In this episode, I talk to my friend Alyson Jones--an avid naturalist and camper--about camping as a black person.
Black to Nature: Episode 2
Camping While Black
Welcome to Black to Nature, the podcast--a monthly discussion of all things related to the intersection of nature and blackness. I’m professor Stefanie Dunning and I’ll be your host.
Stefanie: Before I begin this episode, I would like to do a land acknowledgement to bear witness to and honor the indigenous people to whom this land, that is called America by many, belongs. I want to acknowledge that when we gather anywhere in the Americas on the traditional land of diverse and myriad indigenous peoples, both past and present, we must honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations. This calls us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of whatever lands we inhabit as well and, for me, it means working towards a future where indigenous stewardship of this beautiful place can be restored.
(Owl sounds)
This episode is, on one level, about camping while black. But on another, it’s about the experience of sleeping and living outside, if only for a short time. When I am in the woods at night, listening to the call of owls and the quiet creeping of the night time creatures, I am thinking of Harriet Tubman. I am thinking of what she had to know in order to free herself and many others from slavery. What skill set was required for her to walk off the plantation with almost nothing and hike 90 miles, through the forest, to anti-slavery territory. I am thinking about that journey--not just the before and after, because between slavery and freedom there were trees, plants, the stars pointing the way, animals to be avoided, fish to be caught so people could eat, and bird calls to be developed so that the people escaping tyranny could communicate safely.
Thus the call of the owl, the song of the owl, marks a place in memory for me of freedom because Harriet Tubman, a master naturalist, used these same calls you just heard to communicate with those she was liberating. Consider both the power and poetry of this--that the sounds of animals became a portal to freedom.
The night sounds, which so many of us have been conditioned to fear, were flipped by Tubman’s insightful and courageous method for liberating the enslaved. The ability to sleep outside and move through the forest without fear, re-attunes us as beings, grounding us because the earth--without walls or the illusory sense of separation they create--is our true home.
Alyson to Stefanie: You know as a teacher I always felt children need that because they need to be sort of out there and know that they can make it.
Stefanie, voiceover: I’m talking to my friend Alyson Jones. We met at Spelman College in the 1990s when we were both students there. Alyson lives in Detroit, is a teacher and avid naturalist. She and I have camped together a lot over the past few years.
I ask Alyson about her earliest memories of camping and how she grew to love sleeping outdoors.
Stefanie to Alyson: What was what was it, was it kind of like a YMCA Sleepaway Camp?
Alyson to Stefanie: Yes so I started going to the YMCA camps that were 1 and 2 weeks away and my sister and I would go and take School friends, you know, with us and we would ride the bus there nd come back to give our parents a break. When my parents were traveling they would send us to, still in Michigan, but to different camps. I went to Minnewanka which was like 5 weeks away and it was full of adventure and you’d write notes like, you know, someone come get me, but instead you’d get a care package because no one was coming.
Stefanie, voiceover: I am loving this conversation, where the childhood desire to escape camp and return to the predictability of home is ignored by wise parents who know that the skills of being out in the natural world will serve Alyson and her sister in good stead. This connects for me to Tubman’s naturalist expertise. Alyson parents’ knew that not picking her up when she sent the note meant she would learn how to be strong and free. It may seem ridiculous to equate summer camp with the project of freedom, but natural literacy is deeply connected, I argue in my work, to both feelings of freedom and with the ability to step away from a society that has--historically for many folks--been oppressive.
Camping for me, then, and the natural literacy it inculcates, is intimately tied to black history through not only figures like Harrriet Tubman, but also through the experience of marronage throughout the African Diaspora. We can see the ability to step into the forest and off the Western grid as a key component of black resistance to oppression. It even shows up in some West African texts, when for instance in the work of Malidoma Some, he talks about how he left the oppressive French mission school in his home of Burkina Faso and walked--many miles--all the way back to his village. He survived because he figured out how to live in the forest for the days it took him to arrive home. He survived for the same reason that Tubman did; because of a natural literacy which made walking away from the French mission school, and in Tubman’s case the plantation, possible.
What would it mean to see natural literacy as an essential component of our education on how to be free?
Stefanie to Alyson: (Laughter) Wow, well okay so actually even though it was like as a child camping was perhaps Bittersweet, as you got older obviously you started to somehow reconnect with that natural experience and bring it into your life now.
Alyson to Stefanie: Definitely...going camping is a way to just kind of cool out; just the ultimate you know, relaxation and also it's probably about the fact that I like to be in control of the environment.
