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A CONVERSATION on ART and ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
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With Amahia Mallea Ph.D, Department of History, Drake University
December 17, 2009
This conversation was in conjunction with the exhibit To Know the Land at Drake University's Anderson Gallery.
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Scott:
Hi Amahia,
It is a great honor to have this conversation with you in this forum. I am eager to see what we discover. I think I know where to start.
Allow me to provide a little background. When this art exhibit was scheduled, I drove to Des Moines for my first meeting with the former gallery director Heather Skeens. She expressed interest in the experiential narratives that are part of my work and their elements of ecology, archeology and storytelling. She volunteered that she knew a Professor of Environmental History named Amahia Mallea that could help provide a meaningful conversation about the themes in the exhibit. I had recently read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this emerging field of environmental history and urged Heather to please contact you.
I think Heather's intuition was brilliant and the two of us have had a chance to get to know each other and become familiar with each other's work. I was glad that we were able to take an excursion to Effigy Mounds National Monument.
At our second meeting, you suggested that you thought that the title of the exhibit should be "To Know the Land." Can you describe your thinking at the time?
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Amahia:
When Heather first introduced me to your upcoming exhibit, I looked through the photographs of your work and saw the bison skulls mounted on scythes. Immediately, I connected to your art. It spoke to the way I understood the land through environmental history, but your piece visualized history. Our first conversations centered on these different ways of knowing and I felt we had the same questions and were striving for answers in different ways.
There are multiple ways to "know" land. We can know the land with our experiences, like travel, recreation, climbing a tree, taking a hike or paddling a canoe. We know land through our senses: touching rough tree bark, smelling earthworms after it rains, seeing a hawk ride the thermals, hearing wind in the tree tops, and tasting ocean spray. As the historian Richard White provocatively argues about the classed nature of environmentalism, we can know the land through work, like farming, logging or fishing. The body becomes the avenue through which we know; our labor informs us.
As a cyclist, I know the land better than if I had driven across it. The world at 12 miles per hour is easier to notice, to comprehend and to participate in. My bike is like an open-topped convertible in which I experience the world around me in different ways. I inhale bugs, I smell the road kill, and I provide the energy to propel myself. If the hill is steep I know the hill is steep; I am not detached from the land because my muscles must interact with the hill. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle." I don't know when or where Hemingway wrote this, or which stretches of land he came to know on his bicycle, but it is widely quoted among "wheelers."
You and I both do environmental history but we have different outcomes: you produce tangible art and I produce books and lectures. You use personal experience and historical studies to know the land. While my sources are historical documents, your sources are materials from the land-like skulls and wood. We both interpret. We both tell stories. I'd like to talk about narrative as well.
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Scott:
I like your metaphor of cycling on a number of levels. I like the experiential nature of all our senses being engaged. I also enjoy the image of inhaling bugs. Your description of pushing up a steep hill reminds me of one of our early conversations. You talked about labor as knowledge. Some forms of labor are so specialized and they can migrate in and out of our communities and become part of our story. I remember in Chico, the First Lutheran Church commissioned a custom Pipe Organ based on a seventeenth century German design. A renowned Japanese craftsman named Munetaka Yokota came to town and lived in the community while he fabricated the organ on site.
This makes me think about Craftsmanship as knowledge. Mr. Yokota was part of a long, esoteric heritage. Similarly, when I am working on my wood sculpture, I am working with hand tools. I am the energy source. When I carve a piece of Oak or Rosewood, I am experiencing many of the same sensations that a Haida or Yoruba carver experienced generations ago. This sense of deep history has been especially pronounced the times I have carved Mastodon Ivory. That has the most distinct fragrance.
Yes, I am eager to talk about narrative. I think it is the connective tissue of this conversation and what our work shares in common. There are specific sources for the drift towards narrative in my work. When many of my peers went on to graduate school, I went into the U.S. Forest Service to fight forest fires. Artists and fire fighters were the two communities that I drifted in between. Of the two, the firefighters told the best stories. And at times my experiences in the forest service felt like I was living inside a story. This, by the way was the time that I began to develop a more holistic, systematic sense of wilderness, land use and place.
