Urban Forest Researcher Georgia Silvera Seamans on The Risks and Rewards of Being Black in Nature

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Georgia Silvera Seamans Essay on Medium: “The Risks and Rewards of Being Black in Nature”

Georgia Silvera Seamans is the co-founding director of Washington Square Park Eco Projects in Manhattan’s storied park. She is an urban forester, independent researcher, and writer. Georgia’s research has been published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening and Journal of Arboriculture, and she blogs about urban nature at localecologist.org. Georgia holds degrees from Wesleyan University, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and UC Berkeley. Here’s a brief excerpt from her essay on Medium, “On the Risk and Rewards of Being Black in Nature.”

I first learned about the concept of “nearby nature” in graduate school. The term was coined by Rachel Kaplan and Stephan Kaplan in their 1989 book, The Experience of Nature. The Kaplans define this form of nature as a space that contains “one or more plants…that is proximal [and] it can be indoors or out-of-doors.” With this wide-open definition, there are arguably many subtypes of nearby nature. I’ve thought about nearby nature or neighborhood nature or next door nature especially in the context of cities because of my work in urban forestry and urban ecology.

Conducting my life almost entirely from my apartment in New York City beginning in mid-March of this year because of the pandemic brought home the importance of nature I could easily access, from my window, on a walk around my block, and when things felt less dire, in my local park. The pandemic and how much I craved nature were the catalysts for writing an essay about the benefits of nearby nature. But then the trauma of two stark incidences of racial violence in the outdoors made me pause my work. I didn’t feel that I could unconditionally tout the benefits of nearby nature, of spending time outdoors, when nature has been the setting for anti-black hate crimes. Read the full essay on Medium here.