Cultural Ecopsychology:  Issues of Displacement and the Urban African Community

Literature Review
 
You can end up thousands of miles away from your birthplace, and if you are involved in a healing ritual that is meant to work, you have to invoke the spirits that are at the place where you were born in addition to those who are natives of the place you are in...If you embrace this concept, you will find that human mobility does not remove a person’s original connection to the birthplace (Somé, 1998, p. 39).
 
Personal Statement
As an African American woman who neither lives in a city, nor in a Black community, it is important for me to identify why I am addressing the issue of displacement for urban African Americans. I must acknowledge that I come from an economically secure family and have lived a somewhat privileged life. I feel that the quote above speaks to my connection to this issue. Although I have lived primarily in suburban and rural areas throughout my life, I am a third generation New Yorker. I was born in the inner city of Bronx, New York, while both of my parents were born in Harlem, New York. While conducting the research for this paper, I realized that the story of my own family paralleled the trends that occurred for many African American families.
Both my paternal grandparents migrated to the city from the South between the two world wars under difficult circumstances and together raised a family under harsh conditions which (on the less positive side) included economic poverty, addiction, and depression. The story of my maternal grandparents is less known, but I do know that both were descendants from the Carribean, and that my great grandmother migrated to New York prior to World War I from Jamaica. My ancestors, like many African Americans, were challenged to both meet their basic survival needs and recreate their cultural identity in a foreign environment which held few economic opportunities for Blacks and whose structure represented the heart of an industrialized, western society.
My parents grew up in an environment that, on the negative side, included racial discrimination, economic poverty, and other tensions involved with living in an inner city, yet, on the positive side, they were fortunate to have strong family and cultural connections. As a result, both of my parents were instilled with a strong drive for upward mobility and wanting a better life for their children. Success in this country seems to be defined by economic security and this is what my parents obtained. Both were successful in their careers and in the early 1970's moved our family out of the inner city to the suburbs outside of New York City. This is where I was raised.
I have the highest respect for my parents and am eternally grateful for their struggles to provide me with a life that was easier than their own and the lives of those who came before them. I recognize that I would not be the person I am today without the benefits they have given me. At the same time, I have realized that I have experienced sadness throughout my life because I have been caught between many worlds, none of which seem to hold a place for me. For many African Americans, leaving the urban environment has meant leaving a community that was reflective of one’s racial and cultural identity, and entering a White world. In many cases, obtaining economic security has meant adapting to the mainstream culture, while weakening one’s ties to their primary culture.
My sadness stems from the fact that I have felt a lack of cultural identity and feeling of belonging to a community and place. There have been many years of my life, where my brother and I were the only Black children in our schools. Much of my identity has formed from being the other in my community. This sense of otherness was also experienced, at times, in communities that did have large Black populations. As my early years were spent in White communities, I found that when I re-entered multicultural communities, I was not the same as the other Black children. I did not talk the same or know the same games. On top of this otherness, I am light skinned, and was often teased for my appearance by both Blacks and Whites. I have always longed to fit into a community, craving specifically the sense of belonging I have felt when with my extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
I currently live in a town that is not culturally diverse. I am one of a few African Americans, yet I am becoming increasingly comfortable with my personal identity. At the same time, I feel strong ties to the urban Black communities in this country because they are my roots. I am a Black woman struggling to uncover my past. I realize that my own healing comes, in part, by learning about my roots. As I have started this process, I have found that I come from a rich cultural background, the farther I trace the stronger it becomes.
At the same time, I am deeply concerned with the plight of urban African Americans. One constantly sees negative images of the ghetto — gang violence, drugs, single parent homes, welfare, neighborhood degradation, and homelessness. While these images are not the complete reality of urban life, they are real and urgent problems. Unfortunately, people outside of these areas often seem unconcerned about, isolated from, and/or fearful of these realities. This is true of many African Americans as well. I cannot ignore these issues and feel deeply connected to them. Perhaps the easiest way to get out of ghetto life is to leave the ghetto, but I do not see this as a solution, if it means having to lose part of your cultural identity through assimilation and isolation from your people. Equally important is the fact that ecologically, this western culture is rapidly consuming the natural resources, polluting the earth, and becoming more and more disconnected from a sense of community. If all people sought to achieve the American Dream by modeling the mainstream society’s levels of consumption, the earth would be desolated. African Americans, like all people of western culture, need to address these issues by reaching back to our sustainable, earth-based, communal roots.
My field of study is Cultural Ecopsychology and Education. Cultural Ecopsychology attempts to heal the rift between the human identity and the natural world through a cultural interpretation of the natural landscape. From this interpretation, laws and customs sanctioning how to live are derived for the people of a specific culture. These laws and customs are modeled from natural cycles and are, thus, in harmony with the natural world.
Cultural groupings are needed for this interpretation because they address issues specific to place. The interpretation comes from direct, active, open, and sensory interactions with the local landscape. As landscapes vary from place to place, one human interpretation is not enough. Hence, culture is meaning that comes through interaction with one’s local living geography.
 
