Environmental Racism, Environmental Justice, and Preservation in Pine Grove

by Niya Bates | 03 May 2021

Audio:

 

Muriel Miller Branch: Growing up in the Pine Grove Community, I now realize much later as an older adult, that we were environmentalists long before the word became popular. We rotated our crops, and even when we cut wood, mostly to heat our homes because most of us had wood stoves, we only cut enough wood to last us through the winter. Those farmers and residents who did cut wood out of the wooded areas on their property, cut those trees down to make room and to make light for the other trees to grow. So, it was like a thinning out process that they used.

There was a cohesiveness in Pine Grove that is kind of hard to explain because that cohesiveness was actually across racial lines. If a neighbor needed help harvesting a crop or killing hogs and processing the meat or if someone got sick, people just rallied around you. It was truly- I think Dorothy used the word village, someone used the word village on Friday. I began to feel a different sense for that word. It wasn’t just a collection of people, it was a spirit of some kind of connectivity because we all lived off the land. It was important to respect the land even if some people didn’t respect the people on the land. You understand what I’m saying?

Niya Bates: I’m Niya Bates, a graduate student in the History Department at Princeton University, and this is a podcast is   about the intersections of historic preservation, environmental racism, and environmental justice as experienced by one community in Virginia’s South Central Piedmont.

[historical background]

 

Niya:  Cumberland County, Virginia is deeply rural. Where I’m from, we would call it the boonies or the sticks. The total population of the county is under 10,000 residents. In fact,  the average commute to work for the people who venture to live there is approximately 40 minutes. For city-dwellers who are used to sitting in traffic, this probably seems low. But in reality it means driving 30 or 40 miles in any direction.[1] The community of Pine Grove, located in the northeast section of Cumberland County is roughly one hour southeast of Charlottesville and one hour southwest of Virginia’s capital city of Richmond. Even the closest grocery stores are a 30-minute drive for folks living in Pine Grove.

 

Sonja Branch-Wilson: Let me say that when I was younger, I hated to go to Cumberland. “Oh, we’re going to go to Cumberland,” said my grandparents or my parents, or, “We’re going to ride down to Cumberland.” Great. The only time of the year that I was excited about going to Cumberland was Labor Day weekend when we used to have our annual family reunion because it was seeing all of our cousins, young and old, my age and the elders and we would play, we would get on that rusty swing that had probably been there a thousand years, but we were on it. Then we would smell the food and we would wait to see which cars were going to come up the gravel. You could hear them before they would come. We would look and see what kind of car it was, because depending upon whose car it was, you’d know either you had the potato salad or desserts or something yummy coming.

Niya: Mrs. Muriel Miller Branch and her family have lived in Cumberland County for many generations. She reverse-migrated to Cumberland from Montclair, NJ when her father took ownership of his uncle’s 40-acre farm when she was just three years old. Mrs. Branch’s Great Uncle, Warner Mayo, built their farmhouse in the Cartersville area of Cumberland in the 1880s. She says she grew up surrounded by family in a close-knit community.

Like many counties in the eastern half of Virginia, in the Piedmont and Tidewater regions, Cumberland County built its wealth on the backs of enslaved people. The Mayo, Miller, Dungy, and Agee families in Pine Grove are descendants of those enslaved laborers and retain deep ties to the land that their ancestors cultivated. In 1860, there were twice as many enslaved Afro-Virginians living in Cumberland as free whites.[2] They made up 67% of the total population, which placed Cumberland in the top 3 slaveholding counties by total percentage of the population. There was also a very small population of free Black residents who primarily worked as laborers, on farms, in mills, at other industrial sites, or as boatmen.[3] In Cumberland, tobacco was king – specifically the bright leaf variety that was first identified in Caswell County, NC in the later 1830s.[4] They liked this variety because it could be grown in poor soil, which was common because other darker-leafed varieties had drained the soil in Cumberland of its nutrients and productivity. Poor roads and unimproved waterways made access to the deeply rural countryside treacherous and limited other industries and crops from being profitable in the county.[5] This exacerbated class divisions by creating a wealthy class of planters and plantation owners, an underclass of overseers and other poor whites, and a Black population – free and enslaved – that was consistently exploited.

