Whether denounced or defended, Genesis still sparks interminable debate in Christian discourses of religion and ecology: Is imago dei anthropocentric? Yet when unearthing the notorious “curse of Ham” text (Gen. 9:24-27), the reception histories tend to focus—for good reason—not on the text’s environmental dimensions, but its fraught role in the origins of racialized slavery. In this paper, I contend that this separation of environmental frameworks from critical race studies, of soil questions from slavery questions, winds up impoverishing both. I explore what fresh lines of inquiry might open for the religion and ecology conversation if we read Noah’s enslaving curse as vividly disclosing the perennial human tendency toward political ecology: that is, toward the use of power, domination, and difference in distributing ecological harms and benefits.