Okay, I'm gonna go a few steps deeper on this.

To first put the necessary out of the way, saying "this American thing is deeply entangled with racism" should be axiomatic at this point, because America is deeply entangled with racism.

But . . . [thred] https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1285995631975247873

. . . how we have to specifically deal with this within environmentalism/conservation/natural history/ecology/etc is even more complicated. It's so complicated that all of the names in that list, with the possible exception of the overloaded "ecology," are problematic. 2/

Tantamount to Muir's prolific writings are themes of "discovering" "wild" spaces and then working to "save" them.

And it's hard to even tweet about it because all these words are not fully wrong but also loaded with bad connotations. 3/

The most important fact to remember here is that there are very few square miles of North America that did not in some way bear the marks upon the "natural" landscape of human activities and influence in 1491.

The fancy way to say this is that they're all "anthropogenic."

I still hear educated, well-meaning people who want to be anti-racist sliding back into thinking about pre-European contact as being pre-human contact. These sentiments often essentialize non-colonial land epistemologies as "at one with nature" 5/

19th century environmentalists either, like Muir, dismissed indigenous peoples as somehow too stupid or primitive to understand the land they occupied, or like James Fenimore Cooper wrote elegies to their disappearance, erasing those still trying to live. 6/

Fundamentally, until one understands colonial appropriation of land as not some kind of either "civilization" of it or "ruination" of unspoilt wilderness, racist erasure is going to creep into your historical geography.

There are a few ways out of this:
7/

In the terminology of scientific ecology and wildlife management, the best way to phrase this is as a change in management regime. I've seen this work well with discussions of prairie restoration and understanding the role of fire, controlled burning, and fire suppression. 8/

Marxist and critical geographers make a similar move but, characteristically, with more politics involved. Political ecology emphasizes land forms and relations as crystalized power relations which reflect historic politics.

Both of these are better than "pristine"
9/

I want to note that these are both "human-centric" approaches -- the land form becomes then little more than a reflection of the human social dynamics happening on it.

For many geographers like me, this doesn't fully reflect what we see, but there's another huge danger zone 10/

That zone is more of a "non-human-centric" approach, which is what late 19th and early 20th century geography did, with Friedrich Ratzl in Germany (with considerable field work in the US) and Ellen Semple in the US (who studied in Germaany).

And it got super-racist FAST. 11/

The approach was called "environmental determinism," and it is remembered within academic geography as a black stain on the departmental legacy. Ratzl (who died in 1904) developed the concept of lebensraum, which heavily informed Nazi geography and geopolitics. 12/

Semple adapted lebensraum to environmental determinism, roughly the idea that peoples and cultures develop largely in response to their natural environment.

This became a racism fractal -- first, it made "tropical" people lazy and childish. 13/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Churchill_Semple

Second, to explain why a place like Manhattan Island didn't become New York City until after white people showed up, environmental determinists fell back on racist superiority.

In other words it took the "white race" to build New York.

14/

(The upshot of all of this completely altered the disciplinary course of geography. It ran from strong environmental-human relations, which made it less useful to American imperial impulses, which in part caused it to disappear from US prestige academia.) 15/

(That in turn led to some real room for radical geography to emerge but also a schism down the middle of the discipline between "human" and "physical" geography. So there's a lot of geography inside baseball to go on here.)

Anyway back to environmentalism 16/

20th century environmentalism emerged mid-century with Rachel Carson and the first Earth Day and so on, but the legacy of earlier environmental and conservation groups, in part because they provided ready-made organization infrastructure, remained. 17/

And so we still find the language of the "saving" "pristine" "nature." (Whom are we saving it for? What makes a landscape that used to have people in it but now doesn't "pristine?" And ultimately, what TF exactly is "nature" and by extension "non-nature?")
18/

I won't go deep into the history of the environmental justice movement because it's a little ancillary, but it was a long-needed corrective and let largely by non-white people in Chicago, Warren County, NC, and other places and still remains vital. 19/

And to its credit, the Sierra Club has leaned heavily into environmental justice and anti-racism work in the last decade or so, after heading off a nationalist and neo-Malthusian attempted takeover in the late 90s.

20/

But we're still in need of non-racist and still sensible ways of talking about complex relationships between people and the lands they inhabit and visit and impact and so on. Environmentalism and land "conservation" is still desperately needed work. . . 21/

so how do we keep doing the work of stopping environmental degradation while still being able to talk about landscapes in complex and rich ways without falling back onto these racist foundations?

22/

Trying to solve this problem was the reason I (and a lot of other geographers) ended up reading Latour and Actor-Network Theory. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I will emphasize that one reason ANT is at least useful here is its anti-colonial roots. 23/

ANT's main trick is to insist on studying things as social networks, but where "non-humans" (including petrochemicals, scallops, buildings and so on) get to be equal actors in the "society" that's created.

24/

This has the distinct advantage of defanging a lot of racist and colonial epistemologies. So when we talk about environmental issues, we at least have some fancy language for talking about the intense, affective relationships between people and their environment 25/

This is far from a panacea -- Latour and his closest collaborators, being largely a bunch of European male academics, have come in for plenty of harsh questioning. (Please see Zoe Todd's takedown here: https://zoestodd.com/2014/10/24/an-indigenous-feminists-take-on-the-ontological-turn-ontology-is-just-another-word-for-colonialism/) 26/

I also need to mention the work of folks like Donna Haraway and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa here as engagements in how we can talk about rich and complex relations between humans and non-humans (including what we often call "nature.") 27/

And, as Todd's piece linked above emphasizes, one of the things that all of these need to do is to read, cite, and listen to indigenous and black scholarship on land, justice, and how we talk about the environment. 28/

Scholars like Danielle Purifoy, Zoe Todd, and Kim TallBear are essential to this conversation. I am neglecting a further bibliography at the moment because my toddler is scattering my niece's cards all over the floor but I hope to return to it. 29/