BOOK REVIEW-SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER’S GARDEN

Written by Kendra Hartmann¹

The Environmental Law News Book Review is a recurring column that highlights important and interesting books on environmental law, science and policy. This review discusses Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy.²

A poet, scholar and professor of poetry and literature at Colorado State University, Dungy has held an intense interest in the intersections between literature, environmental action, history, and culture, which has informed her career for decades. In her efforts to find the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and the experiences of those who so often get left out of the canon of environmental literature, Dungy dives into a transformation of her own garden, expertly drawing analogy between her experiences diversifying the plant life that surrounds her home to the need for society at large to cultivate a more diverse and heterogenous national discourse in regards to the environment, its preservation, and all those who live on and care for the land.

Soil opens in 2013, with Dungy in her realtor’s car, searching for a new home in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she had been offered a position as a professor at Colorado State University. Dungy makes her misgivings about moving her family from the diverse Bay Area to the predominantly white northern Colorado city clear from the start, setting the stage for her journey into cultivating a diverse garden in a sea of homogeneity.