February is Black History Month. In the spirit of celebrating Black excellence and brilliance, and in service to the expansion of our minds to learn from Black thought leaders in the environmental and climate movement, staff at the Office of Sustainability pulled together a reading list highlighting Black leaders at the intersections of environmental justice, climate change, food justice, outdoor recreation, sustainability and more.
Black excellence should be celebrated every day. We hope that elevating these writers can help us expand the canon of “must read” works that guide us as public servants in our mission to support healthy people and planet.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
By Adrienne Maree Brown
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
By Dr. Carolyn Finney
The Combahee River Collective Statement
By the Combahee River Collective
Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution and Residential Mobility
By Dr. Dorceta Taylor
Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice
By Dr. Julian Agyeman
The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers the African American Community
By Dr. Robert Bullard
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality
By Dr. Robert Bullard
Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States
By Dr. Robert Bullard, Dr. Glenn Johnson, and Angel O. Torres
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson
The Home Place: A Memoir of a Colored Man’s Affair with Nature
By J. Drew Lanham
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land
By Leah Penniman
The Fifth Season
By N.K. Jemisin
The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors
By James Edward Mills
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
By Camille T. Dungy
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
By Monica M. White
The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
By Anna Malaika Tubbs
Earthseed Series
By Octavia Butler
How to be an Antiracist
By Ibram X. Kendi
The Case for Reparations
By Ta Nehisi-Coates