1 00:00:01,600 --> 00:00:03,166 - Good evening! 2 00:00:03,266 --> 00:00:05,200 My name's Paul Robbins, I'm the director of 3 00:00:05,300 --> 00:00:07,433 the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies 4 00:00:07,533 --> 00:00:09,366 here at the UW-Madison, 5 00:00:09,466 --> 00:00:13,200 and it is an enormous honor to have been invited 6 00:00:13,300 --> 00:00:15,400 to introduce tonight's speaker. 7 00:00:15,500 --> 00:00:16,966 Jed Purdy wrote very recently 8 00:00:17,066 --> 00:00:19,533 that this country, the United States, 9 00:00:19,633 --> 00:00:21,666 is "a country whose environmental politics 10 00:00:21,766 --> 00:00:24,433 "has always been Anthropocene, 11 00:00:24,533 --> 00:00:27,766 "though often not self-consciously so." 12 00:00:27,866 --> 00:00:30,900 And that, but that's an interesting thing to say. 13 00:00:31,000 --> 00:00:33,266 It's interesting to say for at least three reasons, 14 00:00:33,366 --> 00:00:36,433 which I think captures some of what's special 15 00:00:36,533 --> 00:00:38,466 about Jed Purdy. 16 00:00:38,566 --> 00:00:40,366 First, it's extremely, 17 00:00:40,466 --> 00:00:42,733 it's a counterintuitive notion that the Anthropocene, 18 00:00:42,833 --> 00:00:45,133 that name that we would give to a geologic era 19 00:00:45,233 --> 00:00:47,500 formed by human beings, which calls upon us 20 00:00:47,600 --> 00:00:49,833 for all of its novelty and all of its difference 21 00:00:49,933 --> 00:00:51,533 and how different everything is, 22 00:00:51,633 --> 00:00:53,466 the idea that it would be driven back 23 00:00:53,566 --> 00:00:55,900 into the violent beginnings of American history 24 00:00:56,000 --> 00:00:58,533 is counterintuitive, and it says something 25 00:00:58,633 --> 00:01:01,900 very complicated in an extremely accessible way. 26 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:04,033 This is an accessible writer. 27 00:01:04,133 --> 00:01:06,833 Two, it would take a pretty formidable reading 28 00:01:06,933 --> 00:01:10,000 and understanding of American history to prove it. 29 00:01:10,100 --> 00:01:12,466 (audience laughs) It would. 30 00:01:12,566 --> 00:01:15,733 That history would have to hinge on a lot of legal 31 00:01:15,833 --> 00:01:17,233 and policy history. 32 00:01:17,333 --> 00:01:19,000 You'd have to know a lot about the law, 33 00:01:19,100 --> 00:01:21,866 not just about American history, to get that right. 34 00:01:21,966 --> 00:01:23,933 It would have to be rigorous, 35 00:01:24,033 --> 00:01:25,900 accessible and rigorous. 36 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:28,000 And it's also an observation, I think, 37 00:01:28,100 --> 00:01:30,300 that opens doors for new politics 38 00:01:30,400 --> 00:01:31,966 because the Anthropocene politics 39 00:01:32,066 --> 00:01:33,500 actually aren't all that new, 40 00:01:33,600 --> 00:01:35,766 like it actually gives us space of possibilities, 41 00:01:35,866 --> 00:01:38,466 like there's something we can do instead of gnash our teeth, 42 00:01:38,566 --> 00:01:42,700 which makes it poignant, accessible, rigorous, 43 00:01:42,800 --> 00:01:44,200 poignant. 44 00:01:44,300 --> 00:01:47,166 Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law 45 00:01:47,266 --> 00:01:49,433 at the Duke University School of Law. 46 00:01:49,533 --> 00:01:51,933 He holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School 47 00:01:52,033 --> 00:01:55,600 and a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard College. 48 00:01:55,700 --> 00:01:57,000 He's author of six books, 49 00:01:57,100 --> 00:01:58,733 the first of which was written in 1999, 50 00:01:58,833 --> 00:02:03,766 which must've been like the first year of your J.D. 51 00:02:03,866 --> 00:02:04,966 (audience laughs) 52 00:02:05,066 --> 00:02:07,566 I haven't read them, except this one. 53 00:02:07,666 --> 00:02:11,566 They got great titles, including a 2009 Knopf title 54 00:02:11,666 --> 00:02:13,066 "A Tolerable Anarchy." 55 00:02:13,166 --> 00:02:16,466 That title alone is sending me home for some reading. 56 00:02:16,566 --> 00:02:19,000 His 2015 book is the one I hold here, 57 00:02:19,100 --> 00:02:21,766 "After Nature: Environmental Law, Politics, and the Ethics 58 00:02:21,866 --> 00:02:24,633 of the Anthropocene," and I recommend it to everyone. 59 00:02:24,733 --> 00:02:28,466 He has countless chapters, reviews, and essays, 60 00:02:28,566 --> 00:02:31,333 especially in rigorous law journals, 61 00:02:31,433 --> 00:02:33,666 the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review. 62 00:02:33,766 --> 00:02:35,033 He's taught countless courses 63 00:02:35,133 --> 00:02:37,433 at Duke University and elsewhere, 64 00:02:37,533 --> 00:02:39,800 and if I was only allowed to take three of them, 65 00:02:39,900 --> 00:02:42,366 they would be Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy, 66 00:02:42,466 --> 00:02:45,166 - That's two semesters. (audience laughs) 67 00:02:45,266 --> 00:02:47,433 - Well, I'd fail the first semester and 68 00:02:47,533 --> 00:02:49,233 then I'd have an excuse 69 00:02:49,333 --> 00:02:51,933 to take The Conversation of Law and History 70 00:02:52,033 --> 00:02:56,800 and then his class on The Occupy Movement in 2012. 71 00:02:56,900 --> 00:02:59,200 There's a lot here that I don't have to tell you about. 72 00:02:59,300 --> 00:03:01,166 I think, well, some of the other things 73 00:03:01,266 --> 00:03:03,466 that stand out are his popular essays and reviews. 74 00:03:03,566 --> 00:03:05,833 He has written for The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, 75 00:03:05,933 --> 00:03:09,066 The Huffington Post, accessibly. 76 00:03:09,166 --> 00:03:13,033 And finally, he's got a lot of media appearances, 77 00:03:13,133 --> 00:03:14,466 Morning Edition and The Connection 78 00:03:14,566 --> 00:03:17,100 and Talk of the Nation, you know, lefty radio, 79 00:03:17,200 --> 00:03:21,266 but also a lot of other outlets that I think we'd understand 80 00:03:21,366 --> 00:03:23,533 to be extremely mainstream 81 00:03:23,633 --> 00:03:26,066 and an important voice 82 00:03:26,166 --> 00:03:29,666 for these complicated issues to the broader public. 83 00:03:29,766 --> 00:03:32,700 I'll close by reading from the conclusion 84 00:03:32,800 --> 00:03:35,433 of this terrific book, "After Nature," 85 00:03:35,533 --> 00:03:37,366 to speak to this question of poignancy 86 00:03:37,466 --> 00:03:40,400 because he suggests that writing this legal history, 87 00:03:40,500 --> 00:03:45,166 of a legal American environmental history, he suggests that 88 00:03:45,266 --> 00:03:49,100 "people are best able to change their ways 89 00:03:49,200 --> 00:03:51,100 "when they find two things at once in nature, 90 00:03:51,200 --> 00:03:54,766 "something to fear and also something to love." 91 00:03:54,866 --> 00:03:58,066 Now, "Either impulse," he says, "can stay the human hand, 92 00:03:58,166 --> 00:04:02,066 "but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. 93 00:04:02,166 --> 00:04:04,866 "The second keeps the hand poised, 94 00:04:04,966 --> 00:04:07,833 "extended in greeting or in offer of peace. 95 00:04:07,933 --> 00:04:09,866 "This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, 96 00:04:09,966 --> 00:04:12,100 "among people but also beyond us, 97 00:04:12,200 --> 00:04:13,766 "in building our new home." 98 00:04:13,866 --> 00:04:17,100 And that home, I take it, is the Anthropocene, 99 00:04:17,200 --> 00:04:20,166 and I can't really think of a better architect. 100 00:04:20,266 --> 00:04:22,133 Thank you and welcome Jed Purdy. 101 00:04:22,233 --> 00:04:26,400 (audience applauds) (faint speaking) 102 00:04:31,100 --> 00:04:35,733 - Wow, thanks for that really, really generous introduction. 103 00:04:35,833 --> 00:04:38,433 Thank you to the people who brought me here, 104 00:04:38,533 --> 00:04:41,766 and thank you to all of you who are, 105 00:04:41,866 --> 00:04:43,300 who can't hear me. 106 00:04:43,400 --> 00:04:45,033 (audience laughs) 107 00:04:45,133 --> 00:04:49,300 I think we need a little more vocals in the mic maybe. 108 00:04:52,633 --> 00:04:55,766 So it's obviously a, can you hear me now? 109 00:04:55,866 --> 00:04:57,400 - No. - No, all right. 110 00:04:57,500 --> 00:04:58,733 Oh, wait! 111 00:04:58,833 --> 00:05:00,866 There's a button. 112 00:05:00,966 --> 00:05:03,133 (audience laughs) 113 00:05:03,233 --> 00:05:04,633 There we are. 114 00:05:05,700 --> 00:05:09,533 So I really appreciate the generous introduction. 115 00:05:09,633 --> 00:05:12,100 I also really appreciate the work people have done 116 00:05:12,200 --> 00:05:15,966 to bring me here and all of you coming out on what feels, 117 00:05:16,066 --> 00:05:17,733 from the perspective of North Carolina, 118 00:05:17,833 --> 00:05:22,700 like a cold winter evening. (audience laughs) 119 00:05:22,800 --> 00:05:25,866 It's also really great to be asked 120 00:05:25,966 --> 00:05:30,333 and exciting to be asked to speak at Wisconsin. 121 00:05:30,433 --> 00:05:33,200 Although I come to you from a law school, 122 00:05:33,300 --> 00:05:35,533 the kind of thinking that I try to do, 123 00:05:35,633 --> 00:05:38,900 in this book and elsewhere, would be much harder even 124 00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:41,566 to imagine without the work of Bill Cronon, 125 00:05:41,666 --> 00:05:44,266 whom I've admired for years 126 00:05:44,366 --> 00:05:47,300 and whom it's touching to see here. 127 00:05:49,066 --> 00:05:52,000 And behind him, people like Willard Hurst 128 00:05:52,100 --> 00:05:53,866 and Charles Van Hise. 129 00:05:53,966 --> 00:05:56,866 These names may not all be meaningful to all of you, 130 00:05:56,966 --> 00:06:00,700 but they are people who've thought about the interplay 131 00:06:00,800 --> 00:06:05,400 of landscape and law, humanity and the non-human world 132 00:06:05,500 --> 00:06:09,666 in Wisconsin and at Wisconsin for a very long time. 133 00:06:11,433 --> 00:06:18,966 So, I want to talk about 134 00:06:19,066 --> 00:06:21,266 what we do when we look at a landscape, 135 00:06:21,366 --> 00:06:25,566 though to speak of a part of the world as a landscape 136 00:06:25,666 --> 00:06:28,800 is to consider it in a specific way, 137 00:06:28,900 --> 00:06:31,500 as a terrain that's viewed, 138 00:06:31,600 --> 00:06:36,066 that's seen and organized by the eye, 139 00:06:36,166 --> 00:06:38,700 even, especially, 140 00:06:38,800 --> 00:06:40,566 the mind's eye. 141 00:06:40,666 --> 00:06:43,200 A landscape is a place 142 00:06:43,300 --> 00:06:47,000 organized by the meanings it has for people, 143 00:06:47,100 --> 00:06:49,533 and I'm going to talk about some of the ways 144 00:06:49,633 --> 00:06:52,900 that our meanings form and organize landscapes. 145 00:06:54,500 --> 00:06:55,933 The first, 146 00:06:56,033 --> 00:06:58,666 we may understand 147 00:06:58,766 --> 00:07:01,033 a landscape as an origin. 148 00:07:01,133 --> 00:07:02,933 Famously, 149 00:07:03,033 --> 00:07:04,366 nature, 150 00:07:04,466 --> 00:07:05,666 nation, 151 00:07:05,766 --> 00:07:07,000 native, 152 00:07:07,100 --> 00:07:09,066 all have the same root, 153 00:07:09,166 --> 00:07:14,000 birth, the place where life arises and renews itself. 154 00:07:14,100 --> 00:07:18,100 And nature, in this sense, means the world, 155 00:07:18,200 --> 00:07:21,666 viewed in light of its life-making powers, 156 00:07:21,766 --> 00:07:25,500 the origin of each of us and every other living thing, 157 00:07:25,600 --> 00:07:27,766 and, ultimately, of every thought 158 00:07:27,866 --> 00:07:31,633 that we could have about it or about one another. 159 00:07:31,733 --> 00:07:33,700 And by the same token, 160 00:07:33,800 --> 00:07:36,600 nature is linked to nationalism, 161 00:07:36,700 --> 00:07:38,133 to nativism, 162 00:07:38,233 --> 00:07:42,600 and other doctrines that have been demanding our attention. 163 00:07:42,700 --> 00:07:44,766 I want to start at this etymology, 164 00:07:44,866 --> 00:07:48,900 this common root of words that name the very idea of roots, 165 00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:52,433 because it's especially vexed and vexing. 166 00:07:52,533 --> 00:07:57,033 The talking of origins is always partly fictional. 167 00:07:57,133 --> 00:08:00,166 In a sense, because we're born of nature, 168 00:08:00,266 --> 00:08:02,966 we come from the whole world. 169 00:08:03,066 --> 00:08:05,600 In a sense, because we're born, 170 00:08:05,700 --> 00:08:08,900 we're native to just one other person. 171 00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:10,566 A nation, 172 00:08:10,666 --> 00:08:12,466 with the same root, 173 00:08:12,566 --> 00:08:15,333 is famously an imagined community, 174 00:08:15,433 --> 00:08:18,300 a story about an us and a them, 175 00:08:18,400 --> 00:08:20,500 a kind of story that's done a lot of harm 176 00:08:20,600 --> 00:08:23,366 and is not finished doing harm. 177 00:08:23,466 --> 00:08:27,400 So saying these things about how origins are fictional 178 00:08:27,500 --> 00:08:30,700 and nations, like nature, are constructed 179 00:08:30,800 --> 00:08:34,600 is easy in my generation of the academic humanities. 180 00:08:34,700 --> 00:08:36,833 You might even say that it comes naturally, 181 00:08:36,933 --> 00:08:39,633 that it's second nature to say it. 182 00:08:39,733 --> 00:08:42,800 But I think there's something else also worth naming, 183 00:08:42,900 --> 00:08:45,500 in the idea that a landscape of origin, 184 00:08:45,600 --> 00:08:47,800 of your birth, where you're native, 185 00:08:47,900 --> 00:08:51,900 is also your nature, who and how you are. 186 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:55,600 There's an image that people come to again and again 187 00:08:55,700 --> 00:08:58,700 of being born from their terrain. 188 00:08:58,800 --> 00:09:01,166 A few examples, 189 00:09:01,266 --> 00:09:04,233 E.P. Thompson's great historical study, 190 00:09:04,333 --> 00:09:07,100 "The Making of the English Working Class," 191 00:09:07,200 --> 00:09:08,933 is very nearly the antithesis 192 00:09:09,033 --> 00:09:11,600 of picturesque landscape writing. 