Stefanie to Alyson: It’s funny you should say that because I think one reason a lot of people don’t like camping is precisely because they don’t feel in control in a natural environment. Like if you’re afraid of bugs or have other fears, then you won’t feel in control. But if you don't have those fears then camping is like a disconnection, right, from like the computer, the phone, cars, noise, you know lights--like you know all of that is removed but I think a lot of people feel like oh I don't want to go camping because you know what's going to happen to me out there in the wilderness as I sort of covered in the first episode.
Stefanie, voiceover: One of the things I don’t want to do in my work is ignore the very real history, and to some extent, present, danger black people face in isolated places. News stories, like one reported in June of this year, illuminate why so many black people see camping as a dangerous activity. A family was camping in Oregon when some local people armed with semi automatic shotguns accused the family of being antifa operatives and cut down trees to prohibit them from leaving the forest where they were camping. Local high school students came and cleared the road and the police also arrived to escort the family to safety. But incidents such as these continue to taint the water for black folks who might be considering giving camping a try.
Stefanie to Alyson: So here's a question: have you ever had any bad experiences camping like related to racism or anything like that?
Alyson to Stefanie: I know there was one interesting time Ken and I were camping at Wilderness [State Park] not in the rustic places--so now we camp in a rustic places--
Stefanie, voiceover: Ken is Alison's husband.
Alyson to Stefnaie: Were you walk your equipment to your location, you know looking at the lake. So this time, we were with the people and we were in a tent where I think others around us were in a tent but there were also some RVs there was a family from Florida and they would get into these really interesting fights and different things and we were, you know, not worried for our safety but about what we would hear. (Laughter) And there was one family member who thought something was missing from their camp but quickly another family member is said, you know if there's a rule to Camping--you don't touch anybody stuff and clearly we were camping in a small tent next to a big Lincoln so it wasn't like we were going to take anything from them but it did feel like there was a little accusation there that if it was missing then maybe we took it.
Stefanie to Alyson: Oh wow.
Stefanie, voiceover: It is difficult to communicate the pain of being thought to have done something wrong that you did not do. It is even more difficult to explain what it’s like to live, thrive, and experience joy under the anti-black assumptions which frame our society. Writing about environmentalism and African American culture, Carolyn Finney notes that for many African-Americans “the ability to name, frame, and claim a green space is partly grounded in Collective and individual memories that inform how they navigate to understand such spaces.” What I want to do in this podcast is to create an honest archive of both the joys and dangers of black engagement with the natural world.
Stefanie to Alyson: Okay yeah I mean we haven't really had any bad camping experiences directly at us either but there was one time that we were at one of the best campsites...it's called top of the caves and it's in Hocking County in Ohio at Hocking Hills.
Alyson to Stefanie: At Hocking Hills? That’s on our wishlist.
Stefanie to Alyson: Hocking Hills, yes-- you need to come and go to Hocking Hills, it’s beautiful. And it's a wonderful campsite; like people were playing drums you know there was like Obama stickers you know what I mean like the whole vibe was just nice, we were like yes! But there was one family there and they were they were saying all kinds of horrible things to themselves but we could overhear it and and they had a couple of children with them and one of the children actually tried to escape like he was like three he actually just left their campsite he was walking around you know to all the different places where like the happy people were.
And someone tried to get him back to his people; his name was Bryce I remember that. He really did not want to go back to the community of broken, cursing folks who were dropping all kinds of problematic language. But that's as close as we've ever come to like a really bad experience when we've been camping, although I seen some things in the news. But I just feel like when people go camping they really are trying to disconnect for the most part; they really are trying to like interrupt something about their daily life and so there just doesn't seem to be as much like energy, like weird energy, when you go camping as you might find in some other in some other settings.
Stefanie, voiceover: I was not always so comfortable with the idea of being in semi-isolated natural spaces.
Years ago a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee was suggested to me by my ex-partner. He was looking for things to do with his mother, who was visiting from South Asia. Even though I loved hiking and had even taken a hiking class in graduate school (yes, a hiking class, it was California, what can I say), the thought of hiking “down south” filled me with fear. But I went along for the trip despite my trepidations. I ended up having a wonderful time and feeling a connection to the place I did not anticipate. I was enraptured. I was so deeply moved by the energy of the place, I returned the next month with my brother. We stayed out of the “main drag,” where all the tourists congregated and instead, spent the entire time hiking and being outside. We even took all of our meals out under the trees. It was a turning point for me in my own history of being in nature; I shifted the dynamics of my fear and made me feel that I was at least as safe in nature as I was standing on a street corner in Cincinnati.
