Links African American and environmental studies to show that black Americans have been far from indifferent to environmental concerns. This book examines the works of such canonical figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, and others, who wrote about how slavery and racial oppression affected black Americans' relationship to environment.

According to black theorists, the denial of freedom can distort one's relationship to the natural world, impairing steward-ship and alienating one from the land. Her pathbreaking study offers the first linkage of the early conservation movement to black history, the first detailed description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of scientific racism as an environmental theory. It also offers a new way to conceptualize black politics by bringing into view its environmental dimension, as well as a normative environmental theory grounded in pragmatism and aimed at identifying the social conditions for environmental virtue. Smith's work offers a new approach to established writers and thinkers and shows that they justly deserve a place in the canon of American environmental thought. "African American Environmental Thought" enriches our understanding of black politics and environmental history, and of environmental theory in general. Because slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, this body of thought offers us fresh conceptual resources by which we can make better sense of our world.