The Ethics of Restoration

We have been privileged, in the last several weeks, to witness wildlife and riparian restoration projects that include bison, Aplomado falcons, Bolson tortoises. and prairie dogs; we have seen streambeds saved from extreme erosion. We have also discussed more radical plans to reintroduce species, like the cheetah, that were made extinct in North America just after the last ice age, through the “restoration” of proxy species from other continents, with the view to recreate, as much as possible, the environment that predated human settlement.

These investigations led to debates about what restoration means; how to choose a point in history as the goal of restoration;  if it is just to extirpate “alien”  or “invasive” species; and what principles should inform the answers to these questions.

Though many of us concluded that a true or complete restoration is not possible–that successful efforts include our desires for the future in a mosaic with the available past–it is clear that this work of repair is crucial to the preservation of biodiversity and functional wildland corridors across international borders. That immigrants use such corridors to avoid official border checkpoints makes restoration in the borderlands a more political issue than it might seem at first.

Even a glance at the history of the term “alien” shows that the same kind of pejorative language is used for unwanted peoples as well as unwanted species. Immigrants who have been invited into the borderlands can quickly become “vermin” or “weeds” once their original purpose has been served. Many of us decided that we did not want to continue to refer to species as “alien” in light of this history of political violence against “alien” ethnic groups. At the level of ecology, however, I think it is necessary to assess the effects of an introduced species on its host ecosystem when judging the effects of our own actions on the larger world. We considered the effects of tamarisk on desert riparian ecosystems, and I concluded that the tamarisk, which dries up the soil around it through its high water demand, should, if possible, be controlled in the name of a functioning river environment. This application of a Leopoldian principle–the good of the biotic community as the center of “good” itself–suggests that introduced species should not be allowed to destroy ecosystems, but need not be exterminated. The false choice of inaction versus purification suggests that environmentalists should be careful not to import the language of eugenics into theories of restoration.

Immigrants are not alien invaders bent on destroying our home; humans are all one species. That’s my thought here at the 4th of July.

Happy 4th from Bisbee, AZ, “The Copper Borderlands”

We’ve spent the last several days exploring Bisbee, AZ, one of the great centers of copper mining, and home to the Copper Queen mine. (Pictures to follow.) I must admit that I have always thought of strip mining as one of the iconic environmental evils: it destroys mountains, leaves new mountains of tailings, pollutes rivers and riparian communities, belches smelter smoke into the sky, and sometimes buries whole towns. I’m not sure my impression of mining has changed because of Bisbee, but my understanding of what happens to mining communities has changed. It’s been decades since the smelters ran around here, though the tailings may soon be reprocessed to extract every bit of metal from the soil. In the meantime, Bisbee has changed from mining town to hippie kingdom to tourist destination. I find it surreal to witness boutiques and antique shops only miles away from a baseball field where, not a hundred years ago, striking miners were deported at gunpoint in cattle cars. It’s even more interesting to see the museums, bookstores, and businesses incorporate that history into displays and merchandise. Bisbee’s proximity to Mexico, and its history as a working town that attracted immigrants from Europe and Asia, and investment from Wall Street, makes it a temple to labor with a big fat cosmopolitan streak.

Attention, New Yorkers: there are already New Yorkers here!

The Jackelope

Our inability to corner the fierce jackalope may be the greatest failing of our summer seminar.

The Bat Cave

This is a close-up view of the bats flying out of a lava-tube cave on the Armendaris Ranch in Arizona. This is the second-largest flying-of-the-bats in the United States. If you turn the volume up, you can hear me saying “Wow. Wow. This is so cool.” And it was.

done

ReelNative

In conjunction with its American Indian history series “We Shall Remain,” PBS has mounted a group of “ReelNative” videos made by contemporary Indians using cell phone video technology. It is to be checked out.

Our Lady of the Borderlands

Our Lady of Guadalupe, tile mural, Church of San Xavier del Bac, just south of Tucson. Tohono O’odham Catholic community.

On a lighter note

Wolf in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Sometimes it’s hard being furry in the desert.

How’s that for diasporic culture!

I visited the Arizona State Museum pottery wing today, hoping I could see the kind of squash-blossom pattern on Pueblo pottery that Leslie Marmon Silko writes about in “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” No luck so far.

