George Washington Carver is primarily remembered as the man who found hundreds of uses for peanuts, making it an important Southern crop. That's only one small part of Carver's story.

As he grew up in the years after the Civil War, he became fascinated by gardening, herbal medicines, and collected herbs and flowers. His talents led him to Iowa State Agricultural School, where he earned a master’s in agriculture in 1896. Booker T. Washington invited Carver to help start the agricultural school at the new Tuskegee Institute, where Carver's his primary goal was to make the farmland more productive, in order to liberate Black farmers from a farming system designed to keep them dependent upon white landowners.

Overproduction of cotton had drained the soil of its nutrients. “When my train left the golden wheat fields and the tall green corn of Iowa for the acres of cotton, nothing but cotton, my heart sank a little,” Carver recalled in a 1941 radio broadcast. “Fields and hillsides cracked and scarred with gullies and deep rut. Everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle, and the people.”

Carver 's research showed that rotating nitrogen-rich cover crops of peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes would reinvigorate the land, increasing yields and diversifying farmers’ food supply. This in turn helped Black farmers grow more food while spending less money, getting them closer to food sovereignty.

Carver became famous — in Black and white communities alike — for his work. Time named him a “Black Leonardo” in 1941. And in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the creation of the George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American and the first to honor someone other than a president

Carver understood that when land suffers, those who tend it do, too. Emphasizing that link is a key strategy for contemporary organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and you can draw a line between Carver’s beliefs, the Green New Deal, and the recognition that social and economic concerns are inextricable from ecological ones. They’re all part of what Carver saw as an infinite, interconnected web, as he took some of the first steps in the long march toward racial and environmental justice that continues today.

-- "The Land-healing Work of George Washington Carver," by Brianna Baker, at Grist, Feb. 12, 2021.