Race & Environment in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Mark Cladis and Gregory Hitch

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Gregory Hitch: I'm Gregory Hitch, a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies, and I have the pleasure of speaking with Mark Cladis, the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities, and the chair of the Department of Religious Studies. So we'll be speaking today about the recent panel discussion on Race & the Environment. So Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Mark Cladis: Thank you for hosting this!

GH: Right, so first, I just want to say that I really enjoyed and learned a lot from your talk, so thank you for that! So this first question is fairly broad, but I think it's an important one, and that is: what can environmental humanities offer the discipline, as well as the activism of environmental justice?

MC: That's a good question. So the question is, what does environmental humanities, in particular, offer to environmental justice, is that right?

GH: Yes.

MC: Yeah, that's a wonderful question, especially given that my partner in the Race & Environment event hosted by CSREA was someone in Population Studies. So there is—it's clear that a variety of disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and, as I suggested in my presentation, the environmental humanities, can address important issues in environmental racism. So I guess what I'd say is, in the humanities, if we're going to employ that term, there's a variety of ways that we reflect on culture and history and theory, and these are different resources that illuminate this intersection of race and the environment, and in particular environmental racism. By the way, I don't think the topic of race and the environment, as I tried to indicate, is exclusively concerned with environmental racism, but without that critical humanities reflection, a lot can be missed out in terms of environmental racism. So there's, for example, the normative reflection, so in the sciences, we can get, and we need, detailed empirical studies, for example, about how various toxins and pollutants affect populations; for example, communities of color. And the environmental humanities, it can ask broad questions—critical normative questions—about, what are the histories and what are the structures in place that have allowed this kind of pollution on these lands in these communities of color? So that's one aspect of environmental humanities. And also, environmental humanities, there's a way that poignant stories can be told about these communities and their experience of oppression. So again, this isn't at all to say that I mean in the least bit to discount the work of those in the natural sciences and the social sciences, not at all. But I'd like to underscore the importance of partnering with people in these different disciplines, so that we have a more, kind of, robust, full account of what's happening, for example, in various communities that are being subjected to environmental pollution.

GH: Oh that's great, yeah. That interdisciplinarity, I think, is really key in environmental justice studies and, of course, in the environmental humanities, so that's wonderful. So I wanted to follow up with another question about that, because I really enjoyed your discussion of, you know, “more-than-humans” as historical and literary agents. And it reminded me of Kyle Whyte and David Pellow’s important work on environmental and climate justice. And I was wondering, you know, how do you see more-than-human beings playing into social movements or perhaps solutions, you know, to the intersecting crises of racial injustice, settler colonialism, and climate change? And, you know, why is it important to include more-than humans in these movements, in this teaching, writing—doing the things that we do?

MC: Yeah, that's a terrific question, Greg, thank you for that. You know, I’m really—in many ways, I feel like I'm a student in that topic, that field, so I'm really eager to learn what others think about that; I'd like to hear what you think about it. So, when I think about the more-than-human in relation to these issues, I must say, I tend to think of the various ways that, you know, humans have impacted the more-than-human world and have often done it in a fashion that is not in the least bit mindful of the wellbeing, the flourishing, of the more-than-human. So that's how, you know, that's how I typically think of it. In my presentation for CSREA, I also tried to think about in what way agents of the more-than-human are often also involved in sustaining humans, and, in particular, sustaining communities of color. So, and again this was in part because the rubric for that session was “race and the environment”—it wasn't necessarily just environmental racism, but the intersection of race and the environment. So when I was thinking about that intersection, I thought, well, yeah, environmental racism, that's a lot of it, but it's not all of it, so I also wanted to think about in what way agents of the more-than-human, as I said, can, in various way, contribute to those who are variously oppressed by society—either by race, or gender, or class—can contribute to their lives and, in fact, how, in many ways, these agents can actually, for example, combat racism. Now, I worry a little bit about what we sometimes call the naturalistic fallacy: this idea of, kind of, reading, you know, normative values onto the natural world. I worry about that not so much as a philosophical error, but as a way that might somehow not do justice to, kind of, the autonomy, the ways of the more-than-human. But I also think that, you know, we have to think about the ways, these more-than-human ways that, in fact, human life is sustained. We need to acknowledge that and then, in a sense, we can, for example, where there's issues of environmental racism, kind of acknowledge the ways that the more-than-human, in its way, in its fashion, is in fact, you know, mitigating the racism, or in different ways sustaining the lives, the spirits of those who are otherwise oppressed.

GH: That's wonderful.

