Did you know that Black Americans own less land now than they did during Jim Crow? That’s the reality Brea Baker makes clear in the newest episode of A People’s Climate.
Baker is a sixth-generation Black land owner in the South and the author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership. She’s spent her life tracing the history of land theft in the United States and its direct ties to extraction.
"What was first done to the land then was done to us as people and we're all suffering from it,” Baker said.
“We’re all breathing bad air. We’re all vulnerable to bad water. We are all experiencing more frequent and harsher natural disasters. And that’s because the people who have owned the land for the last few centuries have made really, really bad decisions.”
In this episode, host Shilpi Chhotray and Baker discuss how predatory land practices continue to harm our planet and communities: from Indigenous land theft, to plantations that later became sites of petrochemical pollution, to the forced industrialization of Black-owned farms and systematic neglect these farmers now face from the Department of Agriculture.
That’s why Baker says reparations can be one way of fighting this extraction. They aren’t just about cash payments. They’re about returning land to its original stewards, reviving their value systems, and investing in communities with generational knowledge about ecosystems — and building a healthier environment for all.
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