Unsettling Race, Nature, and Environment in Geography

Abstract

What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers—focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment—we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. We note the ascendancy of critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline. The sixteen articles in this special issue embody different ways to “unsettle” disciplinary thought across the vibrant fields of political ecology and human–environment geography. We discuss how the articles collectively grapple with timely questions of land, water, territory, and place-making; render visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence by capital and the state; and make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world.

“动摇”地理学对种族、自然和环境的理解, 意味着什么？气候危机、有害遗留、不均衡发展、国家暴力、大规模灭绝、死亡逻辑、种族不公等塑造了自然（再）生产, 反之亦然。在此时代背景下, 我们在2023年美国地理学家协会期刊“种族、自然和环境”特刊的引言中, 反思了“动摇”的含义和实践。我们指出了英美地理学在种族和种族化批判研究的主导地位, 及其不均衡的传播和未竟的挑战；指出了反叛思维、废除地理学、批判种族理论、黑人和土著地理学、学者激进主义和环境正义实践等掌控和改造学科的不可抗拒力量。针对政治生态学和人地地理学这两个充满活力的领域, 本特刊的16篇文章展现了“动摇”学科思想的不同方式。我们讨论了这些文章如何解决土地、水、领土和地方建设等迫切问题, 呈现了资本和国家在空间和社会生态上对权力和暴力的再现, 讨论了持久的身体、家庭、课堂、公园、城市、社区、区域和全球斗争政治。

¿Cuál podría ser el significado de “desestabilizar” la comprensión disciplinaria de raza, naturaleza y medio ambiente? En esta introducción al número especial del 2023 de Anales de la Asociación Americana de Geógrafos [Annals of the American Association of Geographers] –centrado en la raza, la naturaleza y el medio ambiente– reflexionamos sobre el significado y la práctica de desestabilizar en una época de crisis climática, legados tóxicos, desarrollo desigual, violencia del Estado, extinciones en masa, lógicas carcelarias e injusticias sociales configuradas –y que a su vez son configuradas– por la (re)producción de la naturaleza. Hacemos notar la ascendencia de la erudición crítica sobre raza y racialización en la geografía angloamericana; su desigual difusión y los retos no superados; y la fuerza imparable del pensamiento insurgente, la geografía de la abolición, la teoría crítica de raza, las geografías negras e indígenas, el activismo académico y la praxis de la justicia ambiental para apropiarse de la disciplina y transformarla. Los dieciséis artículos de este número especial encarnan diferentes modos de “desestabilizar” el pensamiento disciplinario a través de los campos vibrantes de la ecología política y de la geografía humano-ambiental. Mostramos el modo como los artículos abordan colectivamente cuestiones de gran interés en la actualidad sobre la tierra, el agua, el territorio y la construcción de lugar; traen a cuento la visible reproducción espacial y sociológica del poder y la violencia por el capital y el Estado; y hacen espacio a las duraderas políticas de lucha en múltiples escenarios –el cuerpo, el hogar, el aula, el parque, la ciudad, la comunidad, la región y el mundo.

Key Words:

• environmental justice
• geographic thought
• nature
• political ecology
• race
• white supremacy

关键词:

• 环境正义
• 地理学思想
• 自然
• 政治生态学
• 种族
• 白人至上

Palabras clave:

• ecología política
• justicia ambiental
• naturaleza
• pensamiento geográfico
• raza
• supremacía blanca

What is taken is easily assumed to be settled. And what is settled is easily assumed to be possessed.

—Richard Howitt (2020, 194)

The attempt to elude capture by never settling.

—Saidiya Hartman (2021, 227)

On an early autumn day in 2020, still deep in the COVID-19 pandemic, Annals editor Katie Meehan and members of the editorial board met virtually to hash out ideas for the 2023 Special Issue. We discussed, we debated, and we zoomed in from the pandemic-structured spaces of our homes and workplaces. The result is in your hands. But its genesis and production—a tiny opening of the editorial black box—is worth a moment of reflection.