These conditions did not change with the arrival of legal freedom at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Niya: The Agees, Mayos, Millers, Dungys and at least sixteen other Black families in the Pine Grove and Cartersville area of Cumberland County were employed doing similar work as they had done under the harsh regime of slavery. Many worked on their own farms and those who did not worked as farm laborers for other landowners.  Everyone was deeply committed to making sure that their families had access to education.

Between 1865 and 1910, Black residents in Cumberland constructed one-room schools for educating people – young and old. By 1910, they opened a high school in Cartersville named Hamilton High School. Hamilton was part of a larger turn in Virginia toward Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education for African Americans all across the U.S. South, which included normal education to prepare women to become teachers. [6]

 

With $50 in support from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, designs created by Robert Robinson Taylor – a Black architect from Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute – , $500 raised by Black residents, and $1000 from the county school division, men from the Pine Grove community constructed and opened the Pine Grove Elementary School in 1917.[7] From 1917 until 1954, Pine Grove Elementary served to educate students from pre-kindergarten through 7^th grade.

Mrs. Branch: My dad was three years old when Pine Grove School was built, so  it was there. Actually, he attended until fifth grade I think, that’s when he had to drop out.

Niya: Starting at the age of 5, Mrs. Branch also attended Pine Grove Elementary in the last few years before the school was closed as a result of school desegregation in Virginia. Unlike the neighboring county of Prince Edward, Cumberland County did not close schools to avoid integration. In fact, they broke away from Prince Edward’s policy of Massive Resistance by creating an independent school district, which has resulted in the sites in Cumberland being added to the  Civil Rights in Virginia Education Heritage Trail.[8]

Mrs. Branch has vivid memories of her time at Pine Grove, including the special privilege of attending school early – before the age most students were allowed to attend.

Mrs. Branch: We walked three and a half miles to Pine Grove School. Now, that was a ritual. Going to school and walking from school, there were these rituals. One was- because we lived further away than any of our cousins that we picked up along the way. We would stop at each lane because we had these long lanes. Everybody lived back off these dirt roads. And we would stop at each of the lanes, and when we get close, we had a little call and response that we would do and we’d say, “Woo-hoo hoo hoo!  Who-hoo hoo hoo-hoo.” If they were on their way, they’d say, “Woo-hoo! ” We did that at every lane so that they would know that we were getting close and we’d be moving on. We’d wait for a little while and then we’d go to the next lane and we’d do the same thing.

It didn’t look like three and a half miles because we kept gathering our family and friends as we walked along the way and kicking rocks, with sticks and chasing each other and playing tag. It’s a wonder we even made it to school. By the time we got to school, Mrs. Gilliam was standing at the door with the little bell. [mimics bell sounds] If you weren’t there, you had better move and move really quickly because she did not ring that bell but once.

Niya: And After you got there, what was your school day like?

Mrs. Branch: The school day consisted of a lot of listening. I remember a lot of listening because you have to understand that there were seven grade levels. The only way you knew what grade you were in was the row of seat that you said on. Mrs. Schelling would start with the younger children and then move back. While we were doing our work, that she would move from row to row, well, Little Miss Muffet (me) would hurry up and get my work done, and I would be listening to what was going on behind me with the older children.

There was a lot of incidental or vicarious learning, but it was a buzz . There was always paper shuffling and I can remember the sound of the pencils on the paper. B ut the real thing that I remember was that chalk, the sound of the chalk on the- we didn’t have chalkboard, they were called blackboards. Then you had the fire in the winter, the crackling of the wood, and the sparks coming out of the stove. Every month or so, the men would get together and put some kind of oil on the wood, on the floors. Sweep them really good, scrub them, and then they put this oil, and boy, you had to tip around pretty- [laughs] you really had to tip around for a few days until that oil soaked into the wood.

Basically, our books were hand-me-downs from the white schools. They were ragged and tattered. Ms. Gilliam taught us how to make book covers out of paper bags. Then she would let us design our own covers for the books and make them as pretty as we could, but she didn’t seem to rely totally on the books. Some days she would fill that blackboard with things that were not in the book, that she remembered or that she thought we needed to know. Everything that we learned didn’t come from those tattered books. Oftentimes there were pages missing.

