Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Department or Program

Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society

First Advisor

Laura A. Ogden, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Maron E. Greenleaf, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Abigail H. Neely, Ph.D.

Abstract

Dominant traditions of urban planning, municipal policy, and environmental science register Black urban spaces through a vocabulary of pathology, as sites of ecological deficit, contamination, and social decay. This dissertation investigates how Black communities in U.S. cities attend to the environment in ways that address legacies of environmental and social injustice while opening pathways toward different environmental futures. I gather these practices under the analytic of Black ecological care, which captures the generative labor of making and maintaining livable worlds within, alongside, and beyond histories of harm. I develop the analytic across twenty-nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2021 and from 2023 through 2025, in Baltimore. I conducted fifty-two semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and archival research. The first chapter reframes the discussion of Black underrepresentation in conservation from a question of absence to a question of presence, and argues that Black conservation practices are unfolding in the city’s interstices. The second follows the transformation of vacant and abandoned land from city property to agricultural territory as a mode of Black sovereignty, and shows that what sets these practices apart is less the growing of food than the claim of authority over the land itself. The third examines the dismantling of the federal environmental justice apparatus in 2025, a loss that federal workers called devastating and unsurprising at once. Taken together, the chapters make a single argument. Black communities in Baltimore practice an environmental care that is at once an ethics of relation to nonhuman life, a politics of sovereignty, and a form of justice.

Original Citation

Casteel, A. (2026). More than Wildlife Conservation: Black Ecological Care in Baltimore. Transforming Anthropology, 34(1), 70–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/740719

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