Dominant culture rarely acknowledges the fact that Black communities have always nurtured a respect and awe for land and plants, for animals and for the cycles of the planet. Africans were kidnapped from agrarian societies where people farmed and lived with nature for generations. Packed into our country’s history, are Black people in the United States tending to and nurturing the land, shaped by the violent exploitation of their labor as enslaved people. How did the 20th century’s Great Migration of African Americans from southern farms to northern cities affect their relationship to nature?

We want to uplift a 30-year-old but timely two-page essay from bell hooks featured in the environmental literary journal Orion that explores these themes and more.

Consider just one line of this poignant essay: “Black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy where we connect our well-being to the well-being of the earth.”

The author is Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks, the name of her great grandmother which she chose to honor female legacies. She stylized her byline in lower case to draw attention away from herself and toward her work. She became globally renowned, famously writing Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. She followed that with nearly 40 other books and hundreds of articles during a career as an academic, cultural critic and public intellectual who taught at Stanford, Yale and the City University of New York before joining Berea College in her home state of Kentucky in 2004. She died in 2021 at age 69.

hooks is best known for her exploration of the way that race, gender and class intersect but she wrote about everything from spirituality to love to children’s rights. She fiercely imagined radical ways of being in the world. She encouraged people to love themselves and their communities. She also called people, especially women, to challenge oppression.

We need brave voices like that of bell hooks, now more than ever. Her essay will provoke your thoughts. It will give you the healing balm of hope in human possibility and endurance. It may be just what’s needed for Black History Month, for this historical moment, and for the challenges ahead. So, if you didn’t click on that link above, click on this one now.