Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author, cultural geographer, and a self-described accidental environmentalist whose work explores the intersection of identity, privilege, and our natural surroundings.

She's the author of Black Faces White Spaces: Re-Imagining the Relationship of African-Americans to the Great Outdoors. And lately she's been workshopping a performance piece titled The N Word Nature Revisited in which she interrogates our collective relationship with the land, an interrogation that includes a spirited conversation with the ghost of John Muir.

Carolyn teaches undergraduates at Middlebury as an artist in Residence and environmental Affairs, and last summer served on the faculty of the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Conference.

In the second part of this 2 part interview, Carolyn & President of Middlebury Laurie Patton continue their conversation on the intersections of creativity and race in our natural landscapes, the need to look beyond environmental justice, her most notable “Midd Moment,” and new ways of thinking about ancestry. 

MiddMoment is a production of Middlebury College and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

On Carolyn's role as an educator

09:02: I wanted to build my knowledge base, my own confidence, and my ability to talk about a wide variety of things. I love learning in the broadest sense. So whether I was living in a village in Nepal for a year and a half or back and getting my master's in Utah, it didn't matter. I was looking to add it all as an opportunity to build something because I wanted the opportunity to have a public platform to do this work. As an educator, I just wanted to have my own independence and freedom to think more broadly and expansively and be my whole self within that process.

Understanding your intention and choices

15:42: You're always going to be faced with choices. Sometimes they're limited, sometimes they're not. But the responsibility is yours to make the choice that's going to be in service to the intention. So you can be authentic in relationships the way that you want and ultimately upright.

Environmental justice and everything else

04:33: The question of justice is also about relationships. Our ability to lean into that tension and show up to it both externally and internally it's about who and how we are. And to think about it as a geographer, it's about human-environment relationships; it's about people and place. We don't exist separately.

Show Links:

• Carolyn Finney
• Carolyn Finney - Middlebury Profile
• Carolyn Finney Instagram
• Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury
• Black Faces, White Spaces Book
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.