A special issue at the Annals is a strange beast. In its ideal form, the special issue ought to be wide-reaching and disciplinary spanning, intending to capture scholarship about an idea or topic that galvanizes broad interest across different subfields of the discipline. Water, health, mountains, climate change, smart cities, migration, the Anthropocene, and futures are examples of previous special issue topics that functioned as an intellectual lattice, a boundary object for the discipline. At the October 2020 board meeting, we tussled between two potential ideas that felt safe, prescriptive, and solid. Later, after the meeting, Meehan received a thoughtful e-mail message from a Board member. “I do find it striking,” the person wrote, “that the topic of race has not been examined as a Special Issue topic—even after all the movement in political ecology on this issue vis-à-vis Indigenous and Black geographies and their respective influence. Very telling.”

Telling, indeed. We immediately ditched the two suggested ideas. How could we not? In 2020, the outside world was screaming examples of entrenched racial injustice, accelerating climate change, widening disparities between rich and poor, and the precarity of planetary life. As production of the issue rolled on through 2021 and 2022, we wrote and edited against the backdrop of uncertainty, fatigue, and loss. We took inspiration from the indefatigable and uncrushable spirit of critical thought and praxis that shakes geography, from the outside in and inside out. “Imagining the world otherwise,” writes Vasudevan et al. (this issue), “as [Berta] Cáceres reminded us, requires us to refuse those dominant stories that sustain our depredatory economic system, a system that empowers those who qualify as ‘human’ and in turn a system they seek to protect at any cost.” In short, the world demanded something a little different for this issue, so we opted for a lightning rod, rather than a safety net.

The 2023 Special Issue on Race, Nature, and the Environment materializes against the backdrop of a persistently white discipline (Pulido 2002; Bruno and Faiver-Serna 2022), structured and informed by the epistemic traditions of white supremacy and settler colonialism that have built geography as an intellectual community (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Kobayashi and Peake 2000; Gilmore 2002; Kobayashi 2014; Pulido 2015; Noxolo 2017, 2022; Heynen et al. 2018; Johnson 2018, 2020; Faria et al. 2019). The normative whiteness of geography—in terms of composition, topics, and epistemology—cannot be underestimated. “If race was more central,” argued Pulido (2002), “all human geographers would have a deeper understanding of it, which would hopefully be expressed in their research” (42). Instead, Pulido (2002) continued, “the study of race has remained isolated within parts of geography because of disciplinary fragmentation, the limited number of people of color within the discipline, and our weak ties to ethnic studies” (42).

Two decades on, many of Pulido’s observations still hold true today. This special issue is not a tidy cross-slice of the discipline; rather, it draws from specific areas of human geography—notably, Black geographies and ecologies and environmental justice—that have carefully developed the critical tools necessary to advance cutting-edge explanations of space, nature, and social difference. Nor does the issue come close to representing all world regions; rather, the issue most prominently features ideas, debates, and empirics rooted in the Americas—a characteristic based on the submissions, not by design. This geography is understandable, especially given the “powerful epicentre of US-focused Black knowledge production” as it “rout[es] outward from there to other centres of Black community” (Noxolo 2022, 1233). Silences and absences, it seems, speak just as loudly as words.

Critical insights about race in the discipline have important precedence within the journal. Nearly two decades ago, Kobayashi (2010)—a past AAG President and Annals editor—traced whiteness in geographic knowledge and practice through a survey of 100 years of Annals articles. In line with pivotal Annals articles such as Pulido (2000) and Kobayashi and Peake (2000), Kobayashi (2010) helped to create space in the journal to apply key lessons from critical race theory—the social construction of race and the normativity of whiteness—to our thinking in human–environment geography, diagnosing a discipline in the slow process of change while haunted by the specter of racist science:

