"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Geography, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Willems-Braun, Bruce"@en . "2009-04-06T19:48:39Z"@en . "1996"@en . "Doctor of Philosophy - PhD"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "This study examines the cultural construction of nature on Canada's west coast\r\nand relates it to the continued presence of a 'colonial imaginary' in practices and\r\nrhetorics surrounding the use and management of nature and resources in the region.\r\nThe work weaves together three arguments. First, drawing on recent\r\nscholarship in social theory, it is argued that what counts as 'nature' on Canada's west\r\ncoast does not pre-exist its construction in and through a series of discursive, social,\r\ntechnical and institutional practices whereby it is made visible and available to forms of\r\ninstrumental reason. The work therefore draws attention to the role that language plays\r\nin disclosing a world of involvements and intentions such that our exhibitions of nature\r\nare intimately related to how nature is encountered and remade in everyday practices.\r\nSecond, it is argued that the construction of nature in British Columbia is always\r\nimplicated in relations of power and domination, but that epistemological traditions\r\nwhich locate nature as something that exists completely apart from our constructions of\r\nit makes these relations difficult to recognize. In particular, the study explores how\r\nconstructions of nature at various sites - from the abstractions of industrial forestry to\r\nthe paintings of Emily Carr - serve to naturalize, or contest, the hierarchical power\r\nrelations generated by colonialism on Canada's west coast. Third, it is argued that the\r\nconstruction of nature does not belong to a singular or unified History, but rather that\r\nnature is constituted in and through social practices that are multiple and discontinuous\r\nand which carry their histories with them. Thus, by relating constructions of nature to\r\nthe perpetuation of colonialist practices in the region, two further arguments can be\r\nmade. First, that colonial discourse is neither singular nor unified. And, second, that\r\npostcolonialism is not simply an historical stage that supersedes colonialism, but that the 'after-effects' of colonialism still infuse the present. This has important\r\nimplications for both ecological and anti-colonial politics on Canada's west coast.\r\nConsistent with the theoretical framework, the work proceeds as a series of\r\nstudies rather than a single, unified account of nature's materialization. Each chapter\r\nexplores different ways that nature is 'framed', traces histories and spatialities that\r\norganize and inform its appearance, and evaluates these practices in terms of a politics\r\nof decolonization. Particular attention is paid to how these constructions of nature\r\nauthorize certain social actors to 'speak for' nature in the midst of struggles over the\r\nfate of the region's temperate rainforests while marginalizing others, often those whose\r\nlives are most closely tied to the 'nature' in question. By showing the ways that a\r\ncolonialist visuality continues to inform what counts as nature on Canada's west coast,\r\nthe thesis insists on the urgent need for a 'reflexive environmentalism' that takes\r\nresponsibility for the social and political consequences of its representational practices."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/6837?expand=metadata"@en . "204800 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "M A T E R I A L I Z I N G N A T U R E : DISCOURSE, PRACTICE A N D POWER IN T H E T E M P E R A T E RAINFOREST by B R U C E W I L L E M S - B R A U N B . A . , The University of Winnipeg, 1988 M . A . , The University of British Columbia, 1991 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T OF T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR THE D E G R E E OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (Department of Geography) We accept this thesis^s conformin^-tD)the required standard. T H E UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A December 1996 \u00C2\u00A9Bruce Willems-Braun, 1996 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of CfC&\u00C2\u00A3tr&-ohL The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date 7^ vry/ta DE-6 (2/88) Abstract This study examines the cultural construction of nature on Canada's west coast and relates it to the continued presence of a 'colonial imaginary' in practices and rhetorics surrounding the use and management of nature and resources in the region. The work weaves together three arguments. First, drawing on recent scholarship in social theory, it is argued that what counts as 'nature' on Canada's west coast does not pre-exist its construction in and through a series of discursive, social, technical and institutional practices whereby it is made visible and available to forms of instrumental reason. The work therefore draws attention to the role that language plays in disclosing a world of involvements and intentions such that our exhibitions of nature are intimately related to how nature is encountered and remade in everyday practices. Second, it is argued that the construction of nature in British Columbia is always implicated in relations of power and domination, but that epistemological traditions which locate nature as something that exists completely apart from our constructions of it makes these relations difficult to recognize. In particular, the study explores how constructions of nature at various sites - from the abstractions of industrial forestry to the paintings of Emily Carr - serve to naturalize, or contest, the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism on Canada's west coast. Third, it is argued that the construction of nature does not belong to a singular or unified History, but rather that nature is constituted in and through social practices that are multiple and discontinuous and which carry their histories with them. Thus, by relating constructions of nature to the perpetuation of colonialist practices in the region, two further arguments can be made. First, that colonial discourse is neither singular nor unified. And, second, that postcolonialism is not simply an historical stage that supersedes colonialism, but that ii the 'after-effects' of colonialism still infuse the present. This has important implications for both ecological and anti-colonial politics on Canada's west coast. Consistent with the theoretical framework, the work proceeds as a series of studies rather than a single, unified account of nature's materialization. Each chapter explores different ways that nature is 'framed', traces histories and spatialities that organize and inform its appearance, and evaluates these practices in terms of a politics of decolonization. Particular attention is paid to how these constructions of nature authorize certain social actors to 'speak for' nature in the midst of struggles over the fate of the region's temperate rainforests while marginalizing others, often those whose lives are most closely tied to the 'nature' in question. By showing the ways that a colonialist visuality continues to inform what counts as nature on Canada's west coast, the thesis insists on the urgent need for a 'reflexive environmentalism' that takes responsibility for the social and political consequences of its representational practices. iii Table of contents Abstract i i Table of Contents iv List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Acknowledgment xi Chapter One The (in)temperate rainforest 2 Clayoquot Sound 2 Materializing nature: discourse, practice and power 8 Episodes 32 Chapter Two Producing marginality 34 The isolation of Simon Lucas 34 Abstracting timber, displacing culture 40 Unthinking neo-colonial 'cultures' of nature 52 Producing marginality 70 Chapter Three 'Saving Clayoquot' 75 Blockades 75 Defending nature: Clayoquot: On the Wild Side 81 Contesting wilderness, writing open futures 106 The cultural politics of nature 119 Chapter Four Territorializing desire 124 Introduction 124 Framing adventure 129 Territorializing desire . 1 3 7 Modernity and melancholy 145 Globalizing self-formation 165 Circumnavigations: enframing nature in Clayoquot Sound 176 Appropriations 188 iv Chapter Five Purifying nature and culture 200 Framing Carr 200 Revisiting Carr 207 Mapping \"BC Seeing\": society, space and visuality 224 Going deeper: from primitive artifacts to primal nature 248 Thinking the clearing 264 Postscript: painting land claims 267 Chapter Six Picturing the forest crisis 276 The 'disappearing' forest 278 Building the mirror of nature 283 Dreams of unity 295 Dynamic ecology 308 Ecologizing forestry 316 Back to the future? The problem of wilderness 325 Conclusion 330 Bibliography 338 V List of Tables Table 6.1 Watershed planning. vi List of Figures Figure 1.1 Map showing location of Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. 3 Figure 1.2 The Clayoquot Land Use Decision, 1993. Source: British Columbia, 7 1993a. Figure 1.3 Map showing traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth. 31 Figure 2.1 Cover. Beyond the Cut (MacMillan Bloedel n.d.). 41 Figure 2.2 Framing forestry. Technical rationality as legitimation. 43 Figure 2.3 Diagram of forest management practices. By convening debates in forestry around the management of the resource the forest is constructed as an abstraction separate from its social, cultural and ecological contexts. 50 Figure 2.4 Normalizing the forest. Sustained-yield forestry is perhaps the clearest articulation of the abstraction of 'timber' from its cultural and ecological surrounds, remaking nature in the image of an undifferentiated 'public interest'. 50 Figure 2.5 Geological Map of Skidegate Inlet. Source: Dawson 1880. 61 Figure 2.6 Nature's architecture. Cross sections of regions near Limestone Islands and Burnaby Islands off Queen Charlotte Islands. Source, Dawson 1880. 64 Figure 3.1 \"The World is Watching\". Cover of Maclean's Magazine, August 16, 1993. 78 Figure 3.2 Cover of Adrian Dorst and Cameron Young (1990) Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. Vancvouer: Western Canada Wilderness Committee. 83 Figure 3.3 \"On the wild side\": framing nature as spectacle. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 88 Figure 3.4 \"On the wild side\": framing nature as harmony. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 89 Figure 3.5. Nature's representative. Photographer, Ron Grover. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 92 Figure 3.6 Framing native culture as traditional: Tla-o-qui-aht paddlers. Photographer, Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 98 V l l Figure 3.7. Tropes of decay: fallen totem 'reclaimed' by nature. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 98 Figure 3.8 Framing imperial nostalgia: capturing the last vestiges of the disappearing 'primitive'. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 99 Figure 3.9 The colonial rhetorics of 'wilderness'. By mapping these dualism onto each other (culture - nature, modern - traditional) native peoples are conflated with nature and areas are seen to remain 'natural' only if the cultures that live there remain'traditional'. 101 Figure 3.10 Map showing native tree use on Meares Island. Source, Stryd (1986). 107 Figure 3.11 Enrolling allies: photograph and diagram of tree-ring sample from culturally bark-stripped tree showing phenol staining on edge of scar face. Archaeologists have enrolled knowledges from plant biology in order to locate 'archaeologically invisible' human tree use. Source, Stryd (1986). 110 Figure 4.1 Framing Adventure: Bowron Lakes, Canada. Source, Ecosummer Expeditions. 131 Figure 4.2 Framing Adventure: Irian Jaya, Papau New Guinea. Source, Ecosummer Expeditions. 134 Figure 4.3 \"Somewhere down there is your soul\". Adventure travel and the journey into the 'inner self. Source: Yukon Tourism Bureau. 161 Figure 4.4 \"There you are.\" Mediascapes and imaginative geographies. Photograph by author. 170 Figure 4.5. The World is full of Possibilities\". Territorializing desire in the global cultural economy. Source: Ecotraveller Magazine, January/February, 1995.173 Figure 4.6 Map showing Clayoquot Sound. Tofino is the last point accessible by road. 178 Figure 4.7 Planning viewscapes: Remaking nature as a visual resource. Source: MacMillan Bloedel (n.d.) Future Forests. 185 Figure 4.8 \"Walk on the Wild Side\". Pamphlet, courtesy Women of Ahousaht. 190 Figure 5.1 Kitwancool [1928] Emily Carr. 208 V l l l Figure 5.2 Cedar [1942] Emily Carr 209 Figure 5.3 Blunden Harbour. Photographer, C.F. Newcombe. 1901. 216 Figure 5.4 A Christian Village - A Heathen Village. Newcombe's source enrolled by Christian missionaries. Source: Crosby (1914). 218 Figure 5.5 Blunden Harbour. Photographer, Edmunde Schwine (?) circa. 1915. Source: Holm and Quimby (1980). 220 Figure 5.6 Blunden Harbour. [1930] Emily Carr. 221 Figure 5.7 Tanoo. Queen Charlotte Islands. [1913] Emily Carr. 225 Figure 5.8 Skidegate. [1912] Emily Carr. 226 Figure 5.9 Map showing route of Grafton's tours to Alaska. 1894. Source: Grafton (1894). 234 Figure 5.10 Cover of guide for Grafton's tours to Alaksa. Source: Grafton (1894). 236 Figure 5.11 Memalilaqua, Knight's Inlet. [1912 or 1913] Emily Carr. 245 Figure 5.12 Tenaktak House, Harbledown Island. Photographer, Edward Curtis, 1914. 246 Figure 5.13 Emily Carr painting in 1913. 249 Figure 5.14 Reconstructing pre-contact native societies. Edward Curtis in Blunden Harbour, circa 1915. Photographer, Edmunde Schwinke (?). 250 Figure 5.15 Edward Curtis and Indian actors clowning for camera. Blunden Harbour. Photographer, Edmunde Schwinke [1914(?)]. 252 Figure 5.16. Totem in Forest. [1931] Emily Carr. 258 Figure 5.17 Vanquished. [1031] 260 Figure 5.18 Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky [1935] Emily Carr. 261 Figure 5.19 Scorched Earth, Clear-cut Logging on Native Sovereign Lands, Shaman Coming to Fix. [1991] Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. 270 Figure 5.20 Clayoquot. [1993] Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. 271 Figure 5.21 Unititled (Longhouse Interior). Detail Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. 273 Figure 6.1 'Ancient temperate rainforests' Source: Sierra Club of Western Canada (1991) 279 Figure 6.2 Nature as self-regulating system. Howard Odum's conception of (a) Energy flows and (b) Material flows in a simple terrestrial ecosystem. Source: Stoddard (1986) 299 Figure 6.3 Nature as harmony. Source: Hammon (1991). 304 Figure 6.4 Clearcut Sound: Clayoquot Sound. The binary logic of industrial nostalgia. 306 X Acknowledgment Like its object of study, this thesis finds its conditions of possibility in multiple sites. Financial support was provided in the form of a doctoral fellowship by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (1991-1995). Many from outside U B C aided my research. Dorothy Baert, Adrian Carr, Jim Darling, Cathryn France, Susan Jones and Joanne Stark all deserve thanks. Staff at the Provincial Archives in Victoria and Special Collections at U B C provided advice and tracked down obscure texts. During the time that this study was completed Vancouver became my home. Randy Konrad, Sue Bailey and Steve Blair made my stay in the city memorable. This thesis could never have been completed without the care, encouragement and generosity of friends and colleagues in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Trina Bester, Alison Blunt, Noel Castree, Dan Clayton, David Demeritt, Averill Groeneveld-Meijer, Jennifer Hyndman, Michael Smith, Matt Sparke and Lynn Stewart provided a stimulating intellectual environment and taught me far more than could be learned in seminars and books. Michael Brown, Brett Christophers, Sarah Jain and Nicky Hicks deserve special thanks. Each could be counted on to bring a sense of humour, perspective and necessary distractions. Without them the thesis may have been completed earlier. At various points Trevor Barnes, Dan Hiebert and Geraldine Prattmade themselves available despite busy schedules. As always Cole Harris mixed advice with charm. Derek Gregory patiently watched as this work took many different forms and was always exceedingly generous with comments, resources and encouragement. Finally, I owe the most to Ruby Willems whose patience, support and companionship mark every page. xi That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. (Martin Heidegger) 1 CHAPTER 1 THE (IN) TEMPERATE RAINFOREST Clayoquot Sound It was hard not to be drawn into the events that surrounded Clayoquot Sound in the summer of 1993. Until then the region seemed only a remote and insignificant corner of British Columbia (Figure 1.1). Yet here, on a small wooden bridge along a gravel logging road, a drama would unfold of which few Canadians could remain unaware. Each day for three months, protesters would arrive before sunrise and await the arrival of vehicles that carried loggers to cutblocks further along the valley. At the first sight of headlights, those who had volunteered to be arrested would take their positions on the bridge. Often they would sit tightly bunched, arms locked together. The bright lights of T V cameras would illuminate the scene, an injunction would be read, and members of the local R C M P detachment would begin the thankless task of unwinding limbs, lifting bodies and carrying or dragging blockaders to the buses contracted to transport protesters to the nearby town of Ucluelet where they would be charged and released. As brief as these encounters were - often less than thirty minutes - they had the desired result. Images of heroic environmentalists defending a pristine nature from a rapacious forest industry flashed across T V screens in Canada and abroad. As the summer wore on, protesters came from further afield - France, England, Germany, Australia, United States - and by early fall, when rains brought the logging season and protests to a close, over 900 people had been arrested, making the blockade one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canada's history. By the time that an article in the Globe and Mail broke news of the pending stand-off in May 1993, I had been following events in the Sound for over two years. My acquaintance with the conflict began in 1990 when, at the invitation of a friend, I traveled 2 Figure 1.1. Map showing location of Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia 3 to Port Alberni to observe and participate in a weekend meeting that had been designed to draw together people representing different 'stakeholders' in what was then already referred to as BC's 'war in the woods'. At few other occasions would such a diverse assortment of individuals be present: members of province's forestry workers unions (PPWC and IWA), representatives from various Nuu-chah-nulth communities,' non-native residents of Tofino, Ucluelet and Port Alberni, environmentalists, tourism operators, workers in the fishery, several members from the caucus of the social democratic party that formed the opposition in the legislative assembly in Victoria, and even a professor of social work from Vancouver. The purpose of the gathering was to find common ground in conflicts over the fate of the region's immensely valuable temperate rainforests. At the time I was interested in strategies and tactics of building local coalitions that could challenge the hegemony of global capital. At this event transnational forestry companies had been excluded, since many thought that the formation of a truly 'local' agenda was possible only if corporations, with their interests in global markets and competition, were not allowed to set the terms of debate. One of my lasting memories from that weekend was that at various points we sat in circles. At the time I assumed - no doubt correctly - that this was done to facilitate open and frank discussion. Circles undermine hierarchy and provide opportunities for face-to-face interactions. I now realize that the circles also presupposed an epistemology, Circles assume centers, and the physical arrangement of chairs implied that despite our varied interests we were all contemplating and discussing the same 'object' - the 'temperate rainforest'. If we could all describe to the group - clearly and precisely - what this object 1 The Nuu-chah-nulth (literally \"all along the mountains\") live along the west coast of Vancouver Island and consist of thirteen groups organized into an umbrella political structure called the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. The Council is divided into a northern, central and southern district. Clayoquot Sound lies in the central district and includes the traditional territories of five bands (Tla-o-qui-aht, Ahousaht, Hesquiaht, Toquaht and Ucluelet). In anthropological literature the Nuu-chah-nulth have long been referred to as the \"Nootka\", an appellation commonly attributed to Captain Cook. 4 looked like from where we sat, then perhaps we could come to a complete understanding, recognize the points that we had in common, and reconcile our differences. From this meeting would then emerge a 'common front'. As the events of the weekend unfolded it became clear that, far from achieving this, any dreams of unity that participants had brought with them would remain unfulfilled. Tempers rose and fell, participants left and then were convinced to return, speakers berated others for their intolerance and fixed positions. When the dispute over Clayoquot Sound exploded into the national and international media two years later, few people acquainted with the area and its crosscutting social, cultural and economic tensions were caught by surprise. In one respect, this thesis is an account of the failure of consensus. Where participants had sought unity, they found disparity. In the place of accord, difference. Instead of a single vision, multiple refractions. Uneasy agreements reached after long and vigorous debate were destabilized almost as soon as they were forged. Perhaps foolishly, I still believe in the value of such gatherings. This is not because I believe that they somehow provide the possibility of undistorted communication. I am as convinced as any by critiques of the metaphysics of presence, which have shown that speech always occurs within an already constituted textuality and that locate relations of power in the knowledges and images that make communication possible. Speech, after all, assumes difference. Yet, the central assumption of this gathering - that if we listen to each other we can find points of connection and work towards locating other better ways of being-together - still provides a political fiction that I am unwilling to do without. It is the terms through which I see these events that have now changed. Where before I imagined that consensus could be reached by 'getting clear' about matters, stripping away ideological preconceptions and seeing things in the clear light of Reason, I now realize that if any 'center' existed in these circles, if any consensus was to be reached, it would be something built rather than found, and thus always provisional, always constituted by what was left 'outside' the frame, always open to contestation. 5 With this in mind, the events of that weekend in 1990 and the protests that captivated audiences in 1993 can be viewed through a different lens. The failure of consensus lay not in inadequate reason or in the mystifications of ideology, but in the fact that the singular 'object' around which we had supposedly convened - the 'temperate rainforest' - was not singular at all. This can be best illustrated through the colourful map that accompanied the contentious land-use plan which the BC government imposed on Clayoquot Sound in April 1993 (Figure 1.2). The map became the focal point for vigorous public debate and civil disobedience. But it also provides a useful metaphor. In this map the landscape is divided between various 'interests', part of an attempt to mediate between 'stakeholders' in the Sound. Rather than evaluate this map in terms of whether the right decisions were made, this study inquires after its conditions of possibility. In a corner of the map a legend relates colours to specific uses. I prefer to see this legend as a menu and each box as an icon. Click on any one, and a further series of screens and menus appear, each outlining further practices and discourses that lie 'behind' the 'self-evidence' of the land-use depicted in the original box. Thus, not only does the map bring together and mediate between various ways of constructing the temperate rainforest (each with its own social and cultural logics), but each construction can be seen as the product of further practices and myriad histories. A nature that appears singular and self-evident now appears multiple and provisional, continually displaced and never fixed. Distorted communication was not the cause of a failure of consensus, but nature's multiplicity. We were rarely talking about the same thing. Significantly, this is also a map of nature's production. If it were only a matter of incommensurable 'images' of nature, no protesters would be placing their bodies on the line, no desperate attempts at consensus would occur and no forest company executives, environmentalists or government leaders would travel to Europe carrying with them an array of maps, statistics, pamphlets and videos. Maps have a way of remaking reality. Yet if this map draws together and mediates between many ways of disclosing nature, then 6 Figure 1.2. The Clayoquot Land Use Decision. Source: British Columbia (1993a) 7 clearly nature's production in Clayoquot also follows no singular logic - it occurs in and through practices that find their conditions of possibility in multiple sites and which carry their histories within them; it is animated by temporal rhythms and spatial patterns that exceed the singular stories of teleology and place. It is to these rhythms and patterns that this study attends. Materializing nature: discourse, practice and power In what follows I take the dispute over the fate of the temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound as a point of departure for a wider discussion about the ways that discourse, practice and power are intertwined in the materialization of nature in British Columbia. This study is therefore organized around three related questions. How is nature constructed? How are these constructions both multiple and discontinuous with each other and what histories and spatialities does each carry within it? And, in what ways is nature's construction political and how does writing the 'politics of nature' offer serious political and analytical hope? Let me turn to each of these in greater detail. The cultural construction of nature. In what ways and with what effects is nature constructed? With the publication of Alexander Wilson's Culture of Nature in 1991, the 'cultural construction of nature' entered the mainstream of contemporary social theory and cultural criticism.2 This phrase has itself come to take on several meanings. Most immediately, it is taken to mean that what counts as nature is for us always 'culturally mediated'. Whenever we look out into a physical world that we assume to be external to 2Wilson's book was intended for a wide audience and pitched at a popular level. As such, it provided far more in the form of examples than it did in theoretical or philosophical argument. While its strength lay in Wilson's uncanny ability to find examples that placed in question an identity that had often been seen as pre-given, it provided few tools for interrogating the cultural and economic dynamics that underwrite nature's semiotic and material construction, leaves science undertheorized, and, beyond showing the obvious ecological implications of nature's cultural construction, rarely gives attention to the other political implications that are closely intertwined with how nature is understood. For accounts of what Andrew Ross calls 'nature's debt to society' that are more rigorous and occasionally more politically attuned, see Smith 1984; Haraway 1989,1991; Ross 1991, 1994; Cronon 1991, 1995; Latour 1993 and Wark 1994) 8, culture, we do so in ways that are invariably bound up with the practices that make it visible. Heidegger's (1962) notion of the 'clearing' (literally 'forest clearing' [Lichtung]) is helpful in this context. Heidegger argued that it is only within the clearing that things are made visible, that they can be dis-closed or come into presence. Importantly, Heidegger explained the clearing as always already historical.3 It is only through the construction of spaces of visibility (Rajchmann 1988; Gregory 1994) that range from the laboratories of technoscience (Latour 1987; Haraway 1992) to nature documentaries (Wilson 1991) that 'nature', or more specifically in this case, the 'temperate rainforest' is given form and meaning. This is not to say that the nonhuman world is merely a figment of our imagination, or that it does not have an existence apart from our descriptions of it. 4 Rather, it is to say that we can never know nature on its own terms: \"The way we describe and understand the world,\" Cronon (1995:296) explains, \"is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated.\" It is precisely this meaning of the 'culture' of nature that Donna Haraway captures so brilliantly in her work, and which she sums up succinctly in discussing nature as tropos - as figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. In short, Haraway writes (1992:296), nature cannot pre-exist its construction. When we assume nature's self-presence, we mistake our discursive practices for the things themselves.5 Drawing her 3Heidegger's argument has important - and often troubling - implications for ethics. For Heidegger, 'ethics' is always problematic to the extent that it fails to examine its conditions of possibility, or, in other words, so long as it remains forgetful of the world's worlding. Heidegger's call for a more originary ethics, although itself deeply problematic in its detachment from the 'everyday' (which Heidegger thought was compromised by the forgetting of Being), nevertheless reminds us that our debates over 'ethics' and !morality' assumes the clearing within which they occur. See Heidegger (1977a). 4Some have felt that theories of social nature have gone too far in writing out the materialty of nature (or nature as itself an actant). The historian of ecological ideas, Donald Worster (1988) is among the most vocal critics. See Benton (1989) for an approach that remains within the orbit of Marxist theory. Callon (1986), Haraway (1992), and Latour (1993) all attempt to retain the agency of 'nature' within science studies without falling into realist accounts. Yet, it is not at all clear how this agency can be figured without recourse to further representational practices. This tension is particularly pronounced in Haraway's work. On the one hand, for Haraway nature can never pre-exist its construction. Yet, on the other, she keeps reminding us that we are not the only 'actors' in this drama. But at no point does she elaborate on how this second point makes any difference to how we produce knowledges of nature. 5 As I explain below, for Haraway nature's 'construction' refers to far more than its 'framing' in language. 9 examples from the field where she was initially trained, Haraway explains that biology is a discourse and not the world itself. Thus, the further that we inquire into the practices of knowledge-building in biology, the more we encounter a series of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that range from science-funding agencies to patriarchy and even imperialism. A similar point - albeit far less politicized - is made by Bruno Latour (1993), who argues that 'nature' emerges as a discrete entity only through practices of purification whereby the quasi-objects of our world - those proliferating hybrids of culture and nature - are assigned unambiguously to either one identity or the other. Only in this way can some things appear as 'cultural' and others 'natural' where in reality the two are always mixed together.6 In the work of Latour and Haraway, then, our traditional lenses are reversed; What must be explained is not how things become hybrids (how nature is 'polluted' by culture) but rather how such hybrids are made to appear as if they were not, an appearance which, as Latour has shown, is the product of considerable work. There is another, equally important sense in which we might speak of the culture of nature. So far, I have paid attention to the way that 'nature' is imbued with cultural meanings. Yet, when writers like Haraway and Latour insist on the culture of nature, they are referring to much more than a layer of cultural meanings spread over nature like a veneer, which, when stripped away, leaves only a natural essence. For Haraway and Latour, nature is cultural in ways that are deeply material (as is also true of the reverse). Haraway (1992) for instance, insists that nature (including the 'body') is relentlessly artifactual. This is particularly evident at the end of the twentieth century when: (1) nature everywhere is 'remade' in the image of the commodity, or in Fredric Jameson's (1984) words, capitalism has penetrated -1 retain the masculinist phrase intentionally - into nature's very structure; and, (2) rapid technological advances have resulted in the mixing 6 Again, for Latour this is an element of nature's material production, only it remains invisible to us, because we assume the prior existence of the 'purified' realms. 10 of the technical and the organic in ever more sectors of social and economic life. 7 Thus, it has become increasingly difficult to locate any 'site' which is unambiguously 'natural'. Human modification of the physical world occurs today on a global scale, from global warming and holes in the ozone to the mapping and manipulation of genetic material, leading some to write nostalgically about the 'end' of Nature (McKibben 1989).8 Neil Smith (1990) has provided what remains the most systematic and sustained attempt to theorize nature's production, but it is one that this study seeks to both problematize and extend. Smith's project follows two paths. First, his focus on nature's production is meant to undermine the naturalization of capitalist social relations. This had occurred, he argued, because of a dualistic conception of nature (as external and universal). By positing nature as external, he argued, Western cultures had come to assume that it is an immutable order that exists outside and prior to culture (and thus free of ideology). This has important implications. Once the social content of nature is evacuated it is nature itself that appears to set limits, not the historical development of particular social formations. These limits could then be known through a positivist science. On the other hand, by assuming humans to be part of nature (nature as universal), existing social relations are 'naturalized' (seen as 'God-given' and immutable). By writing of nature as produced, Smith undermines the reification of nature and culture as separate entities and shows both to be internal to the other. Equally as important, Smith's project builds an account of nature's production that places the focus clearly on the ways that nature is remade under capitalist forms of production. As Castree (1995:20) summarizes, the production of nature thesis captures the 7Haraway's 'cyborg' metaphor - although used broadly to signify nature as always a hybrid of the natural, social and technical - best captures, I think, the acceleration of the mixing of the technical and the organic in late twentieth century technocultures. 8 McKibbon's account, of course, relies on exactly the distinctions between nature and culture that so many recent accounts have sought to undermine. If nature and culture stand in an internal relation to each other, then no transformation of nature can be said to be unnatural. It should be noted that this is a very different argument than saying that we therefore have no means by which to judge whether transformations are desirable or undesirable. 11 way that \"the imperatives of capitalism bring all manner of natural environments and concrete labour processes upon them together in an abstract framework of market exchange....and in so doing, actively appropriate, transform, and creatively destroy it.\" In essence, at the end of the twentieth century \"first nature\" is everywhere transformed into \"second nature\" according to the logic of capitalist accumulation, a process related nowhere else with such brilliance as in Cronon's (1991) Nature's metropolis. Castree argues that Smith's thesis, although one of the most sophisticated theoretical maps produced, remains incomplete. Like a number of other writers (both within and outside marxist scholarship) he indicts marxist accounts for failing to adequately recognize the 'materiality' of nature, or, in other words, the ways that nature is an agent and presence in history (see also Worster 1988). I agree with Castree's argument (and with Demeritt (1994) who similarly critiques the 'new cultural geography' for locating agency only in humans). And, I can also see why critics wish to remind us, first, that our scientific knowledges are possible only because there is a material world to which they refer and thus which allows for certain representations and not others (see Hayles 1993); and, second, that there are consequences to our productions of nature. Yet, I fail to see how the language of agency is helpful, since there is no way to figure nature's 'role' in producing scientific knowledge, nor to know the 'impact' of human activities on a non : human world, outside yet other practices of representation. The language of agency, I fear, risks reintroducing an unacknowledged realism (see Lenoir 1994). As important as these issues are, I wish to extend Smith's thesis along different lines. As I have discussed elsewhere (Willems-Braun 1992, see also Castree 1995), drawing on Paul Smith (1988), theoretical explanations necessarily 'cerne' their subjects -that is, they 'encircle' or 'enclose' their subjects within accounts that limit in order to explain. As Paul Smith notes, to 'dis-cern' implies more than to 'perceive clearly', but more correctly, involves locating and taking responsibility for precisely those moments of theoretical 'enclosure' that limit possibilities for alternatives. Although Smith was 12 concerned foremost with locating the various ways that theories of subjectivity 'cerned' the 'subject', I argued that the same could be said for how marxist theory 'cerned' Nature. The problem with marxist accounts of produced nature, I suggested, was not simply that they were anthropocentric, although certainly one can see how this charge can be made (see Eckersley 1992), but instead that they 'enclosed' nature's production around a rather narrowly circumscribed notion of 'labour'. The 'ecocentric' critique is, I think, clear enough, and needs little elaboration. By privileging human labour (as nature's 'metabolism'), marxist accounts are seen to be guilty of reinforcing an instrumental relation to non-human nature, essentially complicit in the domination of nature. That said, it is difficult to imagine a relation to the non-human that is neither anthropocentric nor instrumental, simply because our relation to things is always already mediated through language (see Bennet and Chaloupka 1993).9 My concern takes a different tack. By narrowly circumscribing 'labour' as that which occurs within capitalist production, Smith (and others) essentially locate a singular 'motor' to nature's production: the logic of capital. Uneven development - as important as this concept is for tracing the 'geographical logic' of capital accumulation - becomes for Smith (1990:xvi) the \"concrete process and pattern of the production of nature under capitalism.\" Certainly marxist accounts have much to contribute to explanations for why deforestation is a growing problem in South-East Asia, or why plantations of fast-growing trees in Georgia and Kentucky are related to and threaten to re-organize the form of industrial forestry in British Columbia (see Marchak 1995). But they are less able to explain how it is that things are able to 'show up' as objects with 'value' to begin with. Here Haraway's work provides insight. When Haraway speaks of nature as 'artifactual', she brings attention to bear on how nature is 'made' through a series of practices. Yet, I think Haraway's phrase -artifactual nature - is able to say much more, for it draws together both nature's cultural 9In this sense, ecocentrism can stand as an ethical position (i.e. one can choose to make decisions that take into account a series of relations that are described to us by the science of ecology), but it cannot claim an epistemological foundation (i.e. we cannot claim to know what it means to 'think like a mountain'!). 13 construction and its material production. Nature is always and everywhere both semiotic and material. This does not mean that nature is divisible into 'concrete' and 'discursive' elements, nor do I think that Haraway wishes to limit herself to the point that we can only know the concrete discursively. Rather, it is precisely because nature is known through a system of signs (semiotics) that it is made available to economic and political calculation.10 Smith's production of nature thesis - as much as it defies our understanding of the \"sacrosanct separation of nature and culture\" - perhaps needs to be reworked through an approach that seems equally 'quixotic': that nature is produced through representation. This can be made more clear by turning to Charles Taylor's (1992) elaboration of Heidegger's concept of language. Taylor locates two traditions in Western philosophy and science. The first - associated with Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac - is a doctrine of language that developed within the confines of modern epistemology and assumes language as instrumental. The second, beginning with Herder and finding its strongest expression in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, asserts instead that language has a constitutive function. It is this second tradition that informs my critique.\" However, we must be careful not to assume that language produces the reality it seeks to describe. When Heidegger argues that language transforms the world, it is important to keep in mind that 'world' for Heidegger is not the cosmos (which is indifferent to and precedes us) but the world of our involvements, or, in short, a sphere of intelligibility. It is in the world of our involvements that the things that surround us become bearers of properties, or are made available to us (in an instrumental manner).12 In essence, Heidegger argues that language provides a clearing [Lichtung] in which things come into presence (language is the 'house of being'). Thus, it is precisely through our discursive practices that things can 10Smith does note that \"the appropriation of knowledge is equally a part of this metabolism between human beings and nature\" (1990:20), but does not develop this in any depth. 1 1 This does not mean that the former is incorrect. Stephen White (1991) is useful here. Language is always both action-coordinating (it helps us do things) and world-disclosing (it makes things intelligible to begin with). Both aspects of language function simultaneously. 1 2 Heidegger distinguishes between that which is 'ready-at-hand' and that which is merely 'present-at-hand'. 14 be 'grasped' (both mentally and physically). But, it is also precisely this constitutive aspect of language that tends to be 'screened out' in everyday life when we approach the 'world' as consisting of pre-given objects. Let me relate this back to notions of nature's production. Language discloses. Thus, objects can have use and exchange value only after they are made visible within specific discursive practices.13 Political and economic calculation assumes a horizon of intelligibility. The practices that transform nature materially (production) occur only within this horizon. In short, culture is not simply implicated in the stories we tell about the natural world, but thoroughly imbricated in this world, in how it is made and remade. If we turn to the BC landscape this is immediately evident. Before British Columbia's coalfields could be 'capitalized' (and incorporated into global circuits of extractive capital), they required the development of visual technologies that saw the land in terms of stratigraphy and correlations across space, thereby transforming the science of 'reading the rocks' into one that was predictive. Nature provided 'signs' that could be read and on which further calculations could be made. As I will show in Chapter 2, these visual technologies were also far from politically innocent since they allowed scientists and entrepreneurs to separate nature's architecture from the native inhabitants that occupied the land. Likewise, Clayoquot Sound becomes the site for nature's production as a visual commodity only with the emergence of a complex semiotics that links this remote landscape to the metropolitan center. Elsewhere, biologists have shown that even our wilderness 'preservations' bear the marks of our ideas about nature (homeostasis, balance, etc.) which are made material in how these areas are managed (Botkin 1990; Chase 1986). The same is true for the human body. As Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) demonstrates, it is possible to map relays between how the body is imaged in medical discourses surrounding 'sex hormones' and the way that it is subsequently made a site of medical and 13Baudrillard (1981) makes a similar point when he notes that Marxist theory has assumed that use value stands in relation to exchange value in much the same way that nature stands in relation to culture. Use value, just like exchange value, Baudrillard argues, is already always a sign relation. 15 pharmacalogical intervention (and, capital accumulation). These interventions are at once political (male and female bodies are differentiated and subject to different practices of regulation) and material (the physical composition of the 'body' is altered in accord with the maps of the body that medical discourse provides). Over a century ago Marx wrote that society and nature were mediated through a metabolic interaction. As Smith (1990) explains, what was original in Marx's notion was that he saw labour as the 'motive force' of this interaction, essentially nature 'working on itself. Yet, in political ecology this has conventionally been understood through a narrow definition of 'labour': the mill-worker, farmer, and so on, transforming physical objects into commodities while at the same time physically transforming the material conditions of production (nature). Thus we can speak of a political ecology whereby nature is remade within the social, economic and institutional relations of production. Yet, perhaps what is included in 'labour' can be widened. If, as Alfred Schmidt argued, through labour \"men (sic) incorporate their own essential forces into natural objects [and] natural things gain a new social quality as use value\" (quoted in Smith, p. 19), there is no reason to exclude from this representational practices. The work of culture - if one can use such a phrase -has rarely been noted in political ecology accounts (beyond culture providing a set of beliefs or attitudes towards the environment), yet it is precisely because nature exists first as tropos that nature can be remade as commodity, just as the tropes of Orientalism underwrote European imperialism and channeled its development along various lines. In other words, we can imagine a politics of ecology (of how nature is made visible and available) that is equally part of any political ecology. This study stands - at one level - as an exploration of the relation between enframing and production. 'Enframing' is not solely about metaphors and representations. Making things visible does not leave things unchanged - it produces a 'world' in which calculation is possible. Following from this, the task of critical inquiry is not one of first noting the world of metaphor before turning to the 'real' world of materiality, but of 16 recognizing how metaphor and materiality are necessarily woven together. Borrowing from Judith Butler (1990), I use the phrase 'materializing nature' in order to capture this double movement by which our discursive practices at one and the same time demarcate and differentiate a material world and in this way open it to practices that materialize nature along certain paths. What constitutes the matter and fixity of nature, in other words, is no less material, but materiality is rethought as, in part, the effect of power. Nature and differential history. How are nature's constructions both multiple and discontinuous with each other, and what are the histories and spatialities that each carries with them ? In this thesis I argue that the production of nature does not occur according to any one historical or social 'logic'. Rather, nature is produced at any one moment and at any one place at the conjunction of multiple discursive, social, technological and institutional relations. This much, I think, is not new. However, to claim that nature is not produced as part of the unfolding of History or in terms of a social totality is not to claim that the production of nature is not historical or social. To clarify what I mean, let me turn briefly to Althusser's critique of Hegelian History in order to prise open the nature of historical time and the historical time(s) of nature.14 Althusser's critique was intended in part to place in question how notions of history had been conceptualized and deployed in Western Marxism. In short, Althusser's complaint was that Western Marxism had introduced History as a theoretical solution rather than a theoretical problem, thereby importing into Marxism a Hegelian notion of historical time that Althusser thought was antithetical to that found in Marx. In order to prosecute his case, Althusser isolates two 'essential characteristics' that structure Hegel's model of history - the homogenous continuity of time and the contemporaneity of time. 1 4 Althusser's critique is indebted in large measure to Bachelard's discussion of discontinuity in the history of the natural sciences and Levi-Strauss's attack on Sartre's notion of History as a series of progressive dialectical totalizations. I leave these to the side and focus only on Althusser since in many ways he brought them together in his articulation of differential history. 17 The arguments arrayed against the first characteristic of Hegelian history (homogenous continuity) are relatively uncomplicated. Hegel's notion of history, Althusser (1970:94) argues, is related to his particular understanding of dialectics as the unfolding of the Idea. This led Hegel to treat time as a continuum \"in which the dialectical continuity of the process of development of the Idea is manifest.\" Thus, Althusser writes, for Hegel, \"historical time is merely the reflection in the continuity of time of the internal essence of the historical totality incarnating a moment of the development of the concept.\" (p. 93). The implication, stated succinctly by Althusser, was that, given this assumption, \"the whole problem of the science of history would consist of the division of this continuum according to a periodization corresponding to the succession of one dialectical totality after another\" (p. 94). Events simply follow upon each other like links in a chain. The second characteristic - the contemporaneity of time - is related to the former and is somewhat more complicated. Althusser claims that this notion is bound up with Hegel's conception of the 'social totality'. For Hegel, the social totality was characterized by an intrinsic unity - a totality wherein every part expresses all others, and where each expresses the social totality that contains them. Althusser referred to this as a 'spiritual' unity, wherein all parts of the social totality existed in the same temporal relation. For Hegel, Althusser writes, the structure of historical existence is such that all the elements of the whole always co-exist in one and the same time, one and the same present, and are therefore contemporaneous with one another in one and the same present. This means that the structure of the historical existence of the Hegelian social totality allows what I propose to call an 'essential section' {coupe d'essence), i.e. an intellectual operation in which a vertical break is made at any moment in historical time, a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence....Each [element] in itself contains in the immediate form of its expression the essence of the totality itself\" (p. 94). In essence, the contemporaneity of time assumes that all elements in the present respond to the same historical logic. 18 In a sense the two characteristics of Hegel's notion of historical time can be understood through the structuralist terms of synchrony and diachrony, where synchrony is taken to mean contemporaneity in time while diachrony refers to continuity through time. Seen in this way it is a relatively simply matter of relating the synchronic and diachronic. The synchronic - seen as an 'essential section' where all parts are in an immediate relationship to all others - presupposes the continuous-homogenous time of History where the diachronic is conceived as \"merely the development of this present in the sequence of a temporal continuity in which the 'events' to which 'history' in the strict sense can be reduced are merely successive contingent presents in the time continuum.