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Sewing Environmental Justice into African-American Sweetgrass Basket-Making in the South Carolina Lowcountry

This paper contributes to the evolving definition of environmental justice by applying insights from the interdisciplinary social science literature in political ecology. While early scholarly environmental justice examinations focused on distributive outcomes of risk, more recent studies have expanded the field to include the analysis of the environmental decision-making and environmental dispute processes. Building on insights in political ecology, including recent research from the Third World that argues for the importance of considering the distribution of environmental benefits and access by marginalized groups, we examine the ways that rural development and urban expansion have affected the tradition of sweetgrass basket-making in the greater Mt. Pleasant area of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The case of Mt. Pleasant basket makers demonstrates that in-migration and associated land-use change are also associated with historical (and divergent) understandings of private property rights, resource access, and the special case of African-American heirs’ property. To overcome these challenges, more meaningful participation in land-use decision making processes by affected communities is needed.