Recent scholarship has only begun to represent the ecoliterary traditions manifested in African American literature and culture. The publication of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), for instance, attests to the legacy of African American texts – traditional and contemporary – engaging the environmental imagination through a range of ecopoetic styles for more than four hundred years. Critical works addressing African American environmental literatures, however, remain underrepresented.

Working to fill this critical lacuna within African American ecocritical studies, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions is a welcome contribution to studies of US environmental literature. Author Kimberly N. Ruffin rightly critiques this field as having neglected the experiences of negatively racialized Americans and as “insufficient in illuminating African American ecological perspectives” (13). Ruffin emphasizes ecology, rather than environment, based on three premises fundamental to her critical orientation: “(1) humans are indeed ‘natural’; (2) humans have developed a powerful and distinct culture within nature; and (3) cultural definitions of ‘humanity’ influence an individual's experiences among humans and with nonhuman nature” (18). By substituting “environmental” for “ecological,” Ruffin positions herself to challenge binaries such as “human/animal, human/nature, and anthropocentrism/biocentrism” (19) and to “illuminate how African American authors understand human beings as part of the natural world” (20), rather than distinct from it. Covering expressive terrain from slave narratives to contemporary blues poetry, and working through a call-and-response structure (where each chapter begins with a call for scholarly attention and is followed by a response of critical and textual inquiry), Black on Earth achieves these goals through succinct historicization and incisive literary analysis, a multidisciplinary approach that enriches critical accounts of this body of literature while also suggesting tangible possibilities for social applications and future scholarly work.

The project begins in chapter 1 with a call to recognize that ecological thought emerges not just from privileged accounts of environmental tourism – the American family national park tour, for instance – but from social sectors whose subsistence has long been predicated upon working in and with nature. Ruffin responds with the productive exploration of slave narratives recorded from 1936 to 1938 by the Federal Writers Project (FWP) – a collection of more than 2,300 first-person accounts. Referencing specific narratives pertinent to ecological inquiry (those of Willis Cofer, “Uncle Henry” Barnes, George Womble, W. L. Bost, James Bolton, and Clara Davis), Ruffin illuminates the voices of individuals with marginal scribal literacy which attest to “ecological belonging in the absence of national citizenship,” and demonstrates in these narratives expressions of “hope for greater reciprocity between the natural order and social order” (31). Speakers recount their ecological experiences as mediated by plantation life, discussing not just the denigration of having been treated as animals, but also the ways in which the enslaved were able to develop herbal remedies, agricultural savvy, and aesthetic and sensorial connectivity with local flora and fauna. Ruffin's contribution to a more ecocentric understanding of the FWP narratives parallels her analysis of George Moses Horton's poetry, which she reveals as a body of work expressing both wonder about nature and, within the same expressions, “frustration about the social order” (42), and expanding understandings of US environmentalism by interlocking agricultural work with socioracial critique.

The second chapter calls for analysis of literary works that clarify “how the lives of those among people at the bottom of human hierarchies can help us better understand varieties of ecological agency” (61). Moving from the historical narratives of the previously enslaved to the neo-slave narrative poetry of Frank X. Walker, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Marilyn Nelson, Ruffin suggests the mirroring of neo-slave literature's attention to collective experience with communal land relationships that subsequently bespeaks communal – rather than individualist – traditions of “ecological agency.” Defining ecological agency as “the successful negotiation of the human and nonhuman systems that determine survival” (59, original emphasis), Ruffin again emphasizes the interdependence of the human and nonhuman while also stressing the agency of individual actors – such as Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver – who harnessed ecological agency to overcome barriers of institutional racism. This method of ecological analysis further enables to Ruffin to implicitly critique the heroics of rugged individualism and to valorize the collective heroics of “wisdom and action born of communal life” (86) – a call to recognize communal pasts in order to realize an ecologically just future that resonates with, for instance, James Martin's The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future (2007).

