ABSTRACT
In a short essay about her childhood, bell hooks speaks to the importance of nature in a time of great transition for the black population of the rural south in the United States. She speaks of nature’s legacy as part of something passed down to her emotionally, materially, and biologically; it is something poignant that she feels at the very source of her being. hooks’ childhood was a time of agricultural transformation in the rural south of the US that, in combination with a burgeoning industrial expansion in the north, motivated the migration of many African Americans to a place where they faced abject poverty and a capitalist system that cared little for connections to nature: “Without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression” (hooks, 2002: 31). These consequences of development and the mass movement of poor people are not unique to particular times and places, and at this moment similar processes play out on a huge scale in contemporary China, where massive industrialization and urbanization, in conjunction with changes in rural areas, are resulting in significant modifications to human/nature dynamics.
