In any case, please post your first question and 12-minute response under the comments here. As a reminder, here's the assignment as outlined on the syllabus.
Twelve-Minute
Blog Writes:
For
every section meeting noted on the syllabus you will prepare one interpretative
question and then attempt to answer this question. Your post should demonstrate that you have
read thoughtfully and thoroughly; it should also spark discussion about the
significance of the course texts. To
earn full credit, these assignments must be posted to the course blog http://uaswilderness.blogspot.com/
by 3:00pm on Wednesday. While the blog
should provide an opportunity for dialogue (and you are encouraged to respond
to posts by your peers), you should also try to develop and answer your own
questions about the texts. Please print out and bring your posts to class, collecting them to turn in as a
portfolio at the end of the term along with a self-assessment. You may miss one blog entry without penalty.
I hope the reading proves informative and useful. I look forward to continuing the necessarily brief conversation from tonight next week.
As always, e-mail if you have any questions or concerns: kevin.maier@uas.alaska.edu
What are God's thoughts on wilderness?
ReplyDeleteAfter this reading it appeared to me that the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God is also a little ambivalent about wilderness. The puritan's were operating with instruction from God to subdue the Earth (28). This same logic (excuse) is used later on in American History as expansion continued Westward. Manifest Destiny was a tool for the American people to "possess the whole of the continent which Providence had given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty (89)."
While one party was acting under God to possess and subdue the Earth another party seemed to view wilderness as God. "Landscape painting will be great in proportion as it declares the glory of God, by representation of his works and not of the works of man...scenes of wild grandeur...never touched by the axe,...never deformed by culture.Muir could also be included within this train of thought. This group saw "God's creations" as something to not be manipulated, whereas the other group was working for God to control the creations.
I find this clash interesting. Two groups working for the same guy performing contradictory actions.
Jesse
How do we "make" wilderness? Is it even possible?
ReplyDeleteAll this talk about the westward expansion and of earlier Americans realizing that they had expanded as westward as was possible got me thinking about the control we as humans try to assert onto nature. Lots of land was being sold as very inexpensive prices, and we were running out of wild land that was "untouched by man" (a reoccurring definition of wilderness in our class discussion). Because of this, we started trying to "make" wilderness in the form of national parks and such. We as humans have started dictating which parts of the land should be considered wild, and which should not. We sell land like it is ours to sell only in order to consume it as if we have a never ending supply of it. In 1878, the Free Timber Act gave people the right to cut timber on public lands reserved for mineral use in order to obtain timber for building farmhouses and towns (p. 139), only to turn around and try to save it later on with movements like the forestry movement and the preservation movement. Are we allowed to decide this? Are we allowed to pick and choose what areas of nature are good enough to preserve? It seems the more we use nature the more we idolize it. The book speaks of an emerging urban appreciation for nature (pg. 72).
This idea of wilderness is so man made because we ourselves have decides what areas should be kept wild and what areas can be deforested and inhabited by humans. And yet here we are, so intrigued by the things we have labeled. With this artificial picking and choosing which parts of the land can be considered wilderness, it seems as though we have almost turned the wilderness into a Disneyland type area, trying to make it cohesive with our lifestyles, instead of making our lifestyles cohesive with the ways of nature.
As can be seen in the patterns highlighted in the book, the more advanced our technologies get, the more fascinated we become by nature. " As the market economy moved across the land, the comments of Audubon, Emerson, and Thoreau evinced a growing preoccupation with nature and its relation to humanity" (p. 72). Although we have an increasing reverence for nature, it seems that we want to "make" more advanced areas of nature to compete with our advancing technologies as well. We install things like gondolas on to the sides of mountains to make the mountains more convenient for us. We look out of the gondolas and point at the trees below us and we agree that yes, that is nature. We have effectively made nature by installing humans into nature.
However, the next question I want to ask is is this addition of human inventions and human decisions onto nature necessary? Would we still have such a reverence for nature if we never experienced it, even if it is sometimes “made”?
Leah
Well this is a second attempt to post to the blog, I hope this works or does not show up twice.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it matter who was here first?
In the first chapters the discussion is between American Indians and the land. The latter chapters talk of European settlers and the tribulations they faced. The final chapters talk about the influence of Euro American settlers and their impact on American Indians and wilderness.
From my understanding there were thriving American Indian groups, particularly in the Southwest. Who is to say that expansion of their societies would not effect the land and wild negatively? They mention the mass killing of buffalo, and that 30,000 pounds would feed their establishments for a month. That is 360,000 pounds of buffalo a year. The only control to the Indian population was drought and disease. Renound horticulturalists the Indian groups managed to balance nature and man. What would happen if their advancements were to continue to expand?
