Welcome to the Ecollective Beta
This environmentalist platform is currently in “beta mode” which simply means the site is in the final pre-launch phase. We are inviting friends and prospective contributors to take a look at the site and provide feedback while we make final adjustments.
The Ecollective experience is immersive: designed to be viewed on desktops or laptops, not mobile phones (which distort the format).
Emerging as “the art of the possible,” our website production funds are low and our aspirations high. We are six black women writers and educators who are passionate about the naturalist ethos as an integral guide to living.
To this end, the Ecollective is a non-profit, community space dedicated to deepening human connections with the natural world.
Current stream
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Taking flight and grounding deeper
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Malaika Favorite’s River Road painting confronts the petrochemical toxicity of the lower Mississippi River. She is continuing the environmental activism of her father.
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The Africans who made “Carolina Gold” rice worth its weight in gold: West African rice farming has a long history of using dikes and other techniques that were passed down through generations and adapted in the American South.
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Sowing the seeds of African American horticultural history into a comprehensive field
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Cintia Cabib: Documenting the Human Connection to the Natural World
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I never imagined I would end up as a “river keeper” … but I inevitably was drawn back home to watch over her
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Daniel Minter making the unseen seen and replenishing the seen
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Marine scientist and climate solutions investigator, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson challenges the narrative of climate doom with exuberant possibilities to “get it right.”
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Placeholder for upcoming article by Samaa Abdurraqib (details inside)
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Placeholder for a forthcoming article by Arisa White (details inside).
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Placeholder for forthcoming article on J. Drew Lanham (details inside)
Continuing stream
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Trees flourishing in Africa in the spirit of Wangari Maathai
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De wata bring, de wata tek (“The water brings, the water takes" – Gullah Geechee saying): environmental perspectives on Kendra Hamilton’s groundbreaking new book: Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess.
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Are Humans Nature's Dumbest Smart Animal?
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Wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant tracks, monitors and cares for animals in the wild.
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The visionary designer who’s taking on one of the world’s most intractable problems
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Seeds of vast complexity
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Roderick A. Ferguson turned his front lawn into a garden as a way to help address the environmental crisis
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Between seeking and attainment is increasing immersion into the Whole
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Marrying the Earth
Earthseed journal features articles, creative non-fiction and reviews.
Great Dismal Swamp, still a place of refuge
ecollective rendering
Wood engraving of a Dismal Swamp maroon called “Osman” in the September 1856 edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The engraving was based on a eyewitness testimony by David Hunter Strother, author of the article about the swamp.
Fleeing enslavement in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, black people developed communities in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Their flight in some ways continued a tradition of immersion into the wilderness in what the Bakongo people called the “mfinda.”
The Ecollective mfinda allows us to create a metaphorical as well as historical and natural history of the Dismal Swamp which was called “dismal” because the English-speaking colonizers perceived dense, southern marshes as disease-breeding miasmas but like Brer Rabbit regarded the briar patch, Africans felt right at home in the ewamp.
Through this space, we will travel to places of refuge within the natural world.
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We begin with an invocation from the South Carolina coast
Photo: Margeorge 2022 for Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Return pose
(balancing the glide)
eyes downward, stepping forward with right foot toes pointing left
on moist clay that becomes pots
hands aloft in mid-flight, fingers turned outwards
balancing the glide of geechee gullah girl divination
between visible and indivisible
Entrance area of the Osun-Osogbo grove, Nigeria
The Osun grove is among the last of the sacred forests which usually adjoined the edges of most Yoruba cities before extensive urbanization. There is a relation between how the Dismal Swamp was regarded by African descendants and the sacred forests of West Africa including the Osun-Osogbo Grove and the mfinda of Central Africa. Self-emancipating black people viewed the Dismal Swamp as more than just a hiding place.
Photo: Doris Ulmann, Lang Syne plantation, South Carolina peninsula, early 1930s
The International Day for Biological Diversity to increase understanding and awareness of ecosystem issues.
(Acharya 63 / Adobe Stock)