Does the Soil Have Scars?
A conversation with Dr. Suzanne Pierre of Critical Ecology Lab + climate's partisan divide, electric buses, the trees of Acapulco, and military reparations
Dear friends,
I have alwas been fascinated by people who can make a place in the world by being deeply, indelibly themselves. Dr. Suzanne Pierre strikes me as one of those people.
As a PhD student studying the philosophy of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell, Pierre found that her questions about how settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism have shaped our natural environment were often unwelcome. That didn’t stop her from asking those questions, and she started describing the work as critical ecology, or “a way of allowing critical social theory on race and gender to take shape in ecological inquiry.” Then, in 2017, she took to social media to deepen the inquiry.
In 2018, Pierre moved to the SF Bay Area to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. Then, in 2020 she founded the Critical Ecology Lab and began building out a small team of researchers dedicated to pursuing related questions, with the stated goal of helping more people understand how our social, economic, and political systems have ushered in the climate and biodiversity crises — and imagining new ways forward.
Here's an excerpt of our recent conversation:
Why don’t you start by telling us about why and how you created The Critical Ecology Lab?
My personality is really geared toward analysis. I’m motivated by understanding the way things work, why they work, and how they respond to changes in all ways, not just in the environment. And I've never been rebellious in a traditional way — I'm a good girl in some of the trope-y ways, and I’m boring and corny sometimes — but I am also super oriented towards doing exactly what I want, even if it's completely made up. And if it goes outside or against the way that things are already set up to operate, I'm extra into it.
I am also pretty introverted. I like working with people, but I love taking lots of ideas and going into my cave and just being left alone — and then popping out with an idea and seeing how people respond to it. So that's a lot of why Critical Ecology Lab exists and works the way it does. I think about what I want to see in the world that isn't here yet, and then I debut it to the world and try to get people on board who want to work towards similar ideas.
It strikes me as ambitious to start an independent lab. What has it been like for you to work this way, without larger institutional backing or support?
To be honest, it doesn't feel like there's an alternative. And you're not the first person to react that way. But the fact that that is often the reaction is exactly why I'm doing it. There have been other independent labs before, but they're mostly funded by extremely wealthy people and run by older white male scientists. I don't think there is an example of anything like this that has succeeded or persisted. But I see independent laboratories as a necessity, and they certainly shouldn't be so rare.
With your Ecological Scars of Slave Plantations project in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, you’re asking: “What unique impacts did the transatlantic slave trade have on Caribbean island soil and plant communities?” Where is your team at in that research and what lies ahead?
It has taken a couple years to get the project off the ground. We’ve been building up relationships with people doing environmental science in St. Croix, local historians, and private owners of forested lands. Now, the project has begun in earnest because of funding from the National Geographic Society and other smaller funds and donors. We’ve done an initial site characterization of soil carbon and nitrogen chemistry in [the soil at] one former plantation site. We've identified a gradient of 17 other former plantations where we will replicate the methods that we used at the first site. And then we'll also expand to include other methods in soil chemistry and biogeochemistry. It’s a large project, spatially and a longer-term project. So, it’s still in the early days.
Can you say more about the goals of the project?
There are multiple goals. One is to provide people in St. Croix, the environmental witness of what the impacts of slavery are for that island, and specifically for soils. The work may be used as a tool towards litigation, or some kind of demand for something for the community but that’s not its only value. There is value in producing another type of record of how persistently harmful slavery has been, beyond oral histories and colonial archival records. But there isn't any research at this time that connects these past environmental disturbances and harms, either to Black enslaved people and their descendants, or to the ecosystems that were destroyed for the purpose of capital production.
We hope to draw a connection between those harms and present-day environmental changes such as debilitating droughts, sea level rise, and warming. Those past harms are interacting with present day harms and our work is to also provide the people of St. Croix — and those in other parts of the world who were impacted by the New World plantation scheme — with evidence and context for explaining why their lands and the descendants of slavery and Indigenous disenfranchisement or land expropriation should be treated differently from other types of present-day climate interventions.
Do you have other similar research that you would like to do along those lines?
There are a number of different questions that we're asking of other places, but not in as full-fledged a way as the Ecological Scars Project. One project that's in a planning phase is in collaboration with the Public History Project and Art in a Changing America. We're looking at the interaction between past colonial conflict, for example massacres or land theft that was documented in colonial archival records, and the ecological impacts on those places. Critical Ecology Lab will be bringing the Western science side to asking the question: How have these sites of colonial harm, violence, land expropriation connected to [changes in] soil chemistry? Is there a signature in soils and vegetation that's related to the kinds of land disruption that happens under the conditions of a battle, massacre, etc. We're focusing on the New York, northern New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut bio region. And the goal there is to also provide environmental data that can be used by BIPOC artists who are telling these stories.
Can you say a little about the work you’re doing with the Liberation Ecology Field Course?