193 00:09:11,700 --> 00:09:14,000 And nevertheless, the book has 194 00:09:14,100 --> 00:09:17,800 a steady rhythm of place-names and terrain 195 00:09:17,900 --> 00:09:20,366 that infuses, at least to me, 196 00:09:20,466 --> 00:09:24,900 an earthborn quality into the human actions he details, 197 00:09:25,000 --> 00:09:27,566 and once he comes out and says it. 198 00:09:27,666 --> 00:09:29,233 Writing of Dan Taylor, 199 00:09:29,333 --> 00:09:32,500 "a Yorkshire collier," a coal miner, 200 00:09:32,600 --> 00:09:35,066 "who had worked in the pit from the age of five, 201 00:09:35,166 --> 00:09:37,733 "who had been converted by the Methodists," 202 00:09:37,833 --> 00:09:42,233 who, still quoting Thompson, "built his own meeting-house, 203 00:09:42,333 --> 00:09:45,966 "digging the stone out of the moors above Hebden Bridge 204 00:09:46,066 --> 00:09:50,400 "and carrying on his own back" 205 00:09:50,500 --> 00:09:52,200 and went on to walk 206 00:09:52,300 --> 00:09:54,766 25,000 miles across England 207 00:09:54,866 --> 00:09:58,500 to preach 20,000 sermons of low church radicalism. 208 00:09:58,600 --> 00:10:00,433 And Thompson concludes, 209 00:10:00,533 --> 00:10:02,933 "he came from neither the Particular 210 00:10:03,033 --> 00:10:05,933 "nor the General Baptist Societies, 211 00:10:06,033 --> 00:10:09,700 "spiritually, perhaps, he came from Bunyan's inheritance," 212 00:10:09,800 --> 00:10:12,000 that is Pilgrim's Progress, 213 00:10:12,100 --> 00:10:14,666 but, still quoting, "but literally 214 00:10:14,766 --> 00:10:17,533 "he just came out of the ground." 215 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:22,866 And here, is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky agrarian writer, 216 00:10:22,966 --> 00:10:26,233 in an essay from the 1960s called "A Native Hill," 217 00:10:26,333 --> 00:10:27,700 that word again. 218 00:10:27,800 --> 00:10:29,266 Berry writes of a place 219 00:10:29,366 --> 00:10:32,000 "where his face is mirrored in the ground." 220 00:10:32,100 --> 00:10:35,266 He imagines his own death and decay on his native hill 221 00:10:35,366 --> 00:10:38,900 and concludes, "When I move to go, 222 00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:42,366 "it is as if I rise up out of the world." 223 00:10:43,900 --> 00:10:46,200 I could multiply examples, 224 00:10:46,300 --> 00:10:47,900 but I think these will do enough 225 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:50,733 to get at the thought or feeling that I'm after here. 226 00:10:50,833 --> 00:10:52,566 I'll come back to it. 227 00:10:54,266 --> 00:10:57,100 Second, when they look at a landscape 228 00:10:57,200 --> 00:10:59,533 as a record of wounds, 229 00:10:59,633 --> 00:11:03,866 a landscape is also, is always partly 230 00:11:03,966 --> 00:11:07,733 a place that is held in memory in a certain way. 231 00:11:07,833 --> 00:11:11,100 The Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, 232 00:11:11,200 --> 00:11:13,733 "It's possible that there is no memory 233 00:11:13,833 --> 00:11:15,933 but the memory of wounds." 234 00:11:16,033 --> 00:11:17,700 And it's surely true that the way 235 00:11:17,800 --> 00:11:20,833 a landscape memorializes us, 236 00:11:20,933 --> 00:11:23,100 how it holds our memory, 237 00:11:23,200 --> 00:11:25,700 is largely in the harm we do 238 00:11:25,800 --> 00:11:29,133 in our use and habitation of it. 239 00:11:29,233 --> 00:11:31,900 In the passage where Wendell Berry imagines rising 240 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:34,333 from the hill of his native land, 241 00:11:34,433 --> 00:11:38,933 he also reflects that his path is several feet below 242 00:11:39,033 --> 00:11:41,866 where he would once have walked and where he would walk 243 00:11:41,966 --> 00:11:45,233 today if his ancestors had not cut the land in ways 244 00:11:45,333 --> 00:11:48,433 that cost it all its topsoil. 245 00:11:48,533 --> 00:11:53,833 The Appalachian hills where I grew up 246 00:11:53,933 --> 00:11:56,233 are much steeper than his. 247 00:11:56,333 --> 00:11:58,766 They're a beautiful place of wreckage. 248 00:11:58,866 --> 00:12:01,800 Mature red oaks collapse with their roots out 249 00:12:01,900 --> 00:12:04,166 because the soil is thin. 250 00:12:04,266 --> 00:12:06,300 Gullies slash the hillsides 251 00:12:06,400 --> 00:12:09,266 where people farmed sheep during World War One, 252 00:12:09,366 --> 00:12:12,366 answering a lucrative demand for wool to make uniforms, 253 00:12:12,466 --> 00:12:16,633 which was a very rare chance to turn that land into money. 254 00:12:17,800 --> 00:12:19,800 The streams are sluggish and muddy 255 00:12:19,900 --> 00:12:22,066 because all the topsoil has run through them 256 00:12:22,166 --> 00:12:25,500 on the way to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. 257 00:12:25,600 --> 00:12:28,066 And that is nothing compared 258 00:12:28,166 --> 00:12:30,200 with the condition of the coalfields, 259 00:12:30,300 --> 00:12:31,800 just an hour's drive south, 260 00:12:31,900 --> 00:12:35,900 and less if you know exactly where you're going. 261 00:12:36,000 --> 00:12:37,766 You may know some of the basic facts 262 00:12:37,866 --> 00:12:40,500 about mountaintop removal strip-mining, 263 00:12:40,600 --> 00:12:44,100 which combines dynamite to blast mountains apart 264 00:12:44,200 --> 00:12:47,400 with earth-moving equipment that can pick up 130 tons 265 00:12:47,500 --> 00:12:49,566 of rubble at a bite. 266 00:12:49,666 --> 00:12:52,266 You may know that the blasting lowers ridges 267 00:12:52,366 --> 00:12:55,400 and mountaintops by as much as 600 feet 268 00:12:55,500 --> 00:12:58,133 in a region where that is about the usual clearance 269 00:12:58,233 --> 00:13:00,433 between valley and ridge. 270 00:13:00,533 --> 00:13:04,000 You may have heard that 2,000 271 00:13:04,100 --> 00:13:06,800 miles of headwater streams have been buried 272 00:13:06,900 --> 00:13:09,633 under hundreds of feet of the resulting rubble 273 00:13:09,733 --> 00:13:14,233 and that that 2,000 miles is a very conservative estimate, 274 00:13:14,333 --> 00:13:16,933 that 500 individual mountains have been destroyed, 275 00:13:17,033 --> 00:13:19,900 and that 1.4 million acres of native forest 276 00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:22,400 have been cleared in the process. 277 00:13:22,500 --> 00:13:24,333 Where mining has been, 278 00:13:24,433 --> 00:13:26,766 the terrain is now something utterly different 279 00:13:26,866 --> 00:13:28,700 from what it used to be. 280 00:13:28,800 --> 00:13:32,133 A terrain dominated by steep hillsides has been replaced 281 00:13:32,233 --> 00:13:36,566 by a mix of plateaus with remnant or reconstructed hillsides 282 00:13:36,666 --> 00:13:40,633 that are shorter and blunter than before mining. 283 00:13:40,733 --> 00:13:43,300 The most common pre-mining landform there 284 00:13:43,400 --> 00:13:46,000 was a slope with a pitch of 28 degrees, 285 00:13:46,100 --> 00:13:48,033 about as steep as the upper segments 286 00:13:48,133 --> 00:13:49,866 of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge 287 00:13:49,966 --> 00:13:52,566 or similar bridges from the same period. 288 00:13:52,666 --> 00:13:55,833 And today, the most common is a plain 289 00:13:55,933 --> 00:14:00,166 with a slope of two degrees, that is, level but uneven. 290 00:14:01,800 --> 00:14:04,133 Mining has filled a steep terrain 291 00:14:04,233 --> 00:14:07,733 with pockets of nearly flat ground. 