MC: And, you know, I guess it was something of a stretch to suggest that the comet, as the more-than-human, is this agent of radical change, but-

GH: No, not at all.

MC: -that's exactly what's happening in that narrative, and what I think’s so fascinating about the comet is that it took this more-than-human agent, not even a sentient being, this comet, so that the humanity of Jim could be recognized by this white woman. Sometimes there's this way that, especially those who are outside of what we might call environmentalism, they kind of see this, this way of pitting, you know, either you're for the environment or you're, you know, interested in people and things like combating racism; but what was so clear in that piece is that the two come together and it's really the more-than-human that is necessary to bring out the humanity of Jim, for his humanity to be recognized, yeah.

GH: Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much, yeah, and I'm really glad that you brought up that story by Du Bois because it relates to the next question, and also in thinking about how it's race and the environment, not just environmental justice or environmental racism. So lastly, you know, I was struck by your discussion of Du Bois’s and Silko’s literature: Black and Indigenous people's relationships with the more-than-human world and what we sometimes call “nature,” right? And I really enjoyed hearing your perspective on how spaces or ecosystems that white settlers characterize and treat as “wastelands,” such as swamps and deserts, have historically been places where Black and Indigenous peoples have found an escape from the oppression of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, or perhaps served as safer enclaves to develop alternatives to those oppressive systems. And I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about these ideas and how you see these literatures speaking to young people, perhaps students, and their interests in developing grassroots alternatives to extractive capitalism?

MC: Yeah, that's—that's wonderful, thank you for that. Yeah, it's a powerful question; it’s a complicated one, right? Though swamps and deserts often, in the white settler imagination, are either, you know, these tangled woods that are difficult to subdue, in the case of the swamp, or else we have the desert, which is “empty”: empty of life, empty of water, empty of civilization. I mean, so that's kind of the gaze, that's the impression of these lands, and so then settler colonialism asked: how, then, do we make them productive, right? And often that has entailed this mutual exploitation of the land and the people of those lands, right? Whereas in Du Bois’s imagination—and he uses some anthropological work for this—and the imagination of the Black inhabitants of various swamplands, they were seen, as you said, they were seen as refuges, as sanctuaries, places where they could escape the brutality of of white oppression. In this fiction, this novel that Du Bois wrote, the swamp becomes a place where you can have an alternative community with its own alternative economics, where—so it's not radically controlled by white capitalistic economics, but they could have their own cooperative farm. So there's this sensitive engagement with the land, and there's this sensitive building of a community that can flourish in a place that otherwise, by the white southern colonial culture, was seen as a place where you just had to enforce control: control of Black bodies, control of the land.

In the deserts, we see, in some ways it's a different kind of story. I mean, you still see, of course, you have Indigenous accounts of the desert where it’s anything but a wasteland, right? It’s home, and it's full of life. Of course, it's a different kind of way of life, so the cultures, the Indigenous cultures that are at home in the desert, for example, they know how to live in a place with limited waterfall without, you know, radically draining the aquifers, for example. So they see it, they understand it, they experience it as a home that's full of life, but because it's perceived as a wasteland, it's become a place for corporations and the government to be irresponsibly extractive, for example in terms of mining, specifically uranium mining, and then of course the dumping of waste. So when you see a place that's empty and not useful, when you don't respect the life that is there, then it just becomes a dump. Of course, what's interesting about Silko’s writing is that it's at this very site, for example, of the abandoned uranium mine where, on the one hand, is this, you know, this powerful symbol of white colonial extractive logic, but it's also this place of resistance, and even a place of hope. You know, we can't really go into this now, but there's something about the abandoned uranium mine in ruins that suggests that eventually, settler colonialism, in time, will eventually come to its own ruin. So there's this huge perspective of time: it doesn't mean that fighting for justice now isn’t important, but there is the sense that, you know, in a sense, we've been here before, we've been through catastrophes before, and eventually this catastrophe of settler culture, of settler colonialism, this catastrophe, too, will come to an end.

GH: Fantastic, thank you so much, that's a perfect place to end it, I think. So thank you, Professor Cladis, this was really a wonderful conversation!

MC: Thank you, Greg! I don't know if there was a conversation; I would have liked to have heard more from you, because I know you know as much or more about these topics than I do, or at least we bring different things to them; so I very much hope that on some other occasion, the tables will be turned and I can ask you about your work, because I’ve always learned so much from you, and thank you for these very thoughtful questions!

GH: Well thank you so much, I hope so, too, that'd be wonderful.

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu