Christian Cooper (right) was featured in the documentary “Birders: The Central Park Effect,” a 2019 One Earth Film Fest film. He was also in the news from May 25, after he asked a white woman (not pictured here) to leash her dog in Central Park’s Ramble, an area where leashing is required. She responded by calling 9-1-1.
By Susan Messer
In last month’s newsletter, One Earth Film Fest Executive Director Ana Garcia Doyle and I discussed criticisms that white, middle-class actors and agendas have dominated the environmental movement. Since then, I have followed a few of the threads Ana sent my way—thus broadening my view of the people at work in the environmental movement and the meaning of their work as pathways to more equitable treatment of people, wildlife, habitats, and communal spaces.
Who We Expect to See Where and Doing What
Some of you might have already heard of Christian Cooper via the 2019 One Earth Film Festival screening of "Birders: The Central Park Effect." Far more of us had a first introduction to him via his disturbing encounter with a dog walker in Central Park on Memorial Day and the subsequent news reports.
In response to that encounter, a group of 30 STEM professionals inaugurated the first-ever Black Birders Week. One of the founders was Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and graduate student at Georgia Southern University with over 65,000 Twitter followers: “For far too long,” she announced, “black people in the United States have been shown that outdoor exploration activities are not for us. . . . Whether it be the way the media chooses to present who is the ‘outdoorsy’ type, or the racism black people experience when we do explore the outdoors, as we saw recently in Central Park. Well, we’ve decided to change that narrative.”
Black Birders Week received broad media coverage—from CNN, NPR, Scientific American, Forbes, and many others. And it drew attention to the research of 24-year-old Deja Perkins, who grew up near 95th and Stony Island (Chicago’s Pill Hill neighborhood): the need to make outdoor spaces more inclusive, and to send the message that nature is something for everyone to enjoy.
Deja Perkins with a barn swallow (photo courtesy of Deja Perkins).
Perkins, an urban ecologist and graduate student at North Carolina State University, is researching bird habitats in cities and extrapolating from that data what the presence of wildlife, or its absence, indicates about an area’s socioeconomics or historical systemic structures like racism. “For example,” Perkins says, “income level can influence things like how many trees or what types of green spaces are found in an area, which in turn influences the number of birds and range of species those areas can support.”
She points out that the parks in minority neighborhoods tend to have basketball courts and open grass fields for football rather than spaces that attract wildlife. Says Perkins, “It’s important our children know that their value isn’t only in sports, that there are other options.” She’d like to see more city parks with trail systems where a child can discover the vegetation that supports a diversity of birds and other wildlife and to understand that nature is for everyone to enjoy.
Which brings us to the topic of the Adventure Gap, the title of a book by James Mills, which explores the under-representation of African-Americans and other people of color in the great outdoors. This is one theme of the film "An American Ascent,” shown at the 2019 One Earth Film Festival, about the first African-American expedition to tackle Denali, North America's highest peak, as they strive to shrink the Adventure Gap.
Team Expedition Denali from the film “An American Ascent,” which was featured at the One Earth Film Festival in 2019.
As Mills says in a recent interview, “Frankly, I think that outdoor recreation is the balm that soothes all wounds . . . . There’s been very positive studies that indicate that the presence of trees and green space in urban areas actually have a calming effect on incidence of violent crime, that you have better community understanding and get better community organization and camaraderie around areas where you have common access to nature. So I’d like to think that if we can instill a sense of appreciation for the importance of spending time outdoors, that we’ll spend more time playing and a little less time fighting with one another, and ultimately aspire to go outside of and beyond our neighborhoods . . . to our natural parks, our national monuments, wild and scenic spaces all over the country.”
Teaching About Equity in Outdoor Spaces
Urban ecologist Toni Anderson is president and founder of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab, based in the Bronzeville community of Chicago. Anderson, a South Side Chicago native, describes Sacred Keepers as “an organization dedicated to teaching our youth and communities to inherit the Earth.” Her flagship program--Sacred Keepers Youth Council (SKY Council)--is designed for teens to study the effects of global colonization on “our relationship with the Earth, sacred traditions, and human connection so they can become agents of mindful social/environmental change.”
