Against ecologies of profit: author Jennifer James urges us to reimagine the commons

The Altman Program in the Humanities 2023-24 began its spring symposium on April 18. This two-day event brought together a diverse group of speakers and educators to discuss environmental justice with University of Miami students. Shriver’s Heritage Room was abuzz with excitement as the symposium’s opening speaker was introduced.

Jennifer James is an associate professor of English and Africana Studies at George Washington University and an author. Her book on African American war experiences, “A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II,” was named Choice Outstanding Academic.

She opened her speech with a personal anecdote about her upcoming book, “Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and African American Cultural Memory.” The book follows three generations of African Americans enslaved by Jackson, many of whom are direct ancestors of James himself, something that inspired her interest in the environmental aftermath of slavery.

James is working on another book, “Captive Ecologies,” which is an exploration of the ecological afterlife of slavery and an exploration of the connections between racial justice and environmental justice. Her talk was based on two chapters of “Captive Ecologies,” which looked at how ex-slaves’ experiences with plantation capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination.

“I suggest that Black experiences of injustice, environmentally and politically, have led to complex responses to the natural world that require their own interpretive strategies,” James said. “And my book is an attempt to do so”

For James and her school of black ecofeminists, thinking, racial oppression, sexism, and environmental injustice are impossible to separate. Just as the relationship between the owner and the haves has been abused to degrade women and African Americans, private ownership of land determines its conditions.

“If the Earth were free, that would mean that everyone and everything else would have to be free,” James said. “The freedom of the earth necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression.”

Ecofeminists want to see change by increasing the viability of commons, or shared land and resources. James strongly disagrees with the view that human nature is inherently selfish and rejects the basis of the tragedy of the commons.

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the concept that when a resource is collectively owned, human selfishness will cause owners to deplete the resource without regard to the others who use it. This theory motivates what James calls “ecologies of profit”: relationships with nature based on exploitation rather than coexistence.

“The commons are about creating collective land ownership for the benefit of people,” James said.

In addition to commons and collective spaces, James wonders what the full emancipation of the Earth could look like. For her, collective spaces bring us closer to a sustainable relationship with the planet, but ecological reciprocity does not begin or end with any asset.

“What if the natural world could never be mine, yours, or even ours?” said James.

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