and Sameer H. Shah

 

9. Regulating Improvement: Industrial Water Pollution, White Settler Authority, and Capitalist Reproduction in the St. Clair–Detroit River Corridor, 1945–1972

Nicole Van Lier

 

10. Articulating Indigenous Law as “Environmental Protection”? The Piikani Nation and the Oldman River Dam Environmental Assessment Review Process

Michael Fabris

 

11. On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

Morgan P. Vickers

 

Part V: Making Thriving Worlds

 

12. At Home: Black Women’s Collective Claims to Environmentally Just Rental Housing

Carrie Chennault and Lynn Sutton

 

13. Toward a World Where We Can Breathe: Abolitionist Environmental Justice Praxis

Ki’Amber Thompson

 

Part VI: A Manifesto for Who We May Become

 

14. A Pedagogy of Unbecoming for Geoscience Otherwise

Christopher Reimer, Sarah-Louise Ruder, Michele Koppes and Juanita Sundberg

 

15. Storytelling Earth and Body

Pavithra Vasudevan, Margaret Marietta Ramírez, Yolanda González Mendoza and Michelle Daigle

 

Biography

Katie Meehan is a geographer at King’s College London, Co-Director of King’s Water Centre, and Editor (Nature and Society) for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. She has published widely on infrastructural geographies, household water insecurity, political ecology, and environmental justice. Her most recent book is Water: A Critical Introduction.