One example of how Anderson weaves environmentalism with history and consciousness around space equity is SKY Council’s annual Adopt-a-Beach cleanup and Earth Day celebration at Margaret T. Burroughs Beach (3100 S. Lake Shore Drive). SKY Council chose the location because Chicago’s beaches are beautiful communal places, but also because that beach has historical significance related to space equity. In 1919, black teenager Eugene Williams drowned there, at the hands of white beach-goers who stoned him when he drifted across an imaginary boundary line denoting the end of the water’s “colored section,” and this in turn led to the 1919 Chicago Race Riot.
Sacred Keepers Youth Council (SKY Council) with Toni Anderson standing fourth from right in blue jean jacket (photo courtesy of Sacred Keepers).
A second example Anderson offers on history and space equity: In July 2020, she gave a Zoom talk titled, “Monarchs, Migration, and Liberation,” sponsored by the Garfield Park Conservatory. What ideas and beliefs, she asked, do we hold about space? Who and what do we determine to have the right to space?
“We have planned poorly,” she said, “for space equity, and this is at the root of the problems we’re having now: environmental, societal, racial, public health.” We must become “compassionate observers of our spaces,” which first entails examining our biases related to use of spaces—who and what we think belongs and doesn’t, how we honor the history of particular spaces, and how we accommodate and nurture humans and other species within them. All of which relates to the monarch, whose migration patterns mirror the historical and contemporary migrations of black and Latinx people—all these long, difficult journeys motivated by survival instincts, all requiring way stations, safe places to rest along the way.
“I love the monarchs,” she says, and she teaches widely about them, bringing young people together to understand and create the habitats that nurture them. But she also wants us to see the broader picture--the monarchs as indicators of overall planet health, as only one of the diversity of living beings on this planet (including humans) that need nurturing environments, and that suffer when those environments are absent or compromised.
Additional Organizations Working for Environmental Inclusion
Blacks in Green. Naomi Davis is the founder and leader of Blacks in Green—also known as BIG—a West Woodlawn-based organization that focuses on sustainability, economic development, and land stewardship in African-American communities. The nonprofit’s work stretches into numerous interconnected sectors. “We have what we call a ‘whole system solution’ for the whole system problem common to black communities everywhere,” Davis said.
Blacks in Green was originally a volunteer-run organization, but funding and partnerships with organizations like ComEd have allowed the nonprofit to establish the Green Living Room, a coffee shop and community gathering spot in Woodlawn that aims to transform the way black people connect with the environment and each other. BIG considers energy efficiency and jobs-driven development the building blocks for growing and circulating wealth within black communities. Says Davis, “We are creating these sustainable square miles. We’re creating this walk to work, walk to shop, walk to learn, walk to play village, where African American people live, where they own the businesses. They own the land. And they live the conservation lifestyle.”
Environmentalists of Color is a Chicago-based network that came together in response to the current and historical exclusion of people of color in the environmental field. The group focuses on an array of environmental issues--from habitat conservation to environmental justice—while also working to assure that environmentalists of color have the resources needed to thrive personally and professionally in leading an equitable, inclusive, and sustainable future.
The Roots and Routes initiative is a collaboration between the Field Museum, the Chicago Park District, The Nature Conservancy, and teams of artists and community-based organizations that are creating and sustaining the Burnham Wildlife Corridor (BWC)--the longest stretch of lakefront natural area within the Chicago Park District system. The BWC is a 100-acre ribbon of urban wilderness spanning both sides of Lake Shore Drive and running through Burnham Park. It is composed of native prairie, savanna, and woodland ecosystems that provide healthy, diverse habitats for migratory birds and other wildlife, and offer opportunities for neighbors and visitors of all species to explore, gather, rest, and enjoy nature. The area is home to five “gathering spaces" that have been designed and created by teams of local artists and community-based organizations from the Chinatown, Bronzeville, and Pilsen neighborhoods.