292 00:14:07,833 --> 00:14:11,600 And what does this terrain show about us? 293 00:14:11,700 --> 00:14:13,866 Henry Thoreau wrote about wild places, 294 00:14:13,966 --> 00:14:15,733 that we go there, quote, 295 00:14:15,833 --> 00:14:19,033 "to see our serenity reflected in them." 296 00:14:19,133 --> 00:14:23,800 Continuing, "when we are not serene, we go not to them." 297 00:14:23,900 --> 00:14:27,100 He was talking about the period when Boston was in turmoil 298 00:14:27,200 --> 00:14:30,566 over the return of an enslaved man to the South 299 00:14:30,666 --> 00:14:33,633 under the Fugitive Slave Act. 300 00:14:33,733 --> 00:14:36,600 But what about when landscapes show back to us 301 00:14:36,700 --> 00:14:40,533 a breaking of the land on a geological scale? 302 00:14:40,633 --> 00:14:43,233 What we find there is ecological derangement. 303 00:14:43,333 --> 00:14:46,900 And what can we say that it reflects of us? 304 00:14:48,500 --> 00:14:51,700 It's partly because this question is unpleasant 305 00:14:51,800 --> 00:14:55,300 that a third way of viewing landscapes has been so appealing 306 00:14:55,400 --> 00:14:56,900 to many Americans. 307 00:14:57,966 --> 00:15:00,433 This is a painterly view 308 00:15:00,533 --> 00:15:04,900 of landscapes as instances of aesthetic ideals. 309 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:06,200 Viewed in this light, 310 00:15:06,300 --> 00:15:09,333 we may catalog the qualities of landscapes 311 00:15:09,433 --> 00:15:11,766 in the way that Frederick Law Olmsted did those 312 00:15:11,866 --> 00:15:14,666 of Yosemite Valley, which, he wrote in the 1860s, 313 00:15:14,766 --> 00:15:16,966 combined the following, 314 00:15:17,066 --> 00:15:18,200 beauty, 315 00:15:18,300 --> 00:15:21,766 the look of a welcoming, regular, gentle world 316 00:15:21,866 --> 00:15:24,166 where you could feel at home, 317 00:15:24,266 --> 00:15:25,666 and sublimity, 318 00:15:25,766 --> 00:15:28,933 the wild, strange, even frightening extremity 319 00:15:29,033 --> 00:15:30,566 of a world that was not made 320 00:15:30,666 --> 00:15:33,100 for your comfort or safety at all, 321 00:15:33,200 --> 00:15:35,833 that was vastly bigger than your powers 322 00:15:35,933 --> 00:15:39,100 and maybe even bigger than your imagination. 323 00:15:39,200 --> 00:15:42,066 These aesthetic principles were also psychological, 324 00:15:42,166 --> 00:15:44,566 even spiritual principles. 325 00:15:44,666 --> 00:15:46,966 They tuned your mind a certain way, 326 00:15:47,066 --> 00:15:49,033 toward peace and calm 327 00:15:49,133 --> 00:15:51,866 or toward inspiration and wonder. 328 00:15:53,066 --> 00:15:57,566 If this is a painterly ideal, what's the brush? 329 00:15:57,666 --> 00:15:59,800 Whoever made the world, whatever made the world, 330 00:15:59,900 --> 00:16:01,466 of course, is one answer, 331 00:16:01,566 --> 00:16:03,733 but another answer, also true, 332 00:16:03,833 --> 00:16:07,400 is the law that picks out these places as special 333 00:16:07,500 --> 00:16:09,666 and preserves and manages them according 334 00:16:09,766 --> 00:16:12,266 to aesthetic principles. 335 00:16:12,366 --> 00:16:15,833 In national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas, 336 00:16:15,933 --> 00:16:18,366 the law has picked out hundreds of millions 337 00:16:18,466 --> 00:16:22,766 of acres of land as the exemplary American nature, 338 00:16:22,866 --> 00:16:25,966 the places where what's best in the world 339 00:16:26,066 --> 00:16:30,233 reflects what's best in us, and the other way around. 340 00:16:31,733 --> 00:16:33,966 In what may be the most widely read 341 00:16:34,066 --> 00:16:36,866 of all his amazing and invaluable work, 342 00:16:36,966 --> 00:16:39,433 Bill Cronon has taught now more than a generation 343 00:16:39,533 --> 00:16:41,100 of scholars and students 344 00:16:41,200 --> 00:16:45,100 that the ideal of the exemplary, nearly sacred place 345 00:16:45,200 --> 00:16:49,666 is connected with the sacrifice of the fallen place. 346 00:16:49,766 --> 00:16:53,233 In prizing what we prize, we also give ourselves license 347 00:16:53,333 --> 00:16:56,133 to neglect or wreck what we do not 348 00:16:56,233 --> 00:16:58,900 so that more than atmospheric carbon levels 349 00:16:59,000 --> 00:17:02,166 connect Yosemite with the coalfields. 350 00:17:04,200 --> 00:17:07,600 Parks and wilderness areas suggest a connection 351 00:17:07,700 --> 00:17:10,466 between the more abstract and literary ideas 352 00:17:10,566 --> 00:17:13,366 about the nature of nature 353 00:17:13,466 --> 00:17:15,966 and why it matters to human beings, 354 00:17:16,066 --> 00:17:20,066 and the most material facts about the world, 355 00:17:20,166 --> 00:17:22,900 the landscapes that compose it. 356 00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:26,300 The link between the two, which completes the circuit, 357 00:17:26,400 --> 00:17:29,166 is often the law. 358 00:17:29,266 --> 00:17:31,566 The circuit that law completes 359 00:17:31,666 --> 00:17:33,933 is very clear when we're looking 360 00:17:34,033 --> 00:17:38,100 at legislation as a kind of landscape architecture, 361 00:17:38,200 --> 00:17:41,366 rather like the aristocratic gardens of England and France, 362 00:17:41,466 --> 00:17:45,166 except that, as Frederick Law Olmsted emphasized, 363 00:17:45,266 --> 00:17:50,466 Olmsted, again, in an 1864 report on Yosemite, 364 00:17:50,566 --> 00:17:53,733 recommending its adoption as a state park in California, 365 00:17:53,833 --> 00:17:56,300 here they should be thought of as parks for citizens, 366 00:17:56,400 --> 00:17:59,100 not for aristocratic owners, 367 00:17:59,200 --> 00:18:00,833 and for that reason they must be shaped 368 00:18:00,933 --> 00:18:05,400 by a sovereign's power rather than a proprietor's. 369 00:18:05,500 --> 00:18:09,066 But just as law can perform landscape architecture 370 00:18:09,166 --> 00:18:14,933 when it has a very clear, painterly template, 371 00:18:15,033 --> 00:18:18,100 in the same way it can shape other landscapes 372 00:18:18,200 --> 00:18:21,466 in line with other ways of seeing. 373 00:18:21,566 --> 00:18:25,466 So, for example, we might see a landscape in a fourth way, 374 00:18:25,566 --> 00:18:27,633 as a stockpile of resources to use 375 00:18:27,733 --> 00:18:30,266 for our utilitarian purposes. 376 00:18:30,366 --> 00:18:32,166 And this is the way of seeing 377 00:18:32,266 --> 00:18:35,466 that the U.S. Forest Service was created to implement 378 00:18:35,566 --> 00:18:37,400 in the almost 200 million acres 379 00:18:37,500 --> 00:18:40,200 of national forests that it manages, 380 00:18:40,300 --> 00:18:44,033 an area almost the size of five Wisconsins. 381 00:18:44,133 --> 00:18:47,266 This idea was very important to utilitarian reformers 382 00:18:47,366 --> 00:18:50,400 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 383 00:18:50,500 --> 00:18:53,433 It was connected with ideas of the American nation 384 00:18:53,533 --> 00:18:56,100 and the American state, 385 00:18:56,200 --> 00:19:01,066 and the national forests dedicate terrain to the idea. 386 00:19:01,166 --> 00:19:04,766 They make it real. They make it as real as dirt. 387 00:19:05,766 --> 00:19:07,866 Or you might see a landscape 388 00:19:07,966 --> 00:19:11,833 as ratifying a national mission and identity. 