The National Park to Come 9780804793421

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T H E

N A T I O N A L

P A R K

T O

C O M E

T H E T O

N A T I O N A L

P A R K

C O M E

M A R G R E T

G R E B O W I C Z

with photographs by J A C Q U E L I N E

S C H L O S S M A N

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grebowicz, Margret, 1973– author.   The national park to come / Margret Grebowicz ; with photographs by Jacqueline Schlossman.        pages cm   Includes bibliographical references.   ISBN 978-0-8047-8962-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1.  National parks and reserves—Political aspects—United States. 2.  Big Bend National Park (Tex.)—Political aspects. 3.  Death Valley National Park (Calif. and Nev.)—Political aspects.  I. Title.   SB482.A4G73 2015   363.6'809764932—dc23 ISBN 978-0-8047-9342-1 (electronic) Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/13 Adobe Garamond

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RODZICOM

SO IT IS THIS GROWING COMPLEXITY IN MOST D O M A I N S , I N C LU D I N G “ W AYS O F L I F E ” O R E V E R Y DAY L I F E , T H AT I A M S K E T C H I N G A S T H E H O R I Z O N F O R Y O U R C E N T U R Y. A N D A C R U C I A L T A S K I S C I R C U M S C R I B E D B Y T H I S S I T UAT I O N : TO M A K E H U M A N I T Y A D E P T AT A DA P T I N G I T S E L F TO W AYS O F F E E L I N G , U N D E R S TA N D I N G , A N D A C T I N G T H A T, I N T H E I R E X T R E M E C O M P L E X I T Y, EXCEED ITS REQUIREMENTS. — J E A N - F R A N Ç O I S L Y O T A R D , “TICKET FOR A NEW STAGE,” 1985

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments    ix

   Introduction: Inside National Parks   1 1   How 2   The

Wilderness Naturalizes Democracy   18

Scene of Nature and Environmental Justice   30

3   Wilderness

and the Promise of Wellness   47

   Conclusion: This Is Not America   58 Notes   83

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was possible thanks to research permits at both Big Bend and Death Valley National Parks. My thanks to the National Park Service and Border Patrol staff who provided interviews, printed materials, and enthusiasm for the project: Blair Davenport, Dave Larson, David Elkowitz, Ryan Hajek, Bob Smith, Allen Etheridge, Jane Brown, and Joe Sirotnak. Special thanks to both Raymond Skiles and Mark Williams for coordinating meetings, planning outings, and offering rides, and for their patience with my interminable questions. Thanks also to Barbara Durham and Pauline Estevez for granting me an interview, the residents of Boquillas del Carmen for their hospitality, and two exceptionally friendly Terlinguans, Tim Relleva and Paul Wiggins. It is the product of travels and conversations with several of my nearests and dearests. It originated in my brother Maciej’s idea to someday write something like a Foucauldian genealogy of capital-N Nature, and matured in the course of countless happy hours spent with Jacqueline Schlossman discussing the history and aesthetics of landscape. Jacqueline’s contribution goes far beyond the photographs themselves. I could not have asked for a better travel companion, more brilliant sounding board, and more responsible collaborator. Much of this was directly inspired by the fine work ix

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of Dominic Pettman and Johanna Oksala, both of whom are also my good friends. Thanks also to my dad, Janusz Grebowicz, for coordinating logistics, feeding us, and taking care of Jackie when she was badly hurt; Brian Kubarycz for an inspiring correspondence at the first draft stage; Yiftah Elazar for helping me frame the initial question; Jason Ponce for delivering me back to the Utah desert; and William Tatge for years of friendship and support. Big thanks to Emily-Jane Cohen for taking this on and reading multiple drafts, Jeff Wyneken for his skills and care, the entire Stanford University Press production staff, and the four anonymous reviewers whose thorough, unapologetic critiques helped to both tighten and expand the work. Finally, and in some ways most importantly, endless gratitude to the Big Bend Search and Rescue team that carried Jackie out of the desert with a broken leg in the middle of the night on December 23, 2013. That unforgettable story is forever part of this one.

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INTRODUCTION

Inside National Parks

At the easternmost end of Big Bend National Park is Boquillas Canyon, remote and majestic, its limestone walls cradling the lazy Rio Grande. In the winter months, the river is between ten and twenty feet across and no more than a few feet deep. The hiking trail begins on the north bank, at the mouth, where a man erupts into a recognizable bolero each time hikers pass him, his booming voice amplified by the canyon walls. Several stones lie on the ground a few feet away, identifying him as “Singing Mexican Victor.” The Rio Grande is also the U.S.–Mexico border and Victor Valdez’s presence on the north bank is against U.S. law. He is one of the people described by the signage particular to the eastern end of the park, warning visitors that “purchase or possession of items obtained from Mexican Nationals is illegal. Illegally purchased items will be seized and violators may be prosecuted.” One needn’t see his passport to know that Valdez is not there to hike. Other Mexican nationals are there also, crossing the river on horseback or by boat countless times a day to collect “donations” that visitors are asked to leave in exchange for little metal scorpions, friendship bracelets, and walking sticks made on the Mexican side. The riders approach visitors, offering the privilege of photographing the horses and photographing oneself on the back of a horse. 1

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Since these people pose no real threat, the relationship between them and the U.S. Border Patrol amounts to a daily, almost ritualized combination of avoidance, verbal reprimands, temporary compliance, predictable noncompliance, tolerance, and friendly exchange. This industry, if something on this small a scale may be called that, has been going on since early 2002, when the U.S. government ordered the closure of all unstaffed border crossings into Mexico and Canada. One of the crossings affected was that at Boquillas, which had traditionally served three purposes. For one, it had allowed park visitors to cross by boat and visit the rural village of Boquillas del Carmen in order to enjoy a taco and a beer and purchase some of these same souvenirs legally. Boquillas is the only crossing into Mexico from the grounds of a national park. The only other crossing within the forty-eight states is in Glacier, which borders Canada, where the border itself, high in the snowcovered Rockies, is significantly more difficult to cross illegally than this one. Since its closure, Boquillas residents have resorted to crossing the river many times a day in hopes of making a few dollars in the form of visitor donations. Valdez’s former job was bringing park visitors across the river, in the same boat that later served to get him to the north bank so that he could sing for money. Secondly, and more importantly, like the other tiny villages along the border, Boquillas was sustained largely thanks to access to goods and services on the American side. Residents shopped at the campground grocery store at Rio Grande Village, the tourist center built in the late 1960s at a site which had been of human interest for centuries and was chosen by the National Park Service partly for its historical value.1 In the decades following, many Boquillas children attended school in nearby Study Butte–­Terlingua. The closest Mexican town is Múzquiz, 250 km away, so going to town meant crossing the river to the American side. And thirdly, the crossing had been central to environmental restoration work on the Rio Grande and the surrounding desert and mountain ecosystems comprised in the land both north and south of the border. In

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2006, four years after the border closure, protected wilderness areas on the Mexican side entered into Sister Park Partnership with the U.S. parks Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, and White Sands. From 2006 to 2013, collaborative restoration work on the river the countries share had to be conducted by means of “many hours of driving through Presidio-Ojinaga and Del Rio-Ciudad Acuña international crossings to work with counterparts.”2 April 10, 2013, was the day of the long-awaited reopening of Boquillas Crossing Port of Entry, which had been announced and postponed multiple times over the two years prior. In this era of homeland security, the port of entry is “virtually staffed,” with a passport scanner and a camera that transmits the image to a staffed border crossing in El Paso, over 300 miles away. Prior to the closure the population of Boquillas was over twice what it is now. Many residents moved to the United States, where they worked without proper documents for years, and only some returned to their families and homes in Boquillas prior to the reopening. Valdez’s is among the twenty-five or so households left in the village, where literacy is low and passport applications difficult to come by, much less to fill out. Without passports, the Boquillas residents may not enter the United States. Once a twoway street, the crossing has reopened as a one-way street for the first time in the history of this region. The benefits of the reopening have been enormous from the perspective of binational conservation efforts, and collaborative wilderness restoration work is now much easier, in particular on the shared space that is the river. The National Park Service also benefits from advertising the cultural experience of visiting a real, honest-to-goodness Mexican village. The reopening is framed in terms of cultural preservation: since this region has historically always been binational, enjoying free mobility across the river, the reopening gives visitors the real experience that was not available while the border was closed. Not too far removed from the decision in 1930 to allow a handful of Ahwahnechee to remain on the

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grounds of Yosemite Park while others were forcibly removed, the value of the crossing is formulated in terms of visitors enjoying an authentic experience of the area and its cultural history. What the park’s interpretive materials leave out is that the unidirectional movement of traffic is a complete departure from the free movement of the past and is in fact creating conditions in Boquillas that are historically unique. The new crossing serves “American tourists seeking to experience a day trip” almost exclusively, while the Mexican nationals continue their northbound movements illegally.3 Valdez now sings on the Mexican side of the crossing for park visitors arriving by boat, while another man, who also identifies as “Singing Mexican Victor,” occasionally sings in the canyon on the American side, a sign that “Singing Mexican Victor” has become an institution. The flyer distributed in Study Butte–­ Terlingua alerting people to the reopening is clearly aimed at visitors more than residents. “Did you bring your passport? You should go to Boquillas!” it reads, and features a bulleted list of the new crossing rules under the heading, “Things to keep in mind”: a valid passport, a visa acquired on the Mexican side, customs regulations, and the crossing’s hours of operation. Among these points is the directive not to bring humanitarian aid items such as food and clothing to give to the villagers, and then another directive, more than slightly confusing in this context, in which First World ecotourism meets Third World desperation: “Have fun!” Inside Panther Junction Visitor Center there is a panel that reads, “Who is the most dangerous animal in the desert?” It opens to reveal a mirror. What exactly is the sense of “the national” that the parks construct, and what modes of civic life are produced by this process? As they demarcate regions specifically designed to read as politically innocent, America’s national parks create particular social margins, in relation to particular social centers. It is this dynamic that I hope to outline in some detail. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed,

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and at what cost (to whom)? In short, how is the contemporary idea of nation, in continuous tension with migration and indigenousness, reproduced in what counts as nature today?4 These are not empirical questions, but ones of political imagination. HOME

The National Park Service (henceforth NPS) website is decorated with the trademarked motto, “Experience your America.” Paradoxically, it is with the creation of the national park idea and the construction of wilderness as unpeopled space that this particular way of thinking about nature, as “yours,” emerges. The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part documentary by Ken Burns that aired on PBS in 2009, begins by emphasizing the collective “you,” a democratically organized body with equal rights to and equal investment in these spaces. “The national parks embody a radical idea, as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence, born in the United States nearly a century after its creation. It is a truly democratic idea, that the magnificent natural wonders of the land should be available not to a privileged few, but to everyone.”5 This means not only that the parks are open to the public, with low entrance fees, but also that the public is directly involved in decision making. The NPS website has a “Planning, Environment, and Public Comment” link, with an extensive list of all currently active projects in the park system, from raising campground fees and fixing damage to park roads to comprehensive environmental management plans. Along with a relatively detailed project summary, each project page lists contact information for the park superintendent or project leader, links to PDFs of related documents, schedules of meetings about the proposed changes, and a page where users may enter comments directly during a limited open comment period. Accordingly, the Burns National Parks enterprise, which includes the six-episode documentary by Burns and Duncan and a coffee-table book by Duncan, also includes an elaborate PBS website with a “Share Your

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Story” feature, onto which users may upload text, photo, and video content to tell their own national park adventures to others. Throughout the Burns series, the collective sense of “you” remains in tension with the first-person singular sense of “you.” A video clip with a voice-over by Burns’s writer and coproducer, Dayton Duncan, quickly turns the focus to the individual “you,” at the same time adding the element of “owner” of the park: “You, you, are the owner of some of the best seafront property this nation’s got. You own magnificent waterfalls. You own stunning views of mountains and stunning views of gorgeous canyons. They belong to you, they’re yours. And all that’s asked of you is to put it in your will for your children so they can have it too.”6 This intergenerational futurity is already written into the Organic Act of 1916, which establishes the purpose of the parks as being “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”7 However, as philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch writes, the actual purpose of the parks, “even today, is far from clear. . . . The periodic disputes over the national parks only underscore the contradictions implicit in their institution from their inception, contradictions that could not help but leave their mark on the very sites that the new agency had been charged with preserving.”8 Boquillas Crossing is precisely such a site of contradiction. Who is at home in this homeland, this space that is the river, at once wilderness and border? As people flock to national parks ostensibly seeking to leave home and to make contact with the Great Outdoors, they encounter spaces that are rigorously domesticated, landscaped, and tamed, not necessarily by design (although there is that too) but by deliberate discursive construction. The continuity between domesticity and wilderness that is the national park should come as no surprise if cultural theorist Dominic ­Pettman is correct in calling the parks “cartographic states of

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exception.” According to the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, urban reformer, architect of New York’s Central Park, and advocate for the Yosemite wilderness and the park idea in general, these spaces were to be set aside for the contemplation of natural beauty by common citizens, especially the working class. In order for this to happen, however, Pettman writes, “this experience must be without any violent disjunction from the daily movements and rituals of urban or suburban life.”9 It is precisely because it is “yours” that the space of the national park cannot be so inaccessible or unintelligible as to seem threatening, foreign, or otherwise traumatic. While city parks offer this continuity with home by virtue of their visibly unnatural designs, the vast spaces that national parks offer are tamed otherwise—ideologically and through the lens of the postcard industry and landscape photographers. For this reason, photography was central to the legal argument for the creation of the national park system. Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton E. Watkins, and Charles Leander Weed offered support for the Olmsted Plan, which stated that the public had a right to Yosemite because natural scenery invites contemplation, that most universal of human activities which has beneficial effects on the society as a whole. At stake in 1865 was the universal, contemplative subject; thoughtfulness and civilized sentiments were no longer qualities exclusive of the elite.10 The supporting photographs offered “a reality . . . that is essentially ‘scenic.’”11 By the time of the drafting of the Organic Act of 1916, which created the park system, a magazine called National Geographic ran the “profusely illustrated” article “The Land of the Best” by the magazine’s editor, Gilbert H. Grosvenor. The article emphasized the scenery of the parks and the National Geographic Society put an issue in the hands of every Congress member before the act came up for vote.12 Today, the Yosemite website has a separate page dedicated to Ansel Adams, which announces that when the photographer (and by extension, every photographer since Adams) looked at the park, “he saw art.”13

