Discussion Questions
Chapter 1
Glave and Stoll
1. What is the epigram about?
2. What does it foreshadow in terms of how African Americans attitudes towards the
environment were shaped?
3. How did segregation influence African American view on the environment?
4. Why do the author’s comment that sanitation was more difficult for African
American women to achieve in their homes?
5. Some environmental programs, such as home gardening, faltered at first, why?
6. How did race, gender, and class discrimination work against poor African
American women?
7. How did the role of the farm influence African Americans?
8. What does race mean?
9. What does ethnicity mean?
10. What is the African American diaspora?
11. Why did some African American women espouse black feminism?
12. What is womanism and who coined the term?
13. What role did agriculture play in African American feelings for the environment?
14. Historically, did African Americans concern themselves with protecting
endangered animals or plants? Why or why not?
Chapter 2
Glave and Stoll
1. How did the history of slavery in North America shape the history of the
environment in North America?
2. What were some important implications of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin?
3. What agricultural knowledge did slaves bring?
4. How did the relationship with the environment differ between slaves and their
masters?
5. Small freedoms some slaves received were often the result of environmental
knowledge, what were some examples of these freedoms
6. Was all the land planted during the plantation era?
7. What was the value of non-planted land?
8. How was hunting part of the African American environmental ethos?
9. How did story telling influence AA environmental thought?
10. What are some examples of slaves using natural resources?
11. Were these resources solely for individual gain?
12. Were these resources valued only for their actual use (i.e. nutrition or practical)?
13. Discuss the role plant knowledge played in the slave’s lives?
14. “Wilderness was a place where the health of individual bodies as well as
communities could be restored and strengthened.”
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15. Authors state that African American slaves didn’t view the wilderness as a place
to find one’s self, but a place of what?
16. Describe some of the connections between social relations and environmental
ones.
17. After the emancipation of the South, how were African American’s depicted in
terms of their desire to travel?
18. How did African Americans participate in a conservation ethic?
19. How did the slave owners view their slaves and the land?
20. What does the author mean when he says on page 19 that, “this history left
twentieth-century black southerners with a double-edged inheritance?”
21. “Relation to the environment has always been social and collective and always
under negation.” What does this mean?
22. How did African Americans view wilderness?
23. Did slaves make the sharp distinctions between human and non-human worlds
that whites made?
24. Does the author argue that all African American feelings towards the environment
came out of slavery?
25. What qualities of African American environmental politics come out of this slave
context?
a. “Pursuit of collective rights,
b. the tendency to see community in broad terms that include both humans
and non-humans,
c. the connection of environmental concerns to the world of work and
production rather than to lifestyle choices and consumption
d. versatile gifts for political negotiation.”
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