Scenes from the insurgent [Black] forest

Through three scenes in the U.S. South, this article traces alternate histories surrounding U.S. forests through Black ecological practices for spiritual sustenance and refuge from slavery. The rich density and network of forest landscapes created possibilities for Black liberation separable, if still arising from, plantations as the dominant moral, social, and economic framework for the United States’ domestic and globalized lifeways. The burgeoning literature in Black Ecologies signals the importance of Afro-diasporic relations with ecosystems representing the intimate complexities of violent extraction via slavery and simultaneous possibilities for sustenance and freedom. Setting aside forest conservation, one pillar of Western environmentalism, a Black Ecologies approach to forests de-commodifies these ecosystems as bundles of resources and reestablishes them as a life-giving geographies offering the possibility of worlds beyond property, plantation, and profit.