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But the turn to the scenic predates the invention of photography by more than a century. The idea of private ownership of nature comes into existence at the same time as the idea of nature as scene, dating back to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century and the construction of private spaces for viewing nature appropriately. As explorers explored wild areas, they also created spaces where nature could be best appreciated and experienced by designating them with markers, describing them in guidebooks, and delineating them physically in increasingly rigorous mapmaking. The idea of rational land management extended to building equivalent natural spaces at home, often including aviaries and menageries of small, exotic animals, to serve as spaces for socializing. Thus, the idea of the natural park begins with eighteenth-century discourses around gardening, tourism, and rational and deliberate designing of environments for social interaction. National parks, however, mark a departure from the bourgeois idea of nature as a landscaped playground for nobles, by introducing the idea of democratic ownership. Modeled on the slightly different nineteenth-century concept of the city park, which belongs to every city dweller in principle, the national park presents the scene of nature for everyone to enjoy. In his writings, Olmsted specifically distinguishes the New World from the Old, where the aristocracy presumed that the working classes lacked the refinement necessary to appreciate either art or nature. “The free use of the land” by “the whole body of the people forever” is thus a political duty, part of the destiny of the New World and its break from Europe.14 Advances in technology in the 1850s made it possible for photographers to participate in Yosemite expeditions and present the public with a nature-scene, whose aesthetic value was beyond question. The twentieth century saw the democratization not only of nature as scene, but also of photography, so that democratic ownership meant that each visitor’s own, insignificant little camera mediated the experience of park space. Today, the right to con-

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template the scenic means, famously, a handful of cars pulled over on the side of the road in Yellowstone wherever there is a moose, elk, or bison in “shooting” range. We almost never hike without our cameras, hoping for our own “Ansel Adams” moments.15 Signage inside parks often shows what is unmistakably a camera icon, indicating an upcoming photo opportunity, which thereby becomes a photo necessity. At the same time, since this imaginary is one of wilderness, we tend to take our park photos in such a way as to exclude the other cars, and indeed any signs of the other people. We make sure our photos of views, many of which we take at designated viewpoints constructed specifically for that purpose, exclude the very roads which brought us there. People, maintenance buildings, toilets, water fountains, trails, handrails, and anything else that recalls the infrastructure which makes our visit leisurely and, in some places, possible at all, is what we take great pains to exclude from the photographic frame.16 The imaginary that is the national park depends on the maintenance of the democratic ideal in the photographic act, an activity related to both ownership and contemplation, and in the photographs themselves, which convey the paradoxical notion of a nature-for-thepeople, at once “It’s mine” and “ It’s really, truly nature, with no (other) people in it.” The impossible simultaneity of these sentiments is necessary for the Great Outdoors to become both domesticated and democratic, “our” home from which we untiringly send postcards (to whom?) as if to say “wish you were here.” But who, exactly, gets to be here, under what conditions, and with what caption? In Big Bend the relationships between ideas of nation, foreignness, and home are uniquely complicated, dynamic, and on display. Assumptions about belonging, security, and safety, expectations of surveillance and reporting, and even ecological concepts like native and invasive species are all inflected with the tensions particular to keeping undocumented Mexican migrants out. Prior to the reopening, the newsletter given to every visitor upon entry included a section about the border, showing a photograph of

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the very trinkets one was instructed not to purchase for multiple reasons: because the Mexican merchants will be arrested and, perhaps most importantly, because “supporting this illegal activity contributes to the continued damage along the Rio Grande, and jeopardizes the possibility of reopening the crossing in the future.” A separate section titled “Border Safety” instructed visitors to “avoid travel on well-used but unofficial ‘trails,’ “report any suspicious behavior to park staff or Border Patrol,” and not pick up hitch­ hikers.17 Those same safety regulations are in the new newsletter. And yet ironically nothing happens on the surface. The tensions are present in precisely what one does not see. The border patrol checkpoints on both highways leading away from the park are in no way related to Victor Valdez and the Mexicans on horseback selling souvenirs, nor does the presence of this handful of people require increasing the number of border patrol officers in the park to eight, in accord with the general plans to increase border security along the entire length of the border. But something out there, somewhere, that abstract presence implied by the words “drug war,” requires these precautions and this infrastructure. In spite of a smattering of signs warning of thefts from unattended vehicles, visitors are well aware that “Singing Mexican Victor” is not a threat to border security, precisely because border patrol has bigger fish to fry. These bigger fish are not actually in the park itself, which boasts being the safest section of the border.18 The dangerous conflicts are taking place elsewhere, but their spectral presence informs the Big Bend landscape, both discursively and in terms of actual policies, which in turn affect the space in material ways. Boquillas Crossing itself posed no danger for many decades, but the closure and the delay surrounding the reopening introduced a new climate, in which wilderness, apolitical by definition, and the ethics of restoration have become discursively and materially intertwined with the politics of homeland security. “Homeland” here refers to a threatened space that requires surveillance

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and protection, which becomes operative in what it means to maintain the park for future generations. Cooperation between the park service and border patrol, and the expectation that visitors will cooperate with both if it comes to that, shape a specific sense of the “everyone” to whom the natural space is imagined to collectively belong. VISITOR

In Death Valley National Park, the word “homeland” is in even more regular use. Here, the other national presence is the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe that has lived on the grounds of the park for centuries and claimed the right to continue doing so in the Homeland Act of 2000, signed six years after Death Valley National Monument gained national park status. The Timbisha Shoshone, and only they, have the right to live on park grounds, through which non-Timbisha U.S. citizens merely pass as “visitors.” The Furnace Creek Visitor Center houses a new exhibit, fully renovated in 2012, which underscores the distinction between who is at home here and who is merely visiting. A large plaque titled “Passing Through,” which refers to the area as being more suitable for visiting than for settling, hangs puzzlingly next to one of equally impressive size, titled “Homeland,” which describes the area as having been inhabited by the Timbisha Shoshone for thousands of years. Death Valley is the only case in which the U.S. government has returned park land to its indigenous inhabitants. This is significant, since the parks from which Native Americans were displaced in the largest numbers were some of the earliest parks created— Yellowstone (1872), Yosemite (1890), and Glacier (1910)—while Death Valley is one of the nation’s youngest (1994). Much of the opposition to the Homeland Act was on the grounds that it would set a precedent according to which other tribes would demand the return of federally managed land.19 The newly redone welcome

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sign identifies the park as “home of the Timbisha Shoshone,” and the visitor’s guide that one receives upon entry lists the tribe as one of the park’s partners in wilderness restoration. In contrast to Big Bend, where “home” refers to America and not Mexico, in Death Valley “home” refers to Timbisha Shoshone land and not the United States. While the majority of visitors to Big Bend are Americans, due perhaps to its remote location (the closest international airport is a five-hour drive away), Death Valley’s proximity to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon causes it to receive comparatively far more foreigners, especially Europeans. The exhibit at Furnace Creek includes a plaque titled “Identity: We Are Still Here,” which is clearly meant to appeal to the experiences and emotions of non-American visitors, describing the conflict between the Timbisha and the NPS as “familiar to anyone who has immigrated to another country—and to anyone whose country has been invaded and occupied.” It is not accidental that Theodore Catton, author of the Homeland Act’s officially commissioned administrative history, refers to the village at Furnace Creek as “the Tribe’s Sarajevo.”20 The unique situation of tribe members living inside the park on reservation land gives rise to Death Valley’s particularly splintered historicity, which complicates the directive to preserve the land “for our children.” The different time scales on which park land may be imagined complicate the intertemporal ethics at work in the park idea. In Big Bend, for instance, the Panther Junction Visitor Center presents the landscape in terms of its prehistory, including extensive materials about dinosaurs that once lived there and focusing on geological information on an impressively large timescale. In contrast, Furnace Creek Visitor Center presents much of Death Valley’s history on the scale of its human inhabitants, including settlers, miners, and early vacationers, in addition to the prehistorical imaginary. But the Timbisha Shoshone’s presence frustrates the human historical trajectory. In “Seeing Death Valley,” the film that is shown in several park locations, tribal elder

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Pauline Esteves describes her people as having “always” lived there—a sense of “always” which is clearly incommensurable with a white-historical time line.21 And while busloads of tourists flock to the fully accessible Salt Creek exhibit in hopes of seeing the endangered, indigenous Salt Creek Pupfish in its natural habitat, the village, visible from the main road, with its smattering of mobile homes, remains mysterious, uncanny, and at a distance. Unlike the Yosemite Indians, and in some ways unlike the residents of Boquillas since the border reopening, the Timbisha’s role, at once ahistorical and contemporary, is not to enhance the visitor’s experience. Despite a very “Indian”-looking sign of turquoise and burnt orange, the village itself is not what Mark David Spence calls “the display of past-tense Indians.”22 Privately, Esteves objects to the use of the term “tribe,” because she knows it to be politically loaded. She’s not talking about a tribe, she explains, but about the indigenous people who live on the land.23 And it was precisely because the land was removed from under their homes by the act of congress that turned Death Valley into federally managed land that the Timbisha became “non-ward ­Indians,” or Indians without official tribal status. Tribal recognition was necessary to receive government aid to continue living where they have always lived, and at the same time impossible, precisely because of where they lived. In 1983 the Timbisha became recognized as a tribe without a land base, which only made the quest for the land that much more urgent.24 Tribal government moved to Bishop, California, leaving behind two small, deserted administrative buildings and a defunct radio station in the village. The trust land on which the Timbisha are allowed to reside (including building privately owned homes with foundations) houses seventeen households today. Most of the inhabitants are elderly, because the young people have moved out of the park. As is clear in the distinction made by Esteves, however, the whole point was not to move. The community persisted thanks largely to a few individuals’ refusal to move out of their dilapidated homes.

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The Homeland Act, an enormously significant event from the point of view of Native American law, deeply affecting the relationship between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management, and of the government-to-government relationship, was founded on the need of the tribe to continue living inside the park, not in the neighboring trust lands directly outside it. The park newsletter includes a tiny map, presented under the heading “To Preserve a Way of Life,” which shows the large swath of land designated as “Timbisha Shoshone Historical and Cultural Preservation Area” to be most of the park itself. However, the village’s economic depression and dwindling population are caused in part by park-specific constraints on commercial development, as well as on the seasonal nomadism the tribe has traditionally practiced in order to survive the extreme climate changes. The mountainous area called “Wildrose,” the tribe’s camp during the sweltering summers, is no longer available for them as a place to live. As with the rest of the park, however, the Wildrose area is open for hiking and backcountry camping all year round, in keeping with the Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man finds himself as a visitor who does not remain.”25 Far from trumping all else inside the parks, however, the Wilderness Act is in ongoing conflict with other acts of Congress—the Patriot Act in Big Bend, the Homeland Act in Death Valley, the Historic Preservation Act, and the Endangered Species Act—in competition with each other to govern park spaces in the terms specific to them.26 Often the terms of one act are in explicit conflict with those of another, and these tensions are among the main themes of this book. Social inequalities, and the economic inequalities that both generate and result from them, exist inside national parks and not merely incidentally. But the ecological and aesthetic concerns at the heart of the park idea turn these into “cultural experiences” for

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the visitor, rendering them unintelligible in political terms. Much work has been devoted to showing that the depoliticization of wilderness has a history, but I am interested in the ways it remains pervasive today. One major reason these dynamics are difficult to see, much less resist, is the role of affect, or emotion, in the production of civic identities marked by a relationship to wilderness. I would like to begin to outline something we might call the wilderness affect, which includes, I argue, our participation in wilderness-as-spectacle as a form of social relation. I hope to show that any examination of wilderness must today also be an examination of mass society, specifically of the emotions surrounding collectivity. And finally, since environmental responsibility is presented in terms of obligations to future generations, my questions will concern the affective investment in the future in ecological discourse. This, then, is a book about the foreigner and the future as they shape nature-spaces held in reserve for an unprecedentedly futureoriented “us.” The two parks I study here, Big Bend and Death Valley, present these issues in particularly vivid ways. But beyond these case studies, how we imagine the foreigner and the future has already begun to impact the national park to come, shaping the national park system in general as it struggles to adapt to breathtakingly rapid social, economic, and ecological changes.