389 00:19:11,933 --> 00:19:14,533 The idea was widespread in the early republic 390 00:19:14,633 --> 00:19:17,466 that the world, by its nature, 391 00:19:17,566 --> 00:19:20,266 belonged to the people who could make it bloom, 392 00:19:20,366 --> 00:19:23,033 and blooming meant being economically productive, 393 00:19:23,133 --> 00:19:25,233 according to the paradigm of the agriculture 394 00:19:25,333 --> 00:19:28,566 and the commodity markets of northern Europe. 395 00:19:28,666 --> 00:19:31,433 People who settled, timbered, and planted land 396 00:19:31,533 --> 00:19:33,300 could become its owners. 397 00:19:33,400 --> 00:19:37,400 Those who merely hunted or lived transient lands there 398 00:19:37,500 --> 00:19:39,366 were not owners. 399 00:19:39,466 --> 00:19:43,033 They passed over it like deer, the lawyers of the time said, 400 00:19:43,133 --> 00:19:45,100 or like ships at sea. 401 00:19:46,300 --> 00:19:51,333 All of this doctrine had the convenient effect of showing, 402 00:19:51,433 --> 00:19:53,166 to the satisfaction of the demonstrators, 403 00:19:53,266 --> 00:19:55,166 that Native Americans had never become, 404 00:19:55,266 --> 00:19:59,766 legally or morally speaking, rooted in the place. 405 00:19:59,866 --> 00:20:02,233 Only Europeans did that. 406 00:20:02,333 --> 00:20:03,733 John Marshall, 407 00:20:03,833 --> 00:20:06,000 the second chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 408 00:20:06,100 --> 00:20:09,433 explained in one of the more candid treatments of this issue 409 00:20:09,533 --> 00:20:11,933 that although the European claim to North America 410 00:20:12,033 --> 00:20:14,833 offended one's sense of natural justice, 411 00:20:14,933 --> 00:20:16,900 it had to prevail. 412 00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:20,166 The alternative was to leave the continent a forest, 413 00:20:20,266 --> 00:20:23,933 a wilderness, unowned, legally uninhabited. 414 00:20:25,833 --> 00:20:27,633 The image of the continent 415 00:20:27,733 --> 00:20:30,066 and the national mission it called forth 416 00:20:30,166 --> 00:20:31,866 is, of course, intimately linked 417 00:20:31,966 --> 00:20:36,100 with the expropriation and genocide of Native Americans. 418 00:20:36,200 --> 00:20:39,400 And, contrary to certain historical images, 419 00:20:39,500 --> 00:20:41,533 very little about the clearing and settlement 420 00:20:41,633 --> 00:20:44,700 that it set in motion was spontaneous. 421 00:20:44,800 --> 00:20:48,133 Much of American law in the first century of independence 422 00:20:48,233 --> 00:20:52,866 was dedicated to converting frontier into private property. 423 00:20:52,966 --> 00:20:56,166 Federal statutes offered a series of bargains. 424 00:20:56,266 --> 00:20:58,566 You could become an owner, a proprietor, 425 00:20:58,666 --> 00:21:00,366 by settling a place, 426 00:21:00,466 --> 00:21:02,733 by cutting trees in forest land 427 00:21:02,833 --> 00:21:05,966 or planting them in grassland, 428 00:21:06,066 --> 00:21:09,400 by draining wetlands or irrigating drylands, 429 00:21:09,500 --> 00:21:11,266 by mining valuable minerals 430 00:21:11,366 --> 00:21:15,533 or, in some cases, simply gathering stone. 431 00:21:15,633 --> 00:21:18,600 The key was to transform something 432 00:21:18,700 --> 00:21:20,800 in a way that drew economic value from it 433 00:21:20,900 --> 00:21:24,333 and brought it into the legal terms of ownership. 434 00:21:24,433 --> 00:21:28,466 The landscapes we mostly know, personally, 435 00:21:28,566 --> 00:21:31,533 the private land of the East and the Midwest, 436 00:21:31,633 --> 00:21:34,000 began in these ways. 437 00:21:34,100 --> 00:21:36,366 John Locke's famous parable, 438 00:21:36,466 --> 00:21:40,166 that people made property by mixing their labor with nature, 439 00:21:40,266 --> 00:21:45,033 happened again and again under the aegis of American law, 440 00:21:45,133 --> 00:21:48,633 often enough via the labor of enslaved people. 441 00:21:48,733 --> 00:21:50,833 In North Carolina, where I live now, 442 00:21:50,933 --> 00:21:53,433 and in other Southern jurisdictions, 443 00:21:53,533 --> 00:21:56,133 settlers could claim extra acres 444 00:21:56,233 --> 00:21:59,400 for each body the law said they owned. 445 00:22:00,600 --> 00:22:03,466 So a few points are emerging here. 446 00:22:03,566 --> 00:22:06,633 One is that different kinds of landscapes are produced 447 00:22:06,733 --> 00:22:10,900 by different kinds of legal landscape architecture. 448 00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:14,166 Laws creating and managing parks 449 00:22:14,266 --> 00:22:16,133 are only the most obvious example, 450 00:22:16,233 --> 00:22:18,266 the way in, so to speak. 451 00:22:18,366 --> 00:22:21,866 In fact, for every part of every landscape, 452 00:22:21,966 --> 00:22:24,400 the soil, the trees and other plants, 453 00:22:24,500 --> 00:22:26,266 the animals, the water, 454 00:22:26,366 --> 00:22:29,466 the oil or gas or metals underground, 455 00:22:29,566 --> 00:22:32,033 the law has said, in some respects, 456 00:22:32,133 --> 00:22:33,833 what shall be done with it, 457 00:22:33,933 --> 00:22:36,666 and, in every case, has said 458 00:22:36,766 --> 00:22:39,333 who will make that decision. 459 00:22:39,433 --> 00:22:41,866 The sum of these two questions, 460 00:22:41,966 --> 00:22:45,933 what will be done and who decides what will be done, 461 00:22:46,033 --> 00:22:47,800 is our collective, 462 00:22:47,900 --> 00:22:51,133 often implicit landscape making, 463 00:22:51,233 --> 00:22:52,833 whether it's the cathedrals 464 00:22:52,933 --> 00:22:55,233 of Yosemite and Glacier that we make 465 00:22:55,333 --> 00:22:59,866 or the geology of wreckage in the Appalachian coalfields, 466 00:22:59,966 --> 00:23:03,100 which you can trace through property deeds, 467 00:23:03,200 --> 00:23:05,266 the legislative compromises that produced 468 00:23:05,366 --> 00:23:09,900 the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1978, 469 00:23:10,000 --> 00:23:12,500 and the interpretation of the Clean Water Act 470 00:23:12,600 --> 00:23:14,566 that allows the burial of streams 471 00:23:14,666 --> 00:23:17,600 in disposing of mining rubble. 472 00:23:17,700 --> 00:23:20,000 Not every way of seeing a landscape 473 00:23:20,100 --> 00:23:22,600 corresponds to a legal regime 474 00:23:22,700 --> 00:23:25,166 as neatly as the ones I've been discussing, 475 00:23:25,266 --> 00:23:29,066 but when a way of seeing shapes a terrain, 476 00:23:29,166 --> 00:23:33,633 when ideas and materiality rise and meet each other 477 00:23:33,733 --> 00:23:35,666 in a changing landscape, 478 00:23:35,766 --> 00:23:39,266 law is often the circuit that links them. 479 00:23:40,700 --> 00:23:42,933 A second point is that, 480 00:23:43,033 --> 00:23:46,300 although I have been naming a landscape 481 00:23:46,400 --> 00:23:49,133 to instance each way of seeing, 482 00:23:49,233 --> 00:23:52,533 every landscape in which people have taken an interest 483 00:23:52,633 --> 00:23:55,466 is also a landscape of conflict. 