\" (p. 96). Not only do events follow upon each other like links in a chain, but each link in the chain is indivisible, it consists as a totality. Precisely because the Hegelian whole is a 'spiritual whole', in which all the parts 'conspire' together, Althusser argues, the unity of this double aspect of historical time (homogenous-continuity/contemporaneity) is, for Hegel, both possible and necessary. In essence, history becomes a succession of internally unified 'essential sections', one following upon another. As will become clear shortly, I will follow Althusser only part way along his argument. Althusser's primary objective was to show that our understanding of the 'social totality' determines our understanding of historical time. For Hegel, the social totality was a unified, singular essence, what Althusser called an 'expressive' or 'spiritual' unity. Thus, history must necessarily consist of an unfolding of successive unified moments. In Marx, Althusser finds a model of the social totality that departs significantly from this unity, and thus leads to a very different conception of historical time. Building on his earlier discussion (in For Marx) of the overdetermination of the social, Althusser argues that Marx formulated an understanding of the social totality that was constituted by complexity. Although still conceiving the social as a structured whole, Althusser argues that this social totality, rather than existing as a 'spiritual unity' contained levels or instances that were distinct or 'relatively autonomous', and which co-existed and perhaps 19 more importantly, were articulated together according to specific determinations. Although Althusser continued to assert that the social could be conceived as a unified totality, or, in other words, that the relative autonomy of its elements existed within a 'structure of dominance', he insisted that this could not be reduced to the primacy of a center but existed instead as a hierarchy of differential levels.15 Much debate has focused on whether Althusser - with his notion of determination by the economic in the 'last instance' and his 'science' of history - reproduced the totalizing sins of structuralism (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Young 1990). I will not reproduce those debates here. Most who have found Althusser's critique useful - Foucault and Derrida for instance - have simply jettisoned his notion of a 'social totality' and his preoccupation with locating determinations between 'levels' and retained Althusser's emphasis on multiple temporalities and historical discontinuity. If we follow this route, the implications that follow upon Althusser's critique are worth emphasizing. First, if, as Althusser asserts, the 'social' consists of differential levels, it becomes impossible to think the existence of this totality through the Hegelian category of the contemporaneity of the present, for any cross-section of the 'social' at any one particular 'moment' would reveal an array of presences and absences, each responding to the rhythm of different histories. Second, and following from this, the model of continuous and homogenous time can no longer be regarded as the single time of history. Let me here quote Althusser (1970:99-100) in some length. We can argue from the specific structure of the Marxist whole that it is no longer possible to think the process of the development of the different levels of the whole in the same historical time. Each of these different 'levels' does not have the same type of historical existence. On the contrary, we have to assign to each level a peculiar time, relatively autonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the 1 5As is well known Althusser retained the notion that these 'specific' determinations were fixed in the last instance by the level or instance of the economy, although, as Robert Young argues, this 'in the last instance' has been subject to much misunderstanding. The point, Young argues, is not that the economic should be seen as a simple causal function that operates alone, but rather, quoting from Althusser's For Marx, that \"the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state...From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes.\" (FM, p. 113. Quoted in Young 1990, pp. 57-59) 20 'times' of the other levels. We can and must say: for each mode of production there is a peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way by the development of the productive forces; the relations of production have their peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way; the political superstructure has its own history...; philosophy has its own time and history...; aesthetic productions have their own time and history...; scientific formations have their own time and history, etc. Each of these peculiar histories is punctuated with peculiar rhythms and can only be known on condition that we have defined the concept of the specificity of its historical temporality and its punctuations (continuous development, revolutions, breaks, etc.). If we return to the land-use map (Figure 1.2), with which I began, we can gain a sense of Althusser's argument. On this map, if we conceive of each coded land-use as 'levels', each with its own specific determinations, it quickly becomes evident that each responds to and is informed by temporalities that draw the past into the present in particular ways. The dynamics informing the production of nature as a visual resource are not the same, nor belong to the same history as those that have resulted in the production of nature as 'ecological reserves'. In short, Clayoquot Sound is not an 'essential section', it reverberates with multiple histories. The same, of course, can be said of the Sound's spatialities. Each level can be seen to define a series of relations of time and space that are unique and cannot be reduced to any other. Of course, all this is far more mixed up than the clearly demarcated spaces of the map suggest. Histories become articulated together, concepts move from one social site to another, metaphors are borrowed, and so on. At best, the Clayoquot map provides a snapshot of a production that integrates and relates these various levels and distributes them across the spaces of the landscape. Althusser's critique of Hegel is not without its contradictions. Throughout it lies a tension between the multiplicity of levels (with their various temporalities) and the notion of a social totality (where these levels are articulated into a whole).,16 Like Hegel, 16This can be clearly seen in the passage that follows immediately after the one quoted above. The fact that each of these times and each of these histories is relatively autonomous does not make them so many domains which are independent of the whole: the specificity of each of these times and each of these histories - in other words, their relative autonomy and independence - is based on a certain type of articulation in the whole and therefore on a certain type of dependence with respect to the whole....The specificity of these times and histories is therefore differential, since it is based on 21 Althusser assumes a unity of the present, which later writers like Lyotard - with his notion of a multiplicity of heterogeneous, conflicting and incommensurable histories - would come to reject. Lyotard (1988) points towards a much more ambiguous and complex, but, I think, infinitely more rich and politically useful notion of the social and of history that, at least for my purposes, suggests the need to pay particular attention to the multiple, intersecting points of emergence for identities and subjectivities. Yet, despite the many problems that later post-structural and postmodern writers have found in Althusser's work, they remain deeply indebted to his critique of Hegel, which, as Derrida (1981:57-58) succinctly summarizes, has shown \"that there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories different in their type, rhythm, mode of inscription - intervallic, differentiated histories.\" In short, our different materializations of nature carry within them their own histories and spatialities. What we encounter as 'nature' or as a 'natural landscape' contains in it innumerable beginnings and events and draws together countless configurations of people and places across space and time. Two additional observations need to be made. First, Althusser's critique of Hegelian historical time did not dispense with history so much as open the way for history to itself become an object of historical investigation, leading in turn to the radical revision of writing history and a new awareness that historical accounts were at once strategic and rooted in present concerns. In other words, if Hegelian historical time, with its dialectical unfolding of the Idea through successive unified 'moments', was fatally undermined by Althusser's critique, this did not spell the end of historical inquiry so much as alter what questions were posed and how 'history' and 'events' were mobilized. In this light, Foucault's genealogical method can be seen to emerge in the conceptual space opened by the differential relations between the different levels within the whole: the mode and degree of independence of each time and history is therefore necessarily determined by the mode and degree of dependence of each level within the set of articulations of the whole. The conception of the 'relative' independence of a history and of a level can therefore never be reduced to the positive affirmation of an independence in vacuo, nor even to the mere negation of a dependence in itself; the conception of this 'relative' independence defines its 'relativity'.\" (Althusser 1970:100). 22 Althusser (along with Bachelard and others). Foucault was concerned less with advancing notions of differential history (i.e. showing the relation between elements in the present) so much as demonstrating how the writing of history - prised free from teleology - could itself become a disruptive event by showing how identities in the present were neither necessary nor essential. Foucault's work was deeply historical, yet his project was far from that of the conventional historian retrieving the unbroken continuity of dialectical history in which the present appears as the last moment in the predestined unfolding of a historical logic, nor were his historical accounts bound to the attempt to capture the essence of things in their primordial origins. Rather than tracing a continuous development from origin to present, Foucault (1977) argued that for every identity could be found numberless beginnings and myriad events.17 Writing history, then, could never be a project of 'recovering' essences. Instead, faced with the proliferation of beginnings, the problem the historian poses is unavoidably grounded in the present (even if this remains 'outside' the picture) and determines - from amid these numberless beginnings - what constitutes an event, and its status in any 'series'. Rather than showing the solidity and inevitability of present identities, Foucault shows their contingent. \"What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin,\" Foucault writes (1977:142), \"it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.\" Foucault's genealogies, therefore, took those identities that we feel are without history (like Nature or the Body), and showed their emergence in the details and accidents of history, in order to show how their 'essences' were \"fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from many alien forms\" (p. 142). Genealogy, Foucault wrote, \"disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.\" (p. 147).18 Thus, where history 1 7To the extent that my argument could be taken to suggest that although discontinuous with each other, each level is discrete and unfolds according to its own unified historical logic, it is misleading. Each level continually opens up into multiple heterogeneous pasts. 18Seen in this light, it is not difficult to see why Foucault was continually irritated by, and sought to deflect inquiries into to how his genealogies could be politically useful. If, as Foucault argued, power and 23 is invoked in this thesis, it is in precisely this manner, not as a History of conflicts like Clayoquot Sound, but rather to destabilize the self-evidence of present-day constructions of 'nature' by which 'history' is being made today. Finally, Althusser's critique of History and Foucault's genealogical method have important implications for a politics of 'nature' (and, as I explain below, a politics of decolonization). Nature - if it is constituted at the intersection of multiple histories and socio-spatial practices - is a highly contested identity. But it follows from this that there is no one singular 'politics' of nature (or any privileged site of 'resistance' to how nature is 'enframed'). The fate of the temperate forest in a place like Clayoquot Sound is contested through a series of local and contingent struggles over what counts as nature, over how nature is materialized and over who has authority to speak for nature. The cultural politics of nature. In what ways and in terms of which relations is nature's construction political? And, how does writing nature's construction offer serious political and analytical hope? In most cases - with the possible exception of Bruno Latour -drawing attention to the culture of nature has been more than a philosophical quarrel or a self-congratulatory exercise in demystification. Instead it has usually proceeded as a component of a critique of ideology and inequality in existing social formations, often drawing attention to how nature has been enrolled to legitimate relations of domination. Thus, we can speak not only of a culture of nature (which in accounts like Wilson's amounts to little more than the recognition that nature is culturally mediated), but also a cultural politics of nature (which takes the insight of the former and shows its political implications). Engaging long-standing Western beliefs that Nature is at once ordered and planned, and thus that it can be read as a template for how life should be lived, cultural knowledge were as deeply imbricated in each other as his historical writings implied, then politics was inseparable from the writing of history, at work continuously in any practice that makes visible precisely that which remains 'invisible' in our taken-for-granted identities, what Rajchmann (1988) has come to call Foucault's art of seeing. 24 critics have sought to show how our appeals to Nature are always already ideological. A n early example, as I discussed earlier, is found in Neil Smith's (1984) Uneven Development where he provides tools by which to unpack what at the time he called \"bourgeois ideologies of nature\". By positing nature as both external and universal social relations become naturalized. However, the political implications of the dualistic conception of nature that Smith identified can be pushed further. It is not simply the case that social relations become naturalized because human society is seen as itself 'natural'. Rather, the dualistic conceptions of nature licenses relays between our 'construction' of nature and social relations. Precisely because nature is viewed as both 'external' (and thus as a reality that can be objectively known through positivist natural science), and as 'universal' (including 'human' natures and social relations) our historically contingent and socially situated constructions of external nature can be mapped back onto the social (which, since nature is universal, becomes subsumed under external nature) as is commonly done, for instance, by sociobiologists.19 It is this sort of dynamic that Haraway traces with such brilliance through the pages of her Primate Visions (1989) where primatology (admittedly a site where the 'culture of nature' is easily located) is shown to be subject to these relays between culture and nature. Scientific knowledges, as Latour and Haraway both show, draw together physical, textual, technical, political and institutional elements. This is not to say that science misrepresents nature (i.e. that science is always and only fiction), only that the knowledges that science produces are always partial, and therefore can be evaluated, and if necessary challenged, on the basis of what is excluded from the picture.20 Thus knowledges produced in twentieth century primatology invariably carry the marks of their enabling conditions in the circuits of twentieth century patriarchy and imperialism, at 1 9For further discussion of the politics of sociobiology see Ross (1995, chapter 5). 20Haraway, for instance, shows how patriarchal assumptions resulted in particular questions being asked of primate communities. By placing these assumptions in question it became possible to fashion new lenses that were open to different accounts. The question of 'good' science or 'objectivity' is not ruled out, only refashioned as always already situated in social and historical contexts (see Haraway 1991). 25 the same time that primates are made surrogates for human culture, enrolled as participants in myths of origins (that in turn naturalize discourses on race, gender and sexuality). Writing the culture of Nature is therefore more than mere description of the various lenses through which what 'counts' as nature is framed, but also a means of short-circuiting mechanisms of social domination, using the acid tools of critical discourse to corrode the self-certainty of representation.21 Although Haraway, and many others in what might be called the 'science as culture' movement, appear reluctant to identify their own intellectual debts, their work fits broadly, I think, within the ethical-political horizon that Richard Bernstein (1991) finds woven intimately into the philosophical ethos of modernity.22 Let me expand on this briefly, in order to clarify and perhaps moderate some of the claims of political relevance made by writers like Haraway and the claims made by others that writers like Haraway obscure the 'real' site of politics. Drawing on an exchange between Foucault and Habermas, Bernstein explains that Foucault sets out a position for critique that rejects the search for transcendental and immutable truth, and takes the function of criticism to be no longer that of denouncing 'falsity' in order to unveil 'truth', but of continually locating and interrogating 'truth-effects'. Criticism is no longer...practices in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather...historical investigation into events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making metaphysics possible...it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral 21While writers like Smith and Haraway are concerned to locate how nature is made an unwitting social actor, they do not share the same epistemological certainties about their own work. Smith - at least in his early work - employs the language of 'ideology'. Although far from unsophisticated in his use of the term, for Smith the term 'ideology' refers to 'an inverted, truncated, distorted reflection of reality' (p. 15), which in turn holds open the possibility of explanatory frameworks that 'get it right'. Haraway is more circumspect, speaking only of partial knowledges built within the rich tapestry of our social texts. To speak of ideology is to use the language of 'misrepresentation' (Mitchell 1990) and thus to assert the critic's role as a demythologizer located somewhere outside the social text. Subverting traditional understandings of 'objectivity', Haraway (1991) writes that such 'disembodied' accounts are not objective enough since they don't take into account their own enabling conditions. 22Foucault, in his essay \"What is enlightenment\" (1984:42) described the philosophical ethos of modernity as a \"permanent critique of our historical era.\" 26 action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events....it will not deduce from the form of what we are what is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom (Foucault 1984:46). The claims made in this remarkable passage require further attention, for with them, I think, we can further sharpen the political potential of writing nature's culture. In the same essay Foucault suggests that the significance of such critique is precisely that it allows us to grasp \"the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take\" (p. 46). But how does one imagine the 'work of freedom' and the 'points where change is possible and desirable' without metaphysics or without universal structures of knowledge: without, in short, a nature and a human nature! As Nancy Fraser (1989) and Jiirgen Habermas (1987b) have both shown, it is difficult to reconcile Foucault's Nietzschean anti-foundationalism with such quasi-normative statements. The same is true of Haraway's work. Like Foucault, she assumes criticism as purposive yet nowhere provides unambiguous maps to a promised land. Writing theory, she asserts, is to produce \"a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible, other present\" (1992:295). Yet, Haraway claims to \"not seek the address of some full presence\"; reluctantly, she \"knows better.\" Theory, then, is meant to orient, to provide rough sketches for travel to \"a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere\" (p. 295). How can Haraway argue that an approach like this offers serious political and analytical hope? How does writing the culture of nature square with a progressive politics, one that requires both identity and normativity? A clue, perhaps, is found in what Gayatri Spivak calls a \"politics of an open end.\" For Spivak (1990), the role of the critic is to read 27 strategically, paying attention to precisely that which disrupts closure.23 The goal of criticism is thus not to replace one orthodoxy with a new one, but to identify the play of absence and presence, to locate the drawing of boundaries and the 'fixing' of identities. What deconstruction offers is not a new 'map', but rather 'openings' by which to imagine other possible configurations. In a sense, what Foucault, Spivak and Haraway are insisting upon - each in their own way - is the specific and local, rather than universal, role of the intellectual. To the extent that prescriptive social science and vanguard politics assumes the universality of its claims, and thus replaces one system of domination with another, the work of the specific intellectual is at once more modest, and perhaps, ironically, more attuned with what Foucault called the 'work of freedom'. William Connolly (1985) I think, best captures this sense. Foucault's intent, he argues - and I would claim that this extends to both his precursors (like Nietzsche and Heidegger - at least apart from the latter's disastrous political philosophy) and his contemporaries (Derrida, Spivak, Lyotard and others) - was to incite his readers to 'listen to a different claim' rather than accept unquestioned the self-certain arguments of universal reason. In the context of the present work, an analogy drawn from the more radical strains of American environmentalism is perhaps appropriate. To the extent that the distinctions between deconstruction and activism blur in projects like Haraway's, cultural critics writing the 'culture of nature' may have affinities with Edward Abbey's (1985) 'monkeywrench gang'.2 4 Only, where the characters in Abbey's novels mixed sand in the oil of industrial machinery (resulting, I suspect, in considerable racket), 23In a wonderful summary, Spivak (1990:47) writes: \"Deconstruction obliges you to say yes to everything. You have to say yes to that which interrupts your project. And in terms of that, you can't have a political program which says 'no' to something.\" In Edward Abbey's novels, 'monkeywrenchers' defended 'nature' by sabotaging the machinery used by developers. At one level Abbey stands at the extreme opposite of Haraway. Where for Haraway (1992:296) nature is \"one of those impossible things that we can never have but can never live without\", and thus must be continuously placed in question at the same time as it is continuously invoked, for Abbey, nature is truly unambiguous, a natural foundation for all life that must be protected at any cost (regardless of the political consequences for human communities). Ironically, the very different philosophical positions does not rule out the possibility that both could be on the same 'side' in political struggles. 28 these cultural monkeywrenchers mix sand in the oil of our representational machinery, not for the hedonistic pleasure of tearing apart, but simply to make the operation of these semiotic technologies more noisy and thus nature's culture and politics more evident.25 Again, care must be taken to not revert to a position that holds the semiotic apart from the material as discrete spheres. If making things visible does not leave the physical world untouched, neither does it leave unaltered the social text in which these objects and entities are intricately woven. Bruno Latour (1988; 1993; 1995b) has persuasively shown how the 'social' is infused with physical objects (machines, natural entities, etc.) ranging from Boyle's air-pump in the eighteenth century and the lowly door closer in the twentieth, to Aramis, a futuristic high-tech people-mover designed for the twenty-first century (but scrapped on the planning table). From these studies Latour concludes that our Hobbesian . mythology about a body politic that consists, in essence, of naked individuals, is gravely mistaken. Everywhere the 'social' is stitched together by things (natural objects, texts, machines, etc.). In every instance, then, the transformation of the physical world of things results in the transformation of the 'social'. In this light, the materialization of nature on Canada's west coast can be seen to transform the social relations of the rainforest at the same time as it transforms its physical nature. Equally as important, our cultural discourses and social practices not only render a natural world visible and available, they also construct and differentiate subjectivities -ecologists, foresters, environmentalists, natives, tourists - that find their conditions of possibility prescribed in the discourses and practices that relate them to 'nature'. As I explore at points in this work, these discourses about nature simultaneously establish 25In the words of Susan Bordo (1992), the role of cultural critic is to engage in \"epistemological guerrilla warfare.\" Of course deconstructing 'nature' in order to undermine the self-evidence of social identities is not a straightforward matter, philosophically or politically. This is evident in questions surrounding sexuality. In debates over gay rights, for instance, actors on both sides have appealed to nature to strengthen their position and weaken the case put forward by opponents. In the case of issues of gender, on the other hand, appeals to 'nature' offer much less to progressive politics. See Butler (1990; 1993) for an account that emphasizes the social construction of both gender and sex. Bordo, on the other hand, while not opposed to theories that see the 'body' as a discursive 'battleground', cautions against writing out the materiality of the body. 29 subject positions and authorize subjects to 'speak for' nature. Whether in the geological surveys of George Dawson from the l'870s (Chapter 2), the landscape paintings of Emily Carr in the early 1900s (Chapter 5), or the ecosystem diagrams of systems ecologists in the 1960s (Chapter 6), each at once posits a world and authorizes nature's 'representatives'. As the work proceeds, it will hopefully become clear that at each site is therefore found struggles over who is able to be heard in the vociferous and often rancorous debates over the fate of the region's temperate rainforests. Authority in the forest, I will argue, has less to do with juridico-political pronouncements and more to do with the various ways that we construct nature and relate it to social life. Clearly, then, the materialization of nature is related intimately to questions of class, gender, race, and ecology and this study continually highlights the politics of nature. Keeping each of these dynamics in focus at the same time is, in practice, almost impossible. So, while each makes its appearance, I focus primarily on one issue: how the materialization of nature is woven into the dynamics of colonialism/post-colonialism. British Columbia is profoundly marked by its colonial past, and its political terrain in the present is cross-cut by the continuing anti-colonial struggles of various First Nations. Look again at Figure 1.2. Nowhere on the map or legend are we provided with any indication that the entirety of Clayoquot Sound falls within the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Figure 1.3).26 What accounts for this absence? What are the mechanisms by which marginality is produced in the temperate rainforest? Thus, in several chapters I seek to show how our constructions of nature are often complicit with the perpetuation of If one looks carefully, Indian reservations can be seen at various sites, thereby continuing the colonial strategies of marking Indian presence while simultaneously containing it. One region - Meares Island - is coded as 'not included in decision'. The island was at the time the subject of a lengthy court struggle over native sovereignty. 30 Figure 1.3. Map showing traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth. 31 colonial relations, implicated in the prescription of subject positions and the denial of voice, autonomy or agency to First Nations people.27 This raises a final question. At what point can we be said to have entered the 'post'colonial? Considerable debate has swirled around what is meant by the 'post-colonial' . Many have found in this term a deeply problematic periodization whereby the 'post' implies a historical stage 'beyond' colonialism. This study takes seriously the call made by Mieke Bal (1991) and others that we pay close attention to how a colonial past continues to inform a postcolonial present. Yet, it is clear that the world we live in today is not the same as that of the colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As I have shown with recourse to Althusser, and as has been argued eloquently in relation to the 'time' of colonialism/postcolonialism by Stuart Hall (1996), the present reverberates with the rhythms of many temporalities. There is no single history of colonialism/postcolonialism any more than there is any single colonial discourse. The operation of colonial power occurs in many different ways and across many different sites, including, as I argue in this work, the materialization of nature. Episodes This study proceeds as a series of episodes. Each begins with an event, artifact or image related to contemporary struggles over 'nature' in British Columbia's temperate rainforests. In turn, these provide points of departure into accounts that relate nature's materialization to a series of discursive, social, technological and institutional practices. This strategy is marked in the titles to each chapter, which emphasise the contingency of 2 7 To wield an anti-colonial optic is a decidedly awkward maneuver for a non-Native writer whose body has not been marked and inscribed by colonialist practices. No doubt too much remains 'common sense' to me, and therefore remains outside my political consciousness. But to leave this task to First Nations people alone suggests that it is their problem, one for which we share no responsibility. All Canadians are implicated in intersecting relations of oppression and thus responsible to think - and thereby unthink - colonialism's cultures. But to disrupt colonialist discourse is not to write from a First Nations perspective - it simply contributes to a politics of decolonization that proceeds by dismantling structures of domination and thereby opening spaces for difference. 32 nature's materializations by converting into verbs the noun forms that have customarily given solidity to modern conceptions of truth: producing, saving, territorializing, purifying, ecologizing. At a number of points I explore how the past is implicated in the present in order to show how what seems self-evident in the present has embedded within it a series of complex and multiple histories, often histories that carry within them the legacy of colonialism. How nature is made visible today is political precisely because it contains unmarked traces of past practices, what Shohat and Stam (1994) call \"buried epistemologies\". Because our sightings/sitings of nature seem ahistorical and objective, we locate these hidden colonial histories only with difficulty. Let me summarize what follows. Chapters 2 and 3 interrogate who is able to 'speak for' nature in places like Clayoquot Sound, how others - particularly First Nations -are marginalized, and how our constructions of nature are implicated in this. Chapter 2 looks specifically at the displacement of the 'forest' into the abstract spaces of capital and the state and suggests how a colonial past is buried in the representations and concepts organizing industrial forestry. Chapter 3 examines the paradoxical nature of the environmental movement's support for First Nation's land rights by exploring some of the contradictions that run through their representations of 'wilderness' and 'traditional' native culture. Chapter 4 explores how adventure travel incorporates areas like Clayoquot Sound into the libidinal economies of metropolitan subjects and shows how this results in reconfigurations of both nature and society in Clayoquot Sound. Chapter 5 looks at the work of Emily Carr, an artist whose west coast paintings form an important archive of images through which Canadians' imaginative geographies of the temperate rainforest are built. Chapter 6 turns from aesthetics to the supposedly solid-ground of science and explores how contesting strands of ecology lead to very different ways of envisioning the 'crisis' in the rainforest. I conclude with some more general comments on postcoloniality and the politics of nature. 33 CHAPTER 2 PRODUCING MARGINALITY: ABSTRACTION AND DISPLACEMENT IN THE TEMPERATE RAINFOREST What 'post-colonial' certainly is not is one of those periodisations based on epochal 'stages', when everything is reversed at the same moment, all the old relations disappear for ever and entirely new ones come to replace them. Clearly, the disengagement from the colonizing process has been a long, drawn-out and differentiated affair (Hall 1996:247). The Isolation of Simon Lucas Framing forestry. In British Columbia the provincial government owns 95 percent of commercial forest lands.1 A variety of forms of tenure provide forestry companies with rights of access to the timber on these lands, ranging from long-term licenses (Tree Farm Licenses) to short-term cutting permits. Since 1945, Royal Commissions on Forestry have regularly been held in order to obtain public input into how to align the administration of these forests with a 'public interest'.2 That the BC government has found it necessary to convene these Commissions on a regular basis underlines the significance of the industry to the province's economy and social order.3 But this necessity also marks a significant failure: what the Commissions sought to 'fix' in a series of timeless management principles that related and regulated the 1 One percent of commercial forest land lies within Indians reserves, while four percent is owned by forest companies. For a history of land tenure and land policy in BC, see Cail (1974) and Pearse (1976). 2Peter Pearse (1976) for instance, wrote that his recommendations would allow the public's interest to be \"protected in the legislation, policies, procedures and practices affecting the allocation and use of forest resources of the province\", and would also ensure \"the full contribution of the forest resources to the economic and social welfare of British Columbians...in terms of the diverse commercial and environmental benefits they potentially may generate.\" (Pearse 1976:xi-xii). The first \"Royal Commission of Inquiry on Timber and Forestry\" was held in 1909-1910 (Fulton 1910) and is often referred to as the Fulton Report. Commissions since then have included two chaired by Judge Gordon Sloan (1945; 1957), the Pearse Report (1976) and the Peel Report (1991). 3The Forest Alliance of BC (1994), an industry-funded lobby group, claims that in 1993 forestry products contributed over half of BC's, manufacturing shipments, that forestry accounted for 17% of the province's GDP, and that the industry directly employed 89,500 workers province-wide and supported a further 168,500 (together amounting to 16.5% of the workforce. 34 'nation' and its 'populations' and 'resources' has continually escaped these frames of reference. The Sloan Commission of 1945, for instance, generated recommendations for the spatial and temporal rationalization of the forest and forest industry and related this to the long-term stability of forestry-dependent communities.4 Yet, the policies of 'sustained yield' advanced by Sloan and implemented by subsequent provincial governments have failed to deliver what they promised: a forest industry that harvests a uniform quantity of timber from set territories on a regular and sustainable basis (in perpetuity); and, an industry which generates predictable and stable levels of employment and revenue. Quite the opposite has occurred. After years of overcutting, the forest industry now faces dramatic reductions in its annual allowable cut; poor forestry practices have led to degraded forest lands (despite Sloan's assumption that long-term leases held by large corporations over sizable territories would lengthen planning horizons beyond market cycles or beyond one 'forest rotation'); technological innovation and global competitiveness have resulted in major job losses with serious consequences for local 4 Sloan's (1945) recommendations revolved around two axes: one temporal, the other spatial. The temporal axis dealt with sustained yield, which Sloan defined to mean \"a perpetual yield of wood of commercially usable quality...in yearly or periodic quantities.\" (p. 127). The spatial axis had two components. First, Sloan visualized sustained-yield in terms of a 'working circle', a spatial metaphor borrowed from conservation discourse in the United States and which imagined the systematic harvesting of the resource in equal increments such that when one cycle had been completed, a second cycle would be ready to begin. In other words, harvesting must be spatially and temporally organized so that at no time would there be a period without production. Second, Sloan argued that these working circles should be organized into 'regional areas' in the interest of industrial and community stability. Following Mulholland (1937), he argued that it would make little sense to manage the entire coast as a single working circle or sustained yield unit. The reasons were simple. Management on a coastal scale could result in specific areas being heavily logged some years and not at all on others. The result, for particular communities, would be a permanent level of instability and social displacements as logging activity shifted up and down the coast. The 'working circle' thus became closely articulated with two other state objectives: industrial development and community stability. Rationalizing the forest regionally in terms of perpetual supplies, Sloan believed, would provide incentive for investment in production facilities and intensive forest management, and thus, would result in long-term community stability. On the coast, he suggested, this could be accomplished by encouraging holders of Crown-granted forest lands to combine these holdings with their temporary leases and additional Crown lands into large management units that would then be managed on a sustainable yield basis. In the interior, it was suggested that public sustained yield units be established over 'unencumbered' Crown lands. In these, timber rights would be allocated, and the Minister would retain the right to prescribe terms and conditions of lease. More controversially, Sloan further argued that the coastal units should be allocated to large companies with long-term investments in processing facilities, rather than the 'small man', since large firms, or so Sloan reasoned, would not be influenced by 'short-term' interests. 35 forestry-dependent communities; corporate consolidation and foreign ownership have led to worries that the benefits of forestry are not retained by local communities; and, conflicting claims to the land have placed in question both forest inventories and security of tenure (Drushka, et al 1993; Marchak 1995). In short, amid shifting configurations of social, technological, economic and political forces, BC's forests, forest industry and forestry-dependent communities have been marked more by transformation than stability, and by political struggle rather than consensus. Despite this, each subsequent Commission has presented itself as further refining forest management, applying new knowledges from biology and economics and thereby addressing past mistakes. Thus, with each Commission, forestry appears to proceed to an ever more rational base. In such a narrative, the report of the 1945 Commission appears as a founding document in a story of enlightened forestry. In this chapter my intention is neither to affirm nor deny 'progress' in the rational management of a public resource. Rather, I seek to place in question precisely those terms in which forestry has been 'framed' - levels of harvest, royalty rates, forest practices, planning processes, public vs. private tenure - in order to bring into focus that which remains 'outside' the picture. If we accept the framing of forestry in these terms as self-evident, I argue, we remain unable to recognize what is made marginal through them. A simple statement by one participant at the Pearse Commission of 1975 can be used to disrupt this frame. Speaking before Pearse in Victoria on October 30, 1975, Simon Lucas, chair of the West Coast District Council of Indian Chiefs (Nuu-chah-nulth), expressed his people's frustrations: \"We feel more isolated from the resources to which we have claim than at any time in the past,\" to which he added simply: \"This is becoming more so. \" 5 In a sense, then, this chapter is a reflection on the isolation of Simon Lucas. 5Pearse Commission public hearings, Victoria, Oct. 30, 1975. Until the 1980's, anthropologists referred to the indigenous peoples of the west side of Vancouver Island as the \"Nootka\", an appellation commonly attributed to Captain Cook. The West Coast District Council of Indians Chiefs is now known as the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, and consists of representatives of the council's fourteen member tribes from the west coast of Vancouver Island. 36 Representing isolation. Speaking as a 'representative' of his people, Lucas' poignant words gave clear expression to the experience of the Nuu-chah-nulth. With the rapid expansion and consolidation of British Columbia's coastal forest industry in the twenty years preceding the Pearse Commission, they had seen their traditional territories on the west coast of Vancouver Island rationalized within the regional and global space-economies of industrial capitalism, reterritorialized according to the spatial and temporal logics of 'sustained yield' forestry, and incorporated into the social and economic logics of corporations, forestry-based communities and state institutions far removed from their villages.6 Segregated and contained on a system of reserves imposed late in the nineteenth-century, Lucas's people found themselves living amongst forests of immeasurable value yet without any access to their great wealth except as labourers on the shifting margins of the white wage labour force. As a representative, Lucas spoke of a specific historical experience. But, Lucas also can be seen to represent (in the sense of 'stand for') a more general condition of colonialism (and its aftermath) in British Columbia. His appearance before the Commission at once marked the isolation of the Nuu-chah-nulth and exposed the 'limit-point' of forestry discourse in the province. His presence threatened the accepted bounds of the Commission by bringing within the frame - if only momentarily - the constitutive 'outside' that made the Commission's positive knowledges possible. In short, Lucas made the colonial frame of forestry in BC visible ? Indeed, Lucas's testimony, duly reported in the Commission's proceedings, brought into view how thoroughly a colonial past had been inscribed on BC's forest landscapes. Despite his poignant appeal, Pearse remained silent on questions of native rights. In the 6 These displacements were not all new. Dan Clayton (1995) shows the many ways that these landscapes were displaced into European regimes of power/knowledge beginning already with the observations and writings produced during Captain Cook's third voyage to the Pacific. 7 Two other First Nation groups also made submissions to Pearse. These were the Skidegate Band Council (Haida) and the Nicola Valley Indian Administration (Nlka7kapmx). Both made oral and written submissions. 37 381 pages of his report Pearse's only comments directed specifically to native concerns appear in a section discussing the possibility of new allocations of timber licenses. \"Native Indian reserves,\" Pearse wrote, \"present another potential source of forest land that might be combined with provincial Crown land into sustained yield units, under band management\" (p. 118). However, as Pearse noted elsewhere, there remained little Crown land outside existing Tree-Farm Licenses to form the core of any new licenses. His comments therefore effectively contained the irruption of native concerns into the space of the Commission by naturalizing the past production of colonial space. Twenty years later, it is not clear that much has changed.8 This became evident most recently in events surrounding Clayoquot Sound. Despite the massive media attention the dispute was most often framed as one pitting environmentalists against the forest industry. Even the long article that broke the Clayoquot Sound story to a national audience in May 1994 - covering more than two pages in Canada's largest circulation newspaper - reiterated the same themes, at no point mentioning the Nuu-chah-nulth (Matas 1993). In the months that followed the release of the plan considerable attention would be given to its details - which areas were preserved, how much of this was 'old-growth', how many jobs might be lost - while much less attention was given to a subsequent report by the provincial ombudsman (British Columbia 1993b) which asserted that throughout the events leading to the Clayoquot Sound decision, the Nuu-chah-nulth had not been adequately consulted, even though the land at issue lay entirely within their traditional The Task Force on Native Forestry in BC (Derickson 1991) found that First Nations people remain underrepresented in the industry, that few bands hold forest tenures and that natives continue to 'hear about' decisions made elsewhere rather than participate in them. Even in the face of ongoing treaty negotiations national and transnational corporations continue to strip the land of the resources upon which present and future native communities must depend. One of the most recent cases involved the 5,000 hectare Pavilian Creek watershed near Cache Creek, part of the traditional territories of the Ts'kw'ayalxw Indian band, and the last remaining region in the band's traditional territories that had not yet been mined of its resources. Despite the region being under treaty negotiations since April 1994, the band learned early in 1995 that the Ministry of Forests was planning to issue cutting permits in the watershed (see Hume 1996). The federal minister responsible for Indian Affairs has admitted that as treaty negotiations have proceeded in the 1990s the pace of resource extraction by non-native corporations has accelerated (see O'Neil 1996). For summaries of issues surrounding native participation in the forestry industry, see Nathan (1993) and Wolfe-Keddie (1995). 38 territories and had never been ceded to colonial authorities prior to 1871 or to the federal state after that date.9 How do we account for the inadequate attention paid to Nuu-chah-nulth concerns in events leading to the Clayoquot decision? How is it that twenty years after Simon Lucas spoke of his people's increasing isolation, forestry issues were still being discussed without consulting the First Nations on whose territories these resources were located? In this chapter and the next I examine the production of marginality in the temperate rainforest. Here I examine the rhetorics that underwrite the authority of transnational forestry companies to speak as 'custodians' of the forest. In Chapter 3 I turn my attention to the environmental movement. In both I locate representational practices that marginalize the voice of First Nations in forestry and conservation issues. I argue that it is precisely because these representational practices have become ' common-sense' that we find it difficult to recognize the buried colonialist epistemologies that are carried with them and the manner in which they serve to naturalize power relations generated by colonialism. I begin the next section with the representational practices of a company holding tenure rights in Clayoquot Sound - MacMillan Bloedel - in order to show how they displace the 'forest' from its cultural surrounds and resituate it in the abstract spaces of the market and nation. I then turn to the late nineteenth century texts of the geologist George Dawson, an important figure in the production and dissemination of knowledge about BC. By placing his texts in relation to those of MacMillan Bloedel it may be possible to suggest continuities between a colonial past and a postcolonial present and thereby undermine the assumption that colonialism belongs only to an unfortunate 'ugly chapter' of Canadian history. 9 Following the release of the Ombudsman's report, an interim agreement was signed between the central region tribes of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and the provincial government that essentially incorporated the Nuu-chah-nulth as co-managers of certain regions. Interim agreements are increasingly prevalent as First Nations and the provincial government seek ways to manage resources on the traditional territories of various First Nations during the often lengthy negotiation of treaty settlements (see Wolfe-Keddie, 1995). 39 Abstracting timber, displacing culture: staging 'pure' spaces of economic and political calculation in the temperate rainforest British Columbia's environmental conflicts are today played out in a highly mediatized terrain in which actors vie for 'public opinion'. Appropriately, then, I begin my discussion of contemporary 'itineraries of silencing' by turning to a cultural artifact drawn from the midst of these media wars. 'Custodians of the forest': the rhetorics and rights of access of transnational capital Technological rationality...protects rather than cancels the legitimacy of domination (Marcuse 1964). Beyond the cut (Figure 2.1) - my first exhibit in this story of nature and its representatives - is a public relations document in which the forest industry conglomerate MacMillan Bloedel (MB) seeks to legitimate its authority as the forest's 'custodian' in the face of strong criticism of industrial forestry as practiced under advanced capitalism.1 0 The document is one of several that the company has produced; it is attractively packaged, and organized in an easy-to-read format that mixes glossy photographs, graphics and written text (including boxed quotes from scientific 'experts'). What intrigues me, however, is not this format - which is ubiquitous today - but the two 'invitations' that this document offers readers and through which MB's authority is built. The first is an invitation to evaluate MB's forest management practices. The second, implicit in the first, is an invitation to forget the colonial histories which have made MacMillan Bloedel's position as 'custodian' possible. It is the second that enables the first to be taken up as 'common-sense' by the reader. I will trace both in turn. 10That MacMillan Bloedel has come to represent corporate forestry in BC is the result of a number of factors: it is one of the only large corporations working in the forest today that began as a local firm (and thus is highly identified with the province, and closely tied to various stages in the development of the forest industry, including its internationalization); its forest tenures include some of the most spectacular stands of 'old growth'; these same tenures are accessible to Vancouver residents; and, it has at different times publicly challenged environmentalists, resulting in considerable media exposure. 40 ;ure 2.1: Cover of Beyond the Cut (MacMillan Bloedel n. 41 The booklet opens with a statement by Ray Smith, then President and CEO of MacMillan Bloedel. At MacMillan Bloedel we are proud of our history of forest management in BC - we believe that we are among the best in the world when it comes to forestry practices and integrated resource management. We asked British Columbians about their views on managing and using the forests in this province, and we are now convinced that M B shares the same constructive values, concerns, and expectations for use of the forest resource as do the majority of people living in the province. We are committed to manage our forestlands in the best interests of the public (p. 1). Smith's statement sets the tone for the remainder of the document, where in a seemingly selfless act of 'corporate responsibility', M B turns the spotlight of public scrutiny on its own practices. This emphasis on management is in large part a response to critics who claim that the forest industry in BC is ecologically destructive and unsustainable (Hammond 1991; Drushka, et al. 1993), but as I demonstrate below, it also carefully delineates what is at stake and whose voices can be considered authoritative in BC's forest disputes. Organized thus, MB's public relations initiatives frame forestry issues in terms of scientific expertise, efficient production, and corporate responsiveness to 'public concerns'. The first is achieved through a rhetoric of 'expert', 'scientific' management. The booklet is filled with photographs of experts at work. \"MB road engineers\", readers are told in a caption beside a photograph of road builders, \"know that poor road construction practices can cause erosion and mud build-up in streams.\" Photographs depict environmental scientists engaged in research \"in the field\", or in the \"lab\", or working with \"computer simulations\" (Figure 2.2) - all privileged sites of 'authority' in Western cultures of science (Haraway 1989). Other photographs depict \"high tech greenhouses\" which grow \"genetically superior offspring\", 'assisting' rather than 'destroying' nature, while tables and graphs provide the reader with extensive 'technical' information about the forests and 42 (CXENO is a family of computer simulation programs that help MB's foresters do their jobs more effectively. Y-XENO simulates forest growth from seedlings to harvcslablc trees in just 15 minutes. Foresters provide the model with basic information about the site and the kinds of silviculture treatments they zvish to test. For each option, it predicts the number, size, and volume of trees per hectare at ten-year intervals. Simulation can help the foresters decide which treatments offer the best return on the investment.}} Sieve Northway, Resource Analyst, Woodlands Services Figure 2.2. Framing forestry. Technical rationality as legitimation. 43 forest management. L U P A T - a Land Use Planning Advisory Team - is introduced as a crack-team of \"environmental specialists\" with expertise in \"soils, wildlife, fish, water resources, and growth and yield projections\". Other experts, we are assured, are consulted about \"recreation and aesthetics\". Finally, the corporation notes that it consults with the state at every level: BC Forest Service; Ministry of Environment and Parks; Heritage Branch; and the federal department of Fisheries and Ocean. Similar strategies are evident in the company's visitor centers in Port Alberni and Tofino. Here displays, models, audio-visual presentations and interactive exhibits detail MB ' s forest management cycle, invite visitors to 'test their knowledge' of temperate rainforest ecosystems, or, as does one computer game, interpolate visitors as corporate forest managers whose natural objective is to maximize profits through rational management practices (the moral in the game, of course, is that this is possible only by understanding and accounting for 'nature').11 In the case of MB's forest management cycle display, the focus is held firmly on scientific expertise, documenting the careful assessment and diligent monitoring necessary to develop ecologically sensitive 'site-specific' plans. For example, the display informs visitors that after harvest \"a site treatment plan is prescribed based on consideration of soil depth and texture, the amount of wood debris, and the species and health of small trees already growing on the site.