Lowcountry Takes Action! with the Lowcountry Action Committee

In this episode, recorded in the summer of 2024, Josh interviewed two organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee. 

Lowcountry Action Committee is a Black African grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the South Carolina Lowcountry. 

Our conversation centers around their 2024 piece on environmental racism, where they trace the climate catastrophe, threatening to wash away Gullah Geechee homelands back to the phosphate mining industry of the eighteen sixties. 

We discuss how today's disproportionate exposure of Black communities to hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators is inseparable from the region's history of chattel slavery and why Black people must be at the vanguard of the environmental movement. 

We then situate the crisis within the broader context of the Black Belt, a historical homeland of Africans trafficked to North America. Now among the most vulnerable regions to climate change, drawing on Kali Akuno's prediction that large portions of the Black Belt may be underwater by 2050. We explore what displacement, housing costs, and organized abandonment mean for Black communities in the Carolinas and beyond. 

The conversation also turns to international frameworks, particularly Cuba's model of sustainable development and the parallels between Cuban soil erosion and sea level rise and the ecological challenges facing Gullah Geechee communities. We discuss how the Lowcountry itself lives under a kind of economic blockade, how this juxtaposition illuminates environmental racism, neocolonialism, and anti-Blackness. 

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Lowcountry Action Committee's Website, LinkTree, Youtube

Crisis in the Carolinas: Racial Disparities, the Climate Catastrophe and Environmental Racism in the Lowcountry

Cuba's Life Task: Combatting Climate Change (Tarea Vida)

 

Organizing to Free the Land with Kali Akuno