She had to adapt the lessons for that. On Fridays, that was a really special day because that’s how I started school. She would allow me, not a lot of five-year-olds because she couldn’t go to school until you were six in Cumberland. She allowed me to come with my brother and sister on Fridays, and then later on, on Fridays, that was our spelling bee  where you’d line up in front of everybody and she would call up these words and you would spell them until you were eliminated. That was a big deal because sometimes she would do it by grade level. If you competed with some of the older people, you were a hotshot.

Niya: A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to visit with Mrs. Branch at Pine Grove with a Historic Preservation Planning class from the University of Virginia taught by long-time historic preservationist and planner, Genevieve Keller. On our tour, we were harassed by a white man who moved into the area just five years ago. He demanded to know what we were doing and when Mrs. Branch pushed him on why he was bothering us – very clearly a group of students with backpacks and notepads — he suggested “the community” has recently had trouble with “prowlers.”…Right… US…PROWLERS. After the disruption, Mrs. Branch reflected on when the social and racial demographics began to change in her  community.

Mrs. Branch: That started in the ’50s as families had to seek employment elsewhere. The schools, once they graduated from the normal school or the training school, Cumberland County training school, there was nothing to do but farm. By this time, farming was just not sustainable because the white farmers had the acreage for the most part and the one cash crop that we had, most black farmers had was tobacco. Cumberland County found a way to cut the allotments of the black farmers, while increasing the allotments of the few white farmers that were even in the community.

Educational opportunities, economic opportunities were the two things that caused the outward migration of blacks from my community. Then what happened was, as my age group began to migrate out of the community, the property started changing hands and then Continental Canning Company came in and they saw an opportunity to take advantage of the economic downturn, the economic stress on black farmers.

They started buying up, just buying up land, buying up land everywhere. That’s how some of that land that we used to own was subdivided and just- they don’t live anywhere near the community, but they had deep pockets. If you’re poor, and someone offers you $1,000 an acre or $500 an acre or $250 an acre back in that day, you took it, that was a lot. That was more money than you had ever known.

[Environmental Justice Battle]

 Niya:  Since 2018, Black and white residents living in the Pine Grove neighborhood have been battling the construction of a mega-landfill by New York based company called Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal. The company received plan and permit approvals from the Cumberland County Board of Supervisors, who supported the project because it would bring jobs and tax revenue to the area. Mrs. Branch and other residents have mounted a fierce opposition to the project on the basis that the proposed landfill will disturb graves of her family’s enslaved ancestors, reroute historic roads and cut off access to the Pine Grove community to accommodate new traffic from dump trucks, and contaminate ground water among other things. If the plan goes through, the Pine Grove school that anchors the cultural landscape of the Black community will be surrounded on three sides by a mega-landfill that will accept between 3,500-5,000 tons of waste per day. According to Green Ridge, the waste would come from places within a 500-mile aerial radius, excluding New York and New Jersey.

What’s within a 500-mile aerial radius from Cumberland, you ask? Twenty other states from as far south as Georgia, as far north as parts of Vermont, almost all of the eastern seaboard, and Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even a sliver of Alabama. Toronto, Canada is within the 500-mile radius of Cumberland County, too

And here’s the kicker: the dump will only provide around 30 jobs. In a county where nearly 20% of residents are living in poverty and the median income hovers just above $46,000, is this really good investment? Is this the kind of development that will truly support people living in Cumberland?

Niya: For Sonja Branch Wilson- these developments are devastating.

Sonja: It infuriates me [chuckles] because when I see my great uncle standing in his tobacco fields, or if I see my grandfather building and I see the homes, this was their community.

Also, to see the headstones that my grandfather made out of— I think with limestone –  and his etching, his handwriting in those headstones, I’m like, “Oh, my grandfather did that.” His grandfather, his grandmother, it says, “At rest,” and while those souls are at rest, for a company who has no connection to the community, no connection to the land is willing to come and disrupt that rest and could care less about the ancestral souls who are there. It’s more than disheartening. It just makes me really angry, like, how dare you? How dare you? Who are you to do something like this, to try to bully a community?

Niya: Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal, offered Mrs. Branch and the AMMD Pine Grove Project group who now owns the school property $100,000 to stop their protest. In an op-ed for the Farmville Herald newspaper, Mrs. Branch wrote:

“We make no apology for not accepting $100,000 dollars, as we are smart enough to know that those few dollars would be “hush” money; a way of silencing us.

We make no apology for raising the alarm about the adverse environmental and health impacts a landfill in our midst would have on life-long residents of the community.