\" Like a kind father holding a child's hand in the strange, chaotic and bewildering public spaces of the city, M B guides urban visitors through the equally alien spaces of the 'working forest'. Indeed, after visiting the center, visitors can take a company-led tour of its tenure lands, seeing 'outside' the center what the company so carefully enframes 'inside'. What makes this representational strategy effective is what Jiirgen Habermas (1971; 1972; 1987) has described as the 'splitting off of expert cultures from the lifeworld, such that communicative action becomes truncated or colonized by systems-imperatives. 1 1 MB makes 'learning' about the forest and forest practices 'fun'. Further, this public face allows the company to appear 'open and honest', subverting the widely held belief that major decisions about BC's forests occur behind closed doors and that forestry companies are not forthright about their intentions. 44 Questions of politics and legitimation are therefore displaced from the social realm ('value' or moral reason) to technical realms (instrumental reason). Likewise, instrumental action becomes estranged from what Habermas calls 'enlightened action' and thus technique comes to be established itself as 'value' such that rationality (as technique) is no longer 12 critique but the basis of legitimation. The issue then is not whether MB's scientific credentials are solid but how instrumental reason becomes a surrogate for moral or political reason. Placed together with aesthetic displays of forest renewal (inverting the 'before' and 'after' photos that the environmental movement has used so effectively) these rhetorics permit the company to narrate a comforting story of rational management and temporary disturbance of a 'public resource'. The message is unmistakable: M B holds the most advanced knowledges and employs 'state-of-the-art' technologies; left to the company the forest will be renewed, if not improved, for future generations. In conjunction with this technical discourse, M B also sets out to demonstrate that it is managing the resource in the best interest of the public. This takes two forms: first, showing that the company obtains the greatest 'value' from the resource (efficiency); and, second, demonstrating that the company is responsive to other non-timber forest values (responsibility). The first is accomplished by drawing direct links between MB's activities and the consumer demands and economic health of the province. Thus, M B explains that its operations are in a sense 'necessary' since it is simply meeting society's basic material needs by \"grow[ing] and harvesting] trees and turn[ing] them into quality forest products that help satisfy society's need for communication, shelter and commerce\" (p. 2). In other publications, M B emphasizes its contributions to employment and government revenues, showing itself to be indispensable to the provincial economy. Likewise, in a recent series 1 2 Habermas's argument is first articulated in Towards a Rational Society (1971) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1972). Here Habermas develops an argument that knowledge is grounded in two quasi-transcendental cognitive interests: social labour and social interaction. The first is organized around instrumental action (and thus involves the realization of a technical interest that relies on 'empirical-analytical' sciences). The second is organized around communicative action (and thus involves a practical intent that relies on historical-hermeneutical sciences). Problems arise when technical interests come to replace practical interests. 45 of T V ads, the company responds to criticisms that it is more interested in achieving windfall profits by liquidating forest resources and selling them as raw material or as primary manufactured goods than in contributing to the further development of the provincial economy. By focusing on new 'value-added' products like Microllam and Parallam (laminated veneer lumber, and parallel strand lumber respectively), which can use fiber from 'less-than-perfect-trees', the company demonstrates that it is committed to obtaining ever new and increased 'value' from the forest resource. As important, by using plantation timber in shorter rotations, or trees that were previously underutilized or left as 'waste', the company can give the impression that its practices will result in less pressure on the region's 'old-growth' forests. MacMillan Bloedel, we are assured at the end of its ads, is 'making the most of a renewable resource'.13 Finally, the company demonstrates its responsiveness to public concerns. In its publications, it notes that it incorporates public input, opens 'its' forests to multiple users, and goes far beyond its legislated responsibilities in preservation of forests and wildlife habitat. We are assured that the company holds the same concerns as the average citizen about preserving areas of \"special importance\". \"The forests of British Columbia\" we read, \"are a great source of pride and concern for the people of the province. No one wants to see them decimated or devoted exclusively to timber production.\" (p. 12). M B therefore cooperates with government agencies in preserving examples of old-growth forests in areas of special beauty and in critical wildlife habitats. Thousands of hectares of forestland on Vancouver Island, it claims, have been transferred from M B ownership or licence tenure to parks and ecological reserves, while logging in other \"sensitive\" or \"aesthetic\" regions has been deferred indefinitely. At the end of the day, M B appears as the public's trusted spokesperson, possessing the most objective knowledge and advanced 13The question of 'waste' in timber harvesting has long been a contentious item. Initially it became an issue for conservationists worried over the long-term sustainability of harvest levels (Hays 1959). More recently the 'gospel of efficiently' has taken a new turn. Environmentalists argue for increased efficiency and wood recovery (both in the forest and in mills) as a way of reducing the area needed for industrial forestry. 46 technology, and mediating - in a 'disinterested' manner - between the claims of various \"interest groups\". As custodians of the forest, M B protects, cares for, and renews this great resource for the benefit of present and future generations.... The company's forestry policies are based on achieving an optimum balance for all users taking into account economic, recreational and environmental factors (p. 2, italics mine). In a world of competing demands and uncertain economic and ecological futures, MacMillan Bloedel knows best. Normalizing the forest: public fictions and national displacements. Questions of forest management are vital, but this is not the place to debate the sustainability of current forest practices, nor to ask whether MacMillan Bloedel has been a good 'steward'. These are important questions, but to convene debate only in these terms would be to accept the first invitation without recognizing the second invitation that accompanies it - the invitation to forget the colonial histories that enable and legitimate present-day constructions of authority in the temperate rainforest. How is it that the forest appears in MB ' s publications, visitor centers and T V ads - and in much 'public' debate over forest management - as a purified space of economic and political calculation (containing visual, ecological and economic resources) without any other competing claims'? Why should this appear so 'natural'? Why is it 'common-sense' to debate rights of access to forest resources in terms of technical expertise and the strategic interest of the 'nation' without any acknowledgment that other 'nations' - First Nations like the Nuu-chah-nulth - may dispute these territorial claims? In turn, how is it that MacMillan Bloedel (or, for that matter, BC's Ministry of Forests) appears as the forest's legitimate custodian? What dynamics lie behind and establish this authority? Perhaps more to the point, how is it that in BC a discourse of resource management (bound to a new and powerful meta-narrative of sustainability and tied to the administrative space of the nation) has been constructed and 47 institutionalized in a conceptual and administrative space entirely separate from another, unmarked, but certainly not unrelated, management discourse that never appears in these discussion, yet which by its absence naturalizes the abstract space of the Canadian state and economy: the demarcation, segregation, management and administration of native communities and lands? These are difficult questions, but we can begin our inquiry into this invitation to forget by returning to Beyond the cut, and by paying attention to the absences and silences that structure its narrative. To begin, MB's rhetoric of accountability can be seen to pivot on the mobilization of a potent (and often necessary) political fiction - the 'public'. MB ' s authority appears legitimate because the company is seen to be meeting the standards of rational management, economic development and ecological sustainability that the 'public' demands. As Bruce Robbins (1993) notes, in Western democracies the 'public' has often served as a rallying cry against private greed, propertied interests, and corporate and bureaucratic secrecy. But it equally has served to further silence already marginalized groups (Fraser 1991; Polan 1991). In this case, constructing and appealing to a 'public interest' serves M B well. Through it the company is able to posit a singular body politic, situate the reader within it, and thus assume a unified, collective interest in the forest which all readers, on sober reflection, must share. This allows the company to draw an important equivalence: the health of the resource is by extension the health of the province and its 'citizens'. Any challenge to MB's authority becomes by extension, a challenge to the well being of the province's population. Legitimacy is thus framed in terms of who is the best manager of the resource. This merits further attention. Not only does this rhetoric flatten out any difference within BC society - in this case rendering native concerns either illegitimate, or at best, only one of many 'special', and thus self-serving rather than common, interests - but it enacts an important erasure that in many ways structures and enables the company's representational practices. What remains completely unmarked in MB's publications, T V 48 advertisements and visitor centers is a subtle maneuver whereby the 'land', the 'forest' and a commodity, 'timber', are simultaneously abstracted and displaced from existing local cultural and political contexts, and resituated in the conceptual space of the 'nation' and its 'public'. The forest that the M B document discusses is at once any forest and no forest at all: it appears simply as a pure space of economic and political calculation that exists only as a ground and raw material for the self-creation and rational management of the nation-state. With the exception of a small map that superimposes MB's forest tenures over the 'empty' space of the province, MB's forests are devoid of specificity - geographical or historical. Emptied of cultural histories, the forest becomes a unit governed by natural history, and thus is free to be subsumed into a discourse of resource management and tied to the administrative spaces of the province, rather than the local lifeworlds of its native inhabitants. Framed solely as 'resource' landscapes, places like Clayoquot Sound are at once ^territorialized and reterritorialized as the 'nation's' forest, divided into units (Tree Farm Licenses), allotted to lease-holders (like MB) and subjected to rational management (computerized models, scientific and economic rationalities) so as to produce 'sustained yield' through rationalized 'forest rotations', all part of the administration of a national 'population' and 'economy' (Figure 2.3). Indeed, in one of the many ironies found in BC's forests, foresters and economists today refer to this rationalized forest as the 'normal' forest.14 In short, it is the absence of any cultural claims to the forest - rather The normalization of nature in forms of modern power remains undertheorized. Michel Foucault (1979; 1980), for instance, rarely looked beyond human subjects, bodies and institutions, but clearly the normalization of 'life' that he documented with such brilliance - its ordering and disciplining through modalities of power, knowledge and spatiality - extends to and incorporates not only human subjects but 'nature' itself. The regulation of populations and economy in BC required not simply the exploitation of the 'forest' but its construction in discursive practices that at once constituted, rendered available and rationalized the 'forest' within an administrative apparatus, making it adequate for models of social and ecological productivity. The relation between modernity, modernization and nature has generally been discussed in terms of the domination (even death) of nature in the face of instrumental reason (Leiss, 1972; Merchant 1980). One of the problems with such work is that it assumes that modernity marks a transition from harmony with, to exploitation of, nature. While the scale and intensity of nature's production by human societies has certainly changed, an argument can be made that what differentiates premodern from modern relations with nature is not harmony vs. domination so much as different knowledges and technologies that articulated nature as a social object and made it available to economic and political calculation in new ways. 49 Figure 2.3. Diagram of forest management practices. By convening debates in forestry around the management of the resource the forest is constructed as an abstraction separate from its social, cultural and ecological contexts. Sustaining the yield in the normal forest . cut over 50-60 50-60 30-40 20-30 A mm 20-30 lit Year 1 30-40 20-30 10-ZO ill 50-60 Cut Over 50-60 * X 0-10 0-10 30-40 Year 10 20-30 40-50 cut over 10-20 10-20 0-10 A A A A A A 0-10 40-50 Year 20 S t a n d age (years) Figure 2.4. Normalizing the forest. Sustained-yield forestry is perhaps the clearest articulation of the abstraction of 'timber' from its cultural and ecological surrounds, remaking nature in the image of an undifferentiated 'public interest'. 50 than the positive discourse of scientific management - that makes MB's claim to 'custodianship' transparent. In this light, the 'normal forest' (Figure 2.4) so dear to BC foresters is much more than a model of the most 'rational' means of forestry, it is also perhaps the most clear articulation of the abstraction of 'timber' from its cultural surrounds and relocation within temporal and spatial logics that have no 'intrinsic' relation to local native communities. As one critic has noted in relation to the Clayoquot Sound dispute, MB ' s forest planning maps impose an entirely different 'cultural geography' on the landscape, erasing and displacing already existing territorialities (Ingram 1994). Ecologists have argued that the 'normal' forest is in many respects 'abnormal', but this is not my primary concern. (Nor do I share belief in a 'normal' forest that can be si(gh)ted independent of regimes of knowledge - even the science of ecology). Rather, in the midst of a putatively 'post-colonial' context, I argue that this abstraction displaces discussions of authority from questions of territory, tenure and rights of access (and their constitutive colonial histories), and convenes them instead - precisely through the normalization of the 'forest' and its integration into the administration of the 'nation-state' and regulation of 'society' - around questions of rational management and conservation. In this way it is not rights of access but the economic and ecological details of the 'normal' forest that are at stake. MB ' s rhetorics assume a priori the juridical, political and geographical space of the nation-state and ignore its historico-geographical constitution (and contestation). By staging the nation-state as accomplished rather than continually articulated, the Tree Farm Licenses which M B holds, and the 'normal' forest it manages, are rendered transparent and thus 'common-sense'. In a neat symmetry, what M B authors, authorizes M B . Detached from their local cultural relations, it becomes a short step to see these territories as empty and public lands ('wilderness'), leased to transnational companies for the 'benefit' of the general population. In light of incomplete decolonization in British Columbia, such rhetorics risk re-inscribing colonial relations, erasing present-day First Nation struggles 51 over sovereignty' and ignoring their continual assertion that what appears as 'wilderness' in one rhetoric is a highly cultural landscape in another. Assuming the fixity of these 'national/natural' spaces (and their staging as an abstract 'void' and normalization within a 'national economy') is, I suggest, a bad epistemic habit, one that simultaneously incorporates and renders invisible the colonial histories through which these spaces have been constituted and naturalized, and which in turn authorize certain voices - resource managers, bureaucrats, nature's defenders - to speak for nature. Unthinking neo-colonial 'cultures' of nature: genealogies of 'wilderness'. Focusing attention on the presence of the colonial imagination in today's post-colonial society is not a gesture of ahistoricism - on the contrary. Problematizing historical distance and analyzing the way streams of the past still infuse the present make historical inquiry meaningful (Mieke Bal 1991:34). If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms... .What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origins; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity. (Foucault 1977:142). It is to these colonial histories and practices that I now want to turn. MacMillan Bloedel's 'authority' is built, in part, by establishing the forest as a 'natural' and 'public' resource. But this is facilitated, in turn, by a history of 'seeing nature' on Canada's West Coast that is itself both colonial and, perhaps more important, colonizing. In other words, the authority of corporate capital today is related in important ways to historical practices of imagining, representing and purifying 'natural' landscapes. As I will argue, these practices permitted 'natural' spaces to be apprehended apart from forms of native territoriality. Wedded to a Western metaphysics of truth, such representations could be seen as revealing the 'real' structure of the landscape. By showing the mechanics of the 52 production of this rhetorical space called 'nature', it becomes possible to write a genealogy of 'nature' as the absence of culture ('wilderness') in late twentieth century British Columbia, and possible also to destabilize claims of authority that are built on this absence.15 I will be necessarily selective; to wnthink the neo-colonial assumptions buried in MB ' s text, I enlist the writings of George Dawson, a geologist and amateur ethnologist, who traveled the coast with the Geological Survey of Canada in the 1870s and 1880s. By reading Dawson's texts against the grain, the fixity of this national/natural space - and its representation as a non-humanized hinterland - appears less certain, its construction as such, upon which subsequent 'rights' of access are built, made visible at the moment of its emergence. Displacements: bounding the 'native' and producing 'nature'. Dawson's travels coincided roughly with the years that the federal Indian Reserve Commission (IRC) was allocating and demarcating Indian Reserves in the province. This makes Dawson's texts particularly significant. It is the reserve commissions that cartographically inscribed colonialist discourse onto the territory of the province; bounding, within a quasi-legal discourse, the space of native villages and beyond their extent, positing an empty nature open to settlement or enterprise. This in turn has authorized subsequent depictions of BC as a 'resource landscape' rather than a 'cultural landscape'. Considerable attention in BC historiography has focused on the Indian Land Question, debating the relative 'generosity' to the Indians of successive colonial administrators, and later, after the colony joined Canada in 1871, specific provincial and federal authorities (Fisher 1977; Tenant 1990). However, as Gayatri Spivak (1990) reminds us, administrative practice presupposes an irreducible theoretical moment. In other words, practices such as those of the IRC occurred not simply through administrative fiat, but were made possible through a series of 15Foucault (1977) develops his notion of genealogy to trace the 'emergence' of objects and identities in the present, rather than understanding these as pre-existing their construction. 53 discursive practices by which a 'space' of administration could appear, and that at once invited and legitimated the actions of administrators. The cartographic inscription of colonialist rhetoric in the 'reserve' was prefigured and facilitated by a more general textualization, which included not only the appearance of written records, but also the emergence of a sense of order and totality through the production and dissemination of knowledge pertaining to the land and its inhabitants. In this way a 'landscape' could be known and made available. As a scientist, Dawson appears 'disinterested' rather than a colonial apologist. That is, his texts assume to provide an objective account of what existed in the landscape, quite apart from the social and political contexts in which he traveled and wrote. Thus his texts provide a valuable window onto the extent of a colonialist visuality that at once ordered and naturalized BC's natural/cultural landscapes, and at the same time underwrote the bounding of native territories and the shape and future direction of state policy. What I wish to trace in Dawson's work, then, is the process by which the 'land' was made to appear as 'nature'; a space that held no signs of 'culture' and therefore could be appropriated into the administrative space of the 'nation'. This occurred, I will argue, not through the denial by Dawson and others of native claims to the land (Dawson personally suggested the opposite) but through a series of representational practices that at once located and contained a native presence, dividing west coast territories into the 'primitive' spaces of native villages, and the 'modern' spaces of the emerging Canadian nation. Dawson's official writings took the form of survey reports for the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). These surveys fulfilled one of the conditions that the colony of British Columbia attached to union with the Dominion of Canada in 1871: that geological surveys be made of the new province's 'domain'. Several scholars have shown the significance of the geological survey in the development and spatial extension of the Canadian nation. Zaslov (1975) notes that the survey was a prime instrument in \"pushing back the frontiers\" and that it was in many places the \"first arm\" of the Canadian 54 government. More recently, Keller (1987) has tied the formation and activities of the GSC more closely to imagined geographies of a 'trancontinental' Canadian nation, and also to utilitarian concerns for national economic development. Both, however, view the survey primarily as a process of enumeration; documenting, through careful observation, the wealth of the new nation. This the survey certainly was. But it was also much more. The GSC not only enumerated, but brought a particular mode of intelligibility to bear on the landscape. This was no mere accounting, it was a means of simultaneously staging and availing, a way of producing 'spaces of visibility' (Rajchmann 1988; Gregory 1994) and by extension 'spaces of /^visibility' that in turn authorized the activities of certain actors.16 The outline of Dawson's (1880) report on his 1878 explorations in the Queen Charlotte Islands (located north of Vancouver Island) makes the construction of spaces of visibility/invisibility in the practice of enumeration abundantly clear. Like most GSC reports, it begins with a general description of the islands - a bird's eye view that situates them in relation to the rest of the nation, and provides a general outline of their physical geography - coastline, harbours, rivers, mountains, and so on. This provides readers with a general 'frame' that relates and incorporates the landscape as a component of the 'nation-state' and can then be filled with more detail. Subsequent chapters and appendices locate and describe the islands' geology, Indians, zoology, and botany - divisions in the text which apparently 'mirrored' what could be 'found' in nature. Plants, animals, Indians, rocks - each were separated and evaluated as discrete entities which, in turn, could be further subdivided, providing, through the 16The erasure of native presence - textually and physically - occurred in many ways, and was in any case uneven across the Americas. Historians of the American West, for instance, have emphasized how the frontier mythology was central to the removal of native people from their lands (Drinnon 1980; Slotkin 1985; Limerick 1987; Limerick argues that this continues to underwrite American imperialism.). In Canada, this mythology did not take hold in any comparable way. Regardless, what I trace here is not the evacuation of the 'real' into 'mythology' (and thus into the realm of the 'untruthful'), but the very ways that locating the 'real' or the 'truthful' through representational practices became aligned with colonialism. In a sense the subtitle to Drinnon's book - 'the metaphysics of Indian-hating' - captures this conjoining of knowledge and power in the marginalization of natives, even if his account does not work directly with this constellation of ideas. 55 enumeration of the 'parts', a picture of the 'whole'. Geological observations, for instance, were divided into further classifications: Triassic; Cretaceous coal bearing; Tertiary; and glaciated and superficial deposits. Likewise, Dawson's notes on the Haida distinguish and analyze physical appearance, social organization, religion and 'medicine', the potlatch and distribution of property, folklore, villages and population. Through the construction of particular circumscribed knowledge domains these landscapes were encountered, organized and enumerated. More than enumeration, Dawson's survey also stood as a remarkable case of 'anticipatory vision'. At the time he undertook this task, the white settler population in BC was still outnumbered by natives, and, further, this settler population was clustered almost entirely at the extreme SW corner of the province (Galois and Harris 1994). Beyond its extent the land was still known and experienced through native territorialities and temporalities. The survey therefore embodied and inscribed a national teleology on a landscape that, although bounded by the cartographic abstraction of national borders, had not yet been rationalized in relation to them. Yet these boundaries - however abstract -were of great significance. As Benedict Anderson (1991) persuasively argues, it is only subsequent to the demarcation of a 'national territory' that surveys like Dawson's could become part of the accounting ledgers of the nation. Only subsequent to this bounding could 'interiors' appear 'empty' and available to be 'f i l led' . 1 7 In a series of telling metaphors, Robert Brown, an explorer on Vancouver Island who preceded Dawson by fifteen years, makes this anticipatory filling explicit. It was the intention...that we should strike through the unexplored sections of the Island, carefully examine that tract as a specimen, and thus form a skeleton to be filled up afterwards (Hayman 1989:9) It is no accident that Dawson first traveled to the west coast as part of a joint British and American survey of the international boundary between Canada and the United States. 56 Later, Brown described the findings of his explorations as \"tests of the whole\" (Brown 1869), by which the regions between his traverses could be \"judged\". At more than one occasion he fantasized of its future transformation at the hands of settlers: The trail from Victoria to Comox crosses the Quall-e-hum River close to the coast, and an extension of this would form a transinsular road connecting coal miners of Nanaimo and the farmers of Comox with the wild savage of Nootka, Klay-o-quot [Clayoquot] and Barclay Sound (1864:25) Likewise, Dawson (1880a:38) speculated in the Queen Charlottes that \"before many years extensive saw-mills will doubtless be established....The quality of the spruce timber is excellent, and beside the immediate shores of the harbour, logs might probably be run down the Naden River from the lake above.\" Both Brown and Dawson assumed and enacted the bounded space of the colony and nation respectively, reproducing in a speculative fantasy what had already been accomplished elsewhere in the Americas. The GSC, then, and Dawson's writings more specifically, must be seen not only as an enumeration, but also, quite literally, as a means of national in-corporation - constructing and filling the 'body' (skeleton) of the 'nation' (specimen); inscribing this corporeal fiction - and its territorializations - onto west coast lands. Significantly, in the colonial context, the in-corporation of the nation (as a body) and the 'visualization' of its 'internal structure' involved also a fundamental division and displacement. This occurred in two ways. First, at the same time that the skeleton of the nation was being given flesh, it was also anatomized - divided into its component parts. The divisions of the survey introduced categories by which the land could be known and appropriated. Second, by constructing discrete entities - minerals, trees, Indians - these could be apprehended entirely apart from their surrounds, dis-placing and re-situating objects within quite specific, but very different, orders of signification. These processes of division and displacement can be seen in Dawson's journals. In these, Dawson recorded observations and kept a daily account of his movements, including descriptions of the social and technical mediations that made his movement and his scientific observations 57 possible: people he met, how he traveled, where he stayed, who acted as his guides, instruments used, measurements made, and so on. On the reverse side of his journal pages, Dawson occasionally inserted details that he had missed. More often, Dawson used these blank spaces to write a second 'parallel' text. In this he elaborated upon aspects of the physical landscape or native culture. Much of the information found on the back of these pages was later incorporated into his 'scientific' texts on the geology, resources and native cultures of the west coast, but it is the organization of these parallel texts that is of interest. Some passages dealt exclusively with geology or botany, others only with native culture, while yet others synthesized both into an enumeration of different aspects of the country (but even here - like in his reports - the two identities were rarely brought into relation; natives appeared as yet another element to be documented). One example will suffice. From August 8, 1878 to August 10, 1878, Dawson, accompanied by his brother Rankine, an Indian guide named Mills and the crew of the schooner Wanderer traveled from Skidegate to Masset, along the east and north coast of Graham Island. On, August 11, the day following his arrival in Masset, Dawson attended church, dined with the missionary Mr . Collison, read recent newspapers, and \"wrote up notes\". The events of the four days are duly recorded in his daily journal entries. On the reverse, two parallel texts are found. The Coast between Skidegate & Masset, in Potlatch. Mr . Collinson gives me some some respects resembles that between additional light on this custom. Cumshewa & Skidegate. A bare open stretch with no harbour & scarcely even a When a man is about make a potlatch, Creek or protected bay for Canoes or boats, for any reason, such as raising a house for long distances. The beach is gravelly & &c. &c. he first, some Months before sometimes coarsely stony to a point near hand, gives out property, money & c , windbound camp of track Survey. Beyond So much to each man, in proportion to this it becomes sandy, & though not without their various ranks & standing. Some gravel continues generally of Sand, all the time before the potlatch, this is all way to Masset. returned, with interest. Thus a man receiving four dollars, gives back six, Lawn Hi l l is evidently Caused by the & so on. A l l the property & funds thus outcrop of volcanic rock described in field collected are then given away at the 58 book, is probably Tertiary. Beyond this for some distance, & including the region about Cape Ball, cliffs, or low banks of drift-clay, & sands characterize. They are generally wearing away under the action of the waves, & trees & stumps may be seen in various stages of descent to the beach. In some places dense woods of fine upright clear trees, are thus exposed in section, & there must be much fine spruce lumber back from the sea everywhere. Very frequently the timber seen on the immediate verge of the cliffs, & shore is of an inferior quality, rather scrubby & full of knots. The soil is generally very Sandy where shown in the cliffs, or peaty in bottom places where water has Collected. Sand hills or sandy elevations resembling Such, are seen in some places on the cliffs, in section, & there is nothing to show that the Soil away from the Coast is universally sandy, but the fact that the upper deposits of the drift spread very uniformly & are of this character. Further north the shore is almost everywhere bordered by higher or lower sand hills, Covered with rank Coarse grass; beach peas, &c. &c. Behind these are woods, generally living though burnt in some places. The trees are of various degrees of excellince, but most generally rather undersized & scrubby. This part of the coast is also characterized by lagoons, & is evidently making, under the frequent action of the heavy South East sea. potlatch. The more times a man potlatches, the more important he becomes in the eyes of his tribe, & the more is owing to him when next some one distributes property & potlatches. The blankets, ictus &c. are not torn up & destroyed except on certain special occasions. If for instance a contest is to be carried on between two men or three as to who is to be chief, One may tear up ten blankets, scattering the fragments, the others must do the same, or retire, & so on till one has mastered the others. It really amounts to voting in most cases, for in such trial a mans personal property soon becomes exhausted, but there an under-current of supply from his friends who would wish him to be chief, & he in most popular favour is likely to be the chosen one. At Masset last winter, a young man made some improper advances to a young woman, whose father hearing of the matter, was very angry, & immediately tore up twenty blankets. This was not merely to give vent to his feelings, for the young man had to follow suite, & in this Case not having the requisite amount of property, the others of his tribe had to subscribe & furnish it, or leave a lasting disgrace in the tribe. Their feelings toward the young man were not naturally, of the Kindest, though they did not turn him out of the tribe as they might have done after having atoned for his fault. Totems are found among the indians here as elsewhere. The chief ones about Masset are the Bear & the Eagle. Those of one totem must marry in the other. (Cole and Lockner 1993:57-59) 59 In one text we find an enumeration of the 'wealth of nature'. Here the sciences of botany and geology play a large part. Specimens are located and related in space. Physical processes are described and possibilities for establishing communications (or lack thereof) duly noted. In the parallel text Dawson describes native peoples, their customs and behaviour (and, on other occasions, their villages). This appears, quite literally, as a turning of Dawson's gaze from one 'object domain' to another. The same separation is found is his photographs: native villages and individuals on the one hand, geological sites 18 and landscape vistas on the other. So, while indigenous peoples were at once described in great detail - their physical features and cultural forms documented and enumerated -they were simultaneously detached from the landscape, which could then be subsequently encountered and described as devoid of human occupation. In other words, Dawson distilled the complex social-ecological worlds of his travels into neat unambiguous categories: primitive culture and pristine nature. No relations are drawn between the two. Instead, the former is contained within the 'village', fixing a native presence in 'place', while beyond the bounds of the native villages, Dawson filled the blank spaces of the imperial map with the coloured spaces of geological and botanical maps (Figure 2.5). Indeed, the science of geology in the nineteenth-century was uniquely suited to these practices of abstraction and displacement. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century has seen a slow shift among natural historians from collecting mineral specimens to developing a science of geological formations (Rudwick 1996). This shift was facilitated by two related developments. The first - the discovery of strata in the early nineteenth century - permitted geognosists to identify and locate formations. The second -the association of specific fossils with specific formations - allowed further refinements in the practice of correlation (the identification of given formations with its equivalents in other regions or even other continents, or, in other words, the 'long-distance' correlation l8Dawson's photographs are collected in the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. 60 Figure 2.5. Geological Map of Skidegate Inlet. Source: Dawson (1880) (.1 of rock formations). While these developments had no necessary relation with either colonialism or imperialism (although certainly both facilitated the global nature of geological fieldwork), they allowed geology to be aligned with colonialism in important ways. So, while geology appears merely the 'innocent' language of 'nature' it is possible to locate in its knowledges the possibility for these to be articulated with colonial practice. To begin, the new science of stratigraphy permitted geologists to develop chronological orders and three-dimensional maps of the layered rocks of the earth's crust. The geological map became the centerpiece of an emerging visual language that displayed boundaries of rock strata according to a colour scheme keyed to the 'stratigraphic column'. In other words, these maps permitted the viewer to 'see' both the areal and vertical (sequential) structure of any one area. In turn, the science of correlation permitted the geologist to draw distant places into relation. These 'visual technologies' allowed what Latour has called an 'optical consistency'. Without it, the layers of the earth stay hidden and no matter how many travelers and diggers move around there is no way to sum up their travels, visions and claims. The Copernican revolution...is an idealist rendering of a very simple mechanism: if we cannot go to the earth, let the earth come to us, or, more accurately, let us all go too many places on the earth, and come back with the same, but different homogenous pictures, that can be gathered, compared, superimposed and redrawn in a few places, together with the carefully labeled specimens of rocks and fossils. (Latour 1986:15). In short, far away places could be related and compared. The science of correlation gave geology (and empire) a global reach; if the presence of coal or a certain mineral was associated with a sequence of strata at one site it was reasonable to expect the same presence at another.19 Equally as important, accompanying this new focus on stratigraphy 19Writing in the Canadian Pacific Railway Report, Dawson (1877:227,234) notes of western anthracitic coals that, Valuable deposits may, however, yet be found in the carboniferous formation proper of the far west; and where, as on some parts of the west coast, the calcareous, rocks of this age are largely replaced by argillaceous and arenaceous beds, the probability of the discovery of coal is greatest. I believe, indeed, that in a few localities in Nevada, coal shales, used to some extent as fuel in the absence of better, are found in rocks supposed to be of this age. The discovery of certain fossils in 1876 in the limestones of the lower Cache Creek group 62 and correlation were new notions of geological time. Human history, it was becoming evident, was put a brief final chapter in a far longer story. This worked further to prise apart human occupants of a given territory and the geology of a region. Nature existed as a separate global 'system' that could be known and related apart from its inhabitants and thus incorporated into imperial structures of knowledge and practice. The extension of geology's visual technologies was therefore in many ways simultaneously a means of annexing new territories into domains of Imperial science, and into Imperial modes of political and economic rationality. Dawson's geological maps exemplify this 'geological imagination', drawing those spaces 'outside' the primitive spaces of native villages into new visual regimes which saw the land in terms of stratigraphy and geological time, 'revealing' an 'environmental architecture' that could be appropriated as yet new frontiers for capital (Figure 2.6). In turn, the enterprising settler, armed with a rudimentary knowledge of geology, could 'read 20 the rocks' according to an assumed plan, and indeed was encouraged to do so. Dawson himself would go on to write texts about Canada as a \"field for mining investment\" (1896), and create provincial maps of the region's \"important trees\" (1880b) - important not for native inhabitants, but for the nascent forest industry. What we find in Dawson's writings, then, is the unveiling of nature's 'plan', a plan which both preceded and lay external to a now allow these, and probably also the associated quartzites and other rocks to be correlated with this period....Rocks of the same age with the coal-bearing series of the Queen Charlotte Islands are probably present also on the Mainland, where fossils indicating a horizon both somewhat higher and a little lower in the geological scale have already been found, and apparently occur in different parts of a great conformable rock series. 'A British Colonist (Victoria) editorial from July 27, 1863 makes this explicit, Every school in the colonies where boys are taught should make these branches [geology and mineralogy] part and parcel of its curriculum. Small cabinets of rocks and ores could be easily made or imported for the purpose of giving the pupils a practical acquaintance with the subject matter of those sciences....The mountains, the hills, and the rocks of the island and the mainland would be no longer trodden over in ignorance without attention....Combining this acquaintance with theory they may learn from books, they would in their prospecting tours be alive to metaliferous indications, and would no longer walk blindfolded, passing unconsciously material for untold wealth, as must now be often the case (De Cosmos 1863:2) 63 a. b. b. a. FlO. 1\u00E2\u0080\u0094POINTE AU NORD DES ILES DE LA PlERRE-A-ClIAUX, MONTRANT LA DISLOCATION ET LES FAILLES DES ASSISES, a. Caleaire. b. Lits volcaniques contemporaiiis. s.w. N. E.. HHS 8! It 1 III i i I a. b. c. b. c, b. c b. F i o . 2 COUPE DE HOCHES TRIASSIQUES, ANSE DE LA SECTION, ILE BURNABY. a. Matiere volcanique conteiuporaine. b. Calcaires et argilites. c. Dykes et injections, Echelle, dix pouces au mille. Figure 2.6. Nature's architecture. Cross sections of regions near Limestone Islands and Burnaby Islands off Queen Charlotte Islands. Source, Dawson 1880. 64 native presence and which would be fulfilled only through the judicious mixing of European (Canadian) capital and labour. The appearance of natural order and the ordering of nature's appearance. Dawson's texts suggest the possibility of writings genealogies of unmarked categories such as 'nature', the 'land', and the 'nation', genealogies that find in these inviolable identities numberless histories and marginal events. But they also help clarify how colonizing power works. As Timothy Mitchell (1988) notes, the illusion of representations like the survey, the journal or the map, was that they appeared to be without illusion: they were faithful to the 'things' represented, promising complete and certain knowledge (even if this was continually deferred, as Robert Brown (1869) noted, leaving \"details\" to \"more minute after inspection\"). This promise allowed readers (and writers) to apprehend an appearance of order that was thought to emanate from nature itself, rather than from the ordering of natural appearances in representational practices. Reading the survey only as a more-or-less accurate 'record' within a story of progressive European acquaintance with west coast lands, obscures the manner that the survey enframed the land within regimes of visibility. It is important to be clear about what is meant by this. What is at issue is not questions of accuracy. Dawson's surveys did not get it wrong; they did not misrepresent. Rather, they produced an 'effect' of truthfulness that was tied to a metaphysics which assumed that behind representation lay an order that representation continually approached. Through the hold of this metaphysic, the survey could be taken as approaching 'nature' itself, effacing the particular technologies of vision through which it was produced and finding in the 'order' of representation the order of 'reality' itself. Dawson's surveys and journals did not invent objects and landscapes in flights of fancy. These were material practices that engaged material worlds. Rather, in rendering the land visible the surveys constructed from what was encountered an ordered scene that could be read. Such practices, as Paul Carter (1987) notes, were not simply textual, but 65 highly material; they did not leave the land untouched. Instead they actively dis-placed and re-situated landscapes within new orders of vision and visuality, and within regimes of power and knowledge that at once authorized particular activities and facilitated new forms of governmentality. It was only after the land was staged as a 'theatre' of 'nature', after all, that it could be made available to political and economic calculation.21 Significantly, the production of 'nature' in colonial discourse did not occur through a straightforward erasure of native presence. In Dawson's texts (as in others of his time) indigenous 'populations' were identified and described in great detail. This presence, however, was ordered and contained in a discourse of 'primitive culture': a culture that lay outside, and had no place in, the unfolding history of the modern 'nation'. At the same time that Dawson placed native peoples 'on view', he displaced them both temporally and geographically from their surroundings. Concurrently, Dawson described a national (physical) landscape consisting of certain geological and botanical entities, containing certain landforms and waterways, and subject to particular climates and meteorological phenomena. What resulted, then, was a textual and spatial separation of the 'tribal' village from the 'modern' nation. Native village sites became tied to a traditional, ahistorical culture, and separated from a surrounding landscape that was figured, in turn, as a field for the enterprise of a dynamic modern culture. Colonial discourse in this instance did not zlCultural geographers have recently placed considerable attention on 'reading' the landscape as a 'text' (Duncan 1990; see also the edited collections by Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Barnes and Duncan 1992). This has had the important effect of shifting attention away from the previous concerns of cultural geographers with mapping the material transformation of 'natural' landscapes into 'cultural' landscapes by successive culture groups, and instead has drawn attention to the cultural construction of landscape through contested practices of signification. Demeritt (1994), drawing on Latour and Haraway, has recently criticized the 'new' cultural geography for locating agency wholly in humans (or the 'social'). I share Demeritt's concerns (although caution that the agency of non-humans - animals and machines - can never be marked apart from a further set of contested practices of signification). However, I find the new cultural geography problematic in other ways. First, by its almost exclusive focus on 'cultural' landscapes, it has left unexamined how so-called 'natural' landscapes have themselves been constructed and contested. Second, and perhaps more important, by presuming the landscape as a 'text' to be decoded, much attention has been given to 'interpreting' landscapes and less attention paid to how the 'landscape' is made to appear as a text to be read in the first place. In this section I have sought to demonstrate how landscapes are made intelligible. Although focusing on different 'mechanisms' of landscape production, I share Mitchell's (1994) desire to retain within the concept of landscape a clear focus on \"how landscapes are produced and in what ways they structure social action\" (p. 10). 66 erase, it displaced. Erasure occurred, to be certain, but not through lack of attention. Rather it occurred in the movement/translation between different orders of signification. Only subsequent to this original displacement did it become a matter of course to represent BC's natural landscape with no regard to its original inhabitants. By the time Judge Sloan wrote his Report on Forest Resources in 1945 - a document that in many ways is responsible for the present form of forestry in BC - this erasure was a constitutive but invisible aspect of 'forest epistemology' in the province. The 'forest' stood as an entity entirely separate from its inhabitants and thus subject to other administrative and political objectives.22 Sloan saw the forest as a single system and could therefore generalize and extend a model of sustainable forestry - and accompanying tenure system - across the entire extent of the province's known exploitable forest resources. Perhaps more than any other single 'act' since the separation and segregation of First Nations on a 'reserve' This is encapsulated well in an analogy that appears early in Sloan's (1945:19) text. If there were a mountain near Vancouver with a gently ascending slope, the climber would find as he progressed upwards that beyond the 2,000-foot line a gradual change in the forest species was encountered. He would notice the Douglas fir was thinning out and the stand was now made up of cedar, hemlock, and balsam, in that order of importance. Still climbing, he would find himself in a forest of hemlock, cedar, spruce, and balsam. Higher up his forest would now be hemlock, balsam, spruce, and cedar. Soon the cedar is left below and the hemlock, spruce, and balsam remain in that order. Should he persist in his climb, he would get into scrub and non-commercial mountain species. Now, let us conceive of our gradually ascending slope, not as a mountain near Vancouver, but as the coastal plane of the province, stretched out from south to north. Let us assume our climber is traveling north up the latitudes instead of up the mountain. He would come upon the same general classification of forest-cover in the same order of species as he encountered on our imaginary Vancouver mountain. Judge Sloan's passage is more than merely metaphorical. Although Sloan quickly returns to the more prosaic language that we associate with Commission reports. Yet, on closer examination, his analogy merits further attention. This is so not because Sloan simplifies what in reality is a complex biogeography (i.e. Sloan abstracts 'trees' from their ecological surrounds). Rather, what concerns me is what lies buried in this analogy, or, to say this differently, the absent presence that allows this metaphorical language to do the work it is being asked to do. The issue here is not that Sloan's mountain is imaginary. Rather, like MB's promotional literature, Sloan's text asks its readers to see the forest in a particular way; Sloan extends an invitation to see the forest as an abstract category. Further, in a fantasy of transcendent vision, we are invited to extend this to the whole extent of the coastal plane. Thus, Sloan's reader is able to apprehend the forest as a whole, and to assume that what is 'out there' corresponds with what is found in the text. Thus, what Sloan maps -metaphorically, and, in the years that followed quite literally - is a landscape that is full of 'timber' (and the bio-physical factors that support trees) but devoid of people. By staging the forests in this way, Sloan was able to generalize a model of sustainable forestry - and an accompanying tenure system - across the entire extent of known exploitable forest reserves. Sloan's metaphor is thus central rather than supplemental. 67 system in the late 1800s this would work to 'isolate' Native peoples like Simon Lucas and the Nuu-chah-nulth from their physical surrounds. For Sloan to unproblematically rationalize the forest in this manner, however, required first that it be made available as an 'empty space' of 'wilderness'. Here lies the significance, in the present, of rereading historical texts like Dawson's. Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has argued that this displacement of the 'native' from their physical surroundings was a common trope in nineteenth-century travel writings produced by Europeans moving through the 'primitive' spaces of Africa and the Americas. As Pratt notes, scientific accounts - like Dawson's - did not exist in a realm apart from imperialism and European expansion, they actively facilitated both. \"Natural history\", she writes, \"extracted specimens not only from their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their place in other people's economies, histories, social and symbolic systems\" (1992:31). In Dawson's texts, native peoples were spatially 'fixed' at certain sites -usually villages or resource procurement sites - and surrounded solely by what appeared as the empty space of nature. Across this empty space primitive peoples only 'moved', leaving little trace of occupation or, in the same discourse, few claims of possession. As people possessing only a transient, undisciplined gaze, it could be assumed that they had no real knowledge of the tremendous riches that lay upon or beneath the \"face of the country\". In this way, Pratt writes, the Americas were re-invented as \"a primal world of nature, an unclaimed and timeless space occupied by plants and creatures (some of them human), but not organized by societies and economies; a world whose only history was the one about to begin.