My emerging ideas about narrative and environment were also greatly activated by literature. I had an art history mentor named Jim McManus that emphasized the importance of reading Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning literature. In chapter one of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck makes the landscape of the Dust Bowl a character in the narrative. The human drama is measured in an environmental scale. He describes the parched soil with great poetry and gives it a nearly anthropomorphic quality. It is astonishing how timeless this story remains because not only is it an account of an environmental collapse, it is an odyssey of an epic human migration.
At some point I was conscious that I was looking to literature and storytelling for inspiration in the way that many of my peers were looking to galleries and museums. I remain greatly influenced by the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and her ideas about the role of storytelling and the health of the community.
And of course, I love history. I have been able to read some of your research on the 1903 flood of the Missouri River and its affect on the Kansas City region. It is a compelling narrative on the convergence of environmental history, cultural sustainability and community health. I am curious about the emphasis on health. Can we explore this?
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Amahia:
My definition of environment includes health-both human and ecological. Using your mention of the Dust Bowl region as an example, the health of the land resulted in social and economic illness that plays out on people's bodies. This broader definition reflects the younger generation of environmental historians, a field that dates to the 1970s. While the earliest environmental historians, influenced by the growth of the environmental movement, tended to focus on the "out there somewhere" wilderness, the second and third generations of environmental historians are more flexible and broad with our definitions of environment. First, the literature tends not to make a dramatic distinction between people and nature. Second, influential histories like William Cronon's edited work Uncommon Ground impressed the importance of looking beyond the physical trees to ideas about trees. Third, explorations of social issues, cities, labor, disease and other subjects have expanded the field; environmental history is absolutely not limited to studying environmentalism or environmentalists.
Our bodies connect us to the world; we know through our bodies. We earlier discussed labor or the senses as a way of knowing, and health is similar. I am thinking of the firefighters you mentioned who-at risk of burns, asphyxiation or death-show how nature plays out on the body. An understanding of forests, fuel loads and the nature of fire is necessary in order to preserve the firefighter's body.
To combine ways of knowing with our discussion of narrative, I think of Aldo Leopold's essay in A Sand County Almanac about cutting down a bur oak. Though born in Iowa in 1887, Leopold is most associated with the desert Southwest and Wisconsin. In the story "Good Oak," Leopold uses a tree to narrate history. As the crew labors to cut it down, they saw through the decades. The tree's rings record the seasons, fires, warfare, landowners and climate; the tree becomes the keeper of history and the storyteller of both human and natural forces.
In my own work, I have used the Missouri River as a metaphor for understanding complex environmental issues. By examining public health issues, I illuminate the ways the average person is related to a much larger ecological system. Through the act of drinking water or flushing a toilet, the body is related to the river, but is also related to bodies upstream and bodies downstream. Conceptualizing the river running through the city and through bodies shows how the individual is connected to the entire river system.
A book that influenced my thinking was Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream. She is a scientist struggling with breast cancer and attempting to understand to combine her textbook knowledge with her personal knowledge of how agricultural chemicals influence bodies. Another book that combines health and environment is Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams; she struggles to understand cancer through the metaphor of a flood in Utah. The health of our bodies and nature are inseparable.
Compare these different ways of knowing: reading scientific articles about oak trees; or, laboring against the grain to cut down an oak tree, smelling the sawdust, and getting slivers from handling it, then turning a rough block of oak into a carving that inspires others to think about art as a mediator between the human and non-human world. These two experiences are vastly different and, certainly, there is nothing wrong with either of them. To me, the concern is that many of us (and here I refer to an American majority) no longer understand the world in direct ways. The labor that sustains us is happening somewhere else and it is done by someone else. And the biggest laborers of all are ancient fossil fuels, the burning of which causes health risks.
To connect health, labor and energy, I come back to Leopold. In his "Good Oak" piece, he discusses the "danger" of assuming heat comes from a furnace. He writes: "If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride the radiator."
Decades after its publication, Leopold continued to speak to us. Scott, would you talk a little bit more about literature? I'm interested in hearing more about the books and writers that have influenced you the most.
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Scott:
As an old woodcarver, I love Leopold's Good Oak piece. When I am carving, I am aware that the piece of wood contains the essence of everything that passed under the tree's shade. I still marvel that there are Bristlecone Pines that are 4000+ years old. Have you ever seen them?