484 00:23:55,566 --> 00:23:59,466 They're cross-cut by competing visions and narratives. 485 00:23:59,566 --> 00:24:03,966 In Appalachia, for instance, my way of telling the story 486 00:24:04,066 --> 00:24:05,700 will run up against another 487 00:24:05,800 --> 00:24:08,233 in which the survival of coal mining 488 00:24:08,333 --> 00:24:12,500 against environmentalist intrusion is heroic self-defense. 489 00:24:13,633 --> 00:24:15,400 And as recently as the 1970s, 490 00:24:15,500 --> 00:24:17,766 there was a third narrative there, 491 00:24:17,866 --> 00:24:20,066 advanced by the insurgent labor movement, 492 00:24:20,166 --> 00:24:22,100 the Miners for Democracy, 493 00:24:22,200 --> 00:24:24,100 which held that miners should work 494 00:24:24,200 --> 00:24:26,700 in a way that preserved their own health 495 00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:28,533 and the health of the land, 496 00:24:28,633 --> 00:24:30,366 and should strike 497 00:24:30,466 --> 00:24:34,266 when they were asked to dig coal in ways that either 498 00:24:34,366 --> 00:24:36,500 threatened to give workers black lung 499 00:24:36,600 --> 00:24:39,266 or trapped them in mine collapses, 500 00:24:39,366 --> 00:24:43,066 or promised to destroy streams and mountains. 501 00:24:44,500 --> 00:24:49,133 Now that version of the coalfields is gone, 502 00:24:49,233 --> 00:24:51,500 along with most of the power of its union, 503 00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:53,333 the United Mine Workers, 504 00:24:53,433 --> 00:24:58,266 and the meaning of this land is split between two poles. 505 00:24:59,733 --> 00:25:03,766 From one, the sacrifice of a region for a few decades 506 00:25:03,866 --> 00:25:06,866 of marginally cheaper energy is one of the great pieces 507 00:25:06,966 --> 00:25:09,966 of environmental injustice in our age. 508 00:25:10,066 --> 00:25:13,500 From the other, the victims of environmental injustice 509 00:25:13,600 --> 00:25:17,633 are the miners themselves, expelled from their work, 510 00:25:17,733 --> 00:25:19,833 much as farmers were expelled from the land 511 00:25:19,933 --> 00:25:23,333 that became the Shenandoah National Park nearby, 512 00:25:23,433 --> 00:25:26,300 a few hours to the east of the coalfields. 513 00:25:26,400 --> 00:25:28,366 I don't share the second view. 514 00:25:28,466 --> 00:25:30,400 I think it's ill-founded, 515 00:25:30,500 --> 00:25:33,066 but I don't find it mysterious. 516 00:25:35,000 --> 00:25:38,033 By the way, I never use slides, 517 00:25:38,133 --> 00:25:40,533 so my fingers are figuring out how to use them. 518 00:25:40,633 --> 00:25:41,766 (audience chuckles) 519 00:25:41,866 --> 00:25:43,666 The lecture is about the words always, 520 00:25:43,766 --> 00:25:47,933 but I felt, in this case, that some images would help. 521 00:25:50,033 --> 00:25:52,366 In some landscapes, 522 00:25:52,466 --> 00:25:55,633 the lines of conflict-- 523 00:25:55,733 --> 00:25:59,033 Actually, I'm not going to talk about those 524 00:25:59,133 --> 00:26:00,633 because we need the time. 525 00:26:00,733 --> 00:26:03,200 The conflict that I'm talking about here 526 00:26:03,300 --> 00:26:06,200 is not just notional or metaphoric. 527 00:26:06,300 --> 00:26:09,333 These overlapping, competing landscapes 528 00:26:09,433 --> 00:26:11,700 have their constituencies, 529 00:26:11,800 --> 00:26:13,533 people invested in certain ways 530 00:26:13,633 --> 00:26:15,533 of relating to the natural world, 531 00:26:15,633 --> 00:26:17,033 in the ways they make a living, 532 00:26:17,133 --> 00:26:19,700 but also at the level of identity. 533 00:26:19,800 --> 00:26:22,800 To take an extreme example, those militia types 534 00:26:22,900 --> 00:26:25,266 who occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge 535 00:26:25,366 --> 00:26:27,966 in Southeastern Oregon last spring 536 00:26:28,066 --> 00:26:32,766 were carrying forward the view that land really belongs 537 00:26:32,866 --> 00:26:35,833 to those who work it and make it productive. 538 00:26:35,933 --> 00:26:39,733 Their beef was with the visions and laws 539 00:26:39,833 --> 00:26:42,366 of each ensuing generation, 540 00:26:42,466 --> 00:26:44,633 with federal land managers, 541 00:26:44,733 --> 00:26:48,233 with romantic aficionados of undisturbed beauty, 542 00:26:48,333 --> 00:26:51,433 and, of course, with ecologists who can explain 543 00:26:51,533 --> 00:26:54,066 how cattle grazing harms the waterways 544 00:26:54,166 --> 00:26:58,033 where migratory birds rest in the Malheur. 545 00:26:58,133 --> 00:27:02,233 These landscapes are overburdened with conflicting uses, 546 00:27:02,333 --> 00:27:06,000 conflicting laws, conflicting meanings, 547 00:27:06,100 --> 00:27:09,433 and sometimes the lines of tension snap. 548 00:27:11,500 --> 00:27:15,033 These landscapes of conflict, it seems to me, 549 00:27:15,133 --> 00:27:17,133 are very concrete expressions 550 00:27:17,233 --> 00:27:21,433 of something that is often said in grandly abstract terms, 551 00:27:21,533 --> 00:27:24,666 that the world has entered a new geological era, 552 00:27:24,766 --> 00:27:27,266 which some earth scientists and others call 553 00:27:27,366 --> 00:27:30,600 the Anthropocene, the epoch of humanity. 554 00:27:30,700 --> 00:27:33,166 I think the Anthropocene idea 555 00:27:33,266 --> 00:27:36,300 is best broken down into two ideas, 556 00:27:36,400 --> 00:27:39,700 which are distinct but entangled together. 557 00:27:39,800 --> 00:27:43,333 First is the Anthropocene condition, 558 00:27:43,433 --> 00:27:47,100 the intensity and pervasiveness of human influence 559 00:27:47,200 --> 00:27:50,033 on the world's biological and chemical orders, 560 00:27:50,133 --> 00:27:52,466 which means that, from here forward, 561 00:27:52,566 --> 00:27:56,500 the world we inhabit will be the world we have made, 562 00:27:56,600 --> 00:27:57,833 shared with the other life 563 00:27:57,933 --> 00:28:00,500 that we've valued enough to preserve it, 564 00:28:00,600 --> 00:28:03,466 on the landscapes that match our visions, 565 00:28:03,566 --> 00:28:07,800 or, as with the coalfields and, in some respects, 566 00:28:07,900 --> 00:28:10,400 with every climate-changed place, 567 00:28:10,500 --> 00:28:12,966 our unspoken priorities, 568 00:28:13,066 --> 00:28:17,233 even if not the ideas many of us would stand up to claim. 569 00:28:18,733 --> 00:28:24,200 Second, is the Anthropocene insight, 570 00:28:24,300 --> 00:28:27,766 the recognition that all these competing ideals of nature 571 00:28:27,866 --> 00:28:31,800 and the human place in it are cultural creations, 572 00:28:31,900 --> 00:28:36,033 ways that we've learned to see and to be, 573 00:28:36,133 --> 00:28:38,966 and, usually, ways of arguing 574 00:28:39,066 --> 00:28:42,233 about our political, economic and cultural lives 575 00:28:42,333 --> 00:28:45,533 as much as about the non-human world. 576 00:28:45,633 --> 00:28:48,233 Once we've peeled away the layers 577 00:28:48,333 --> 00:28:51,300 of human activity that shape these landscapes 578 00:28:51,400 --> 00:28:54,100 and appreciated the many angles of vision 579 00:28:54,200 --> 00:28:56,033 from which they can make sense, 580 00:28:56,133 --> 00:29:00,433 there's no avoiding that they are Anthropocene landscapes. 