We make no apology for questioning the so-called buffer for a 692 feet high landfill, or the smell and dust the landfill and truck traffic would cause. We make no apology for not wanting to disturb the 22 formerly enslaved souls behind Pine Grove School or further decimate their memory by having garbage piled on them.

We make no apology for advocating for what is right and just and for calling attention to America’s long history of environmental racism in communities of color who have no high-paid lobbyists to speak for us. ”[9]

Niya: I spoke with historic preservationist and urban planner, Genevieve Keller about her pro-bono work to help Mrs. Branch and the Pine Grove community. We started our conversation by talking about the intersections of historic preservation and environmental racism and environmental justice.

Genevieve Keller: I’m Genevieve Keller. I usually describe myself as an architectural historian preservation planner I’m a founding principle of a small preservation and landscape architecture firm in Charlottesville, Virginia – Land and Community Associates. And  for the last five or six years, I’ve been adjunct faculty in historic preservation at the University of Virginia.

Because we were starting our practice in 1975, we were very close to the environmental movement of the 50s, 60s, and 70s and all of the environmental acts that came about through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, you know? So, I always say that the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was at the vanguard of those environmental acts – maybe being the most conservative about them but there was a federal mandate to review and protect historic resources before clean air and clean water.[10]

Well, you know, our profession Historic Preservation was actually born in issues of racial and environmental injustice then it kind of overzealous over patriotism that glorified whiteness and masculinity and elitism –  And it intentionally obscured and suppress the contributions of people who were not white and male, and elite. Even the way we name properties, you know, even, even the homes of the elite, It may have come to a man, through his wife’s dour or through his mother’s inheritance, but it’s still going to have his name, you know? So at the very essence of the survey process, it’s male and it’s white. And so, the first people that were surveying Virginia were male, and were white. And I think that that that just, you know, trickled down and it came out of our museum heritage, you know?

And then you overlay NEPA and Historic Preservation Act on that. People weren’t looking for slave dwellings and smoke houses and joineries, and all of those other things and in fact, they saw them as ugly. And they removed them from the landscape. And in doing so, they suppressed that and there were intentional places, as well, where people were concerned about the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and the riots places in the Shenandoah Valley felt they were very close to Washington DC. And that if they still had records that prove that they had enslaved people on their farms, they would deliberately destroy those.

Niya: Right. there’s something different about being the birthplace of America, and dealing with these issues.

Genevieve: Right, right. I mean, we came in and displaced and killed the indigenous people. And within, you know, less than a decade really, then we started a race based enslavement process. And then we were a major battleground of the Civil War. And now we have more Confederate monuments than any other place and in the United States. And we had massive resistance and a very vigorous Jim Crow – and genetics and we influenced Germany at you know we are the place.[11]

I was saying to someone yesterday, really the whole of the Commonwealth of Virginia is a sight of conscience – should be a site of conscience – you know, because we are so culpable in so many ways. We’re so rich in other ways. I don’t want to damn all of it, because I think there’s some good that comes out of the preservation movement, but I think we can use preservation to look more deeply at that history and take responsibility for what we did and take responsibility for how we’re going to repair it.

[Where do we go from here?] 

Niya: So where do we go from here? Over the past few years, Virginia has seen a number of reactionary preservation projects brought forward by communities of color fighting major development and infrastructure projects – not to prevent productive development, but rather to protect the desecration of sacred grounds and irreplaceable history. In Buckingham County, the Black community in Union Hill successfully fought against a proposed Dominion Virginia Power compressor station on the basis that it would disproportionately negatively impact their community. In the process, they created Virginia’s first Freedman’s historic district, the only rural historic district in the state focused solely on Black historic resources. At Rassawek, the Monacan Indian Nation – a federally recognized sovereign tribe –  is embroiled in a tense battle to prevent the James River Water Authority from building a pump station and pipeline that would disturb over 20 ancestral burial sites. Rassawek has been their capital for over 5000 years and 200 generations. In Charles City County, residents are in a similar situation as the community in Pine Grove, facing the construction of another mega-landfill. And in Richmond, descendants of enslaved and free Black Richmond residents created a historic district as part of their battle to save the Shockoe Hill African Burial Ground from being further desecrated by the construction of a high speed rail connecting DC to Richmond, VA.

