This article is a critical reflection that explores the histories of water, marronage, and Black placemaking in the southern United States. It uses insights from history, ethnography, and cultural geography to connect the dual histories of racial slavery and environmental degradation in the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta. This essay argues that, during slavery, swamps, bayous, rivers, and wetlands were geographies in which a fleeting Black commons could be sustained hidden away from the violence of the plantation. These same ecologies are now under extreme duress from coastal subsidence, the petrochemical industry, and climate change. This reflection argues that by charting the meaningful cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and practical insights of Black southern communities, an alternative ecological practice born of maroon imaginaries might be developed that could resist the degradation of these vulnerable southern ecologies.

This essay examines the environmental thinking and activism of Malik Rahim, a member of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panther Party, Green Party political candidate, and co-founder of Common Ground Relief, a grassroots mutual aid organization established in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Rahim’s influences and career help illuminate an alternative history of Black environmentalism whose evolution runs parallel to the mainstream US environmental movement of the 1970s, but also diverges from it in terms of its primary concerns. Drawing from media accounts and extensive oral interviews, the article traces the development of Rahim’s environmental advocacy, locating him in a wider tradition of southern Black environmental justice activism.

Introduction to the Human/Nature issue (vol. 27, no. 1: Spring 2021), guest edited by Andy Horowitz.