Author: Hogan, Katie Title: Stefanie K. Dunning, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture ©Ecozon@ 2022 ISSN 2171-9594 213 Vol 13, No 1 Katie Hogan University of North Carolina, USA khogan14@uncc.edu Stefanie K. Dunning, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 193 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2022.13.1.4512 In a 2019 Edge Effects podcast focused on the question, “What Is Land,” environmental justice scholar Dr. Monica White replies, “It’s a scene of a crime and a strategy of freedom and liberation” (Hennessy 4:52). White’s response sums up the argument of Stephanie Dunning’s new book, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return in African American Culture, which investigates how “Black people and nature are mutually othered” (95). Just as nature has been targeted for exploitation and abuse for centuries, so have Black people. Anti-Blackness and the destruction of the earth are the building blocks of Western civilization; they are how civil society “constitutes itself and operates” (Dunning 109). Though civil rights, equity programs, and diversity movements can temper the violence of white supremacy, the ongoing shooting deaths of Black adults and children and the aggressive destruction of the physical environment suggests, Dunning contends, that “civilization, in every iteration, is always the opposite of freedom” (Dunning n58 178). Focusing on twentieth and twentieth-first-century Black writers and artists, Dunning explores these ideas in texts that circumvent civil society’s toxic anti-Black and anti-nature ideas, signaling a “pastoral return” in African American culture. Dunning begins with an analysis of primitivism, chattel slavery, and lynching as the primary causes of Black people’s alienation from nature as well as the stereotypes of Black people as “naturally” urban and environmentally indifferent. The bulk of the book, however, examines Black texts that “reclaim the natural world for the Black person via the abolition of civil society” (Dunning 23). Using Zen philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing and African-centric nature-human entanglements, Dunning surmises that the “appearance [of nature] in Black texts is a gesture toward another world and another space of being” (20). Black art and culture have consistently responded to the lethal violence of the state by illustrating a bond between nature and Black people, despite civil society’s efforts to sever that connection. Dunning draws on poet Lucille Clifton’s assertion that the earth “is a black and living thing/ is a favorite child/of the universe” as an example of Black literary culture as a site of healing (6). In addition to Clifton’s poetry, African land-based cosmologies, and Zen philosophy, Dunning draws on Black feminism, Afro-pessimism, literary and film studies, and the author’s own reflections of personal nature-based experiences to illuminate the rich dimensions of Black ecological literary traditions (4).