\" (1992:126) Dawson's textual divisions and rhetorical displacements were, in effect, agents of deterritorialization, rendering invisible existing relations between native peoples, their immediate surroundings and the complex cultural/political institutions that organized these relations. In turn, other notions of property and ownership particular to European societies could be inscribed over the extent of the territory and institutionalized in legal and political discourse. 68 Indeed, there is an entire institutional/administrative history to the construction of 'natural/national' space. I have deliberately not focused on this here. The separation of the 'land' and its 'resources' from native peoples and their communities and its relocation into the abstract space of the nation is not solely, or even primarily, the result of juridico-political statements and public administration (colonialism proper). Nor are neo-colonial practices today solely the result of administrative policy (i.e. forest tenure systems). The conditions of possibility for modern Tree Farm Licenses - abstracted as ahistorical, rationalized, spaces - are multiple and disparate. In part, they were prefigured and facilitated in the manner that the BC landscape was encountered and described by explorers, travelers, scientists and settlers and the cultural, economic and institutional forms that were subsequently inscribed and reproduced in BC society. \"The act [practice] of language\" Paul Carter (1987, 144) notes \"[brings] a living space into being and render[s] it habitable, a place that [can] be communicated, a place where communication [can] occur.\" This is an important point to make in the political present. In legal struggles today, and in recent \"government to government\" negotiations, First Nations must always deal with the question of 'evidence' for native claims. Most commentators on native 'dispossession' have debated colonial policy and legal pronouncements. (Tenant 1990) While this is important for tracing the quasi-legal apparatus of dispossession, it fails to sufficiently identify the many ways that past colonial policy (and administrative practices today) relied upon and incorporated representational practices that as a matter of course already depicted the land through colonialist rhetorics which narrowly circumscribed notions of native territoriality within a larger narrative of the emerging nation, nor how present practices normalize the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism. The displacement that occurred in the 'spatial writings' of settler societies rendered invisible existing territorializations, making the land appear \"as Eden\". This was, figuratively and materiality, the \"worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory, part of an imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that it [re]territorialized was in fact 69 previously uninscribed.\" (Spivak 1990: 1). MB's public relations materials re-enact much the same erasure. Native land rights have been notoriously difficult for Western colonial cultures to see. Indeed, countering colonialism's 'itineraries of silencing' - both historical and contemporary - was a central task faced by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in their early 1990s land claims case (See Monet and Skan'nu 1992; Solnick 1992). If these founding rhetorics and territorializations are left unexamined, then past colonial authority appears legitimate, and by extension, so also does the authority claimed today by transnational forest companies. By noting that dispossession occurred not simply through legal pronouncements, but also, and primarily, through a visuality that at once geographically located and spatially contained native presence (and therefore authorized European claims to an empty land), a narrative that sees the land as unoccupied can be contested and dismantled, creating a conceptual space within juridico-political discourses in which past and present forms of native territoriality and possession might be made visible. Producing marginality To conclude, let me return to the figure of Simon Lucas. In British Columbia today, Royal Commissions on Forest Resources and discourses of resource management seem far removed from a colonial past. They are about trees, about abstracting the most value from them, and about doing this in the 'best interests' of the 'public'. The experience of Simon Lucas and the Nuu-chah-nulth suggest that behind these identities lies something entirely different. This chapter has raised a series of questions surrounding the relation between a colonial past and a supposedly postcolonial present. The result has been to place in question what is included or contained in the term 'postcolonial', an issue to which I will return at the end of this work. The 'isolation' of Simon Lucas can also be used to help rethink the production of marginality. As I have shown in this chapter, the marginalization 70 of subaltern groups does not simply originate in administrative processes and state policies. It is not solely the product of unequally distributed abilities to wield allocative and authoritative power in juridical-political fields. As important as policy is for the implementation of colonialist practices (even today after the end of 'formal' colonialism), such policies and processes cannot be fully understood or resisted without paying attention to their conditions of possibility, or, in other words, to the discursive practices that underwrite and legitimate their authority. In short, the figure of Simon Lucas suggests that we need to re-orient both how we understand marginality and where we locate processes of marginalization. To begin, marginality does not refer foremost to a spatial category (as in writing from the margins). To write marginality as a spatial category risks essentializing the margin as a site that exists 'outside' or 'prior to' its discursive production, and which is subsequently excluded from, made subject to, or incorporated within forms of power. Marginality is produced in and through colonial discourse and practice. In the words of Seshadri-Crooks (1995:60), it refers to that 'constitutive negativity' that makes 'positive knowing' possible - to that which must be excluded from the frame for identities to appear coherent and complete. However, this does not mean that space is incidental. As is evident in the writings of George Dawson and in colonialist forest practices, marginality was produced precisely through the representation and production of space. It was through the discursive and spatial separation of native peoples from their lands, for instance, that 'wilderness' is able to appear as an object in and of itself, an identity whose constitutive 'outside' becomes visible and contestable in the figure of Simon Lucas. This has important implications for where we locate the production of marginality and how it might be disrupted. To begin with policy and administration is to overlook what Gayatri Spivak (1990) calls the 'theoretical moment' presupposed in these - the marking and regulation of difference such that subjects are interpolated within discourse as subordinate and without agency, while others are bestowed with both agency and 71 authority. In other words, colonialism can be seen to have been, and continues to be today, a product of signifying practices and productions of knowledge that legitimate authority. As Nicholas Thomas (1994:2) explains, Colonialism is not best understood primarily as a political or economic relationship that is legitimated or justified through ideologies of racism or progress. Rather, colonialism has always equally importantly and deeply, been a cultural process; its discoveries and trespasses are imagined and energized through signs, metaphors, and narratives; even what would seem its purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by structures of meaning. Colonial cultures are not simply ideologies that mask, mystify, or rationalize forms of oppression that are external to them; they are also expressive and constitutive of colonial relationships in themselves. Thus, rather than focus on state policy, histories of forest-tenure, or legal judgments to explain why, in the words of a witness to the Task Force on Native Forestry, First Nations live as 'prisoners in their own lands', it is equally as important to interrogate the representational practices which have worked to abstract the 'forest' from its cultural 'surrounds' and subsequently re-situate it within very different cultural and spatial logics. As I have shown, such practices authorize very different spokespeople to 'speak for' the forest: no longer traditional 'owners' and 'stewards' (such as articulated in the Nuu-chah-nulth system of hahuulhi24), but rather forestry corporations, professional foresters, economic planners and environmentalists.25 It should also be noted that by employing such an approach I depart in significant ways from the current fascination in British Columbia with 'round tables' on the environment, which assume that such arenas provide possibilities for 'ideal speech situations' (see Mason 1996). Although these arenas do often increase possibilities for participation they do not by themselves mitigate the relations of power that are inscribed into public debate through the categories and identities by which conflicts are organized and understood. By establishing their resolutions as products of 'open' public processes, existing relations are often legitimated. 24Hahuulhi is the name given by the Nuu-chah-nulth to the system of resource ownership, control and use practiced by its various constituent groups. Resource procurement sites were owned by individual chiefs and this was recounted and reinforced in oral traditions during feasts and other cultural gatherings. Along with ownership came certain responsibilities (see Scientific Panel 1995a). 25The abstraction and displacement of the local into the global has become a well rehearsed theme and it is not only aboriginal communities that are marginalized by such processes (see Hecht and Cockburn, 1989). However, in the case of British Columbia, for this abstraction and displacement to proceed a native presence must be at once erased or marked in ways that de-link indigenous peoples from their surrounds. This occurs in different ways from the marginalization of other social groups. 72 Seen in the context of current political struggles by First Nations, writing the 'war in the woods' as in part a crisis of representation does not reduce it to 'mere' philosophical or literary concerns. On the contrary, it insists on the political significance of representation. This is an especially important argument to make today when First Nations, in their struggle to seek redress for past colonialist practices (dispossession of lands, the physical separation and segregation of native peoples on reserves, the paternalistic administration of 'native affairs' through the Indian Act, and so on), must also confront a growing non-Native backlash that has girded itself in the seductive rhetorics of liberalism and which questions why First Nations should be granted 'special privileges' to which no others are 'entitled', or which might limit the individual 'freedoms' of non-native 26 Canadians. This backlash, I argue, is underwritten by the presumed self-evident nature of identities such as the 'nation', 'property', 'wilderness', and the 'public good'. In other words, a whole series of cultural practices prevent Canadians from seeing native 'rights' as pre-existing the 'nation-state' and impede recognition of how the 'fixity' of the Canadian nation-state is achieved precisely through this constitutive absence. Our constructions of 'nature' play an important role in this. As I showed in this chapter, with each representation of the forest as only a 'resource landscape', unrelated to the colonial production of space, an existing native presence is marginalized, and in a sleight of hand, the forest appears as an uncontested space of economic and political calculation that has neither a culture nor a history. In such an 'empty' space no other claims than those of the 'nation' and its 'public' are seen to exist. This has had important effects. Not only have native peoples in the past derived few benefits from the activity of extractive capital on their territories, but in recent years discussion over the fate of the forest has been convened within a logic (jobs vs. environment) that seems common-sense, but which has worked to yet again marginalize This has recently become the rhetoric of the BC Liberal Party. 73 First Nations. As important as this binary staging has been for bringing attention to bear on the consequences of forest modification, the responsibilities of forest users, and the problems inherent in maintaining a sustainable forest industry and sustainable forest communities, it has also worked hand-in-hand with, and indeed relied upon, the marginalization of voices that do not 'fit' either of the positions ascribed. In the next chapter I explore the other side of this binary code. 27Baudrillard (1984) argues that this sort of 'regulated opposition' comprises both the form and content of politics in highly mediatized societies, without which the singular collapses under its own weight. If this^ is true, First Nations in BC face two 'cultural' obstacles: historical practices that rendered natives invisible;1, and, a mediatized culture in the present which makes it difficult for the articulation of multiple perspectives 74 CHAPTER 3 \"SAVING CLAYOQUOT\": ENVIRONMENTALISM, COLONIALISM AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF NATURE Blockades and the spatial and temporal logics of the normal forest Since Judge Sloan's report in 1945, industrial forestry in BC has followed the spatial and temporal logics of sustained-yield forestry. The principle involved is simple - harvest only the amount necessary each year such that once the entire forest has been logged once, it consists of a regular age distribution of even-aged stands and a second rotation can begin. In practice of course, determining the rotation period has proved difficult, dependent upon adequate knowledge of inventories, and on a variety of economic, ecological and technological variables that determine at what age and in what areas it is viable or desirable to harvest. Two consequences merit attention. First, sustained yield policies assume that over time the entire 'working forest' will be remade in the image of a single commodity: timber. Second, there has been a predictable geographical (and political) pattern to this production of nature. In each sustained-yield unit harvesting has generally begun with stands nearest to manufacturing centers. As these were depleted and networks of roads extended into outlying areas, more remote forests were brought into production. This left distant areas 'untouched' until the final stages of the first rotation. Today, few unlogged regions remain, but those that do often appear 'pristine'. Since 'modified' landscapes are considered by many to be 'unnatural' (see Chapter 6), the result is that the 'end of nature' on places like Vancouver Island appears imminent: industrial forestry now appears on the verge of 'liquidating' the last vestiges of 'ancient rainforest'. Yet, these unlogged forests have been part of the economic and social equation of forestry in BC for many years. Without them the spatial and temporal patterns of forestry are disrupted and thus so also are its social logics. Predictably then, valley-by-valley conflicts between forest-dependent 75 communities and environmentalists have sharpened with the final stages of the forest's normalization. Speaking for nature. In the 1980s logging began to push further into the \"wild side\" of Vancouver Island.1 With each valley entered, the scale of conflict increased. Carmanah, Walbran, Tsitika; for many in British Columbia these remote valleys have become household names. Until 1993, what had previously seemed only an accelerating series of local conflicts spilled into the international arena as thousands of activists arrived at the blockades set up to halt logging activity in Clayoquot Sound, one of the last and largest regions of temperate rainforest that remained 'intact' on the Island. As I noted earlier, on most days the blockades delayed the progress of loggers by only a matter of minutes. Yet all recognized that this was in many ways immaterial, for with the blockades, BC's environmental movement showed that what was crucial was not whether in the short term the trucks rolled on, but whether the images produced were suitable for consumption and circulation in the mediatized circuits that have become such important local/global sites of political contestation at the end of the twentieth century. By staging the logging road confrontations in the ways that they did, environmentalists clearly recognized the changing configuration of public spheres within what one commentator has called the global \"mediascapes\" and \"technoscapes\" of advanced capitalism, and adopted strategies appropriate to these new social spaces. Through the production of scenes that could be filmed and readily disseminated on network news broadcasts; through computer bulletin boards and networks of electronic mail; and on other occasions by choosing as the site of protests large cities such as San Francisco, Bonn and London, the movement 'The designation 'wild side' used by environmentalists refers both to the grandeur of the region's natural forces (it is exposed to the Pacific) and to the limited scale of development in the region, in comparison to the east side of the island facing Georgia Strait. 2Arjun Appadurai (1990) coins these terms in an attempt to locate the new terrains of social identity and political struggle emerging in the media circuits and technologized spaces of our global cultures. See also Thompson (1995). 76 appropriated spaces of publicity and built a constituency in and across disparate geographical locations, strategically mimicking the same circuits of capital and consumption that have so quickly remade much of BC's environment in the image of a single commodity: timber.3 Such spatial and representational practices are today highly effective local/global tactics of resistance. As a recent cover of Canada's most popular newsmagazine declared (not without some anxiety), in many ways the world was watching (Figure 3.1).4 Rather than focus on the shifting contours of 'publicity' in global media and transnational public spheres, their significance for political strategies, or the specific tactics employed by BC and international environmental groups, in this chapter I raise a series of more immediate questions about the manner in which 'nature' in Clayoquot Sound has been represented by environmental groups within these local/global public spaces, and, subsequently, the way that the environmental movement has built its authority to speak for nature in the region. As I hope to show, in the politically charged context of 'postcolonial' British Columbia, representing nature and speaking for nature is never innocent, but always bound up with cultural histories and cultural politics. A deceptively simple image from the 1993 summer of protest can set the stage and clarify the issues in question. In this scene a male protester is dragged off the barricades by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. As he is dragged in front of the news cameras he seizes the moment: \"Here I stand for the wild things who have no voice in our courts, our boardrooms and our politics. I speak for the wolves, the trees, and eagles.\" 3 One of the most effective transnational strategies used by BC's Green movement has been to make visible the ecological relations of consumption for various forest products. Greenpeace, for instance, has been highly successful in its campaign directed at the readers (and publishers) of German newsmagazines, resulting in many publications switching to alternate paper sources. 4 The globalization of BC's environmental conflicts has raised a number of important questions ranging from how conventional social and political identities like 'nation', 'community', 'citizenship' and 'sovereignty' are reconfigured by new spaces of publicity, who is included and who is excluded from these spaces, and the effects on local political autonomy when the 'local' is displaced into 'global' circuits of information, images, commodities and capital. Residents of local forestry-dependent communities, for instance, have expressed resentment at the intervention of 'outsiders'. 77 Figure 3.1. \"The World is Watching\". Cover of Maclean's Magazine, August 16, 1993. 78 This statement can be read at various levels, and for various ends. Most immediately, it is a conscious and effective tactic of resistance made by an individual fully aware of its potential reproduction and circulation in the global spectacle of television news. It is without doubt, dramatic. More substantively, the protester's statement also articulates an important political and moral challenge that locates, questions and undermines how limits to moral and legal discourse in our public cultures have been drawn.5 Around what figures do we organize responsibility? How do we define these boundaries? Who and what has rights? To what does our 'democratic imaginary' extend? Further, the statement displaces the dominant economic rationalities that have organized life in the region and asserts in their place the priority of ecological relations.6 In short, the protester seeks to give voice to a 'mute' nature - those 'wild things' that have conventionally been figured within Western humanism only as inert and voiceless 'resources'.7 Thus the significance of the Clayoquot blockades should not be underestimated as an important challenge to the 'ecology' of Western capitalism. Yet, as important as such statements are, they are problematic, for - as writers like Donna Haraway have shown - it is impossible to imagine a site from which speaking for nature is not also a staging of nature. In short, the claim to 'speak for' presupposes both the constituency represented - in this case 'nature' - and the authority of the representative. Perhaps neither should be so readily assumed. As I did in the previous chapter for the literature of MacMillan Bloedel, in this chapter I explore one way that BC's environmental movement builds its authority to 'speak for' nature. As I 5This is similar to the arguments of animal rights activists and eco-centric theorists who question the way that notions of responsibility to the 'other' have been narrowly circumscribed around the figure of the 'human', despite the evident problem of separating this figure from an 'ecological' context and the always unstable boundary between the 'human' and 'non-human'. See Eckersley (1992). 61 explore the ecologization of nature more fully in Chapter 6. 7This is consistent with much \"green\" thought that finds in western industrialized societies a narrow instrumental relation to the non-human world. See Naess (1989). Against this instrumental reason is posited a holistic or spiritual relation which is assumed to be more primary or original. See Devall and Sessions (1985). Others have questioned the possibility of transcending instrumental relations, arguing that our understanding and experience of nature is always bounded in language and practice, suggesting instead that all that can be fostered within these power-charged fields is an ethical relation to the non-human. These questions are addressed in the collection of essays edited by Bennett and Chaloupka (1993). 79 hope to show, the question of 'saving Clayoquot' opens up into a set of larger issues relating to the boundaries that we draw between 'nature' and 'culture' and between the 'traditional' and the 'modern'. On these much turns. Siting/sighting the natural/cultural. This chapter proceeds by relating and comparing two specific 'sightings/sitings' of landscapes in Clayoquot Sound.8 The first is a popular and widely distributed book of photography published by a local environmental group in the context of its fight to 'save' Clayoquot Sound from industrial forestry. The second is a map from an archaeological study produced in the context of a land-claims trial in the same area. Both documents construct landscapes for viewers. But, as I hope to show, they authorize very different spokespersons for 'nature' in the region, and license very different political projects. Much hinges on how 'nature' and 'culture' are represented and related. As will become clear as I proceed, the presence of First Nations in BC's 'wilderness' has proven problematic for BC's Greens, and has resulted in representational practices and political commitments that are often both complex and contradictory. Before proceeding, I should note that this is a cautionary tale which I tell with a certain reluctance, lest it be used to dismiss the legitimate ecological concerns of the environmental movement. Theoretical purity can be a dangerous game when it undermines the identities that ground political agency. The inherent risk is that such a critique may be used by forestry interests in a way that minimizes an ecological critique while at the same time buttressing the assumed 'value-free' rhetorics of 'benevolent management' and 'community stability' deployed by the forest industry. It is precisely these rhetorics that 8I use the dual term sight/site to intentionally foreground representation as involving both 'seeing' and 'making objects to be seen' (Shapiro 1993:129). In this first sense, 'sight' refers also to the corporeality of sight, positioning representation resolutely in the historical, em-bodied viewer, rather than prior or external to the particular historical, social, political and technical dynamics within which observers are constituted (Crary 1990). The second sense - site - refers to the historical practices by which 'things' come into presence as visual objects. By writing of vision as the product of many practices, the still widely-held belief that seeing is both passive and transcendent can be shown to be ideological since it refuses to acknowledge how vision is located and enabled in specific material and discursive practices. 80 transnational capital has used so effectively to link their continued control over the region's forests to the future economic and social health of forestry communities. And it is these also that have proved so effective for constructing and maintaining antagonisms between labour and the environmental movement whereby labour becomes enrolled by capital to resist changes to forest practices or reductions in land-areas open to industrial forestry. In this rhetoric, any reorganization of BC's forest-land tenure system, changes to methods of industrial production, redistribution of the ownership of the means of production, or protection of forest areas becomes closely articulated with the deeply held fears of forest workers about continued security of employment and community and family stability. My objectives are different. I agree fully with the calls currently made by BC's Greens for a broader sense of responsibility and accountability in our modifications of physical environments and support the alternative narratives that these groups put forward that re-inscribe nature in terms of a series of interdependent relations rather than detached and abstracted commodities. My reservations lie instead in the unintended cultural politics that these narratives incorporate. Deconstructing narrative is not a detached or disinterested practice; it engages that which is close at hand (and heart), identifying critical absences and enabling moments in order to locate other possible worlds where current practices of \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 marginalization have a less secure hold. \"Blasphemy\", Donna Haraway (1991:149) writes, \"protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy.\" If this chapter is blasphemous, it is so in order to contribute towards a reflexive environmentalism that carefully considers what is gained and lost in commonly deployed languages of nature. Defending nature: Clayoquot: On the Wild Side9 The 'after-effects' of colonialism - as I showed in Chapter 2 - continue to infuse the activities of extractive capital and state-economic planning. Indeed, the situation in BC is 9Adrian Dorst and Cameron Young, Clayoquot: On the wild side, Vancouver, 1990. 81 not unique within Canada. From Clayoquot Sound in BC to the Great Whale hydro project in Quebec, race, colonial histories and staples development have been closely intertwined (Cohen 1994). In each instance, the explicit environmental racism has been contained and naturalized in practices that abstract and displace resource commodities from cultural contexts. Many First Nations speakers have argued precisely this point, that the economic exploitation of nature-as-resource has tended to rely on, and reproduce, colonial relations in B C . Recently, native groups have begun to ask whether the same might be said of environmentalist rhetorics articulated in the defense of nature? To what extent does the defense of nature merely reverse rather than displace the staging of nature-as-resource in staples economies? This question was recently brought foreword forcefully in criticisms leveled by George Watts during the European tour of the BC Premier in February 1994, who argued before German Greens and the German media that the environmental movement is guilty of its own forms of neo-colonialism.10 To explore Watts' complaint I return to the same 'media wars' from which I drew my material in the last chapter in order to tell another, different story of 'nature' and its 'representatives'. On the wild side: showcasing Nature. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side (Figure 3.2) is one of the most popular coffee-table books published by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. Consisting of both photographs and text - both significant in their own right -it is the 160-odd photographs that grace every page which are clearly asked to bear the 10Premier Harcourt's tour of European cities was intended to forestall a boycott of BC forest products which Greenpeace had threatened to organize. Watts' statements became the most provocative aspect of the trip, and the most widely reported back in British Columbia. The 'accuracy' of news reports and Watts' own position as a Nuu-chah-nulth spokesperson - Watts is a former chair of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council -came under considerable attack from both natives and non-natives in the days and weeks that followed. Regardless of how either issue is answered, Watts' comments brought to the fore the problem of conflating two very different political struggles - environmentalism and anti-colonialism. Similar issues surfaced again in the summer of 1996 when members of the Nuu-chah-nulth asked Greenpeace to withdraw from the Sound, after the organization planned road blockades without first obtaining the approval of native leaders, (see Hamilton 1996). 82 Western Canada Wilderness Committee Figure 3.2. Cover of Adrian Dorst and Cameron Young (1990) Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. Vancvouer: Western Canada Wilderness Committee. 83 narrative burden.11 Like the representational strategies of National Geographic, the text and the photographs hold no necessary relation (see Lutz and Collins 1993); both can be viewed/read independently of the other. By paying close attention to the textual strategies employed, we can begin to recognize and subvert situations where environmentalism is articulated with colonialist representational practices. Taken as a whole, the book - not unlike MacMillan Bloedel's literature (see Chapter 2) - is an attractively packaged, visually arresting collection that follows a time-tested formula. Indeed, photographic collections have been used effectively to mobilize support for the preservation of certain landscapes (usually 'wilderness') in the United States and Canada since the 1930s when the Sierra Club first published Ansel Adam's photographs in its struggle to preserve Kings Canyon, California from resource development (Turner 1991). It is important to note, however, that photographs - even in documentary photography - do not 'mirror' nature; they actively construct landscapes that observers are invited to grasp as the 'real'. As John Tagg (1988:8) notes, The photographer turns his or her camera on a world of objects already constructed as a world of uses, values and meanings, though in the perceptual process these may not appear as such but only as qualities discerned in the \"natural\" recognition of \"what is there\" ... The image is therefore to be seen as a composite of signs ... Its meanings are multiple, concrete and most important, constructed.12 So, although Clayoquot: On the Wild Side disrupts the representational logic of extractive capital, it does not necessarily reveal an essential 'reality' that is obscured behind the commodity form. Rather, it invites the viewer to engage the landscape of Clayoquot Sound in highly selective ways. In itself this is not a problem - it is the nature of all representational practices. But it means that rather than accept these photographs as a nCameron Young makes exactly this point in his own \"personal statement\" in the introductory pages. \"This is Adrian's book, a testament to his commitment to the wild side of Vancouver Island. Over the years he has assembled a spectacular portfolio of wilderness photographs of the coast, and believed that a selection of this work might reach a wide audience with a fundamental message: the remaining wilderness areas on the west coast of Vancouver Island are in urgent need of protection... .1 was honoured when asked to write the supporting text\" (p. 6). I 2For further critical discussion of photography, see Barthes (1981) and Sontag (1977). 84 transparent reflection of 'nature itself we should read such images as texts that at one and the same time are organized through a particular optic and actively construct what counts as 'nature' and 'culture' in this landscape. In short, Dorst's photographs constitute and organize a 'field of vision' that establishes and circumscribes both the objects and relations visible and the viewing positions made available to the observer.13 Clayoquot: On the Wild Side, therefore, invites viewers to engage the region in highly selective ways. This has important consequences. First, what is represented in the photographs gives form to a possible politics. In other words, Dorst's photographs are not innocent - they establish and demarcate a terrain of political calculation (wilderness) and call viewers to occupy certain subject positions (preservationists). In short, the pictures and text construct viewers as part of a 'concerned public' and invite them to 'save' Clayoquot. I will explore how this is accomplished in more detail shortly. Second - and no less important - texts like these are mobile (Latour 1986). They draw together people in disparate places. It is no accident that the mass protests that occurred in the summer of 1993 followed the wide circulation of images of BC's temperate rainforests both in Canada and abroad, and included, for the first time, large numbers of people from the United States, Europe and Australia. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side, then, must be understood as part of a wider circulation of texts and images by which geographical and ecological imaginations are constructed (and globalized). In what follows my argument is not that 'aesthetics' should not play an important role in political struggles, nor that it distracts from rational political discourse. Nor is the issue whether so-called 'outsiders' should 'interfere' in local politics, although it does raise important questions about who can be heard in these new transnational public cultures and how global communications Recognizing the manner that 'landscapes', 'fields of vision', or 'seeing', have been constituted within cultural and social dynamics is indebted to writers such as Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (see Cosgrove 1984; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). Gillian Rose (1993) however, has demonstrated that this literature has all but ignored important questions concerning the gendered construction of both visual fields and viewing subjects. 85 reconfigure local politics. If we give any credence to the accounts provided by ecologists, environmental issues are not so easily contained under notions of the 'local' or managed within rhetorics of state-sovereignty (see Keuhl 1996). Further, in the global cultures and transnational circuits of capital that characterize fin-de-siecle societies, the local and the global are not easily distinguished. The environmental issues that emerge at the close of the twentieth century are often best understood as localized moments of global flows. In turn, the site of local politics is not necessarily 'local' in conventionally understood ways (such as occurring within a specific locality or defined by proximity). Local environmental groups have taken their struggle to sites of forest product consumption as one among many global strategies of local politics. However, the material effects of such political struggles are localized in important ways and experienced unevenly by different social groups. For these reasons alone, it is important to ask how the 'nature' of Clayoquot Sound is constructed in such accounts, or, in other words, to explore how the region becomes textualized.15 Let us turn, in more detail, to Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. As I will show, both the organization of the book and the specific photographs and text included, have important implications for how authority is built and distributed between various actors.16 To begin, Earlier protests, such as the blocking of MacMillan Bloedel loggers from beginning operations on Meares Island, consisted of members of local tribal groups and residents of the town of Tofino. Both protesters and loggers were likely to know each other, and to have a well-nuanced understanding of the issues and histories involved in the dispute. This raises a series of important issues about the ways that the globalization of the dispute has also simplified a complex issue into a series of oppositions that appear to share no common ground. 15I refer here to Spivak's (1990) notion of \"worlding\" whereby landscapes are territorialized and made to bear meanings. This is quite literally the materiality of language and discursive practices as they come to order an unruly material world: a textualizing. 1 6 In this chapter I explore how the environmental movement enacts closure around 'wilderness'. This is not meant to suggest that the book reviewed is not itself open to contesting interpretations. No doubt native readers would read the book 'against the grain', but not necessarily in the same way that I do (and, given the contested character of 'nature', 'wilderness' and 'tradition' in native communities there would no doubt be various readings there also). The book, however, is clearly directed at an urban middle-class audience for whom wilderness preservation is a compelling issue, and which has the political clout to push for state intervention. When, in the preface to the book, Robert Bateman speaks of 'we Canadians', and 'our generation', and calls readers to 'draw the line' for the defense of wilderness on Canada's west coast, it is this audience that he no doubt has in mind. First Nations people or forestry workers would find it somewhat more difficult identifying with this 'we'. 86 the book opens with a series of photographs depicting 'spectacular' landscapes. In this introductory photo-essay the photographer, Adrian Dorst, displays his substantial talents and finely-tuned aesthetic sensibilities as a nature photographer. Titled appropriately, \"On the Wild Side\", what unfolds are scenes of a sublime yet enchanting landscape filled with powerful forces of nature (Figure 3.3) and intricate, even delicate ecological relations (Figure 3.4). In this spectacularized display of 'nature', the 'wild side' of Vancouver Island appears as what Young, in the text, declares a \"showcase of environmental elegance and diversity\" (p. 20). From the wide sweep of crescent beaches to wave pounded coastal headlands; from shoreline trees sculpted by the lashing winds of fierce winter storms to the unimaginable, soft silence and teeming, luxuriant growth of its ancient forests, Dorst 'reveals' a stunning, complex landscape. Land, forests, animals and sea are brought together into a symphony of natural harmony. This is a land that is resolutely 'wild' and 'non-humanized' - the last stand of a pristine nature external to and threatened by the juggernaut of industrial society. In light of recent millennial pronouncements of the 'end' of Nature (McKibben 1989), Dorst's images are not only striking, but contain a sense of political urgency. Who would not wish to see these 'wild' spaces preserved? Yet, as important as the authors' political commitments are, these images are deeply problematic. As I hope to show, Dorst's is a partial vision, one that brings only certain elements within its frame, but which are composed into a landscape that appears as the land itself. Most important, for Dorst's Clayoquot landscapes to be resolutely 'wild' and 'unhumanized' in this opening section requires a series of strategic absences. First, humans and human activity are almost entirely absent.17 Indeed, where people appear at all in the book as a whole, they are usually unidentified and insignificant to the larger drama of 'wild nature' and 'natural forces'. In only two photographs, for instance, is labour depicted. The implications are 17Where human activity is present it generally follows four patterns: traditional native culture/artifacts; scientific observation; wilderness recreation; and industrial intrusion. 87 Figure 3.3. \"On the wild side\": framing nature as spectacle. Photographer. Adrian Dorst. Source. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 88 Figure 3.4. \"On the wild side\": framing nature as harmony. Photographer. Adrian Dorst. Source. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 89 worth noting: for the environmental movement's appeals for the preservation of Clayoquot Sound to be acceptable to a wider audience, it is necessary to detach the landscape from the communities that depend on its resources for their social and economic well-being and to reposition it in a mythical time/space prior to culture. As I will show shortly, this also includes detaching 'wild nature' from the native communities that are located in Clayoquot Sound, although, paradoxically, this is achieved not through erasure, but through how natives are incorporated into the text. Before exploring this further, it is important to note that these are not the only, or necessarily the key absences, for the absence of humans extends to Dorst himself, although with an important difference. Where he does appear within the field of vision, he is identified and appears in the guise of the heroic explorer piloting his inflatable, motorized vessel (zodiac) through the wilderness - nature's intrepid, disinterested representative. Yet, even here the absence of labour is key: at no point is the work of 'making pictures' allowed to enter the frame. Dorst's absence allows the realist fiction of unmediated vision to proceed unquestioned. Thus, it is this last absence that allows all the other absences to appear natural. The camera - detached both from its material conditions as a technological device and the material conditions of the photographer - appears as a transparent 'mirror' to nature. In turn this enables the representation of Clayoquot Sound as a non-humanized 'wilderness' to be taken as the 'real' (as the only Clayoquot), and, further, to be in need of a 'representative'. The text that follows produces much the same effect. The title of the book's opening chapter - \" A Gift of Nature\" - completes Dorst's earlier self-authorizing maneuver. Indeed, the trope 'gift' affirms precisely the position of Dorst as nature's representative to whom nature 'reveals' herself, echoing Francis Bacon's sixteenth-century articulation of the relation between the inquiring empiricist and the (sexualized) secrets of nature. 18Francis Bacon's sexualized language is discussed in Merchant (1982). See also McClintock (1995) for a recent discussion of the sexualized landscape imagery in exploration literature. 90 Today the west coast of Vancouver Island remains an extraordinary showcase of environmental elegance and diversity. In many places, this is still a virgin landscape lost in time and governed by the unequivocal laws of nature - a gift of nature to humanity, (p. 20) Elsewhere Young writes of nature as a 'spectacle', a 'massive tableau' and 'sculpture', or claims that it gives 'virtuoso performances' and is 'tightly choreographed'. Here the physical landscape is at once vitalized - against which human activity appears inconsequential - while at the same time set before the viewing subject as an immediately present and readily appropriated visual object whose 'ownership' is relinquished by nature as she reveals herself to the observer who must only look to possess.19 Possession by the viewer is enabled by the absence of other possessors. To present Clayoquot Sound as a gift to an undifferentiated 'humanity', of course, deploys rhetorics that are remarkably similar to MacMillan Bloedel's displacement of the resource landscape into the space of an undifferentiated 'public' (Chapter 2) - no other claims to the land precede this displacement. This is, after all, a 'virgin landscape', one 'lost in time'. Here, Young writes, \"you can feel that you are witnessing the perpetual big bang of creation....this is a truly anti-matter world that spontaneously erupts with playful displays of its evolutionary masterpieces\" (p. 20). It has no human history or possessors. It is governed only by natural law; there is no sense in this chapter that this 'gift' is called by others 'home'. Quite appropriately, the next chapter is entitled Bearing Witness to the Wilderness. It is here that the only photographs of Dorst can be found (Figure 3.5). Dorst - described alternately as a biologist, wildlife manager and photographer in Young's text - is presented only as a dispassionate eye roving over the 'spectacle' of nature, a heroic pilgrim in this land of powerful natural forces. Again, this relies on constructing distance between Dorst and the evils of 'civilization'. 19It should not go without mention that this book also conflates women and nature, and in so doing makes both an object of a sexualized gaze. Although there are few photographs of people, two photographs of naked women are included, one paddling a canoe, the other bathing under a waterfall. 91 Figure 3.5. Nature's representative. Photographer, Ron Grover. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 92 He is about as close as you can get to a modern pilgrim. Equipped with a camperized van, his trusty zodiac and a weathered cedar-strip canoe, Adrian has dedicated himself to seeking out the mysteries of the west coast wilderness (p. 28). Whether Dorst would recognize himself in Young's portrait is incidental to the place that he holds in the book's drama. Here is the story's (masculinized) hero, speaking for a feminized ('virgin') nature. His relation with nature is unmediated and authentic. The home of his dreams, Young writes, would be a driftwood cabin nestled beside a rotund Sitka spruce on an isolated rocky headland: \"Robinson Crusoe with a zodiac\" (p. 31). Paddling his weathered, cedar-strip canoe, Dorst is devoted entirely to his cause, having no truck with the soft consumerism of what can only appear in contrast as a feminized mass culture.2 0 This is 'hard' work that requires sacrifice and devotion; over time the distance between 'nature' and its 'representative' closes until Dorst alone is the most qualified individual to 'speak for' nature in the region. Dorst's opening photo-essay and these initial chapters are highly significant. The region is established as irrevocably wild, located external to, but threatened by an industrial society. \"Scanning the complex shoreline,\" Young writes, \"Adrian sees an island paradise; but he also sees its impending destruction\" (p. 32). Within this frame, a politically engaged, scientifically sound, 'witnessing' is authorized. \"Clearcutting has laid waste much of Vancouver Island's ancient temperate rainforests,\" Young explains. \"Adrian knows that the same fate awaits the rest of the west coast forest landscape - unless there is a fundamental change in the kind of values we attach to our natural environment\" (p. 32). The authorial domain is constituted around the figure of the concerned 'scientific' pilgrim, whose knowledge (and photographs) will ultimately demonstrate the correct mode of moving through or 'dwelling' in the land (even if this dwelling is precisely a non-dwelling). 2 0 Indeed, there is little mention of any domestic economy that enables Dorst's 'public' function as nature's representative beyond a note that Dorst is dedicated to a simple life and that he makes ends meet by selling photographs, wood carving and contract work for the Canadian Wildlife Service. 93 But Dorst's authority requires something more. Together, the photographs and text provide a powerful myth of nature as external to humanity: a Garden of Eden for our use or preservation. Dorst's and Young's urban middle-class readers are reminded that their past failure was simply that they did not recognize nature's 'intrinsic' value, conferring value only through the market. Ironically, however, what Dorst and Young set up in contrast to an economic 'value' is no less an abstraction: where the former abstracts nature into the form of the commodity, Dorst and Young abstract it into the form of 'wilderness'. Donna Haraway (1992) describes these displacements as hyperproductivism and transcendental naturalism, and argues that both are founded on similar assumptions, effacing the complex imbrication of cultural histories and natural landscapes (including the histories of the viewer) and permitting nature to be continually remade not in the image of those whose lives are closely bound up with it, but in the mirror image of its 'representatives'. The one is simply the inverse of the other. Wilding Clayoquot: tropes of traditional culture. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. (Karl Marx 1965 [1852]) Clayoquot Sound, of course, is far from unoccupied. Today, some 1800 people live in the region, of which members of three Nuu-chah-nulth tribal groups account for about half. The non-Native population lives almost exclusively at the south end of the Sound in the town of Tofino, which is also the Pacific terminus of the TransCanada Highway, and thereby stands - for many non-Native Canadians - as the symbolic end of 'humanized' nature. Beyond this lies 'wilderness'. Native communities in Clayoquot Sound are today centralized at Ahousaht, Opitsat, Hesquiaht and Esowista. A l l but the latter are located 21 beyond Tofino and accessible only by boat or float plane. 2 1 The equation of 'wilderness' with 'roadless territory' is common in American environmentalism. The implication is that roads 'open' a region to mass use, and thus once a road enters a region its 'nature' is destined to be brought within a cultural rather than natural economy. After all, it is possible to stop a car at any point along a route. To arrive by boat or float-plane on the other hand, requires resources that few have 94 Yet, for all the spectacularization of a 'wild' nature that occurs in the first chapters of Clayoquot: On the Wild Side, consistent with other photographic books published by the North American preservation movement, much more is happening between its covers. While the first two chapters admit no native presence, both Dorst and Young are more than casually aware that the Nuu-chah-nulth have long lived in the region. The region is not simply a natural landscape. In the middle of the book the authors include a chapter that focuses at some length on the Nuu-chah-nulth. Here can be located a crucial tension: a cultural presence lies at the heart of this 'natural paradise'. How this tension is negotiated and resolved points to underlying differences between the environmental movement and First Nations in BC and reveals some insidious neo-colonial tropes that lie at the heart of environmental representations of 'nature' and 'culture' in the region. These are not immediately apparent and have generally been overshadowed by the support that most sectors of the environmental movement have given to First Nations land claims in B C . Indeed, Dorst and Young reiterate this support. Their book is itself dedicated to the Nuu-chah-nulth, and the text - at least in this chapter - is clearly sympathetic to Nuu-chah-nulth struggles within a judiciary that has often refused to recognize native sovereignty,22 Cameron Young, for instance, celebrates pre-contact Nuu-chah-nulth life, which, he writes, subverting a discourse of primitivism, was \"lived on a grand scale\". He also readily available, requires stepping 'outside' an automobile centered culture, and permits fewer points of access. Thus, in the eyes of North American environmentalists, areas accessible by boat or plane remain in a 'wild' state. Recent interventions in North American environmental discourse have begun to question whether this focus on wilderness as an ontological category is better replaced with the 'wild' as an aesthetic -that is, as that which exceeds and subverts modern forms of rationality. In this sense the 'wild' can be located in the 'city' as readily as 'beyond' culture. See Rothernberg (1995). 2 2 The book closes with a statement by Klah-keest-ke-us of the Hesquiaht Indian Band: \"The very survival of the Nuu-chah-nulth people depends on the survival of old-growth forests. Old-growth forests are our most important places of worship. Within forests we are completely surrounded by life; within forests we can renew our spiritual bonds with all living things\". Located where it is, it appears to give tacit consent to all that has come before. Further, it allows only a spiritual relation between First Nations and the forest thereby legitimating the Wilderness Committee's call for the region's preservation. The book's dedication at the beginning is even more problematic, ascribing to the Nuu-chah-nulth the same wilderness ethic as held by environmentalists. This book is dedicated to the original inhabitants of Vancouver Island's west coast, the Nuu-chah-nulth, and to all those who share with them a love for places yet untrammeled, wild and free (italics mine). 