Signage along road to Boquillas Canyon Visitor Area, Big Bend National Park, 2012

German and Austrian visitors at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Boquillas border crossing station (under construction) with photograph by Ranger Bob Smith, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Timbisha Shoshone Tribe sign, Death Valley National Park, 2013

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My interest in nature reserves and in the constructed boundary between wilderness and the rest of life is not motivated by a particular vision of how we should think about nature. On the contrary, the point is not to substitute one version of what nature “really” is (divided into wild and domestic, for instance) for another (interconnected and continuous, as holistic positions argue). Rather than showing that national park policy is somehow out of touch with what is really out there, I am interested in how the real itself is produced in the course of the struggle over ideas, particularly ideas about nature. Far from being a realm somehow outside of politics, our contemporary fantasies of nature as wild, authentic, and original result from the struggle over the political concepts I am examining here: home, democracy, otherness, belonging, future. My aim is to follow philosopher Johanna Oksala in “revealing the forgotten political institution of reality,”1 and few things today are presented as less instituted—or more real—than what goes under the name of wilderness. The first national parks were sometimes presented as playgrounds and spaces of wonder, in the tradition of the World’s Fair and other carnivals. At other times they appeared as the land in its truest form, figures of simple transparency and universal human 18

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needs. This was one of the binary oppositions governing nineteenth-century American culture after the Civil War, and it structures what geographer and landscape theorist J. B. Jackson calls the “vernacular, urban, contemporary perception of nature” to this day.2 The word “vernacular” is especially important here, because whatever is vernacular is what is most difficult to view from a critical distance. To step out of our most familiar, vernacular perception of nature in order to scrutinize it is no easy thing, especially because this perception of nature organizes our very ideas about the human and the real. F R O M PA R K S TO W I L D E R N E S S

At the same time that the U.S. government created spaces that were supposed to be kept safe from industrial development, the growth of the railroad industry allowed for those same visitors for whom the parks had been laid aside to access them. The process of park development from its earliest days to the Organic Act of 1916 was shaped by the railroad companies, which created the new phenomenon of mass-market tourism by means of an invention: the West as a land of “playgrounds.”3 The Northern Pacific Railroad began its “Wonderland” line in 1885 with an advertisement for “Alice’s Adventures in the New Wonderland, the Yellowstone National Park” and “A Romance: Wonderland,” cashing in on well-worn fantasy tropes.4 In 1915, Rocky Mountain National Park organized an elaborate hoax in order to bring the park to national attention, announcing that a twenty-year-old “co-ed” would spend a week in the park wilderness “as a modern Eve,” unassisted, barefoot, and dressed in leopard skin.5 Today, the bookshelves at Panther Junction display serious naturalists’ guides like Birds of the Trans-Pecos next to the much-better-selling title Death in Big Bend and numerous Wild West narratives. One of Death Valley’s ­backcountry attractions is called “The Racetrack,” where, as the ­newsletter says, “rocks mysteriously slide across the dry lakebed,”

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although upon closer inspection the mysterious force in question is wind, according to rangers. Thus, the park idea and commercial development are not exactly opposites of each other in any straightforward way. In 1901, Freud used the American nature reserves as an example of what happens in the formation of fantasy, a realm split off from reality and governed entirely by the pleasure principle.6 Just as reality needs a fantasy space that is safely demarcated, the naturalists and the developers historically defined themselves in terms of each other, and all projected their particular vocabularies and logics onto the park spaces. It is easy to imagine the park system as always trying to outrun capitalist development in an effort to stay physically and morally uncontaminated, and development, in turn, always encroaching upon it. But the apparent opposites of nature and development function together to create the unified but internally inconsistent park idea. In what follows I appear to reduce the two ideas, national park and wilderness, to each other, or at least to vacillate between them with some vagueness. This is deliberate. Although they are officially, legally two separate entities, and the National Wilderness Preservation System is not geographically identical to the system of national parks, the contemporary idea of wilderness seems to have emerged from the belly of the park idea as its giant, unruly offspring. They intersect both geographically, with the NPS managing over 40 percent of federal wilderness land, and ideologically. The park idea is the creation of the nature reserve for the sake of human recreation and thus human wellness, and if we extend this thinking of the relationship between nature and humans to its logical conclusion, it becomes necessary to remove the humans from it entirely, precisely for the sake of their own wellness. Wilderness is the park idea taken to its logical conclusion, informed explicitly by the latter’s anthrophobia and humanism. Like the park idea, wilderness is a deeply social concept, framed by a host of other discourses about society with which it is in ongoing

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conversation: geography, urban planning, economics, environmental philosophy, landscape photography, psychiatry, and all of the social sciences. From city parks and national recreation areas like Gateway in New York and Golden Gate in San Francisco, to the most remote and inaccessible wilderness of Alaska, the ideal of human wellness is at the heart of the conversations about parks, especially in arguments which rely on claims that are “anti-urban, antitechnological, antipeople, antihistory.”7 In the first episode of the Burns film, several speakers, like Burns’s cowriter, Dayton Duncan, introduce the park idea in these terms. I think that deep in our DNA is this embedded memory of when we were not separated from the rest of the natural world. . . . We were part of it. The Bible talks about the Garden of Eden as that experience that we had at the beginnings of our dimmest memories as a species. So when we enter a [national] park we’re entering a place that has been . . . at least the attempt has been made to keep it like it once was, and we cross that boundary and suddenly we’re no longer masters of the natural world, we’re part of it. And in that sense it’s like we’re going home. It doesn’t matter where we’re from. We’ve come back to a place that is where we came from.

DNA, memory, Eden, species, mastery, origins, holism, home: all of these ideas are conflated in what is supposed to be the simplest thing in the world, simple precisely because it promises to restore us to our unmediated, unalienated selves. This notion dates back to the writings of Transcendentalist philosophers like Henry David Thoreau, for whom a return to nature meant a return to an original, true human state, a reality uncontaminated by the artifices of development. It is not by accident that the American West was described by explorers in terms of recognition of something we had lost long ago, and especially in terms of the Garden of Eden.8 Duncan’s reference to the boundary crossed when one enters a park is not just about the physical boundary, but the metaphysical one: we enter a space in which we are restored to a

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time before the Fall, a time of innocence. Writer Gretchen Ehrlich describes the motivations of John Muir, nineteenth-century explorer and passionate developer of the park idea, in similarly spiritual and universalizing terms: John Muir once said, “By going out into the natural world, I’m really going in.” He defined in that sentence what it is to be a human being. Because I think we’re born lost and we remain lost until we remove the shell of who we think we are, all the preconceptions of who we think we are, to expose ourselves to the great power of the natural world, and to let that power reshape us the way it’s reshaped the rocks of Yosemite Valley.

This ontology is echoed famously in the writings of Edward Abbey, former park ranger and activist for wilderness, most notably in Utah, who bemoans the artifice of the parks. “Arches National Monument, for example, has become a travesty called Arches National Park—a static diorama seen through glass.”9 But the terms in which Abbey talks about wilderness are precisely the same ones in which the Burns documentary describes parks. He writes, “Wilderness. . . . The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb and earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit . . . the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see.”10 Likewise, another staunch critic of parks, philosopher and mountaineer Jack Turner, argues that “if anything is endangered in America, it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact.” Turner writes about a primeval connection “between the wild in nature and the wild in us” and denounces all attempts at land management. The experience must be unmediated—that is the only way that it can be real “contact.” As much as Turner imagines himself to be opposed to the national parks, he in fact repeats the same mystifying gestures as Duncan and Burns do, as when he invites readers to have a real experience of nature by going into a

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forest alone at night. “Sit quietly for a while. Something very old will return,” he announces mysteriously, drawing on the very same trope of genetic memory of some original, true experience deep within, covered over by culture and needing excavation.11 Throughout his work, Turner calls for solitary experiences of nature, away from the restrictions placed upon park visitors and absolutely away from other people. If wilderness is the unruly offspring of national parks, mystical positions from Abbey’s to Turner’s that demand complete solitude are the unruly offspring of wilderness, calling for ever wilder experiences in the name of an original human state, which Turner identifies with our sense of home. “To seriously help homeless humans and animals will require a sense of home that is not commercial. The Eskimo, the Aranda, the Sioux—all belonged to a place. Where is our habitat? Where do I belong?”12 One position from which to begin responding to the wilderness idea is that it is grounded in a conception of the natural world that is simply empirically false. Today’s environmental ethics and animal ethics literature shows that the wild/domestic binary is inconsistent with the paradigm that underpins all of the natural sciences, namely evolution by natural selection. According to evolutionary theory, the differences between species are differences of degree, not kind, which means that the terms “wild” and “domestic” in reference to plants and animals are cultural projections and do not pick out discrete, real entities in the world. Domesticated species are not as different from wild ones as we assume and there is no boundary, physical or metaphysical, between wild and domesticated environments. There are only interpretations of spaces and beings as one or the other, with this “or,” the line between them, taken as a given precisely because the concepts are defined in terms of each other.13 The more critical response, which I have begun to outline, is the claim that wilderness policy creates wild spaces. The home to which Duncan repeatedly refers must first be instituted in order to then take on the effect of transcendent, universal home. In other

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words, the argument that relies on the idea that the wilderness simply is14 forgets or erases the fact that, historically speaking, it first had to be created by federal wilderness policy. This forgetting is itself an anthrophobic wishful thinking that imagines a time “before” the world was such a violent, disordered, alienating mess. It is remarkable that one of Burns’s foregrounded dramatis personae, William Cronon, has penned perhaps the most well-traveled critique of wilderness in precisely these terms. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” he writes, Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.15 

Cronon objects to the anthrophobia inherent in the wilderness idea on the grounds that “it is not a proposition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results.” But this, of course, does not necessarily follow. It could be argued that measures like population control, limiting access to the point of forbidding entry to wild spaces, or even the disappearance of humans altogether will yield quite positive and practical results for ecological health and biodiversity. Cronon describes the position that “if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves” as absurd, but in fact it is entirely logically sound. What makes the fantasy of unpeopled wilderness problematic is not its unsoundness, but the role it plays in the naturalization of democracy. The wilderness idea functions actively to depoliticize not only nature, but politics.

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As historian Donald Worster has shown, wilderness and democracy have the same late-eighteenth-century ideological origins at the intersection of social equality and individual liberty.16 But I wish to make a stronger point: nature not only becomes a useful locus for the democratic ideal; it allows us to imagine that democracy is not a form of modern politics, but some original human state. The idea that this kind of original experience, this opportunity to be “found,” should be available to everyone and not just the elite creates the effect of a people who can become truly, once and for all, themselves, speaking as themselves in this, the final form of social organization, final because it is original. Directly on the heels of Burns’s footage of Ehrlich, the heads of the “founding fathers” carved into Mt. Rushmore become the paradigm of the park idea, in which natural phenomena and democratic ideals are literally one and the same. The faces become the actual “face” of the mountain and the mountain simply has faces in it as if no human intervention had ever taken place. During the footage of the stone heads, the narration continues: “But they are more than a collection of rocks and trees and inspirational scenes from nature. They embody something less tangible, yet equally enduring, an idea, born in the U.S. nearly a century after its creation, as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical.” The parks thus become spaces in which the natural human experience is solitary and atomistic, and in which politics disappears because it simply “is” the transparent truth of what the people—at once collective and absent—want. The mountain is the face of Washington, who in turn is his people, and the forces sculpting the faces of this collective “we” are natural, not political. “Every member or officer of the federal government ought to remind himself, with triumphant pride, that he is on the staff of the Grand Canyon,” writes British playwright and Grand Canyon enthusiast J. B. Priestley, as if the government itself were in the

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service of nature.17 The landscapes become part of what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls the “National Symbolic.” We inhabit the political space of the nation, which is not merely juridical, territorial (jus soli), genetic (jus sanguinis), linguistic, or experiential, but some tangled cluster of these. I call this space the “National Symbolic.” Law dominates the field of citizenship, constructing technical definitions of the citizen’s rights, duties, and obligations. But the National Symbolic also aims to link regulation to desire, harnessing affect to political life through the production of “national fantasy” . . . through the images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness.18

All modern nationalism depends on the linking of political regulation to desire, hope, optimism, and wellness, but it is in the United States that this linkage is accomplished so effectively by the idea-image of wilderness, which makes it difficult to see as nationalism. Abbey’s anarchism (or libertarianism, depending on one’s position on his controversial politics) is grounded precisely in the (firmly American) idea that nature provides the true form of social organization. The complaint that Burns treats both nature and democracy as static, ossified things that belong in a museum never questions their coupling. On the contrary, the criticism that Burns “freezes [nature] into a finished composition, not the open-ended improvisation of a nation pragmatically piecing together its relationship with the world,” for instance, overtly naturalizes the American political process.19 In the July 1979 issue of National Geographic, dedicated to America’s national parks, a photograph of the Statue of Liberty is captioned, “Now a national monument, the statue draws over 1.5 million visitors yearly. Heirs of the immigrants she once welcomed, Americans yearn to breathe free. Today, in growing numbers, they seek freedom in the national parks.”20 Along with the scripture and Anglophone European literary tradition that Muir, a Scottish immigrant, knew so well, democratic ideas lost their historical and cultural specificity and became transcendent when

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superimposed on nature-as-scene and a narrative of origin, truth, and home. Humanity became found, in the Christian sense, in the democratic paradigm, at the moment when politics, understood as the realm of power and rhetorical manipulation, finally fell away and what was left was universality and truth. The new interest in nature facilitated a blindness to social inequality, as geographer Carolyn Finney points out. You have John Muir talking about preservation of the land and the idea of the national parks as these beautiful spaces that are going to be public treasures for everyone, every American. . . . But meanwhile, enslaved people had just gotten freed, were given land, had that land taken away, and then were living under the threat of Jim Crow segregation for all those years afterward. That’s a real cognitive dissonance: There were words on paper saying these protected spaces were meant for everyone, but we know they weren’t really meant for everyone, because everything else that was going on in the country at the time indicated that.21

Indeed, one year after the civil rights March on Washington, the Wilderness Act of 1964 created the National Wilderness Preservation System, which includes national park land and overtly stipulates an ethic of noninterference so that the land may retain its primeval character. The NPS wilderness website states, Wilderness protects open space, watersheds, natural soundscapes, diverse ecosystems and biodiversity. The literature of wilderness experience frequently cites the inspirational and spiritual values of wilderness, including opportunities to reflect on the community of life and the human place on Earth. Wilderness provides a sense of wildness, which can be valuable to people whether or not those individuals actually visit wilderness. Just knowing that wilderness exists can produce a sense of curiosity, inspiration, renewal and hope.22

Abbey states explicitly that in turning away from wilderness, we turn our backs on human decency and justice. “The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. We return

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once more to the nightmare cultures of Hitler, Stalin, King Philip II, Montezuma, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Herod, the Pharaohs.”23 The naturalization of American politics continues to be maintained by today’s vernacular approach to natural spaces as sites of democracy. For instance, the Burns film recounts the March on Washington in terms of national park space. The Lincoln Memorial, before which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, is part of the national park system. The sixth episode shows a detail from a photo: behind King’s face is the face of a park ranger in the recognizable ranger hat. African American historian John Hope Franklin’s voiceover states, Here is Martin Luther King giving his great speech “I Have a Dream” before a vast audience, before Abraham Lincoln, and with a park ranger standing by him. You have this sweep of history, you have these dramatic turns, you have these marvelous coincidences and ramifications that extend from Lincoln to King, from the idea of the national park to the park service officer standing by King.

