A land ethic is a very personal thing. Land stewardship is about a person’s relationship to the land. It’s about what you believe on the inside.

“Once we collectively feel this connection, this relationship, we can then begin to understand the responsibility we have—the responsibility that I feel, and that my ancestors felt.”

Land use regulations have contributed to the construction of White supremacist racial categories and the persistent conjunction of race and property in the United States. Drawing on archival analysis of documents regarding early 20th-century municipal segregation ordinances and legal analysis of court decisions regarding property and land use law, this study makes three primary contributions to the literature. First, it homes in on the origins of a persistent thread of a racialized collective right to exclude at the neighborhood scale, exercised by White residents through some of the United States’ earliest land use regulations. Second, it draws on foundational works in critical race theory to illumin- ate how land use regulations helped construct race and property, examining how courts’ efforts to reconcile property rights in land with property rights in Whiteness changed judicial conceptions of the viability of property regulations, specifically zoning and land use laws. It builds on this analysis to connect the thread of racialized exclusion in the Supreme Court’s most recent takings decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021). Third, it draws from Black geographies to suggest takeaways for planners in supporting Black spaces that can simultaneously support Black efforts to name the collective political reality and highlight the contingency of racial constructs in ways that can eradicate the substantive conditions of Black subordination.

Dirt Gems is a plant oracle deck and guidebook designed to invite you into a more personal and subtle relationship with the plant world. It is a practice of listening and observation. Creating relationships with the nonhuman world requires that we slow down, decenter ourselves, and learn from the intelligence of the silken spider web, the humming saltmarsh, carnivorous bog plants, and desert superblooms.