My plans heading towards my thesis takes my concentration/area of interest along with my fascination with the concept of wilderness derived from PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment) and focuses on the situated context of central Idaho, a region almost completely owned by the federal government and much of which is protected under wilderness status. While many campaigned for the Boulder-Whiteclouds to become a National Monument, in August of 2015 President Obama signed into law three new wilderness areas in the region: the White Clouds Wilderness, the Hemingway-Boulders Wilderness and the Jim McClure-Jerry Peak Wilderness. This is the culmination over over forty years of advocacy and controversy (with remaining controversies regarding both mining and mountain biking alike). Whats more is that this area is a mere 90 minutes drive from Sun Valley, Idaho, one of the west’s premier ski resorts with its own corporate, celebrity landscape.
Many of the resources that I’ve found that are relevant to my topic (which has a wide variance of variations from tourism to the ecocriticism of Ernest Hemingway) are historical textbooks and analyses of the development of the touristic west. Each of these has their own specific angle and argument and connects with different questions for the future. As I make my way through ENVS 330, I am discovering more and more the realities of interdisciplinary research and development. A wholly historic focus is not the #LCENVS way. Thus, I have been struggling to conceptualize a broad and rich framing question for my concentration/area of interest that incorporates the historical component without limiting it. Like we did for our research projects in ENVS 330, I attempt to find other examples of my topic in other situated contexts which might provide valuable comparison, contrast, frameworks, or methods. While our reading of The Oyster Wars by Summer Brennan was one insight into the implications of wilderness management elsewhere, I was disappointed by the lack of theoretical engagement demonstrated by Brennan’s fictional, reportage style. However, the narratives at Point Reyes offer a unique historical framework to the questions of wilderness. In addition, readings and experiences from Environmental Theory (ENVS 350) have provided me with two other potential frames to connect the history and controversy of wilderness in central Idaho to broader implications in other contexts.
The Ethics of Historical and Wilderness Preservation in Point Reyes National Seashore
In my philosophical inquiries into designated wilderness controversies in the 20th Century United States, I came across several papers that outlined the specific complications of wilderness designation in Point Reyes. The one that most explicitly drew a connection between human history and wilderness was the cleverly titled “The Trouble with Preservation, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Term for Wilderness Protection: A Case Study at Point Reyes National Seashore” by Laura Watt (Watt 2002). This article asks how “untrammeled” must a wilderness be at the time of designation to be designated as such and explores the intent of a wilderness area with Point Reyes as its case study. As we learned from Brennan’s The Oyster War, Point Reyes was classified as a “potential wilderness,” a temporary designation meant to set the stage for the area to become full-fledged wilderness after necessary modifications to the landscape. These modifications were chiefly the removal of human presence. Specifically, Watt outlines the ranches and dwellings that had their beginnings in the mid-19th Century and existed in what is now the wilderness area well into the era that called the area a park. The long and short of the story is that in order to comply with wilderness designation, wilderness managers attempted to erase these human-shaped scenes by clearing the ranches to create a feeling of wilderness through the visual experience of the landscape. Despite the patchwork nature of the wilderness area and the obvious preexistence of human structures, dwellings, and ranching operations, this visual aesthetic of wilderness was the basis for management, according to Watt.
Watt connects this story with the ethics and complexities of the preservation of historic artifacts, thus her emphasis on the term “preservation” as a complicating factor. I could see my thesis developing out of this pressure on the word “preservation.” What exactly are we preserving, both according to the Wilderness Act and in management practices? This is also an example of historic erasure, something that tends to both have a negative connotation while happening all the time. Watt seems to draw a line between history and ecology in the context of the Phillip Burton Wilderness Area, where history is compromised in favor of an illusion of ecology. Is there a line between history and ecology? Does the preservation one one justify the erasure or destruction of the other? This is obviously a very strong binary and might be able to be expanded to the other measures outlined in the Wilderness Act. Another interesting component of this case study is that the wilderness area is named for Phillip Burton, a California politician with a big personality. This concept of naming wilderness areas for historical figures (particularly after they are dead) is a curious way to mark an ideally non-human landscape with a human presence. I am attracted to this paper because it uses historical narratives to explore (or perhaps create) a contemporary dilemma or question. Is this perhaps viable as a method?
Potential framing question: How should human history (including that of indigenous people) be managed within designated wilderness areas?
Potential framing question: How does the naming of a landscape affect its perception?
Landscapes of Loss in Resource Dependent Rural Communities: “Losing” Land to the Federal Government in Douglas County, Oregon
This weekend, we traveled to Douglas County in Southern Oregon with the Environmental Theory class to gather data and explore with the intention of grounding our theory readings in a praxis project. From our first activity of meeting with the County Commissioners of Douglas County, I found endless applications for theory and numerous connections with my personal area of interest. One soundbite that particularly caught my ear was the proposed Crater Lakes Wilderness Area that many environmentalists are currently campaigning for. While Crater Lake National Park isn’t in Douglas County, the maps of Douglas County all include it since it lies just outside the southeastern boundary and as Oregon’s only national park, it carries a lot of pride.
