In the US state of Louisiana, you can follow the flow of oil and gas from wetland wells through thousands of miles of pipeline and arrive at petrochemical plants occupying the footprints of fallow sugarcane plantations. Here, unmarked burial grounds of enslaved people are disarticulated by waste retention ponds and borrow pits. But sometimes they remain as islands of trees in seas of cane.

These trees are descendants of wild magnolias planted by enslaved people, who were denied headstones, to mark the graves of loved ones. Trees hold bodies of land and people together against the tide of destruction and desecration. These Black ecologies root us to memories of a future of ecological integration.