Poetic Protest: Defending Nature and BIPOC against Settler Colonialism

In 1982, the state of North Carolina designated the small, predominantly, black Warren County as the dumping ground of hazardous Polychlorinated biphenyl. PCB-infected soil can leak into ecosystems, get absorbed by animals, and make its way up the food chain causing fatal carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic disorders. As a result, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a large protest, which, while it could not spare Warren County, mobilized the environmental justice movement across the United States. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have been victims of and activists against racism and the wanton destruction of the environment by settler colonialism since the seventeenth century. Underlying the pollution of the environment and the endangerment of BIPOC lives is white supremacy and its intendant settler-colonial idealogy which reduces nature to a source of extraction and BIPOC lives to disposable labor. My research focuses on how literature is the site of this contestation over environmental degradation and racism. As critic Cheryll Glotfelty posits in Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis, “we must conclude that literature does not float about the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system, in which energy, matter, and ideas interact” (19). This paper analyzes how nature poetry by BIPOC writers exposes the exploitation of nature, critiques the colonization of BIPOC, and offers alternative modes of thinking