LEFC is trying to address the gap in the types of fields based environmental education that is needed, both in academic and broader spaces inhabited by BIPOC communities. In most formal education spaces, field education — where learners are learning measurement techniques in the field and methods of making observations about the natural world and natural phenomena — are typically dominated by white students and are almost exclusively taught by white educators. And these experiences are formative for people across environmental fields, in terms of a sense of knowledge, belonging, and solidifying their dedication to being an environmental practitioner of some kind. It is also often the moment when the few Black and brown students who take those types of courses in undergrad usually leave as a result of a sense of not belonging. It's a huge point of attrition, but it's also this real opportunity.
We're asking: “What does it look like to teach these skills in an environment outside of the university, that emphasizes the presence and experiences of other BIPOC people? And what would it look like to mix folks who are going into academic fields, with a broader group of people who are working in environment related fields?” We wanted to know, is there a greater sense of belonging? Is there greater efficacy? Are there novel research questions that emerge? And is there space for the healing of the kinds of environmental traumas that disproportionately affects BIPOC folks? This was our pilot year and it was kind of life-changing for me. And I've heard feedback that it was influential and critical for a lot of the participants as well.
Much of your work is focused investigating and reframing what has happened in the past, in order to respond more thoughtfully to what's coming. How do you balance that reflection with some of the urgency—and I realized that that urgency can be a white supremacist concept—that exists within the scientific community at this moment, as we talk about whether it’s possible to keep the Earth’s warming at 1.5 C above preindustrial levels?
This is a very real tension that comes up a lot for me and my colleagues in the lab. We are, obviously, feeling the urgency of the 1.5-degree goal, and all the potential ramifications of not meeting that goal. There's always this sense of necessity to work hard and pursue these critical questions that we think are going to help us move ahead and figure out the key to why it has taken society so long to start to regulate the climate. But, like you mentioned, we continue to come back to the idea that these harms are already in motion. There's a lot of scholarship about how the current environmental crises are just the recent manifestations of long-term harm to racialized people. And that reminder allows me to pause and recognize that the urgency that we experience right now comes from the sudden experience of harm to white and wealthy communities in the recent decades. It's not a response to the protracted harm that racialized people have experienced because of extreme weather and resource loss, but also because their labor has been implicated unjustly in harmful, CO2-generating capital systems.
We literally talk about this on a weekly basis in our lab because it allows us to remember that taking time to think about theory — and to do the things that many climate and planetary scientists largely don't see the need to do — has value. And it's a reminder that if we continue to plow ahead the way that capitalist systems want us to move fast and be as efficient as possible and externalize costs as much as possible, if we recreate that, we're not doing our job. We're just going to reinstate the same systems that got us in this horrible position of climate collapse.
You can support Dr. Pierre’s work through the Critical Ecology Lab or on Patreon.
Climate News You Might Have Missed
Climate’s partisan divide
The latest Pew Research Center survey on climate change was released last month, and it is packed with fascinating information. But I was most struck by the stark way political affiliation can be seen as drawing a hard line through the middle of the country when it comes to climate.
Although 88 percent of Democrats and “Democratic leaners” told Pew that “climate news makes them feel sad about what is happening to the earth” compared to 50 percent of Republicans and “Republican leaners.” Seventy two percent of Democrats felt motivated to do more to address the climate change while only 26 percent of Republicans did. Meanwhile, 58 percent of Republicans, “felt annoyed there is so much attention on the issue of climate change” while 78 percent of Republicans felt suspicious of the groups and people pushing for action on climate change (compared to 30 percent of Democrats, a number that also seems quite high).
Earlier this year, Pew did longer interviews with 32 adults who don’t see climate change as a crisis. The subjects expressed distrust in the media’s reporting on the topic and some openness to hearing directly from climate scientists, but a larger sense of concern about both groups’ ideological agendas.
All this lines up rather neatly with the “climate plan” Republican leaders have put forward as part of their Project 2025 plan, which — according to Politico — promises to “block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.”
Writing for The Hill this week, climate scientist and author Michael Mann said “Global climate action lies on a knife edge” and warned that next year’s election will “determine not only the course of the American experiment but the path that civilization collectively follows.”
A bold move to keep food waste out of landfills
When I started covering this topic over a decade ago, I was sure that simply revealing the shockingly large percent of food that was going to waste — one third! — would lead to change. And yet, after years of advocacy and efforts from environmental groups and government groups and quite a few awareness campaigns, it has become clear that awareness is far from enough. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a treasure trove of research on the topic last month found that over 62 million tons of food waste ended up in landfills in 2020, more than double the number from 1990. When it decomposes, that food accounts for more than half of the methane emissions from landfills.
Last week, 56 local officials from 18 states called on the EPA to stop landfills from taking food waste by 2040. This is a sizable request, and it’s hard to imagine the slow-walking EPA taking the date seriously (the agency has been concerned about antibiotics in meat supply since the 1970s and has yet to make any decisive policy to stop farms from using them). But now is the time for bold demands when it comes to keeping fossil fuels out of the atmosphere, and the letter strikes me as one of the more gutsy moves I’ve seen in the food waste space so far. It’s also strengthened by the fact that the letter’s authors put recent and future climate impacts front and center.
