The Reality of Mainstream Environmentalism

The article “Ghostbusters in Environmentalism: Black Women (Re)Shaping Environmental Justice” is about the acknowledgement and praise of  black women within environmental justice. The author of the article, Katherine Dicaprio, says that a lot of mainstream environmentalism is centralized on white people, which leaves no room for marginalized voices. In this article, Dicaprio analyzes how black women have contributed greatly to environmental justice. With all of the odds against them black women have used various resources to gain momentum for environmental justice for their communities. Women like Carolyn Finney, Dorceta Taylor, MaVynee Betsch, Majora Carter, Brenda Palms Barber, Rue Mapp, and Harriet Tubman have paved a way for environmentalism in their own right. Carolyn Finney, author of

Black Faces, White Spaces

, has a scholarship dedicated to debunking the exclusion of black women from environmentalism and she strives to destroy the narrative that black people are not invested in the environment. Dorceta Taylor along with Carolyn Finney, has a scholarship program and does research on the exclusion of blacks within the environmental workforce and in positions of authority. Women like MaVynee Betsch took the least popular route to protect what they loved. She is  known for relentlessly protecting  her childhood beach American Beach, Florida, one of the only beaches open to blacks in the Jim Crow era.  According to the text, Majora Carter, Brenda Palms Barber, and Rue Mapp all decided to fight against the racial disparities and environmental injustice in their communities by founding their own organizations. Carter created Green for All, Sustainable South Bronx, and Majora Carter Group. Barber founded a small beekeeping organization, which employed previously incarcerated people in response to mass incarceration economically affecting ethnic communities in Chicago, and Mapps is the founder of Outdoor Afro, an organization “that both shapes young leaders and disrupt dominant conceptions that black folks are incapable or unwilling to establish a relationship with nature.” Harriet Tubman, the oldest example of black women in environmentalism, her connection to the environment saving hundreds of lives and creating history. I found reading this article very enjoyable. It show greatly how mainstream environmentalism has clouded over marginalized voices. I had never heard any of these women's names before, beside Harriet Tubman. I also realized that i never formed a connection between the environment and Harriet Tubman. I, and I'm sure a lot of people never thought of Harriet Tubman as an ecofeminist. I never really thought about how important her connection and knowledge of her environment was to the success of the underground railroad possible. Her legacy also sheds light of the myth of the absence of black peoples participation in environmentalism.

elucidates- meaning to explain or clarify

canon- a general set of prencipals
 

queer ecologies- "a loose,...constellation of practices that ,...,aim  to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory." (Keywords for Environmental Studies by Catriona Sandilands)