How this Study Began 
I was first exposed to the field of ecopsychology while I was completing my teacher certification through Prescott College. Through interest, I supplemented my curriculum with two ecopsychology courses. The first was introductory, documenting the various ways western society has separated its identity from the rest of the living world. I immediately connected with this contention. We are living in a society that places the needs of its population above everything else. Ecopsychology seeks to reintegrate the human identity into the living world.
Within this course, I was exposed to the revelatory work of Carl Anthony, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Urban Habitat Program in San Francisco. In the video, Ecopsychology (Foundation for Global Community, 1995), Anthony acknowledged the contradictions between the environmental movement and the movement for diversity and inclusiveness. Much of Anthony’s work addresses how the mainstream environmental movement has left out the needs of non-White and impoverished groups, especially African Americans.
According to Anthony, the destruction of the natural environment and the oppression of Blacks are interlinked. History demonstrates that the institution of slavery was a means of cheap labor in order to exploit the natural resources of the world. Europeans colonized the habitats of earth-based peoples in order to take the wealth of these lands. This domination was rationalized through the perpetuation of the myth of racial superiority. Achievement for Europeans meant the attainment of material goods. The more one could dominate, the more powerful, and superior one was.
Anthony stressed that this idea of domination transfers to the way western culture communicates. He feared that the field of ecopsychology would be formed and practiced without incorporating the views of other non-western cultures. He recognized that the most renowned ecopsychologists are of European descent and concentrate predominately on nature and overlook the voices of different cultures.
Why is it so easy for these people to think like mountains and not be able to think like people of color . . .I think the problem is projection: white people want to be able to project on the world the images that have allowed them to control the world. Why is there so much energy put into that? I mean it’s not natural, is it, this need to control... (Anthony, 1995).
Anthony contends that in order to fully realize the lessons of ecopsychology, there needs to be greater levels of multiculturalism reflected in its development. The absence of many different voices, which contain many important lessons in terms of our relationship to the earth, will result in yet another western theory of domination. Although ecopsychologists of European descent acknowledge the need for diversity, they are unable to speak for the people of color which inhabit the earth. People of color make up the majority of the human population. Without their contribution to and understanding of our ecological problem, global and human healing cannot occur. It is important to recognize that many non-western cultures are earth-based peoples. Others have only recently been linked to the western practice of dominating natural resources. When one looks at the sickness and despair in many non-western cultures, it is clearly a result of an inability to adapt to western ways.
Once exposed to the field of ecopsychology and the work of Anthony, I knew I had found my passion. Environmental degradation and cultural oppression have always been issues of great concern to me, but I never recognized their intrinsic connection. I began to look at how ecopsychology related to African Americans, recognizing that Blacks are the descendants of relatively sustainable cultures. Clearly the wisdom of the earth-based traditions from African cultures would be more valid for Black Americans than this new field of study that was dominated by White Americans.
In the same year, I also took an advanced ecopsychology course which furthered my thinking. I read The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra (1996) and was exposed to his living systems model. Capra claims that any system that is living (natural) will have three specific criteria: a pattern of organization, a structure, and a life process. These terms will be explored more in the following chapter. Reading Capra, coupled with learning about the principle of non-duality, spurred me to question why both the environment and people of color were oppressed. The principle of non-duality revealed that terms such as good/bad, male/female, and Black/White are not in opposition to one another, but are, instead, two necessary characteristics found within the living world. One trait does not exclude or compete with the other. Moreover, they are supportive of one another.
This knowledge raised the question, why is the system of western culture exclusive of the needs of the environment and other cultures? The answer could not be that western culture was simply bad. Upon further exploration, I concluded that western culture was not embedded in a living system and thus it would manifest many unhealthy practices such as racism, environmental degradation, classicism, and sexism. Looking at the system on a larger scale was needed in order to relate environmental and cultural oppression. At the same time, I recognized that a living system cannot be generalized. Its interpretation manifests in many forms. For humans, a living system is dependent on the factors of culture and place. Returning to a sustainable culture involves looking at a specific culture in a specific place. I choose to look deeply at these issues for urban African Americans for this is the culture I come from. The following details the four research chapters of this paper.
 