Until the turn of the twenty-first century, there was negligible space in the Annals devoted to scholarship from a feminist or an antiracist perspective. Environmentalism, of course, had often clothed overt racism in science, but human geographers were slow to counter the claims of racial difference, explicit or implicit, turning instead to systemic processes, including culture, as the basis for geographic explanation. It is surprising nonetheless that as late as 1968 the Annals published an article written from an avowedly racial science perspective (de Laubenfels 1968; cf. Carlson and Armelagos 1971). In contrast, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Annals published many articles on the problems created by racial segregation, especially in American inner cities. The attention to “race” differs thus substantially from the inattention to gender, but theoretical debates on the nature of “race” came much later. (Kobayashi 2010, 1101)

In a 2014 article, Kobayashi expanded her intellectual excavation of the discipline. “I want to highlight the advances in antiracist scholarship by geographers of color since the 1970s,” Kobayashi (2014) wrote: “They have received too little attention, although they influenced a new generation of geographers” (1101). This twin analytical move—the making visible of whiteness and its emphatic decentering—has been central in advancing critical approaches to race and nature, in and beyond the pages of this journal (cf. Faria and Mollett 2020; Nassar 2023; Gois this issue; Mollett this issue; Purifoy this issue).

In an important recent appraisal, Bruno and Faiver-Serna (2022) argued that “the whiteness of geography, in both representation and epistemological values, not only produces harsh intellectual climates for ‘other’ geographers, it also perpetuates the neglect of critically necessary engagements with race and racial justice within scholarship on the climate crisis” (159). Meanwhile, the authors noted, the recent formation of the Black Geographies and Latinx Geographies Specialty Groups, and their coalition building efforts with other AAG specialty groups, has “spurred new calls for papers and jobs and attracted new scholars to the discipline” (Bruno and Faiver-Serna 2022, 159). An antiracist transformation of geography is at once structural, institutional, epistemological, and personal. As Johnson (2020) made clear, “challenging the white background of academia must be done through both recognizing the role of normative whiteness in the research that we produce and challenging the institutional norms that inform our research production” (94).

No journal is an island. The 2023 Annals Special Issue should be read in relation to many other sites of geographic knowledge production—specialty groups, articles, journals, events, and coalitions—that have emerged to advance dialogue, thought, and action (c.f., Davis et al. 2019; Mollett and Faria 2013, Noxolo 2017, to name a few). Of note are the symposium “Political Ecologies of Race” in Antipode (Van Sant et al. 2021), the special issue on “Racial Regimes of Property” in Society and Space (Ranganathan and Bonds 2022); the special issue on “Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization” in Ethnic and Racial Studies (Cháirez-Garza et al. 2022; Gergan and Smith 2022); the collection “Global Black Ecologies” in Environment and Society (Hosbey et al. 2022); and the special issue on “Black Geographies in and of the United States South” in Southeastern Geographer (Bledsoe et al. 2017), to name just a few collections.

In the remainder of this introduction, we set the table for the special issue by first briefly reflecting on a practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. We note the ascendancy of critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline.

A Praxis of Unsettling

What might it mean to “unsettle” geographic thought? As Howitt (2020) remarked, “[t]he verb unsettle carries ambiguity. It has overtones of both displacing from settlements that occupy space and make places of privilege and exclusion, as well as troubling the everyday discourses of erasure of the histories of settlement as invasion, occupation, dispossession and violence. It also carries an emotional content: feeling unsettled takes us outside of our comfort zone” (194).

Recently, scholars have made renewed calls for unsettling the “traumatic fallout” at the heart of political ecology and human–environment geography (Moulton et al. 2021). For example, Moulton et al. (2021) argued “for an approach that encourages unsettling, uncomfortable, and generative conversations about and beyond trauma” (677). In its place, Moulton et al. (2021) “propose seriously attending to the ways in which our scholarship and activism can engage trauma, offering more space for radical possibility, accountability, and care” (679)—a point echoed across several works in this collection (Bonds and Holifield this issue; Chennault and Sutton this issue; Gois this issue; Thompson this issue; Vasudevan et al. this issue).

