Broken Ground

Walk out your front door, listen, and look. That’s the advice avid birder Christian Cooper gives to those wanting to take up his passion, birdwatching. Cooper is a lifelong birder, Emmy Award-winning host of National Geographic’s “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper,” and The New York Times bestselling author of “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World.” For Earth Day, he shares how birds connect us through time, to the natural world and to each other.  
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Jo and Joy Banner envision a time, not too distant from now, when travelers visiting their small town along the Mississippi River don’t gawk at the concentration of polluting petrochemical plants nearby, but instead revel in the area’s rich cultural history. As founders of the non-profit Descendants Project, the twin sisters have dedicated themselves to preserving the histories of the Black communities tied, like theirs, to the nearby Whitney Plantation. They’re also challenging the industrialization that has given their beloved home its unwelcome nickname, Cancer Alley. 
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On her group walking tours around Durham’s Hayti District, performance artist Aya Shabu brings Black history to life, transporting visitors back to Hayti in its heyday. Once known as a Black Wall Street, the community was founded by freed people from Stagville and other nearby plantations. But eventually it was torn apart by urban renewal and construction of Highway 147, leaving residents dealing with displacement, air pollution, extreme heat conditions, and economic loss.Today, as development and gentrification pressures mount, residents like Aya celebrate what came before, while fighting to make sure they have a voice in what comes next.  
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A “keeper of memory” and Director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites, Michelle Lanier has built a career on understanding layers of history underlying our Southern landscapes, not just battlefields and burial grounds, but native pine forests as well. Prized for their lumber and ‘bled’ for their multipurpose pine gum, Longleaf pines were exploited, much as the enslaved and indentured laborers forced to harvest them were. Today, though few Longleaf pines remain, echoes of this exploitation endure in the Black Southern communities now battling the biomass industry.
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Writer Latria Graham helps us unearth the surprising ways in which long-ago plantations and modern environmental injustices are intertwined in the South. From some of the earliest Freedmen’s communities built on frequently flooded land, to contemporary Black neighborhoods now hemmed in by polluting industries, we map the many ways that racist systems codified during plantation slavery still dictate who thrives in the South today – who breathes clean air, who owns land, who is most impacted by climate change. A fifth generation South Carolinian, Latria also shares her family’s own experience of flooding and Black land loss.  
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