Black Ecologies Initiative

The Black Ecologies Initiative encompasses various multi-media projects to document, amplify and create alternative cultural resources related to the ecological vulnerability Black communities in the U.S. and around the African Diaspora face.

The initiative supports the work of cultural workers, organizers and intellectuals, providing alternative epistemic entryways for historicizing and interrupting the current overlapping ecological, social and political crises.

As Justin Hosbey and J.T. Roane have outlined elsewhere, Black Ecologies is a two-pronged analytic:

Foremost, it “provides a way of historicizing and analyzing the ongoing reality that Black communities… in the African Diaspora are most susceptible to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, subsidence, sinking land, as well as the ongoing effects of toxic stewardship.”

Secondly, and more importantly for the purposes of the present work, “it names the corpus of insurgent knowledge produced by these same communities, which…[should] have bearing on how we… historicize the current crisis and how we conceive of futures outside of destruction.”