95 relates recent work by anthropologists that estimated populations on the so-called 'wild-side' of Vancouver Island to have stood at 70,000 at the time of contact. Prior to contact, Young continues, \"these people developed a cultural philosophy and a life-support system [that was] subtle and complex\" (p. 41). Placed against the comments of a BC judge who claimed that pre-contact native life was \"to quote Hobbs (sic)...at best 'nasty, brutish and 23 short',\" Young's text weighs in on the side of anti-colonial struggle. Yet, despite such assertions, this chapter's anti-colonial statements are ambivalent. Placed in the book as it is, it gives the impression of simply 'inserting' native people into, and as part of, a pre-existing natural landscape. Previous chapters revealed a spectacle of natural forces while subsequent chapters focus exclusively on the rainforest, wildlife, coastal ecology and so on. 2 4 This is mirrored in the text of the chapter itself, which begins with a brief account of the region's natural history and ends with the appearance of what amounts to one of nature's constituent parts - native peoples (summarized best by the chapter title: \"At home in the wild\"). It is not that native people are erased from representations of Clayoquot Sound. Rather, just like with the writings of George Dawson at the end of the nineteenth-century, it is how they are made present that matters. Most problematic, I think, is that the authors remain within the thrall of a transcendental naturalism that requires that nature appear in its most 'pure' form as the absence of culture: a virgin landscape lost in time. On this much turns. Within this wilderness rhetoric - a mainstay of much North American environmentalism (Guha 1989) -23Chief Justice Allan McEachern's comments were more extensive: \"... it would be inaccurate to assume that even pre-contact existence was in the least bit idyllic. The plaintiff's ancestors had no written language, no horses or wheeled vehicles, slavery and starvation were not uncommon, wars with neighboring peoples were common, and there is no doubt to quote Hobbs (sic), that aboriginal life ... was, at best, 'nasty, brutish, and short.'\". Delgamuukw v. the Queen, 1991: 129. This trial, McEachern's reasons for judgement, and their relation to certain notions of vision and landscape, is discussed further by Tim Solnick (1992). 2 4In this sense Clayoquot: On the wild side is oddly reminiscent of writings by earlier travelers who organized their discussions of colonial regions into categories: geology, vegetation, animals, meteorological observations, Indians. This was a common practice among explorers and scientists (Robert Brown, George Dawson) traveling the west coast of British Columbia during the second half of the nineteenth century. See Pratt (1992) for a more general discussion of the production of \"landscapes\" and \"bodyscapes\" in colonial travel literature. 96 the text and photographs can present native culture only in narrowly circumscribed ways. If we look at Dorst's photographs in more detail, we can see how this is achieved through a series of distinctions that at once mark a traditional native presence but erase all signs of a modern Nuu-chah-nulth presence. Indeed, as the chapter unfolds it becomes clear that it is not necessarily human presence that is a problem in the Sound, it is the presence of modern technological societies. In order to hold native people within this frame as 'authentic' guardians of nature requires that the author and photographer maintain and police a careful distinction between the 'traditional' and the 'modern'. A l l photographs that depict Nuu-chah-nulth culture therefore firmly bind this culture to history, not to the present. Eight photographs in the chapter contain 'native' content. In the only one to show 'live' natives, members of the Tla-o-qui-aht band are shown paddling a traditional canoe (Figure 3.6). In another a fallen totem pole is reclaimed by nature (Figure 3.7). A moss-covered skull is identified as the remains of a Nuu-chah-nulth member, while another photograph depicts the decaying corner post of a traditional longhouse, a young tree growing from the decaying wood. A single dugout canoe is shown on a beach as dusk falls. In a similar scene a canoe floats a few meters offshore, silent and empty in the fading light. A whale bone is located at an old village site. A lone totem is found still standing in the forest (Figure 3.8). Clearly, Dorst's photographs are the product of a decidedly romantic vision. From this, it is a short step into the nostalgic tropes found in Young's accompanying text. This 'natural harmony' of natives and nature, of course, has been, or is everywhere in danger of being disrupted by modernity. Young's text puts in words Dorst's aestheticized discourse of decay - recording the sad but inevitable fatal contact of the modern on the traditional. The headings tell this story best: \"coastal ghosts\"...\"a nation in distress\"...\"where worlds collide \"...and, finally, \"last remains\". Much of the chapter uses the past tense: \"once was 25Ramachandra Gvxha (1989) argues that the way that \"nature\" has been constructed in North American environmental discourse is particularly dangerous when exported to the \"non-West\". This point is also made by Suzanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn (1989) and, in passing, by Donna Haraway (1992) 97 Figure 3.6. Framing native culture as traditional: Tla-o-qui-aht paddlers. Pliotographer. Adrian Dorst. Source. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. Figure 3.7. Tropes of decay: fallen totem 'reclaimed' by nature. Photographer. Adrian Dorst. Source, Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. 08 Figure 3.8. Framing imperial nostalgia: capturing the last vestiges of the disappearing 'primitive'. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Source. Clayoquot: On the Wild Side. i)9 the site\"; \"islands were home\"; \"abandoned\" villages, and so on. It is not that this is untrue, Native communities in the Sound have centralized in response to technological change and the large decline in populations that occurred in the nineteenth century. Only, in the absence of any reference to modern Nuu-chah-nulth life, these images becomes part of an overarching narrative of decline. In a memorable passage, Young mourns the loss of an earlier, more \"authentic\" traditional native life. On one of the beaches, the last remnants of a rare west coast ruin lie concealed from view by a tangle of salal bushes. Hidden away here are the structural remains of at least eleven traditional longhouses, including several corner posts and a handful of beams. Low midden ridges encircle each dwelling, outlining all the house sites - the last dead imprint of a once vital village. Jim Haggarty believes the village may have been built during the 1850s. It was perhaps the last attempt by the land's original people to carry on their age old way of life. As Adrian Dorst bends low inside the salal thicket, he steps gingerly over a slumping cedar timber to study one particular house post with grooves chiseled all around its perimeter. Smooth and stately, this cedar post looks for all the world like the fluted marble columns that once supported the classical structures of Greece and Rome. The light is fading on this long summer's day, and during that slow ebb into darkness, Adrian can faintly imagine the sounds of cedar canoes being hauled up on the beach, the chatter of fishermen unloading their halibut, and the strong smell of smoking salmon in the air. For a brief moment Adrian is able to conjure up those ghostly images, and the beach seems to come alive. But out at Pacheena Point, evening sports fishermen have tired of riding the ocean swells and are racing back to Bamfield. The roar of their outboards drives the ghosts back into hiding (p. 44). Native ghosts disrupted by a modern reality, till what remains, to use Young's words, are simply \"ghostly shadows across the landscape of Vancouver Island's west coast\". Young continually depicts loss, even in his assertions of native presence: \"despite at least a 4,000 year history of native settlement, the wilderness rainforest appears substantially undisturbed by human activity, yet for the trained eye, examples of past human use are everywhere.\" This is not nature itself, examples of use are everywhere. But the key word 100 Figure 3.9. The colonial rhetorics of 'wilderness'. By mapping these dualisms onto each other (culture - nature, modern - traditional) native peoples are conflated with nature and areas are seen to remain 'natural' only if the cultures that live there remain 'traditional'. here is past. Native culture is relegated to the 'traditional'. Nowhere in the book's photographs, and only rarely in the text, are native people depicted engaging in any activity, or using any technology which might be considered modern. Traditional slides into the natural in a discourse on a culture that is at once ' in tune' with natural rhythms, and at the same time simply ' o f this nature. Only when nature is constituted as a holistic harmony of traditional cultures and natural processes do outboard engines disrupt primal scenes and \"driv[e] ghosts into hiding\". Dorst's photographs - together with Young's text - invite viewers to encounter the region through a well organized, historically specific optic that trades heavily upon distinctions drawn between nature and culture, the modern and the traditional. Through lenses ground in histories of colonial (and colonizing) practices, natural and cultural identities are constructed, purified, and disseminated. From the contested multiple identities of social life in the Sound are captured a timeless series of 'pure' forms. This optic can be displayed as operating along two axes (Figure 3.9). Together with the nature-culture (or wilderness-city) axis that Roderick Nash (1973) mapped in Wilderness and the American Mind can be found a second continuum: traditional-modern. On each axis identities are invested with meaning by the antipodal identity of the other. Identities are more 'pure' the further they can be separated. Nature is the absence of culture. The 101 traditional is the absence of the modern. In turn, once these dualisms are established a logic of equivalence can link 'similar' terms: Nature/traditional; culture/modern. The two axes - nature-culture, and traditional-modern - become conflated into a singular story of modern, Western cultures and traditional, non-Western, natures. Once established, other dualisms can be mapped onto this grid: science-ethnoscience, fact-myth, civilized-primitive, spoiled-pristine, and so on (Hall 1992). Ironically, by locating native culture resolutely in the realm of the 'traditional' the writer and photographer can retain a contradictory political posture that articulates support for native land claims and also a desire for preservation. These very different political struggles become conflated through the assertion that traditional native culture was not, and therefore, if it remains 'authentic', should never be, ecologically disruptive. In turn, by staging this region as 'nature' and the Nuu-chah-nulth as 'traditional' the environmental movement establishes its own right to be modern, scientific, enlightened spokespersons for nature (and 'natives') in the region, and the legitimate opponents to corporate capital. Zodiacs, it appears, are reserved only for photographers or other 'disinterested' moderns (scientists, journalists, etc.). The politics of tradition. Dorst's and Young's representational strategies intersect with local political struggles over the 'fate of the forest' in important ways. Within their rhetorics of \"nature as the absence of culture,\" First Nations are provided with few possible subject positions, and those available are highly circumscribed. While nineteenth century colonial rhetorics - like George Dawson's - simultaneously marked and contained native presence and voice, setting the stage for the complete erasure of natives from the literature of today's forest companies, this representational logic 'gives back' a native voice only to ask it to speak the language of traditional culture and cultural authenticity. Iain Chambers (1994:74,81) argues that such rhetorics have long underwritten the hegemony of the West and its subtle forms of racism. 102 The temporal (and teleological) distance between 'primitivism' and 'progress'...has consistently justified so much of the intellectual, political and cultural capital invested in the center-periphery model of culture and history...Whether following religious or secular compasses, [this] has permitted evil to be externalized by relegating it to the 'savage' and 'heathen' peripheries of the world. Then, in a reverse image, that imperious gesture has more recently been extended to the mourning for the pristine culture of the primitive, that is, the past, the elsewhere, from within the perceived decay of the metropolitan present....The notion of the pure, uncontaminated 'other', as individual and as culture, has been crucial to the anti-capitalist critique and condemnation of the cultural economy of the West in the modern world. Such a perspective evoke[s] its surreptitious form of racism in the identification by the privileged occidental observer of what should (a further ethnocentric desire and imperative) constitute the native's genuine culture and authenticity. Who is defining authenticity? As Chambers clearly shows, it is the 'observed' who are once again spoken for and positioned, a problem that has surfaced often in environmentalist texts, where aboriginal peoples are asked to occupy a 'redemptive place' for members of Western industrialized societies (Emberley 1994). To talk of authenticity, Chambers continues, invariably involves referring to tradition as an element of closure and conservation, \"as though peoples and cultures existed outside the language of time. It is to capture these in the anthropological gaze, where they are kept in isolation and at a 'critical distance', as though they do not experience movement, transformation, and the disruption that the anthropologist represents: the West\" (p. 82). In Clayoquot: On the Wild Side, native peoples are asked to occupy subject positions demarcated by others. Within this frame, for First Nations to forge a modern future within the staples-based economies of the west coast is to risk 'losing' what many non-Natives consider 'authentic' native culture and thereby also their right to speak as native people for their lands. On the other hand, to refuse modernization - in essence to constitute identity around the 'traditional' as the environmental movement implicitly asks -is to remain forever outside the economic circuits of the global economy, situated where European cultures have always placed indigenous populations - back in nature; always 103 outside modern forms of rationality; as undeveloped, primitive precursors to modern cultures; as in need of representation. Both rhetorics easily lead to an assumption that - as was recently noted by a Hesquiaht woman - aboriginal people are \"incapable of being maintainers of our own territory\" (Charleson 1992). In a region whose future appears destined to be tied to staples production (and its associated industry, nature tourism), these rhetorics are deeply problematic. My argument is not that cultural traditions should be abandoned, or that native people should neither appropriate the languages of Western culture, nor speak from the various 'positions' available within these discourses. As Cree Chief Whapmagoostui explained in a context that has distinct parallels (the Great Whale project in Quebec), when necessary the Cree played the Dances with Wolves card to great effect (Cohen 1994), trading on the romantic images in the movie of the misunderstood but noble savage. Such tactics are effective. Rather, attention must be paid to whether these distinctions - nature-culture, traditional-modern - among others, are externally ascribed or internally claimed by a people for whom the categories may have little salience, or may, at certain moments, become mechanisms for cultural invisibility. By removing signs of modern Native culture from the landscape, the same rhetorical maneuvers which enabled the region to be seen as a 'resource' landscape in the first place are again deployed, only its terms are inverted: hyperproductivism becomes a transcendental naturalism. Both trade heavily on a clear distinction between nature and culture. Furthermore, by representing nature as the absence of culture, only certain voices - those that can most appear disinterested (science, the state, etc) - become authorized to speak for the region. The recent, and much contested land-use plan for Clayoquot Sound (which divides the region into productive regions, protected regions, and scenic corridors) rests precisely on this assumption of an empt(ied) land that can be known, classified and 104 managed apart from the local cultural relations that are also part of this 'pristine' nature. Haraway (1992:311) calls this a \"ventriloquism\" in which objects are disengaged from their cultural and social context and relocated in the authorial domain of the representative - the privileged speaking subject who speaks for. \"Permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, in each case the object or ground of representation is the realization of the representative's fondest dream.\" The significance of this ventriloquism becomes readily apparent in two statements with which I will close this section. The first is taken from the preface to the book and is written by the renowned wildlife artist Robert Bateman. With native claims to the land, and an 'open' future as modern natives foreclosed by the conflation of the 'primitive' with the 'pristine', it becomes possible to displace and re-locate landscapes like Clayoquot Sound into the narratives of the 'nation'. Bateman writes, The world recognizes Canada as containing one of the last great remnants of wilderness and we Canadians have always prided ourselves in our natural history ... This decade will see them saved or lost. Our generation must draw the line for all of them (italics mine). Likewise, a recent Greenpeace U K (1994) publication extends this further. Clayoquot Sound....is at the center of an ecological catastrophe of global significance....An area of stunning beauty, Clayoquot Sound is the largest remaining area of intact ancient rainforest left on Vancouver Island. The people of British Columbia therefore have in Clayoquot Sound the best opportunity to protect an irreplaceable part of their natural heritage before it is destroyed by logging (italics mine). Despite the familiar refrain of support for land claims in this last document, the photographs actually do erase native presence from the Sound. The region is shown to consist solely of forests, wildlife, and the devastation wrought by logging. In short, for 26Nuu-chah-nulth leaders simply rejected the whole decision claiming that the province had no jurisdiction over these lands. Since the Clayoquot land-use decision was announced in 1993, a series of further agreements have been appended that seek to incorporate Nuu-chah-nulth members into decision-making processes in the region. This includes Nuu-chah-nulth elders being included as \"experts\" within a scientific panel investigating forestry practices in the region, and equal Nuu-chah-nulth/provincial membership on a panel reviewing land-use plans for the region. Both developments occurred only after significant resistance on the part of the Nuu-chah-nulth. The region as a whole remains subject to land claims negotiations. 105 British viewers the conflict is simplified into a dualism: nature spoiled or nature saved. As important as these new transnational spaces of publicity may be, it remains important to pay attention to the representational practices that organize 'action from a distance' (Thompson 1995). Contesting 'wilderness'; writing open futures The relations of power whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others need to be criticized and transformed. This is no small task. In the meantime one can at least imagine shows that feature the impure, \"inauthentic\" production of past and present tribal life; exhibitions radically heterogeneous in their global mix of styles; exhibitions that locate themselves in specific multicultural junctures; exhibitions in which nature remains \"unnatural\"; exhibitions whose principles of incorporation are openly questionable (Clifford 1989:213). If, as I was saying, the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge (Bhabha 1990:211). Dorst and Young's landscape imagery/imaginary is widely shared, but not uncontested. By moving to a second siting/sighting of nature and culture in Clayoquot Sound it is possible to sketch another contesting vision, one that refuses closure around either 'tradition' or 'wilderness'. In 1986, a team of archaeological consultants produced a map of 'culturally modified trees' (CMTs) as part of a multi-volume work that examined Nuu-chah-nulth forest uses in Clayoquot Sound (Stryd 1986, see Figure 3.10). Like other similar studies, it was commissioned by lawyers representing BC First Nations in a court struggle over native sovereignty, in this case, the struggle by the Ahousaht and Tla-o-qui-aht to assert sovereignty over Meares Island. CMTs have become important actors in struggles over land rights in British Columbia. In what follows I argue that this map is significant in two 106 FIGURE 2 Location of CMTs recorded on Meares Island in 1984 and 1985 (from Areas Associates 1986). Figure 3.10. Map showing native tree use on Meares Island. Source, Stryd (1986). 107 respects. First, it disrupts the tropes of wilderness that have underwritten the authority of both industrial capital and environmentalists to 'speak for' nature in Clayoquot Sound, and, second, it interrupts narratives that see native cultures in terms of a great divide between a pre-contact period where these cultures existed 'outside of history' and a post-contact period where the timeless forms of primitive culture are seen to have been 'tainted' by the introduction of modern Western practices, technologies and commodities. Enrolling allies. Let me set the stage for the map's production. Most immediately the map was produced as an exhibit in a court case surrounding Meares Island. But as is always the case in land-claims trials, what was at issue was the past, and indeed, how the past continues to infuse the present. Briefly, in the late 1800s, native groups in Clayoquot Sound were separated and segregated onto reserves, while lands that lay outside these reserves were retained by the Crown. 2 7 At first this had little effect on native territoriality since few areas of Clayoquot Sound were alienated. However, in the 1950s much of the Sound was divided into two Tree Farm Licenses and the rights to the timber on these allocated to two large forestry companies. By the 1980s, as more accessible timber elsewhere became depleted, one of the tenure-holders, MacMillan Bloedel, submitted plans to commence harvesting on Meares Island. In response, the Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht, together with supporters in the environmental movement, blockaded MB's attempts to land workers and equipment, resulting in a series of court struggles over whether logging could proceed, but which were in essence struggles over sovereignty. The context of the map's production is important for a number of reasons. First, since in any judicial trial over 'evidence' must pass the test of 'facticity' this study underlines its scientific credentials. Accepted rules of archaeological research and ethnographic fieldwork are followed and carefully explained. Methods of locating and interpreting biological evidence of tree modification are presented in great depth. This 2 7 For an extensive account of native political agency in struggles over land, see Tenant(1990). 108 includes detailed discussions of not only the marks that specific tools leave on trees, but how the subsequent growth of the tree may either display or hide these signs. A n appendix that gives criteria for identifying signs of cultural modification, for instance, provides extensive discussion of how an analysis of tree ring characteristics can provide evidence of modification even when the 'external' signs do not point unambiguously to either 'cultural' or 'natural' causes (Figure 3.11). By systematically surveying 165 transects (each 30m wide) running inland through the coastal stratum (covering approximately ten percent of the territory) and by employing probabilistic sampling methods, researchers could begin to project 'conservative' estimates of the extent of human modification of the forest with 'statistical confidence'. The study, then, followed a rigorous methodology that emphasized objectivity and reliability and enrolled as allies, knowledge produced in the sciences Of archaeology, anthropology, ethnobotany and tree biology in trials of strength over the 'truthfulness' of representations of landscape in Clayoquot Sound. Thus, like Dorst's 'wilderness' photographs, the map is a visual artifact that is assumed to bridge the gap between representation and reality; both draw on a realist tradition that assumes that if one looks carefully, and for a period of long duration, one 'sees' what is 'really there'. Yet, the difference that do exist are important. Dorst and Young simply assume that the camera lens mirrors ('captures') reality. At no point is the work of producing these images brought within the frame. The archaeological study, on the other hand, is linked to fieldwork, and thus details how it derives its truths, consistent with the protocols of 'good' science. The result is that, while assuming that correct methodology is a guarantee of truthfulness, the study provides critics with a means of questioning the adequacy of its observations and conclusions.28 My objective, however, is not to identify one set of representations as either more accurate or more reflexive, but instead to pay close attention 2 8 Haraway (1989), for example, notes that feminist primatologists have not abandoned 'objectivity' but rather have contested the ground on which 'objective' claims are made. 109 Figure 3.11. Enrolling allies: photograph and diagram of tree-ring sample from culturally bark-stripped tree showing phenol staining on edge of scar face. Archaeologists have enrolled knowledges from plant biology in order to locate 'archaeologically invisible' human tree use. Source, Stryd (1986). no to the manner that these images enframe and relate 'nature' and 'culture', and, in turn, how this becomes articulated with wider political, economic and cultural struggles. Contesting tropes of dispossession. How does the map undermine the authority of both extractive capital and environmentalists to speak for nature in Clayoquot Sound? First, far from an unhumanized wilderness occupied by a 'dying race' or a people that live in 'harmony' with nature, this map documents a natural/cultural landscape that is the product of intensive use and transformation. Indeed, the scale of forest modification is astounding. The map identifies and locates 1,779 CMTs at a density that at times exceeds 3,000 CMTs per kilometer of coastline. Using transect data as a base, an estimate of 20,000 CMTs for the coastal stratum was derived. This excludes CMTs that remained 'archaeologically invisible' or that may exist further inland on the island, a region that lay outside the specific parameters of the study, but not beyond the forest-use activities of the Nuu-chah-nulth. From this the authors conclude: Archaeological evidence from the west coast of Vancouver Island and northwest Washington State indicate that tree use has been an integral part of Nootkan culture for at least 2500 years. The antiquity of human settlement and tree use of Meares Island is not known, but the enormous midden at Opitsat has probably been occupied for several thousand years. Our tree-ring dating showed that tree use on Meares Island goes back at least to the 1640s [Cook landed in 1778], and there is no reason to believe that this use does not go back further in time. Both the tree-ring dates and our ethnographic information indicate that this use has carried on to the present, although there have been changes in specific tree uses in response to changing needs. In a few cases, such as red cedar stripping, canoe carving, and the collecting of traditional medicines, the present-day activity represents a direct continuation of a long-standing tradition. This continuity between the past and the present was illustrated during our research by a number of CMTs recorded during the archaeological survey which were later identified in the ethnographic research, and confirmed by the tree-ring dating, as instances of very recent tree use (Stryd 1986:35). i l l At a number of levels this is a highly significant intervention in the representation of the British Columbia landscapes and in debates over who is permitted voice in Clayoquot Sound. Most immediately, the map asserts native presence. First Nations in Clayoquot Sound did not simply wander across the surface of the land living off its bounty - they actively transformed their environments in a purposeful manner. Moreover, they did so prior to the establishment of the reserve system in the late 1800s. This map therefore takes on added significance when placed against the dispossession of native peoples. No treaties were ever signed between the Canadian government and First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Rather, as Paul Tenant explains (1990), dispossession of native lands justified in part through recourse to Lockean notions of property that tied possession to signs of use. Personal property, Locke argued, exists because every person has a property in their own person. Therefore, the labour of their body and the work of their hands were theirs such that whatever one 'removed from out of a state of nature' and 'mixed their labour with' was deemed private property. For Locke this extended to the land as well as the fruit of it. Thus, if land showed no signs of 'labour', it could not be claimed as property.2 9 This map shows native tree use to have been extensive, thereby appropriating a Lockean discourse in order to place in question the principles that organized and justified 30 the initial dispossession of native lands. Equally as important, the study shows continuity in land-use, thereby contesting colonialist narratives that see native cultures in terms of a great divide between a pre-2 9 Tenant claims that examples of these rhetorics are common in early BC history. I'll quote only one. With respect to the rights of the natives, you will have to confer with the chiefs of the tribes on that subject, and in your negotiations with them you are to consider the natives as the rightful possessors of such lands only as they are occupied by cultivation, or had houses built on, at the time when the Island came under the undivided sovereignty of Great Britain in 1846. All other land is to be regarded as waste, and applicable to the purposes of colonization (italics mine). Archibald Barcley, Hudson's Bay Company, 1849. Quoted in Tenant (1990). 3 0 These rhetorics were reproduced in a recent land claims trial in northern BC (see Solnick 1992; Monet and Skan'nu 1992). 112 contact and post-contact period. On the far side of this divide lay the presence of a timeless, static primitive culture governed by 'nature' and 'mythology', and on the near, an acculturated people whose 'primitive' past had been inevitably eroded by the cold light of modern reason, the introduction of modern technologies and the intrusion of distinctively European practices. In such accounts, there is only one epochal event: contact.31 As Yvonne Marshall (1993) has shown, this view is the product of a telescoped historical narrative that has divided BC history into a static native/natural prehistory and a dynamic European settler history. This can be illustrated by turning to the writings of Philip Drucker, an ethnographer who published important studies of the Nuu-chah-nulth (and other First Nations) in the 1950s (based primarily on research done in the 1930s). Like the salvage ethnographers that preceded him - Boaz, Jacobsen, Sapir - Drucker was still preoccupied with this great divide even though some one hundred sixty years had passed since 'contact', and sixty years since the Nuu-chah-nulth had established regular 'modern' links with Eurocanadians (steamships, telegraph, etc.). Contact, for Drucker, marked the beginning of an inevitable decline and decay: \"The evil star of civilization dawned for the Nootkans and their neighbors on the Northwest Coast...when Cook stood in to King George's or Nootka Sound in the Resolution during his third voyage of exploration.... [Later] when it was learned that in Canton the lush brown pelts were worth more than their weight in gold, the fate of the native culture was sealed\" (Drucker 1951:11). Rather than directing change, Drucker saw native culture as only 'reacting' to a modernizing world over which they had no control. Changing settlement patterns in the 3 1 This anticipates rhetorics used to describe transformations of 'nature' at the end of the twentieth century and gives rise to similar nostalgic tropes: nature is either 'pristine' or 'spoiled', with the first sign of human use, nature is no longer 'intact'. There is a certain irony here: where at the end of the nineteenth century ethnologists sought to save 'pristine cultures' before it was too late, environmentalists are doing the same for 'pristine nature' at the end of the twentieth, replacing (or often combining) an 'imperial nostalgia' with an 'industrial nostalgia'. Thus, in a widely-read document that mourns the loss of 'pristine' forests in BC can be found parallel statements about the 'last shreds of native's cultural heritage' disappearing with it. See McCrory (1993). 113 nineteenth century, for instance, were viewed solely as responses to growing trade, rather than intricately tied to native polity and society. In the case of the Nuu-chah-nulth, eventually all traces of 'authentic' culture disappears: \"The final step in the transition to modern acculturation consisted of several parts: the establishment of Christie School at Clayoquot Sound in 1899; the increased white contact resulting from the establishment of canneries and other enterprises at Clayoquot, Nootka, and other localities; the white community at Tofino; and regular steamship service up and down the coast\" (1951:14). Drucker (1955:v) would later write that \"only fragments are to be found today of the aboriginal civilization described in these pages. Many of the Indians of the coast are nowadays commercial fisherman and loggers. Most of them are more at home with gasoline and Diesel engines than with the canoes of their forefathers.\" A similar imperialist nostalgia pervades work like Clayoquot: On the wild side. No effort is made to locate modern forms of native life; only nostalgic images of a 'past' glory are permitted within the field of vision. The roar of outboards does not suggest the continuity of a native culture where a fishery - in whatever form - was an essential part, but instead drives the ghosts of a native past back into hiding. Such nostalgic tropes would matter little if they had no effect in the political world, but it is important to attend to what such rhetorics license. Drucker's distinction between a 'pure' past and a 'corrupted' present allowed him to drive a wedge between native cultural practices in the present and those in the past. \"Aside from the fragments and people's pride in their identity as Indians,\" Drucker (1955 :v) wrote, \"Northwest Coast culture must be regarded as having disappeared, engulfed by that of the modern United States and Canada.\" By focusing on change as discontinuity Drucker's tropes could underwrite and legitimate the dispossession of native lands. Indeed, as became evident in later work, Drucker's rhetorics of discontinuity were of a piece with his dismissal of native land rights. Regarding the assertion of these rights in political and legal arenas, Drucker (1965:229) wrote, 114 The inspiration throughout was non-Indian, or by sophisticated Indians long-removed from the native way of life and thought. The techniques used were non-Indian - a petition drafted by attorneys, attempts to utilize British legal procedure, fund-raising campaigns to implement the legal contest, and the like. The obvious conclusion is that Indian interest in land, outside the few heavily settled areas, was largely artificial (italics mine). Contact as rupture; hybridity as inauthenticity: in Drucker's hands these are tropes of dispossession. Seen in this light, Dorst's and Young's narrowly circumscribed positions held out for natives to occupy - 'traditional' culture or a non-native modernity - seem equally problematic. Today, First Nations have placed great emphasis on deconstructing this great divide, not denying the significance of European-native contact, but questioning whether its transformations were really so unidirectional and catastrophic and perhaps more important, whether the categories of this great divide (pre- and post-contact) are the salient ones. If these telescoped histories are broadened out, Marshall argues, alternate historical narratives can be recovered that show First Nations to have always already been adaptive cultures, reconfiguring existing social, political and economic structures into ever new forms while also transforming the land in which they lived. Thus, as she shows in relation to native groups in the northern district of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, change in native culture did not begin with the arrival of Europeans on the shores of a land 'lost in time'. By drawing on her own archaeological and ethnographic work, along with that of others working in the field, Marshall identifies a cultural history that extends from before the so-called 'historical' period (that for which there are written archival records) and into the present. She shows, for instance, how archaeological work allows for new accounts of political, cultural and economic transformations that reach back several thousand years.3 2 In her own work, Marshall identifies a complex history of changing economic relations and political structures, specific to particular regions but set in a wider coastal network of social relations. She traces continuities and transformations of Nootkan culture from 4000 32Those most active in the field include John Dewhirst, Arnaud Stryd, Richard Inglis, James Haggarty, David Huelsbeck, Yvonne Marshall, Alexander Mackie, and Gary Wesson. 115 BP; locates the development of a whale-centered social-economic system around 1500 BP and the concurrent reconfiguration of political relations; and, drawing on ethnographic work and the texts of salvage ethnographers, traces these structures through further transformation prior to, during, and after the contact period and colonial administration. Indeed, Marshall views the current Nuu-chah-nulth political body - the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council - as a political form that has antecedents in earlier confederations that existed before contact. In short, a Nuu-chah-nulth present is forged out of the material cultures and historical conditions of an enduring, yet neither static nor self-contained Nuu-chah-nulth culture. Where previous histories divided First Nation cultural change into directed (contact period) and undirected (colonial period to present), or alternately located a 'middle ground' where native peoples and Europeans for a short period maintained 'mutual dependencies', Marshall locates cultural change prior to contact and continuing to the present, subverting 33 the tropes of 'fatal contact' or worries over the loss of authenticity. Rather, many of the transformations that occurred since contact can be seen to be continuous with changes that had occurred prior to contact, simply reconfiguring already existing social, political and cultural forms. Further, she contends, pre-existing forms were not organic, but also the product of complex social, political and economic relations and struggles between various Nootkan groups and in relation to other coastal societies. Thus, in Marshall's account the Nuu-chah-nulth are presented as deeply historical and continuously evolving. This is not mere quibbling over a dead past. The consequences of writing these alternate histories are highly political, as Marshall herself underlines: A 'new past' from which an 'open future' can be realized .... requires/a temporal frame broad enough to bracket and ultimately foreclose on colonization. Rather than start with the fur trade and end with the welfare cheque, [I have] chosen to begin with ancestors of the Nuu-chah-nulth whale 33The concept of a \"middle ground\" is articulated in work of historical geographer Richard White (1983) and historian Robin Fisher (1977). 116 hunters and end with an increasingly confident and increasingly self-determining Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council (Marshall 1993:340) From this point of view, the only culture that has died is the one that was 'frozen' in the accounts of early explorers, missionaries and ethnologists. If we return to the map of CMT's on Meares Island, we can see how it contests colonialist narratives at a number of levels. On it more than 300 years of continual tree use on Meares Island are brought within the visual field, dating from the period prior to contact, and reaching into the present. More than this, though, the authors refuse to employ a common distinction that would safely contain the political implications of their findings. By positing continuity across the great divide the authors carefully avoid the language of rupture. First, citing their own research and that of other ethnographers and archaeologists, they argue that \"at the time of contact with the Europeans, Nootkan culture was characterized by massive woodworking (i.e. the use of large trees), and an extensive material culture in wood and bark\" (1986:3). Wood products were important items not only for internal cultural economies, but as items of trade. In short, 'contact' cannot be used to explain the scale of forest modification by natives. The scale of use is not a 'response' to external modern forces. Second, and equally as important, although with contact 'profound' changes occurred, this did not bring to an end a pre-existing tree culture but rather resulted in transformations that were continuous with the past. Nootka culture has changed profoundly since the arrival of the Europeans two hundred years ago. Nootkan adoption of Eurocanadian housing, clothing, containers, rope, boats, and other items resulted in the decline or end of many traditional tree uses. In other cases, the Nootka adapted their tree use practices to modern economic pursuits. European tools and felling techniques have been widely adopted by the Nootka in this century, and milling has altered the way in which the Nootka obtain their planks (p. 5). Later, the study discusses how forest use has been integrated into commercial pursuits, including the fishing and sawmilling industries. Adaptation, adoption and alteration: these are changes, certainly, but the differences that matter in this account are no longer those of 117 'pre-' or 'post-' contact, nor is the language of rupture or discontinuity the salient one. The focus is not on a timeless 'tradition' nor on policing 'authenticity'. Changes in how or to what purposes trees were used are placed in relation to the evolving character of Nuu-chah-nulth culture rather than explained by 'European influence'. Hybridity, it turns out, is not the same as inauthenticity. This map brings the 'cultural politics' of nature into clear focus. In contrast to Dorst and Young, these authors refuse to 'wild' nature by 'wilding' culture. What is represented is neither a pristine landscape or a traditional culture living in harmony with nature. It is, instead, a dynamic, trammeled landscape. Native people do not lose their claim to 'speak for' nature as soon as they begin to modify these 'pristine' environments, or as soon as they take up 'modern' technologies. I prefer to call this the enculturation of nature, distinguishing it against the deculturation of nature found in much environmental literature. In such representational practices the land can no longer be unproblematically seen as a pure space of political and economic calculation separate from the claims of the Nuu-chah-nulth, or a place to be preserved. In short, by refusing the categories that shape the vision of Dorst and Young, it becomes possible to posit an 'open' future that understands Nuu-chah-nulth culture as coeval with that of Euro-Canadians, one where modernization is not the same thing as acculturation and where modern native activities are continuous with past productions of nature. In the face of struggles for decolonization, perhaps it is time to heed Clifford's call and to exhibit 'unnatural' nature rather than 'superNatural B C . 118 Conclusion: The Cultural Politics of Nature Nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor an essence to be saved or violated....Nature is, however, a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician's place or topic for consideration of common themes... .Nature is also a tropos, a trope. It is figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. (Haraway 1992:296) \"Nature,\" Donna Haraway (1992:296) argues, \"cannot pre-exist its construction.\" What counts as nature is always something attained, not found in passive observation. It is given form and meaning, identity and specificity, through a series of specific, embodied practices. Through these, not despite them, nature is \"made to speak\". I began this chapter with the declaration of an environmental protester who claimed the moral authority to speak for a mute nature that had no voice in the political and economic structures of British Columbia. I wish to return to this scene in order to make a series of suggestions about the present and future form of environmental politics in the region. The claim to speak for certain natural entities in the region is at once necessary and problematic. In the transnational circuits of information and images that construct webs of meaning for global subjects at the end of the twentieth century \"images of ecology\" necessarily remind us of the fragile physical basis of all life on the planet. But as Andrew Ross (1994) has noted, these images are also part of an \"ecology of images\" that establishes other relations including those between social groups. We need to pay heed to both. Dorst and Young stage a stunning display of 'natural forces' and provide an eloquent defense for a region 'threatened' by industrial forestry. But their landscape imagery/imaginary stages nature in Clayoquot in ways that simultaneously mark and erase native presence. For Clayoquot to emerge as natural in the form that it does, other cultural aspects of the landscape cannot appear within the field of vision unless rendered as traditional, subtly subsuming native culture within nature. By so doing Dorst and Young subvert their own stated intention of supporting land claims by disqualifying important 119 aspects of the Nuu-chah-nulth's struggle to forge a modern cultural existence, while at the same time authorizing themselves to ventriloquate - to speak unproblematically for Clayoquot's nature. That this occurs is both ironic and troubling, since effective resistance to the designs of transnational capital in the region have required a sustained and sensitive coalition-building between environmental groups and local First Nations. In this light, Haraway's comments take on added significance. Her point, as I take it, is not simply to argue that nature can be represented in many ways - which is obviously true - nor to turn materialist accounts on their head by insisting on the materiality of representation (without emphasizing that this is always also a representation of materiality). Rather Haraway insists that how nature is constructed matters. There are not simply many cultures of nature, but many cultural politics of nature. Indeed, the material and political effects of the exhibition of nature in Western cultures - in travel narratives, maps, scientific documents, film and other cultural artifacts - has been well documented in the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1992), Donna Haraway (1989), and Alexander Wilson (1991), among others, who have shown the discourses and practices that make visible and available a world of 'natural' objects and 'natural' relations to be infused and marked with relations of power. The remaking or production of nature, they suggest, occurs not only in the instrumental rationalities and abstract commodification of extractive capital, but extends to, and works through, a further series of scientific and cultural practices that are not immediately reducible to the commodity form (although, as Pratt has shown, they often facilitate this mode of appropriation). More importantly, to these authors, the consequences of such representational practices (whether scientific or aesthetic) extend beyond relations with, or the depiction of, the non-human to include cultural identities and social relations. Haraway's comments are thus consistent with much poststructuralist theory which has insisted upon the 'unfixity' of identities like nature, in part to move away from notions 120 of ahistorical 'essences' or underlying 'structure' (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985). While it has led at times to arcane debates over 'social constructivism' - an unfortunate phrase which, as Bruno Latour (1993) has shown, displaces everything into the 'social' without attending to the practices of purification by which the 'social' itself is made to appear self-evident -1 wish to highlight more explicitly the political usefulness of poststructuralist theory for environmental studies and environmental activism more generally. Emphasizing the unfixity of identities suggests that they are always in the process of being constituted and that attention must be paid to the processes by which identities assume degrees of fixity. 3 5 Hence, what counts as nature is always only 'unstably fixed'. If we refuse to accept identities as immutable, then the many ways that they have been constructed, and, more importantly, the political effects of each are always open to political contestation. Yet, contesting the construction of nature, despite widely-held assumptions, is not simply a matter of speaking nature's truth. Somewhat ironically, given their mistrust of modernity, environmentalists have remained under the thrall of this most modern mythology. Nature is not 'hidden' through misrepresentation. Nor is there any environmental 'ethic' that pre-exists a way of valuing, enframing or disclosure (Heidegger 1977a). Environmental politics is not solely a matter of 'speaking for' a 'mute' nature, or becoming nature's 'voice' in the midst of, and against, what is thought to be - in modern, industrialized societies - a narrowly instrumental relation to the non-human world. This is because speaking for nature is always simultaneously an enframing of nature. There is always - as both Derrida (1976) and Spivak (1988b) have shown - a 'double session' to 3 4 By showing identities to be 'social' Laclau and Mouffe (1985) draw attention to their production within discursive practices. The result is to place far more importance on articulatory practices rather than economic structures alone, thereby widening the 'political' to include those areas usually seen as 'superstructural' in Marxist theory. However, it is important to note that while Laclau's and Mouffe's intervention has important implications for seeing 'nature' as at once social and political,'writing the materiality of nature back into Laclau and Mouffe may problematize a number of their assumptions, not the least being their notion of 'unfixity'. I thank Derek Gregory for drawing this to my attention. \"Numerous writers have emphasized this point. I trace my own trajectory towards this understanding of the political potential of deconstructing \"fixity\" to several texts, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985); Gayatri Spivak (1988); and Donna Haraway (1991). 121 representation; to represent as a proxy is always already to frame a constituency. Both aspects of representation - speaking o/and speaking for - are present simultaneously. Failure to attend to this, as I've sought to demonstrate, risks engaging in an unacknowledged, hidden, or buried politics that a metaphysics of presence renders invisible. Yet, we cannot simply avoid the problem of representation: one cannot not represent. Responsibility (political and academic) therefore lies at that point of internal tension that marks the 'double session' of representation; one needs be vigilant about the problem and politics of representation. As I have shown in this chapter, Nature is never a 'pure' category. It is always invested with, and embedded in, social histories. Indeed, it is precisely when it appears as a pure category that it operates most ideologically (Smith 1990). First Nations in BC know this well. The ambivalent natural/cultural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest have been distilled into 'natural' and 'cultural' landscapes by European explorers, scientists and settlers since the time of first contact in the second half of the eighteenth century. Today, the marginalization of native voices can be found, despite important differences, in the rhetorics and practices of both extractive capital and environmentalism. Each constitutes nature as external to human communities, a rhetorical maneuver that authorizes certain 'disinterested' voices - the resource manager, the ecologist, or nature's 'defender' - to speak as nature's 'representatives'. From an anti-colonial perspective extractive capital and environmentalism are in many ways 'mirror images', sharing common elements of a culture of nature. In the case of the former, the BC landscape is staged as a 'natural' landscape filled with 'natural' resources but empty of people. In the case of the latter, nature is also emptied of cultural content, understood as existing in its most purely 'natural' state only in the absence of (modern) culture. Taken together, these rhetorics constitute a 'natural' field and divide it between opposing non-Native interests. It is important to stress that neo-colonialist accounts have not gone unchallenged. Long before the contact period (from time 'immemorial'), First Nations peoples had clear 122 conceptions of ownership, political authority and social and ecological responsibilities (Monet and Skann'u 1992; Marshall 1994). The landscape that Captain Cook's crew thought in 1778 \"remained in a state of nature\" was already a fully social and political landscape. These relations did not disappear with the cartographic and quasi-legal separation of native peoples from their lands. Today, in a series of interventions - from commissioned archaeological studies to documentary film making, from deconstructing maps to building road blockades - First Nations are contesting the buried colonial epistemologies that enframe nature through a defining absence (Stryd 1986; Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council 1990; Wild 1993; Brody 1994, Blomley, in press). At these sites can be found representational practices that construct nature as social, relating physical environments to historical narratives and cultural practices. In these cases to speak of nature is immediately to invoke and articulate a series of other intertwined contemporary cultural identities while at the same time placing in question those representations that construct nature as external to cultural and social relations. 