In this way, unsettling is not mere wordplay, but a matter of cultural and worldly struggle. As de Leeuw and Hunt (2018) pointed out, “[t]he question of Indigenous peoples’ everyday practices—practices lived in place—is more than ideas or ideals: Given Indigenous lives, communities, languages, and cultures continue to bear the burden the settlement, material survival is at stake. This work has the potential to challenge, disrupt, or unsettle normative disciplinary areas of study” (9). Unsettling, in this case, is a significant spatial practice as well as challenge. “By insisting on their agency, survivance and futurity, geographic work by Indigenous peoples, both within and outside the academy and focusing on embodied theorizations of daily life, challenges geographers’ notions of settler colonialisms’ spatiality and of contemporary Indigeneity” (Leeuw and Hunt 2018, 9).

For us, unsettling is a critical project with multiple registers—as metaphor and actual practice. As Crowley (this issue) explains, unsettling “is a disturbing of the received order of things; it is a fight against settler colonialism; and it is [a] mode of analysis that contests conservative visions of the world that fix individuals and groups in (hierarchical) place.” Multiple registers are present in this collection of articles, in differing degrees and styles. For example, Vickers (this issue) uses the swamplands of South Carolina (USA) to muddy the boundaries between terrestrial land and aquatic habitats, between exploitative and extractive practices of property-making and the liminal spaces of Black fugitivity, liberation, and knowledge. Gois (this issue) draws on the lived experiences and environmental knowledge of Black residents in Quilombo Alto do Caixão (Brazil) to argue for pluralistic conceptualizations of space and place that situate Black spatialities as freedom.

Unsettling also involves pedagogical praxis, including experimental methods to make visible and repair place-based relations (Daigle and Sundberg 2017). Toward that end, Reimer, Ruder, Koppes, and Sundberg (this issue) invite us to unsettle a site familiar to many of us: the geography classroom. Their teaching experiment introduces the notion of unbecoming—following an antiracist, anticolonial pedagogical framework—that “nurtures an extrarational, embodied, and relational geosciences otherwise.” The authors provocatively ask, “What do we need to unlearn, to unbecome? Where and how can we do this unlearning and unbecoming?”

Ecologies of Power and Struggle

“Soils modified. Plant life changed. Wildlife affected. Coastlines, waterscapes, and aquatic life shifted. In the wake of slavery,” writes Bruno (this issue), “the very ground beneath the feet of Black communities has been and continues to be affected and altered.” In Port Arthur, Texas (USA), where Bruno works, these degraded grounds viscerally reflect the “social and political processes that leave Black communities to disproportionately experience environmental pollution and climate change impacts.” Bruno reminds us why geographers should pay heed to how the relations that shape human lives also shape our nonhuman kin and environments—what Bruno calls the “biophysical afterlife of slavery”—in places far beyond Port Arthur. For political ecologists, environmental justice scholars, and human–environment geographers more broadly, toxic relations and conditions are familiar grounds: We tend to traffic in the production of traumatized environments and communities (Moulton et al. 2021). The question then becomes this: What are other ways of writing our geographies? What might this collection offer that is “new”?

We take note of at least three cross-cutting themes and offerings from this special issue that draw a different tideline for the discipline. First, the articles maintain a fidelity to space and territory—its claims, relations, processes, and contestation—as key analytics to understand race, nature, and the environment. “Freedom is a place,” Gilmore (2022) reminded us. Unsurprisingly, the question of land remains central to geographic thought and abolitionist struggle across the special issue, a classic disciplinary focal point that has been rekindled and transformed by scholars in Black ecologies and Indigenous geographies (cf. Daigle 2020; Roane 2022). “Soils and land have long been central to the description of Black people as enslaved labor,” explains Bruno (this issue), “working soils for white capitalist accumulation.”

At the same time, the relationality of land provides a window of possibility. Freshour and Williams (this issue) contend that, even while “relations of racialized destruction were a willful development of the [Mississippi] Delta,” this history is “challenged and contested by visions and practices of sustainable and cooperative development manifested by Black Southerners.” Drawing on analysis of Black farm communities, the authors explore the abolitionist logics and vision that confront conditions of agro-environmental racism—an ecology of struggle “grounded in the soil.”

