Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril

Char Miller

Description

This collection of environmental essays explores the threats of fire, drought, development, and fracking. Miller's thoughtful vignettes and fascinating historical interpretations clearly lay out our environmental challenges and threats due to climate change.

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Weeks Act
• Farallon Islands
• John Muir
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Chin Music Press Inc.
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781634050388
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 by Char Miller
Publisher
Reverberations Books
Santa Cruz, CA
www.reverberationsbooks.com
Imprint of Chin Music Press
Seattle, WA
www.chinmusicpress.com
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022935659
ISBN: 978-1-63405-037-1
First Edition
Printed in Canada
For Heili and Nora
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Natural Consequences has benefitted greatly from travels and conversations with my comrade-in-arms Judi Lipsett, whose insights and editorial interventions have been crucial to this book and all others. Susan Brenneman at the Los Angeles Times, and for whom some of these essays were initially written, has sharpened my prose and pushed for greater nuance in it. At Reverberations Books/Chin Music Press I am indebted to publishers Gregory Graalfs and Bruce Rutledge for their enthusiasm, generosity, and support. And a major shout out to friend and colleague Todd Shimoda: He read every word of Natural Consequences and made it much tighter and more compelling.
As this book went into production, two major life events occurred within my extended family. In late December 2021, our daughter and son-in-law brought the amazing Elinor Ruth (Nora) into this world. Five days later, after cheering Nora’s birth, my beloved sister, Heili, died. Natural Consequences is dedicated to them, and the inescapable weave of love and loss, joy and grief.
CONTENTS
Points of Departure: Introduction
Re / creation
Walking Through a Pandemic
Rising Tides
Recreating the San Gabriels
Trail Mix
Flower Power
Embers
Time to Pivot
Fiery Past
Burning Eyes
Forest for the Trees
Bonfire Politics
LA is Burning!
Enough is Enough
Hot and Fast
Architects of Smoke
Unearthed
America Fracked
At Fault
A California Nightmare
Divest Now
Carbon Sequestered
Watersheds
Upper Reaches
The Water Beneath Our Feet
Restoring Big Tujunga
Danger Below
Desert Waters
Unquenchable Thirst
Follow the Money
Safe Havens
This Land is Their Land
Coastal Haze
Unsanctified
Marine Life
Grand Design
Grandmother Ocean
Niche
Homesteaded
Defensible Space
Air Flow
Concrete Loss
Code Green
Build Up
Re-Righting the City
Growing Native
Indigenous Grounds
POINTS OF DEPARTURE
My first clue should have been the length of its tail, but I completely missed its significance when I pushed through the windowless door of Mason Hall and stepped into the cool morning. Five feet away, an animal walked up the ADA ramp, stared at me and kept moving. Thinking it was a feral, songbird-eating cat, I clapped my hands to startle it, but no sooner had one hand struck the other than I realized my error. This was no stray domesticated feline. It was a bobcat, lean and beautiful. As it slipped through the railing, landed softly on the sidewalk below, and padded across the manicured landscape, it looked perfectly at home.
This small moment marks a particular time and place. Yet the vignette is also a reminder more generally that we share spaces that we often think of as ours, alone. To be alert to the reality that we cohabitate with other species is not easy to do in a contemporary society that has been so effective in flattening the environment to suit its needs. But cultivating that awareness is essential, Charles Sepulveda argues in his powerful essay, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility” (2018), if we have any hope of repairing the land and our relationship with it.
A member of the Tongva and Acjachemen nations in Southern California, and a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah, Sepulveda links colonial-settler society’s efforts to displace the region’s Indigenous Peoples and the landscape they stewarded with its intense efforts to control the Santa Ana River. Channeled, dammed, and leveed, the river has been desecrated. Yet to restore the region’s largest watershed requires more than dismantling its concrete-straightjacketed condition that defines its once-braided course. “I want to bring her back to life and decolonize our sacred waters,” he writes, by exposing the “colonial processes through the history of systematic domestication forced on both Native peoples and their lands/waters” and to develop an “alternative model meant to assist in the re-establishment of human-beings’ organic relationships to land.” Central here is the concept of Kuuyam, the Tongva word for guests. By this means, non-natives are “potential guests of the tribal people, and more importantly — of the land itself.” The land as place not only is sanctified, it’s replete with life “beyond human interests.”