When Euro Settlers came they too tried to balance nature and man. The advancements in tools shifted the balance real fast. Nature was no longer a resource but a currency. The value was no longer subsitance, but wealth. The ignorance of early settlers led to where we are now.
Regardless to how the Euro settlers treated existing groups in America the byproduct of the new world settlers is government, federal acts, and The United States of America. I am not saying what original settlers did is right, but I appreciate where we are now. Federal Acts protect the land, and regulations have been set to protect the wild.
One thing I would like to stress is there appears to have been a balance of man and nature when Euro settlers first came across from England. The immediate impact was counter productive to the land. The end product has National Parks, and and other wilderness protection. Regardless of how drastic the change was, who is to say there would not have been a negative impact had the American Indian groups continued to expand?
When Europeans first set foot on the American continents it was a savage and wild land. The unknown was terrifying to them, it was uncharted and the very definition (at the time) of wilderness. While reading Merchant's American Environmental History I couldn't help but imagine how the early settlers must have felt traipsing the great mountains and prairies of the west. I feel that there was an unknown appreciation for the land and all is bounty. The indigenous people had known it for hundreds of years, but here was this young race of people determined to capture the wilderness for their very own.
ReplyDeleteDuring our class discussion we were asked to define what wilderness meant to us. As I delved into the early histories of our nations wildernesses I couldn't help but wonder when human’s perspective of wilderness changed from a mystical respect driven by fear to an eagerness to consume in the pursuit of understanding. The further into our reading I got the more I understood that the conquering attitude had always been present it the minds of European settlers.
How could so much wilderness get destroyed?
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I think that it has to do with the fact that wilderness didn’t have the same significance to people for the last 200 years: When the European (white) people came to live on the American continent, they often came because they were hungry, they couldn’t survive in Europe. To conquere this wild land was therefore important for their survival. The wilderness of this time was (and seen as) dangerous, live-threatening. The one who could „control“ this place was powerful - in a white way of thinking where dominating nature was seen as being the goal compared to the indian way of thinking (p. 15). Dominating and domesticating these wild areas meant survival – by several means: With guns, by making farmland out of wilderness,by cutting the trees down, ... So people had the technology and the knowledge to make this wilderness „their own“.
But I feel like the loss of wilderness got worse once the transportation and market revolution had started. People had more efficient technologies to „use“ the wilderness and make profit out of it - with gold and other minerals, timber, water, etc.
Wilderness and its ras materials came to be a product. Nature got even more destroyed by the industrial revolution and urbanization.
I believe that the human being sometimes needs to be badly hurt to understand the consequences of its own actions. This could be one explanation of why so much time was needed until bigger groups of people wanted the wilderness and its benefits back, respectively began to fight against the bad outcomes of „civilization“ (garbage, air and water pollution, etc.). I also think that we have to be able to see or feel consequences in order to understand certain things happening - when you live in a big city without access to wilderness or nature, you probably care less for it.
But this doesn’t explain why native americans did not destroy the wilderness they had had around them for a long time, was it because of their different perception of wildness and nature or because of the lack of technologies the european immigrants had had?
Was something lost or taken away from the "ideal" wilderness/ wilderness area by removing the native peoples who had been living there?
ReplyDeleteAn overall idea that was expressed both in this book and in the Wilderness Act was that wilderness must lack human presence. People wanted to experience a place that appeared to be untouched by humans. This idea has been around so long that I have a hard time picturing a national park or what I would imagine a wilderness area to be having humans living there. However I cannot help wondering if taking out the native peoples from national parks and other preserved wilderness areas was a large human impact itself. Everyone wanted a place that was truly wild and lacked human influence but if these places had humans living there in the first place I think removing those people would be one of the greatest noticeable signs of human impact on the area.
I also wonder if American had not gone through such a long phase of completely polluting and not taking care of the environment if people would have been so dead set on having wilderness areas that must not have any human presence what so ever. Even though I think that much of the process of removing the native people from their homes, such as with the establishment of Yosemite National Park, was political I think that it may have also been out of a concern that all people would at some point cause as much damage to the environment as Americans did during the industrial revolution.
Will humanity ever have the same appreciation of nature and to an extent Wilderness that they may have once had? I honestly do not believe so. At the most optimistic, it won't be in the same way, rather people will flock to specific locations knowing exactly what they will be expecting to see in part because of the rapid technological advancement of information and photography. At it's worst, I believe that the unexplored Wilderness now belong to only a select few who are willing to forsake the destination (Look up Tongass National Rainforest) and instead venture onward through their journeys. In turn, the majority of people will simply absorb the imitation through photos, videos, and the works of other men and woman. For in an age when a simple search can take you across the world, the awe and majesty of these places have now become another picture to show other people.
