Presentation short abstract

Black diasporic communities in the Low Countries use food, gardening and land care to resist extractive systems and cultivate relational, just ecological futures rooted in everyday practice.

Presentation long abstract

This paper offers a grounded account of Black diasporic ecological practices in Belgium and the Netherlands, tracing how communities with roots in the Global South cultivate land-based autonomy and resist the ongoing coloniality embedded in European food and environmental systems. Building on narrative ethnography and participatory deep mapping with Black-led initiatives such as Back 2 Soil Basics (B2SB) and the farm of Mahécor, the only Black organic farmer in Flanders, the research highlights how food practices, seed exchanges, permaculture, and collective gardening function as everyday acts of refusal against racialised enclosures, greenwashed institutional agendas, and extractive understandings of land.

Centering ancestral memory and community knowledge, the contribution illuminates how Black diasporic ecological practices—shaped by histories of displacement, care, and intergenerational world-making—assert alternative relationships to land, food, and biodiversity that exceed market-based and technocratic models of sustainability. These practices enact forms of food and seed sovereignty grounded in relational ethics, reciprocal care, and more-than-human kinship, offering visions of ecological justice that speak back to the exclusions of mainstream European environmental discourse.

This project employs embodied and creative approaches, including storytelling, walking, collaborative mapping, and visual documentation, to co-produce knowledge with community members and to trace how ecological futures are already being practiced at the margins. By foregrounding Black diasporic ecologies as sites of resistance and resurgence, this work demonstrates how rooted stories can unsettle dominant political ecologies and open space for more just, situated, and culturally grounded environmental futures.