In the U.S., less than 2% of historic sites on the National Register of Historic Places are associated with African American history.[12] While structural inequities with the process remain a primary source of this imbalance – for example, criteria that is hyper-focused on the built landscape at the expense of cultural landscapes, oral history, and intangible heritage – centuries of dispossession and displacement have left us with communities and histories that are difficult to identify and locate through traditional data sources like the census and windshield surveys. Practitioners have ignored and overlooked places of significance to communities of color, new property owners have torn down or otherwise destroyed buildings and landscapes that “weren’t pretty” despite knowledge of their historical significance (like the underground railroad site in Petersburg, VA for example). Urban renewal and other forced erasures for the sake of development have made those landscapes difficult to identify even on maps.

Genevieve Keller, Andrea Roberts, Lakshmi Fjord and others working in this space have testified to the tremendous power of local knowledge as one strategy for locating and preserving communities that exist at the margins or have not yet been mapped.

Genevieve: Local knowledge of environments is an essential part of environmental justice. It is something that hasn’t been built into most preservation projects in an integral way beyond using the traditional and often white and well off owners of historic legacies. And it often requires public comment for environmental reviews and historic designations. But, the sad thing about public comment is that it does not necessarily inform the process, nor need to be heeded, and it usually comes at the end of her project rather than at the beginning. It’s just a mandated part of the process. And in many instances communities of color may be outnumbered and out funded and their voices may not be heard. I certainly know that in my own work I’ve made mistakes especially when local knowledge was not funded and built into the process.

Students  of my Preservation Planning class at UVA are learning more and more from local leader, the Reverend Muriel Branch, about burial traditions, historic pathways, and lack of internal boundaries in her beloved pine Grove community. And, as you well remember, you and I first met because your African American descendant community had not been included as informants, decision makers, and supporters of the Southwest Mountains Rural Historic District, while the descendants of plantation-owning enslavers played a major role in developing and informing that project. So I think we’ve come to a point where many of us are realizing that environmental justice demands that we do better and that we value local knowledge so that we can repair past damage and that we can repair the narrative and repair the designations to ensure protections that are equitable and inclusive in the future.

Niya: Members of the Pine Grove Community also share similar ideas about local memory and local knowledge. However, they also frame the challenge around shifting ideas about cultivating the next generation, focusing on the good types of development, and educating the public on the history. Mrs. Branch, her cousin Dorothy Rice, and daughter Sonja Branch-Wilson are committed to this fight.

 I think the Pine Grove Project is an opportunity to share with the immediate community because I’m not sure the people that are there really are that invested in this legacy, they’ve probably taken it for granted like many people do when you have something, and it’s only when you’re on the verge of losing it do you want to try to save it.

Mrs. Branch Agriculture is different now so I think maybe we need to look at agriculture differently. You’ve got the hydroponics, you’ve got all kinds of agricultural-type industries that are popping up. I think it’s incumbent upon us as an organization to, as I wrote in that op-ed, that we need to show people what we’re for and come up with some plans that we can offer. If we can get a park, a nice park at Pine Grove, and get the school restored, that will be a green space for people to be able to claim. To come in us and claim, and gather, all of those things that rebuild community.

Tourism, we can get Cumberland, we can get the cemeteries, the schools in that area, even into Buckingham as a part of a historic tour, bringing tourism into the community, somehow linking that huge green space called Bear Creek Lake to these rural sites as a part of the recreational industry. There are many things that we can do to attract younger people.

We need to get together with the school system and help them envision what could be and prepare their young people for what could be. There’s too much apathy and complacency because of poverty. The people feel defeated and the white people only have one thing to hang on to and that’s their color.

Sonja: I think my mother said something very powerful and you witnessed it on Friday and I’ve stated it several times. I don’t want to call- refer to them as this, but it’s kind of I don’t know, I really don’t know, another word to say that would describe them outside of newcomers. They are new to the community. They do not know the history of the community. They haven’t cared to know the history of the community. They just see it as a quiet quaint place where the neighboring community, Powhatan , has developed so much.

Again, you would ride and you would go up Route 60 and keep going. At one point, it was like civilization cut off because it was just trees and a house here and there, but Powhatan has really blossomed now. There’s still no supermarket there. They’re just– You have the gas station that sells good food, by the way, they have great food at the stop and go. You have the Dollar General.

