Dianne Glave Joins STH for Lowell Event: The Black Church Never Left the Outdoors
On January 26, Dianne Glave will join Boston University School of Theology for its biannual Lowell event, discussing “The Black Church Never Left the Outdoors: Eco-Justice and Environmentalism.” She will be joined by Kapya John Kaoma (STH’10) as a discussion partner.
Glave is Coordinator of Diversity Development with the Western Pennsylvania United Methodist Church Conference Center. Dr. Glave, who has an M.A. and Ph.D. in History with an emphasis on African American and environmental history, is the author of Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage and the co-editor of To Love the Wind and the Rain: African American Environmental History.
Glave began her work when there was very little scholarship on African American environmental history, even though African Americans have deep historical ties to the land. “I thought it was important to tell those stories because they weren’t being told when I was a graduate student,” she says. The topic held an emotional resonance for Glave, thanks to her childhood memories of visiting her grandparent’s farm in Jamaica and her summer sojourns to a camp in upstate New York, where she and her family were some of the few people of color.
On those summer trips, she said, “I was given the freedom to be on my own all day long. The only time I saw my parents was at breakfast, lunch and dinner.” Glave was able to explore the lake and the cave and paddle a canoe alone across the water.
Her research shows that African Americans have a complicated historical relationship with nature. “Africans had a foundation in the soil, in the earth, in the environment, but that changed when Europeans forced Africans to take the Middle Passage from Africa into the Americas,” she says.
Forced into outdoor labor, their relationship with nature became painful although the outdoors was still, in many ways, a refuge. “They came into the woods to get away from the slaveholder,” says Glave. “In some instances it was a temporary reprieve and in other instances it was a permanent way of getting away from the slaveholder.” Although this complicated relationship with the outdoors prompted many African Americans to move into urban environments as soon as they had the freedom to do so, Glave says it is wrong to assume that connection to the environment is fully severed.
Today many African Americans face socioeconomic barriers to the full enjoyment of nature, she says: the economic stress of working to put food on the table, the lack of resources to travel, and little political clout in the environmental decisions affecting their neighborhoods.
But many organizations are doing excellent work to help African Americans reclaim and deepen that historical connection to the environment. “There’s a transformation that’s taking place,” Glave says. When Glave lived in Memphis for several months, she attended St. Andrew American Methodist Episcopal Church, a church that brings fresh vegetables to the community through a farmers markets and had an environmentally-themed vacation Bible school for children and adults.
Glave also names Outdoor Afro as one organization that “celebrates and inspires African American connections and leadership in nature.” Faith in Place, an Illinois-based nonprofit, “inspires religious people of diverse faiths to care for the Earth through education, connection, and advocacy.” Audrey Peterman encourages African Americans and other minorities to visit American National Parks.
Glave has written about her own experience visiting Glacier National Park—her first visit to a National Park—and said it was a transformative experience seeing black bears and witnessing the glaciers before they disappear.
Please join us for The Black Church Never Left the Outdoors: Eco-Justice and Environmentalism. The event will take on January 26 at 5:30 pm at Boston University School of Theology, 745 Commonwealth Avenue B23-B24, Boston, MA 02215. This event is free and open to the public, and it is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Lowell Institute.