In the spring of 1970, there were no shortage of critiques of the emerging environmental movement. But sociologist Nathan Hare offered a different perspective in a piece entitled “Black Ecology”: “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people. Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.” In the rest of the incisive essay, published in the April 1970 issue of The Black Scholar, the pioneering Black studies journal Hare co-founded a year before, he laid out how ecology matters to Black people, but the emerging definition of environmentalism was too focused on reform and maintaining quality of life for the white middle class, ignoring the environmental issues caused by racism, oppression and inequality, particularly experienced by Black people in America’s central cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nySvjvxVnfs

Episode #37 - Negroes in Housing.

This radio show is the brainchild of Roi Otley.