“Without fast action on methane, local governments will increasingly face the impacts of warming temperatures, sea level rise, and extreme weather events,” they wrote. “From the recent hurricane in Florida to the heat dome over Phoenix, these conditions are costly for local governments and threaten the lives and wellbeing of our residents.”
The trees of Acapulco
People in and around Acapulco are struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Otis, the most powerful hurricane to hit the West Coast of Mexico in recorded history. On top of the still-mounting death toll damage to roads, powerlines, and over 200k homes, the tropical forests around the city have been devastated. These photosfrom the NASA Earth Laboratory provide a stark before-and-after comparison. The damage is being compared to what happened in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria—when a full quarter of forest biomass was lost in the storm—but it will likely be worse.
Electric buses vs. propane
The US is still far, far behind China when it comes to 100 percent electric buses, but cities and counties here have begun moving at a steady clip to catch up. In just the last few weeks, Durham North Carolina announced its plan to add six new electric buses, Las Vegas added four, Merced, California added five, San Diego announced a “binational bus line” that stops at the Otay Mesa border crossing, and Saint Petersburg, Florida announced that it’s replacing its entire 62-bus fleet (and will cover the cost for low-income riders).
School buses are also being electrified in a whole range of places, thanks in part to The Volkswagen settlement, which allocated $3 billion for transportation projects around the country that will reduce diesel pollution. But not all that settlement money is going to buy electic buses, writes, Rebecca Leber in a recent Vox piece. Instead, a great deal of the funds may go to less expensive buses run on propane, an industry working to brand itself as “near-zero emissions” which has nonetheless been found to show no substantial benefits over diesel when it comes to climate pollution. And yet the propane industry is using a federal trade commission — funded by a small fee attached to every propane purchase — to attempt to move the dial in their favor.
“If you use a propane grill, fees on the fuel you buy are driving campaigns that include school assemblies, advertisements, and influencers aimed at convincing kids, parents, and school officials to invest in the propane school bus,” writes Leber.
The U.S. military owes billions in climate reparations
The scope of military spending in the U.S. (1.8 trillion in 2023) is so large and seen as so locked-in politically that it can seem at times like it’s hiding in plain sight.
And yet in addition to fueling wars in places like Gaza, it’s also being used to generate an enormous quantity of fossil fuel emissions. In order to offer minimal compensation for the damage to vulnerable communities caused by those emissions, a new report by the US-based Climate and Community Project and the UK-based Common Wealth found that the US military would need to offer $106 billon in international climate financing.
For more context on climate reparations, an important topic at the upcoming COP28 summit, see the recent op-ed from Farhana Sultana and Saleemul Huq, a well-respected climate justice leader who passed away suddenly in October. In it, they write, “Climate accountability is a shared duty. It’s an intricate web of actions, decisions and commitments. Rather than a buzzword, it’s the bedrock of our fight against the climate crisis.”
On the Brighter Side
1. California’s Kern River, which once flowed through Bakersfield, is now dry “99% of the time.” Now, a judge has ordered the water to stay in the river in an effort to restore fish habitat and the larger river ecosystem that has long been dormant.
2. Mangroves on the southern tip of Jamaica, in a region called the Bight, have made an impressive comeback after being nearly destroyed be a series of hurricanes. According to Yes! Magazine, “The water- and wave-absorbing power of wetlands and the salt-absorbing power of the mangrove forests have also provided a kind of economic security for communities. People know their homes and farm fields are less likely to get washed away with the next storm. This has empowered these communities to invest in dry-forest conservation in the Bight as well, which creates income opportunities from things like apiculture (beekeeping).”
3. Some architects and developers are replacing the steel and cement in skyscrapers — both massively carbon intensive building materials — with treated wood. The results are said to store carbon and they’re also a little swoon-worthy.
4. Psychiatrist Emily Wood wrote about using psychedelics to treat climate anxiety for the Washington Post recently and I appreciated her take. “Psychedelics can also teach us how to experience and hold intense emotions that feel too much to bear, allowing for the ability to observe our suffering in a new way. And they can help us access courage and the motivation to organize and act in the face of fears.” I also wonder about whether ketamine, the treatment she referred to in the piece, which can cost thousands, will ever be accessible to people outside the upper class.
5. Michigan is close to passing a set of laws that will require 100 percent of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free sources by 2040. Governor Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign the laws this week, making Michigan the battleground state with the boldest climate plan to date.
6. In dark times, stories about animals pushing back on the constraints of the modern civilization are a balm to my soul. Much like the Orcas, the Javelinas who tore up a golf course in Arizona last month—and the #teamjavelina memes they have inspired—have been bringing me unexpected joy. (This photo of a javelina giving a racoon a ride on its back, is the cream of the crop.)
Take care out there,
Twilight