123 CHAPTER 4 TERRITORIALIZING DESIRE: ADVENTURE TRAVEL, IDENTITY AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE IN THE GLOBAL CULTURAL ECONOMY It is early; the ocean reflects the morning light in long oblong streaks that dance and shimmer with each passing swell. As yet there is no wind. Wisps of fog emerge mysteriously from unseen breaks in the shoreline of a nearby island, slowly recompose shape and size, then disappear. Ahead, a dark bank of low lying clouds enshroud the outer reefs of Clayoquot Sound. The sound of 'boomers' is distinctly audible, a dull low-pitched thump that rolls its ominous warning across the water. The guides were right; it's best to be on the water now. Our paddles pierce the glassy surface without noise: efficient, effortless. The group is quiet and relaxed, afar cry from the previous afternoon when a brisk wind and tidal currents had produced a 'chop' that required all our concentration and interrupted the regular rhythm of our strokes. Today, in contrast, patterns of light reflecting on the ocean surface provide the illusion that we are traveling at a great speed. In the serenity of early morning, I imagine a unity of body, mind and matter, the paddles mere extensions of my arms and hands, my rhythm mimicking the ocean's. As if on cue, two porpoises breach only yards to the side, follow us for a short while, then adjust their bearing and disappear. Vancouver has rarely seemed so distant. So different. Introduction For many members of North America's middle classes, adventure is again on the agenda. With each year, a growing army of sore-footed trekkers and weary ocean kayakers can be found relentlessly searching the globe for places and ecologies most removed from signs of metropolitan life. At home, a proliferation of magazines extol the virtues of travel that provides unique challenges in exotic settings, while travel guides and television documentaries provide lengthy features on destinations or cultures 'off the beaten track'. Outdoor equipment stores scramble to cater to the rising demand for expensive, state-of-the-art technologies for 'getting back' to nature. Dacron, cordura, polytetraflourethylenes and tensile strength have become part of a new lingua franca found in outdoors magazines 124 and overheard in remote hostels. It is as if at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with its monstrous promise of nature 'fully operationalized,' or, worse, with the ambiguous boundaries between the 'real' and the 'virtual' appearing less distinct with each passing day, frontiers, adventure, fortitude and virility are again part of the our social imagination in ways that harken back to the close of the nineteenth century when anxiety surrounded the supposed decline of the individual and national body in the face of mechanization and mass society (see Seltzer 1992). This chapter examines adventure travel as a mode of producing nature at the close of the twentieth century. I argue that as a social practice adventure travel can be viewed in relation to three intersecting phenomena: anxieties over the 'self and the 'body' that are specific to late modernity; a series of cultural narratives about the consequences of modernization that give adventure travel its nostalgic form; and, the development of media and transportation technologies that allow individuals to spatialize imagination in ways that were previously less readily available. Desire, discourse and technology therefore provide a triangulation by which to understand how nature at specific sites becomes capitalized within global economies of adventure. I explore these issues in the first portion of the chapter. In the last sections I turn to an example from Clayoquot Sound in order to examine a concrete example of how nature is produced in and through practices of adventure travel, and the social and political implications for various social actors in the Sound. Before I proceed, three qualifications are necessary. First, adventure travel at the close of the twentieth century shares some common themes with aspects of travel in the nineteenth century. Most obviously, like 'travel' in the nineteenth century, 'adventure travel' today valorizes journeys to places 'off the beaten track'. Indeed, it is during this earlier period that James Buzard (1993) locates the rise of anxieties over 'authenticity' that initially underwrote the distinction between 'travel' and 'tourism' and which led to new representations aimed at distinguishing authentic from spurious or merely repetitive 125 experience. Adventure travel share similar anxieties, although its geographies have changed. Where for British travelers in the nineteenth century France represented 'tourism' while southern Italy or Egypt represented 'travel', today Egypt (at least before the rise of Islamic movements) represents the former while places like Irian Jaya represent 'adventure'. In this sense what has changed is simply the geographical and physical extent of creative destruction in capitalist modernity beyond the reach of which supposedly can be found 'authentic' cultures and natures. There are other similarities. Nineteenth-century discourses that tied travel to 'health' are reprised today in concerns over the 'body' and 'fitness'. In both periods issues of class identity (as in Bourdieu's notion of 'distinction') are significant. Travel as an experience of 'going back in time' is as important today as it was for travelers on the Nile in the mid-1800s. Likewise, travel today retains some of the masculinist tropes of earlier periods (active travelers, passive natures and cultures) although this does not mean that the experience of travel for women and men is the same today as then. Even nature is re-inscribed within adventure travel in ways that are reminiscent of the nineteenth century (see Green 1990) although certainly with the age of ecology and dystopic narratives about the 'end' of Nature, what is significant about nature has shifted resulting in different types of 'nature travel' that are roughly equivalent to the difference between traveling to the 'countryside' and traveling into 'wilderness'. As important as these continuities and discontinuities are, the aim of this chapter is not to draw up a ledger of differences and similarities in order to show travel at the end of the twentieth century is the same or different from earlier periods, but, rather, to show how nature in sites like Clayoquot Sound is produced in and through global economies of adventure. Second, in this chapter I interrogate the discursive, social and technological relations that organize and focus the desire to 'escape modernity' in adventure travel. By so doing, I show adventure travel to incorporate some very modernist impulses. This does not mean that that no significant differences exist between forms of travel and tourism in 126 late modernity. Many feel that adventure travel (and the closely related eco-tourism) represents an important shift to more benign forms of tourism that are 'non-intrusive' or are characterized as 'traveling light' (i.e. without the weight of cultural assumptions or material comforts), in contrast to a highly consumptive 'mass tourism'. 1 Whereas the latter is often thought to be implicated in forms of cultural and economic imperialism or to degrade local cultures and natures, alternative forms of tourism are often thought to provide experiences whereby it is the traveler that is challenged to change rather than the host culture. Whether these differences hold is a matter of great debate, one that has increasingly filled the pages of nature and outdoors magazines. I will remain agnostic about whether adventure travel is 'better' or 'worse' than other forms of travel, and focus instead on the way that adventure travel works to reconfigure local 'natures' in the image of a series of metropolitan anxieties.2 Finally, the object of this chapter is to provide an account that draws out how nature in Clayoquot Sound is produced in and through specific discursive, social and technological practices. My focus, however, is less on Clayoquot Sound than on the dynamics that organize the appearance of the adventure traveler in the region and that structure his or her activities and movements there. At various points in the chapter italicized passages are inserted which relate particular 'moments' from my research in Clayoquot Sound. In a sense, the remainder of the text inquires after their conditions. In preparation for journey that lies ahead, let me quickly sketch a map of the argument. The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section I develop a critique of adventure travel that focuses on a number of specific questions: What gives rise 1 The Adventure Travel Society (ATS) differentiates between adventure travel and ecotourism in the following manner. Ecotourism: environmentally responsible travel to experience the natural areas and culture of a region while promoting conservation and economically contributing to local communities. Adventure travel: participatory, exciting travel that offers unique challenges to the individual in an outdoor setting. As is evident in ATS publications and those of its members, the two genres of travel often merge. ^ Impact assessments are necessarily contingent on a variety of local conditions that refuse generalizations. Moreover, in tourism studies, 'impact' is often evaluated in the same nostalgic terms that organize the desire for 'authentic' experiences of pristine natures and cultures. 127 to the desire for adventure-in-nature at the end of the twentieth century? How is this related to modern forms of subjectivity and to the changing configurations of society, space and nature that accompany global modernities? In what ways and through what discursive practices are distant places drawn into the libidinal and spatial economies of self-formation for metropolitan subjects at the close of the twentieth century? As the reader will soon realize, such an analysis quickly moves away from the 'site' of adventure to the social practices and cultural narratives that inform it. Adventure travel, I argue, provides a site at which to locate and map the imbrication of identity, space and nature at the end of the twentieth century. Thus, in the second section I return to Clayoquot Sound and explore the way that nature is produced in and through adventure travel. Far from 'passive' or 'light' I suggest that adventure travel carries with it its own tranformative and colonizing practices. However, while it is important to recognize that the 'gaze' of the adventure traveler contains its own logics (whereby non-Western natures are remade in the image of certain metropolitan anxieties) this may not be the only, nor always the most important, story to be told. As I show at the end of this chapter, native women in the village of Ahousaht in Clayoquot Sound have appropriated the tropes of adventure travel in order to intervene in, and direct, social, cultural and ecological changes in their community. There are a number of implications that follow from my argument, but I want to begin by highlighting two. First, by examining the phenomenon of adventure travel it should become clear that how nature is remade in the image of the commodity is a complex process that involves a series of discursive, cultural and institutional practices by which 'things' can show up as 'commodities' for exchange. Second - and this will remain at best a promissory note in the following discussion - a critical examination of adventure travel suggests possibilities for rethinking the 'space' of the 'subject'. Briefly, adventure travel provides a window onto how anxieties over the 'self and the 'body' in late modernity become territorialized. The subject-in-process, then, is not 128 only a subject-m-space - whether these are the spaces of language or the material spaces of the city - but also a spatializing subject. In adventure travel we can locate practices where the negotiation of subjectivity occurs across and draws together both libidinal and spatial economies, and, furthermore, economies that at the end of the twentieth century are increasingly globalized. In essence, then, as flows of images and technologies reterritorialize our imagination along global lines, nature is increasingly reconfigured at specific sites within and through a dialectic of 'self and 'other' that is figured and experienced globally. Framing adventure The process of displacement and differentiation....renders it a liminal reality (Bhabha, 1994:51). In this section I sketch relations between adventure travel, identity and nature in late twentieth-century technocultures. Let me begin, then, where most adventure travelers begin: in the city. Ecosummer Expeditions is among the largest of Vancouver's adventure travel companies. Each year it distributes an extensive catalogue which outlines the company's 'journeys of discovery' to various remote locations - from Greenland to Papau New Guinea. Similar catalogues are available from Ecosummer's local competitors and the hundreds of other North American adventure travel companies that advertise in such places as the 'active traveler' directory of Outside magazine, in Eco-traveler, Explore, Sierra, Men's Magazine, Buzzworm, Sea Kayaker, among countless other magazines that promote adventure, or in outdoor equipment shops like REI in the United States, or Canada's Mountain Equipment Co-op that cater to the burgeoning trade in adventure travel and nature tourism.^ Two facing pages from Ecosummer's Summer/Fall 1995 catalogue 3Indeed, REI now operates its own adventure travel company (REI Adventures) that offers trips ranging from Antarctic cruises to trekking the Inca Trail in Peru. 129 provide a window into how the adventure commodity is framed and how particular 'sites/sights' are able to 'show up' as potential places of adventure for North American travelers. At the same time we can also begin to sketch the outlines of the cultural narratives that organize and direct 'self-formation' for particular social groups in North American society at the close of the twentieth-century. Each of the facing pages outlines one of the company's 'journeys of discovery'. The first (Figure 4.1) describes a canoe expedition into the Canadian wilderness. Photographs show paddlers setting out into the wild spaces of British Columbia's Bowron Lakes, a series of eleven lakes and connecting rivers that can be paddled as a 'circuit', while the text provides a brief description of what travelers might see. A large photograph dominates the page. In it we see a group of adventurers advancing heroically into the unknown, with each paddle stroke increasing their distance (figuratively and physically) from 'civilization'. In this classic scene of exploration the first canoe literally breaks into the pristine, its wake dividing the image in two. Before lies wilderness, behind, culture. This is a familiar story, so familiar in fact that it is easy to overlook its semiotic codes and the mechanics of its construction. Like the photographs of Adrian Dorst in the previous chapter, the camera is an absent presence that structures the photograph's meanings. This occurs in two ways. On the one hand the absence of the camera erases the technological and institutional framework of 'adventure'. The representation and consumption of such an idyllic scene of 'wild nature' requires work. Yet, the labour of producing this experience, including the modern technologies that enable clients to arrive on the 'verge' of wilderness, are not represented. What the adventure traveler buys, therefore, is the 'pure' experience of adventure separate from the labour of its production (in essence, adventure becomes a sign). But the camera is also a figurative presence in the photograph, one that structures the viewer's position. Behind the camera (which by substitution becomes the viewer's 'eye') lies a 'modern' technologized society with which, as viewers, we are asked to identify. This is both metaphorical and spatial: by positioning 130 CO \u00E2\u0080\u0094 ...... \u00C2\u00AB\u00E2\u0080\u00A2 _ 5 * O z ^ ( \ \ A 1 > V 1. . ! ' . , . ! C O Z , ' \"tj \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 < I'M II II W W ' - \u00C2\u00AB L l w \" \" I ^ I T F . I . S T A T E S I^TiJ fislj C \u00E2\u0080\u00A2(ijiunreiilvijii r %iUemess Canoe C Canoeing (8 days) Departure Dates: June 26. July 6. 18, 30, Aug. 16, 28 Cost; SI2-0. OA)/5995. US from the Bowrtm Lakes, BC Group Siz Rowron Lake Park i.s a wildlife sancruar) within which there is a world renowned canoe circuit comprised ot 11 lakes and interconnecting rivers. Abundant wildlileand rich flora, set amidst a backdrop of azure lakes and high mountain peaks, provide a rruly inspirational setting lor the novice and experienced canoeist, photographer and naturalist alike. Soaring peaks and thundering waterfalls; long clear lakes filled withTish and tinging with the cries ol loons; verdant marshes teeming with waterfowl, beaver and moose; lush green lorests carpeted with wildflowers and mosses, alive with bears, snowshoe hares and lynx. Bowron Lake I'ark is a wilderness filled with naiuial beauty and a rich complement of wildlife, both plaru and animal. Out regular 8 day tours are designed for adults of all ages including active seniors. In addition, our cusioni executive tours are available lor smaller groups ol 4 or > participants. Al l trips are led by professional guides who are certified cantx' instructors, instruction is provided wherever necessary so (hat everyone can learn to paddle then canoe with confidence anil enjoyment. The pace of the trip allows plenty of time to enjoy fishing, wildlife observation, photography, and fireside relaxation. C H R I S H A R R I S is a superb photographer and author/publisher of the beautiful book, T H E B O W R O N LAKES. This work ^ culminated years and L ^ S S ? ^ dozens of paddling trips on the Bowron circuit in all seasons. Chris was one of the founders of Ecosummer and now concentrates on his photography and operates our 'Bowron Lakes' program with Dean Hull, a long-time paddling partner who has himself led over 100 trips around the Bowron Lakes. Jim Boyde, a 20-year veteran ot canoe and wilderness guiding in BC and the Yukon rounds out our Bowron Lakes team. Photos by Chrib Harm Figure 4.1. Framing Adventure: Bowron Lakes, Canada. Expeditions. Source, Ecosummer 131 the observer behind the camera as a viewer watching these adventurers depart, the camera itself becomes the boundary between the modern and premodern and between culture and nature whereby the observer is firmly (and self-consciously) positioned in modern culture, looking 'out' into a nature that lies external to his or her gaze, and by extension 'outside' modern civilization. Ultimately the absent referent that structures the meaning in this photo is the city itself, the place where these images are consumed and interpreted. Hence, the photograph, despite its realism, is allegorical: the snow-clad peaks that rise in the distance signify the 'limits' of humanization, and the canoes, propelled only by human power promise the recovery and rediscovery of an essential pre-modern harmony of 'self, 'body' and 'nature'. In narratives that see modernization as the continual taming and externalization of nature, these foreboding mountains and primitive transportation suggest its opposite: a primordial, natural realm that lies beyond but also prior to the artificial gloss of modern culture and its many forms of alienation. The photograph thus establishes a dualism between 'nature' and 'culture'; and it is this semiotic terrain that is covered by the expedition as much as the lakes and mountains themselves (Culler, 1991, see also Green 1990).4 In this light, a second inset - which depicts an encounter with 'wildlife' - is doubly significant, for it not only presents a detail of what might be experienced on the trip, but it stands as the company's guarantee that this mode of travel is authentic, bringing the adventure traveler into direct, unmediated contact with 'nature' itself - differentiating it 4 For an excellent discussion of the consumption of nature as an element of urban life and in relation to the social, spatial and technical organization of the city, see Green (1990). Green's discussion is grounded in nineteenth-century Paris, where, he argues, a type of modern urbanism crystallized that provided the conditions for a new discourse on nature: The quality of city life...[is] central to our argument about the discursive relation of nature to bourgeois culture. But the city is not set up as the counterpart to some natural 'other'. Rather, it is the material and cultural fabric of the metropolis which is seen to set the terms for the social production of the country side.... In short, such a vision of nature was deeply bound into the crystallization of a powerful metropolitan ideology (p. 4). Although Green examines nineteenth century Paris (when 'nature' was constructed as 'countryside') many of his observations about the relation between nature, identity and metropolitan life remain applicable at the end of the twentieth. 132 from the 'staged' nature of urban zoos and theme parks.5 In a world of simulacra, these trips promise the real. It is also - as I will show shortly - a promise that engages a deeply-felt metropolitan anxiety: despite our alienation from nature in late modern technocultures, individuals can perhaps still escape the constraints of metropolitan life and commune with a nature that returns their gaze, bridging the gap between Nature and Society. Let me turn briefly to a second advertisement that appears opposite the first. At first glance this 'journey of discovery' (Figure 4.2) promises an adventure of a very different kind. Here readers are invited to imagine a trekking adventure into the 'lost world' of Irian Jaya, where travelers will find remote cloud forests and people who \"are on the cusp of the stone age and have given up cannibalism only in the last 25 years.\" The language on this page evokes 'primitive' pasts and 'natural' cultures. In these cloud forests, recently discovered tribes literally emerge from the mists of time. The primary photograph depicts a Dani chief in a classic primitivist pose and adorned with all the appropriate signs that sets the 'savage' apart from the 'civilized' - nakedness, exotic jewelry, body piercing, penis gourd and face paint. A l l signs that might mark this site as 'similar' to the 'everyday' are bracketed. No modern technologies or 'western' clothing is allowed into the frame. The effect, as Rojek (1993) explains, is that the scene appears 'liminal'. Thus, the trip promises to take the trekker deep into the mythological space of the 'Other', and perhaps more important, into the 'pre-history' of the West. Here is the ultimate promise of return and recovery. As if to underline this, the journey is described as 'rigorous' and 'demanding', inviting participants to imagine that in their physical exertion they will also be returning to the time when travel was travail - when exploration was strenuous and uncertain - and thereby rediscovering in themselves long-lost harmonies between body, soul and mind. \"Our exploratories\", the catalogue intones, \"are physically 5 Likewise the photo of the guide - together with a description of his qualifications - underlines the 'authenticity' of these supposedly unmediated encounters. The guide, through his identification and intimacy with the area, becomes nature's representative, the 'decoder' of a nature that the client - only recently arrived from the metropolis - is not yet prepared to interpret. Hence, the text underlines the guides' experience, usually measured in years spent in the area or number of trips taken. 133 <\u00E2\u0080\u00A2 A 0-\u00E2\u0080\u00A2 M i l l . o it.,,:.;: / ' II II ll Of 1 \ V ...he .Los] WwrU. of Irian J i Dani To Yal i A d Trekking (14 Days) Dates: Oct. 13-29 and Oct. 27-Nov. 12 Cost: S2395. US from Wamena, Irian Jaya Group Size 10 A rwo week trekking adventure in Irian's highlands, this trip combines pan of the central Balieni Valley with a tew days in the more primitive and rugged mountains to the east, home of the Yali tribes. From the Baliem Valley you will take a breathtaking flight into the mist-shrouded land of these Yali, who arc shorter in stature than the Dani and recognized bv the extensive rattan hoops worn bv most males in conjunction with their penis gourds. Village liie and customs are also substantially different. In these mountains we will make a 6-day traverse, along reasonably good but steep trails, through a remote and stunningly beautiful terrain of highland rain forest. In contrast IO the Dani, little has been written about the Yali, a people who are on the cusp of the stone age and have given up cannibalism onlv in the last 25 vears. This is a superb Irian experience. Photos by: Jim Allan, Jean Barbeau ' i l l FOR T u t 7 T H Y H R E C O S U M M F R IS OFFERING its exciting trekking itineraries in Irian Jaya, the western and most primitive half of the island ofNeu> Guinea. Irian is the last frontier for travel amongst stone age cultures and the terrain is spectacularly lush and rugged. Travel outside the central highland Baliem Valley and the coastal lowlands is very minimal and available information is even less about the many tribes that are tucked into remote cloud forest valleys or spread across the expansive lowland rain forests. Our exploratory routes are constantly changing its one of the aims of this program is to map and document the terrain and the inhabitants of this unknown land which may soon fall prey to a rapidly expanding world. A fascinating destination and the exploratory trips are definitely on the leading edge of adventure travel today. Tk p Ex p 1 D r n 1 o r l Trekking (17-21 Days) Dates: October I November / 995 or March I April 1996 Cost: $3000. -3900. US (depending on group size and length of trip) from Wamena, Irian Jaya Join Jim Allan, F.cosummcr's Expedition Director on one ot a series of exploratory- expeditions in Irian Java. For each trip we select a new area to explore as we map and record the unknown routes and the people who reside in these isolated area. On a highlands exploratory' in the Star Mountains, we will traverse the tribal lands ot the Yali, Kim Yal, Wickbone. Goliat and Ona and you can be guaranteed to be amongsr the very lew outsiders to visit these spectacular areas. Similar to our highland exploratories our lowland exploratories through the uncontacted territories ol the upper Asmat are physically strenuous and have the additional demands ot being in the lowland rain forests where temperatures and humidity are much higher than in the highlands. These exploratories are suited only for those in excellent condition and prepared lor the unknowns ot adventure. It you fit into this category, please contact us in writing summarizing your experience and your preferred months ot travel (March. April, October or November). We will then keep vou intormed of expedition details as they become finalized. O Z at: Figure 4.2. Framing Adventure: Irian Jaya, Papau New Guinea. Source, Ecosummer Expeditions. 134 strenuous....and are suited only for those in excellent condition and prepared for the unknowns of adventure.\" Prospective participants are asked to contact the company in writing summarizing their experience. This is highly gendered and sexualized language. Anne McClintock (1995) has shown how an 'erotics of ravishment' has long organized male European travel. In European lore, she argues, non-European continents were libidinally eroticized, and accounts of travel abounded with visions of monstrous sexuality. Africa and the Americas became what McClintock calls a 'porno-tropics' for the European imagination, sites over which Europe projected its forbidden desires and fears. With his penis gourd and nakedness, it is not difficult to recognize the interweaving of the exotic and the erotic in this image. Moreover, despite the portrayal of a male Dani Chief, the advertisement invokes a masculinist discourse of adventure. Irian Jaya is presented as an 'unknown land', its territories remain 'uncontacted'. The 'adventurer' is thus invited to penetrate into the veiled, secret interior of the island which is portrayed as passive against the aggressive thrust of modernity (to which it 'may soon fall prey') and the 'strenuous effort' of the adventurer beating his competitors to the prize (a rape fantasy thinly veiled as a paternalistic concern over uncontrolled 'contact'). The first image has its own, more subtle 'erotics of adventure' - the canoe penetrating the pristine water, the pursuit of elusive wildlife - even if at first glance it has only to do with 'nature'. In each, then, we find the interweaving of erotics and nature tourism. This leads to a further observation. Like all commodities, these 'journeys of discovery' are notable for their differences. Each trip - like brands of soft drinks or makes of automobiles - turns on its differentiation from others, presenting consumers with the fantasy of individuality through consumption. Importantly, what differentiates the examples I've given is less that the latter discovers 'primitive culture' while the former takes adventurers into 'nature', than it is the degree of rigor and adventure found in each and thus the distance that each marks out from highly technologized metropolitan cultures. 135 (Indeed, the 'culture' of the second is - through the rhetorics of primitivism - conflated with nature, allowing both trips to appear as journeys into worlds that are primarily bio-physical rather than cultural.) Importantly, each trip positions the site of adventure on the other side of a cultural divide between the modern and the pre-modern and between culture and nature. The difference is only one of degree. The first trip transports travelers into the 'wilds', presenting the promise of communion with a primal order that exists before and beyond the modern metropolis. The second trip takes the trekker further into the place of the West's darkest mythologies - the tropical rainforest - a world ruled by biological drives and instincts, not by cultural codes and institutions. It is the second trip, described as the 'leading edge of adventure travel today' (and thus made to appear to travel the furthest into the pre-modern) that stands as the guarantee of authenticity and adventure for all other Ecosummer trips, establishing a continuum of adventure that runs through the entire catalogue. The trip to the Bowron lakes (accessible to 'active seniors') is thus of the same kind (but not degree) as the trek through Irian Jaya (suited only for those in excellent condition), one step along the way to an experience of pure difference. Indeed, earlier catalogues rated each expedition on a scale of difficulty, something still done by many companies. The consumer is thereby empowered to choose how far along this continuum he or she is willing to travel. Much more could be read in these advertisements and images. What goes almost without saying is that the tourist object - even in adventure travel and eco-tourism - is foremost a textual object, enframed within representational practices and semiotic codes (Culler 1991; MacCannell 1976). The adventure traveler, like any mass tourist, consumes signs: 'primitiveness', the 'pristine', the 'authentic'. But it would be mistaken to find in advertising itself the production of these codes. Advertising may differentiate commodities and imbue them with cultural capital, but it does so only by tapping into cultural narratives through which certain commodities can be fetishized and imbued with exchange value (Jhally 1990). What makes these advertisements effective is that they at once mobilize and 136 appeal to certain anxieties surrounding 'identity' and the 'self in late modernity. In short, there is a process of identification between the reader and the image. In what follows I suggest how we might theorize the identification of the consumer with the adventure commodity. This takes two steps. First, I explore two contesting accounts of identity formation in modernity in order to suggest from whence the desire for adventure-in-nature arises. In other words, adventure travel can be seen, alternately, as related to the libidinal economy of the self (Lacan), or, as one available site for 'self-formation' in a 'reflexive' modernity (Giddens). Second, I argue that in either case, for adventure travel to be a site of unconscious desire or a site of conscious self-formation is not solely a response to modernization, but produced through the mobilization of a series of discourses on modernity and modernization which locate in modernity an ineluctable 'decline' or 'repression' and which posit, against this, a 'pre-modern' world of essential identities. As I explain, these narratives emerge from a variety of sites, including critical theory itself, and have contributed both to the 're-invention' of adventure at the end of the twentieth century and the global production of local natures in its image. Territorializing desire: modernity, identity and adventure travel In the West, the decline of modernist identity has led to a new search for salvation (Friedman 1992:355) I have suggested that adventure travel and identity are closely related. Although a focus on identity is increasingly common in travel and tourism literature (see articles in Robertson, et al 199\u00C2\u00BB4), most discussions of tourism and travel have tended to find explanations based in sociological analysis, locating in tourism a response to transformations of work, leisure, the family, and social organization in advanced capitalism. Tourism is thus understood in relation to, or indeed as a facet of, work (Urry, 1990). Without dismissing sociological approaches, which usefully relate tourism to the regulation and reproduction of labour, I will suggest that approaches that frame tourism in terms of questions of identity may 137 provide a more thorough understanding of how the desire for particular experiences in tourism is constructed, how this becomes materialized in specific and differentiated modes of travel, and how it is satisfied through identification with and consumption of fetishized objects of the tourist gaze. Psychoanalytic theory provides one path into these questions. I cannot here take up the complexities of contesting interpretations of psychoanalytic theory (other than to say that psychoanalytic theory is far from unified), nor do more than rehearse some of its central themes. Rather, from psychoanalytic theory I draw a series of general concepts that may enable us to identify psychic mechanisms that relate adventure travel to the 'libidinal economy' of the self. More than this, I argue that questions of subjectivity are always spatially and materially negotiated. Hence, by looking at the example of adventure travel, I seek to sketch the imbrication of what I will call the 'territorialization of desire' with the consumption of nature and also its material production. As helpful as psychoanalytic theory may be for understanding some of the motivations for travel (Porter 1991), it is not the only means by which to arrive at an explanation for why people travel, nor does it in itself tell us anything about the form and expression that this desire takes in the global spaces of late modernity. Alternative explanations can be found in versions of modernization theory which locate in modernity the emergence of 'practices of the self whereby the 'self is understood - in Anthony Giddens' (1991) phrase - as a 'reflexive project'. Both approaches - as different as they are - see the 'self as non-essential and thus as fluid. Hence, both suggest that the 'formation of the self occurs in and through social and discursive practices. Precisely for this reason, following my discussion of competing notions of the 'self in modernity, I will turn in more detail to a series of cultural narratives and transformations of time-space that can be seen to channel or organize what I wish to describe as the 'spatial economies' of self-formation in late modernity, of which practices of adventure travel form one part. 138 Adventure travel and 'lack'. Let me begin with psychoanalytic theory, and in particular, the work of Jacques Lacan from which I wish to build an account of how the desire for adventure-in-travel is constituted.6 In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory the subject is understood to be constituted through its insertion into a pre-existing symbolic order. It should be noted immediately that this had led to two competing readings, one that sees a continuous conflict between the 'instinctual energies' of the subject and the symbolic order, and another that is skeptical of the implicit assumption of a pre-existing subject found in the former and which suggests instead that the subject is always and only 'called into being' in relation to this symbolic order (otherness) and thus has no pre-existing 'core'.7 If we follow the latter reading, which assumes that the subject does not pre-exist its entry into language, several related points can be made which may allow us to draw a relation between the 'self and travel. First, as Paul Smith (1988) notes, because the subject is constituted in language, and because language is a differential system (words have meaning only in relation to other words), the subject is constituted within and by the logics of the signifying chain rather than emerging fully formed as a bundle of pre-existing biological drives. The implications of such an understanding merits emphasis. To begin, rather than the law 'repressing' the instinctual energies of a pre-existing and singular subject, Lacanian psychoanalysis holds that the subject is always already unstable, constituted in and divided by precisely that which enables it to articulate its experience as its own (Mowitt 1988:xiv). Lacan's famous discussion of the 'mirror stage' is particularly pertinent here. Lacan suggests that because 6 Psychoanalytic theory provides a model of the 'subject' that is both universal and ahistorical. Whether psychoanalytic theory should be universalized is a matter of considerable debate. It is not necessary, I think, to construct psychoanalytic theory in a 'transcendental cast' (Gregory 1994:324n). Rather, one of its great insights - especially in post-Lacanian forms - is that how desire is expressed, and the objects which take on a 'fetishistic' structure in relation to the desiring subject, are socially and historically specific. 7 In the case of the former the subject is seen as 'submitting' his/her libido to the systematic pressures of the symbolic order. In short, in this interpretation, by adopting language the subject allows his or her \"free instinctual energies to be operated upon and organized.\" (see Bowie 1991). The latter, and more widely accepted reading of Lacan (owing much to post-structuralism) assumes that the subject does not pre-exist its entry into language. 139 the subject is inserted into language, it can only know itself as an image forged in relation to an Other, or more broadly, in relation to the 'symbolic order'. But, since this 'other' or 'symbolic order' is never fixed or sutured, the subject is continuously 'thrown off-center' in relation to itself. In short - and this is the second crucial point - the subject experiences a continuous and defining sense of 'lack', expressed as a desire for coherence or plenitude which in turn can be satisfied only through the 'Other'. This leads to a third implication. Since the 'self (ego) can only be known in relation to other identities, and since it experiences this relation as one of 'lack', the subject is always oriented toward the Other, or in other words 'entangled' in the social construction of reality (Mowitt, 1988). What ties the subject to the symbolic order, therefore, is what Lacan describes as a 'primary narcissism', no less than the fantasy of reuniting the subject with the object of desire which promises to complete or unify the subject (Lacan calls this object the 'maternal object').8 The significance of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for theorizing 'motivations' for travel, then, pivots on the continuous decentering of the subject in relation to a symbolic order, and the dialectical construction of subjectivity in relation to an 'Other'. As Homi Bhabha (1994) has noted, the 'other' thus becomes constitutive of the 'self - its presence both destabilizes identity and simultaneously results in the 'non-self becoming the terrain upon which the self continually seeks to reintegrate itself. In short, 'desire' is externalized as the subject seeks to achieve coherence. Anthony Elliott (1996) provides a useful summary: Lacan's theory, he argues, helps explain how something 'outside' and 'other' is taken 'inside' subjectivity. It is in this vein that Porter, among others, suggests that at 8 Lawrence Grossberg (1992; 1996) sets out a contesting conception of identity that takes as its starting point not negativity or difference but mobility and placement. Such a 'positive' account has a number of advantages. First, identity is seen as emerging not in terms of essences or universal/transcendental forms, but in the midst of possibilities and experiences offered forth by the organization of social life. Second, Grossberg's account provides a sense of how identity is related to the 'spatial logics' of daily life. Finally, his account is open to explanations of changing identities that relate this to the transformation of the spatial (and technological) basis of social life. However, it is unclear how Grossberg accounts for the psychic mechanisms that tie the subject to social life. I prefer instead to understand Lacan's symbolic as deeply social and historical, such that the subject's libidinal investments in things (and identity) is transformed along with the symbolic order. 140 some level most forms of travel cater to desire, in the sense that travel promises, or allow us to fantasize, the reunification of the subject through an encounter with the 'non-self. As such, at a fundamental level travel involves a fantasy of regression in the sense of returning to a lost condition of wholeness that prefigures the subject's insertion into language. Travel becomes a flight from uncertainty and unease. Thus, to the extent that other cultures, sites, or nature itself, can provide the promise of fulfilling the subject's constitutive 'lack', travel becomes a means of 'centering' the self, of obtaining lost plenitude. Indeed, it is precisely because traveling is undertaken to 'restore something that is lacking', that it has a fetishistic structure (Curtis and Pajaczkowska, 1994). As I explore later, the 'non-West' appears to fulfill this desire because, in contrast to the apparent mutability of cultural forms in the modern West, its cultural and social forms are seen as stable, eternal and coherent. I will return to this shortly in order to suggest that contemporary discourses on modernity-as-loss give shape to the particular form that this condensation of desire takes at the end of the twentieth century, and how this permits both the 'non-West' and 'nature' to become sites for desire. Reflexive modernity and the self as project. In essence, psychoanalytic theory suggests that travel is a journey into the 'non-self in order to order and fix the 'self. Another more sociological and historical explanation for the motivation to travel can be derived from theories of modernization. In general these theories have placed far less emphasis on the 'structure' of the subject, and much more on how the experience of 'selfhood' has been transformed in modernity. In this vein, Anthony Giddens provides a view of the self that locates its mobility not in a defining lack but in a variety of social forces that have worked to destabilize self-identity in modernity: the destruction of tradition and the fragmentation of social l i fe . 9 The loss of tradition in the face of forms of modern rationality and global 9 Giddens (1991) states clearly that while his main focus is on the self, \"this is not a work of psychology\" (p. 1). 141 exchange is for Giddens of particular importance, since it is precisely tradition which previously provided the subject with coherent reference points by which to understand the 'self and to locate oneself in relation to a wider community. 10 i f pre-modern societies were stable, in modern societies - Giddens argues - crises are endemic, and the 'self is continuously destabilized as its phenomenal worlds are reconfigured. Giddens points particularly to the mediatization of experience and to the disembedding mechanisms that bring about time-space distanciation (globalization) as the two most important aspects of the destruction of tradition and the fragmentation of identity in modernity. H Giddens notes, for instance, that our worlds today are global in the sense that they are no longer contained within the confines of place-specific and historically enduring social forms. Care must be taken with Giddens's sweeping generalizations. Certainly worlds have been global long before the advent of modernity and not only for Europeans. However, it is reasonable, I think, to argue with Appadurai (1990) that what is new is the speed and scale of global flows such that the horizons of culture and the self have been radically altered. The significance of all this, Giddens writes, is that in the 'post-traditional order' of modernity and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, the 'self ' becomes a 'reflexive project'. Identity (and the body) are thus both sites of anxiety and self-work since neither are pre-given. Instead each is continuously subject to changing social and cultural dynamics. In short, the more tradition loses its hold, the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of a dialectical interplay of the local and the global and the more individuals are forced to negotiate a series of choices about style of 10 Jonathan Friedman (1992) makes a similar point, arguing that modernity is characterized by the separation of 'identity' from 'tradition' or fixed cosmological reference points. Giddens's conception of tradition is profoundly casual, rarely articulated as anything more a series of undefined stable practices and ontological conceptions that are assumed to be undermined with the onset of modernity. H Giddens (1991) emphasizes two mechanisms by which relations are 'lifted out' of the immediacy of 'tradition' or Gemeinshaft, and rearticulated across time-space: (1) Symbolic tokens such as money, and (2) Expert systems that bracket time and space. 142 life. Significantly, according to Giddens, there is a conservative bias built into reflexivity, since individuals seek 'ontological security', or a sense of continuity and order. 12 Although there are important differences that separate Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and modernization theories, they are not, I think, wholly incompatible.13 Care must be taken not to conflate one into the other. Perhaps the most important differences lie in the significance each gives to the unconscious. In psychoanalytic theory, as Freud wrote, the unconscious 'does not think, calculate or judge' and remains inaccessible to reason. Hence, 'the ego is not master of its own house.' For Giddens, such an approach is incompatible with models of agency in which subjects are knowledgeable actors. He therefore downplays the significance of the unconscious, seeing it as a mechanism that tends to 'distort' rather than 'structure'. As Paul Smith (1988:79-81) notes, this results in a model of the unconscious that no longer has any significance in the 'dialectic' between structure and agency that Giddens suggests, but is essentially rendered epiphenomenal. Yet, to the extent that the 'symbolic order' postulated by Lacan is not taken to be fixed, but rather constituted in social and historical processes, it is possible to relate - in a rough manner - the destabilization of the subject in relation to a general 'other' as described in Lacanian psychoanalysis with the fragmentation of the 'self in the mediatized and globalized social spaces theorized by writers like Giddens. This requires being somewhat unfaithful to both accounts. While Lacan provides a persuasive explanation for why the subject desires, or, in other words, why the subject is necessarily 'oriented' towards the 12 There are affinities, I think, between Giddens's discussions of detraditionalization and fragmentation and Fredric Jameson's (1984) description of postmodernism as a historical moment that \"transcends the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world\" (p. 83). From this perspective it is also possible to see how the desire to 'cognitively map' the social reality of the end of the twentieth century can take the form of nostalgia since, as Curtis and Pajaczkowska (1994:205) note, \"the 'foreign', as well as the 'past', has the virtue of clarity and coherence and a distance that renders it desirable and appropriable.\" 13 Other modernization theorists like Jonathan Friedman (1992) wish only to incorporate the 'general' argument of psychoanalytic theory into accounts of identity-formation. Friedman argues that it is not necessary to advocate or universalize psychoanalytic theory in order to appropriate the basic concept that acts of 'self-definition' are dependent upon the Other, and further, that identities are capable of 'self-realization' or, in other words, conceiving of themselves as 'projects'. 143 'Other', Giddens - with his focus on the rapidly changing social fields of modernity/postmodernity - provides a means of theorizing why this 'Other' is never fixed but is instead a continuously shifting identity. Furthermore, he does so in more material ways than simply the 'unfixity' of signifying chains. Finally, by drawing these two approaches into relation, it may be possible to construct accounts that explain why at certain historical junctures and among certain actors the desire for plenitude should take the form of fantasies of 'return' to a world of more certain and stable identities. In short, by drawing on both psychoanalytic theory and modernization theory we can link the representational expression of desire with the social and cultural worlds of modernity/postmodernity. Such approaches, Elliott (1996) suggests, are necessary in order to grasp the 'criss-crossing' of fantasy and culture, or the inseparability of society and subjectivity in the postmodern age. 14 With the global spread of cultural production in the mass media, for instance, the subject is exposed to a 'reordering of the symbolic codes of society' (Elliott 1996:33). I will turn to this in greater detail later. Adventure travel, I suggest, is a product of precisely such a criss-crossing of fantasy and culture, society and subjectivity. To map its contours, however, requires not only theorizing a 'decentered subject' but locating a series of discourses on modernity by which the 'pre-modern' and the 'non-West' can be set apart and valorized as a realm of essential identities and thus show up as sites of desire. 14 Elliott argues that this 'criss-crossing' has been left undertheorized due to social theory and psychoanalytic theory establishing 'society' and 'self as separate fields of research. 144 Modernity and melancholy: the cultural narratives of adventure travel Much of our current critical and political project appears to me as a kind of unrealized mourning in which all of life has become reorganized around something that 'died' (MacCannell 1989: xi-xii). When the real is no longer what it used to be nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality, of second hand truth, objectivity and authenticity (Baudrillard, 1983: 12-13). To locate the desire for adventure travel in the structure of the self (Lacan's sense of 'lack'), or in the fragmentation of identity and loss of reference points in modernity (Giddens) takes us only part way to an understanding of how and in what form this desire finds expression and becomes spatialized at the end of the twentieth century. In what follows I suggest that adventure travel is enabled by, at the same time as it mobilizes, a series of cultural narratives that surround both modernity and modernization and that these narratives have become important elements of the social and discursive fields in which subjects 'recognize themselves'. As such, adventure travel is a product both of the destabilization of the subject in modernity and of the discourses about modernity that provide for individual subjects a means of narrating the 'self, its 'dissolution', and possible 'recovery'. It is these discourses, I will argue, that give form to the desire for adventure-in-nature, and in particular that can explain how the 'non-West' and the 'pre-modern' become valorized sites for the 'recovery' of the self in late modernity. In short, it is these narratives which organize where we look to find the unity of self, and are therefore in part responsible for places like the Bowron Lakes or Irian Jaya to 'show up' as sites for a self-consolidating experience of adventure. Modernity as decline. Richard Bernstein (1992) has argued that at least since the French Revolution two competing narratives of modernity can be distinguished. One equates the Enlightenment (and modern reason) with progress. The other inverts this narrative to suggest that modernity is characterized by forms of rationality that deny, repress and 145 dominate. Both are teleological: the former a story of progress, the latter a story of ineluctable decline. What is significant for my purposes is not the accuracy of these narratives, but precisely the way that they locate a rupture between the 'pre-modern' and the 'modern' and subsequently valorize one over the other. Adventure travel, I wish to argue, trades heavily on this distinction, and in particular, on narratives that locate in modernity a pervasive decline. In turn, this allows for a call to 'return' to a pre-lapsarian state, before the fall into modernity. Thus, in the words of one promoter of alternative tourism, Active travelers prefer to dig down through the thin crust of modern civilization to their destination's ancient core; unexcited by nature that has been brought to heel, they want it without fences, untamed and pristine (Bill 1994:A2, italics mine). In descriptions like these, adventure travel is scripted as a journey from the 'shallow' to the 'deep', and likewise from the 'modern' to the 'ancient'. At one level, statements like these echo the critiques of consumer culture made by writers like Christopher Lasch (1979) and Daniel Bell (1976) where modern civilization is seen as 'thin', overly narcissistic, individualistic and inauthentic, and the self dissipated by the 'cultural contradictions' of capitalism. Many contemporary critiques of postmodern culture mirror this, arguing that in postmodernity the 'real' has been emptied into 'simulation' , a world of signs unmoored from their signifiers where 'Disneyfication' becomes shorthand for the commodification of experience and the 'hollowing out of meaning' in everyday life (see, for instance, Zukin 1991). In rhetorics like these, authenticity - like indigenous peoples - continually retreats before the onslaught of the West and its 'fatal impact'.