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Remote Control Plantations and Black Forest Ecologies in Rural Alabama
Topics: Black Geographies
, Environmental Justice
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Keywords: Black Geographies, Black Ecologies, Environmental Justice, Forests Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract Day: Sunday Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) Room: Virtual 68
Authors:
Danielle Purifoy, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Abstract
This paper examines the contemporary timber industry as a reproduction of plantation power via remote control, which occurs through absentee landowners, Black family land grabs, greenwashed forestry politics, and legal regimes designed to reserve “devalued” land for future consumption. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities possess alternative modes of land relations to sustain themselves within the “afro-econundrum”—the friction between the economic interests forced by racial capitalism and the ecological interests arising from Black quests for liberation. With the Alabama Black Belt region now experiencing rapid rise of the biomass industry, which sources from local timber plantations and manufactures biomass at the expense of the health and well-being of Black communities to export a falsely renewable biofuel, the reciprocal traditions of Black forest ecologies represent a mode of land relation and intervention that are necessary for livable futures.
Remote Control Plantations and Black Forest Ecologies in Rural Alabama