Burns’s extraordinary rhetorical-semiotic gesture manages to collapse something as distinctly and urgently political as the civil rights idea into the park idea. The demand for desegregation becomes a part of the power of nature to sculpt the “we” as it has sculpted the rocks of Yosemite Valley; in this “aha!” moment the viewer looks past King’s head to see the recognizable ranger’s hat, as if the park service had had King’s back all along, as if Nature Herself had somehow facilitated the kind of progressive politics most of us like and with which we align ourselves. The concept of the national historical park, like Women’s Rights in Seneca Falls, New York, or Brown vs. Board of Education in Kansas (both administered by the NPS), exploits this idea. Ironically, actual social problems become invisible in this space. As another critic of the Burns series points out, “far from simply being created from noble democratic impulses, the actual process of national park creation was often anti-democratic—with deeply

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troubling race and class consequences,” but we are reluctant to see those parts of the process as essential to it because of our investment in the democracy mythos.24 It could be argued, then, that the national parks are political states of exception twice over: first, as fantasy spaces offering pleasure and escape from the real, and second, as places where the political and the natural collapse into each other in a way that makes both democracy and wilderness policy appear transcendent, as if they belonged to the realm of natural, not civil, law. It is this second sense that especially interests me.

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The creation of federal wilderness was hardly uncontroversial. At the time of the Wilderness Act’s inception, photographers like Robert Adams engaged in a critique of landscape photography in the tradition of the scenic and sublime, especially that of Ansel Adams (no relation), on the grounds that such picturesque images of uninhabited nature “inadvertently enlarged the gulf between humans and the natural world.” Robert Adams, in contrast, attempted to offer a definition of nature which reintroduced the human element in order “to foster a basic respect and affection for the nature right outside our doors, homely and modest as it may be—an emotional connection that is a necessary precondition to making a true commitment to preservation.” He wrote of the dangers of defining nature as wilderness, as if what is not wild were not natural.1 Indeed, upon closer inspection, the idea of wilderness appears as a sort of collective hallucination. “Most park visitors will probably never enter into a wilderness area, yet they enjoy wilderness as a scenic backdrop to developed park areas,” states the NPS wilderness site.2 The official handbook of the Wilderness Act includes a well-traveled quote by Wallace Stegner, the writer commissioned 30

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by the Sierra Club to assist in protesting the building of dams in Dinosaur National Monument, whose 1955 book This Is Dinosaur is often taken as the beginning of the modern environmental movement: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of assuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”3 Squarely in the Stegner tradition, in the book by Dayton Duncan that accompanies the Burns film park ranger and crime writer Nevada Barr repeats the tendency to imagine wilderness as an object for gazing from afar: “I think we require national parks for our psychic stability and sanity. We need national parks because we psychologically need to have a place to go when we can’t be ‘here’ anymore.”4 That the wilderness had to be forcibly depeopled in order to become the fantasy of an original “world without us” is old news to anyone interested in First Nations history. But what remains to be theorized is the idea of the wilderness hallucination, the postcard projection, the scenic backdrop, the wild as spectacle. Writing in 1967, the French Marxist thinker Guy Debord explains that spectacle is not a collection of images but a relation among people, arising when the real world can no longer be grasped directly and must become mediated by images. In these conditions, “the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.”5 The agreement that there is wilderness, regardless of whether one has seen it or ever will, that it just is, without having to be brought into being, and that it must remain untouched, as a backdrop to human development and to the entire realm of things that require justification and undergo change—this could be described as some sort of contractual mass mirage, mediated by photographs serving as evidence of this thing, as if it preexisted them. Debord calls this “the basically tautological character of the spectacle,” its capacity to serve as its own evidence, so that when someone questions wilderness policy, it suffices to hold up a postcard of the Grand Canyon or point to a Sierra Club poster hanging

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on a nearby wall and cry “Look!” as if what we’re looking at were itself unmediated, empirical reality and not a photograph.6 The Burns documentary functions in this way as well. Rather than showing the instituted character of parks, it never questions the received idea that American nature was there to be discovered, and later, to be protected and restored. There is something here of what contemporary philosophers mean when they discuss “the real.” Alain Badiou writes about the passion for the real, the absent center around which a situation is organized and action may be mobilized. Badiou’s real is always beyond reach, unrepresentable, only referred to by emancipatory projects but never directly accessed.7 But Slavoj Žižek points out the inherent paradox in the passion for the real. What results from our efforts to show the real once and for all is a theatrical spectacle creating what he calls “the effect of the real,” transforming whatever we are taking pains to expose—in this case, Nature with a capital N—into an instrument of ideology. His examples of theatrical spectacles that create the effect of the real are, for one, the Stalinist show trials, which were heavily publicized precisely because they were essentially staged, their outcomes decided ahead of time, and for another, visually spectacular terrorist acts like 9/11.8 This is also the nature of photography: to present its content as if it were being accessed directly. Only so can we make sense of the very idea of “photographic evidence.” “Photographs are of course artifacts, but their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects— unpremeditated slices of the world,” writes Susan Sontag.9 However, photographs themselves can never serve as evidence of an event without that event being already characterized, as she points out. In order to be worthy of being photographed, something must first be deemed “an Event: something worth seeing and therefore worth photographing.”10 The “frame,” as it were, or at least the need for framing, is there prior to the camera. The photography of nature as scenic backdrop effects a forgetting of this. Wilderness as

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a priori goes hand in hand with the idea of the photo as real. Artist and landscape theorist Deborah Bright describes such landscape photography as a repeated repression of the fact that “beauty, preservation, development, exploitation, regulation . . . are historical matters in flux, not essential conditions of landscape.”11 The end result of our passion for the real, Žižek writes, is that we become stuck in an endless loop of spectacle serving as its own evidence, while everything real continues to elude us. This passion for wilderness as the real, or as a ground for human experience, in contrast to the mundane domestic(ated), needs the alienation and distancing required for something to become spectacle. Nature-as-scene institutes the boundary that Duncan talks about crossing, in sharp distinction to whatever is mundanely natural at home. The mundane domestic is not sublime; the algae living in one’s Brita filter do not have the effect of an ocean or mountain landscape or a herd of giraffes. This logic, however, quickly leads to a kind of nostalgic malaise for wilderness, what French thinkers might have called a mal de désert, that aching memory to which Abbey refers, bubbling up from some unknown psychic depths, increasingly difficult to assuage the more we seek out a cure. Places like Boquillas Crossing and the Timbisha Shoshone Village are uncanny precisely because they function to bring the institutional, constructed character of wilderness to light. They stand out in sharp contrast not only to the land itself but to the imagination that organizes the experience of America-as-landscape, beyond the actual experience of wilderness to the abstract knowledge that wild spaces exist in the world at all. As sites that exist in response to the needs of mundane human habitation, these two residential spaces defy the crucial aspect of wilderness that specifically precludes habitation, a preclusion which creates wilderness as functioning in the service of wellness, in the form of relief from the mundane domestic, on one side of the spectrum, and from the violence of development on the other. They interrupt the idea that unpeopled nature will make us well, an idea that extends from

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Central Park to Alaska, from Frederick Law Olmsted to Christopher McCandless, the young protagonist of John Krakauer’s nonfiction book Into the Wild, later made into a film directed by Sean Penn (2007). More than one hundred years after Olmsted, McCandless “escapes” the pressures of the modern life awaiting him following his graduation from college, as well as his dysfunctional family, by traveling across the country until he finally ends up at the destination of his dreams, the Alaskan wilderness. The young man dies there, in part because he attempts to survive completely alone— which guarantees the authenticity of the experience—in extraordinarily severe conditions, in which humans have thus far been able to survive only in collectives. While it may appear that the moral of the story is “Don’t go to Alaska alone,” the emotional impact of the scenery, the sweeping landscapes onto which his solitary journaling voiceover is placed, clearly champions the moral purity and economic simplicity of the solitary experience of wilderness over, and by means of sharp contrast to, McCandless’s emotionally unavailable, wealthy parents, their deeply troubled marriage, and the pressure they put on him to attend law school. It upholds the fantasy that when things go wrong at home, we have a more original home to which to return. I N T O T H E W H A T, E X A C T L Y ?

As national park wilderness offers visitors the scenic and dramatic experience of universal home, the mundane home of actual habitation is necessarily excluded. This is what makes the Timbisha Shoshone’s claim to habitation rights both radical and unintelligible. Prior to the passing of the Homeland Act, tribal governments coming into their own in the 1990s began to make serious claims for lands from which their members had been removed. These claims, however, were made largely on the basis of environmental restoration (they knew best how to take care of the land)

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and religious use of sacred sites (their religious practices were sitespecific)—two discourses consistent with NPS ideology—not on the basis of land rights qua habitation rights. The Timbisha’s position is unique, and their clear demand for land understood as homeland may be heard in their refusal to accept the NPS’s terms in the most heated stages of negotiations. When tribal recognition was not accompanied by reservation land, the NPS commissioned an “alternatives” study, seeking alternatives to actual reservation land on park grounds. Several alternatives were proposed, but the Timbisha rejected all of them. They did not accept life tenancy for current landholders, the usual model used in cases of in-park landholders, insisting on “a permanent home for posterity,” not only for those alive at the time. They also did not accept a reservation with conditions, to which the NPS was willing to agree. There could not be conditions in principle, if the Village was to be recognized as their home. The condition in question was, predictably, the possibility of a casino, which the NPS did not accept. And while the tribal leaders offered assurances that building a casino at Furnace Creek was the furthest thing from their minds, they simultaneously stuck to the broader principle that the tribe should be able to define the conditions of its own commercial sustainability, rather than having them defined by the NPS. This meant that one tribal government’s promise would do nothing to guarantee that the next tribal government wouldn’t change its mind and build whatever it wished.12 Behind the scenes of the negotiations, then, was not just the land but the question of what “home” actually means and the tribe’s refusal to allow the U.S. Department of the Interior to answer it for them. In the film “Seeing Death Valley,” Pauline Esteves states that she does not like the word “reservation.” In a certain sense, the Timbisha’s quest for the land base inside Death Valley National Park concerns not just the small tract of land that is the Village, but the place that the notion of home occupies in the binary between nature and institution. As reservation land, the Village is

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the home that the U.S. government gave to the tribe, an instituted home, like all other reservations. As the land on which they have lived “since time immemorial,” the Village is a home that is not instituted but natural, for posterity, a singular place from which the people spontaneously emerged very long ago and which they continue to maintain for the sake of neither ecology nor religion, but for the simple reason that it has always been their forever home.13 J. B. Jackson distinguishes between the political landscape, which is “deliberately created in order to make it possible for men to live in a just society,” and the inhabited one, which “merely evolves in the course of our trying to live on harmonious terms with the natural world surrounding us.”14 As a national park, Death Valley—the ancient-and-new homeland of the Timbisha, into which visitors are welcomed as visitors, but only as they are designated so by the tribe, who properly belong here—is stretched between these two possibilities. The exhibit at Furnace Creek houses the Flicker Feather Banner, which was “presented on a staff as a gesture of welcome to important visitors,” to serve as a reminder that the issue of proper belonging is irreversibly historically sedimented. The banner, perhaps the tribe’s most significant artifact, does not belong to them at the moment and is on loan from Xanterra Parks and Resorts Inc., the park’s primary concessionaire. The totemic token of welcome—functioning here as an artifact and as an active performance of welcoming—is itself borrowed, improper, displaced, and stretched between the political landscape and the inhabited one. Does the concept of domestication even function under these specific conditions? The Timbisha’s highly contested practice of gathering piñon nuts exemplifies the problem of getting a grip on what is meant by “domestication.” The practice is protected by the Homeland Act, under the category of maintaining traditional ways of life and tribal ecological practices. But when the NPS defines the practice as harvesting (a definition the Timbisha reject), it is banned under the Wilderness Act.15 For the Timbisha, the ritual-

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ized picking of the nuts has nothing to do with the domestication of nature, because in their worldview there was no preexisting, wild nature to domesticate. The Acts thus conflict with each other over how the gathering of piñon nuts should be defined, and there is no way to adjudicate the dispute because each definition is grounded in a different conception of what counts as nature, what counts as culture, and what “home” means in the context of those words. One thing is certain: the universal home of humanity to which the park idea refers and which it wishes to hold in reserve for all visitors comes at the price of violent instituting acts that displace inhabitants, indigenous and otherwise. Again, this is old news to those who have studied the disastrous consequences of westward expansion for First Nations people. What seems to have been written out of the people’s histories, however, notably by authoritative, popular “documents” like the Burns film, among others, is that the park and wilderness systems demanded this instituting violence and dispossession as part of their very logic, a logic which remains unchanged to this day and continues to organize our experience of parks. Episode 1 of the film merely hints at Indian removal in mentioning “our greatest shame” during a shot of teepees on the horizon, as if genocide had been an embarrassing mistake made on the side of otherwise sound land management policies. But historians argue that Indian reservations are part of the same ideology which created nature reserves, yielding what Mark David Spence has named the “dual ‘island’ system” in his argument that nature reserves and Indian reservations are inextricably bound, historically and logically.16 In the case of Death Valley, dispossession includes the very recent, active destruction of actual homes; the park service washed away the Timbisha’s adobe huts with hoses in 1957–58, under the Indian Resident Housing Policy.17 N E V E R M I N D R E A L I T Y: T H E C A S E O F A L A S K A

