By Devon Burke, CCC Corps Member
On March 8th, 2025, three members of the ACLT community attended Nature Forward’s annual Taking Nature Black conference in Silver Spring, MD. Board members Shirley Knight and Darlene Harrod, and CCC Corps member Devon Burke packed up trail maps, Visit Calvert County brochures, and several copies of the ACLT cookbook, A Culinary Trail, and joined the ranks of numerous environmental organizations within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed working to uplift racial and social equity within conservation and outdoor recreation. Despite the week’s national news headlines causing stress and despondency to the average conservation-minded individual, the energy of the conference was vibrant, lively, and grounded in a shared sense of purpose.
Presenters and panelists of Taking Nature Black provided no shortage of compelling stories, case studies, and ideological frameworks for us to take home and apply to ACLT’s work supporting equitable access to our lands for black and brown community members in Calvert County.
Panelists representing Anacostia Park in Washington, DC, presented their experiences with the Restorative Park Engagement (RPE) approach, recording available here. Restorative Park Engagement is defined as an approach to park programming that considers how parks can support healing, mental health, and community wellness, especially for people living in stressful environments. Anacostia Park’s community programs address local needs such as grief support, youth engagement and empowerment, re-entry support for those returning from incarceration, family health resources, and job training. While the social landscape and community needs of Anacostia will differ greatly from that of Prince Frederick, the applicable takeaway is that public green spaces should be considered key players in the continuum of community care, alongside other institutions such as schools, churches, hospitals, and food pantries.
ACLT’s current work includes evaluating our existing community programs to identify possible barriers to participation and opportunities to improve accessibility for resource-stressed and vulnerable families in our community. ACLT has made strides toward equitable access to our trails through developing bilingual and culturally informed outdoor excursions, conducting community outreach to diverse local cultural groups, and supporting oral history interviews for the Parkers Creek Heritage Trail documenting local black history. Most recently, ACLT has partnered with Calvert County-based Latina organization Las FLOREs to develop bilingual programs. (Stay tuned for more information.) This multilayered effort is intended to expand the reach of the organization to diverse communities, engage new visitors in ACLT’s many opportunities for participation in watershed recreation and stewardship, and uplift the historical legacies of families who have lived in the Parkers Creek Watershed for generations. The RPE framework allows us a new way to approach these efforts, starting with these questions:
- How can future programs at ACLT take the needs of resource-stressed households into account?
- Who in Calvert County is underrepresented within our visitorship?
- What barriers might be keeping vulnerable populations from accessing ACLT’s trails? How can these barriers be addressed?
- How can ACLT’s community programs support the existing continuum of care for Calvert County residents?
When considering how to build racial and social equity within ACLT’s community programs and offerings, we can look to the work of Carolyn Finney as a guide. Finney is the author of Black Faces, White Spaces, an exploration into why African Americans are so underrepresented in nature, outdoor recreation, and conservation, despite rich cultural legacies of land protection and stewardship. Finney asserts that the long-lastings impacts of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have engendered cultural understandings of the “great outdoors” that largely exclude and separate black and brown people from nature. Finney’s keynote presentation at Taking Nature Black highlighted the power of stories to address the systemic erasure of black history within outdoor exploration and conservation: “Our stories are the places where we can breathe.”
Finney’s presentation (recording available here) underscores three excellent black conservationists whose stories persisted as guiding lights throughout history, illuminating the path of future generations working to uplift black and brown communities’ participation in environmental protection. Among these was the story of York, the enslaved man who played a crucial role in Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition across North America to reach the Pacific. York provided hunting and navigation skills, negotiated with Native Americans, and discovered new plants and animals for which Lewis and Clark received credit. Finney also told the story of MaVynne “The Beach Lady” Betsch, who made it her life’s work in 1957 to preserve and protect Florida’s oldest African American beach from development pressure. MaVynne was a skilled community organizer, leveraging her financial and social resources to protect the beach and its ecosystem, and recruit others for the cause. Lastly, Finney highlighted the story of John Francis, affectionately nicknamed “the Planetwalker” due to his 22-year journey of exploring the Americas on foot, 17 years of which were spent in silence. During this time, Francis completed several degrees in environmental conservation and land management – all without speaking. Since then, he’s created an environmental nonprofit, Planetwalk, dedicated to building environmental literacy in youth.
As Carolyn Finney would say, “Stories are the places we can breathe.” By uplifting these stories of black excellence in conservation, we can chip away at the legacy left by the exploitation of lands and people, reframing ideas of who “belongs” in nature and who should be included in its protection. At ACLT, we will continue to address barriers for black, brown, Latino, and Indigenous community members to access the land and contribute to its stewardship, as well as amplifying the histories of the Indigenous tribes and black families who cared for this land before it entered the land conservancy. If stories are the places we can breathe, the black and Indigenous histories of Parkers Creek offer us a breath of fresh air, and a profound reminder of who has called this land home for centuries.
Dive into cultural history offerings on the Parker’s Creek Heritage Trail webpage, found on ACLT’s website. Start with these three articles:
- PCHT Oral History-Sisters Delois Harrod Johnson and Phyllis Harrod Dawkins
- William and Suddie Commodore: A Parkers Creek Family
- Lemeul Wallace: Farm, House, and Family
- For a more comprehensive account of local black history, check out the PDF version of The African American Community of Parkers Creek, circa 1800-1960, developed by the Parkers Creek Heritage Trail Research Team in 2022.