I agree that health is a defining element of the environment. Over time I have come to also include culture in my definition of environment. Though I had been getting signals for years, it really required my relocation to Iowa for me to get it. In California, with its many national parks and wilderness areas, I was able to convince myself that there was a fire wall between humans and wilderness. Of course, I was fooling myself. I was regularly stumbling upon a trail marker, a chainsaw cut, a choker cable or a shell casing.
Since I moved to Iowa in 2001, I continue to struggle with the lack of public land and wilderness. Yet, I began to shift my definition of public land from wilderness to the Commons. I had read about the concept of the commons in Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild. Snyder characterized a common as a public landscape of open space that represented symbiotic uses and shared interest. This is definitely what I experience when I kayak the Mississippi River.
Practice of the Wild also compelled me to consider the notion of Language as Natural History. This opened a number of horizons. I could then see shelter/architecture as natural history or agriculture as natural history. I could see these cultural elements through a socio-ecological prism.
This way of thinking created a fresh vantage point. If I could examine cultural elements as natural history, I could also measure our culture as an ecosystem. For me, the idea emerged after I saw Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. There was a passage in the movie where he described the planet as having an inhale/exhale respiratory cycle. In fact the founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai refers to the vast forest of the Amazon and Congo Basins as the Great Lungs of the planet. I started to think that our arts culture had a similar respiratory cycle. It was not very difficult to imagine.
The inhale and the exhale are two halves of a whole. Inhaling is tonic and regenerative. If I was searching for metaphors in art, I think of the humanitarian architecture of Samuel Mockbee or the work of the Thai artist Montiem Boonma and his elaborate installations constructed with traditional herbal medicines. However, just like a person, our culture cannot hold its breath in forever.
Culturally the exhale is toxic and transgressive. The term that seems to be in vogue with curators now is subversive. This is important. It does not simply mean seeing what an artist can get away with before being censored or arrested. Exhaling is purgative. In art it deals with the legitimate terrain of ennui, outrage or dissent. It is expressed in Goya's Disasters of War. A more troubling example is Tony Shafrazi's premeditated defacement of Picasso's Guernica.
Then there is the point where the boundary gets blurred. I am fascinated by the precise point where one thing becomes the other. The inhale becomes the exhale. Here is another example. You attended high school in Astoria, Oregon where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean. I sometimes try to visualize the exact, split second moment when there is equilibrium between fresh and salt water.
The Japanese word Omomuki comes closest to defining this phenomenon. It describes the precise moment when the perfect cherry blossom turns towards decay. These transformative moments or tipping points are extremely fleeting and fragile. If I were to attempt to apply this metaphor to a cultural artifact, I recall a few years ago when I attended the exceptional Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Walker Art Center. I can not think of a more perfect artistic expression of Omomuki than Frida.
I think the ice is getting pretty thin here. Permit me to close for now by getting back to your last question. One author that was deeply influential was the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. I discovered Soyinka when I was in the Forest Service. The fire crew had a day off in town and the front page of San Francisco Chronicle announced that Soyinka had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. My pockets were fat from fire overtime so I went straight to the bookstore and bought his Collected Plays.
The play Dance of the Forest resonated with the experiences I was having on forest fires. In fact, there is a forest fire in the play. The nucleus of the plot centers on the long cultural memory of the ancestral landscape across generations. This was the germination of my theory of Kinesthetic Memory. It seems audacious but I simply made this up. But I could not find a word or term that described what I was sensing. This was a residual, atmospheric quality that hung in the air of places that had experienced a profound event. You can really feel it palpably in old battlefields like Wounded Knee. It is almost like an emotional scar. Or maybe it is more like a tear in the skin that lets us slip past the surface. Soyinka made it possible for me to become aware of this.
So much for thin ice.
Amahia, I know that you were able to attend a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities conference this past summer. Did you hear anything there that resonates with these ideas? How would a historian grapple with this phenomenon of Kinesthetic Memory?