581 00:29:00,533 --> 00:29:04,766 What else could they be, as long as we are in them? 582 00:29:06,433 --> 00:29:10,166 And what, then, could be the value 583 00:29:10,266 --> 00:29:14,066 of imagining that you rise from a piece of land, 584 00:29:14,166 --> 00:29:18,633 continuous somehow with its spirit and meaning, 585 00:29:18,733 --> 00:29:21,966 the idea of a landscape as an origin, 586 00:29:22,066 --> 00:29:25,866 the place where I began this lecture? 587 00:29:25,966 --> 00:29:28,633 I'd like to return to that idea now, 588 00:29:28,733 --> 00:29:30,533 but along a different path, 589 00:29:30,633 --> 00:29:35,366 by thinking of a landscape not as an origin exactly 590 00:29:35,466 --> 00:29:40,000 but, in one sense, the opposite, as a sanctuary, 591 00:29:40,100 --> 00:29:41,566 a place 592 00:29:41,666 --> 00:29:44,233 of respite and reprieve, 593 00:29:44,333 --> 00:29:46,500 not the place where you come from, 594 00:29:46,600 --> 00:29:48,766 but the place you flee to. 595 00:29:50,633 --> 00:29:54,566 "Without wilderness," said Senator Frank Church of Idaho, 596 00:29:54,666 --> 00:29:58,566 debating the Wilderness Act of 1964, 597 00:29:58,666 --> 00:30:02,733 "Without wilderness, this country would become a cage." 598 00:30:03,966 --> 00:30:06,333 "We need a place," Thoreau had written 599 00:30:06,433 --> 00:30:08,333 more than a century earlier, 600 00:30:08,433 --> 00:30:11,166 "where we feel our limits transgressed," 601 00:30:11,266 --> 00:30:15,233 a place outside villages and subdivisions. 602 00:30:15,333 --> 00:30:17,200 This was something, 603 00:30:17,300 --> 00:30:20,500 this idea of the outside, 604 00:30:20,600 --> 00:30:23,300 the outside of everything as a kind of sanctuary, 605 00:30:23,400 --> 00:30:25,500 an alternative inside, 606 00:30:25,600 --> 00:30:27,266 that enslaved people understood 607 00:30:27,366 --> 00:30:30,300 when they escaped into the Great Dismal Swamp 608 00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:33,200 at the border of North Carolina and Virginia, 609 00:30:33,300 --> 00:30:35,600 and established long-lasting settlements there 610 00:30:35,700 --> 00:30:38,666 with furtive ties to the solid ground 611 00:30:38,766 --> 00:30:42,833 where they would have quickly been reclassified as property. 612 00:30:42,933 --> 00:30:46,100 It was apparent to the peoples of highland Southeast Asia 613 00:30:46,200 --> 00:30:49,433 who resisted domination by lowland empires 614 00:30:49,533 --> 00:30:51,066 for many centuries, 615 00:30:51,166 --> 00:30:55,433 a story Jim Scott tells in "The Art of Not Being Governed," 616 00:30:55,533 --> 00:30:57,633 a study in geographic imagination 617 00:30:57,733 --> 00:31:00,533 that puts the upland margins of empire 618 00:31:00,633 --> 00:31:05,100 at the center of a counter-imperial picture of history. 619 00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:08,966 I have my own way of thinking about this question, 620 00:31:09,066 --> 00:31:11,000 which, as it happens, 621 00:31:11,100 --> 00:31:14,200 I developed while thinking about a series of dreams 622 00:31:14,300 --> 00:31:17,133 that I began having a few years ago. 623 00:31:17,233 --> 00:31:21,800 In these dreams, I start walking up a wooded slope, 624 00:31:21,900 --> 00:31:25,933 and here the dreams depart 625 00:31:26,033 --> 00:31:29,866 from the low terrain of the Carolina Piedmont where I live. 626 00:31:29,966 --> 00:31:33,166 In the dreams, the slope rises and rises, 627 00:31:33,266 --> 00:31:36,833 through the loblolly pine into steep pastures, 628 00:31:36,933 --> 00:31:38,866 which level out into high meadows 629 00:31:38,966 --> 00:31:42,600 and then rise again to crests of stone. 630 00:31:42,700 --> 00:31:44,600 Sometimes there's no stone. 631 00:31:44,700 --> 00:31:46,233 The meadows are the top. 632 00:31:46,333 --> 00:31:48,533 They slope along a broad ridge line, 633 00:31:48,633 --> 00:31:50,400 or they may be just a couple hundred 634 00:31:50,500 --> 00:31:52,600 vertical feet of pasture 635 00:31:52,700 --> 00:31:56,866 with a little mix of beech and oak tufting on top. 636 00:31:58,033 --> 00:32:01,066 Only waking destroys my new geography. 637 00:32:01,166 --> 00:32:03,166 And when I wake up, my sense that the dream 638 00:32:03,266 --> 00:32:06,466 has identified something real is so strong 639 00:32:06,566 --> 00:32:09,566 that I've more than once looked up topographic maps 640 00:32:09,666 --> 00:32:12,466 just to see whether the hills I've dreamed 641 00:32:12,566 --> 00:32:14,466 are actually there, 642 00:32:14,566 --> 00:32:17,500 which, of course, they're not. 643 00:32:17,600 --> 00:32:20,566 I think the wish these dreams express 644 00:32:20,666 --> 00:32:24,733 is for a way to get above a terrain without leaving it, 645 00:32:24,833 --> 00:32:27,733 to merge many small horizons 646 00:32:27,833 --> 00:32:30,200 into one image. 647 00:32:30,300 --> 00:32:33,300 These dreams sketch a geography of thinking, 648 00:32:33,400 --> 00:32:38,000 a way of seeing a place whole without leaving it. 649 00:32:38,100 --> 00:32:40,033 Of course, my dream landscape 650 00:32:40,133 --> 00:32:42,900 is not the only geography of thinking. 651 00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:45,300 It's the one that you might carry if you had grown up 652 00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:50,166 where I did, in a very specific Appalachian landscape. 653 00:32:50,266 --> 00:32:53,233 From any place that people lived there, 654 00:32:53,333 --> 00:32:56,666 you could escape on foot to a higher spot. 655 00:32:56,766 --> 00:33:01,166 Every settled place contained its own upward exits. 656 00:33:01,266 --> 00:33:04,300 It was really not one landscape but two, 657 00:33:04,400 --> 00:33:06,866 a pattern of valleys called hollows 658 00:33:06,966 --> 00:33:10,300 with its counterpart in a second pattern of ridges. 659 00:33:10,400 --> 00:33:13,100 The pair of terrains were joined 660 00:33:13,200 --> 00:33:15,533 by steep, mainly wooded hillsides, 661 00:33:15,633 --> 00:33:19,933 and knowing the valleys did not mean you knew the ridges. 662 00:33:20,033 --> 00:33:23,433 A slight misstep setting off from a high place 663 00:33:23,533 --> 00:33:26,033 could land you in an unintended valley 664 00:33:26,133 --> 00:33:29,433 with unexpected people and miles by the valley roads 665 00:33:29,533 --> 00:33:31,766 from where you meant to be. 666 00:33:31,866 --> 00:33:34,700 The two landscapes had complementary logic, 667 00:33:34,800 --> 00:33:39,500 and moving between them took caution and attention. 668 00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:44,900 That's a landscape that gives its dissidents 669 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:49,733 an upward path to escape on foot, at least for a while, 670 00:33:49,833 --> 00:33:54,233 and that lends its critics a commanding view of its shape. 671 00:33:54,333 --> 00:33:56,866 It's not a safe or certain landscape, 672 00:33:56,966 --> 00:33:59,100 and moving across it can always exact 673 00:33:59,200 --> 00:34:01,166 the price of confusion, 674 00:34:01,266 --> 00:34:04,666 the likelihood of still walking the wrong way 675 00:34:04,766 --> 00:34:06,500 when night comes. 