The Daily UbuntuThread 04 · Climate and Our Relationship to the Land · September 25, 2026
Environmental racism, right here
Who breathes the smoke, who lives next to the dump? Environmental racism raises the question of "us" on the scale of a whole territory.
1 · The scene
A community garden, in August. A neighbour waters the plants of someone who has gone on vacation. No one asked her to.
Here, the land is shared like a favour returned. What we give the soil comes back to everyone.
Original vignette
2 · The documented case
Environmental racism, right here
Nuisances are not distributed at random. In There's Something in the Water (Fernwood, 2018), researcher Ingrid Waldron documents environmental racism in Nova Scotia: the way Mi'kmaw and African Nova Scotian communities have been more exposed to polluting facilities and their effects.
Ubuntu offers another way of seeing: a relationship to the land based on reciprocity rather than extraction. It meets many Indigenous knowledges from here, which think of territory as a relationship to be tended, not a resource to be emptied.
3 · The voice
“I am, because we are.”
4 · The question
Who gets the smoke, the noise and the vacant lot, and who decides where they go?
Sources
- I. Waldron, There's Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities, Fernwood, 2018. fernwoodpublishing.ca
Every figure on this page links to a verifiable public source.
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