Mrs. Branch: No medical facility.

 Sonja: No medical facilities, right. You have a library, a post office. I’m trying to think. I’m going up Route 60 and you hear my pauses because I’m thinking, as we’re traveling up and down 60, what’s there? But,  there’s nothing there. One of my cousins, she calls it Mayberry. It’s still Mayberry. It still Mayberry. So what’s going to happen is that cycle from my mother’s generation is going to continue where the opportunities are not there for the children to stay.

What are the 2021 graduates going to do? Why would they stay in Cumberland? That means there’s more Black land that if you have elders in the family, that land would be passed down. Now, these children in 2021, they’re going to go, they’re going to thrive, speaking it into an existence for them. Then why are they going to come back? Unless they have that history connection tied in and linked.

Muriel: We are the place makers. That was a Black community, the ratio was like 60 to 10 within a 6, 7 mile radius. We created, built, sustained that community until about the ’60s, mid-’60s at that. That’s when the mass exodus of Black kids, young Black people, went out of that area.

[Conclusion]

Although the Black communities in Pine Grove stand to lose the most from the construction of the Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal mega-landfill, environmental racism and inequality hurt everyone in Cumberland. The county’s leaders have prioritized corporate gains and tax revenue over the welfare of their own residents. That’s a self-devouring type of growth that doesn’t make possible a future where Cumberland County’s residents can escape poverty, stay on the land, and build strong connections with the people around them.[13] The 30 or so jobs created by allowing the landfill are only guaranteed for the life of the landfill, which is estimated at around 30 to 35 years.[14] And then what? The damage to the waterways, the rerouting of historic roads and pathways, and the desecration of the burial grounds of enslaved people will already be done. The county will be left with 1200 acres of unproductive land – potential park space for people who will have already moved away to find better opportunities elsewhere.

Cumberland leadership could choose instead to invest in the types of future-oriented development that are informed by how Pine Grove’s residents lived in the past: in sync with the land and in community with each other.

That’s all the time I have for this episode. I would like to thank Mrs. Muriel Miller Branch, Mrs. Dorothy Rice, my sister – Sonja Branch-Wilson, and Genevieve Keller for participating in this podcast. Thanks for listening!

Music Credit: Crate Concerto by Dusty Decks (Epidemic Sound).

[1] “Cumberland County, VA | Data USA,” accessed April 23, 2021, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/cumberland-county-va#demographics.

[2] “Population – 1860: Geography of Virginia,” accessed April 29, 2021, http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/pop1860numbers.html.

[3] William Maphis Whitworth Jr, “Cumberland County, Virginia, in the Late Antebellum Period, 1840-1860,” Masters Theses, Paper 1127, 1991.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Luther P. Jackson and Cumberland Training School,” AfroVirginia, accessed April 29, 2021, http://places.afrovirginia.org/items/show/257?tour=5&index=29; “024-0105 Hamilton High School,” accessed April 29, 2021, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/024-0105/.

[7] “024-5082 Pine Grove Elementary School,” accessed April 29, 2021, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/024-5082/.

[8] Jeffrey Carlton Scales, “A CASE STUDY OF BLACK STUDENTS’ EDUCATION AND SOCIALIZATION SINCE PUBLIC SCHOOL CLOSURE IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY VIRGINIA,” n.d., 198; “024-0105 Hamilton High School.”

[9] Muriel Miller Branch and April 1, “COLUMN — We Are What Environmental Justice Looks Like,” The Farmville Herald, April 1, 2021, https://www.farmvilleherald.com/2021/04/we-are-what-environmental-justice-looks-like/.

[10] The National Historic Preservation Act (NEPA) was signed into law on October 15, 1966. The National Environmental Protection Act was signed into law on January 1, 1970.

[11] Here, Genevieve Keller is speaking about the role that scientific racism and eugenics played in influencing Nazi policies toward Jewish people during the Holocaust.

[12] Casey Cep, “The Fight to Preserve African-American History,” The New Yorker, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-fight-to-preserve-african-american-history.

[13] The term “self-devouring growth” is derived from Julie Livingston, Self-Devouring Growth : A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa, Critical Global Health. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), {“https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv1131dbm”:[“www.jstor.org”]}.

[14] “Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal Facility,” accessed May 1, 2021, https://greenridgeva.com/project-description.html.