676 00:34:07,600 --> 00:34:10,900 So with this image in mind, let's return for a minute 677 00:34:11,000 --> 00:34:15,100 to those opening images of a landscape as a point of origin. 678 00:34:15,200 --> 00:34:18,600 Take E.P. Thompson, whose radical coal miner 679 00:34:18,700 --> 00:34:22,900 literally came from the ground as Thompson says. 680 00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:25,400 Actually, everything in Thompson's story 681 00:34:25,500 --> 00:34:27,233 feels as if it came from the ground 682 00:34:27,333 --> 00:34:31,533 and had some sense of it clinging to the defining acts 683 00:34:31,633 --> 00:34:34,666 of the radicals whose stories he tells. 684 00:34:34,766 --> 00:34:38,066 Without saying so, not more than once anyway, 685 00:34:38,166 --> 00:34:40,900 Thompson manages to conjure up that most un-Marxist 686 00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:42,933 and un-academic thought, 687 00:34:43,033 --> 00:34:46,300 that the land itself was somehow aligned 688 00:34:46,400 --> 00:34:50,400 with the populist and radical ancestors of English socialism 689 00:34:50,500 --> 00:34:53,966 and that its defining chemistry, color, and scent 690 00:34:54,066 --> 00:34:58,266 were present in the moments of their decisive acts, 691 00:34:58,366 --> 00:35:02,666 that the land was a friend to its own dissenters. 692 00:35:02,766 --> 00:35:07,266 Berry, too, wants the land to be with him in his dissent, 693 00:35:07,366 --> 00:35:08,866 dissent from what he called 694 00:35:08,966 --> 00:35:11,066 in the title of his most famous book, 695 00:35:11,166 --> 00:35:13,233 "The Unsettling of America," 696 00:35:13,333 --> 00:35:15,966 the separation of identity from place, 697 00:35:16,066 --> 00:35:20,266 pleasure from work, eating from knowledge. 698 00:35:20,366 --> 00:35:22,766 These claims of nativity 699 00:35:22,866 --> 00:35:26,700 are really bids for sanctuary, 700 00:35:26,800 --> 00:35:30,166 for a piece of ground where the higher, 701 00:35:30,266 --> 00:35:32,200 not the higher, let's say the larger, 702 00:35:32,300 --> 00:35:37,033 the larger logic of the world does not entirely rule, 703 00:35:37,133 --> 00:35:39,633 a seedbed for your dissent. 704 00:35:39,733 --> 00:35:42,833 What else are people getting at when they say, 705 00:35:42,933 --> 00:35:44,266 "They tried to bury us, 706 00:35:44,366 --> 00:35:47,300 "they didn't know we were seeds"? 707 00:35:47,400 --> 00:35:50,400 Imagine a terrain where that's true. 708 00:35:51,566 --> 00:35:53,166 Thoreau wrote in his journal, 709 00:35:53,266 --> 00:35:57,233 around the same time that he was engaging Massachusetts's 710 00:35:57,333 --> 00:36:00,366 dispute over the Fugitive Slave Act's enforcement, 711 00:36:00,466 --> 00:36:05,066 that it was a "maimed and imperfect nature" 712 00:36:05,166 --> 00:36:07,666 that he was "conversant with." 713 00:36:08,833 --> 00:36:11,066 For someone who went into the landscape 714 00:36:11,166 --> 00:36:13,533 to see himself reflected, 715 00:36:13,633 --> 00:36:16,666 that's a strong piece of self-knowledge. 716 00:36:16,766 --> 00:36:19,033 Walking to the ponds, as he put it, 717 00:36:19,133 --> 00:36:22,433 was never a return to something pristine. 718 00:36:22,533 --> 00:36:24,966 It was, like politics, 719 00:36:25,066 --> 00:36:28,700 a way of joining in with a record of damage 720 00:36:28,800 --> 00:36:30,700 and of conceits and fantasies 721 00:36:30,800 --> 00:36:33,233 that have turned to material facts, 722 00:36:33,333 --> 00:36:36,000 which then have to be inhabited. 723 00:36:37,933 --> 00:36:40,900 The violence of nationalism and of nativism, 724 00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:43,100 to return to those words, 725 00:36:43,200 --> 00:36:46,866 is partly in their denial of these realities, 726 00:36:46,966 --> 00:36:48,500 the realities of imperfection, 727 00:36:48,600 --> 00:36:53,066 of conflict, of multiplicity, of inherited damage, 728 00:36:53,166 --> 00:36:55,233 their torrid fantasy of a terrain 729 00:36:55,333 --> 00:36:58,133 that is theirs and no one else's, 730 00:36:58,233 --> 00:37:01,366 that's home to their meaning and no other. 731 00:37:01,466 --> 00:37:03,833 The violence gets more concrete, of course, 732 00:37:03,933 --> 00:37:07,966 in detention centers and airports and the building of walls, 733 00:37:08,066 --> 00:37:10,300 but some of it belongs to the very idea 734 00:37:10,400 --> 00:37:14,300 that any place in the world could belong to and ratify 735 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:16,733 just one way of being in it. 736 00:37:17,900 --> 00:37:21,366 A landscape that sides with its dissenters, 737 00:37:21,466 --> 00:37:24,600 like a historical narrative or a constitutional culture 738 00:37:24,700 --> 00:37:28,100 that prizes its dissidents and outsiders, 739 00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:33,133 may be a resource for a certain productive 740 00:37:33,233 --> 00:37:35,833 ethical ecology and political ecology 741 00:37:35,933 --> 00:37:39,566 between self-restraint and self-assertion, 742 00:37:39,666 --> 00:37:41,966 at least for people like me 743 00:37:42,066 --> 00:37:45,133 whose minds are already and always 744 00:37:45,233 --> 00:37:46,900 bent toward terrain. 745 00:37:48,133 --> 00:37:50,833 In landscapes whose meaning is as crowded 746 00:37:50,933 --> 00:37:53,066 and conflictual as ours, 747 00:37:53,166 --> 00:37:57,533 there's room, at least, for strange kinds of dissent 748 00:37:57,633 --> 00:38:01,500 and for unexpected kinds of consciousness. 749 00:38:01,600 --> 00:38:04,566 When I finish a reflection like this one, 750 00:38:04,666 --> 00:38:09,100 I feel, like Berry or like E.P. Thompson's miner, 751 00:38:09,200 --> 00:38:11,233 that I'm recollecting myself, 752 00:38:11,333 --> 00:38:12,666 rising up from the ground 753 00:38:12,766 --> 00:38:16,566 and reborn into my usual consciousness. 754 00:38:16,666 --> 00:38:19,633 We might ask this question about any little 755 00:38:19,733 --> 00:38:23,100 ecological trip like this one, any sojourn 756 00:38:23,200 --> 00:38:27,300 into the question of nature, nativity and place. 757 00:38:29,233 --> 00:38:31,833 The question is does it make the question, 758 00:38:31,933 --> 00:38:36,100 does it make the issue of how to live among other people 759 00:38:36,200 --> 00:38:40,066 seem simpler or seem more complicated? 760 00:38:40,166 --> 00:38:41,400 If it makes it seem simpler, 761 00:38:41,500 --> 00:38:44,566 maybe we should mistrust where we've been. 762 00:38:44,666 --> 00:38:47,133 If it makes the question feel more complicated, 763 00:38:47,233 --> 00:38:50,433 then we might, for the moment, be doing something right, 764 00:38:50,533 --> 00:38:54,833 no matter how difficult making sense of it may be. 765 00:38:54,933 --> 00:38:57,033 Thank you very much for joining me, 766 00:38:57,133 --> 00:38:58,766 and I'm delighted to discuss 767 00:38:58,866 --> 00:39:01,366 the themes of this lecture or anything else with you. 768 00:39:01,466 --> 00:39:04,133 (audience applauds)