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When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers.
Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more than 100 volunteers leading 60,000 participants on everything from strolls in the forest to bird walks to climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
“It was not a part of our national narrative to just even think about Black people and their connection to the outdoors, and so I set about trying to change the narrative of who we imagine gets outside,” Mapp told the Vermont Conversation.
The problem does not lie with nature.
“The outdoors are welcoming. The trees don’t know what color you are. The flowers are gonna bloom no matter how much money is in your account. The birds are gonna sing no matter who you voted for. So the outdoors is not at fault. It’s just people and policies,” she said.
Mapp referenced the Jim Crow era when public swimming pools and recreation areas had “whites only” signs. One consequence: Black children did not learn to swim and die from drowning at up to 10 times the rate of white children.
“Alongside that exclusion, alongside that blatant racist reality, was a perseverance among Black people to find their places of purpose in nature,” Mapp said. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched an initiative to teach 100,000 Black children and their caregivers to swim.
Mapp’s efforts have brought her national attention. She was invited by the White House to participate in America’s Great Outdoors conference and took part in the launch of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. She has taken Oprah Winfrey hiking and canoed with the interior secretary. Mapp was named a National Geographic Fellow, Heinz Awards Honoree and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Communication Award.
Rue Mapp has a new book, “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.” It is a collection of essays and photos of Black people intended to “inspire Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world.”
When confronting a challenge or just in daily life, Mapp wants Black people “to recognize the power of nature as both a healer and a connector.”
“Nature never closes,” she said.