^ Hence, when companies like 15 Marshall Sahlins (1993) returns to Marx to locate a telling example of how the hegemony of a Western modernity is viewed as inevitable. \"By the rapid improvement of the instruments of production and communication, proclaimed the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie draws all nations, \"even the most barbarian,\" into \"civilization.\" \"The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.\" (Marx and Engels 1959:11) 146 Ecosummer sell their excursions as trips to places 'off the beaten track' or as yet 'undiscovered' what is being sold is not simply nostalgia for exploration, but melancholy. It is not only the status of being 'first' that has such cultural cachet in the metropolis. Rather, the 'undiscovered' implies the unmediated and thus a direct relation to, and merging with, the Other. 16 \"p 0 r each trip,\" Ecosummer's catalogue declares, \"we select a new area to explore as we map and record the unknown routes and the people who reside in these isolated areas you can be guaranteed to be amongst the very few outsiders to visit these spectacular areas.\" (p. 19). Indeed, Ecosummer trades on distinctions between modernity and a utopic, pristine culture threatened by the 'fatal impact' of modernity. \"Our exploratory routes,\" the company's Irian Jaya advertisement proclaims, \"are constantly changing as one of the aims of this program is to map and document the terrain and the inhabitants of this unknown land which may soon fall prey to a rapidly expanding world.\" Where precisely Ecosummer sees itself and its clients in relation to this predatory modernity is unclear (surely mapping and documenting are but another expression of the will to power in modernity?), but what is clear is that adventure travel as a commodity requires not only a differentiation from a tourism that is accessible to more than 'the very few', but a continual vigilance over the boundaries between the modern and premodern.17 Statements like these mobilize common assumptions about the hollowing out of experience in late modernity. But they also tap into a more deep-seated belief that modern culture and institutions mask a realm of essential human nature and cultural cohesion. As Sahlins point, of course, is that the Chinese wall has proven not so vulnerable. 16 It is interesting how this becomes materialized in specific places. On a wall at the back of a Tofino kayak rental shop can be found a map that indicates with small green markers which sites in Clayoquot Sound are frequented by tour groups. The assumption, of course, is that the true adventure traveler will seek beaches where tour groups will not be encountered. Of course, excursions sell this same 'undiscovered' landscape, with consequences that are both comic and tragic. A tour guide in the area related a story of a trip that had almost ended in a violent encounter between the clients of two different groups when, due to unforeseen circumstances, both found it necessary to overnight on the same beach, thereby disrupting the illusion of solitude that clients of both groups had purchased as part of the 'adventure' commodity. 17 Ian Munt (1994) draws on Bourdieu (1984) to argue that 'tourism' is a form of cultural capital bound up with the construction and display of class distinctions. Buzard (1993) notes that similar dynamics ordered the distinction between travel and tourism drawn by English middle-classes in the nineteenth-century. In this case travel implied both distinction (from the crowd) and solidarity (with a 'select few'). 147 Roland Robertson (1992) has noted, the West has long attributed to 'non-Western' or to 'primal societies' a cohesive functionality that is threatened in the slow slide into modernity. Indeed, the notion that pre-modern societies are somehow closer to the origins of humanity remains pervasive, even today in an age of supposed postmodern de-differentiation when the familiar dualisms of modernity (modern/pre-modern; culture/nature; work/leisure) are thought to no longer hold. Thus, if, as some have suggested, alternative travel is an expression of 'postmodern' sensibilities (Munt 1994; Beezer 1993), then this certainly is a postmodernism that, in its ironic and reflexive attitudes towards modernity, often looks back to a period 'prior to' the advent of the modern, and in so doing reprises some very modern themes. Arguably, adventure travel incorporates aspects of an anti-modern modernism rather than a 'new' postmodern sensibility and weaves threads of this history of anti-modern critique into the natural landscapes of the present. 18 Tristes-tropiques and the triste tropes of adventure travel: traveling towards degree zero. To explore these tropes of modernity-as-loss in more detail I will turn to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss's work is useful in a number ways. First, through it we can sketch the outline of cultural discourses that give rise to, and animate, the desire for adventure travel at the end of the twentieth century, especially those that rely explicitly on a great divide between the modern and premodern. Second, his work can be used to 18 John Urry (1990) suggests that a growing 'post-tourist' sensibility is pervading postmodern forms of tourism. The post-tourist, he writes, playfully accepts inauthenticity, is aware of the multiple options for the direction of the tourist gaze, dismisses 'high' and 'low' cultural distinctions and knows that tourism is a game (see Buzard 1993:336 for summary). In brief, the post-tourist engages the tourist experience in an ironic mode. White it is true that some adventure travelers play ironically with tropes of imperial nostalgia, it appears, by and large, that most attempts to 'return' to a past fullness remain under the thrall of a melancholic modernity. Moreover, I have three reservations to Urry's account. First, like Buzard, I suspect that the post-tourist, by playing at tourism, is simply dis-playing his or her cultural acumen. In this sense, by inverting the 'seriousness' of travel, post-tourists remain within its frame. Second, to speak of the 'post-tourist' as solely a 'postmodern' phenomena overlooks the many ways that earlier travelers were also ironic (see Pratt 1992). Finally, care must be taken to differentiate between types of tourism. Irony may be more easily present in places like Disneyland than Clayoquot Sound. 148 show how pervasive these tropes are, even in accounts that attempt to undo such distinctions. As a structural anthropologist, Levi-Strauss sought after universal structures of the human mind and culture, and thus he was determined to undermine assumptions that held that the West was somehow different in essence, or superior to, non-Western cultures. Modernity, so Levi-Strauss maintained, was marked by its own mythologies. However, as Jacques Derrida (1976) has shown in an important reading of Levi-Strauss's Triste Tropiques, precisely those tropes used in Western philosophy and the human sciences to maintain and police a divide between the premodern and the modern reappear in Levi-Strauss's critique of Western ethnocentrism and in his anxieties over his own presence in the 'non-West'.I 9 As I hope to show, there are marked similarities between this and the simultaneous critique/anxiety that marks adventure travel. Finally, by turning to Levi-Strauss, I want to think about the ways that local natures and cultures are materialized in discursive practices that come from afar and carry their histories within them. Levi-Strauss's work incorporates narratives that draw a relation (and imply a physical movement) between a metropolitan center and its presumed 'Other'. Triste-Tropiques was written in the 1950s. In it, Levi-Strauss set out to write an account of his journeys and research in South America in the 1930s on which some of his famous texts were based. The book therefore mixes a travel narrative with anthropological observations on a series of indigenous peoples living in Brazil. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of this book is that Levi-Strauss shuttles back and forth between a critique of other travelers and reflections about his own travels (see Arshi, et al 1994). This prefigures anxieties that mark adventure travel today. Before looking at this, however, I want to focus on Levi-Strauss's account of his work as an anthropologist. In these can locate a series of crucial distinctions between the West and the non-West and 19 Triste-Tropiques was originally published in 1955. All quotations are taken from 1992 translation by Joan and Doreen Weightman which includes passages not found in an earlier 1974 translation and which Levi-Strauss also changed slightly from the original French version. 149 narratives of modernity-as-loss that inform both Levi-Strauss's texts and adventure travel today. These are particularly pronounced - as Derrida shows - in a crucial section of the text that deals with his encounters with the Nambikwara, a tribal group found in the Brazilian interior. In this section Levi-Strauss relates his journeys and observations, but at the same time worries over the impact of his own presence, figured through an account of his introduction of writing to a culture that had previously known only oral tradition. It is precisely in his anxieties over the introduction of writing that Derrida locates some enduring themes in Western philosophy and human sciences, in essence, what amounts to a recapitulation of Rousseau's critique of modernity and his dreams of 'origins'. Rousseau - as is well known - distinguished between a modern civilized existence and a primitive state of communal grace from which, he argued, moderns were 'cut off. Modern civilization, according to Rousseau, entailed an alienated social existence that 'corrupted' and 'distorted' natural instincts. Significantly, it was the advent of writing that Rousseau felt had initially sent the West down this fateful road. As Christopher Norris (1987: 123) summarizes, for Rousseau, \"writing is the origin, the essential precondition of all the forces which attack the state of nature and precipitate the long decline into modern mass civilization.\" In Levi-Strauss a similar assumption is present. Prior to his arrival, Levi-Strauss explains, the Nambikwara had no written language, nor did they know how to draw \"apart from making a few dotted lines or zigzags on their gourds\" (p. 296). Nevertheless, among them Levi-Strauss follows a practice that he had performed among other tribal groups, distributing sheets of paper and pencils among them. At first, he notes, the Nambikwara did nothing with them, until one day he noted that they were all busy drawing wavy horizontal lines. Levi-Strauss interprets this as an attempt to mimic his act of writing, although they had not yet 'grasped the purpose'. None, that is, except their chief, who, as Levi-Strauss relates the story, soon recognized the relation between writing and authority and set out to use writing to solidify his own position. Levi-Strauss interprets his own actions as having resulted in the 150 introduction of a technology of hierarchy and domination, leading to the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment (p. 298). But it is the terms in which this is cast that are particularly telling. Essentially, by introducing writing, Levi-Strauss sees himself to have introduced 'culture' (law, hierarchy) to 'nature' (harmony, equality), so as to distort a pre-existing 'order and natural peace'. This becomes particularly evident if one reads this account against a passage found only a few pages prior where Levi-Strauss relates an experience that he had recorded one night 'by the light of my pocket-torch'. On the dark savannah, the camp fires sparkle. Near their warmth, which offers the only protection against the growing chill of the night; behind the frail screens of palm-fronds and branches, hurriedly set up on the side from which rain and wind are expected; next to the baskets filled with the pathetic possessions which constitute the community's earthly wealth; lying on the bare ground which stretches away in all directions and is haunted by other equally hostile and apprehensive bands, husbands and wives, closely intertwined, are aware of being each other's support and comfort, and the only help against day-to-day difficulties and that brooding melancholy which settles from time to time on the souls of the Nambikwara. The visitor camping with the Indians in the bush for the first time, is filled with anguish and pity at the sight of human beings so bereft; some relentless cataclysm seems to have crushed them against the ground in a hostile land, leaving them naked and shivering by their flickering fires. He gropes his way through the scrub, taking care not to knock against the hands, arms or chests that he glimpses as warm reflections in the glow of the flames. But the wretchedness is shot through with whisperings and chuckles. The couples embrace as if seeking to recapture a lost unity, and their caresses continue uninterrupted as he goes by. He can sense in all of them an immense kindness, a profoundly carefree attitude, a naive and charming animal satisfaction and - binding these various feelings together - something which might be called the most truthful and moving expression of human love (p. 293). This is a beautiful, moving account, but its effect - juxtaposed with the equally poignant account of Levi-Strauss's introduction of writing - is to re-invoke precisely those distinctions which separate a pre-modern from a modern world. This is mirrored in his distinction elsewhere between 'cool' cultures like the Nambikwara who exist 'at ease' in 151 their environment, and 'hot' cultures of the West that engage in continuous technological and cultural change. In essence what Levi-Strauss marks - and mourns - is the penetration of the latter into 'the lost world' of the Nambikwara - a \"small group of native nomads who are among the most primitive to be found anywhere in the world\" and where a telegraph line \"provides the only landmark [for Levi-Strauss] over a distance of seven hundred kilometres\" (p. 272). In Triste-Tropiques, then, we can locate two assumptions that surface again in the practices and rhetorics of adventure travel. First, Levi-Strauss found it necessary to travel to South America in part because - as Pollock (1994) explains - modern society was simply too complex and its structures too smashed by rapid economic, social and psychological change to yield to analysis of 'fundamental structures of human thought'. Hence, 'non-Western' or 'primitive' cultures could be seen as nearer to (the West's) origins or to an essential human nature. Indeed, Derrida (1976:114) argues that these tropes of 'recovery' are pervasive even in critiques of the West since these \"ha[ve] most often the sole function of constituting the other as .a model of original and natural goodness\" Non-Europeans appear as an index to a hidden and good nature, or the 'zero degree' against which one can outline the structure, growth and degradation of the West. But, equally as important, the adventure traveler, like the anthropologist, risks 'infecting' the primitive, violating its purity. By the introduction of modern culture and technology a universal and spontaneous condition of life that obeys no laws is disrupted. I want to push Derrida's discussion of Levi-Strauss further. Levi-Strauss finds anthropology implicated in the 'fall ' . What Derrida does not remark upon is that Levi-Strauss responds to this awareness by falling into the 'eulogizing embrace' of nature (Arshi, et al. 1994) . Levi-Strauss's chapter \"In the forest\" has received far less attention, but it can be read as a logical extension of Levi-Strauss's anti-ethnocentric and anti-modern critique. What makes the forest so important for Levi-Strauss is precisely that \"it keeps man at a distance and hurriedly covers up his tracks....[its horizons] soon close 152 in on a limited world, creating an isolation as complete as that of the desert wastes\" (p. 340). Not unlike the truly primitive society (which always eluded Levi-Strauss, in part because of his presence), nature pursues only an \"undisturbed and independent existence... to which we can only be admitted if we show the proper degree of patience and humility\" (p. 341). Indeed, the forest promises precisely this communion with the eternal and universal: \" A few dozen square yards of forest\", Levi-Strauss writes, \"are enough to abolish the external world; one universe gives way to another which is far less flattering to the eye but where hearing and smell, faculties closer to the soul than sight, come into their own\" (p. 341).20 Set against the tropical rainforest, European forests appear humanized and demythologized, separated from the rainforest by \"a gap so great that it is difficult to find words to describe it.\" Significantly - for it makes an equivalence between the nature and the primitive explicit - Levi-Strauss describes himself as 'plunging' into the primal rainforest in order to meet up with one of the tribes he studies, the Tupi-Kawahib. Despite his remarkable reflexivity on anthropology and travel (both seen, in essence, as never escaping the orbit of the West), Levi-Strauss reinforces a narrative that divides the world into the pre-modern and the modern, equates the former with nature and finds in the latter the cause of the former's disappearance. In brief, Levi-Strauss can be 20 If this sounds Rousseauist, it is not by accident. In his Geneva lectures Levi-Strauss makes his debts to Rousseau explicit: The Rousseauist revolution, pre-forming and imitating the anthropological revolution, consists in refusing the expected identifications, whether that of a culture with that culture, or that of an individual, member of one culture, with a personage or a social function that the same culture wishes to impose upon him. In both cases the culture or the individual insists on the right to a free identification which can only be realized beyond man: an identification with all that lives and therefore suffers; and an identification which can also be realized short o/the function or the person; with a yet unfashioned, but given, being. Then the self and the other, freed of an antagonism that only philosophy seeks to excite, recover their unity. An original alliance, at last renewed, permits them to found together the we against the him, against a society inimical to man, and which man finds himself all the more ready to challenge because Rousseau, by his example, teaches him how to elude the intolerable contradictions of civilized life. For if it is true that Nature has expelled man, and that society persists in oppressing him, man can at least reverse the horns of the dilemma to his own advantage, and seek out the society of nature in order to meditate there upon the nature of society. This, is seems to me, is the indissoluble message of the Social Contract, the Lettres sur la botanique, and the Reveries. (Levi-Strauss, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 245 , quoted in Derrida 1976; 115, italics author's) 153 used as an index of the pervasiveness of a melancholic modernity. Adventure travel shares with Levi-Strauss a Rousseauist mythology of 'origins' (such that the adventure traveler seeks to escape modernity by traveling to degree zero - those places where the 'primitive' or the 'pristine' remain undisturbed). But the adventure traveler also shares anxieties over their own culpability with the 'violation' of the primitive/pristine (which becomes expressed in the traveler's mode of travel, i.e. 'minimal impact' , 'culturally sensitive' tourism, etc.). In essence, a 'great divide' between the modern and pre-modern structures both Levi-Strauss's texts and adventure travel: the melancholy of Triste-Tropiques is reprised today in the triste tropes of adventure travel. Modernity as repression of self. Adventure travel shares with structural anthropology the relegation of the Other to a temporal space that the traveler and the anthropologist do not themselves occupy (Fabian 1983). Hence, like time-travelers in Western SF films and novels who worry that their anachronistic appearance in either the future or past may alter the natural course of history, 'alternative' travelers continually remark upon their possible culpability in polluting the pristine - not through their own actions, of course, but because once established, others might follow their path, resulting in a slow slide towards mass tour ism. 21 Let me briefly sketch a second aspect of a late-modern anti-modernism. Few have drawn links between Levi-Strauss and the Frankfurt School, but members of the Frankfurt school can be seen to have instilled a comparable distinction between the pre-modern and the modern. Levi-Strauss pondered the journey traveled by modern societies from their pre-modern origins. Members of the Frankfurt School weighed the repression of the self in modern forms of instrumental reason. 2 1 Indeed, the journal Ecotraveler has recently added a regular column entitled 'Balancing Act' which addresses the question of 'whether travel in remote corners of the world does more harm than good'. 154 Again this merits review. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse are key figures in these accounts. Both remained heirs to Enlightenment aspirations, in the sense that both held on to possibilities for greater autonomy and equality in modern forms of reason. Yet, their work was often marked by a pessimism, and it is these aspects that have been rehearsed time and again in critical theory and even in popular culture.22 in particular, both relate modern forms of rationalization to domination. In this they draw on and extend Max Weber's worries over the dehumanizing of 'man' in modern institutions. Richard Bernstein (1992) is not far off the mark when he suggests that Weber's often quoted conclusion to The Protestant Ethic reads today like an epigraph for the twentieth century, no doubt in part because of its reiteration at the hands of later theorists. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be said: \"specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart\"; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved. (1958:182) Today these terms read less as a dystopic vision of the future and more as received truth about the nature of modernity. 'Civilization', in these rhetorics, results in the dehumanizing of life, the loss of spirit and heart. Weber's themes are taken up and reworked by Adorno and Marcuse. For Adorno, despite his unwillingness to abandon Reason or to seek a Heideggerian authenticity, Western culture was characterized by an instrumental rationality that had led to an administered world and the repression and denial of difference and singularity; in short, the world, for Adorno, was increasingly remade in the image of the 'one'. Bernstein 22 My argument is not that discourses on modernity-as-decline are 'correct'. There are good reasons to argue the opposite. Cornelius Castoriadas, for instance, suggests that these narratives mark not the decline of the West, but in Elliott's (1996:10) summary, \"the failure of social and political thought to address the imaginative opportunities ushered into existence by modern social institutions and their worldwide spread.\" My interest lies in the way that these cultural narratives 'frame' the modern and instill a desire for return. In an important sense, adventure travel finds its conditions of possibility precisely in the reduction of discourses on the consequences of modernity to an either/or, for/against debate. 155 (1992:42) summarizes this well. For Adorno, he writes, \"the domination and control over nature inexorably turns into the domination of men over men (and indeed men over women) and culminates in sadistic-masochistic self-repression and self-mutilation... .The hidden 'logic' of Enlightenment reason is violently repressive; it is totalitarian.\" In part, the 'repressive hypothesis' articulated by Adorno and Marcuse is facilitated by their use of a topological model of the human subject, borrowing drive theory from the early 'biological' Freud and wedding this to their critique of modernity. Thus, not only did Adorno (with Horkheimer) paint a bleak picture of the oppressive weight of technological reason on modern social life, but in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) located in modernity the repression of an 'inner nature' (in the process of dominating 'outer nature'). Marcuse, similarly, mapped the dissolution of the individual subject within the psychic and social fields of modernity, whereby as Elliott (1992:54) explains \"the insidious rise of systems of technology and bureaucracy has led to a general breakdown of the stable features of self-identity\" (italics mine). Human subjects, for Marcuse, were victims of an administered society, continually subsumed and manipulated by a rationality \"imposed upon him (sic) from the outside\". In the face of modernity's repression of the self, what was needed, Marcuse believed, was to recover the core of selfhood - the 'degree zero' of the 'self - that still existed, timelessly residing in the unconscious, despite the repression of libidinal drives in civilization. If we return to Adorno we can locate a similarly dystopic vision. Modernity, for . Adorno, was characterized by psychological impoverishment, giving rise to the sense that the modern subject was little more than an automaton. The rationalized world of commodified culture and depersonalized social relations generated a failure in ego development.23 In summary, Adorno's and Marcuse's accounts of the self in modernity 23Although rarely discussed in relation to each other, distinct parallels can be located between Adorno's critique of the 'self in 'totally administered societies' and Lefebvre's (1991) argument that the passage from the 'pre-modern' to the 'modern' was accompanied by a shift from 'absolute' to 'abstract' space, and thus to the decorporealization of the body. 156 are significant in two ways. First, by retaining a topological model of the self ('id' and 'ego', 'primary' and 'secondary') and wedding this to a critique of modern rationality as repression of inner drives, both - like Weber earlier - locate in modernity the reduction of the subject (or the repression of 'primary' processes). Second, figured thus, any project of emancipation requires recovering a more essential realm of human nature - a spontaneous self lost amid the rationalized and depersonalized social relations of late capitalism. Nature as 'fetish' and the terrirorialization of desire Only the counterfeit can satisfy the thirst for authenticity (Baudrillard 1996). I now wish to draw out two consequences of these narratives and relate these more specifically to adventure travel. First, despite the celebration of the radically decentered subject in much postmodern and poststructuralist writing, narratives of cultural decline and the loss of an essential self in modernity are pervasive in modes of social and psychic analysis and reproduced in myriad ways in popular cultural forms.24 These narratives allow for the belief that there exists something 'behind' or 'prior to' our everyday experiences. In this sense, Foucault's (1980) dictum that the manufacturing of discourses on 'sex' and 'desire' gives rise to the illusion that there exists something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatamo-physiological systems, sensations and pleasures, is particularly relevant. In essence, what I am arguing is that contemporary discourses on modernity-as-decline, and the loss of the 'self in modernity, produce their own 'truth-effects' to the extent that they permit the assumption that a 'real', pre-linguistic or pre-cultural realm of unalienated and essential cultural and psychic relations exists. Second, it is precisely the 'truth-effects' of these discourses that license projects of 'recovery' and journeys of 'rediscovery'. In this sense adventure travel becomes deeply 24 One does not need to look far to find examples. In cinema these range from early films like Metropolis to more recent films like Brazil, but it is probably most evident in advertising where the consumer is so often invited to express their individuality in the face of a highly rationalized and normalized culture. 157 paradoxical; despite its supposed distance from an 'intrusive' mass tourism, in its demarcation of the pre-modern and identification of this space with essential forms, the critique of Western modernity doubles back as yet another form of cultural imperialism abroad. Let me explore what I mean in more detail. If we return to the earlier discussion of the 'self we can begin to sketch the outline for an account of the territorialization of desire - in other words, how the libidinal economy of the self becomes spatialized. To the extent that individual subjects can 'recognize' themselves in these narratives of modernity-as-decline (which, in essence, become part of the symbolic field in which subjects negotiate their sense of self) they are invited to seek coherence and unity in fantasies of escape from the constraints of modern civilization. In other words, if, as Curtis and Pajaczkowska (1994: 210-211) argue, \"the question of what motivates the tourist to set off on a quest for visible experience depends on a much deeper need to return to a pre-social world of imaginary plenitude,\" then these narratives give this quest a spatial form which is simultaneously metaphorical and material. What I wish to argue is that these narratives contribute to the formation of 'imaginative geographies' whereby this desire for plenitude becomes mapped across global spaces.25 Because modernity in these narratives is equated with the 'West', the 'non-West' exists in a relation not only of spatial but of temporal difference whereby traveling across space (to 'other' cultures) can be made equivalent with traveling through time (into the 'past'). Pollock (1994: 64) expresses this well, in a passage that may well have been written with the adventure traveler in mind. Tourism requires a territory on which this territorial ellipsis can occur. It creates a spatial encounter in what is always a fantastic landscape populated with imaginary figures whose difference must be constructed and then marked in order that the sense of loss, lack and discontinuity characteristic of metropolitan modernity can be simultaneously experienced and superseded by a momentary vision of a mythic place apparently outside 25 Again, similar dynamics can be seen to mark the nineteenth century, although as I explained earlier, the 'imaginative geographies' of that period took different forms. 158 time, a 'before-now' place, a garden before the fall into modernity. This experience therefore, becomes a classic example of fetishism, a repetitious experience of knowing loss and disavowing it by substitution.26 In short, adventure travel entails a spatial encounter, whereby the 'non-West' becomes (yet again) the terrain for the remaking of Western subjects. In the case of adventure travel, nature rather than primitive culture often fulfills the role of 'Other' to modern technological societies. This in turn draws upon another logic of equivalence that locates in nature a static realm of timeless or eternal forms in contrast to the dynamic, fleeting and transitory forms of modern culture. As a recent Ecosummer (1990) catalogue explained to its clients, \"to stand in a cathedral of giant cedar and spruce...is to get into contact with what has spiritually sustained our species since we began.\" Hence, like the journey into 'primitive' space, the journey into 'nature' provides the illusion of a return to our 'pre-history', a fantasy of recovering origins. William Cronon (1995:80) expresses this well. North American environmentalism, he writes, appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are - ought to be. In this economy of signs, 'unspoiled beauty' takes on particular significance, since sites that can appear 'untouched' by modernity (whether 'other' cultures or 'nature') offer an experience of time before the vitiating effects of modernity and the loss of innocence that it entails. 2 6 Anne McClintock (1995:40) uses the phrase 'anachronistic space' to capture the manner in which colonized peoples were \"contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history.\" 159 It is precisely for this reason that adventure travel not only seeks as its destination natural and cultural sites that can be made to signify the 'Other' to modernity, but also attributes such importance to the mode of travel. The point is not only to view the pre-modern but to be immersed in it. Modern methods of travel are seen to 'alienate' individuals from the physical world. Thus, activities like trekking, kayaking and sailing become valued methods providing for the fantasy of 'return' whereby the body is brought in tune with natural forces. Indeed, similar to the nineteenth century, the effort of travel (travail) becomes again - at the close of the twentieth century - part of the commodity sold. A recent article in Ecotraveler, for instance, informed readers that one of the advantages of kayaking was that it introduced uncertainty - it provided for a 'confrontation' with the unknown, and required 'self-reliance' rather than the 'crutches' of civilization which simply insulate the traveler from his or her environs. At the end of the day self-propelled travel brings self and nature into a unified harmony. \"Even as a beginner\", the author writes, \"I felt an intimacy with the water\" (Glickman 1995:8). In short, adventure travel relies on fantasies of reintegration with a natural order. Thus, to travel 'into' nature is to engage in two parallel voyages - a journey into an ancient 'core' that lies beneath and prior to modern civilization, and into the 'core' of the self (see Figure 4.3). Adventure-in-nature achieves the second - into the core of the inner self - in two ways. First, once removed from the inauthentic or repressive relations of the metropolis, the individual is free to move into a spiritual realm filled with essences, authenticity and wholeness. Second, without the 'soft' support of a feminized mass culture, the individual must draw on physical, mental and emotional resources in order to overcome physical challenges. As noted by the author of an Ecotraveler article on mountain sports, \"the interior adventure is as thrilling, if not more so, as the physical feat\" (Foehr 1995:36). This is 'hard' travel, and through it highly valued personal attributes such as strength, individualism, character, and so on are developed. As the same article notes, such travel is about discovering one's 'true mettle' - echoing the masculinist and 160 Figure 4.3. \"Somewhere down there is your soul\". Adventure travel and the journey into the 'inner self. Source: Yukon Tourism Bureau. 161 colonialist tropes of Baden-Powell. One gains 'confidence' as one gains altitude. In this economy of signification bruises and scars become important signifiers in new rites of passage.27 Let me conclude this section by returning to the question of the subject and space. Writing of similar tropes of adventure and masculinity present during Baden-Powell's time, Mark Seltzer (1992: 164) claims that \"anxieties about identity and virility\" were \"distributed across natural landscapes.\" In a sense Seltzer locates in America at the end of the nineteenth century a dynamic that has been globalized at the end of the twentieth. More important, although he didn't explore it in these terms, what Seltzer was locating was the spatialization of the self through the territorialization of desire. This suggests that we need to broaden our perspectives both on the production of nature and on subjectivity and space. In terms of the former, as I will explore later in relation to Clayoquot Sound, the production of nature is intricately bound up with late-modern anxieties of the 'self, or, in other words, with spatial practices of self-formation. In terms of the latter, the subject must not be seen only as negotiating subjectivity ' in ' space, but as actively producing space in and through the act of negotiating subjectivity. This merits further elaboration. Spatial metaphors have become common in discussions of subjectivity. Recently, geographers have sought to make the 'space' of the subject more concrete, suggesting that it is important to recognize how the subject is constituted in and through spatial practices and relations. This involves two issues. First, 'subjects' are shown to be determined in part by their anchoring within particular bodies, and this in turn enables us to think concretely about how subjects are both continuously 2 7 Anne Beezer (1993), in an otherwise excellent article on adventure travel (and one of the few to specifically examine this phenomenon) writes that adventure travel is foremost concerned with 'stripping away' the 'supports' of Western culture. This is consistent with my argument. However, I am less willing to follow Beezer's subsequent claim that adventure travel thus represents an instance of postmodern cultural relativism whereby adventure travel becomes a journey toward a new selfless self which is 'responsive' to cultural otherness. It seems far more likely, given the continual policing of the 'great divide' between the modern/pre-modern, civilized/primitive that characterizes adventure travel that the goal behind stripping down the self is precisely to find the self rather than lose it, and thus rather than responsiveness to otherness, adventure travel is deeply narcissistic. 162 'decentered' and achieve degrees of 'fixity' (Kirby 1995; Pile 1995); and, second, it also calls us to responsibility for our own enabling conditions within social and spatial relations as individual subjects and social actors (see Keith and Pile 1993). But there is another important way in which the subject can be said to be spatial. Anthony Elliott (1996) suggests that the unconscious imagination (desire) is a generative space. Like others, Elliott writes metaphorically, but there is an important sense in which desire is generative of space. Desire assumes difference, which is why we speak of the subject being always oriented to the 'field of the other'. As Kirby explains, difference cannot be thought in terms that are not spatial (even language - as a differential system - is inherently spatial). Thus, to the extent that desire is projected across and consolidates in specific sites, and to the extent that the 'self is constituted through 'bringing in the other', self-formation must be seen as, necessarily, a spatial practice that outlines a libidinal economy. The 'subject-in-process' figured in post-structuralist theory is thus always already both a subject in space and a spatializzng subject that draws the space of the other into the space of the self. It is for this reason that discourses on modernity are so important, since they frame a 'world' which is also a field of fantasy; in short, they territorialize desire. Conceived through the nostalgic tropes of a melancholic modernity, subjects are invited to see the world in terms of a spatialized teleology that codes 'other' places along a continuum of difference (i.e. 'hot' or 'cold'). Across this terrain subjects are invited to imagine the recovery of a complete or plenitudinous self. In what follows I explore this further by showing how the terrain in which fantasies of 'return' are enacted is not only an effect of discourse, but paradoxically, an effect of modernization. If the journey towards 'ground-zero' is licensed through a spatializing discourse that conflates the non-modern with the non-West, it is given concrete form within the space of global flows of capital, images and technologies. There is an important irony here: it is precisely because of, and not despite modernization that disparate and distant places can be drawn into relation as sites of desire. The possibility for recovering the 'essential' self alienated in modernity in places like the 163 Bowron Lakes, Clayoquot Sound or Irian Jaya is possible not because they stand in a relation of essential difference from cities like New York and London, but precisely because through global technologies they can be drawn into a semiotic relation that is at once a product of the deterritorialization of global space and at the same time a means of its reterritorialization. We eat dinner as the sun sets. If there is any universal found in ocean kayaking it is this -no matter how early you are on the water, dinner plates are washed in the dark. Perhaps it is because daylight represents the possibility of seeing - so long as there is sunlight there is a landscape to witness and photograph. More likely it is because after hours of paddling, nobody feels particularly inclined to begin the task. The late afternoon sun presents an ideal moment to lay on the sand, read or slowly explore the surrounding environment. At some point, it seems, everyone naps. Dinner tonight is burritos; the tortillas, beans, lettuce and guacamole incongruous with a land where seafood is abundant and has been the staple for millennia. Mexican food has its advantages. Simple to pack and prepare, disliked by few, it also offers guides a flexible menu that can be predominantly vegetarian without alienating those who are not. As I eat, I trace networks. Beans, lettuce, tortillas, salsa - products of a global system of agribusiness that has been built around biotechnologies, chemical fertilizers, modern transportation and transnational labour markets. All of the food on this trip is brought to Tofino from elsewhere and stored in a small warehouse that is also the storage site for all other trips run by this company elsewhere on BC's West Coast. Pristine Canadian beaches tied to Californian produce. The labour employed no doubt tracing yet other networks that extend beyond the borders of the United States, incorporating families and communities south of the Rio Grande. As darkness falls, less visible global networks will be traced. On these trips dinner is a transitional moment. It marks the time when exploration ends and the social aspect of the trip begins, a time of gathering around the fire and regaling each other with accounts of the experiences from the day, or of telling stories of other trips, explaining how they were similar or different. On the water we were travelers encountering nature, in the evening the familiar reference points of lives lived elsewhere resurface. As the talk carries on identities emerge. A couple from Albuquerque bemoan the \"Calif ornication\" of New Mexico. She a community college instructor and aficionado of coffee who imports her beans directly through a distributor in New Orleans, he, paradoxically, a video/sound producer for the Hollywood film industry, active in a local raptor preservation group. Moonlighting as a professional nature photographer he had brought 50 rolls of film on his three-week vacation. When not searching for the sublime or the picturesque he would sit to the side meticulously removing any grains of sand that might have found their way into his equipment. Two men from Reno: one, a stock-broker, 164 had his office at home wired directly into markets in New York and Los Angeles and served clients in Nevada who were mostly retired 'tax-refugees' from California. He explained to the group that he received market information simultaneously with traders on the 'floor'. Each evening during the trip he would quietly leave the group in order to tune in to market reports on the short-wave radio he had brought specifically for that purpose. Inside one of his clothes bags he had taped a list of stocks he was tracking. Our final day was carefully orchestrated to give him enough time to make his flights back to Vancouver, Seattle and beyond that same afternoon. The other, a soft-spoken pediatrician with a passion for cycling and a love of literature; he would over the week listen patiently as members of the excursion described their ailments, variously agreeing or discounting advice found in the popular health and fitness magazines that trace the changing contours of the body in late modernity. Both made a practice of leaving Reno for several weeks each year on nature-holidays, even if only to the rustic cabins that they owned in the Sierra Nevadas Others traced different networks and geographies of desire. A middle-aged teacher in a New York school for the children of UN employees was in Clayoquot more to please his mother than on his own initiative and confided to me early his mother's desire that he find a wife. Things weren't looking promising. A couple from Ontario had decided that they were going to travel after the husband's early retirement from his position as a security manager at a large nickel mine. Like many others his age he had taken a package as part of the restructuring of the company. Finally, a number from Vancouver - a couple and their daughter; a woman in her mid-thirties who worked for a local news service; and a male friend of the guides who taught special needs children in a local school. Finally, me - along for the trip in order to see first hand how a Vancouver adventure travel company organized its tours of Clayoquot Sound - tired and nursing a strained back after an eight day tour of the Sound on my own immediately prior to this trip. Fifteen people, including two guides. Less than half from Western Canada. None, aside from the guides and me, had been in the Sound before. Globalizing self-formation The company whose excursion I accompanied in the summer of 1994 sends a mailing to each of its clients shortly after they return home. In it the company includes information on other excursions and a short questionnaire that asks clients to rate the company's service and to provide suggestions for how this might be improved in future trips. The questionnaire allows the company to cement its service-provider - client relationship and provides for the client the sense that their interests and suggestions are taken into account as the company plans future trips. Indeed, many clients return in subsequent years to take 165 other excursions. Because of the intimate nature of adventure travel, the response rate is high (often near 90%). In the summer of 1994 the company agreed to mail out a slightly longer version in order to include questions that might be useful for my own research.28 Far from representative, the survey nonetheless provided a useful profile of the company's clientele. Often this simply confirmed what we had expected - clients were middle to upper-class professionals, almost all had a university education, and most showed marked disdain for 'mass' culture activities (professional sporting events, zoos, etc.) and an equally marked interest in 'high' or 'alternative' cultural events by which individuals could display their cultural capital (theatre, reading, outdoor recreation). This is not to say that surprising patterns did not emerge. Women, it turned out, were far more likely than men to take the company's trips, and this was especially so if they were single. Nor were clients as young as we had expected, no doubt a function of the cost of the excursions. If individuals under the age of 25 came along, they were invariably part of a larger family unit. But the largest surprise came from a question that we added at the last minute, one which asked clients which other countries they had traveled to in the past five years. Between the 74 respondents, fully 59 different countries had been visited, with some countries the destination of a large number of clients (Thailand, for instance, had been visited by 1 in 5 clients, China by 1 in 12). Only 13 respondents had not traveled outside North America in the five previous years. Not only were these clients globe-trotters of remarkable proportions, but most had also traveled some distance in order to experience adventure-in-nature in Clayoquot Sound. Of the company's clients, three in four came from out-of-province.29 28m one of the ironies of reflexive modernization, the office manager of the adventure travel company had spent the previous four years studying popular culture (including the semiotics of tourism) at a local university. 29Another Vancouver-based competitor that regularly surveyed individuals who asked for information on their excursions found that of the 536 people surveyed, 74% lived outside British Columbia (51% USA; 5% international; 28% other Canadian). 166 Several things are remarkable about these figures. The first and most obvious is simply the extent that this select group had traveled, the diversity of locations, the distance covered, and perhaps most of all, how few had not left the continent. The only area of the world not visited extensively was sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously it is impossible to generalize this mobility over the whole of North American society; our survey had shown these clients to be drawn from specific socio-economic groups for whom travel was at once affordable and also seen as an integral part of self-identity. The second remarkable aspect of the list of destinations was that, consistent with the anti-modern/anti-consumerism/anti-urbanism tropes that organize adventure travel (and which are most likely to be held by North America's educated classes), the locations traveled to included a good number of sites that were widely taken to be naturally 'pristine' (in places like Chile and Peru) or culturally 'distinct' (in Thailand or India). Third, and perhaps more important for my purposes, the figures suggest that for these clients the world was increasingly seen as a series of destinations (many had traveled to more than one foreign country per year) that could be related and compared not only to 'home' but to each other. In other words, what these responses revealed was the production of imaginative geographies that related places within a system of differences. Deterritorializing and reterritorializing imagination One of the principle shifts in the global cultural order, created by cinema, television, and V C R technology (and the ways in which they frame and energize other, older media) has to do with the role of the imagination in social life. Until recently, whatever the force of social change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial, that traditions provided a relatively finite set of 'possible' lives, and that fantasy and imagination were residual practices, confined to special persons or domains, restricted to special moments or places....In the last two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images and ideas has taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms. That is, fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host 167 of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many peoples in many societies. (Appadurai, 1991: 198). In a widely-read discussion of globalization, Arjun Appadurai (1990:5) claims that the world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life. At the intersection of global flows of technology, images, capital and people, he argues, imagination is no longer 'mere' fantasy, escape, elite pastime or contemplation; it is, rather, \"an organized field of social practices, a form of work...and a form of negotiation between sites of agency ('individuals') and globally defined fields of possibility.\" When imagination was merely escape is uncertain, and it is entirely too simple - as Appadurai recognizes - to claim for the end of the twentieth century the sudden appearance of global phenomena, or that subjectivities are only now negotiated within global flows where before they were not. Various large-scale interactions have occurred for centuries. But Appadurai argues that today's interactions are of a new order and intensity. Whereas in the past problems of time, distance and technology tended to produce forces of gravity that worked against the formation of large-scale ecumenes, today, with rapid innovations in technology and information the world is linked together in ways that are strikingly new. In some ways Appadurai's argument is similar to that of Anthony Giddens, who, as I noted earlier, locates mediatization and time-space distanciation as the most pronounced characteristics of a new world of 'reflexivity'. Appadurai, for instance, echoing Harvey's (1989) account of time-space compression, notes the impact of transportation technologies (steamship, automobile, aeroplane), and image technologies (camera, the computer, telephone and we might add television and internet) in drawing together 'those most distant from ourselves'. But, in contrast to Harvey, he pays considerable attention to what he calls 'mediascapes' - by which he refers both to various media, and the images of the world created in these. Here Appadurai's (1990:9) comments merit further attention. \"What is most important about these mediascapes\" he writes, \"is that they provide large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the 168 world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed....What they offer [individuals]...is a series of elements out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. These scripts can and do get dis-aggregated into complex sets of metaphors by which people live as they help to constitute narratives of the Other and proto-narratives of possible lives, fantasies which could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement.\" Mediascapes. How is it that in Clayoquot Sound I shared a beach with paddlers from Albuquerque, Reno, New York and Ontario? To this point I have suggested that adventure travel finds its conditions of possibility in the way that desire is constituted and socially organized in the cultural terrains of late modernity - or, in other words, in the criss-crossing of 'self and 'society'. Here I want to extend this discussion further, by suggesting that the reinvention of adventure that occurs in adventure travel is possible only due to modernization. At one level this is obvious. It is precisely those areas that show the least signs of 'creative destruction' that can be incorporated into the semiotics of adventure. But it is equally as important to recognize how the globalization of communication technologies (electronic media, air travel) has 'emptied out' space and time and thus allowed distant places to be drawn into the libidinal economies of metropolitan subjects. This can be illustrated in a straightforward manner with an object close to home. In the summer of 1994 a billboard advertising the Discovery Channel appeared along my route to work (Figure 4.4). The channel specializes in nature documentaries, science and technology programs and shows about exotic locations. In the advertisement a plush red armchair is set in a verdant rainforest, with the heading \"There you are\". What is missing, of course, is precisely the object that gives the image is precisely the object that gives the image its meaning - the T V screen with which we usually associate the soft 169 Figure 4.4. \"There you are.