The Law Trials #3: Reclaiming the Earth From the Ashes of Policy
AFROFUTURIST DECLARATION: Reclaiming Earth from the Ashes of Policy
"There are Black people in the future—and we are not waiting for permission to breathe."
The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental safeguards, including limiting greenhouse gas reporting and dissolving science advisory panels, is not just technocratic tinkering—it is eco-apartheid in real time. These decisions erase accountability in the face of an escalating climate crisis that disproportionately affects Black and brown communities. They erase the data trail of harm. They erase our futures.
But Afrofuturism teaches us: they cannot erase what we imagine.
From the techno-rhythms of Detroit’s sonic architects to the speculative worlds of Butler and Delany, Black imagination has always been an act of resistance and recovery. Today, that imagination is a call to arms. It is a survival blueprint. It is a counter-infrastructure.
We Refuse to Vanish from the Data
Afrofuturism is data sovereignty. Black Speculative Practice demonstrates how Black communities can use digital humanities to recover erased histories, re-map spaces of resistance, and visualize alternative futures rooted in justice. The same methods must now be used to gather hyper-local environmental data, build community-owned climate sensors, and create decentralized archives that refuse state erasure.
We Will Archive Our Atmosphere
In the spirit of Monroe N. Work and the Negro Year Book, we will create our own records. Citizen scientists in historically neglected neighborhoods can monitor air, water, and soil—training elders and youth alike to be stewards of truth. Data visualization tools, open-source platforms, and mobile storytelling apps will become our tools of insurgency.
We Will Build Speculative Infrastructure
Through an Afrofuturist lens, infrastructure is not just roads and bridges—it is ritual, memory, and future possibility. We will resurrect environmental memory. Solar-powered mesh networks. Gardens coded with ancestral lore. Augmented reality archives mapping histories of displacement and resistance. These are not dreams. They are plans.
Education is Liberation Tech
Following the ethos of projects like Cities Imagined and Afrofantastic.com, we must reimagine environmental education as a community ritual. Curriculum that blends techno-poetics, Black geographies, and data literacy must become central in schools, churches, and community centers. Children must be taught not just to fear the future—but to author it.
Communal Actions We Can Take Now
Install Community Climate Sensors
Partner with local universities or use open hardware like Arduino to track air quality and temperature in frontline communities.Create Data Commons
Use cloud services or local servers to archive environmental changes, protests, and testimonies. Share data across Black-led coalitions.Educate with Speculative Media
Screen sci-fi films and host community workshops that explore environmental justice through the lens of speculative fiction.Reclaim Land as Archive
Transform vacant lots into community gardens that double as memory spaces, named after those lost to environmental racism.Launch Oral History Projects
Interview elders about changes in local ecosystems and publish them alongside data dashboards.
In the Shadow of Collapse, We Construct Wakandas
Let this moment be our Comet—not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new one, where Black futures are neither regulated away nor buried in toxic policy. The state may try to silence science, but we are the data, we are the witnesses, and we are the future’s architects.
We are Monroe Work encoded in the cloud. We are Sun Ra in solar panels. We are Octavia Butler in soil.
We. Will. Not. Be. Erased.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Reflection
The LLM’s response to the current rollback on EPA policy highlights several elements of Afrofuturism that are worth considering closely. First, the policy erasure at the federal level merely forces those disempowered at the local level to work together to improve their daily lives and reject the hegemonic narrative covering the harm associated with the proposed policy. These groups must measure, record, and report the truth to create a counter-information ecosystem that ensures their truth is understood. Second, the history of environmental racism and the response that the working poor and racial minorities need to create serve as a foundation of the Afrofuturist response, and the textual legacies of the movement are on display. Finally, the solution acknowledges that the challenge is a multigenerational one, suggesting, just as the current reactionary moment is the byproduct of years of grassroots activism by conservative forces to change definitions, undermine public institutions, and create civil doubt, the work of building a hopeful future will take parents and children who are educated in a new system of liberation and freedom.
