bell hooks: Unsung Environmental Activist and Writer

White environmental activism zeroes in on industrial capitalism, condemning excessive consumption and the exploitation of the Earth, but fails to acknowledge the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy culture have driven us towards the current climate crisis we face today. Black feminists, on the other hand, have always pointed out the ways in which capitalism is inextricably woven into the fabric of white supremacist institutions and belief systems. These interlocking systems of oppression result in environmental racism and injustice, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the water war in Payahüünadü, unchecked industrial pollution in the Southern Louisiana region common known as “Cancer Alley,” and higher levels of air and noise pollution, as well as less green space due to the historically violent practice of redlining, to name only a few manifestations.

bell hooks, prolific Black feminist scholar, writer, activist, and Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College, was intent on bringing to light the connections between capitalism, white supremacy, and environmental degradation and injustice particularly in Kentucky where she grew up.

hooks, who was born an astute and analytical Virgo on September 25, 1952 and died too soon on December 15, 2021 at the age of 69, was lesser known for her environmental writing and reflections of living in Appalachia. 

You might’ve noticed hooks’ book All About Love: New Visions published in 2000 circulating your social circles during the pandemic as it experienced somewhat of a renaissance and became a New York Times bestseller. While hooks’ work focused on the intersections of race, class, and gender, prioritizing Black women’s experience within the exclusive mainstream, white feminist movement, she also wrote about the importance of communing with the natural world and protecting it from exploitation and extraction.

In “Connecting Appalachia to the World Beyond,” hooks reflected on how she knew that because she was a Black woman her voice, insight, knowledge, and writing wasn’t going to be taken as seriously in environmental spaces as the work of her contemporary, a cis, white man, Wendell Berry:

“As a black woman writing about Appalachia, I receive little notice. I can talk race, gender, class, and be heard, but when I speak on environmental issues and all the ways agrarian black folks hold the earth sacred few listen. As a voice for Appalachia, Wendell Berry is heard. Suddenly, I listened to his words and learned. Fervently, he teaches me. But like a mighty giant, a goliath, as a Kentucky black female writer I stand always in his shadows. I am not considered a companion voice. We do not join together to speak our love for Kentucky, our hopes for an earth free from exploitation.”

White environmentalist spaces, groups, or organizations would do well to read more Black feminists like bell hooks. hooks’ abundant collection of writing serves as a foundational guide not only as a way to create truly reciprocal, mutual, and equitable relationships with each other, but also as a way to heal our relationship with the earth and the earth's “resources.”

“With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality,” (hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place.)

hooks is speaking to what too many white-led environmental organizations avoid out of fear of experiencing discomfort: examining and taking into account how our identities and power dynamics influence the work we do as well as our daily operations. Ultimately, hooks is speaking to the need to de-center whiteness because whiteness is what maintains hierarchical power structures and dynamics within environmental and outdoor industry spaces, which leads to the silencing and/or tokenizing of Black and Indigenous voices.

hooks grew up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She studied English literature at Stanford University (B.A., 1973), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1976), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 1983). 

She then went on to teach a range of topics at the University of South California, Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York from the mid-70s to the early 2000s. In 2004, hooks returned home to Kentucky and became a professor in residence at Berea College. 10 years later, Berea College welcomed the founding of the bell hooks Institute in 2014.

Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s poet laureate, professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and hooks’ friend and colleague, published “‘I Am a Writer Because of bell hooks’” in The Atlantic in memory of the renowned feminist and writer. “She taught us that you can be a Black visionary intellectual from Kentucky and forge a voice of defiance amid—and in order to heal from—segregation, racial hatred, voicelessness, and separation from nature,” Wilkinson wrote.

In her essay, “Touching the Earth,” published in Orion in Autumn 1996, hooks writes that “from the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth.”

White men like John Muir, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and others, get undue credit for being fierce and committed environmentalists, but in their writing lies a pronounced dearth of any kind of critical, personal reflection on how they as white men contribute to the extraction and exploitation of the natural world they claim to love. With no mention of how protecting the environment requires dismantling white supremacy, their work is incomplete at best, and at worst, used in a modern context to justify national parks and public lands – white inventions that have led to the continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

In Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes about land, land ownership, the idea of “home,” what it means to belong, and how the politics of race and class play an inextricable role in shaping these things.

“There is much work to be done, to create a positive environment where the collective voices of Appalachian women can be heard, across race, across class,” lamented hooks in “Connecting Appalachia to the World Beyond”.

Ja'han Jones recently reported for MSNBC that hooks “...is listed among several Black authors whose works were cited by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration in its explanation for blocking an Advanced Placement African American studies course for high school students.”

hooks is an incredible resource for environmentalists to learn, interrogate, and question our own relationship to place, land, and the natural world. Her writing provides a groundbreaking blueprint as to how we can cultivate more honest, accountable, and truly loving relationships with one another, the earth, and all sentient beings, while maintaining and honoring the complexities of our differences — this being a necessary path of integrity, which allows us to create what hooks called “beloved community.”

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world,” (hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism).

May hooks live on forever in our memory and hearts, and may her spirit inspire us to take  coherent, resonant, and honest actions towards a world free from oppressive systems.