Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2017). 162 pages. ISBN 978-1626982017

Reviewed by Nicole Hoskins, University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Black communities, particularly black women, have been at the forefront of environmental and climate justice, even before the environmental justice movement began in the 1980s. Nevertheless, images, reports, and histories of environmentalism and climate justice as a primarily white concern inundate us. Many are beginning to see invisibilizing and flat-out erasure of African American history in environmental discourse. They are rightly connecting it to a history of antiblack environmental violence in the United States. Melanie Harris’ Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths responds to this erasure by guiding readers through critique of antiblack environmental racism, while exploring its intersection with sexism and incorporating black women’s experiences as a primary source for environmental and climate discourse. 

Harris develops an interdisciplinary method for critically excavating African American environmental history. Rooted in womanist traditions, the seven-step method includes (1) honoring experience and mining ecomemory, (2) critical reflection on experience and ecomemory, (3) womanist intersectional analysis, (4) critically examining African and African American history and tradition, (5) engaging transformation, (6) sharing dialogue, and (7) taking action for earth justice. Harris calls the method an act of political resistance that challenges “the metanarrative of environmental history [a]s ill informed and malformed in part because it does not include (and sometimes denies) the histories, presence, and contributions of people of color, including Native Americans and African Americans, to the environmental movement” (4). 

The text offers compelling reasons for exploring ecological justice from a womanist perspective. To begin, Harris builds on sociologist Dorceta E. Taylor’s environmental justice paradigm, and insists on an interdisciplinary approach that engages religion, sociology, geography, black feminism, and more. Harris argues that interdisciplinarity cuts through white patriarchal logics of domination embedded in environmental history and discourse, which are especially harmful to the survival and thriving of black women and the earth. Harris also normalizes care for the earth as “innate to African and African American life” by asserting moral commitment to ecological justice is normative in African religions and communities and, perhaps, foundational to African American life. Harris moves beyond Kimberly Ruffin’s “ecological burden-and-beauty-paradox”—that black people experience a beautiful spiritual connection to the earth and at the same time continually bear the burden of being environmentally othered. To be clear, Harris does not suggest doing away with the paradox. Rather, she tells her family’s ecological story to both reveal how the paradox operates and show how an interdisciplinary approach helps unfix paralysis that often comes with dualistic, contradictory relationships. These moves allow Harris to make an appeal for taking action for earth justice, ecowomanism, and ecological reparations and to argue that teaching about black women’s environmental experiences is critical to the fight for earth justice.  

One point Harris might engage more deeply is the discussion of a black sense of place. Harris explains that despite the terror and violence black people suffered in the woods, on the ocean, in the plantation house, etc., she feels a sense of “home” within American landscapes. She notes a sense of home as “part of an ecowomanist paradigm that helps African peoples recover and reclaim their connection to earth and their relationship with the land” (4). I wonder whether “home” functions as a morally neutral symbol and ideal imaginary as it does in many other Christian environmental, theological, and ethical writings. Or, is Harris pointing to alternative ways black people make places home in spite of being in the perpetual state of homelessness imposed by slavery that continues through racist white spatial imaginaries? As minute as this point might be, this conversation would be fruitful in thinking about black liberation on and with the earth. How does one get from experiencing violence to feeling a sense of home? What are the alternative ways black communities are making place? How does their sense of place reveal the necessary conditions for black liberation on the earth and with the earth? 

This book will be useful for those seeking to teach ecology and theology from a justice centered perspective.