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Amahia:
Kinesthetic memory is a powerful concept. It connects culture and physical landscapes over time. It blurs the lines between current residents and those of the past. It reminds us that we cannot escape our history. There are some things that don't change, as much as we might to think that we are new and different. It should give us great comfort that we are connected in this way. Improvement is not definitively defined as change to something new and better; continuity might be a kind of progress.
It gives me comfort that the vistas I'm attracted to today are the same places that captivated people of the past. I felt this when we visited Effigy Mounds. If I were going to build monumental art in places that spoke to me and my culture, I'd choose the same spots on the river bluffs that the Woodland peoples of the upper Mississippi River valley selected two thousand years prior. Standing amidst their monumental art, where bluffs meet river, I understood why. On the surface, cell phone culture is unlike mound builder culture and yet both share and revere the same landscape.
Yes, I had a rewarding experience at a NEH field institute in the Southwestern borderlands. "Nature and Culture at the Nation's Edge" was based out of the University of Arizona in Tucson but we traveled to Spanish missions in Arizona, Ted Turner's ranch in New Mexico and a copper mine in Sonora, Mexico. Throughout the institute we had a variety of experts speak with us. One speaker was Stephen Pyne, the "fire historian." Pyne has written a history of fire for every continent-including Antarctica, where its absence is defining. I mention him because I know that you are doing a burn in preparation for this exhibit and because you have fire experiences in the West. Like you, Pyne has been a fire "fighter." However, his study of fire reveals that humans are fire lovers; Pyne sees the ability to control fire as a defining element in human history.
Pyne gave his lecture to our institute while gathered in the Chiricahua mountain range overlooking the 1994 Rattlesnake burn area in the Coronado National Forest. Looking out from our mountainside perch, we could see everywhere around us evidence of destruction and rebirth, part of the cycle of fire.
My family visited Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988, the day before the great Yellowstone fire began engulfing thousands upon thousands of acres. The build up of fuel on the forest floor due to fire suppression worsened the conflagration. Influenced by the science of ecology and an emergent understanding that fire was necessary for ecosystems, the park service initially allowed the lightening strike fire to burn naturally. Upon a recent return to the park, I witnessed a regenerating landscape; a young forest emerged from the nourishing ashes, providing a public laboratory to teach about fire and history. Allowing the Yellowstone fire to burn represented a shift of fire policy in public land management since the 1960s but, overall, American fire remains constrained, whether it be on the plains, eastern forests or the arid west. Our resistance to fire has had unintended consequences, including less healthy forests and heightened fire dangers-a tale beautifully told by historian Nancy Langston in Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares.
Fire, which is central to the evolution of life on Earth, is a great way to understand human and environmental history. Pyne thinks about world fire history as natural and anthropogenic, or "firestick" history. By gathering around fire for warmth, food, protection and storytelling, we engage continuity in human history. Humans have a culture of fire and those flames connect us to our past, and to the land around us. Whether it is a campfire, the Burning Man festival, fighting a forest fire, or using a combustion engine, we are experiencing a kind of kinesthetic memory. I would argue that the challenge is recognizing the latter-automobiles and other machines, for example-as part of that same history. Today, we have a deficit of natural fire, like lightening. Anthropogenic industrial fire-the use of fossil energy and combustion engines, for example-is more prevalent, especially in the U.S. The combustion engine is a way to control fire, as opposed to being a new development that separates us from our human past.
As close as we are to fire, as much as it makes us who we are, we don't fully control it. If we understood and controlled it, then we would not be struggling with global climate change. This is humbling. Fire history stands as a metaphor for the human relationship with the world. We are part of it, but we are not lords; we may never come to completely know the powers of fire or the land.
The plains and prairies evolved as fire-maintained landscapes and they have a cultural and ecological memory. Humans on the plains have used fire for clearing, agriculture and hunting and, over thousands of years, both natural and anthropogenic fire throve and became as ubiquitous as it was necessary. Historical records, whether scientific or human, bear witness to the presence of fire. Like fire, bison, prairie dogs, grasses and people have played a role in the development of the prairie. In limited fashion, conservationists, farmers, ranchers and ecologists, have used fire as a tool for prairie restoration projects.