Indigenous groups were not the only ones displaced by the creation of the park system. Referring to rural people, Cronon asks,

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“What are the consequences of a wilderness ideology that devalues productive labor and the very concrete knowledge that comes from working the land with one’s own hands? All of these questions imply conflicts among different groups of people, conflicts that are obscured behind the deceptive clarity of ‘human’ vs. ‘nonhuman.’”18 Along these lines, it could be argued that the entire state of Alaska is a sort of manic wilderness experiment. Alaska was considered “America’s last chance to do it right,” a place where parcels of land could be set aside for conservation on a scale unimaginable in the lower forty-eight states. Many Alaskan citizens, who had moved there specifically to get away from government regulation of land, protested the parks vehemently, and the opposition greatly outnumbered the support.19 People may visit Alaska to see natureas-scene, but they move there for commercial development opportunities, often motivated by secessionist sentiments. Today, over 64 percent of the state is federal land, and 56 percent of the federal wilderness of the entire United States is in Alaska. Since the whole wilderness system is only slightly over 20 percent of all federally managed land in the country, there is pressure to increase that number and designate as much federal land as possible as wilderness.20 Unlike national parks in the lower forty-eight states, Alaska’s parks, considered the nation’s crowning jewels, are almost entirely inaccessible except for a few sections. In the case of Alaska, the foreigner may be the Alaskan with secessionist tendencies who opposes wilderness policy. The Alaskans’ antienvironmentalist culture is based on a claim that becomes increasingly difficult to refute: that environmentalists are out of touch with reality. In a sense, the accusation is not false when the national park idea depends in large part on leaving reality behind and entering a sheltered space. In Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a wildlife enthusiast who spent long periods living among bears in a remote region of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and who was killed and eaten by one of the bears he was following and filming, the word “reality” is repeatedly pitted against

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environmentalism. In one scene, two Alaskan ecologists read hate letters that they received after Treadwell’s grisly death. The letters seem to have less to do with Treadwell and more with idealistic environmentalists who want to protect the land, “never mind reality.” One local helicopter pilot says that Treadwell “got what he deserved” because he had “lost sight of what was really going on.” And yet, despite this provocation, just like Into the Wild, Grizzly Man repeats the mystifying gestures, invoking the wilderness boundary with increasingly moral overtones. Sven Haakanson, executive director of the Alutiiq Museum, states that while it is tragic that Treadwell died, he “disrespected” the sacred space of the bears by crossing into it. This is something that isn’t done, Haakanson insists, not simply because it is dangerous, but because the bear wilderness is that place where people do not go. It was morally wrong of Treadwell to go there, the museum director seems to be saying, even though Katmai is a national park and is by definition and law open to and for the express enjoyment of tourists. Herzog himself repeatedly refers to an “invisible line” between the human and natural realms, and this line appears to have less to do with Treadwell’s actual presence in grizzly bear territory, which did not constitute trespassing in any legal sense, and more with the fact that he was there not as a tourist, but as some thing else (cohabitant? fellow bear?). The invisible line that Treadwell is charged with crossing throughout the film does not hold for wilderness recreation, which is welcome and expected. But even as he performed this metaphysical trespassing, Tread­ well knew well how to maintain the effect of wilderness as a space distinct from mundane life, and that this division was necessary for the kind of film he was making. In the course of months of filming his experiences with the bears in order to raise awareness about them, he deliberately constructed his shots so that he would appear to be completely alone in the wilderness, though in fact his girlfriend Amie Huguenard accompanied him on large segments of his stay and supplies were occasionally flown in by helicopter.

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Treadwell knew that in order to communicate “wilderness” he had to present as alone, and naturally, transparently so. His solitude in the wilderness was the event worth seeing and thus worth filming. At one point, other figures appear in Treadwell’s footage, whom he suspects of being poachers who are out to kill both him and the bears. He offers these alleged poachers as an example of why humans must stay out of wilderness. Enemies of nature, corrupted by the promise of profit, they are everything Treadwell is running from when he moves into the land of grizzlies, and everything we ourselves wish to keep out of the space of nature in reserve. DOMESTICITY AND GENDER

Relatedly, Huguenard’s gender did not fit the social template of Treadwell’s film or of wilderness representation in general. Herzog’s film echoes this: all the women in Grizzly Man are shown in domestic settings, while the men are shown at work, many of them working in wilderness areas (one of the helicopter pilots is identified as a “former rodeo rider”). Like the public/private binary, the wild/domestic binary is gendered, with masculinity on the side of untamed, dangerous, raw, and imposing wilderness, while femininity, as usual, stays home. An interesting double bind makes this possible. First, as Cronon argues, “the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the feminizing tendencies of civilization.”21 Thus, wilderness restored masculinity. But alongside the idea that civilization makes us soft exists the equally insidious essentialist identification of women with nature. Feminist analyses of the history of ideas show how often women and other minorities are identified with animals and nature, in order to exclude them from the category “human.” However, in the context of the wilderness idea, that identification becomes mundane and totalizing in ways that end up excluding women from wilderness. Women simply are natural because of the activities our culture identifies with nature, mundane domestic activities like

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childbearing and child rearing and other caretaking, and with which it naturalizes women’s devalued social status.22 Since they are imagined as being a part of nature, women cannot enter into nature in the dramatic way that men can, by crossing that mythic boundary and thus entering nature in a way that fundamentally transforms them. The idea of the boundary that one must cross in order to enter nature thus always implies a masculine subject. The landscape photographer, for instance, is always imagined to be male, relatively young, solitary, strong, and rugged, like the Marlboro Man23, and it is with this figure that we identify when we stand at the edge of wilderness and look in. It is not the actual gender of the photographer-viewer that matters here, but the gendered subject position from which we all view classic wilderness landscapes. Likewise, the existence of women wilderness/adventure writers like Pam Houston and Cheryl Strayed has not changed our deeply gendered fantasies. These women present as masculine, hard, different. The person who stands at the edge, poised to cross the boundary into the wild, is never a (real) woman.24 The valuing of wilderness is thus also the simple reverse of the devaluing of domesticated life: the routines and pressures of our tame, emasculated lives demand wilderness, its risks and sublimity, its power and virility, even just as an idea. Nature-as-scene inspires awe; domesticity-as-unseen does not inspire. Without ever questioning the binary itself and how it shapes our lived experience of domesticity, we can live out our not-so-wild lives better just knowing that an alternative exists out there, beyond the threshold of the mundane home. This model remains pervasive, and landscape images creating the wilderness spectacle remain “the last preserve of American myths about Nature, Culture, and Beauty.”25 For Cronon, experiencing ourselves ahistorically means evading responsibility: We inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be the most precious part—aloof from its entanglements. By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from history, in its

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siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century.

But ahistoricity is just the beginning and ethical aloofness is only one of its dangerous consequences. The devaluing of domesticity is part of the democratization of nature, constructing a solitary, universalized, original, depoliticized subjectivity that is in fact marked by gender, class, race, and civic life in general, and for that reason deeply and unwittingly locked into patterns of collective experience that maintain existing power structures. In other words, the dangers of the wilderness idea lie not only in what it allows us to avoid doing, but also in what it enables us to do. Rather than an escape from responsibility, as Cronon presents them, we might come to see national parks as places that actually enable the people for whom they have been created to participate actively in power differentials they have not chosen and do not support. Seen from this perspective, they pose a threat not only to environmental responsibility but to social responsibility, locking us into modes of collective experience in which social justice is no longer a priority. THE FOREIGNER

Federal wilderness and national parks both have linear boundaries, a telltale sign that we are dealing not with physical entities, but political ones. On a map, they look more or less like rectangles, which means that their boundaries are not defined naturally from within, by the very nature of the land, but from without. Linear boundaries, writes J. B. Jackson, “give permanent human quality to what would otherwise be an amorphous stretch of land. Those roughly geometrical enclosed spaces are a way of rebuking the disorder and shapelessness of the natural environment; seeing them from outside, the alien wanderer wishes he too belonged.”26

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Jackson ties this to the formation of the grid-plan city, which allows for the easy interpretation (from the outside) of space as a “unit,” and ultimately to the tradition of the public square, the site of civic participation. “It is assumed that those who come there are already aware that they are members of a community, responsible citizens, and that on occasion they will participate in public discussions and take action of behalf of the community.”27 While landscape photographs establish a solitary viewer-visitor who has managed, after a long journey, to get away from it all, the linear boundaries of the parks demarcate political spaces and position the visitor as a civic participant. The national park is after all modeled on Olmsted’s late-nineteenth-century utopian vision of the restorative power of the city park, that other geometrically shaped space in which relief from exploitative capitalism and overcrowded tenement buildings is provided not only by contemplation and leisure, but also by a well-organized collectivity.28 In national parks, not only is nature presented as essentially hospitable, as it is made manageable by park infrastructure and more intelligible by interpretive signage, but human actions, governed by the idea of sustainability for future generations, are inflected with a hospitality of their own. Hospitality is a complex issue within the national park idea. In order to become the kind of place in which I can receive guests, the home must be rightfully mine, instituted as mine, pronounced my own. It is only in my house that I can act as a host to another. Thus, as philosopher Jacques Derrida shows, an original violence is built in to the very possibility of hospitality. “The perversion and pervertibility of this law (which is also a law of hospitality) is that one can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one’s own hospitality, the own home that makes possible one’s own hospitality,” a logic that depends on what Derrida calls the collusion between hospitality and power.29 And in this way, the anthrophobia at the heart of the idea of unpeopled wilderness becomes the xenophobia at the heart of the idea of home, identifying and

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excluding the figure of the true foreigner. When natural spaces become constructed as humanity’s universal home, the mechanism of hospitality, which includes xenophobia as one of its moments, is put in motion. Who, then, counts as a legitimate visitor, and who is perceived as a threat? Big Bend and Death Valley are actively inhabited by minority groups with concrete needs, specific to habitation, that are often in direct conflict with park and wilderness management policies. These two parks pose the question of home, the foreigner, and democracy inside the park idea in terms not of a historical past, or a prehistoric past that only our DNA “remembers,” but of the present moment. The Timbisha and the Mexicans emerge as foreign to the parks in question in essential ways, just as the foreign tourists are unproblematically incorporated into the park idea as visitors. The problem of the foreigner appears in Big Bend in an exceptional way, although this has nothing overtly to do with the dislocation or relocation of indigenous inhabitants. The Chisos (Chizo) Indians, after whom the Chisos Mountain Basin is named, were among the foraging, nomadic groups in the northern Chihuahuan Desert prior to the sixteenth century, when they moved south into Mexico in order to escape Spanish and Apache invaders. Although the region boasts over ten thousand years of Native American history, including the Comanche Trail, which went through the entire length of what is now the park down into Mexico, there is no problem of reclaiming or rightful belonging on park grounds today. In one sense, today’s Boquillas del Carmen residents obviously do not live inside the park. But in another sense, when crossing the riverborder is articulated as part of the visitor’s experience, the park— and its accompanying imaginary of universal, transcendent human experience—effectively extends into the village of Boquillas. The village itself would not exist were it not for the park, because it is completely isolated from the rest of Mexico by the protected land which surrounds it, three distinct Mexican wilderness areas under protection, together comprised in the “sister park” to Big Bend.

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The park newsletter includes a new section on crossing the border. The port of entry is staffed by several park rangers, but no customs officials. The interpretive sign at the river, titled “An Open Door: Boquillas, a village on the edge of two countries,” traces the history of the village back to the 1800s, integrating it in the idea of an international park which arose in the 1930s. “As a frontier border town, Boquillas reflects the durable character of the region and its residents, welcoming visitors to experience the culture and its history on the end of two countries.” With interpretive signage like this and the new port of entry functioning unidirectionally in practice, it could be argued that the village has become a 3.7-million-dollar interpretive exhibit inside Big Bend. As Derrida writes in the opening passage of his analysis of hospitality: “Isn’t the question of the foreigner [l’etranger] a foreigner’s question? Coming from the foreigner, from abroad [l’etranger]?”30 Not only are the Timbisha and Mexicans not U.S. citizens; they are foreigners “inside” the parks, whose status functions as an interruption, infinitely more foreign than the European and Asian tourists who come to the park as visitors in order to recreate. This creates a sort of crisis of intelligibility that makes these communities practically invisible to either of the governments that might be charged with caring for them. Collaborative conservation efforts between the sister parks of Big Bend and Maderas del Carmen/ Ocampo/Cañon de Santa Elena have benefited enormously from the port of entry reopening. Examples of what are called “shared resources” between the areas include “the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river corridor, prehistoric and historic resources, and rare wildlife including beaver and black bear.” The port of entry serves as the main line of communication for not just Big Bend, but also Guadalupe Mountains National Park and White Sands National Monument, both of which have Mexican sister parks.31 Meanwhile, as we have seen, the citizens of Boquillas have not benefited nearly as much from the reopening. The village is so remote from the rest of Mexico that the Mexican government has done nothing

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to develop its infrastructure for more successful ecotourism. The U.S. government does not take the village to be its responsibility, even though it substantially adds to the park’s touristic appeal. Neither government has come to the aid of the villagers to provide them with passports so they may legally cross in order to get supplies. A relatedly perverse logic is at work in Death Valley’s Indian Village. Since the tribe’s headquarters relocated from Furnace Creek to Bishop, the households at Furnace Creek are last on the list of priorities. And it is not the problem of the NPS to support the Indian Village. The newly remodeled visitor center, however, devotes a disproportionately large exhibit to the presence of the Timbisha, one that completely misrepresents the importance to the U.S. government of actual collaboration and integration with the villagers themselves. Again, it becomes a problem not just of resource allocation, but of intelligibility itself, as the community’s demand for habitation conflicts directly with the idea of democratic ownership of federally managed lands, under a particular way of imagining democracy. This crisis of intelligibility is what marks the foreigner as foreign, as essentially heterogeneous to the social scene in the background of the contemporary environmental imagination, an idea of nation no longer necessarily bound to any particular national identity. Today, our dreams of wilderness extend beyond “America” to the awareness that almost all nations have national park systems. The universality of nature parks is one example of how wilderness leaves nation behind while continuing to produce specific modes of civic life. Others include the uniquely, complexly internationalized wilderness of Antarctica, and the geographical abstraction that is the night sky, considered “endangered” and with its own dedicated preservation system, the International Dark Sky Association.32