Systems and their Relation to Culture
This section answers the following three questions:
1. How is western culture oppressive to the natural environment and Blacks?
2. What system is inclusive of the entire living world, both human and non-human?
3. What is the role of place and culture in manifesting a living system?
It is important to look at these questions in a holistic manner in order to understand how our present ecological and racial inequalities have arisen and how not to repeat these errors when shifting to a different system.
The first two questions bring together a range of theorists which all critique, to some extent, western culture. Some of the theorists such as Fanon (1968), Bookchin (1991), and Nelson (1993) look at the large scale manifestations of western culture, detailing its oppressive behavior on the social order. Others such as Berry (1988), Sliker (1992), and Glendinning (1994) show how the rift in the identity of humans of western culture with the rest of the living world has resulted in ecological degradation. While others, such as Hale (1982), Bullard (1993), and Anthony (1995) link the system of western culture to the oppression of other cultures, specifically (but not limited to) African Americans.
This oppression is not limited to the environment and African Americans, but in actuality, is oppressive to any entity embedded within the living world. The author touches upon systems theory, detailing the ways this oppression manifests. Identifying western culture as a system is the starting point. Understanding how it is linear, mechanistic, and in contradiction to an inclusive living world is necessary in order to shift to a different model. The point of this critique is not to depict western culture as entirely negative or invalid. Instead, it acknowledges that this linear culture is one way humans have sought to maintain order and prosper. However, the western system is exclusive to living beings that do not hold its core values. These beings include indigenous cultures and the natural ecology of this planet.
From here the author shifts to looking at what is an inclusive, living system. Fritjof Capra’s definition (1996) of a living system is the foundation point. The author connects this definition to a circular system, relying on works such as Nelson (1993), Foster (1998), and Somé (1998), stressing how a circular system is inclusive and non-discriminatory to any particular group. Moreover a circular system is a mirror of the natural universe, bringing the human identity back into universal truth. There has been less work done in this area.
Lastly, the author probes how, with this knowledge, western culture can employ or, better yet, heed a living system. This is, perhaps, the author’s greatest contribution to the field of ecopsychology. Here, the contention is that the role of culture is at the center of a human system that is living. Culture regulates how humans interact with the living world through practices, ethics, and philosophy. A sustainable culture is one that mirrors the living world. Humans must interpret this relation in a manner that does not continue to be anthropocentric. However, it is not enough to have one cultural interpretation of this relationship, for it needs to be place-specific, mirroring the natural landscape of a specific bioregion. This section gives a larger perspective of how oppression has resulted for African Americans through their displacement from their original landscape and culture.
 