Stefanie to Alyson: So do you feel like, I mean aside from me, do you have any other friends who go camping or is this like one of those things it's like you and Ken's solo hobby?
Alyson to Stefanie: My friend Nan and her family they go camping a lot up north and she sends lots of pictures; let's see, my friend Ador from the Philippines he loves just being like on the beach and having his kids camping with tents for like one and two weeks and so we talked about going you know to the park where they go. Other than that we are trying to get some friends from Detroit to maybe experience camping because they WILL like it. (Laughter)
Stefanie to Alyson: It’s a bit of a hard sell because there is a comfort factor and this is the part of the interview that I've been most looking forward to with you, my friend, because your gear!
Stefanie,voiceover: Those who know me well, know that I’m not a materialistic person. Like, not at all. However, when it comes to camping and outdoor gear, I have a weak spot. Let’s just say that there is a ban on visiting REI in our household without an explicit list. But my friend Alyson’s gear? Legendary.
Alyson to Stefanie: I remember when we were camping together on a mountain or something on Pennsylvania?
Stefanie to Alyson: Yes, and it rained and we had to leave.
Alyson to Stefanie: But before that I got to make cookies in the oven. Do you remember the oven?
Stefanie to Alyson: (Laughter) Yes, I remember the oven! I mention it often to my family when we’re camping. I’m like, “I know Aunty Alyson isn’t here to make you cookies in the oven, so you’ll just have to be happy with this graham cracker!” (Laughter) Yes, I remember the oven. Have you still been using the oven?
Alyson to Stefanie: Well not recently but we've taken it a few times because we tailgate for football games at times, so we sometimes take it to make a really good breakfast because we’re outside for like 8 hours and also have to make lunch. (Laughter)
Stefanie to Alyson: And that’s the thing you're out there camping you have an oven, you have an air mattress, and you can have everything to make your stay comfortable. (Dog barking in the background.)
Stefanie, voiceover: I guess I should take a moment to introduce you to my dog, Ghost who is barking in the background. He might make some appearances on the podcast in the future. I record these interviews on Zoom because of social distancing and Covid, so sometimes the actual stuff of life shows up in the podcast like my dog barking in the background. So, introducing Ghost.
Stefanie to Alyson: There you are making pizza in your Camp...I have yet to graduate to the camp oven but you know what we need to do is we all need to go back to Canada, to Mt. Tremblant, and we can take the camp ovens then and you know we can just do it up with pizza, biscuits, cookies--all that good stuff.
Alyson to Stefanie: Yes and we have the coolers to do it to.
Stefanie to Alyson: But my guess is that my family will just come over and eat all your food like they always do. (Laughter)
Alyson to Stefanie: That brings us so much joy though.
Stefanie to Alyson: Well that brings YOU joy. (Both laugh.) I’m like, I can bring a mango and they’re like no, we’d rather have chips. But if Aunty Alyson brings a mango, they have to have it. (Joking) I will never forgive them! (Laughter) But I guess the food is always greener on the other side.
Alyson: Yes (Laughing)
Stefanie,voiceover: So perhaps the place where gear becomes most important is around the stuff you bring to sleep on. Air mattresses, inflatable sleeping bag inserts, sleeping bags with down feathers--there's a variety of different options for the camper looking for the best night’s sleep.
Alyson to Stefanie: It can't be very it can be very comfortable to sleep outside. There are various technologies, things you can slip into a sleeping bag or whatever and it's just dream land.
Stefanie to Alyson: Although I don’t like the little inflatable that slips into the sleeping back because it goes icke-icke all night long. (Laughter) Like for car camping, I have to have a big, full size inflatable mattress. Even backpacking, it’s better to eat the 2 lbs and take a cot for me than to have to listen to that little inflatable all night long. (Laughter)
We went camping for my birthday a couple of weeks ago but the dog had had like pulled the leash a couple of days before and I had strained a shoulder muscle and it was really hurting and then I slept outside for two nights in a row and like it literally healed the whole thing. I mean it was probably a combination of time and sleeping outside but there's a lot of evidence that shows that sleeping outside for a range of reasons is like really healing.
