Chapter 2

        This chapter mainly focused on the history of black people in agriculture and the continuous issues that they have faced. The chapter starts by talking about the original promise of "forty acres and a mule" for recently freed families. I have heard of this before, but I never really learned how hard people worked to keep people from this and take it away once they got what is rightfully theirs. The legal and physical "bullying" of African American communities done by law enforcement, government agencies, banks, etc... kept any real chance of freedom from happening.

        I think one of the common threads of the book so far is returning to the past. In this chapter we have Olivia Watkins returning to her ancestral land and working to regenerate it after her family was no longer able to care for it. In the first chapter we read about Latrice Tatsey working to bring back bison to her community. More generally, we have the entire movement of regen ag which uses modern ideas and technologies to reintroduce what many cultures throughout the world practiced for the majority of history. I think this idea is growing in society as a whole. Many people are now truly able to be aware of the world around them and learn the history of their families/cultures, and because of this, organizations like BIPOC FIRE that have the numbers and means to make a difference.

        As they talked about towards the end of this chapter, there are still harmful ideas seen as positives in the environmental/climate action communities. Planting trees always sounds like a good idea on paper, but forests are more than just one tree. Forests are diverse environments that support many different species of trees alone. To truly make a difference, people must understand what makes an ecosystem and what the causes of the climate crisis are in the first place.