Du Bois, Geography, and Urban Ecology

This talk argues for Du Bois’s significance as an environmental thinker. Du Bois had very little to say about conservation or landscape or any similar keywords of the contemporaneous environmental imagination. But as a... [ view full abstract ]

This talk argues for Du Bois’s significance as an environmental thinker. Du Bois had very little to say about conservation or landscape or any similar keywords of the contemporaneous environmental imagination. But as a critic of the types of geographical mobilities and strictures afforded to black Americans around the turn of the twentieth century, he necessarily confronted the central problems of environmental justice. My paper argues that by reading works like The Philadelphia Negro and Black Reconstruction in America with an eye toward issues of urban ecology, metabolic rift, and resource distribution, we can begin to see the conjuncture of political and environmental injustice permeating his historical and sociological thought just below the surface. The connection becomes clearer in his later, less studied works on the social geography of Africa. Placing Du Bois’s work in the context of the dominant strains of environmental and climatic determinism arising out of late nineteenth century geographical thought, I attempt to show how Du Bois’s sociological methodology grapples with racist forms of environmental thought in order to forge an original analysis of urban emplacedness and transatlantic flows of good and people, thereby engaging problems of both environmental perception and resource exploitation.