ReplyDelete"...Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonics of nature are turned to discords" (142). We learned in chapter seven that because George Perkins Marsh wrote about this in his book Man and Nature, people were moved to form conservation groups such as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and others.
ReplyDeleteWhat sort of impacts could we expect from a beginning or, re-beginning rather of a conservation movement such as the ones Marsh set in motion?
I had a hard time answering this question simply because I’m not sure it really has a solid answer. I would like to be able to say that somewhere somebody will say something as profound as this and start a new environmental movement but I’m doubtful. We’ve already seen this movement happen over many generations. It started in the early 1960’s and kind of worked its way through people from there. And it’s lead us to the here and now. Sure, there are environmental movements and conservation groups left and right but without a great amount of humanity on board, what’s the final outcome?
I suppose I think that people need a “new” awakening to understand the complications and consequences of the lives we choose to lead. We as a society and more importantly, as individuals need to experience something that hits close to home and makes us want to live outside our comfort zones. In other words, we need to stop being so anthropocentric.
The question I kept asking throughout this reading, and know I’ll be addressing throughout the class, is how has the Tlingit relationship to land changed?
ReplyDeleteMerchant doesn’t talk about this directly, but talks about the examples of other tribes in different regions, and mentions that doing a case study on Tlingit hunting could be insightful. She later mentions Richard White in a different section, but his book Roots of Dependency addresses some framework for addressing the question of how indigenous peoples relationship to land changes in relation to western society and market economics. Here too, though, the focus was on three tribes that were all outside the Pacific Northwest, and thus doesn’t address this question directly.
Still, I found his assertion that we know nature through our bodies interesting. Those that worked the land, typically ordinary people, came to know and understand the land one way, while intellectuals understood it in another. In a similar vein, Kirk Dombrowski’s work Against Culture: Politics and Religion in Indian Alaska drew distinctions between subsistence and non-subsistence lifestyles and approaches to land amongst natives, and noted how their politics, religion and culture tended to shift along these lines as well.
I’ve studied Tlingit history quite a lot and have traced some of the movements as it adjusts to contemporary times, but I’ve never focused on the environment and wilderness in particular.
One thing that I want to do throughout this class is see how the ideas of nature that Euro-American and Indigenous people had, have shifted, and then relate these changes to Tlingits. One thing I have studied in some detail has been the developments of education and how these tied into the fight for land rights, eventually culminating in ANCSA and ANILCA.
The continuing question I have though, is what have Tlingits done with those land rights and how have their understanding of lands shifted? What are the cultural and philosophical implications of moving from a subsistence based lifestyle, to one in which timber harvest is potentially a buy-in into the market economy?
On a different note, though indeed related, I really like Merchant’s use of the I-Thou, for instance on page 65 and 74. I and Thou by Martin Buber is a good read and I like applying some his philosophy of language to the understanding of approach to nature. Partially tangential, but I wanted to at least mention it in case others picked up on it as well.
How would the United States and Native Americans be functioning as a nation today without the addition of Guns?
ReplyDeleteBefore Europeans and immigrants came to North America, Native Americans survived and flourished as a people through the boundless resources that walked this land. One of which, Buffalo or Bison, at one time there were "30 million head" (15) just in the Great Plains. Buffalo exceeded the number of Native Americans and immigrants. Native Americans survived as hunter-gatherers and their method of harvesting large number of bison, was first and foremost by herding them over cliffs called "cliff drives." The induction of guns throughout all Native Americans tribes changed the way buffalo and any harvested animal could be harvested to date. The Colt Six-shooter and high powered rifles made hunting too easy when Native Americans switched over after using bow and arrows for many years. Many different kinds of guns can be used to help make harvesting game easier but temptation can bring out the worst in anyone who uses one because of the power they can hold. Not only did guns help change hunting forever, but guns also shaped the way for colonists and early American settlers to take over Indian tribes land to the point of near extinction today. Native Americans were no matched for guns that could fire multiple shots at the rate of one arrow being fired. The accuracy at which guns can be fired with hardly any experience must have been a horrifying sight when Native Americans saw it first hand when their land was taken right from under their own feet.
It is hard to say confidently where and how society would function today in the United States without guns because it is inevitable that they would have been created sooner or later. There is a "price-tag" on everything but whether or not we read the fine print is up to us.
What ecological role would you fill if you where here pre-european interactions?
