Ecowomanist Spirituality

By Melanie L. Harris

Ecowomanist spirituality is a form of African American religion that focuses on the theological, political, and socio-cultural perspectives of women of African descent and their engagement with climate justice. Specifically, it highlights the scientific research, spiritual activism, and religious practices of African and African American women who serve as environmentalists, religious leaders, and policy makers in the climate-justice movement.

Ecowomanist reflections in religion suggest that the way we connect with the earth can open alternative visons of how we might live into more environmentally just ways of being with earth. When we consider an African cosmological vision that honors the interconnection between the divine, natural, and human realms, we are presented with a moral prescription and theological base from which to explore questions about humanity’s responsibility to care for and be connected with the earth in just and ethical ways that honor all creation.

“When and Where I Enter …”

As the granddaughter of Black farmers who worked to build one of the first all-Black farming communities and settlements in the West, my work as an ecowomanist theologian and ethicist is a spiritual practice that roots me in the earth and allows me to honor my ancestors’ hopes, hard work, and dreams. It opens a door for me to explore the religiosity they carried as they migrated west to escape Jim and Jane Crow laws in the South. As I discuss in my book, Ecowomanism, 1 the promise of a life free from the constant terror of racial violence was not the only reason my grandparents joined the great migration and left Mississippi around 1918. They

were also drawn by the promise of being able to cultivate land and build healthy and sustaining communities while enjoying the beauty of the earth. The legacy of the blood, sweat, and tears that they poured into the earth in Dearfield, Colorado, is shared by an entire movement of justice keepers who from then to this very day continue to weave together racial justice and environmental justice as they strive to create earth justice.

What religion and what kinds of spiritual practices helped my grandparents’ generation deal with the agony of being separated from the soil of their birth? What spiritual practices empowered their courage to withstand and resist racial attack and white supremacy even as they tried to build a new life of freedom? What theological truths and underpinnings shaped their relationship to the earth and honored the agricultural epistemology they brought from the deep South to the Rocky Mountains? Such questions inform my theological explorations into my own earth story as an ecowomanist.

What about you? Where does your earth story begin? Consider accepting an invitation into the first three steps of the seven-step method of ecowomanism. First, inquire into how you first came into a conscious relationship with the earth. What theological references, stories, or biblical narratives helped guide you in creating a just and sustainable relationship with the earth? To do this work may take courage depending on who you are and the social location you inhabit. Think about it. Who are you in relation to your vision of a just earth?

Second, reflect upon your own social location, including factors such as your race, class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical home, age, and theo-political leaning, and ask, How is my earth story reflective of who I am, who my family and my peoples have been on the planet? Reflecting on your earth story or experience with explicit awareness of your socio-cultural location carries you more fully into ecowomanist analysis.

Finally, build upon these reflections on your social location and your earth story and engage in intersectional analysis by considering how those categories come into play when you experience or witness environmental racism. Ecowomanism is often referred to as race-class-gender analysis, or womanist intersectional analysis, because it is careful to track connections among environmental injustice and the dynamics of racism, classism, and sexism, or heterosexism when engaging issues such as climate change and environmental racism.

Womanism is also always constructive, focusing upon solutions. Rather than simply offering a deconstructive analysis of unsound environmental practices— how deforestation in the Amazon impacts the lives of countless women, children and families, or how lead poisoning affects children and families of color in Flint, Michigan, and Mississippi due to “sanctioned” water pollution—ecowomanism highlights the work of African and African American women. Though they are devalued by many in the environmental movement, they work at the forefront of the environmental sciences in reforestation movements and as activists fighting for access to clean air and water for all.

Why Ecowomanism is Interdisciplinary, Interfaith, and Interreligious

Embodying a spirit of radical inclusion and mirroring the wondrous diversity of life on earth, ecowomanism is not monolithic. Ecowomanism is inherently interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interreligious. The interreligious nature of the approach signals the importance of engaging in inter-religious discourse when considering responses to environmental injustice. As a form of third-wave womanism, ecowomanism honors the Christian orientation of classical womanist theology but expands beyond Christian parameters to include all varieties of religion that are life giving for African and African American women. For the sake of the planet and for the wholeness of all beings on earth, especially as we confront the global realities of climate change, ecowomanism stresses the importance of all religious and spiritual insights that honor the earth as sacred and express ethical responsibility for earth care.

In contrast to intellectual or religious movements which prioritize one religious perspective over all others, ecowomanism honors diverse earth-honoring religions across cultures. Ecowomanism honors diverse religions, landscapes, and symbols; however, it is not sectarian or relativistic, for it fosters interreligious dialogue that invites non-hierarchal and non-hegemonic approaches to climate justice.

Ecowomanist Spirituality as African American Religion

At this vital juncture in the age of the Anthropocene, ecowomanism offers a unique contribution to African American religion. Expanding upon challenges to the larger environmental movement raised by Black liberation theologian, Dr. James Cone in “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?”2 including the challenge Cone offers specifically to African American communities, ecowomanism embraces environmental justice as a central component of the traditional fight for human justice. And ecowomanism also establishes a theoretical framework and practical method for African and African American social-justice advocates to engage the environmental movement. So ecowomanism speaks simultaneously to both the historically white-led environmental movement, which struggled to take race seriously in its analysis, and to Black social-justice activists and religious and civil leaders, who often struggled to take environmental justice seriously.