It’s one thing to acknowledge that the settler society of which I am a part has brutalized and dispossessed Indigenous Peoples while exploiting the land, its soils, minerals, and waters. It’s another thing to figure out how to live and act as a good guest. My instinct — and Natural Consequences is an outgrowth of it — is to start small. To observe, to witness, to reflect. To wonder. Then to write about the things that catch my eye or that I don’t understand yet feel the need to, and frame these inchoate thoughts, as historians tend to do, in context. Our professional conceit is straightforward — the past matters. But to what degree? To whom and for whom? Why? There are no simple answers to these questions, and one could spend a lifetime trying to come to terms with them. Trust me, I have. The process only gets more complicated if the claim that the past matters is made relative to environmental politics and policy. Those who formulate policy at all levels of government tend to do so reactively — the goal is to solve a set of pre-existing concerns with relative dispatch. Historians are reflective; speed is not our concern. Nothing slows down the process like asking whether the problem as defined is in fact a problem, or asking if it’s a problem only for those who have defined it. Is there another unidentified issue that might be more important to more people and for different reasons? You can see why we don’t get invited out much.
So I have to wrangle any invitation I can to speak with land managers, wildland firefighters, and grassroots organizations committed to environmental preservation and justice; or those devoted to ecological restoration, urban greening, and watershed health; or any civic group or cultural institution — from the League of Women Voters and the Autry Museum to the Rotary Club. Ok, I’m an academic and talk for a living, so this impulse to get in front of a microphone isn’t solely about public service. That said, most of the time the event’s organizers offer ideas about of-the-moment topics and hot-button issues their constituencies wish to explore. Their ideas set the agenda, and I have to decipher as best I can how and why the requisite concerns have emerged, contextualizing their on-the-ground realities and historical underpinnings. If I’m lucky, the conversations do not end there, but might morph into a professional article, magazine essay, newspaper commentary, blog post, or even a book. Natural Consequences grew out of my engagements with these opportunities and the chances I’ve been given to speak to communities about the decisions earlier generations made for how they would live, work, and act in and on the world. My larger hope is that more informed deliberations about the past might lead to smarter choices for the future, though this too is a touch self-serving. Entering the civic arena, participating in public debate and discourse, engaging as an ally, and amplifying voices of those too-long silenced, may also help me and others become more thoughtful guests.
That the dominant culture — industrial, profit-driven, consuming — has been a rampaging visitor, that we have trashed this good earth, is evident in the issue-centered and site-specific chapters that follow. So are some of the possible resolutions, whether implied or explicit. If we are to understand our place in whatever location we inhabit, step one is to step out. Walking a street, strolling along rivers or even flood-control channels, hiking uphill and down, or playing in a park or on a beach — each offers a respite. The essays in Re / creation suggest outdoor activities can spark conversations about the physical terrain through which we move. It sparks ideas we might hold about our environment and how we might share them. This interplay and the context in which it occurs is what in Camping Grounds (2021) historian Phoebe Young calls “public nature,” a setting “where people work out relationships to nature, nation, and each other.”
How we develop a new relationship with wildfire, the subject of Embers, may determine the larger contours of life in California and other parts of the flammable West. That is why these essays read like dispatches from some hellish frontline. But the battle is not with fire as fire, although combat is often the rhetorical device that journalists and public officials deploy to describe the effort to control these blazes. The battle is with ourselves. It’s with the historic decision the US Forest Service and other agencies made in the early twentieth century to suppress fire and, not incidentally, oppress Indigenous fire managers for whom the flame was a natural land-management tool. Conquering fire has been a particularly onerous form of racial imperialism. The consequences of those actions can be read in the intensifying wildfires in the first decades of the twenty-first century, conflagrations that are also driven by climate forces, political calculations, and new subdivisions constructed in a drying out landscape. Dismantling these interlocking actions, and the systems they erected, is not simple. Not to do so is a choice that has deadly consequences.
The same can be said about the struggle to eliminate fossil fuels. Unearthed explores some of the dimensions of the enduring challenge to decarbonize the economy by tracking the past t