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Prescribed Fire Use Among Black Landowners in the Red Hills Region, USA
Get PDFThe Red Hills Region of southern Alabama, northern Florida, and southwestern Georgia is one of the most prominent areas in the United States for conducting prescribed fire research and is the birthplace of fire ecology. The culture of prescribed burning in the Red Hills has been influenced by multiple ethnic groups, including the Seminole and Creek nations, Black landowners, and White researchers. Given the distinctive reliance of the region on prescribed fire, it is noteworthy that the combined issues of Black land loss, underrepresentation, and incentives for using prescribed fire on private lands in the southeastern United States have generated questions about diversity and inclusion in landowner outreach. To increase understanding about Black landowner historic and current use of prescribed fire for land management in the Red Hills Region, formal and informal interviews were conducted from May through August 2019 with 21 Black landowners and tenants to document the perspectives and thoughts of Black landowners and tenants of southern Alabama, northern Florida, and southwestern Georgia. The results of this research show that Black landowners, tenants, and fire experts, have been, and continue to be, influential in the development and sustainment of fire traditions in the RedHills and in the resilience of the longleaf pine ecosystem
Book Review of The Nutmeg\u27s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Get PDFAmitav Ghosh, a celebrated author of fiction and nonfiction, earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford. In this iteration of his nonfiction oeuvre, Ghosh’s mapping of the historical entanglement of human rights abuses and environmental exploitation is framed upon the pillars of postcolonialism and posthumanism. Many of the processes he writes about in his acclaimed book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis overlap with the interests of Human Ecology readers. Chapters 4 “Terraforming,” 5 “We Shall be Gone Shortly,” and 6 “Bonds of Earth” may feel familiar to students of environmental histories and aficionados of Alfred Crosby and William Cronon. In these chapters Ghosh shows how colonial violence occurred in parallel fashion in the Bandas and the Americas through variations on colonizers’ erroneous terra nullius misperceptions, the egotism of human exceptionalism, anthropogenic ecological change, biological warfare, usurpation and commodification of natural resources, hijacking of local trade networks, and more.Ghosh traces the history of the trade in nutmeg and other spices from the first Dutch contact with and subsequent brutal colonization of the Banda Islands of Indonesia in the first quarter of the seventeenth century and draws illuminating parallels with the contemporary social and environmental histories of the Americas