Stefanie, voiceover: Kenneth Wright, a sleep expert at the U of Colorado Boulder, had done studies that show that sleeping outside offers a range of health benefits. He explains that decreasing our exposure to electrical light in the evenings and increasing our exposure to sunlight during the day resets our circadian clock in a way that is beneficial for our overall functioning. Wright’s work shows that the technological environment we live in causes fluctuations in the hormone melatonin, which we all know affects how easily and how well we sleep.
Considering that a recent study indicated that the mammalian brain (that’s us) eats itself when it is sleep deprived, and studies that show that around 70% of Americans are sleep-deprived, getting a good night’s rest is much more important than not being groggy the next morning.
In fact, I might make a grand leap here and say that being well-rested might be central to projects of social justice and political Justice in our society. Furthermore, researchers at the University of Michigan have observed that time outside eases PTSD and there are a range of other health benefits that have been linked to sleeping outside, from a faster metabolism and an improved immune system.
Stefanie to Alyson: I think there's there's a renewed attention around camping in the black community with organizations like Outdoor afro and there's something called Melanated Camp out--but in the era of Covid I don't know what's going to happen--but in Atlanta it’s this huge camp out, like a camping Festival really, that's you know specifically catered towards black folks. So hopefully experiences like that will get people engaging more in these activities.
The startup for camping can be kind of expensive but once you kind of get your tent and you get your sleeping bags and you have the gear it's not the kind of thing you have to replace often.
Alyson to Stefanie: This is true you can have it for many years and the actual cost of a camping at least tent camping is very inexpensive for families. And right now at this point it's recommended because if you're doing like, if you're rustic, if there's no one around you, then you know you're safe to be unmasked and jump in that Lake.
Stefanie to Alyson: Exactly.
One place we should go is Sapelo Island. It’s a black island and there are very few aspects of the state around to make you feel menanced. I see it as a really safe place. There’s also cottages you can rent if you don’t want to sleep in a tent. But there are these places. Plus you get to have this great down South experience.
Alyson to Stefanie: It might also feel good to be on Sapelo just because where we are in state parks in this probably may be the same in National Parks you just feel like you're the only one when kind of walking around, hiking or whatever you're doing. It’s not that you feel unsafe you just feel like it's just you.
Stefanie to Alyson: Another aspect of of camping that people may not know about is the state park thing, which has a kind of problematic history right, like the creation of the state parks is--like I mean I'm glad I guess they exist now in the face of like monocrop agriculture but you know so that like not everything is given over to growing like corn and wheat--but the way they were created was really to displace indigenous people from the land and from their ancestral and traditional ways of living.
Stefanie, voiceover: I want to pause here and add a few footnotes to some of the things we’ve been talking about. Up til now, you’ve heard Alyson make reference to what she calls “Rustic” camping versus more mainstream camping. The difference here is between camping at state parks versus camping at big chains like KOA. This is an important distinction, because in my experience, the more rustic the campground or camp site, the less likely one is to encounter problematic situations. For example, the folks who were from Florida that Alyson mentioned, and the drunken campers I mentioned, are not typically up for a 6 mile hike to get to their campsite or even to a campsite where you have to walk your gear to where you’ll be sleeping. I could speculate on why this is the case, but suffice it to say that in my experience the more rustic the camping experience, the fewer folks you see who are likely to these types of campers. In other words, the deeper you get into the woods the safer you will be from the problems which characterize human society.
I’d also like to, at this point, complicate some of the notions I’ve presented here as well as some of the terminology I use. I often use the terms nature, pastoral, wilderness, wild places, etc interchangeably. I would like for my listeners to know that I am deeply aware of the contested ground that exists around these terms. The idea of “wilderness” in a Western context, is a fraught colonial concept which arises out of a false dichotomy between “man” and “nature” which characterized enlightenment thinking. As I argue in my book, The earth was the European’s first other. Nature was the European’s first dead “thing,” to be used, without recourse or consequence, as he saw fit. In an article titled “How the Enlightenment Separated Humanity from Nature,” Alexander Blum explains, “Beginning with early scientific thinkers like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, the study of observable nature was divorced from the study of human beings, and ever since, our relationship to the natural world has been fraught with utopian error.”[i] This “error,” he goes on to argue, is founded in Cartesian dualism.