Then I wandered into the gift shop and found a goodly array of local pottery, mostly from the Hopi nation. After the shop dude chewed my ear off about Hopi pottery, I asked him if he had ever seen the squash-blossom pattern on pottery from Acoma or Laguna. He ran into the back room to fetch his boss, who pointed me to the Dine (Navajo) squash-blossom necklace on display behind me. It looked something like this:

This is not the pattern Silko is talking about. It is, however, interesting in its own right. The boss described his theory of what this pattern really is: an Indian adaptation of an amulet that hung on the forehead of conquistador-horses to ward off the evil eye. The flowers are not squash blossoms, but pomegranate blossoms, indicating the Arabic influence on Iberia. And the central pendant is the charm itself.

Now, in a strict scholarly sense, I can’t vet this account of the necklace. However, the pendant really does resemble a Mediterranean-style anti-Evil Eye charm, and the color of the lapis lazuli echoes, in local materials, the blues of the traditional amulet.

If this theory is true, it would mean that the “squash-blossom” necklace made in Arizona is the result of a Dine-Spanish-Arabic-Italian/Turkish/Greek odyssey from the borderlands of Eurasia to the borderlands of Mexamerica.

That’s a lot of borderlands, is all I’m sayin’.

3rd View/Second Sights

Linda Connor, Coptic Monastery, Egypt, 1989

Today we talked about photographic methods of relating to the borderlands, and the border shared by scientific and artistic approaches to photography.

On the scientific side, there is the excellent multimedia site “Third View/Second Sights,” which allows access to photographs of the same sites across the West as seen in the early 1900s, the 1970s, and the present day. This comparative visual method is a powerful way of representing change over time in both cultural and natural terms.

On the artistic side, there is photographer Linda Connor’s “Odyssey” project, which represents spiritual landscapes through a vocabulary of illumination and thick darkness. The blog “On the Seawall” displays outstanding examples from the collection.

I recommend both approaches heartily as alternatives to a text-only environmental scholarship.

Nature and History at the Nation’s Edge

This is my first post from the Field Institute for Environmental and Borderlands History, sponsored by the NEH as one of its summer institutes for university and college teachers. It’s being held at the University of Arizona, Tucson–the picture above is a view of the roof of the student union. Looks like a starship waiting to take off to these geeky eyes. Three cheers for nerd adventure!

The institute is quite the thing, bringing together teachers from fields as disparate as geography, anthropology, and literary studies–not to mention our kind overlords hosts, the historians of UAZ, Tucson. My own goals for this month-long project are fairly modest–to learn Desert Ecology 101, to understand the basics of Southwest history, and to bring back a photographic archive for use in teaching my students about environmental history and politics, especially the history and politics of the local “water wars.” (My family in Phoenix claims that the Colorado River belongs to them, but there’s the rub.) However, there are clearly many grand plans afoot among my distinguished colleagues, so we’ll see what sort of mischief arises as we head farther into the summer heat and deeper into Special Collections at the library.

Today, as an ice-breaker–if such a thing is possible in Tucson–we sat in small groups and discussed what we meant by the terms “environment” and “borderlands.” My own group wondered exactly what kind of borders create borderlands–the term as used by historians tends to refer to national or regional borderlands, but we are also interested in cultural, ethnic, and geographical borders within cities and neighborhoods. “The wrong side of the tracks” seems to us a kind of borderland, too. What we noticed about our use of “environment” is that it carries a strongly scientific and political valence at the same time, and that it tends to slide into “environmentalist” and “environmentalism”: the term for our immediate surroundings now implies a kind of person that guards or protects. I think this might be more true for my discipline, ecocriticism, than it is for environmental history or physical geography, but I’m not sure, and I intend to find out.

In any case, it became clear to me from the introductory lectures today that the notion of a transfrontier, an area that is better defined by geography and shared cultural and economic activity, rather than international borders, applies perfectly to Tucson and the Sonoran region to its west and south, especially when the history of the Tohono O’odham nation, which straddles the US/Mexico border, is taken into account. I will have more to say about this when we’ve actually gone into the field.

On a more archival note, we were allowed to see local natural history texts from mid-19th century Anglo-American explorers, and I was struck by their rigorously scientific tone. Just as in Victorian British natural history texts, animals are presented in written descriptions accompanied by illustrations, but unlike the more popular Victorian texts–I’m thinking of the Animate Creation series in particular–there is no attempt to make the animals perform allegorical functions. Foxes are foxes, rather than symbols of craftiness. As our art historian pointed out, however, it is interesting that only the birds are presented in color, as if the artists feel they must compete with Audubon, whose famous bird book was already circulating.

Personally, I feel lucky just to have found the bookstore, but tomorrow will bring our first trip into the field, and an experiment in cooking Saguaro cactus fruit the old-fashioned way, so I’m sure the feeling will fade. Until then, have a look at this xeriscaped garden, and then imagine acres of cactus stretching out to distant mountains…