3  WILDERNESS AND THE PROMISE OF WELLNESS

“The end of the world has already happened. We sprayed the DDT. We exploded the nuclear bombs. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the end of the world.”1 For environmental theorist Timothy Morton, nature is not approaching its end. Perhaps this is why Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht has invented a name for the sadness particular to environmental crisis: “solastalgia” is a form of pining for a lost environment, a version of homesickness that does not require actually leaving home, but is instead the experience of home as already gone. Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness or mood disorder, unprecedented in human history: “They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing.”2 If Sontag is right that “people robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture-takers,” we might see how solastalgia and the photograph go hand in hand.3 The recent increase in literature on the psychological dimensions of environmental crisis invites a more general investigation of affective investment in nature reserves as a particular form of social relation and future-orientation. 47

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K E E P I N G N AT U R E O N T I M E

The temporality of the wilderness idea is a slippery thing. Abbey’s accounts of being alone in the wild give one a sense of absolute, eternal presence, as if time weren’t passing at all. “A suspension of time, a continuous present. If I look at the small device strapped to my wrist the numbers, even the sweeping second hand, seem meaningless, almost ridiculous.”4 But Abbey refers to the most immediate and “unnatural” sense of time passing, namely the idea of the equal hour. There is a completely different timescale operative in the wilderness idea that makes it difficult, perhaps even impossible to actually be “present.” Because wild nature is at once an ancient artifact and destined for the future, “for our children,” the present tends to disappear easily. Once again, the terms of the discussion are set up in such a way that what is environmental ends up necessarily excluding what is social, for the sake of society. Environmental problems pose a challenge to traditional forms of ethics, or what we might call human or social ethics, on multiple fronts. Most obviously, environmental ethics calls on us to think beyond anthropocentric notions of duty, posing questions of duties or obligations to other kinds of entities, like mountains, oceans, ecosystems, and species. But another challenge, the one most at work in the park idea, is the one of intertemporal or intergenerational ethics. In other words, environmental ethics asks us to consider our duties to beings and ways-of-being which do not yet exist, and to people we will never meet. Some of these entities already have temporality built in to their meaning. A species, for example, is not just a collection of the individual beings that make up that species at any given moment in time, but what environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III calls a “lifeline.” “Extinction” is a term that applies only to species, not to individuals, and if there is something morally troubling about extinctions, it is because we are orienting ourselves ethically toward a species, not toward any particular individual member. This has generated the ongoing debate in environmental ethics

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between those who hold that our obligations to future generations override our obligations to present ones, and those who disagree. The “for our children” stated explicitly in the Organic Act and the Wilderness Act invokes precisely the idea that we owe something to future generations. But “lifeline” implies a past as well. The Burns film begins with a description of the Grand Canyon as “a mile deep gash in the ground where the Hopis say the first people emerged from the underworld and where scientists say a river has patiently carved its way to expose rocks that are 1.7 billion years old, nearly half the age of the planet itself.” The parks are presented as ancient, and this timescale has ethical force. “Presented as ancient” is not to imply that they are not in fact ancient, or that some falsehood is taking place. Again, at stake for me is the question how we come to experience this sense of timescale inside these spaces. One’s sense of time becomes suddenly, spectacularly expanded inside the park idea, in which the material present is imagined in terms of its geological prehistory and the future generations for which it is kept safe. The actual age of the rocks in the Grand Canyon is one thing, but their presentation as artifacts is very recent. The idea of nature as an ancient artifact that must be preserved for the future is a modern invention, irrespective of the geological facts about the land in question. In exhibits that show the age of ancient trees by means of cross-sectioning, for instance, it is customary to demarcate events in human history, like the signing of the Magna Carta, on the tree itself, as corresponding to a moment in its life.5 The temporality built in to the national park experience also aligns perfectly with the act of photography, which is necessarily inflected with the passing of time. “When we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” writes Sontag, and by the time of the first inkling that nature must be reserved in order to be protected, we are acutely aware of the mortality of nature and nostalgic for a more authentic, natural time somewhere deep in humanity’s past. “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another

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person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”6 But what is it that we mourn, if indeed there was never any nature, if the reserve creates a nature that, as Pettman argues, “does not exist outside the ‘crisis’ of humanity’s relationship with it?”7 Boquillas Crossing and the Timbisha Village appear on the scene as uncanny, out of place, and somehow even morally inappropriate, in part because of their undeniable now-ness. They defy the mourning and apocalypticism of the new environmental imagination. They are fundamentally incommensurable with the ostensibly unpeopled and socially transcendent wilderness in which they are located. T H E C U LT O F T H E C H I L D

Boquillas Crossing reopened on April 10, 2013. Needless to say, it did not make network news. Around the same time, American collective energies were directed at another park space, namely the one in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park, reissued in 3D on April 7. The film, now over twenty years old, is so iconic it hardly needs introduction. At first glance, the focus of the story is the dinosaurs, cloned by a billionaire philanthropist and a team of scientists on a distant, isolated island, which the philanthropist is turning into a theme park. But the dinosaurs are just the particular form that the figure of catastrophe happens to take in this film, which is actually about the relationship between technoscientific disaster and the nuclear family. Žižek states that the catastrophe narratives of Hollywood films since the 1980s all share a particular structure: “Although we directly enjoy the spectacular shots of the catastrophe, . . . the surplus enjoyment is provided by the sub-narrative of the couple. It is this frame, the frame through which we perceive the spectacular events. It bribes us libidinally to accept the ideology of the story.” The ideology of the story, in the case of Jurassic Park (and all of Spielberg’s films, Žižek argues), is the “impasse of paternal authority” and its ultimate restoration.8

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In Jurassic Park, the impasse of paternal authority is visible not only in the figure of Sam Neill’s character, an alienated scientist who cannot relate to the two children who have been placed in his care on the course of his visit to the island, but in the more abstract threat to the nuclear family that is posed by science “playing God” and cloning the dinosaurs, which have all been modified in their embryonic form to be female, thus ensuring that they not reproduce. They are, in short, queer dinosaurs on their own of Isle of Lesbos. Human scientific arrogance creates this “unnatural” situation, which leads to disaster. In the end, the makeshift family that Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and the philanthropist’s grandchildren create manages to escape the murderous queer dinosaur colony, and paternal authority and the heterosexual nuclear family are safely restored. But the film is not only about the perseverance of the family in the face of disaster. It is about the family faced with natural disaster, and specifically disaster caused by human interference with nature. This is a nature reserve gone terribly wrong, so much so that the electric fence that contains the dinosaurs is a central feature of the story. The fence is almost a character in its own right. The story centers on the boundary, but a boundary that must be restored in order to keep humanity safe from what is on the other side: the catastrophic consequences of capitalist technoscience interfering with the natural order. At the start of the film, the park functions like a national park in the Burnsian sense: a place of awe, sublime landscape (this one includes dinosaurs, which are also presented as scenic), and a return to prehistoric, genetically encoded, natural origins. When the old philanthropist says with breathless pride, “Welcome to Jurassic Park,” and the orchestral theme by John Williams swells to accompany the broad landscape shots, the park functions as a stand-in for everything that counts as nature. Sam Neill and Laura Dern weep at the sight. The temporal logic of the idea of sustainability, which is intelligible only in terms of the future, views all of nature as a “standing reserve” and

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extends the logic of the national park to cover the globe.9 At that moment, nature is inside the park boundary, safely ensconced and indeed “restored” to some original version of itself. When everything goes wrong and the film turns into an adventure film, this gets turned on its head, so that what is inside the park boundary is the chaos and violence of development.10 For Burns, the intergenerational futurity of “for our children” translates into a vision of the family as restored to its proper function in the reserved, protected natural environment. With tears in their eyes, the speakers interviewed in his film talk about their experiences of going to parks as children with their parents and years later taking their own children there. Many of the park staff state that they joined the park service because of park visits they made as children. Thus, at the same time that the park idea naturalizes democracy, as the previous chapter shows, it naturalizes the heterosexual, reproductive nuclear family. At stake in this move is not just the family, but a particular sense of the future. The futurity built in to the park idea relies on what queer theorist Lee Edelman calls the figure of the Child, which “embodies the citizen as an ideal.”11 Footage like the kind Burns uses to create a particular sense of the future, namely footage of actual children inside national parks, is “not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children.” These are metonymic representations of the Child as the ideal, uncorrupted citizen, the figure of the future understood as continuous with the past, foreclosing the possibility of disaster. “And lo and behold, as viewed through the prism of the tears it always calls forth, the figure of this Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now—or later.”12 The Child as figure of futurity is not just a simple, literal symbol of times to come, but the suturing of the imagined past to the future which must not be apocalyptic in order to be a proper future. The Child’s sameness, universality, and vulnerability guarantee that the future

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will be like the past, which in turn restores something like meaning to existence. As long as there is the Child, there is hope. A close inspection finds this figure in every aspect of national park culture, regardless of whether actual children are involved or even relevant. The Mexicans selling souvenirs on the riverbank in Big Bend even use the fantasy to increase sales. The stone sign lying next to the small displays states that donations will go to the children of Boquillas, for their school, which the border patrol supervisor assures me is false.13 The Timbisha display in the Furnace Creek Visitor Center shows a plaque titled “Protecting the Land Together,” which describes the idea behind and the urgency of collaborative conservation between the NPS and the tribe, using a photo captioned “Tribal Elder Pauline Esteves and Tribal Member Pauline Durham’s grandson gather the young willow branches used for making baskets.” Visitors automatically assume that children live inside the Village, when in fact the remaining inhabitants are almost all elderly and the number of households is falling. But the figure of the Child and the idea of the park remain tightly interwoven. In the Burns film, episode 6, a teary-eyed Dayton Duncan describes his family trip to Glacier National Park, during which he took a photo of his daughter, “about to become a beautiful woman in the same place that her beautiful mother had once sat.” The film shows both photos, almost identical, guaranteeing the continuity between past and future and futurity in general as reproductive: one woman giving birth to another, who will soon give birth to another, and so on. Immediately before, Cronon addresses the apparent inconsistency between parks that are natural spaces and ones that are human-made memorials, and states that what these things have in common is that “they are all about where we come from.” The real America is forever prepolitical, innocent, enshrined in an imagined past that is now and forever in the hands of the children, or more accurately, the hands of the Child, the once and future figure of innocence, innocence-aspromise, citizenship-as-hope.

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The analysis of Jurassic Park that focuses on the figure of the family and reprocentric futurity but forgets the crisis of nature in this story might fail to notice another sense of future in this film: the one that makes the film’s sequel possible. It could be argued that the survival of the family opens the door to the next film, because the audience wonders what happened to those people. But in truth all we care about by the end of the first film is what happened on the island, behind closed doors (where many think all queer activity should remain), after the humans left. Starting with Jeff Goldblum’s cryptic announcement that “life, uh, finds a way” (“Life Will Find a Way” is also the title of the aforementioned theme music by John Williams), we imagine the murky, primordial soup of processes—at once natural or evolutionary and technologically mediated—that allow the island to develop into whatever it will be by the opening of the next film. That unimaginable, and wildly imaginable, soup of queer but reproductive activity behind the closed gate offers an alternative futurity, one that ruptures the totalizing, continuous narrative of the family, not only by means of its logic but literally: the lesbian/trans, cloned, asexually reproductive T. rex might come eat the Child. The threat to the Child is what makes the sequel possible. Otherwise, no one would watch. Superimposing this drama between competing futures onto the national park idea, we get something like Jurassic Park in negative form, in which the developed world itself is a queer, disordered threat to social order, and peace, order, and futurity are guaranteed inside the park. The national park boundary serves to shelter innocence inside and keep the scary world out, creating an intimate relationship between the discourse of environmental crisis and that of the care of the self. This produces what Berlant calls “cruel optimism” towards the idea of nature-in-reserve. Optimism becomes cruel when attachment to an idea becomes the condition for the very possibility of existing, or at least of being well (however that is defined). “When your pen breaks, you don’t think, ‘This is the end of writing.’ But if a relation in which you’ve invested fantasies of

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your own coherence and potential breaks down, the world itself feels endangered.”14 We have invested the national parks with fantasies of our own coherence and potential to such a degree that it is impossible to even really “see” them beyond the scenic postcard evidence of themselves that they endlessly generate. When the idea of nature-in-reserve is the very possibility of wellness, sanity, or social order, it becomes impossible to revise or even criticize in any meaningful way. As Morton puts it, “To have ecology, we must give up Nature. But since we have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful. Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality.”15 M N E M OT E C H N I C S A N D T H E N AT U R E H A B I T

In the summer of 2013, New York City hosted multiple interdisciplinary theory and media conferences on the topic of the future, with glossy advertising and exuberant invitations to the public. “In the coming years, we will all become futurologists, whether we like it or not,” writes cultural theorist Allan Stoekl.16 But how open is the idea of the future for any form of debate, when the viral Hyundai “suicide” car ad was pulled from the Internet and YouTube in 2013 because it was deemed offensive?17 The ad shows a middleaged man trying to commit suicide in the garage of his home by inhaling his car’s exhaust fumes, which he funnels into his sealedup car through a tube stuck in the window. In the course of this, he discovers that the new Hyundai is a zero-emissions vehicle, and thus the fumes cannot kill him. He opens the garage door, walks out dejectedly, and goes back inside his suburban, single-family home. The panic over the ad had to do with the appearance that it takes suicide lightly, something unacceptable to many Americans. But the moral of the story is no joke. The implication is that we are all slowly killing ourselves by inhaling various fumes in our daily lives, and that zero emission means the end of this form of death. The ad is actually radiantly hopeful: not only does the man fail to kill himself, but we all end up living longer, saner lives

