"a responsibility to something besides people" 1: African American Reclamation Ecopoetics

From the beginning, African American reclamation ecopoetics has functioned, in Jonathan Skinner's terms, as a way of pointing out the unequal privileges that exist for white people as opposed to African Americans in a more general context: "Ecopoetics offers no dialogue without a critique of the terms of engagement and a strategy for reversals on the power gradient" (Skinner 112). Because of historical and social context, African American reclamation ecopoetics does not merely participate within an already established genre; it has always existed in its own right. Reclamation ecopoetics represents humans as fully invested in the amelioration of nature when it is threatened or already damaged because it is an investment in humankind as well. [...]if we recall Dixon's "Wood and Rain," with which I began this inquiry, we see that it calls attention to the unequal power gradient of access to natural spaces; it asks us to consider what it means to assume that, for all audiences, trees hold positive connotations and soil represents life-giving forces.