To come back to narrative, knowing the history of the plains tells us who we are and how we connect to landscapes present and past. One author I am reminded of that seems to understand the idea of kinesthetic memory on the plains is Ian Frazier. In his book Great Plains he describes places like the Texas house where Bonnie and Clyde had a run-in with law enforcement officials. Upon revisiting the location, Frazier found a cheap stick of bright lipstick, the kind a teenager might drop while "parking" on a Friday night. The place continued to lure young people; the place had a memory. Frazier also feels this same recurrent sense of the past on the landscape when he discusses Crazy Horse or explains coal strip mining as wiping away history by removing, as if by industrial archeology, the layers of land and history-replacing ruins with ruin.
Lastly, I want to say something about the city and I'd like to hear your thoughts. I started my journey as a young environmental activist and budding historian with a bias against cities. I thought cities were the antithesis of nature, which reflected larger American culture's urban discomfort. But cities are environments, too. They are constructed of "natural" materials and are human concoctions or re-creations; no city can exist without the non-city-there are economic and environmental relationships between city and non-city that blur these categories. Furthermore, cities are not immune from ecological cycles and forces.
The book that helped change my mind about cities was William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, a history of Chicago and its hinterland. One cannot explain the history of Chicago without taking into account the wheat fields of Illinois, the forests of Wisconsin, the corn and pigs of Iowa, and the railroads that linked the Atlantic and Pacific. As Cronon's title suggests, the city was made up of the surrounding nature, making the city into what he calls "second nature."
In order to understand our current environmental and cultural issues, we must come to terms with the city. The majority of Americans currently live in suburbs which are sprawling manifestations of cities. Rather than see the city as a distinctly human and not antithesis to environment, we must come to terms with what kind of environment cities are and how our urban environment connects us to everything else. Instructive in this are the accessible writing of Jennifer Price. A point in her recent articles on Los Angeles is that we consume without knowing the connections. We don't know the land, the labor, or the consequences. If we don't embrace the city, grapple with understanding it, and stop pining for a lost nature that is "out there somewhere," we won't get very far. The rent between city and nature that Americans feel is cultural; like fire, we aren't really removed from it.
To get substantive about how my understanding of environmental history plays out in an urban environment, I fear that we are raising a generation that is ignorant of its connection to the world. Increasingly, in the developed world, we do not grow the food that sustains us, nor do we cut down the trees or strip mine the coal that heats our homes. We don't know what it means to wield a firestick and understand both the benefits and the destructive power we hold. It is dangerous to be ignorant of interdependency.
Some interesting research is being done that shows human development is harmed by lack of access to the big wide world. Exposure to nature is important to knowledge, creativity and brain development. I often wonder if ADHD isn't short for "needs to play outside." Somewhere I read that a child was asked why he didn't like to play outdoors and he expressed his bias for the indoors by the fact that there were no electrical outlets outside. In addition to the work of environmental psychologists, scientists are investigating how childhood brains develop differently in an electronic world. As phenomenologist David Abrams suggests in The Spell of the Sensuous, when we look at a tree, the tree look back; it is a sentient world and by engaging it we can better know it.
These are big questions and, while I don't propose to answer any of them, I appreciate considering and discussing them. I like that your work provides a manner in which to reflect on humans, the land and history.
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Scott:
I remember that Yellowstone Fire that you visited with your family. They said it was one million acres. My last season was 1987 so I followed it in the news. Things have changed a lot. Wild land fire suppression is one of the places you really see climate change play out. Fire season used to be from June to October. Now it is year-round.
But you are right there is no dispute that fire is a critical element to a healthy forest ecosystem. In addition, we knew that every fire we put out would be worse the next time. We can know this intellectually but the socio-economic pressures are enormous. I have actually heard today's wild land firefighters joke sardonically that they are risking their lives only to save vacation homes instead of forestry resources. This may be too broad a brush stroke, but it has become a serious problem as the urban/wild land interface becomes blurred. We also need to rethink who pays the cost of fire suppression when government resources are used to protect private property that is adjacent to fire dependent habitat.
Yet we have made some progress when possible. In 1985 my fire crew was dispatched to Lassen Volcanic National Park for a "Let Burn" at Badger Flat. Our orders were to keep the fire on the north side of a dry creek bed. Everyday was the same. It was mellow until around two in the afternoon when the winds would sweep in. We would then chase spot fires in a frenzied chaos until the sun went down.
