With Nature as Our Witness: The Lies of Enslavement and the Love of Earthly Being (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798991427982)

Nature was a secret agent in the liberation of enslaved African-Americans. With Nature as Our Witness: The Lies of Enslavement and the Love of Earthly Being unites the words of the formerly enslaved and art from their descendants to tell the story of how nature supports "earthly being," a necessary transformation of "human being," in the past and present.

With Nature as Our Witness: The Lies of Enslavement and the Love of Earthly Beingoffers readers a ceremony of environmental homecoming that both returns African-American voices to the American nature story and illuminates a pathway forward in our time of ecological upheaval.

By curating hidden wisdom from "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938" (an archive held by the Library of Congress), Ruffin recovers an inspirational and healing story, weaving together a hybrid-format creative non-fiction story of environmental testimony, nature's witness, and "earthly being" with oral history excerpts, prose, archival photos, poetry, zines, and original illustrations.

Ruffin asks three questions: What were the environmental experiences and perspectives of the enslaved? How did other-than-human nature witness the humanity of the enslaved? How can the environmental legacy of the enslaved inform us in an age of climate crisis?

Combining ancestral wisdom akin to Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and the paradigm-shifting power of Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project, With Nature as our Witness repairs fissures between social and environmental reality. A book about the burden and beauty of the past, Ruffin inspires with historical clarity and fresh optimism about our future.