ReplyDeleteI believe that if I where to live in America before european interaction I would have fit in as a hunter or gatherer with the people of north eastern corner of america. Reading about the people native to land I grew up in seemed to spark memories because some of the things resonated with me. I remember hunting with my grandfather and my father thanking the animal for giving its life to my family. My family is 1/16 blackfoot indian so the heritage doesn't run very strongly in my family but some things seemed similar. Thinking about how nature and people interact in the area it seems clear to me that the white people who settled in the area definitely learned some things from the natives. Though the fur trade is no longer prevalent in most of new England locals still see the effects of the over use of the fur trade when it was prevalent. Their are still deer, moose, beaver, and other animals they mentioned but their numbers are dwindling. It's extremely uncommon to be granted a tag to even be able to hunt moose in Vermont. Last I checked the frequency of the tags being given out is one person in ever five hundred. They have to limit the number of people in the area who can hunt the animal in the area otherwise the animal would eventually disappear like some other animals in the area. For example the north American Bald Eagle has long since been gone from the ecosystems surrounding vermont. other animals like lynx and mountain lion have also vanished from the area.
That was a bit of a rant but back to where I would fall into the more traditional life. I believe I would be comfortable in the areas that relied heavily on hunting and gathering apposed to the areas that rely heavily on farming because even though much has changed in the area their are still roots reaching back to the people who originally hunted the lands I grew to know and love.
By the way this is Blake Fletcher. I had an account from an AP English class I took is it ok if I use this profile?
DeleteAmerican Environmental History
ReplyDeleteAlex Calkins
A fantastic read that really feels more like geography textbook. I found some parts concerning Native subsistence land-use really fascinating. But it was more of a refresher that talked about animism, the connection to the earth that native peoples feel and the resulting environmental impact by these groups. Now I ran into a roadblock in chapter 7, “Conservation and Preservation”. It is so interesting to read about Federal Land Use and how that has evolved over the decades. I remember reading “A Synthetic Fish” last year. It chronicled the history of the Rainbow trout in the United States. It is so hard for me to digest some of these blatantly violent land-use policies that our government has put together. How can you trust an organization that spawned the idea that poisoning watersheds to eliminate native species can be a good thing? I have such a hard time taking government or big-businesses sides when talking about land use issues. There is some sort of automated bias against them that has been ingrained thru just a brief study of American Environmental History. Drawing out the history of the United States thru geographical measures is so important to understanding the culture we embody and the attitudes of different populations throughout our nation during different periods. It ties back into sport fishermen in Colorado. All they wanted were trout in their rivers, and a good experience in nature for them was to be able to catch trout out of a river or stream. It wasn’t about having a piece of unspoiled nature, it was about the illusion of nature. It isn't about the connection to the animals, the spirits and the feel of a place like with the native animists, instead its all about commodity and the ability for the land to provide. I look forward to exploring and discussing some of the results of the different homesteading acts and the periods of expansion and settlement of the American West. Specifically, I would love to look at Alaska and talk about the history of land use disagreements and solutions that have happened in our state.
PHIL’s post: While reading through Carolyn Merchant’s work, I couldn’t help but wonder if wilderness has ever successfully been defended as having intrinsic value. At first, the pilgrims and puritans were very much against wilderness. Wilderness was god-forsaken, essentially, something in which humanity struggled in order to claim redemption of the soul. This, unfortunately, also led to the Native Americans living there being categorized as savage heathens, which set the stage for hundreds of years of subjugation. Later on, as settlers and pioneers pushed farther and farther west,wilderness was still seen as, at best, a waste of resources. What strikes me most is that during this entire history, there were very few, if any, actual wilderness areas. The whole concept seems to be centered around the American mythos of the frontier. This discounts a whole continent settled by multitudinous and diverse cultures, each of whom found ways to utilize the land to their advantage. It’s a very strong-willed ignorance on the part of American culture. It’s only after most native American tribes were extinguished, defeated, or duped out of their territory that wilderness in the form of national parks began to form. The last indians were forced out of these refuges, seemingly because their long history and culture pertaining to an area didn’t fit with the wilderness definition of the time. At this point, wilderness was very clearly stated to be for the enjoyment and use of temporary visitors. Is this better or worse than the earlier idea that wilderness was supposed to be developed and maintained for resource extraction? I don’t know. At the very least, these areas are still around, and still, in most cases, somewhat able to sustain themselves. What is the modern concept of wilderness? Is it still a place that necessarily excludes humans for the purpose of human recreation? Is it more ecocentric? Are these definitions fair? I don’t know. The concept of deep ecology discussed in chapter ten seems to be much better than earlier definitions. I guess only time will tell whether the growth of mankind and our needs are compatible with the environment.
ReplyDelete