Why Using Afrofuturism in Environmental Education Excites Me

Terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘the anthropocene’ have entered every day vocabulary. Wider attention is being given to changes in global weather patterns, including the heightened frequency and intensity of ‘super-storms’ such as Hurricane Michael, as well as other dangerous environmental catastrophes like wildfires in California. The rich are seeing a problem, talking about moving to outer space as an escape; and potential wars over resources are being rehearsed by the State.

Working class and Black, Brown, Indigenous, and otherwise marginal communities, disproportionately impacted by the detriments of environmental pollution and climate change, will not be saved by the political, economic and cultural machinery of the colonizers.

We are on the front lines of ecocide, yet we’re being pushed aside by dominant modes of “sustainability.” This tells me that new climate panic is really about finding new technologies to preserve massa’s house.

I’ve volunteered and worked as an environmental co-educator along the Bronx River for the last several years. I witness the larger exclusionary approach in environmentalism happen on the level of analysis all the time. Prime example: how we talk about harmful algal blooms. These are caused by sewage. New York City’s sewer system releases wastewater into the River, if there is a mixture pouring in from the streets during rain or snow, and from our homes, etc. This is Combined Sewage Overflow.

This sewage often contains a naturally occurring chemical compound known as nitrates. Plant species need nitrates to produce amino acids that help them grow; a sewage overflow introduces too much of these necessary nutrients to a water body, a phenomenon called ‘eutrophication’ (literally “well nourished”). Eutrophication can cause algae in the water to ‘bloom’ because there are so much nutrients now. It is this bloom of algae, in which they are high in numbers, that causes the River to change color, because they use up the excess nitrates, eventually dying. As they die, decomposers use up alot of oxygen to break them down, turning the water red-brown and adding a nasty smell. Dead fish start to show up on the shores of the Bronx River at this point, unable to breathe because the water is hypoxic, and visitors to the river find ourselves recoiling in disgust at the stench.

We use an array of activities (videos, games, conversation, and scientific tests) to help folk understand exactly why sewage overflow in the Bronx River is a problem, its causes, and the science behind its detrimental ecological effects. Often times, however, conversations on sewage in the Bronx River lay the responsibility on individuals to use less water at home during rain (to minimize the likelihood of the system overflowing). This causes the very existence of combined sewer systems to be accepted as a given, obscuring the infrastructure/policy histories behind them. Furthermore, any considerations of existing or future alternatives (and their implications) are shut down with the caveat “these things take time! What can we do NOW?”

In a location like the South Bronx, impacted by the worst of capitalist violences, with its high concentrations of police, poverty and air pollution, a focus on individualism and limited information is politically convenient because it depoliticizes the environment. This folds working class and Black and Brown communities into the project of mainstream environmental movements. It is one of many examples in which these movements mask their anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism by feigning and centering an ‘objective’ study or conservation of nature.

But, Black people have neither time for nor interest in the prevailing idealistic, exclusionary, and often boring ecology or environmental science. Especially not while white environmentalisms are (among many other things):

1. trying to mobilize the punitive/carceral state against the use of plastic straws, a total disregard for the effects on disabled and Black, Brown, Indigenous communities this will have, and a measure whose basis is a questionable source of research, again pinning blame for ‘unsustainable’ practice on individuals as opposed to the larger system of capitalism and imperial-colonialism.
2. deploying ‘overpopulation’ arguments to pathologize the poor, either putting emphasis on teaching Third (and Fourth) World families to have less kids or pushing xenophobic policy, all in the name of preserving ‘finite resources’ from our (supposedly irresponsible) use thereof. This is even despite the fact that these very same communities experience structured lack of access to resources, or that wealth more likely correlates with negative environmental impact
3. erecting wildlife preserves and other conservation initiatives that marginalize and even criminalize indigenous peoples on their ancestral lands, on top of instating profit-driven, Eurocentric designations for which plant and animal relationships should exist within their confines (excluding other formations).

We need Black radical ecology. An environmentalism that is symbiotic in its science, drawing on many interconnected understandings, but pathogenic in its politics, holding the power to suck life out of the limits, hierarchy, and boundaries in environmental knowledge. I think Afrofuturism contains this most “mycorrhizal” epistemology. In other words, Afrofuturism can be the answer.

Afrofuturism is a complex tradition in African and African Diasporic artistic and theoretical history. Exciting and entertaining, with its transposition of Black people into space, digital worlds, alternate pasts, new futures, Reynaldo Anderson defines it this way: “Black speculative art integrates African diasporic or African metaphysics with science or technology and seeks to interpret, engage, design, or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and as a catalyst for the future.” In this way, all Afrofuturism has an underlying drive: the constant, critical and creative re-assessment of boundaries, with an emphasis on synthesizing tradition and science to re-create possibilities for the future.

The first time I’d ever seen Afrofuturist media with (explicit) environmental themes was Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi. Set in East Africa, Pumzi deals with the political effects of water scarcity for the dystopian community young Asha lives in. Asha’s dreams and a mysterious note lead her to believe that plant life has survived beyond their walls and she quests to prove it. Later I came across an essay by Fikile Nxumalo and Stacia Cedillo that suggested using “Black speculative fiction in… co-creating with children… environmentally attuned literary representations.” The authors suggested this as a strategic way to resist exclusion of Black children from environmental narratives. Pumzi and Nxumalo and Cedillo’s essay together motivated me to begin writing a script about nitrate pollution of a water body that set a Black family (and supernatural entities) against an energy company.

Through my piece, I wanted to play with the boundaries of hard science, fantasy, and spirituality. Part of it required that I research ‘algal blooms’ and ‘eutrophication’ in order to help one of my characters explain them to his kids. In fact, apart from the script I wouldn’t have learned to explain algal blooms the way I did earlier. Thus, the process of developing an Afrofuturist work became a science learning method for me (I explain this more here).

That this piece helped sharpen my science knowledge made me curious if I could use it in my work and get the same results. So, I held a workshop around it, in which folk could perform as my characters and learn about eutrophication in the context of a sci-fi adventure. What’s most interesting to me about that experience is not just how participants in the workshop learned from my script about forming hypotheses or about sewage overflow, but their excitement about its being a sci-fi adventure, and one with Black characters at the center especially.

This allowed us to not only have conversations about environmental science, but about how alternate perspectives are often marginal in the environmental movement. Here, then, Afrofuturist inquiry re-assessed a boundary in environmental thought: we were discussing pollution and power. Since then, I’ve been imagining ways to fight environmental racism by harnessing Black speculative art.

For example, what if radical “green” Afrofuturists worked to create alternate worlds of access to water filtration technology where there is none? Simultaneously, we could use a speculative framework to encourage communities to critically analyze ongoing oppressive histories that create the gap in access, and to combine traditional understandings with new technologies, articulating visions for more equitable/sustainable futures.

How can we start thinking more scientifically, socially, and speculatively about the environment? Our youth are situated in a technological age complicated by climate destruction and the resurgence of (neo)fascism. Afrofuturism, with key themes like history, difference, technology, synthesis, futures, cosmology, spirituality, philosophy of science, etc. is both aesthetically engaging and politically resonant at this point. Yes we are absented by mainstream environmentalism, but our perspectives are essential. Seeing that and centering our voices will help us mobilize for the future of Black liberation. Afrofuturism is calling us to this, towards sankofa as ecopolitics — reaching back, looking ahead, feet in the soil, eyes on the cosmos.