Douglas County is an example of a resource-dependent community. While it has its origins in an Oregon Trail agriculture destination, after World War II, the boomed economy of Douglas County boomed as the suburbia housing explosion occurred nationwide. Just over 50% of Douglas County is owned by the federal government and is managed by the BLM and the Forest Service. This ownership, which takes on a checkerboard pattern, originates from a land scheme during the construction of the Oregon and California Railroad, which culminated in the federal government redacting land grants and holding them until today. However, loggers were still able to harvest timber and the county made significant profits in timber sales until 1990, when the spotted owl was listed as an endangered species by the efforts of passionate environmentalists. The environmental advocacy was incredibly effective in stunting the timber economy of Douglas County (efficacy of spotted owl rehabilitation remains ambiguous). Since 1990, Douglas County has seen an enormous amount of demographic and economic change. Much of this history is ripe for solution-based environmental studies and is a fascinating situated context (that I am considering as a major aspect of my thesis), but for the comparative purposes of this exploration, the campaign for the Crater Lake Wilderness Area hold my attention.
Wilderness is the highest form of protection a landscape can be afforded by the US government. This means no mining, no cars, no timber, and not even bikes. Some people even use the rhetoric that land is “locked up” in wilderness areas. This is a narrative of loss, much in the same line as the history of Douglas County. Environmentalists cite the need for a Crater Lakes wilderness due to threats by logging and helicopter flight over the park ruining some aspect of the wilderness experience. More information regarding the campaign can be found through Oregon Wild’s proposal and Umpqua Watersheds’ website. From our field trip, its clear that Douglas County hosts a wide variety of actors, from environmentalists, county commissioners, young up-and-coming entrepreneurs, and hippie loggers. In a region very much surrounded and determined by federal management of federal lands, it would be a valuable case study to survey different stakeholders on their position on the costs, benefits, and uses of wilderness near their community. Local communities who cannot profit off of federal lands yet are charged with maintaining roads and conducting search and rescues in remote areas are an important voice in assessing the future of wilderness. This case study is very grounded and has a lot of potential for gathering accessible data and grounding in an accessible place. The framework that this provides is that of a resource-dependent community. This case study less so provides a theoretical frame than a useful context for comparison, specific language, and hints at appropriate levels of scale (county).
Potential framing/focus question: How do members of resource-dependent communities perceive and utilize public lands at various levels of federal protection?
Potential framing question: What is the relationship between members of resource-dependent communities and the surrounding landscapes?
Potential framing question: How do people who have experienced loss (economic and cultural/heritage), explain that loss?
Environmental (In)Justice: Poverty and Gentrification in Rural Communities in Idaho and Montana
In my recent meditations on research and academia, stemming from my environmental theory class and applying to be a research assistant for the summer, I have come to understand environmental justice as a (and probably the most) important answer to the questions “why?” and “so what?” that professors so frequently ask. Yes, science and scholarship should and must be ethical, but moreover, research and academia should be compassionate. Judging from my habitually strong reactions to justice concerns in the texts I read in both my environmental studies classes (such as The Oyster War) and my English classes, I tend to seek fairness and equitable outcomes in the world. Certainly this is idealistic, but without at least a little idealism, how can one imagine a future?
All of this to say that for my eventual thesis and the cumulative research that it will require, I see the broader implications as inherently related to (in)justice in the landscape of the American West. As seen above in Douglas County, there is a lot of injustice (or at least perceived injustice, which must be recognized as such) even in a region that is held up at utopic. In doing research on case studies of environmental (in)justice for my theory class, I came across two articles that highlight different (but of course related) justice concerns. I discuss these in depth in my post Case Studies of Environmental (In)Justice. Briefly, the first article, “Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest” by Lawson et al., compares regions with high percentages of poverty in the American Northwest, choosing to focus on a county in southern Idaho and a county in eastern Montana. Using a mixture of ethnographic interviews and quantitative economic data, Lawson et al. chose to compare places where the impoverished population was predominately white with places with impoverished populations of color. The authors distinguish three categories of place: “dumping grounds,” “playgrounds,” and “unseen grounds.” The second article, J. Dwight Hines’ ethnography “In pursuit of experience: The postindustrial gentrification of the rural American West” (Hines 2010), explores the phenomenon of rural gentrification. This is the process where wealthy migrants from big cities who hold advanced degrees and high power jobs relocate to small western communities (often resource-dependent) rich in outdoor amenities. This is a process that was actually described in the Sun Valley of the 1950s and 1960s, so thus is certainly relevant to the situated context of my tentative thesis.
Because justice is so important to me, these articles gave me a lot of theoretical grounding to explain the justice concerns for which I didn’t previously know the language. In addition, these articles have very different but useful explanations of their methods, from an economic analysis of the situated contexts to a much more qualitative ethnographic process of interviewing and living with residents of these western communities.
Potential framing question: How are landscape narratives passed down through generations?
Potential framing question: How can locals retain power when wealthier migrants colonize a community?
Potential framing question: How, if at all, is the contemporary American wilderness idea shaped by neoliberalism and globalization?
Potential framing question: What is the contemporary American wilderness idea and how has is changed from the creation of the Wilderness Act in 1964?
Potential framing question: Who is wilderness for?
Works Cited
Watt, Laura. “The Trouble with Preservation, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Term for Wilderness Protection: A Case Study at Point Reyes National Seashore.” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 01/2002; 64(1). DOI: 10.1353/pcg.2002.0009