by Rasheena Fountain
Rasheena Fountain is Communications Manager at Seattle Audubon and a Chicago native who finds inspiration in exploring nature in cities. Through her work, she hopes to counter dominant environmental narratives by revisiting stories of the past and present, specifically related to her own family and other Black people post emancipation. She has written for Huffpost, Embrace Race, Thrive Global, Mountaineer Magazine, Traile Posse, Austin Weekly News, AustinTalks, and continues to write on her project, Climate Counscious Collabs.
My environments have always been complex: a mixture of the hopes and dreams of my southern-born ancestors blended with the fruition of those dreams and the disappointments of the promise lands deferred.
I am a black environmentalist. This is a heavy phrase for me to say or even write because I still live with a certain feeling of inadequacy and contradiction at the words “black” and “environmentalist” being combined. However, for close to a decade, I have been on a journey to feel adequate—to earn my right to wear this phrase. I have been driven by a mysterious feeling that pinches my sides—a feeling that catapulted me into a field that I thought distant from everything I knew, and a feeling that caused me to leave all I knew to head west to Seattle from Illinois for a graduate degree in environmental studies.
When I first read environmental writings in a college classroom in Illinois and began to understand the concept of environmentalism and sustainability, something awoke in me. I experienced a feeling like water rising in a well, a familiar exuberance, yet so dissonant and sorrowful. I connected with the message to promote healthy environments. I connected with not wanting family to be affected by air pollution and for a healthy planet for future children. I connected with the calmness of sunrays across my cheeks, the enthusiasm of the maple tree leaves turning an array of colors during autumn, and the euphoria of hearing early morning birds chirp above the rising sun. Yet, many of the writers I read were white men and women—distant perspectives describing pristine views not emblematic of my journey or others like me. I felt like a viewer looking from the outside into a scene in a snow globe or on the other side of the television in front of distant nature documentaries. I was now an outsider asking to be let into a party I seemingly showed up late to or was not invited to.
I strove to be a voice beside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, calling attention to the dangers of environmental pollution—causing sickness and death to unsuspecting people.
I wanted to spread the messages of biodiversity and conservation that Aldo Leopold championed to new diverse audiences.
I wanted to connect and live more in sync with nature like John Muir experienced in Yosemite National Park.
Whatever it was I was chasing—that yearn to be a part of environmentalism—I did not know anyone personally who had gone down similar path of environmentalism.
I was born in Chicago, Illinois. I am the product of high school sweethearts from the inner-city who became teenage parents when they had my oldest brother John. As a baby, I lived in an area on the Westside of Chicago in the North Lawndale community referred to as K-town. I soon after moved to Urbana, Illinois before moving back to Chicago’s Westside with my mother and grandparents when I was 7 years old.
For many years, when I thought of my inspiration for environmentalism, I thought of the times as a child in Urbana, Illinois watching my mother garden with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese elders in her garden plot near the corn fields in Family and Graduate Housing at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana where my father was attending school. I thought environmentalism felt like the calm mixture that often seeped through my open windows on warm summer nights: a blend of cow manure from the nearby farms, accentuated by a chorus of nighttime crickets. I thought of the summer of kindergarten driving through Yosemite National Park with my family and seeing the towering Rocky Mountains through the windows of my family’s white Buick Skylark. These reflections of connections with nature often ended when I reflected on my childhood in Chicago.
On my grandmother’s street in Chicago, natural open spaces came in the form of vacant lots full of tall, unkempt grasses filled with shiny debris: glass, aluminum cans, small plastic baggies and other man-made materials. As a child, the vacant lots were where the neighborhood kids played Tag and other imaginative games. The animals and plants danced to a different tune than rural nature I had experienced; nature often served as a back drop and an invisible object in my city surroundings. No one used the word nature, and environmentalism was seen as a distant thing that white people did who fought against the cutting down of trees by chaining themselves to them. During my childhood in Chicago, my memories of natural connections happened when I went to camp for two weeks in a nearby town in Illinois: I did not even consider my time spent visiting family in rural Mississippi as a natural experience.
Essentially, I have often mourned nature. It’s a never-ending sorrow, a nagging pain that has followed me like my parents’ divorce or like witnessing firsthand the crack epidemic in 1990s on Chicago streets. I mourned nature even as I saw my grandmother toiling in the soil in her front yard to plant flowers in Chicago. I felt distant when I saw my grandmother, my mother’s mother, pick green tomatoes from the fuzzy green vines in her backyard garden near the alley way that lead to the neighborhood corner. I neglected to see nature even as she sliced the tomatoes with pride, preparing to fry them up in a savory cornmeal recipe as southern as her Mississippi childhood.
My grandfather on my mother’s side also mourned nature. He often told me stories of being in the military and encounters with exotic wildlife overseas while I sat humoring him, but disconnected. He talked of our Native American history, telling me the different tribes in our ancestry. I haven’t been able to verify any of these stories, but I can remember so vividly the detail and excitement in his eyes as he relayed this information to me. He often sat in his Lazy Boy arm chair, fixated at the television, welcoming me to join him to watch nature documentaries that highlighted wildlife in distant landscapes more pristine than our Westside Chicago streets. Here, I witnessed a longing and imaginative awe nature inspired.
I continued on for years feeling like an outsider mourning nature and in search of environmentalism as a black woman who grew up partly in inner city Chicago. That was until I realized that I was on the wrong journey. I realized that I hadn’t shown up late to the party, but I had unknowingly stumbled into and was asking to be let into the wrong party. The environmentalism of John Muir and Aldo Leopold was indeed not my environmentalism— not my Chicago community’s environmentalism and not my family’s environmentalism. To be a black environmentalist means reconciliation with the land and reconstructing the perceptions of nature. It means embracing the toiling of my grandmother in her Chicago backyard urban garden, stepping beyond the nature documentary dreams of my grandfather, and embracing that we too have always been and are environmentalists. Still, in its current state and conception, environmentalism and blackness continues to feel dissonant to me, as many are still in mourning, and communities like inner-city Chicago, Puerto Rico, and Flint, MI are still disregarded. Promised Lands are still deferred.
And while I am skeptical of reaching the Promised Land or if there will ever be true reconciliation with the land during my generation for people of color, I hope that I can be a part of lessoning the dissonance in being a black environmentalist. I hope to continue changing the narrative so often exclusive of those like my grandparents in inner city Chicago. I envision my grandchildren seeing a concept of environmentalism where their ancestral lineage is included and where they are welcomed—not an afterthought. I hope I am working to add to the plurality of perspectives and stories of relationships with the land. It’s a bridge that I and other environmentalists of color are working hard to build. For this reason, no matter how dissonant it feels, I will keep uttering the phrase “I am a black environmentalist,” Because I am too an environmentalist, even if my dreams may be deferred.
Comments are closed.