This would enable a kind of freedom that did not seek inclusion into existing systems of domination, exploitation, and extraction, but moved toward relationships of abundance with each other and the land. It provided escape grounded in the soil and toward collective stewardship for Black agrarian futures.

Similarly, Mollett (this issue) argues that political ecology scholarship on land grabbing tends to miss the way that land control is coconstituted by racial, colonial, and patriarchal logics—not only in the United States, but across Latin America. In exploring land as a relation in tension with the body, Mollett directs our focus to disentangle the intimate scales of land dispossession in Panama, at the level of gendered, classed, and racialized workers.

Second, the articles collectively make visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence at the hands of capital and the state. This “lifting of the veil” has a long tradition in critical and radical geographical scholarship, in which the production of toxicity, surplus, waste, and violence are shaped by capitalist relations (cf. Blaut 1979; Harvey 1990; Massey 2005). A key difference, at least in this special issue, is the centrality of race within that relational matrix. For authors in this collection, the “race” in racial capitalism is not additive; racial capitalism is capitalism (Robinson 1983).

Urban nature and green development are prime examples of the ways that race is fundamental to the spatial relations of property and capitalist development, guarded by the racial state. Using the case of Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA), Walker, Ramer, Derickson, and Keeler (this issue) explore how “real estate developers worked with civil society organization and local government agencies to secure public investments in green amenities, including gardens and public parks, while blanketing their developments with racial covenants.” The authors “lift the veil” on Minnesota-nice to reveal how developers advanced ideals of whiteness and nature to build a city that advantaged white populations at the expense of racialized groups.

The duality of the racial state—as provider and police—shapes the spatial fabric of resource provision. Workman and Shah (this issue) show us how the infrastructural delivery of drinking water to Black residents of a North Carolina community creates a paradox of vital resource provision (drinking water) that also works as an active agent of exclusion and marginalization. “In Morningside, residents view the security of water as inseparable from the control of space and aesthetic.” Infrastructure is unsettling in this account: “In Morningside, municipal annexation and the extension of centralized water and sewerage infrastructure are perceived not as an improvement, but as an intrusion—precisely because water infrastructure is understood to increase in-migration and population density from the majority-minority city of Greensboro.”

For a World Still Unwritten

What might it mean to become unsettled in geography? Praxis and public scholarship are very much alive in the discipline—despite entrenched norms and structural forces that work against it. Public scholarship is present in this special issue, a testament to the ways that the “outside world” seeps in and slowly transforms our ideas, practices, and institutions. This point brings us to our third and final observation: The articles here make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world.

In thinking through a different register of struggle, we take inspiration from Hartman’s (2021) very spatial notion of the wayward, “related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild” (227). For Hartman, waywardness is a site of “unregulated movement” and “ambulatory possibility.” To be wayward, argued Hartman (2021), is “the attempt to elude capture by never settling,” a fugitive, riotous, and rebellious figure; a critical praxis that “sustains the dispossessed” (227).

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics on occult visions of other rules and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is on ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the housed of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.

When there is little room to breathe. “Racial capitalism and colonialisms create the condition of suffocation,” writes Thompson (this issue). In response, Thompson founded the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project, named in honor of Charles “Chop” Roundtree, Jr., who was shot and killed by the San Antonio Police Department in 2018. The Bloom Project works to build outdoor spaces and healing and learning experiences “where Black, Indigenous, and youth of color can breathe, and in doing so, how we prefigure and embody alternative worlds where we can all breathe.”

The Bloom Project actively builds “an abolition geography of care, healing, interdependence, and easy breathing with and for our community and the land.” Thompson shifts the analytical focus “toward the ways that communities are imagining and practicing alternative ways of being, embodying the worlds they desire.” In making space for possibility, the Bloom Project aims to build a world for “easy breathing.” This is no easy task. With an eye on us all, Thompson asks, “What infrastructure would have to be put in place, what ways of being would have to shift, what would we have to transform for the affirmation, ‘we can breathe,’ to be true?”