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because of zero-emissions cars. It is cruelly optimistic in Berlant’s sense: the future is so bright that the man doesn’t get to kill himself, in spite of his best efforts. There is even a new discipline emerging called “ecopsychology,” which begins from the assumption that “either you’re green or you’re not. Either you’re sane or you’re not.”18 Environmental wellness aligns perfectly with the health, including the mental health, of the individual to produce a single, coherent sense of “life.” And the First World definition of “having a life” is invariably inflected with reproduction, consumerism, and upward mobility. The claim that we need wilderness to stay sane turns out to be completely, frighteningly true: nature-in-reserve ends up literally making the world possible, or rather, as the ground of the subject’s internal coherence and the mechanism which produces a future, serving as the condition of possibility for the experience of “world” by a sane, consistent, future-directed subject. What is thereby created is indeed a sustainable (at least temporarily) system, but it is sustainable for the sake of the continuation of development and consumerism. In his work on energy and expenditure, Stoekl has coined the word “postsustainability” to refer to a state in which sustainability, rather than being a set of practices that allow us to survive, is understood as that which ensures survival so that we may continue our most coveted, unsustainable practices, precisely those practices which make it unbearable to be “here” and thus necessary to escape to a wilderness-in-reserve in the first place.19 Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer reflects on postsustainability in some provocative ways. It is set in a near future, humaninduced ice age in which the last surviving humans live on a Noah’s Ark-like train that goes around the world, a fully enclosed, self-sustaining ecosystem in delicate balance. The train is the world, because the world outside it is uninhabitable. The central story concerns class difference and resistance, depicting the revolt of the poor, imprisoned in the “tail,” against the rich, who inhabit the “head.” There are many interesting environmental subplots, however, including constant references to sustainable systems, the

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scenes of the botanical garden and aquarium, and the drug Kronol to which many are addicted and which is made of industrial waste. By the end of the film, the train stands for both capitalism (including the idea that exploitation is simply a necessary evil for the whole machine to run smoothly) and a sustainable earth (including the idea that population control, and totalitarian control in general, are required by such a delicate system). The Eternal Engine runs forever, as long as the violence and exploitation, thanks to which it runs, remain unchallenged, and one of the ways in which order is kept is precisely in relation to nature, which is maintained in reserves like greenhouse gardens and aquaria, for continued human use. But the real nature-in-reserve is the frozen world outside the train’s windows, breathtakingly rendered, massive, silent, and threatening. As the last survivors of the revolt, two children, walk out of the exploded front wagon and into the icecovered wilderness, they encounter their first wild animal, a polar bear. While Snowpiercer is a critique of neoliberal sustainability culture, it returns in the end to the fantasy of nature as both freedom and redemption. The effects of this way of imagining nature are numerous, from providing an escape hatch from dealing with the more mundane aspects of our unsustainable lives, to the real conflicts that emerge when the interests of groups like the Timbisha Shoshone or the Boquillas residents clash with “our” (but whose?) need for a reserved place in which we can redeem ourselves. Those groups find themselves up against not only some actual political body, like the U.S. government or the park service, but something much more abstract and powerful: the fundamental conditions of possibility for what is commonly called “hope for humanity,” the basic emotional attachment to this cluster of ideas that makes it so difficult to dismiss as mere propaganda. This emotion, or what psychoanalysts call “affective attachment,” joined as it is with the mechanics of spectacle as a form of social relation, poses uniquely difficult obstacles for imagining change.

CONCLUSION

This Is Not America

The examples of Big Bend and Death Valley demonstrate that we can no longer get away with justifying nature-in-reserve on the grounds that it makes us feel better. However, a serious investigation of the social effects of national park wilderness must attend to how we feel. Debates about habitation rights and the distribution and management of natural “resources” are woefully incomplete without a systematic interrogation of the affective dimensions of the wilderness idea. Stegner was right that wilderness is part of the geography of hope. Or rather, his optimistic pronouncement has become true. While this functioned as the conclusion of an argument for wilderness reserves in the 1960s, however, it takes on a different function at present, pointing instead to the need for a new cartography of affects. The national park to come requires increasingly self-reflective mapping of our nostalgia, mourning, and desire, and our experiences of futurity and internal coherence in relationship to instituted nature-spaces. It requires deeper understanding of how mood, or mode of attunement, is at the center of our collective experience of an environment in trouble. Critical theories of media have taught us that spectacle precisely inhibits such collective self-understanding. In his 1927 work The Mass Ornament, German media theorist Siegfried Kracauer wrote, 58

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“Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense.” At the same time, he warned (prefiguring Debord), “never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding.”1 Long before the invention of television, magazines like National Geographic allowed the world to disappear into images, which, Kracauer argued, were omnipresent and contiguous, leaving no space for the world itself. This exhaustive visibility intersects with a particular relationship to the present which photography encodes: “In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized.”2 The wilderness spectacle holds us captive in an affective relation to a world out of time. “The parks are always where I can go home again,” because “it’s the same when we go back,” states Nevada Barr.3 In response to the pitfalls of spectacle, Morton proposes that the end of the world need not be spectacular at all. “What if it’s not a huge catastrophe worthy of a Spielberg movie but a real drag, one that goes on for centuries? What if the disaster isn’t an imminent cataclysm but has already occurred? What if this is how it looks?”4 But Morton stops short of exploring the effects of this on collectivity. Is there a vista point from which to best receive that which substantially challenges our hope? Or is the relationship between what counts as photography and what counts as nature doomed to repeating nostalgia for the future, a nostalgia doomed to function ideologically? What would an engagement with natural spaces look like were it not a fantasy of innocence and restoration to a lost past “deep in our DNA,” but rather an engagement with what is not (fore)seeable through landscape photography as we know it? Or, if both the national park and photography are emblematic of the twentieth century, will the park to come be reimaged for the twenty-first by means of media other than

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photography? Environmental justice projects must do a better job of examining the role of media in the production of ideology, from precisely how shifts in media have the power to change what counts as ideology at any given moment to how new media produce unprecedented modes of collectivity. A LO N E TO G E T H E R

Edward Abbey wrote, “Why do I do this? (My feet hurt.) Why? Well, it’s the need, I guess, for some sort of authentic experience. (My hip joint hurts.) As opposed to the merely synthetic experience of books, movies, TV, regular urban living. (My neck hurts.)”5 At the climax of Snowpiercer, after all the hardships that the revolutionary protagonist, Curtis, has had to endure—starvation, cannibalism, watching his friends die, discovering that his hero is a traitor, and the enormous physical challenges of the fight itself— there is one thing that literally brings him to his knees. It is the question, “When was the last time you were alone? You can’t remember, can you?”6 Whatever social injustices are afoot inside the train, what makes the train truly unlivable is the impossibility of getting away from it all. The connection between solitude and authenticity remains irresistible, still at the heart of precisely how we imagine nature will save us. The national park experience, like the practice of photographing that experience, is at once profoundly solitary and profoundly collective. The landscape must be uncluttered by people (in a way that the landscapes of Times Square or Ipanema beach need not be), but our motivation for taking the photo has everything to do with showing this solitude to others. Even Abbey’s treks were clearly not only in the service of trekking, because he wrote about them prolifically, passionately, for his entire adult life. Irrespective of medium, the act of recording is the performance of a certain commitment, a particular kind of engagement with temporality, and a declaration of what is worthy, not just of seeing or telling,

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but of committing to memory. Timothy Treadwell had to construct scenes of solitude in order to reach a wider audience, but he shot over one hundred hours of footage, presumably to show to that very humanity from which he was running into the proverbial wild. Chris McCandless sought to escape society, but kept a journal and had plans to write a book about his experience. He took over six hundred photographs of himself.7 The solitary human in nature becomes a drama when recorded, but it also becomes a figure of optimism. And recording technologies are themselves intrinsically optimistic, as photos of weddings and babies suggest. Technologies of memory, or mnemotechnics, as they were known in antiquity, work backwards, forcing us to remember the past, but they also work forwards, “in the promise of a glorious and triumphant future,” Pettman writes.8 The scenes that national parks provide are at least as much scenes of an Edenic future in which the environment is no longer in crisis as they are of the past. In science fiction, visual representations of planet surfaces subjected to terraforming bear striking resemblances to our own unpeopled wilderness footage. The film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for instance, shows the restoration of Kirk’s paternal authority, perennially in crisis due to his famously promiscuous planethopping, at the same time that the Enterprise crew witnesses the terraforming effects of Project Genesis, an awesome space of nature-in-reserve that has no actual past because it was created in a lab. Morton describes the environmental imagination as invoking an ecological paradise that has not yet happened, resulting in what he calls “nostalgia for the future.”9 Environmental nostalgia is a form of terraforming, and equally futuristic. UTOPIA IN CRISIS

Perhaps the most striking figure featured throughout the Burns series is Native American park superintendent Gerard Baker. With

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his silver braids, dark skin, and park service uniform, his presence introduces considerable semiotic complexity. Not only are his segments especially moving, given the Indian removal which made the parks possible, but he deliberately takes us back to some fantastic time of a universal, shared America in which such conflicts were not endemic to the place itself, or the park system itself. “We need national parks to have people, especially our kids, understand what America is. America’s not sidewalks, America’s not stores, America’s not video games, America’s not restaurants. We need national parks so people can go to them and say ‘Ah! This is America!’” This could be read as a particular version of philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s claim that “the US is utopia achieved,” where humanity has arrived at its proper state, as nature and nation fuse together and make the (instituted) citizen disappear into the (universal) human.10 The more it may be claimed that wilderness grounds true human experience, the more wild spaces require protection from potential threats. According to Baudrillard, America is “the only remaining primitive society,” primitive because rather than understanding or imagining itself in terms of culture and civilization, this society imagines itself in terms of nature-in-reserve. “Only Puritans could have invented and developed this ecological and biological morality based on preservation—and therefore on discrimination— which is profoundly racial in nature. Everything becomes an overprotected nature reserve.”11 But what is protected has no particularity because it is the truth of universal human experience. “Theirs is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence.”12 Indeed, it could be argued that the very idea of environmental crisis on a global scale is, ironically, distinctly American. The presentation of the future environmental cataclysm as the great equalizer, the disaster from which no one will be safe, is actually quite misleading, of course. Poverty makes for a very different experience of fires, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, droughts, and sinkholes. As Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums, the urban

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poor are disproportionately vulnerable to environmental disasters, slums are created and worsened by disasters, and Third World urbanization poses the greatest threat to the very green-spaces that make cities sustainable in the first place. And yet, the idea that environmental means universal, which allows us to treat individual catastrophes as mere symptoms of a much larger, imminent, equalizing catastrophe lurking under the surface, remains in the foreground of the vernacular conception of nature that is, as we have seen, American, both historically and ideologically. National parks continue to be presented to foreign tourists as one of the top reasons to visit the United States, alongside Broadway and Hollywood.13 The presentation of these spaces as the truth of America serves precisely to underscore the fact that the foreign visitors are, well, just visiting. A real foreign presence is one that actually challenges the culture of preservation and protection. According to the New York Times, the Wilderness Act is currently “facing a mid-life crisis.” The most far-reaching critiques of the act are, predictably, based on its environmental effects. Because the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century are different from those under which the act was conceived and passed, the fundamental ethic of noninterference is under fire. We now know that, thanks to  climate change, we’ve left no place unmolested and inadvertently put our fingerprints on even the most unpeopled corners of the planet. This reality has pushed respected scientists to advocate what many wilderness partisans past and present would consider blasphemy: We need to rethink the Wilderness Act. We need to toss out the “hands-off” philosophy that has guided our stewardship for 50 years. We must replace it with a more nuanced, flexible approach—including a willingness to put our hands on America’s wildest places more, not less, if we’re going to help them to adapt and thrive in the diminished future we’ve thrust upon them.14

Indeed, controversial hands-on approaches to wilderness, like rewilding, are proof that the Act can be radically rethought.15 But the idea that the only reasons to rethink the Act, or at least the only

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ones that matter, are ecological obscures the social dimensions of wilderness policy, specifically its role as an enabling factor in some problematic political dynamics on park grounds. Today the idea of nature-in-reserve shapes something much more fundamental than national identity, namely what counts as being well, having a life, and having a future. Its most powerful vehicle, the wilderness spectacle, has been our answer to the diminished future that faces all forms of life in late capitalism, so it is only natural that we shudder at the thought of putting our hands on nature-in-reserve. It seems especially counterintuitive to do so in the service of humans, who are the cause of all the trouble in the first place and the very beings we so passionately wish to outrun. AFTER OPTIMISM

Like Burns’s teary-eyed speakers, I now find myself writing this book because my own park visits made such an impact on my sense of wellness and self-care. I came to the United States in 1981 as a child, from Poland, and between 1981 and 1985 my parents and I visited most of the national parks in the lower forty-eight states. We settled in Texas in 1989, the same year I discovered Big Bend, the park closest to us, which I have managed to visit often since then. In the late 1990s, years after I had moved out of the family home, over a decade after our first Yellowstone visit, we took a two-week-long national park trip, which included Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Devil’s Tower, and Badlands. It turns out to have been our final national park trip, and our final vacation as a family. It is only from here, the perspective I have been calling “postapocalyptic,” that I am able to see the degree to which these family voyages were inflected with the original loss and rupture of immigration and, later, the unmistakable agony of letting go of ever being a unified, nuclear family. As I discovered the hard way, no mnemotechnics gives us actual control over the future. Nothing guarantees that continuity, that seamless flow on which our postcard representations of Nature, the Eternal Engine, insist. Not