Moving to analyses of Alice Walker's essays and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1998) in chapter 3, Ruffin explores the hybrid functionality of ecotheology and the literary articulations of human animality. As Ruffin summarizes, “Walker's ecotheology pushes human beings to reconnect to their animality through deeper relationships with nonhuman animals and the Earth,” while “Butler's perspective on human animality yields an ecotheology that aims to help humans surpass their negative tendencies in order to survive on whatever planet they should inhabit” (95). Ruffin's analyses of the texts produce as many questions as they do answers, leaving the reader to wonder about the possibilities – and the limits – of ecological imaginaries grounded in religious thought. As a pedagogy this might be effective; as literary criticism, this chapter seems to take a rest, relying on comparison and contrast of two writers with shared concerns about the planet's environmental well-being. In contrast, Anissa Ward's recent book, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective (2011), more effectively expands the conversation transnationally, bringing memory and African religious origins into play and thus situating the analysis fruitfully in a more meaningful diasporic context.

An approach to myth and ecology, where myth is considered to convey “the conceptual complexity of our connection in place, past, present, and future in language” (112), grounds Ruffin's fourth chapter. She views myth as a site holding promise “of supplying an outlook that recognizes the past but that also contains a critical and creative assessment of human history and behavior” (113) – but not without safe distance from overvalorizing the mythological imagination in African American literature. Quite rightly, Ruffin regards myth-making as a double-edged sword: on the one hand it can positively consolidate ideas about group identity and “connection with … Africa and its diaspora” (114), but on the other hand it can destructively subjugate individuals with fallacious ideologies predicated on large-looming myths of pseudoscientific racism and exclusionary group identities. Thus Ruffin poses a compelling question in this chapter, one crucial to opening the conversation up to world perspectives: “What is the value of myth as an aspect of ecological writing, particularly for African Americans, a largely nonindigenous North American group?” (115). In answering, Ruffin presents analyses of Henry Dumas and Percival West which lead her to propose the equally compelling distinction between “ecological entitlement” afforded to those racialized positively and “ecological deviance” associated with those racialized negatively (124). Another distinctive contribution in this chapter is Ruffin's demonstration of literature's influence upon understandings of racial interactions in predominately white regions – such as the American West – where prevailing myths and their literary icons can marginalize nonwhite racialized groups.

The fifth and final chapter, “‘I Got the Blues Epistemology’: Thinking a Way out of Eco-crisis,” paves the way for what might have been the book's most distinctive insight into African American ecocritical thought from a musicultural perspective had sufficient attention been paid to actual blues lyrics. Unfortunately, the chapter proceeds from a rote summation of blues history in order to analyze the ecologically inclined blues poetics of Jayne Cortez. Nonetheless, Ruffin's expository recognition of Cortez's poems “I Got the Blue-Ooze 93,” “Deadly Radiation Blues,” and “Endangered Species List Blues” provides a useful overview of Cortez's employment of the blues as a mouthpiece for individuals “who are experiencing the ecological emergencies of our current day” (150). Ruffin's mentioning of “Drying Spit Blues” and “They Came again in 1970 and 1980” provides an opening into – but not a journey through – Cortez's transatlantic and even planetary ecological discourse, an opening future scholars concerned with postcolonial and cosmopolitanist ecocriticism might productively explore more intensively.

Black on Earth is a remarkable project that accomplishes what it set out to do: to bring African American ecoliterary traditions – from oral histories to contemporary literature – into the critical forum of ecocriticism, and situate humankind in and of nature – not apart from it. As such it is an indispensable compliment to the academy's formative ecocritical projects of the last twenty years, deserving a place alongside, for instance, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995) as a highly generative work of ecocriticism proper. Ruffin's clear yet impassioned prose, forming calls for inquiry and their analytical responses, makes the book particularly engaging and useful as a springboard for continuing inquiries into the arena of African American environmental literature – a field of inquiry crucial to understanding more fully the historical origins and evolution of literary and environmental thought, particularly as stemming from the African diaspora.