Significantly, as we have seen, ecowomanism invites thinkers to first acknowledge the importance of their own earth story and eco-memory. “Ecomemory” refers to collective and individual memory of the earth and relationship to and with the earth. While no generalization can be made across the African diaspora, Dr. Kimberly Ruffin insightfully notes that many African American communities have a unique and paradoxical relationship with the earth.3 Due to the foundational nature of the practice of white supremacy, acceptance of white racism as a norm, and the history of the transatlantic slave trade in America and throughout the globe, many African Americans living in the contexts of the Americas today are descendants of enslaved peoples. These enslaved Africans, and in some cases Afro-Indians, were bound to the earth by chattel slavery. According to the white supremacist logic that maintained the shackles of slavery, African peoples were considered to be sub-human, animal, or property. They were devalued according to a logic of domination which allotted them less value than the plantation soil they were forced to work. This oppressive sense of being bound to the earth, however, is not the only view of how African peoples were or are connected to the earth.

As the story of my grandparents illustrates, African peoples also felt a deep spiritual connection with the earth. This spiritual tie that “binds” does not displace, nor dominate, but rather roots and liberates. Alive to Ruffin’s insight about African Americans paradoxical relationship to the earth, ecowomanism strives to recover a rooted and liberative connection with the earth in the ongoing struggle against those who would displace and dominate. Thereby ecowomanism binds together the struggles for social, racial, and earth justice.

Confession and Repentance: Ecological Reparations and Ecowomanism

Since earth justice is social justice for ecowomanism, it is important to consider both the parallels of beauty that connect peoples of African descent to the earth as well as the parallel way that the earth and African peoples have been oppressed. Womanist theologian Delores S. Williams helps significantly with this work. In her essay, “Sin, Nature and Black Women’s Bodies,” she points out the parallel nature of the oppressions waged against enslaved Africans, especially enslaved African women, who must endure both racist and sexist assault and the oppression of the earth.”4 Here she exposes the logic of domination at work against the freedom of black women and the freedom of the earth by revealing parallels between the logic of white supremacy and the logic of anthropocentricism. Both logics follow a hierarchal model of thinking, placing value on one side of a dualism and reducing the value on the other. In the case of anthropocentricism, humanity is centered and valued over and above the earth and all aspects of nature. In the case of white supremacy, whiteness is considered superior to blackness. Williams also raises a very important point in this essay, describing how Christianity and especially traditional normative (read: white) theology establishes divine sanction of these hierarchies. This understanding is often followed by a theological claim that God ordains and even commissions humans to “dominate” the earth and force the earth into a submissive relationship with all humanity.

The logic of domination that accompanies this Christian theological claim not only cements the hierarchy, it also produces an acceptance of human-centered approaches as normative in all Christian thought. Williams uses womanist intersectional analysis to disrupt such theological claims and pushes us to ask questions about how this kind of hierarchal thinking erases the value of the earth and erases the value of all who are not White males, especially those who are neither White nor male, Black women. Reclaiming Paul Tillich’s concept of “sin,”5 Williams argues that a womanist frame helps correct Christian theology’s acceptance of hierarchal thinking as normative. Instead, it challenges the white supremacist logic lodged within this form of Christian theology and argues that the “sin of defilement” of any black woman or any sin of defilement waged against the earth should be exposed and resisted.

What must we do to confess and repair our relationship with God, each other, and the earth when such sinful acts are uncovered? Ecowomanism suggests both confession of eco-sin and of social sin are required before making a reparative turn towards creating earth justice. Rather than escaping the ills of society or blaming the violence of white supremacy on previous generations, ecowomanism invites all communities and individuals to ask how we can name past harms and ongoing harms and take reparative steps. To begin, it is vital that we listen to parts of earth most damaged and that we are intentional about listening to stories of ecocide, genocide, and terror as told by communities of color, and that we learn from these narratives of trauma what truly must be repaired. “Only justice can stop a curse,” writes Alice Walker, and when it comes to our shared connection with earth, only earth justice, embodying true justice with one another, with other creatures, with the earth, and with God can heal the beating heart of the planet.6 This work is holy work. This work is sacred work. Are you ready? Yes. Then let us begin.

NOTES

1. Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2017).

2. James Cone, "Whose Earth Is It Anyway?" in Earth Habitat edited by Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen (Minneapolis: MN, Fortress Press, 2001), 23-32

3. Kimberly Ruffin, Black On Earth African American EcoLiterary Traditions (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2010)

4. Delores S. Williams, “Sin, Nature and Black Women’s Bodies” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred edited by Carol Adams (New York: Continuum), 24-29.

5. Williams, 24-29.

6. Alice Walker, "Only Justice Can Stop A Curse" in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers 1983), 338-342.

Melanie Harris is professor of Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology at Wake Forest University and School of Divinity. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Iliff School of Theology, Spelman College, and the Harvard Leadership Program, she received the AddRan Administration Fellowship and GreenFaith Fellowship. Her research and scholarship examines intersections between race, religion, gender, and environmental ethics.