If human beings were “outside” of nature, separate from it, and if it could only be seen as inanimate in opposition to the animation that characterizes humans, it stood to reason that “man” could do whatever he wanted to nature. Francis Bacon went so far as to define nature as a slave or servant:
This view of nature as a recalcitrant resource that must be beaten into submission and made subordinate to “man” bears nascent relation to the place that the African comes to occupy in the imagination of the Enlightenment European. Hence, European notions about nature set the stage for the violations of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery in the Americas, as well as usher in the European’s complete misreading of Indigenous people’s relationship to land, plants, and being itself. It makes sense, then, that one of the earliest ways Europeans characterized Africans and Native Americans was as primitives, as those as of yet uncoupled from nature. For the Enlightenment European, anyone who lived in harmony with nature, or who did not live as they did, was always already a “thing,” the same kind of “thing” that nature was seen to be. And “things,” in this exploitative cosmology, were meant to be used, mined, and made to work for the (hu)man. A whole world of exploitation rotates on the axis of this insight, as the rupture from nature in European thinking is the primal ground upon which subsequent blood is shed. In other words, philosophical notions about nature provide scaffolding for a range of other areas of human/other interaction and activity, and the “otherizing” of nature enacted by Enlightenment thinkers enables the anti-blackness of Western society.
Many people are inclined to see the rise of transcendentalism as a departure from this enlightenment view of nature, but as I show in my book, transcendentalists maintained the object status of nature, though they defined it as a “a good” object instead of a bad one. In both cases, however, the objectification of nature--whether it is a thing one loves or a thing one seeks to subdue--has similar consequences for the people who Western thinkers also define as objects. This is why, I suggest, some of the most famous environmentalists--like John Muir--were also some of the most virulent racists. Thus, in my work I seek a different genealogy of outdoorsmanship, turning my historical lens to Harriet Tubman and the maroons whose knowledge and comfort with the natural world was indelibly linked to their freedom.
Alyson to Stefanie: Going and listening to the lake, just the sound of the lake, even if you can’t hardly sleep because it's so loud (laughter)-- there's a calming that happens and also to view nature. We saw a beautiful blue bird and a chipmunk was giving it the blues or whatever but for to see it was so beautiful. Every time we go to the dark sky Park-- that means we leave our Campground for 5 minutes--but we learned this time if you just look up there all the stars so we don't even have to try. That was a realization, like oh my goodness, but when we do go we go out we always see maybe a fox or a deer or something on our way back so it's not just being away from the noise but it's also being a part of of a natural environment and the joys that come with that.
Stefanie, voiceover: Alyson’s language of “being a part,” gets to the idea of interbeing, which I argue in my work characterizes black engagement with nature. This notion of interbeing emphasizes the mutual aliveness of ourselves and nature in a way that language scarcely allows. Even in attempting to share this with you, I am forced into naming ourselves and the whole world, referred to here as nature, as two things when in fact there are no two things--there is only the one thing--being itself and all the various fruits of this big, amazing tree of life.
Stefanie to Alyson: Which is that where the fruit of this ancient tree. We came out of this Earth and so we're not really separate from it even if we want to travel into space, we have to take--we have to recreate--the physical and quantum realities of Earth within a canned vessel that we call a ship and take it out into space. That's how deeply connected and integral to this place we are and so I think going into nature you can feel that and there's a kind of calmness that results, as you said, and a kind of centering and grounding in that.
For millions of years humans lived what is basically camping and people slept outside. When it got cold they left and they followed the sun you know to where it was warm to sleep outside.
Alyson to Stefanie: On Island Park Belle Isle, when it was too hot to sleep inside their homes, Detroiters would go out to the island park and sleep.
Stefanie to Alyson: Oh wow. It's like sleeping outside with the sound of the Crickets and the birds and the natural rhythm of the day...like you learn so much about your yourself as a human right because once the sun goes down and then you know at 6 am or 5:30 or whatever time the birds wake up it’s like “tweet tweet” (Laughter) and it’s time to get up. And so your body gets into this really wonderful kind of rhythm as well, so yeah it's if you know it's like--we became who we are sleeping outside and as humans it’s like we can remember who we are probably by sleeping outside.
Stefanie, voiceover: What would we discover if we surrendered fully the experience of this quantum entanglement with nature? What vistas and valleys wait to be found, within ourselves, and in our experience, when we step away from curated reality and into the irreducible infinite that is nature? Perhaps, like Malidoma Some, we will find that the perception of the gap between the world and ourselves, that Richard Wright describes in his poem and which I mentioned in the first episode, can be closed through an embrace of an intimacy with nature. Some writes in his book “Of Water and Spirit,” about his journey back home through the forest, “I was uncertain about whether I was going the right way, yet I didn’t have any better ideas. In front of me I noticed a tree loaded with fruits that looked like oranges. The sight of a fruit tree alleviated my panic somewhat, however, reminded me that I was, after all, in the bush where natural food was plentiful..Almost one tree out of ten carried some fruits...I began to feel like it was perfectly natural to be out there in the middle of nowhere trying to go somewhere. Is this the first sweet taste of freedom? I thought back to the seminary, now lost in the jungle far behind me.”