Such worlds are already in the making, glimpsed in the pages of this collection. Purifoy (this issue) explores how Black people in the United States formed communities amid “perilous landscapes, spaces considered undesirable, inaccessible, and inhabitable by White planter classes” in ways that allowed them to defend against white supremacist violence. Such towns persist today, formed as “extralegal spaces of freedom and alternative land relation.” In a different example of making place, Chennault and Sutton (this issue) identify the “cooperative practices of survivability” in the struggle for safe and secure rental housing—what Hartman might call the “untiring practice of trying to live.” What does survivability look like in practice? Chennault and Sutton narrate tenants’ struggles and organizing to “make homeplaces and neighborhoods that are livable and enjoyable, for landlords to take responsibility for rental home environments, and for enforcement of property maintenance codes in a timely manner.”

Survivability and freedom are a tricky dance, a two-step with the state and capital. Toxic mold, lead paint, rodents, and broken appliances: Although these elements rarely figure into global narratives of “nature” and climate justice, these two articles, alongside others, bear witness to why the “home” is a central thread in the web of life, the insurgent grounds of environmental justice, a vital part of “the everyday struggle to live free” (Hartman 2021, 227). Insurgent grounds extend into our most intimate spaces of learning (Reimer et al. this issue), dwelling (Chennault and Sutton this issue; Gois this issue; Purifoy this issue; Vickers this issue), working (Freshour and Williams this issue; Mollett this issue), playing (Bonds and Holifield this issue), and storytelling (Vasudevan et al. this issue).

“Geography,” Vasudevan et al. (this issue) suggest, “is undergoing a reckoning.” We certainly hope so. They continue, “Geography’s reckoning is also a resurgence, emerging alongside Indigenous struggles to protect land relations; abolition movements linking state violence to environmental racism’s slow violence; and queer, trans and crip-led movements centered on care, kinship and transformative justice.” Stories are powerful analytical mechanisms and often underrated tools of change. In a small way, we hope the voices and stories presented in this collection inspire a fleet of wayward geographers; a radical reorientation and rewriting of social and spatial relations; and a solidarity “to protect the lifeblood and spirits of this earth.”

Acknowledgments

We thank the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories for providing us with space to work on this introduction and special issue. Katie Meehan, the editor, is grateful to Jennifer Cassidento (Managing Editor), Dr. Stephen Hanna (AAG Cartographic Editor), and Lea Cutler (Production Editor at Taylor & Francis), who carried this issue, alongside so many others, across the finish line. The Annals editorial board and other editors—Ling Bian, David Butler, Brian King, and Kendra Strauss—provided advice, wisdom, review labor, and a supportive environment that has made the editorial process a truly collective affair. Finally, a million thanks go to the Annals reviewers, whose hidden labor was central to making this special issue a reality, through the ups and downs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Behind every academic publication is an even greater number of (mostly unrecognized and unpaid) people whose time and intellectual labor feeds into our work, sustains our books and journals, and reproduces the discipline. The work of reviewers remains mostly backstage; all I can say is I (Katie) see you, and I thank you.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Meehan

KATIE MEEHAN is Co-Director of King’s Water Centre and a Reader in Environment and Society in the Department of Geography, King’s College London, WC2B 4BG, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. She is a human–environment geographer and political ecologist with research interests in infrastructural geographies, feminist political economy, household water insecurity, and environmental justice.

Mabel Denzin Gergan

MABEL DENZIN GERGAN is Assistant Professor of Asian Environmental Studies in the Department of Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayan region. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race with special interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, and decolonial theory.

Sharlene Mollett

SHARLENE MOLLETT is a Professor in the Departments of Human Geography and Global Development Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Professor Award in Feminist Cultural Geography at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include feminist political ecologies of race and land struggle in Central America.

Laura Pulido

LAURA PULIDO is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected]. Her scholarly interests include white supremacy, environmental justice, cultural memory, and Latinx studies. Her current book project is Monumental Denial: U.S. Cultural Memory and White Innocence.