Displacement and Oppression for Urban African Americans
This research section makes the connection between the historic displacement of urban Blacks from their traditional homelands and cultural traditions, and their oppression as a cultural group. Most of the research documenting the history of African Americans is commonly known and has been explored thoroughly by others. However this study goes further by placing the history of urban Blacks into a geographic and psychological study.
The author first looks at what displacement is and how it may affect a cultural group. Theorists such as Abram (1996), Huggins (1977), and Sliker (1992) are employed to show the psychological trauma that is experienced as a result of displacement from one’s traditional landscape, the place where one’s culture originates from. The contention is that urban Blacks exhibit this trauma of displacement because they were uprooted, first by enslavement, and second through migration to the urban, industrialized areas of the United States.
This section is framed along five principles presented by Bullard (1993) in Confronting Environmental Racism. Bullard claims that oppression for "people of color" has five commonalities:
1. They enter the ‘host’ society and economy involuntarily;
2. Their native culture is destroyed;
3. White-dominated bureaucracies impose restrictions from which whites are exempt;
4. The dominant group uses institutionalized racism to justify its actions; and
5. A dual or ‘split labor market’ emerges based on ethnicity and race (p. 16).
The author explores what the initial configuration of African American culture during the slavery era entailed. Much of this information comes from African American historians who have studied numerous aspects of slave life. In addition, the author points out that while enslavement was a social tragedy, the displacement in geographical landscape was less intense than the later urban migration of Blacks. This idea comes from the work of Carl Anthony (personal interview, 1999) and Wendell Berry (1989). Anthony reveals that the landscape where the enslaved Africans originated were not drastically different from the Black Belt of the United States, where they were forced to live. Berry shows that the enslaved Blacks were still embedded in an earth-based means of productivity, working the plantation land. This is in sharp contrast to life in urban regions.
The author goes on to document the cultural disintegration which occurred through urban migration. The post-Reconstruction era up through the present is the time period researched. The underlying economic, political, and social dynamics of this period are explored in depth, ultimately explaining how many of the negative attributes of the modern "ghetto" have arisen through the systematic oppressions of Blacks. At the same time, the disconnection from working with land and the environmental racism of living in the inner city is explored as another means of oppression. This latter section relies heavily on Black academics from the social sciences such as Manning Marable (1983) and Franklin & Wilson (1997). The importance of this section is to document how this oppression has shaped urban Black communities.
 
African Nature-based Traditions
Once documenting the oppression that has resulted from placing Blacks from an earth-based to a linear culture, the author researches a range of earth-based traditions from West and Central Africa, the areas the enslaved Africans originated. The author acknowledges that every tradition from these areas is not necessarily earth-based and sustainable. However, there is a predominance of African traditions that provide models of living in congruence with the natural world.
The need to use a psychological model that originates from these traditions is explored, relying on the research of African psychologists such as Fulop & Raboteau (1997) and Azibo (1996). These authors introduce culturally relevant principles that are rarely employed for Africans within the western culture of the United States. These include the role of the ancestors, the natural landscape, and the human soul. The holistic nature of the African cultural model is detailed, giving the reader a sense of this world view. Clearly all peoples from Central and Western Africa do not share the exact same world view, yet this area is identified as a cultural region, showing a similarity of central thought and action.
Next, the author explores some specific examples of earth-based traditions from this region. They include practices and philosophies from the Akan, Ogun, and Ifa. It also includes examples from Malidoma Somé’s Dagaran culture which is in West Africa. Here the author illustrates what a more circular, living system has been in the past traditions of Blacks. The idea is not to return to these traditions, but to reconnect with their foundational principles, and to ultimately utilize their model in reforming the current urban Black community.
 
Conclusion: Cultural Reintegration into a Living System
The last section makes a connection between the previous three, looking at how the urban Black community can possibly reform to improve its situation by reconnecting to a living system. Ultimately, the author believes that every population embedded in western culture needs to complete this reform in order to bring about sustainability. However this cannot be accomplished through only one way. A truly sustainable culture must be place-specific, mirroring the natural landscape of its region. Urban Blacks have an advantage in bringing about this type of reformation because they are: ready for dramatic social change; are the descendants of earth-based traditions; and live in geographically segregated regions.
This section is framed by Johanna Macy’s prescription for "The Great Turning", the move to a sustainable culture. Macy contends that in order to achieve this shift, humans must address issues along three levels:
1. Actions to slow the damage to the Earth and its beings;
2. Analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives:
3. A fundamental shift in worldview and values (p. 17).
The author applies these three principles to the urban Black community. All three are identifiable within this community, making the shift a real possibility. Moreover, the author contends that in order for Macy’s "Great Turning" to occur within the Black urban community, alliances need to be made with constituencies outside of the community. In terms of action, the author provides examples of various protests and organizations within and outside of the Black inner-city which seek change. Traditional sources such as publications and non-traditional sources such as Hip Hop music are presented as examples of "analysis" and "creation of alternatives." Lastly, the author emphasizes several examples of the power of spirituality within the African American community as illustration of the potential for "a shift in worldview and values." The author identifies how all three shifts are manifesting within this community and, in addition, what needs to happen in order to make this reform more wide-scale.