I have a funny story about the Badger Flat Fire. The crew learned that there were two attractive female archeologists that were surveying the fire. Every guy on the crew was aware whenever the archeologists were around. My superintendent was a kind of a trickster Coyote figure. He was out scouting the fire and saw what he thought were the archeologists skinny-dipping in Cluster Lake. He decided he would crawl on his hands and knees to sneak up for a closer look. Imagine his surprise when he peered over a rock and saw six-foot-three Randy Crimmel stand up out of the water.
Episodes like this were part of the culture and a pressure valve for the crew. You told these stories back at base camp because laughter was the best medicine. It fits in with Leslie Silko's notion of storytelling and the health of a community. It was a counterpoint for the times when we were earning our hazard pay. When I came back to camp with pink polka-dots on my hardhat, everyone knew I was close enough to the action to get bombed by retardant from the air attack. It could be pretty intense.
I remember the Wheeler Fire in Ojai. We were on a skinny spine of a ridgeline not far from the California Condor habitat. It was 106 degrees and the Santa Ana Winds were blowing across our fire line. Over the radio we were informed that we were on schedule to back-burn with heli-torch. It was the only time I ever heard my superintendent say "I don't think it is a good idea." The radio said "you better get ready because the helicopters are coming."
Needless to say, I became pretty comfortable around fire. So it surprised no one when in 1987, I assembled two eight foot tall sculptures and set them on fire. Ever since then I had intended to do a larger, expanded fire sculpture. When Kathy and I moved to Iowa, we started helping with prescribed prairie burns. My urge to do a fire sculpture was rekindled and I produced a watercolor rendering of a prairie fire proposal. Heather Skeens saw it and made me promise that I would execute the project for the Drake exhibit.
I gathered material and constructed three 12-14 foot tall sculptural elements. On October 12, 2009, Leon Lindley and I spent the day touring the possible prairie units near La Porte City. I selected the Cedar Island Unit because it had a nice view-shed and an advantageous uphill slope. Our first possible burn date was October 24. But we had a weird autumn with heavy rains and then an untimely warming trend. Grasses that were supposed to be dying and drying were starting to grow again. We finally had some killing frosts and we took advantage of a one day window for a dramatic burn on December 2. Two days later it snowed.
Ever since word got out that I was developing this project, I started hearing about other artist that had explored the subject including the renowned Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy. However, I was confident that my experience as a firefighter would equip me to have a unique vantage point. On December 2, you would have found me inside the burn with a video camera being buffeted by a significant fire storm. I knew I would have to make a big statement about the existential nature of fire for my project to be relevant.
I want to shift gears into another topic you addressed.
I too have been thinking for a long time about the ecology of the urban environment. As an adult, I have lived in Seattle and Minneapolis and in both cases I was walking distance to the downtown districts. I loved seeing the Peregrine Falcons soaring among the skyscrapers. I was a teenager in urban Southern California when I first noticed the dynamics of habitat and adaptation. All while growing up, we had Mockingbirds in our back yard. I remember noticing a Scrub Jay one day and I had never seen one before. Shortly after this I was aware that the Mockingbirds had disappeared and the Jays had taken over. I also remember seeing my first Osprey fishing in the very urban and polluted Santa Ana River directly behind Angels Stadium in Anaheim.
I am only aware of a handful of artist that are exploring the urban environment from a natural sciences idiom. Gary Snyder captured this spirit in two poems, Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin and Walking the New York Bedrock. The Australian artist Natalie Jeremijenko has done some daring explorations on this theme. She recently did a piece with cloned Walnut trees and interspersed them in different locations in New York City. She will use them to measure types and amounts of toxins they absorb. A third artist that comes to mind is the painter Karen Kitchel whom I recently exhibited with. Her oils have the most elegant, gestural brushwork. They depict botanically identifiable native plants that have adapted to find a niche in the urban landscape. Artist like Karen and Ms. Jeremijenko help our environmental awareness become cultural awareness. It helps our society begin to reflect on the health of our urban ecosystems.
