NATURAL CONNECTION

A case for taking a stand against environmental depredations and the system that thrives on them.

A member of the Ghanaian diaspora and “Black woman and environmentalist living in the West,” U.K.-based Longdon observes in her opening that the word “radical” traces to the Latin word for “root.” This affords her a springboard to advocate forming roots reaching down from the human everyday into the natural world, whether affiliations forged in rage, shaped by spirituality, or informed by science. Longdon builds case studies in each, writing, for example, of a Kenyan computer scientist who has drawn on both algorithms and Indigenous knowledge to formulate strategies for farmers to cope with extended drought, and of a group called the Or Foundation committed to battling throwaway-fashion culture and curbing the economic and environmental costs of disposability. Longdon is especially attuned to the struggles of people of color to protect their homelands against environmental damage wrought by outsiders, sometimes exasperated by the fact that luminaries like Greta Thunberg capture the headlines when so much else is going on. Longdon highlights, in one instance, a homegrown North Carolina movement against a toxic landfill site owned by a megacorporation; as Longdon writes, this movement was manifested in the six-week-long “PCB Protests of Warren County,” with more than 500 community members jailed. In a particularly compelling segment, she examines the work of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in preserving forest lands against timbering, drawing from an “understanding of nature [that] includes not only the trees, plants and forest or the animals and waterbodies but also humans and the Ethiopian nation itself.” In this way, as one of her chapter titles puts it, Longdon holds that “nature is a human right,” one that the polity needs to insist on by forging roots, whether declaring slime mold to be kin or taking government agencies to court for disguising corporate malfeasance.

A readable, closely argued work of environmental advocacy.