From the Editors

by ASHIA AJANI

We have spent months diving into the monument that is environmental writing by writers of color. We invited BIPOC submitters to share their truths, their futures, their fantasies and elegies as they relate to the environment and ecology. As climate change and environmental decline raged on, we found ourselves recommitting to the narratives of those most affected by environmental burdens. More than that, we were aching for a kinship born of lived experience; we needed song and salve.

As people of color, environmental engagements are often interactions of race, geography, and history. No experience is “neutral,” but we all can appreciate a bird’s morning song, the smell of rain on concrete, the ache of a home when home is constantly out of reach. But there is something unique about our folklore, the way we weave traditional and insurgent ecological knowledge into daily practice, our relationship to memory and culture that transcends locality. 

Despite our multifaceted relations to the environment, we are historically erased from environmental canons. This is compounded by our lived realities: that Black Americans are 75 percent more likely than whites to live near a hazardous waste facility, over 90 percent of the uranium mines and mills that ever existed in the United States were/are located on or near tribal lands, and sea level rise is rearing its ugly head against island nations. On the literary side, of 7,124 books surveyed between 1950 and 2018, 95 percent were written by white authors. Most folks at least recognize the name John Muir but know nothing about Fannie Lou Hamer, Haunani-Kay Trask, or Berta Carceres.

Thinking broadly about the environment in environmental justice terms as the place “where we live, work, play, learn, and worship, as well as the physical and natural world,” and expanding the concept of ecologies to mean the various ways we are connected to and in conversation with one another, these writers have thought deeply about how their writing embodies elements of space, place, and relation. From time-bending observations of rhinos to post-apocalyptic sunsets, this issue calls for a renewed sense of wonder amidst a whole lot of mourning.

Sun Ra said, “The earth cannot move without music. The earth moves in a certain rhythm, a certain sound, a certain note. When the music stops the earth will stop and everything upon it will die.” These poems, essays, stories, and manifestations are filled with music, and it is our pleasure to invite that music to dance on the page and in our hearts. As ecological articulations, they are filled with hope, rage, regret, curiosity, reverence, and possibility, reminding us how capacious cultural-environmental lyric can be. Our many futures are laid bare on these pages.