Beyond the Anthropocene: Toward A Historical Ecology of Slavery
The transatlantic slave trade era ushered in a radical shift in people and environments in the Americas. The introduction of new species of flora and fauna, large-scale terraforming and clear-cutting for irrigation and mono-crop agriculture, and the physical construction of plantation and industrial buildings necessitated new ecological relationships and left lasting environmental impacts. Anthropologists, and archaeologists more specifically (Erlandson and Braje 2013; Braje et al. 2014; Witmore 2014; Lane 2015; de Souza and Costa 2018), have articulated this global climate change and its impact on historic and contemporary communities through discussion of the Anthropocene. In contrast, environmental scientists have sought to identify the main drivers of landscape change while largely glossing over the specific influences of socio-economic processes that shaped human diasporas and their cultures. Discussions of the Anthropocene have articulated its relationship to the development of global capitalism (Tsing 2015; Altvater et al. 2016), but scholars have only recently begun to articulate the significance of race and racism in the development and perpetuation of these ecological processes (e.g., Yusoff 2018; Baldwin 2020; Saldanha 2020). While poised to make these connections through the material record, the archaeologists studying race and the African diaspora are only beginning to make the articulations. We contend that race and slavery are foundational to this modern geological epoch and imperative to understanding how the Anthropocene has developed over the last five centuries. To draw out these relationships between race, slavery, and ecological change, we propose a critical ecological framework that focuses on two broad questions: How did the Transatlantic Slave Trade and plantation slavery affect ecologies in the Americas? How do those legacies persist today? This proposal addresses aspects of these two questions with a focus on archaeological and ecological research at the Estate Little Princess, a historic eighteenth-century Danish plantation in the St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.
Unpacking the relationship between slavery and massive environmental change is an important application of critical ecology, which seeks to use the plantation as an ontological testing ground for the empirical relationship between racism and environmental degradation. Critical ecology is in effect the merger of disciplines, including Black studies, critical race studies, global change ecology, archaeology and related subdisciplines, to address the limitations in each of these disciplines to explicitly address the role of white supremacist processes, including but not limited to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, have contributed to the state of the environment.
Unpacking the relationship between slavery and massive environmental change is an important application of critical ecology, which seeks to use the plantation as an ontological testing ground for the empirical relationship between racism and environmental degradation. Critical ecology is in effect the merger of disciplines, including Black studies, critical race studies, global change ecology, archaeology and related subdisciplines, to address the limitations in each of these disciplines to explicitly address the role of white supremacist processes, including but not limited to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, have contributed to the state of the environment.
Collaborators
Dr. Justin Dunnavant, University of California, Los Angeles
(Principal Investigator)
Dr. Suzanne Pierre, Critical Ecology Lab
(Co-Principal Investigator)
The Nature Conservancy
Virgin Islands Program
(Principal Investigator)
Dr. Suzanne Pierre, Critical Ecology Lab
(Co-Principal Investigator)
The Nature Conservancy
Virgin Islands Program
Funding Sources
Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research (20200930-RFW)
REferences
- Erlandson, Jon M., and Todd J. Braje
2013 Archeology and the Anthropocene. Anthropocene 4. When Humans Dominated the Earth: Archeological Perspectives on the Anthropocene: 1–7. - Braje, Todd J, Jon M Erlandson, C Melvin Aikens, et al.
2014 An Anthropocene Without Archaeology—Should We Care? The SAA Archaeological Record 14(1): 26-29. - Yusoff, Kathryn
2018 A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - Baldwin, Andrew, and Bruce Erickson
2020 Introduction: Whiteness, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 3–11. - Saldanha, Arun
2020 A Date with Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Beginnings of the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 12–34. - Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt
2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. - Altvater, E., Crist, E. C., Haraway, D. J., Hartley, D., Parenti, C., & McBrien, J. (2016). Anthropocene or capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Pm Press.
- Witmore, Christopher
2014 Archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the Hypanthropocene. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1). Global; human time; forum response: 128–132
