how Black Ecological Knowledge informs activism
They tried to sever the roots, but we held on.
Black people have always had a relationship with land that goes beyond survival.
Even during the horror of the transatlantic slave trade, that relationship did not vanish.
It adapted. It went underground like roots that know how to keep growing in the dark.
When enslaved Africans were forced onto ships, many carried seeds in their hair.
Literally. Rice, okra, black-eyed peas, and other food crops made their way to the Americas because people braided them into their cornrows, hiding them from slavers but keeping them safe for planting.
This wasn’t just an act of resistance, it was ecological foresight.
It was Black agricultural science. It was saving the future before it had a name.
These seed-saving practices formed the foundation of what would become entire foodways in the American South.
In fact, much of the rice cultivation knowledge that powered early Southern economies came from West African farmers, who knew how to engineer irrigation and dike systems in wetland environments.
This was not happenstance.
White plantation owners in South Carolina actively sought out people from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa for their expertise, though they rarely acknowledged their contributions publicly【source: Smithsonian Magazine】.
So when we talk about conservation, we must remember that Black ecological knowledge has been present — and exploited — from the beginning.
But it wasn’t just in fields.
It was also in the woods, in kitchens, in the quiet spaces where people remembered and remade rituals.
Harry Roseland reading tea leaves
Hoodoo, often dismissed as superstition or “spooky” folklore, is actually a deep archive of African American ecological and spiritual knowledge.
It is rooted in African traditions, shaped by survival under slavery, and influenced by Indigenous practices.
It teaches us how to use herbs, how to honor water, how to protect our homes, and how to read nature for messages. It is climate wisdom with memory and teeth.
In the rural South, Hoodoo practitioners understood what plants could do; for healing, for protection, and for power.
As ethnobotanist and herbalist Leah Penniman writes, enslaved Africans brought over “the brilliant technology of composting, polyculture, cover cropping, and other regenerative practices” long before white scientists coined the terms【source: Southern Cultures Journal】.
Hoodoo held that knowledge and safeguarded it in the face of cultural erasure.
It’s also important to name how Black and Indigenous communities sometimes exchanged knowledge.
In maroon communities ( places where enslaved people escaped and created new settlements, often on the edges of swamps or forests) African and Indigenous practices came together.
These communities depended on mutual learning about shelter building, edible plants, land navigation, and spiritual lifeways. These weren’t always perfect or romantic alliances, but they were real, and they remind us that land can be a place of solidarity and survival.
Black ecological knowledge is not limited to the past either.
Today, we still see it in the work of urban farmers reclaiming vacant lots, in mutual aid efforts that center food justice, in Hoodoo root workers (like myself) who pass on plant knowledge, and in people who honor ancestors through tending gardens, building altars, and protecting land from harm.
Holding on is more than surviving. It is a practice of remembering.
Of insisting.
Of making sacred again what was meant to be disposable.
Conservation is not new to us. It’s ancestral.
Sources and Further Reading
The Slave Trade’s Long Legacy of Rice Cultivation in the American South, Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slave-trade-left-legacy-rice-culture-american-south-180959036/African American Environmental Thought and Activism, Southern Cultures Journal
https://southerncultures.org/article/african-american-environmental-thought-and-activism/Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018)
Faith R. Mitchell, Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies (Sandlapper Publishing, 1978)