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only do we not know the future will be continuous with the past, but furthermore, this is not something we could know. “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger,” writes Derrida, simply because anything is possible and what arrives is by definition impossible.16 The impossible is the only thing that can arrive. As long as something is possible, it is in a sense already here, now, with us. The impossible, what Derrida calls the arrivant, is the very possibility of the future as something distinct from the present. The impossible irrupts, not as a spectacular eruption on the horizon, but as an interruption of horizontality itself. I’ll conclude by pointing to the concept that inspired this book’s title, Derrida’s notion of democracy to come. What makes democracy such a unique and compelling form of government is precisely its openness to what is not within its existing definition. We cannot answer the question, Is this democratic? a priori, by recourse to some preexisting model. Democracy has no positive content of its own. It could in principle be anything, including the harshest dictatorship. “Fascist and Nazi totalitarianisms came into power or ascended to power through formally normal and formally democratic electoral processes.” Democracy is essentially open to the most undemocratic forms of government, which it cannot exclude in principle, simply by virtue of its open definition. “Hence a certain ‘suicide’ of democracy,” Derrida writes, indicating that the threats to democracy come from its own internal logic rather than from “rogue” nations which simply cannot get with the democratic program.17 Since democracy does not exist, properly speaking, because it is not anything in particular, Derrida describes it as perpetually in a state of “to come.” Democracy is nothing more than its own differential movement18 toward its future articulation.19 The futurity built into the democratic process means that this process can never in principle exclude the foreigner, the real foreigner, the one who disagrees with us in fundamental ways and who does not speak our language, the one who threatens democracy. “If he was already speaking our language, with all that that

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implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to him?”20 While hospitality both demands foreignness (the true foreigner is the only one to whom I can extend hospitality) and excludes it (the home is the space which excludes intrusion), democracy is in principle open to everything. This includes not only its own death, but the even more troublesome possibility that this death will not have been redemptive or expiatory. The nature reserve that can offer a true haven from the diminished future we have thrust upon ourselves can only do so free of the fantasies that created capital-N Nature long ago. What we find revitalizing about these places can only be truly life-affirming if it is no longer in the service of the late capitalist idea of what it takes to have a life. If the reserves of the future are to be sites for contemplation, environments for thinking, they cannot be colonized by the compulsory optimism that has a stranglehold on all our attempts at life-building today. How nature after optimism will make us feel remains to be seen, as are the modes of public life that these feelings will produce, the collectivity to come.

Santa Elena Canyon Trail, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Dante’s View, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Dante’s View, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Viewing area, Artist’s Drive, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Tuff Canyon, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Tuff Canyon, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Santa Elena Canyon Trail Visitor Area, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Santa Elena Canyon Trail Visitor Area, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Dante’s View Visitor Area, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Badwater Basin Visitor Area, Death Valley National Park, 2013

Santa Elena Canyon Trail, Big Bend National Park, 2012

Painted Canyon Visitor Area, Death Valley National Park, 2012

Juniper Canyon Trail, Big Bend National Park, 2012

South Rim Trail, Chisos Mountain Basin, Big Bend National Park, 2012

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. For more on Boquillas during the heyday of park infrastructure development, see Ross A. Maxwell, The Big Bend of the Rio Grande: A Guide to the Rocks, Landscape, Geologic History, and Settlers of the Area of Big Bend National Park (Austin: Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin, 1968), 41–50. 2.  National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (Mexico) and U.S. National Park Service, “Binational Strategic Planning Event with Sister Parks 2013” (report), 3. I thank Joe Sirotnak for access to this document. 3.  John Waters, “Boquillas Crossing Gets Legal Green Light; Facility to Cost $3.7 Million,” Big Bend Gazette, November 4, 2011. http://bigbendgazette.com/2011/11/04/boquillas-crossing-getslegal-green-light-facility-to-cost-3-7-million/. Accessed February 3, 2013. 4.  I borrow the phrase “what counts as nature” from Donna Haraway. For more on this, see chapter 2 of Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 5. http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/history/ep1/. Accessed June 28, 2012. 83

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6.  http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/. Accessed June 28, 2012. 7. http://www.nps.gov/dena/upload/NPS Organic Act.pdf. Accessed January 12, 2012. 8.  Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 134–35. 9.  Dominic Pettman, Human Error: Species Being and Media Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 51–52. 10.  Robert Cahn and Robert Glenn Ketchum, American Photographers and the National Parks (New York: National Park Foundation and Viking Penguin, 1981), 123–27. 11. Damisch, Skyline, 143. 12.  Melville Bell Grosvenor, “A Long History of New Beginnings,” National Geographic, July 1979, 20, 26. 13. http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/ansel-adams.htm. Accessed March 29, 2013. 14. Cahn and Ketchum, American Photographers and the National Parks, 126. 15. Big Bend even has a ranger-led program called “You’re Not Ansel Adams, But You Could Be.” 16.  These exclusions were also at work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century depictions of nature as “view” in all mediums, not just photography. 17.  The Paisano 32:1 (2012), 3. 18.  Interview with Mark Williams, Border Patrol Supervisor, Big Bend National Park, December 17, 2012. 19.  Theodore Catton, To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act (Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit for Death Valley National Park, 2009), 86. 20. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 89. 21.  For more on the subject of Native Americans and historicity, see Calvin Martin, “The Metaphysics of Writing Indian-White History,” in The American Indian and the Problem of History, ed. Calvin Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27–34.

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22.  Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 124. 23.  Interview with Pauline Esteves, Tribal Elder, Death Valley National Park, January 4, 2013. 24. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 26–35. 25. http://wilderness.nps.gov/document/WildernessAct.pdf. Accessed February 2, 2013. 26.  Interview with Blair Davenport, Cultural Resources Manager, Death Valley National Park, January 2, 2013. CHAPTER 1

1.  Johanna Oksala, Foucault, Politics and Violence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 5. 2.  John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 90. 3.  “All Aboard: The Role of the Railroads in Protecting, Promoting, and Selling Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/RAILROAD/home.html. Accessed March 8, 2013. 4.  See http://www.sharinghistory.com/RR4.htm for examples of advertisements. Accessed March 8, 2013. 5. “Eve of Estes.” http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/watch -video/#807. Accessed March 8, 2013. 6. Damisch, Skyline, 132–33. 7.  Jackson, Sense of Place, 88. 8.  See Roderick Frasier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and John Sheail, Nature’s Spectacle: The World’s First National Parks and Protected Places (London: Routledge, 2013). 9.  Edward Abbey, “Preface.” Beyond the Wall (New York: Holt, [1971], 1984), xv–xvi. 10.  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Touchstone, [1968], 1990), 166–67.

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11.  Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 26. 12. Turner, Abstract Wild, 34. 13.  For this kind of argument, see Anna L. Peterson, Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 67. 14.  For a survey of arguments in defense of wilderness, see Michael P. Nelson, “An Amalgamation of Wilderness Preservation Arguments,” in Environmental Ethics, ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 15.  William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” http://www.williamcronon.net/ writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html 16.  See “Nature, Liberty, and Equality.” https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=cOV7hx4GUp8 17.  Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009), 224. 18.  Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5. 19.  Adrian Ivakhiv, “Nature/’s Nation: Improvisation, Democracy, and Ken Burns’s National Parks,” Environmental Communication 4:4 (December 2010), 467. 20. Robert Paul Jordan, “Will Success Spoil Our Parks?” National Geographic, July 1979, 59. 21.  Francie Latour, “Hiking While Black: The Untold Story,” Boston Globe, June 20, 2014. http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/ 2014/06/20/hiking-while-black-the-untold-story-black-people -great-outdoors/ssRvXFYogkZs2e4RX3z6JP/story.html 22.  http://wilderness.nps.gov/faqnew.cfm. Accessed March 10, 2013. 23. Abbey, Beyond the Wall, 44. 24.  Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Salvaging Wilderness from the Tomb of History: A Response to The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” Environmental Communication 4:4 (December 2010), 490.

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1.  Allison N. Kemmerer, “Reinventing the West,” in Reinventing the West: The Photographs of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams, exhibition catalogue (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2001), 17. 2.  http://wilderness.nps.gov/faqnew.cfm. Accessed March 10, 2013. 3.  The Wilderness Society. The Wilderness Act Handbook (Washington, DC: Wilderness Society, 1994), 68. 4.  Duncan and Burns, National Parks, 196. 5.  Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, [1967], 2010), 4, 18. 6. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 13. 7.  See Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007). 8.  Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (New York: Verso, 2002), 9. 9.  Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 69. 10. Sontag, On Photography, 11. 11.  Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 129. 12. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 36. 13. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 1. 14. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 42. 15.  Interview with Blair Davenport, Cultural Resources Manager at Death Valley National Park, January 3, 2013. 16. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 3, 5. 17. Catton, To Make a Better Nation, 29–30. 18. http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_ Wilderness_Main.html 19.  Duncan, 367–69. 20.  “Alaska Wilderness: The Politics of Energy and the Environment,” p. 3. http://www.anwr.org/features/pdfs/wilderness.pdf

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21.  William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” http://www.williamcronon.net/ writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html 22.  Grace Clement, “The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 309. 23.  Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,” 129. 24.  See also Val Plumwood’s work on nature and gender. 25.  Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,” 140. 26. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 15. 27. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 35, 17. 28. For an interesting account of Olmsted’s son’s plans for expanding the park and coastal system of Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1999). “Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Harlan Bartholomew were quiet, conservative reformers whose personal utopia was park-rich Minneapolis, not Soviet Russia. Yet if their proposals had been implemented, the results would have been virtually revolutionary. The existing hierarchy of public and private space in Los Angeles might have been overturned. A dramatically enlarged commons, not the private subdivision, might have become the commanding element in the Southern California landscape” (68). Davis often describes California in terms of “lost futures.” 29.  Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 54–55. 30.  Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 3. 31.  National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (Mexico) and U.S. National Park Service, “Binational Strategic Planning Event with Sister Parks 2013” (report), p. 3. 32. Both Big Bend and Death Valley have been designated goldstar level International Dark Sky Parks. http://darksky.org/international -dark-sky-places/about-ids-places/parks. Accessed December 20, 2014.

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1.  Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 98. 2.  Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds,” Wired 16:1 (December 20, 2007). http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/ 16-01/st_thompson 3. Sontag, On Photography, 10. 4. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 11. 5.  I thank Emily-Jane Cohen for reminding me of this. 6. Sontag, On Photography, 15. 7. Pettman, Human Error, 132. 8.  “Hollywood as an Ideological Machine.” March 12, 2008. http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/hollywood-ideological-machinelecture-performance-slavoj-zizek. Accessed April 12, 2013. 9. Pettman, Human Error, 145. 10.  The same structure appears in the film Congo (dir. Frank Marshall, Paramount Pictures, 1995), also based on a Michael Crichton novel. The murderous white gorillas that guard the hidden, mythic temple in which giant diamonds abound are products of eugenic breeding by the greedy humans who wanted to hide the diamonds from the rest of the world. By playing God, they created an unnatural space, in which genetically modified gorillas turned on them and killed them all. In contrast, the scene of natural nature outside the temple space has zebras, sunflowers, and unmodified gorillas. The “family” that is restored at the end of this film is not the human one, but the gorilla one, when the sign-­ language-speaking gorilla Amy returns to the jungle, signing the word “mother” and running off with the silverback who will ostensibly become her mate, as her human guardian, grimacing like a concerned and slightly jealous dad, mutters, “handsome fellow.” My thanks to Jason Wright for bringing this and several other films to my attention.

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11.  Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 12. Edelman, No Future, 18. 13.  Interview with Mark Williams, Border Patrol Supervisor, Big Bend National Park, December 17, 2012. 14. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_ on_cruel_optimism/. Accessed April 27, 2013. 15.  Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 95. 16.  Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xx. 17. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/04/25/ hyundai-suicide-ad-commercial/2113461/. Accessed April 26, 2013. 18.  Daniel B. Smith, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 19.  See Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak. C O N C LU S I O N

1.  Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1927], 1995), 58. 2. Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 59. 3.  Duncan and Burns, National Parks, 196. 4. Morton, Ecological Thought, 118–19. 5. Abbey, Beyond the Wall, 14. 6.  Snowpiercer, dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2013. 7. Two hundred and seventy of these photos and much of his journal have now been published in Back to the Wild: The Photographs and Writings of Christopher McCandless (Twin Star Press, 2011). I thank Mark Ferber for pointing this out. 8. Pettman, Human Error, 55. 9.  Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007), 162.

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10.  Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1999), 77. 11. Baudrillard, America, 8. 12. Baudrillard, America, 77. 13.  Pamela Prah, “Selling Broadway, National Parks, and Hollywood to Foreign Visitors,” USA Today, October 21, 2013. http:// www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2013/10/21/stateline -foreign-tourists/3143151/. Accessed January 10, 2014. 14.  Christopher Solomon, “Rethinking the Wild: The Wilderness Act Is Facing a Midlife Crisis,” New York Times, July 5, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/the -wilderness-act-is-facing-a-midlife-crisis.html?_r=1 15. See, for instance, George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For more on rethinking “nature” in parks and wilderness, see David N. Cole and Laurie Yung, eds., Beyond Naturalness: Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010). I thank Connie Millar for bringing these to my attention. 16.  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 5. 17.  Jacques Derrida, Rogues, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 33. 18.  I am not my future self, so I am different from my future self. But “my” future means I am oriented toward this other self. But “towards” is problematic because the future is too unthinkable, unimaginable, to offer a direction or point of orientation. This cluster of problems is at work in Derrida’s complex notion of “to come.” 19. Derrida, Rogues, 37. 20.  Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 16–17.