As you suggest, childhood development is critical. My wife Kathy Scholl is helping the state of Iowa develop an environmental literacy plan. This will coincide with pending federal legislation called No Child Left Inside. I know now how lucky I was. My Dad's greatest gift was taking me to Joshua Tree National Park at a very young age and letting me wander in the formations as far as my courage would carry me. Somehow I always found my way back to camp. It gave me a healthy sense of discovery and place.
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Amahia:
I am interested in how you see the fate of humans in the world and your contribution to our understanding of our role in the world. You have come of age within an environmental movement that tends toward pessimism and misanthropy. Do you see the "American experiment" (or the human one) optimistically and what does your art reveal?
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Scott:
Yes, I came of age during the emergence of the environmental movement. I was a child in Southern California during the horrific oil spill in Santa Barbara. I remember seeing the news when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland and I toured the Trojan Nuclear Reactor in Longview, Washington a month after the accident at Three Mile Island.
I am not pessimistic or misanthropic. But I do not underestimate how difficult these environmental challenges are. There is no moratorium on human nature to put off difficult things. Personally, I tend to ascribe to the maxim of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: "The way that leads forward seems to lead backwards." Let me emphasize that it seems to lead backwards. This does not mean that we will have to go back into the Pleistocene or devolve into a Devonian Sea populated by bacteria and Jellyfish. What I take from Lao Tzu's statement is that the past is full of organic, bioregional possibilities to solve contemporary problems. This is already evident in some progressive architecture and environmental engineering. I believe we will ultimately do these things because the planet will constrict and channel our options. Yet, it will be a new paradigm. It will be forward.
In my early 20's, I could see that the intersection of environmentalism and contemporary art was relatively unexplored. I knew that joining the Forest Service would give my art a unique point of departure. These days I try to discover landmarks or echoes of ecological and archeological memory that get under the surface of our cultural ethos. When it works, it happens through craftsmanship, beauty, loss and pathos. At times, it feels like I am aiming for something akin to a yellow light in an intersection. A yellow light alerts us that the situation is changing, that we are entering a changing environment.
For years, it felt like there was little interest for this genre in the art community. I am grateful now to feel like part of a much larger movement of artist concerned about the sustainability of our socio-ecological environment. There are a number of excellent organizations such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Canary Project that are pioneering multi-disciplinary partnerships among the visual arts, literature, technology and the environmental sciences. I recently exhibited at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno that is home for The Center for Art + Environment. The existence of these organizations is testament to the progress we have made merging the ecological with the cultural.
Let me finally say what it means to me to know the land. I was an impressionable young person when I learned Thomas Jefferson would take friends on biological field trips and I saw the iconic picture of Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir. These events seemed important and romantic. Now I spend time with people who know the names of birds, trees and prairie plants. I know that as an artist, I am part of the transcendental tradition and gestalt of the American landscape. Globalism and archeology expanded my vision.
The Author Bill Fox expressed this esthetic nicely. "To Travel with people who know their country is to encounter landscape as an entity, animated, inhabited and continually renewing itself."
I think this is a good place to close. This endeavor, this conversation we have been having has been one of the most interesting things I have done as an artist. There was no blue print and no way of knowing where it would lead. I can not say strongly enough how much I have enjoyed it. Thank you.
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Amahia:
It has been a pleasure. Aldo Leopold wrote, "There are many straws which indicate that this senseless barrier between science and art may one day blow away." This discipline crossing has been very rewarding. It has broadened my academic, intellectual and personal horizons. I have appreciated this opportunity to combine our ways of knowing the land.
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Eclectic list of suggested readings
David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
Ellen L. Arnold, Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko
Jerry Brown, Dialogues
William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
William L. Fox, Aereality: On the World from Above
Ian Frazier, Great Plains
John Herron, ed. Human/Nature: Biology, Culture, and Environmental History
Robert Hughes, American Visions
Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation
Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir
Jennifer Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A." in Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles or Jenny Price, "Remaking American Environmentalism: On the Banks of the L.A. River" in Environmental History (July 2008)
Stephen Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth and Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire
Gary Snyder, Practice of the Wild
Gary Snyder, The Real Work, Interviews and Talks 1964-1979
John Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez
Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
Richard White, Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River and "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?': Work and Nature" in Uncommon Ground
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
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