What Black women’s relationship with the earth taught me about the liberation of soil, sky, and all things held between

When I first entered the environmental sector, I thought I had finally arrived in a space where justice and care for the planet were central to the work. I believed I was stepping into a movement that recognised the urgency of climate breakdown and the need for change across all levels of society. But it didn’t take long before I started to notice how narrow the mainstream environmental lens can be. Even in spaces that claimed to care about justice, the planet came first and people, especially those from marginalised communities, were often treated as secondary. The goal was to protect forests, oceans, and ecosystems, but rarely with an honest reckoning of who has destroyed them or who has sustained them through generations of care and relationship. 

Too often the narrative positions nature as something to be saved from people. This way of thinking makes it easier to rally around saving endangered species or pristine landscapes, instead of advocating for communities facing displacement or environmental harm. Those most deeply connected to the land are often treated as if less important than the land itself.

At home, the earth wasn’t a resource but a relative. We lived in relation to it as kin, not as owners or stewards. This meant respecting its limits, noticing changes and moving with care. I saw it in my mother, who reused and repurposed everything, not because it was ethical, but because it felt natural. Like so many African mums, she was a hoarder, keeping old containers, empty jars, plastic bags, and yoghurt tubs. Our freezer was full of ice cream tubs, none of which actually contained ice cream. I saw it with my aunt, who paid close attention to the weather, tended to her garden, the soil, the seasons.

It’s funny to think that growing up I didn’t feel a strong connection to nature. Not, in the imagined way: there were no family Sunday walks or camping trips. Nature was presented to me, as somewhere you went, if you had time, money, or the right boots. Those around me never used the language of ecology or sustainability but they practiced it daily and intuitively, through small acts of care. 

This is the kind of environmental knowledge that doesn’t show up in reports or strategies. But instead is rooted in love, and as bell hooks writes in ‘Touching the Earth’ in their book Belonging (1952), ‘When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. The ancestors taught me it was so.’ 

Black women have always lived with this awareness. When I’m ill, I think about the foods my mother would cook. What to eat to draw out heat, what to avoid when your throat is sore, the lingering smell of ginger simmering on the stove. She would send me to the garden for herbs, rough leaves for steeping, bitter ones to chew, roots that always tasted like soil. That knowledge didn’t begin with her, it came from her mother, and her mother before. 

These remedies aren’t just about what the body needs, but what the land gives, and what lessons we receive from those who came before. In many ways, these practices exist because other systems refused to show up for us. When healthcare is inaccessible or dismissive, when institutions fail to recognise our pain, when care is conditional, we continue to turn to what we already know. In Shona culture, there are whole mythologies rooted in the land. Ancestral spirits live in forests, rivers carry warnings, mountains remember. Nature holds memory, and communities have for centuries taught themselves to listen.

What is missing in many environmentalist spaces is the understanding that people and land are not separate. The same forces that exploit the planet: capitalism and colonialism, also exploit Black women. The Combahee River Collective famously wrote, ‘if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.’  I return to this often. 

I write from my own place, as a Black woman shaped by a particular lineage of practices, stories and ways of knowing. This relationship with land and care is not unique to Black women. Many communities, particularly Indigenous peoples and other women of colour, have their own deep and complex relationships with the earth. Writer and researcher Jennifer C. James speaks to the way both Black women and the earth have been positioned at the “bottom” of our social hierarchy, used, exploited, extracted from, and expected to keep giving. This position is a result of colonial and white supremacist logics that frame certain bodies, and the land itself, as endlessly available for exploitation. However, James also invites us to rethink what that space can mean. If we reject hierarchy itself, and refuse the idea that value must be measured from the top down, we can begin to see that what has been cast as marginal is, in fact, foundational. The so-called bottom, can hold possibility, relational knowledge and alternative ways of being that don’t rely on domination. Still, it is important to remember how Black women have long been dehumanised through associations with nature, treated as more physical than intellectual, more body than mind. So when I write about Black women’s relationship to land, it’s not about an essential or mystical closeness to nature. It’s about practices that have been shaped over time, through memory, creativity, and deliberate acts of care. Practices that reflect knowledge passed between generations, often in quiet ways, often unrecognised by dominant systems, but always present. 

If we recognise that climate justice is not about freedom for people at the expense of the planet, nor the protection of the planet that necessitates leaving people behind, we can begin to see environmental liberation as a kind of freedom that recognises how healing the land and healing ourselves are the same.

If environmental movements truly took this seriously, and centred the leadership, knowledge, and long-standing practices of Black women, we could begin to move beyond a crisis response, towards systems that do not only sustain our ecosystems, but embrace the people who have protected them all along.

Any meaningful healing must include everyone. And in that, there is joy. A joy that reminds us that we are all already part of the world we are trying to save.