Lesson: Environmental Racism

For my class in Race and Social Justice Literature, a number of my students were interested in doing projects around environmental racism and, specifically, connections between social justice projects and climate change concerns.

Three anthologies that I found immensely helpful were:

• Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (U of Georgia P, 2018)
• Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, ed. Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King (BlazeVOX Books, 2017)
• Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille Dungy (U of Georgia P, 2009)

For a three week unit in an upper school English class, I would start with Camille Dungy’s introduction to Black Nature, which lays out in detail the connections among nature writing, poetics, and racialized identities. How has writing about nature been historically confined to certain classes, genders, and races? How has environmental “disasters” disproportionately affected people of color? How can poetry (and nature writing more broadly) be an appropriate answer to climate change?

We would then spend at least four class periods reading through a selected grouping of poems from the three anthologies, asking us to not only look at how those poems were constructed, but also how those poems illuminate those connections between justice for people of color and the environment.

In the second week, we would concentrate on reading news reports and essays about current eco-demonstrations by people of color, such as Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline, or Mauna Kea and the TMT. How did these acts of civil disobedience come to be? How are they indebted to writing and literature?

In our third week, we would delve further into choosing and researching our own intervention in climate change, writing both a critical essay and a suite of poems that attempt to engage with both cultural understandings and the science behind climate change.