Environmental Intersectionality: Yes, It Exists
By: Hannah Hassler
Tags: Environmentalism, Intersectionality, Agriculture, Environment, Environmental Issues

According to Leah Thomas of Intersectional Environmentalism, here’s what intersectional environmentalism is:

…an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. It identifies the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected. It brings injustices done to the most vulnerable communities, and the earth, to the forefront and does not minimize or silence social inequality. Intersectional environmentalism advocates for justice for people + the planet.

What marginalized communities? Well, Leah Penniman notes:

Today we have food apartheid, a system of segregation that relegates certain people to food abundance and others to food scarcity. If you’re a black child in America, you are twice as likely to go to bed hungry tonight as a white child.

[Image Description: Blue cloudy sky, mountain peaks in the background, green forest in foreground. White text reads: Intersectional Environmentalism.]

If you’re thinking environmentalism should *obviously* be intersectional…I agree. BUT I would also note that it hasn’t always worked out that way.

When I think of environmentalism in general, I have often had a (very not intersectional) image of “crunchy” white people shopping at Trader Joe’s with their recyclable bags whilst they sip glass-bottled kombucha and consider vegan quiche recipes.

I’m not saying that’s what environmentalism is, I’m saying that’s the image that tended to pop into my mind. It’s obviously extremely limited, but it does open a doorway to have a conversation, and that’s the point here.

Why crunchy? Why white? Why Trader Joe’s?

Well, let’s look at some of the ways in which my own intersectional identities have come together.

I’m from the rural midwest. I’m white. I’m female. I grew up lower-middle class in a Christian, Republican family.

[NOTE: The information in these next few paragraphs is NOT factual information. It’s my own hodgepodge of internalized ideas about who environmentalism was for, and it very much came from my own lived reality, assumptions, stereotypes, etc.]

We never shopped at stores like Trader Joe’s, so in my mind, it was a super elite and bougie place to get anything. If you shopped there you wanted organic things and used cloth bags, and I aligned those things with “environmentalism”. That led me to believe that if you could only afford to shop at Walmart and the Dollar Store, then you couldn’t afford to be an environmentalist. After all, in my imagination, it was really only rich white people who shopped at Trader Joe’s.

I had also picked up on the fact that “good” Christians were Republicans → “good” Republicans weren’t going to let the environment stand in the way of their individual freedoms → environmentalists were people to be wary of, as they were Democrats for sure. And based on what I had put together about the wealth and race connection, they must be rich white Democrats.

Growing up where I did, this demographic is commonly lumped into the anti-gun/anti-second amendment camp, and are the repository for a great deal of scorn about rich city-born people and their foolish ideas. In general, I didn’t have a great deal of respect for this group as a whole, so I threw out the baby, the bathwater, and the whole damn tub as well.

In all those imaginings, the honest truth is that I was working off of stereotypes that were impressed upon me in all sorts of innocuous interactions. They aren’t really things that were explicitly said to me….just things I pieced together, for better or worse.

Overall, governmental agencies that attempted to regulate much of anything, much less use of the environment, seemed pretty sketchy. In my senior year of highschool, I even wrote a scathing essay about how the EPA had cherry-picked data in order to ban smoking in public places (restaurants, for example), in a massive overreach of their power. (Imagine the horrors of banning public smoking! 😂.)

And in all of these imaginings about environmentalists, none of them contained people of color, or poor people, or people in either rural or urban areas. Environmentalism, in my mind, was all about the wealthy whites in the suburbs.

I grew up. I know that’s not the full picture.

And I realized we needed to do better….but I also felt (and feel) overwhelmed by the how and what. I try to make small choices that make a difference, but sometimes it seems stupid. A corner of my brain still associates wealth with environmentalism, probably because a lot of the showy mandates (Buy THIS! Shop HERE!) aren’t reasonable for people who don’t have a lot of disposable income. I never really thought that much about who I perceived the movement being for until I started doing more digging.

In July 2019, I read an article in my favorite magazine (The Sun), titled To Free Ourselves We Must Feed Ourselves, in which Leah Penniman was interviewed about Soul Fire Farms. Here’s a bit of what she shared:

Picture of Leah Penniman, wearing a headband, smiling into the camera, hands on her shoulders. Republished from The Sun article linked here.

In 2007, wanting to provide fresh food not just for their family but for the South End community, the couple [Leah and Jonah] purchased seventy-two acres of mountainside farmland in Grafton, forty minutes outside the city. They spent three years building a post-and-beam, straw-bale house on the property while both working full-time: he in construction and she as a teacher. And they began to restore the soil and plant crops using a mix of Western agricultural science and indigenous African traditions and spirituality. Today Soul Fire’s team of eight people operates a sliding-scale CSA (Community Supported Agriculture program) called Ujaama — Swahili for “cooperative economics.” Through it Soul Fire provides naturally grown produce, eggs, and chicken to about a hundred families in Albany, Troy, and Grafton, half of whom identify as “low income” (soulfirefarm.com).

Penniman’s journey with agriculture began early:

As a teen she spent time with her Haitian American mother in Boston and discovered agriculture when she took a summer job with the Boston-based Food Project. She went on to work at the Farm School, then to co-manage Many Hands Organic Farm. Though she enjoyed farming, the sustainable-agriculture movement was dominated by white people — mostly men — and she began to question whether she belonged.

That questioning is often the result of looking around and not seeing people who look like you. As a kid and young adult, I assumed environmentalism wasn’t for me because I looked around and didn’t see rural Americans in my family’s income bracket taking part.

I said: Ohhh. This is for “those other people”….

and moved on.

Thankfully, Penniman took note of the disparity and chose to NOT move on. Instead, she doubled down and:

…cofounded Soul Fire Farm with her husband, Jonah Vitale-Wolff. Located in Grafton, New York, the working farm also serves as a training ground for aspiring farmers of color who come there to learn about sustainable agriculture and reclaim a connection to the land severed by centuries of trauma and oppression. Many black people, Penniman says, disdain farming because they associate it with picking cotton on plantations. She helps them see how growing their own food fosters independence in the face of systemic racism. More than 80 percent of Soul Fire’s graduates go on to work as farmers and food activists.

Penniman’s work is a thriving example of intersectional environmentalism. It’s vibrant, powerful, inclusive, and based on loving others. I honestly wanted to copy pretty much her ENTIRE interview with Tracy Frisch here, but I’m not going to do that! Instead, I’ll send you over to The Sun to read it for yourself.