I paraphrased a bit there but what's important about this quote is the line “Is this the first sweet taste of freedom?” The image of those orange like fruits on the tree, which are plentiful in the forest all around, begin to imply something about freedom quite distinct from what he had experienced in the seminary. I want to hold these images together in our mind of sleeping outside, of freedom, of the maroon, of Harriet Tubman, of Some, of a sojourn out of the places of bondage and into the place of freedom because freedom itself is natural and it is our birthright, all of us.
Stefanie: Before I offer my BTN campbook review for this episode, I want to let my listeners know about a website called blackandcamping.com, which serves the same purpose as the Black to Nature campbook. There, you’ll find a list of black ownend campsites, as well as reviews on camping gear and tips for camping--with information on everything from how to make a fire to how to make sure the water you drink is safe for consumption. So if you’re reading to hit the trail and pitch a tent, be sure to check them out.
I’d like to add that these campgrounds are not just for black folks, but for folks of any identification who are interested in diversity and good vibes.
So for this episode’s Black to nature Campbook review, I’m going to review one of the parks Alyson and I mentioned: Mt. Tremblant State Park in Quebec, Canada. This is a huge state park just a few hours north of the US border at Niagara Falls. When we camped there, we camped by a lake and it was strikingly beautiful and peaceful. There were some outhouses at our rather remote campsite (it took 45 minutes from our campsite to get to the main office on that side of the park), but no showers. Folks camping here should be prepared to bring all their food and all their water, as there are no facilities nearby. There are bears in the park, so control of trash and food is important so as not to attract them to camp. Our whole week camping there we never saw or heard a bear.
Because of the bears, a park employee or ranger made the rounds nightly to collect trash and make sure that all the campers were okay. All the rangers we met were friendly and welcoming. We experienced absolutely nothing problematic from any of the other campers, many of whom were international travelers. There is also the little town of Mt. Tremblant which is a great place to visit on your way into the park or on your way out. It’s a famous skiing town and looks like a picturesque Alpine village. Vibes were cool in the town too.
Overall, I’m going to give the Mt. Tremblant State Park a 5 out of 5 Black to Nature Campbook rating for having been a safe, beautiful, and fun place to camp.
Stefanie to Alyson: The thing about camping and nature, I mean my experience anyway, is that in nature I just feel like people who go out to Camp or go out to backpack are way less likely to bother you because if you're out camping people can't make assumptions about like what you're doing there or whatever. They know why you're there you're there which is for this really beautiful, innocent reason which is that you want to be in nature.
Alyson to Stefanie: And you have to focus on your survival most of the time. You’re like how am I going to get my food and did that bug bite me? Is there a bear?
Stefanie to Alyson: Yeah if there is a bear in camp we’re all going to have to band together.
Alyson: (Laughing) Yes.
Finally, my friend Alyson Jones’ family own a bookstore in Detroit called the Source Booksellers. It’s one of our country’s black owned bookstores and is a fabulous place to pick up books. If you’re ever i the Detroit area, please stop in and tell Alyson, or her mom Janet, that the folks at the Black to Nature Podcast sent you. Alyson sent me a book recently called “the Camping Trip” by Jennifer K Mann. This book, whose illustrations feature black children, is a great primer for kids about camping. If you’re thinking of taking the family camping for the first time, this book is a great way to introduce younger kids to what camping is all about.
I want to thank you all for listening to this podcast and I hope you’ll tune in next time when I talk to my guest Michelle Pichon about Forgotten Louisiana. If you want to get your Black to Nature information fix between now and then, follow me on Instagram at Black_2_nature or check out the facebook page for the podcast. It’s called Black and Country. Likewise, stay tuned to our social media accounts for a pre-order link for my book, Black to nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi in spring 2021.
Thank you for listening to the Black to Nature podcast. All the music used in this episode is from the Youtube, license free Audio library. I’d like to thank my guest, Alyson Jones, for generously sharing this time with me. I hope you’ll tune in next time and maybe I’ll see one of you out on the trail somewhere. Until then, keep on blooming.