\" Mediascapes and imaginative geographies. Photograph by author. 170 armchair. The significance of this image is not simply its promise to bring the viewer 'to' a specific place (\"there you are\"), nor that the 'rainforest' appears as a simulacra, dislocated from its specific geographical site and relocated as a free-floating image in transnational media circuits. Indeed, the image is arguably self-reflexive, noting the absurdity of the consumption of nature from the comfort of one's favorite chair. Rather, its significance lies in what it tells us about how the world increasingly appears to viewers in mediatized societies at the end of the twentieth century: as a succession of images that can be assembled, disassembled and reassembled in countless ways. I want to draw out two consequences of this and relate them back to adventure travel. First, as Appadurai notes, our lives are increasingly imagined within this global circulation of images rather than circumscribed around place and tradition. Second, such media circuits have the effect of emptying out space and time: an image of ethnic conflict from Burundi follows upon similar images from Bosnia and another from Northern Ireland or Quebec. The effect of this proliferation of images is not so much increased awareness but rather deterritorialization (whereby places are grasped apart from their historical geographies) and reterritorialization (whereby places that previously had no apparent relation are drawn into relation). Global media - as Urry (1992) notes - permit almost everywhere in the world to be seen and compared with anywhere else.30 Moreover, reduced to a surface of images, these no longer have 'depth', the multiple and disparate histories that inform each are effaced. Hence, supposedly similar incidents of ethnic tension can be related regardless of whether the conflicts can in any way be said to share characteristics or causes. Placed together with myriad other images that bring distant places into proximity (or the past into the present), viewers are invited to reconfigure the 'local' and the 'global' in a semiotics of difference and sameness and to imagine their place in it. This also works to extend the 'space' of awareness to distant sites while leaving local 30 Harvey often relates time-space compression to disorientation, dread and fear in what appears as a 'postmodern' sublime (see also Jameson 1984). This connects broadly with Giddens' (1991) account of subjects seeking 'ontological security' in late-modernity. 171 sites foreign. (We may know as much or more about Borneo's rainforests, and the rate of deforestation found there, as we know about the dumping of toxic wastes in a local working-class community). In brief, the mediascapes of late modernity encourage viewers to encounter the globe as a series of places linked together not by physical geography but by representation.31 With this in mind, I wish to return to the two images that opened this chapter (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). What is significant about these images is not simply the way that adventure is framed, but that Irian Jaya and the Bowron Lakes, despite massive political, cultural and economic differences, can appear the 'same'; both can be abstracted into a single discourse on the 'pre-modern' and 'modernization'. In summary, as is clearly evident in an advertisement for one of the leading magazines of adventure travel, such travel occurs in and through the cfeterritorialization of place in mediatized cultures and its reterritorialization within and through the circulation of images (Figure 4.5). 3 2 As the 1990 Ecosummer catalogue makes clear, the world is full of adventure possibilities. To stand in a cathedral of giant cedar and spruce as on the Queen Charlotte Islands, clamber over the rich intertidal zones that sustained the Haida culture for millennia, snorkel among the coral cities of Belize, canoe down the Zambesi River or kayak among the icebergs of Ellesmere island is to get into contact with what has spiritually sustained our species since we began. Technoscapes. If adventure travel finds its conditions of possibility in the mediascapes by which fantasies of self-formation are globalized, then it is equally true that adventure travel is made possible by changes in transportation technologies. Indeed, while at one level global flows have led to homogenization, at another global flows of images and 3 1 Shortly after writing this chapter, Microsoft announced (July 17, 1996) that it was launching an Internet travel magazine entitled Mungo Park. 3 2 A wide variety of adventure magazines like the widely-read Outside are significant sites for the construction of imaginative geographies. In each edition a different 'site' of adventure is usually profiled, while at the back of each issue, in a section called 'Active traveler directory', hundreds of adventure travel companies advertise their unique journeys. Outside has recently gone 'on-line', allowing readers to toggle back and forth between articles, issues, etc., reproducing the globe as a series of adventure that can be imagined without leaving the office. 172 THE WORLD IS FULL OF POSSIBILITIES To subscribe Call 1-800-334-8152 or mail order to EcoTravcUr, P.O. Box 469003 Escondido, C A 92046-9850 \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 $12 one-year (6 issues) U.S . only. Add S6 tor Canadian, $15 for foreign orders. Figure 4.5. \"The World is full of Possibilities\". Territorializing Desire in the Global Cultural Economy. Source: Ecotraveller Magazine, January/February, 1995. 173 technologies have allowed infinte differentiation, allowing for, among other things, the 'niche' marketing that characterizes adventure travel. The significance of technological modernization to adventure travel requires little further elaboration other than to note the irony involved. In my discussion of Ecosummer's advertisements I noted that what was not allowed to enter the 'frame' were precisely those technologies (airplanes, trains, automobiles) that allowed clients to arrive on the 'verge' of 'wilderness' or the 'primitive'. Yet, what allows these places to 'show up' as objects of desire in the rhetorics of a nostalgic postmodernism are precisely those processes of modernization that the adventure traveler seeks to escape. In other words, the 'Dani' and Irian Jaya can be a site for adventure only because airplanes and automobiles (not to mention flows of capital, commodities and images) now integrate its apparent 'isolated' and 'primitive' spaces into global flows. No doubt the photograph of the Dani chief occurred only after considerable negotiation and exchange even though it appears in Ecosummer's catalogue as an 'unmediated' encounter. Stated simply, it is not the case that adventure travelers are preceding modernity, arriving to be among the first (and last) to witness this terrain and inhabitants before they 'fall prey to a rapidly expanding world.' For the adventure traveler to 'see' the Dani requires following already-established routes of communication by which these sites belong to the same modern world as the adventure traveler. There can be no 'primitive' and no 'pristine' - and thus no fantasies of 'return' -outside or prior to these networks. In short, the staged experience of 'outrunning time's winged chariot' is possible only through modernization and not despite it. Let me draw this section to a close by relating my discussion of 'mediascapes' and 'technoscapes' back to the question of the 'subject'. It is commonly suggested in Lacanian accounts that the subject is constituted (and continuously decentered) in and through its relation to the symbolic order. This is often conceived as the entry into 'language', which has had the unfortunate result of licensing interpretations of subjectivity as (only) discursive. Yet, if the symbolic order is recast as social and historical rather than fixed, 174 then it becomes possible to place both the subject and the symbolic order ' in motion', whereby the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of social life can be seen to result in the reordering of the symbolic codes of society within which subjectivity is continuously (re)negotiated. In short, if the subject is always oriented toward the Other, in the complex intersecting global flows of late modernity the Other is far from unified, fixed or singular, but is rather a shifting social and spatial field, continuously remade as social life is globalized and technologized. The territorialization of desire in adventure travel occurs within these shifting fields. Day 1: Clients depart from behind Tofino Kayaking and travel east towards Meares Island, almost immediately encountering the strong tidal currents ofDeadman and Browning Passages. On the far side lie the old-growth giants of Meares Island. Here the group lands and spends an hour hiking, taking pictures and eating lunch. From there the group moves north-west, first past the shallow Lemmens Inlet where numerous waterfowl can be seen, then past the native village of Opitsat, which - in the manner of many coastal native villages - appears as a long row of houses facing a narrow beach. Children play on the sand. Before landing on an small beach at the north end of Meares Island clients navigate the rough waters of Father Charles Channel. Day 2: From Meares Island paddlers pass the quaint Morfee and Dunlap Islands, and then move along the base of the Catface Range. At intervals the rustic cabins of squatters can be seen hugging the shore ofEpper Pass. Lunch is served at a small beach where clients are given a lesson on landing and launching kayaks in surf conditions. From here the group heads further along the range, leaving the protected waters of Calmus Passage and entering Russell Channel where the ocean swell begins to be felt. Before landing on a protected corner of a long beach, the group skirts reefs that extend from the Catface Range and against which clients see the first instance of the ocean's power. Day 3: This day starts early and ends late. The journey begins with a long crossing to Flores Island over an exposed stretch of water. Porpoises follow the group for part of the distance. Clients are told to keep an eye open for Stellar Sea Lions who inhabit the treacherous outer reefs. At Kutcous Point, the group lands, has lunch and then divides in two. The 'adventurous' travel west along Flores to get a taste of the heavy swell of the open ocean and to witness its power as it crashes over the outer reefs. Others stay behind exploring a stream that emerges from the old-growth forest or. explore the fauna and flora of the beach and headlands. In late afternoon the group travels to the native village of 175 Ahousaht where a 'traditional' salmon dinner is served. As dusk arrives the group crosses Miller Channel and returns to the previous night's camping spot. Day 4: Again, an early start. This time the guides lead the clients south-east on another long crossing, eventually landing in an isolated cove on Blunden Island. In the afternoon the group walks a trail to the ocean-facing side of the island, noting signs of native forest use and spending several hours exploring tidal pools, sea caves and surge channels. In the evening a short stroll in the opposite direction brings the group past a 'midden' and then onto the site of an old 'longhouse'. From here some walk into the recesses of a magnificent stand of old-growth while others take a late-day swim in the shallow waters of the cove. Day 5: When the fog lifts the group embarks to nearby Cleland Island, renowned as a nesting site for a variety of seabirds and classified as an ecological reserve. The group observes from a distance before proceeding to Ahous Bay, with its heavy surf, wide crescent-shaped beach and beautiful sunsets. Clients are informed that this bay is a primary feeding site for a resident group of gray whales, but on this day none are seen. Day 6: From Ahous Bay the group heads southwest, winding between the rugged La Croix Group and the outer coast of Vargas Island, then round Wickaninnish Island for the final push back to Tofino. The excursion returns in time for lunch and with adequate time left for clients to make the last airline connections of the last ferry back to Vancouver. Circumnavigations: enframing nature in Clayoquot Sound Tourism is not just an aggregate for merely commercial activities; it is also an ideological framing of history, nature and tradition - a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needs. (MacCannell, 1992). Spaces of self-formation are increasingly global in scale, but they are have important effects on locality. Until this point I have focused on the cultural narratives and socio-technical fields in which adventure travel finds its conditions of possibility. To do so I have traveled some distance from the waters of Clayoquot Sound, drawing together sites and texts that at first glance may appear some distance removed from the encounter with nature in British Columbia. In the last sections of this chapter, however, I wish to make explicit the links between the negotiation of subjectivity and the production and politics of 176 nature. Let me return, then, to Clayoquot Sound, where we can begin to consider ways that the territorialization of desire and the enframing of place combine to reconfigure nature and culture in very material ways. Arriving at the departure: social/technical/semiotic networks. Since the late 1980s adventure travel companies have run excursions in Clayoquot Sound. Most immediately the growth of the industry in the area has coincided with two developments. First, an improved transportation network links Vancouver to the town of Tofino, a small village located at end of a highway on the northern tip of Esowista Peninsula (see Figure 4.6).33 Beyond Tofino there are no roads, making it an ideal location from which to travel 'into' nature. Second, the increasing frequency and intensity of conflicts over the fate of BC's temperate rainforests, far from discouraging tourism, played into an industrial nostalgia whereby people came to see these areas before it was 'too late'. In the summer of 1994 I accompanied one of these excursions, a trip that began in Tofino and for six days traced a circular route that explored Russell Channel and circumnavigated Vargas Island, one of the largest islands in the Sound. To claim that this trip 'started' at Tofino is, of course, misleading in the sense that it brackets the cultural and technical networks that link Clayoquot Sound with the 'imagination' of clients, including the specific networks of images and information that have allowed Clayoquot Sound to 'show up' as a place of adventure. For many of the company's clients in the summer of 1994, Clayoquot Sound was associated with the highly mediatized struggle over its preservation, and in particular, with the protests staged the previous summer. During that summer, and over the following year, Canadian newspapers and television broadcasts regularly carried stories about this 'threatened' wilderness, and many of these circulated beyond the borders of the nation-state along circuits of global media. It was not 3 3 Prior to the construction of a paved highway in the early 1970s access to the area was limited to boat, float planes or a treacherous network of logging roads. 177 Figure 4.6. Map showing Clayoquot Sound. Tofino is the last point accessible by road. 178 infrequent, therefore, for customers of this company to explain that they had chosen this excursion because it was a 'renowned hot spot' or, because they wished to see it before it was 'ruined'. As a retired school teacher from Indiana explained, she had taken the trip because she \"wanted to see this area before it was to be clearcut\". What linked Indiana with Clayoquot Sound, then, was both a circulation of images and a specific culture of nature that valorizes the pristine. Indeed, the arrival of clients in Tofino was invariably bound up with these technical-semiotic networks. Only six percent of clients that toured Clayoquot with this company in the summer of 1994 had learned about the trip directly from the display in the entrance to the company's Vancouver Granville Island office, even though this popular marketplace is where the majority of the city's adventure travel companies are located. Simply put, Vancouver's adventure travel companies rely little on 'walk-up' customers but instead find clients through global networks of images and information, explaining in part why a majority of the clients arriving at the 'start' of the trip in Tofino were from outside Western Canada, and of these, three of four from the United States or abroad. The wide geographical distribution of clients is in part due to the company's promotional strategies. The company regularly runs advertisements in magazines like Outdoors, has had their Clayoquot Sound excursion profiled in a recent book (entitled simply, Ecotravel) that provides details on \"100 unforgettable adventures throughout the world\" (Geffen and Bergile 1993), displays its brochures outlining the company's North American and foreign excursions in outdoor equipment stores throughout North America, and operates a website where potential clients can obtain information (and pictures) on specific excursions. Perhaps more important, the company's owner regularly invites an editor of a major US outdoors magazine and also one from a national Canadian newspaper to accompany him as he 'explores' new locations, resulting in wide coverage of the company's new adventures while also establishing ever-new 'exotic' locations for clients 179 eager to be ahead of the hordes (the articles invariably provide a brief promotion for the company, including how readers can get more information). From these circulating images in national and international news, outdoors and nature magazines, clients are presented with a world of 'adventure' in which they can imagine their own 'itineraries'. Two examples make these technical-semiotic networks more concrete. Among the company's Clayoquot Sound clients was a 41-year old woman from Reading Massachusetts. Employed as the vice-president of a large American environmental organization where she was in charge of finance and administration, she had a long list of previous 'adventures' behind her: white water rafting in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bolivia and Alaska; an ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro; a 'jeep safari' in Pakistan; and adventures in Thailand and Costa Rica among other places. Sea kayaking was something that she had not yet done, and had been looking for some time for an opportunity to try it in an 'exotic' setting. She had found out about the Clayoquot Sound trip at the local REI store, where the company's brochures were displayed. Since she had to travel to Seattle on business, she decided to integrate the excursion into her broader itinerary, catching the two short flights that took her from Seattle to Vancouver and then on to Tofino. The second example, like the first, traces transnational technical-semiotic networks, only in this case more extensive. In this case a 49-year old woman living in Christchurch New Zealand read about Clayoquot Sound in Sea Kayaker, one among many specialized journals that focus on specific forms of 'adventure'. Like the previous example, this woman integrated business with adventure, incorporating the Clayoquot Sound trip into her return from a conference in London, England. This was relatively simple, requiring only that she route her return flight through Vancouver. In both cases the 'start' of the trip in Tofino was facilitated by the weaving together of worlds that were both technical and semiotic. T V images, magazine articles, Faxes, the internet and airplanes link Christchurch, London,. Boston, Seattle, Vancouyer and Tofino. In the case of the woman from Christchurch, a further detail allows us to see the way that 180 places become both 'framed' and interchangeable within these economies of signs and space. As this woman explained, if she had been unable to fit the Clayoquot trip into her schedule, she had planned to replace it with a trip to Fiji , where she had hoped to spend a week wind-surfing. In both cases places coded as 'pristine' or 'pre-modern' were seen as sites of physical adventure. In short, the 'escape' from modernity to the 'pristine' spaces of Clayoquot Sound is made possible through rather than despite the social/technical/semiotic networks of late-modernity; in this sense, adventure travel is no different than vacations in resorts or a trip to Disney. The departure from Tofino on the first day of the company's excursion must be seen in this light. What is described as a 'departure' is in many ways an 'arrival' that is scripted in advance. Not only have clients been prepared for what they will 'experience' in Clayoquot Sound by the company's brochure which describes the excursion along with a series of photographs of kayakers and wildlife, but once clients have reserved a spot on the trips, the company sends them a more detailed itinerary (even though this is rarely followed), outlines various transportation options that clients can use to get to Tofino, and supplies lists of the clothing and equipment that clients should pack (a competitor provides a list of suggested readings!). Itineraries of adventure. It is to the itinerary itself, however, that I wish to turn, for if we follow the excursion as it moves through the landscapes of Clayoquot Sound we can begin to see how these social/technical/semiotic networks not only prefigure the arrival of the client, but become inscribed into the region's landscapes, in essence re-making nature in the image of the adventure commodity. Most trips run from 5-14 days, long enough for the client to feel like they have left civilization behind - for skin to be salty, clothes soiled, muscles sore, and the pressures of work and home at least temporarily forgotten. Short enough that the discomforts of 'hard' travel can be aestheticized and endured rather than turned into the drudgery of daily life. Equally as important, these trips correspond with 181 the length of time that individuals usually get for vacations, such that the journey into 'degree zero' can be integrated into the time-spaces of work and home. The excursion I accompanied lasted six days, not including the first evening when clients were given a brief kayak orientation/safety course, instructions on packing, and provided with an opportunity to introduce themselves to each other. The next day, after an early breakfast at a local restaurant hosted by the company, clients were led into the waters of Clayoquot Sound. On each subsequent day the group would travel through a new and previously unseen part of the Sound (see itinerary, p. 175). This is significant for a number of reasons. First, adventure travel is both highly visual and trades on the notion of the 'encounter'. It is essential, then, that the trip takes clients through a variety of landscapes where individuals can have new vistas and new experiences. To stay at one place would be to reduce the 'different' to the 'same'. Likewise, part of what the client purchases is the excitement of the 'unknown' and the thrill of 'danger'. In short, clients are buying the fantasy of exploration, where around every corner lies a new adventure. Adventure travel is thus predicated on continuous movement. Staying within a circumscribed area undermines this experience, just as retracing paths reduces the illusion of exploration. The ideal route, therefore is circular.^ If each day is differentiated from the day before and after, it is also internally divided. Guides attempt to incorporate two or more sites into each day's journey and ideally each site should be an experience of a different kind. On the first day, for instance, 34The physical and human geography of Clayoquot Sound enable adventure travel companies to construct the illusion of exploration without requiring the traveling of excessive distances. Vargas and Meares Islands separates the 'outlying' areas of the Sound from the town of Tofino such that after only an hour of paddling clients are no longer in sight of 'culture' and can maintain the fantasy of journeying 'deeper' into nature. By incorporating side-trips to other nearby sites, adventure travel companies essentially circumnavigate the island over the course of a week - a distance that an experienced kayaker can cover in a day. Significantly, given the importance of ever-new sites/sights, it is possible to do this while never camping on the island! 'Independent' kayakers in Clayoquot Sound that are familiar with the region often travel beyond the area covered by the excursions on their first day, thereby avoiding regions that have already been 'polluted' by the commodification of adventure. However, these independent travelers generally follow the same type of circular itinerary, only incorporating the northern half of the Sound (essentially the much larger Flores Island). 182 clients are swept through an area of strong tidal currents, walk a trail to a group of cedars that stand as some of North America's largest trees (some in excess of a thousand years old), paddle past a shallow estuary that contains thousands of seabirds, skirt a native village, encounter yet another region of tidal currents that rush through a narrow passage, and then eventually camp on the north side of Meares Island, out of sight of the town of Tofino and to the side of the main channel that local fishers and residents of the region's native communities use to commute to and from the village. Each subsequent day brings a mixture of scenery, wildlife, picturesque culture or physical challenge. Over the course of the week clients will experience what it is like to kayak the heavy swell of the open ocean, 'stumble across' the ruins of old native villages, see a variety of wildlife, and camp on 'pristine' beaches that open up on spectacular vistas. Where possible, all signs of the 'modern' and the 'technological' will be carefully avoided. Visual regimes of adventure travel: enframing Clayoquot. Why dwell on this itinerary? Adventure travel and eco-tourism have been characterized as unobtrusive modes of travel that leave sites 'untouched'. In part this grows out of the assumption that the adventure traveler only 'looks' in order to 'learn' or 'witness' rather than asking that the tourist object be shaped according to their particular tastes or desires. In these rhetorics vision is conceived as passive; witnessing nature has no lasting impact. But at what point does the 'passive' witnessing of nature become a moment in its production'? As numerous writers have noted, tourism is in large measure a visual practice in which objects (landscape, rituals, etc.) are set up as things to be viewed and remade as visual commodities. Thus, it is possible to speak of a 'tourist gaze' (Urry 1990) that is at once disciplined (organized in particular ways) and colonizing (enframing the 'object' within a particular visual order). The same is as true for adventure travel as any other form of tourism. 183 This becomes evident quickly in Clayoquot Sound. Adventure travel in the Sound is dominated by sea-kayaking, which, despite its emphasis on the body, is organized around the visual consumption of successive 'viewscapes'. What matters most as clients make their rounds is that which enters the field of vision. Since the 'gaze' of adventure travel is what Urry calls 'romantic' - concerned with the pristine and the picturesque - it seeks to freeze these landscapes in the past of 'primal nature'. This is no less a production of nature than the clearcuts of industrial forestry even if its form and ecologies are different. Where industrial forestry abstracts one commodity - timber - from its ecological and cultural context, adventure travel abstracts another commodity - 'viewscapes' - from their ongoing historical construction. This has important social and even ecological consequences. For the adventure commodity to retain its exchange value other activities that might transform the 'object' of vision and reduce its ability to signify the 'pre-modern' must be suppressed or reorganized. The recent Clayoquot Land Use Decision, for instance, did not simply divide the landscape into regions open to industrial forestry and regions that were to be protected for ecological reasons, but introduced a whole range of other land-uses that were designed around protecting visual resources, such as the contentious 'scenic corridors'. In these 'visually sensitive' areas - the language of vision begins to insinuate itself across the landscape -only alternative harvesting methods are to be used, thereby reorganizing forestry in the same logic of adventure travel (Figure 4.7). Significantly, in a place like Clayoquot Sound, with its rugged topography, it is difficult to find areas that are not 'visual resources'. Far from passive, the visual logics of traveling towards 'ground-zero' contain in them economic, cultural and political logics. Shifting the base of the local economy from forestry to tourism, for instance, reconfigures the flows of capital and people in the region. Forestry has provided well-paid highly-skilled jobs for local residents. Workers in the tourism industry, on the other hand, are often paid less and are poorly organized. 184 Figure 4.7. Planning Viewscapes: Remaking Nature in the Image Commodity. Source: MacMillan Bloedel (n.d.) Future Forests. 185 Moreover, most adventure travel groups - despite the rhetorics of the industry - do not employ locals. The Clayoquot Sound excursion that I outlined, for instance, is organized out of Vancouver, spends its advertising budget in publications throughout North America, employs a number of guides of whom most hail from the city (and all of whom are Eurocanadians), imports all its food from outside the regions traveled to, and organizes its tours in such a way that clients can arrive and depart without spending any additional time in the region. In short, the trips are vertically integrated, organized from a central office and utilize global transportation networks whereby adventurers can quite literally 'drop in' to exotic places for adventure experiences. In the case of the tour I accompanied, the only moments that the local economy was engaged were the night prior to departure (clients were responsible for their own accommodation), an initial meal the first morning at a restaurant operated by non-native owners, and a meal purchased at the native village of Ahousaht. In the same town paddlers were encouraged to visit a local craft store. Upon the trip's completion, most clients left on the same day.35 Indeed, adventure travel is a form of 'flexible tourism' - with little physical investment in local communities, adventure travel companies can simply redirect their resources at will - when Clayoquot Sound no longer appears 'exotic', the shift to another site is easily done. Equally as important, in the context of incomplete decolonization in Clayoquot Sound, these dynamics become articulated with issues surrounding race. Just as local First Nations begin to obtain more control over the shape of forestry and more employment within the forest industry, its high paying jobs are placed in doubt. In BC the adventure travel industry has found its natural allies to be preservationists, since preservation - far from valued for its ecological vision - serves the purpose of ensuring that the region 35A liberal estimate would be that 5-10% of the revenues generated by the company find their way back into the local economy ($50 per client). Independent of the excursion, clients likely contribute 2-3 times this amount while in Tofino (very little of the money generated from adventure travel ends up in the native economy). The independent adventure traveler is unlikely to engage the local economy in any greater extent. Trips are usually planned in advance, and the traveler usually arrives ready to embark. At most, local stores are visited to purchase those last-minute items that were left behind. 186 continues to signify the 'pristine' and the 'pre-modern': \"The race is on,\" declares a Vancouver-based adventure travel company, \"the last of the ancient rainforests are being logged....Wilderness travel is one of the surest ways of recruiting new troops for the war\" (Ecosummer 1990). Yet, as a local native woman explained, this conjoining of tourism and preservation was something to fight rather than encourage: \"Current events force us to remain ever vigilant that growing pressure from tourism and environmental groups will not lead to park expansion in our lands and waters\" (Charleson, 1992:A9). The same company whose excursion I accompanied provides space in its advertising brochures for the Sierra Club, contributes to the Friends of Clayoquot Sound, a local preservationist group, and includes a pamphlet outlining the Sierra Club's campaign to save west coast rainforests in its follow-up mailing to clients. Clients are thus actively encouraged to lobby for the preservation of the region or to donate to the various groups fighting for an end to logging.36 In short, the 'gaze' of adventure travel is not innocent, it enframes nature within a romantic visuality which in turn works to reconfigure local social, economic and ecological relations. Far from passive, adventure travel draws together and relates anxieties over the 'self in modernity with the consumption and production of 'natural' landscapes. Thus, what appears as 'traveling light' and as 'minimal impact' is in many other ways traveling heavy: adventure travel brings the weight of an anti-modern melancholy to bear on places like Clayoquot Sound and imprisons it in its shackles. 36 Of course, the protection of 'viewscapes' is not necessarily a wise decision ecologically. Indeed, by reorganizing production around aesthetics, decision on such things as tree harvesting may be displaced from ecological rationalities to aesthetic rationalities with shoreline 'beauty strips' retained while more sensitive or critical landscapes are radically remade under the logics of extractive capital. 187 Almost a year to the week after paddling Clayoquot Sound in the company of strangers, I am running down the government wharf in Tofino, a matter of yards from where we had launched our kayaks into the waters of Tofino Inlet. Moored alongside the dock, the Spirit of Marktosis is an unassuming gray boat with a large passenger cabin. Crates are being loaded onto the back deck, and through its windows I can see a number of passengers. Having been delayed searching for batteries in a local store I am the last to arrive, and no sooner do I step down into the cabin than the engines roar to life, disrupting the calm of Tofino's waterfront and edging the boat away from the wharf. I look around. About twenty people are scattered throughout the cabin. In the front the skipper and a friend chat. Occasionally a message crackles on the radio, to which one or the other responds. In a matter of minutes we are churning through the choppy waters of Father Charles Channel. Neither the boat nor the skipper appear to give its irregular standing waves any notice. As a kayaker, I've learned to avoid them. Behind the skipper, on seats that remind me of an old school bus, passengers sit in small groups. Most are young, including several women with children. Two older women, perhaps the infants' grandmothers, watch the bustle of activity that surrounds them. On my side of the cabin two adolescent boys sit in the front row. The only other non-native passengers - a woman and daughter - occupy the seats immediately in front of me. Behind me a number of young and middle-aged men sit talking or step in and out of the cabin to stand on the boat's deck. Three styles of clothes predominate: hockey shirts, team jackets adorned with the names of different native villages (Opitsat, Ahousaht), and the ubiquitous T-shirts that outline the recent tour dates of one rock group or another. I feel conspicuous in my fleece coat and bright yellow anorak. Few look outside as we pass Lone Cone and move towards the Catface Range. Ahead, the volcanoes of Flores Island are lost in brooding clouds. With the exception of the two other non-native passengers and myself, all are engaged in conversation. Among this group, I surmise, is my guide. Appropriations: The Women of Ahousaht and A Walk on the Wild Side The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models....The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics which we have only begun to theorize. (Arjun Appadurai 1990:8). Until this point I have framed my discussion in terms of how certain places 'show up' as sites of adventure-in-nature for metropolitan subjects and the social.and ecological logics 188 that adventure travel carries with it and brings to bear on places like Clayoquot Sound. In this last section I want to problematize the preceding discussion. Taking a walk on the wild side. Despite suspicions towards tourists among First Nations in the Sound, in March 1994, ten women called, simply, the Women of Ahousaht, entered the adventure travel/eco-tourism industry. At one level, their plans were modest: the establishment of a trail along the southern coast of Flores Island, along which to take clients on guided tours through the rainforest. At another level their plans entailed nothing less than the reconfiguration of identity and social relations among the Ahousaht people. As I hope to show, for these women in Ahousaht, the re-invention of adventure by metropolitan subjects opened a political space through which to work towards the reconfiguration of social life and community politics. Let me explain in more detail. The \"Walk the Wild Side\" project that the Women of Ahousaht envisioned was relatively simple. Each year an increasing number of travelers were arriving in Tofino in order to view its natural environment. From Tofino, visitors had several options. They could tour the Sound on their own (usually in kayaks or powerboats); they could sign on to one of the many whale-watching tours that whisked visitors back and forth between Ahous Bay on Vargas Island and the town of Tofino; or they could remain on the Esowista Peninsula and spend their days on the renowned beaches of Pacific Rim National Park. In each case, the Sound's native residents derived few economic benefits from the annual influx of summer tourists. The Ahousaht band appeared to benefit the least, even though as many as 8,000 tourists visited their traditional territories each summer. 3 7 Most immediately, then, the \"Walk the Wild Side\" project sought to channel some of the economic benefits of eco-tourism through the village. Thus, 37These figures were provided by community members. Most of these visitors traveled to the outer coast of Flores Island, where, arguably some of the most spectacular scenery in the entire Sound can be found. The outer coast of the island is also an excellent site for whale-watching and a playground for independent kayakers (most commercial trips consider the outer coast of Flores too dangerous). The Western Canada Wilderness Committee uses this region for its posters calling for Clayoquot Sound's preservation. 189 3 the \"West Coast of Vancouver Island/*1 J * \u00E2\u0080\u0094 . - r - Canada Vr Irivitpyou to \jsiB n v. -1 Sea Lions, Bird life arid \"Whales* ;r i.while travelling the: waterways-o\u00C2\u00A3| CLAYOQUOT, SOUND ^ ^ ^ ^ gassrssif 4 ? \ I 3 * IS s?t 11 s Meatedjenclosed itibltA Washroom aboard \"\"* | | \u00C2\u00A7 | p | Reasonable Return Fare f ^ Ask us for Custom Tours \u00C2\u00AB Figure 4.8 \"Walk on the Wild Side\". Pamphlet, courtesy Women of Ahousaht. 190 together with the newly formed Nuu-chah-nulth Business Association's booking office in Tofino, the women organized and promoted a tour package that visitors to Tofino could purchase (figure 4.8). For a set price, clients were transported by seabus (Spirit of Marktosis) to the village of Ahousaht. Here they were taken on a tour of the village, a walk through the ancient forests and across the white-sand beaches that ring the island, and then on to the \"Arts of Paawac\" center where arts and crafts made by local Ahousaht artists were displayed for sale. Clients were then ferried back to Tofino, the whole trip taking no more than three hours. Run as a non-profit organization, the economic benefits derived from the project remained almost entirely in the village.38 As important as these economic aspects of the project are, the Women of Ahousaht had objectives that extended far beyond merely operating an eco-tourism business, and it is to these that I wish to turn, for, as will become evident, the Women of Ahousaht found in eco-tourism not an end in itself, but a space through which to engage in a series of political struggles. I will break these down into three 'moments' and explore each in turn. Eco-tourism and adventure travel, I will argue, provided increased possibilities for the assertion of local native control (including the expression of land claims), the articulation of Ahousaht identity, and the reconfiguration of social relations within the Ahousaht band. Local control. A l l of Clayoquot Sound lies within the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth. Yet, as I noted in an earlier chapter, through a system of 'reserves' the Nuu-chah-nulth are confined to an area that amounts to less than 0.4% of the region's land-base. As adventure travel boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, groups like the Ahousaht increasingly found that their traditional territories were becoming the playground for urban adventurers who viewed the territory as a publicly-owned wilderness. The \"Walk the Wild Side\" project therefore extended Ahousaht claims of sovereignty over their territories. ^Organizers estimate that revenue was distributed in the following manner: 15% to the booking agency; 40% to the Spirit of Marktosis; 35% to guides; 10% to Walk the Wild Side. Additional revenues from sale of arts and crafts went directly to local artists. 191 This was achieved in several ways. First, the trail over which clients are guided visits a series of beaches that lie outside the Ahousaht's 'reserve' lands, and includes several that are frequently visited by excursionists. At this level, then, the Ahousaht claim the land and its visual resources as their own. 39 The guides extend this claim by relating the nature of Flores Island to Ahousaht culture and thus remark on the many ways that these landscapes have been used by the Ahousaht in the past and continue to be used in the present. Signs of native tree use are identified, plants and animals still used in Ahousaht economic and cultural practices are discussed, and middens are located. Second, the Women of Ahousaht prepared a guidebook that is given to each client and which further links the Ahousaht (and the Nuu-chah-nulth more generally) with the territory of Clayoquot Sound. In this the Nuu-chah-nulth are described as long-term residents of the region, and details are provided on the tribe's social organization, its systems or ownership and property (hahuulhi - proprietary rights; and tupaati - hereditary privilege), food gathering, history and archaeology. Only after this does the guide provide a description of the region's forest ecology and a list of animal and bird species that clients might witness. Finally, one of the objectives of the project has been to present Ahousaht life as the Ahousaht wish it to be viewed. Previously, visitors to Flores Island learned what little they did about the Ahousaht from non-native sources (books, Tofino residents, and so on) or, if they did disembark in the village, often wandered around 'viewing' native life without any extended contact with the people. As one of the women explained, with travelers moving at will through their village, residents could not control where visitors went or what they saw, and thus had no means of shaping their impressions of the village and Ahousaht life. By taking visitors on guided tours, the Ahousaht found that they could 'narrate' their 39 Plans call for the construction of a 6km boardwalk that would take visitors from Ahousaht to Cow Bay, a popular destination for sea kayakers and whale watchers. From here a trail to the top of one of the Island's volcanic cones is also contemplated. 192 community to visitors on their own terms. As the group explains on their homepage,40 the walk seeks to provide clients with the enrichment \"that comes from seeing another way of life, rather than looking for the 'beach paradise' of the tourist posters.\" In short, the tour rearticulates what is significant in the landscape. Clients on the \"Walk the Wild Side\" tours are therefore shown more than forests, beaches and signs of land-use, but also the village's new school (and the considerable art work that adorns the building), new developments in the town (including the gallery and the commercial center that it is in) and other sites which are particularly meaningful to the community. More than this, by gathering tourists together and guiding them through town, the Ahousaht in a sense reverse the gaze. As the knot of tourists moves down its streets it is they that come under the watchful eye of village residents. In short, the \"Walk the Wild Side\" tour is not simply about adventure and ecology, it is also about building a public image for the Ahousaht as a modern native community with historical claims to ownership of the neighboring lands and forests. Articulating Ahousaht identity. Building a public image for the Ahousaht, however, is only one important political or cultural problematic with which this project has been articulated. As explained by the woman who first initiated the project, the Walk was initially devised for no other reason than to save the Ahousaht-owned seabus service that runs daily between the village and Tofino. For several years in the early 1990s it had been operating at a loss. While at first this may appear a relatively modest goal, on closer inspection it can be seen to be linked to a whole series of issues significant to the Ahousaht and that cut to the core of Ahousaht life. The village of Ahousaht lies on Flores Island, approximately 20 kilometers from Tofino, a journey which includes a crossing of Russell Channel, a stretch of water exposed 4^The Ahousaht are no strangers to using various media in their political struggles. The homepage for \"Walk the Wild Side\" is part of the Western Canada Wilderness Society's website. 193 to the open ocean which is often subject to heavy winter seas that buffet smaller boats.41 The effect of the loss of the ferry on village residents who did not own their own boats, or for reasons of age or health were unable to operate one, would be isolation. This is especially important to the women in the community, many of whom depend on the ferry as the only means of leaving the village. As important, the loss of the ferry would place increasing pressure on community members to abandon their village site, and with it, important aspects of their identity as Ahousaht. This can be extended further. As is the case with many native villages on British Columbia's coast, residents of the village (especially young men) regularly find it necessary to leave the village to find employment in places like Vancouver and Port Alberni. For these individuals, the ferry provides a crucial link that ties a diasporic community together with its 'home'. This is of great importance for the community as a whole. Unlike many white communities in Canada, Ahousaht identity is closely tied to the land, and in particular to the band's traditional territories on Flores Island and the surrounding mainland. Maintaining Ahousaht identity thus means, in essence, maintaining the viability of the townsite, and increasingly this means a series of spatial strategies by which members of the community shuttle back and forth between the village and places of business and employment in Tofino and beyond. In essence, the Ahousaht fit the description of 'bifocal' or 'transnational' subjects as described by Peter Smith (1994), who must continuously think two 'sites' simultaneously. By enticing adventure travelers and eco-tourists to board the ferry to Ahousaht the community appropriates the rhetorics of nature tourism and ties it to strategies of articulating Ahousaht identity. 41 The village of Ahousaht remains one of the few remaining native villages that lie on islands off the west coast of Vancouver Island, or that are inaccessible by road. Other villages and tribal groups, either due to economic conditions or forced by the coercion of the state, have moved to mainland locations. In Nootka Sound immediately to the north, the Department of Indian Affairs moved the Muchalaht from their traditional location at Yuquot (the site of first contact between Captain Cook and Maquinna) to a 'new' site near the white Canadian town of Gold River. This was accomplished by withdrawing services, most importantly, the local school. The villages of Hesquiaht and Kyoquot are essentially the only other native villages on the west coast of Vancouver Island that remain viable without road access. 194 Reconfiguring social relations. While the immediate objective that informed the \"Walk the Wild Side\" project was to rescue the single most important technology of community identity, organizers and village residents soon found that the project became articulated with local village politics spanning issues around gender, forestry, employment, ageism, and control over 'justice'. I will touch only on a few of these. Like in many isolated resource-based villages, gender relations in Ahousaht are marked by a strict division of labour, with men working on fishing boats or in the forest industry, and women charged with childcare and domestic labour. Gender politics therefore infuse the \"Walk the Wild Side\" project at several levels. First, as was explained by members of the Women of Ahousaht, women find themselves far more isolated than men, and likely even more isolated than women in 'interior' resource towns. Again this is related to the lack of road access. For many women, the only means of getting off the island is on the Spirit of Ahousaht. The end of this service, therefore, would have a far greater impact on the lives of women than the villages men who regularly ply the waters between the two settlements in their own fishing boats. As important, women were faced with almost no work opportunities in the village, resulting in single women having to seek work outside Ahousaht and women living with men often dependent on the male wage-earner's employment. The development of the \"Walk the Wild Side\" project together with the \"Arts of Paawac\" center has provided much needed employment and training opportunities for village women.42 In a similar way, by tapping into the growing eco-tourism industry, women were also able to begin developing employment opportunities that were not tied directly to either forestry or fishing, two industries that have historically been reluctant to employ women. This has had the further effect that women in the village have been empowered to question 42one woman explained that some men in the village were now concerned that the women were not staying home enough. 195 to what extent the Ahousaht should participate in the forest industry both before and after the negotiation of land claims. In other words, adventure travel has provided for the village the possibility of articulating social and economic futures that may be more ecologically sustainable than what may be possible without tapping this growing industry. 4 3 Beyond this, the project has benefited elderly residents by maintaining a transportation link with Tofino, and some have even suggested that band members convicted of minor offenses may be allowed to serve 'community time' as volunteers on the project, thereby also allowing the community to regain some control over the definition and administration of justice among its members. Re-figuring global flows. What this brief analysis suggests is that care must be taken in how we represent global flows of people, information, commodities and capital. While it may be true that adventure travel maps metropolitan anxieties across the space of the 'Other', we simply reproduce the same representational maneuver if we assume that this is necessarily a singular story, where the 'non-West' is yet again figured as the passive surface across which a dynamic West writes its accounts of 'self and 'modernity'. The 'agendas' of adventure travel are not imposed on places like Clayoquot Sound in any mechanical way, but instead are reshaped and reworked in relation to other processes of globalization and localization. Thus, what from the perspective of the West appears as the Westernization of other cultures, from other perspectives may appear as simply one in a series of cultural, economic and political flows which have no 'center' but rather are diffuse and disorganized (Appadurai 1990; Pred and Watts 1992). Indeed, in many ways it is the hubris of the West to assume that our presence implies the destruction of the 'integrity' of other cultures, or that somehow our arrival results in a 'fatal impact'. As is 4 3 This is true in several ways. First, since few residents work in the forestry industry, it is possible that the tourism industry may provide more employment opportunities than forestry has. Second, with the village economy augmented by tourism, the band may find itself less compelled to engage in unsustainable logging practices if and when they gain control over their forest lands. In other words, with diversification may come possibilities for linking forestry practices and cultural, social and ecological objectives. 196 evident in the case of the Ahousaht, the rhetorics of adventure travel can be turned towards other ends in what amounts to one among several paths of modernization and cultural identity for a First Nation on Canada's West Coast. Theories of globalization as homogenization risk deploying similar tropes to those of a melancholic modernity. By re-scripting globalization as decentered, it becomes possible to bring other dynamics to light. Other globalizations and other modernities that do not have their origins in the West or that precede the advent of a specifically Western modernity can be located. Likewise, if globalization is decentered, then it is also possible to move away from theories which see global flows as 'overriding' locality, or that assume that globalization must always exist in tension with localization. Instead, as Robertson (1995) suggests, what we are witness to today are simultaneous and interdependent processes of globalization and localization. In the Women of Ahousaht's \"Walk the Wild Side\" project, local politics are articulated through global flows, and this leaves neither unchanged. Thus, globalization does not represent the obliteration of history or locality. Such an assumption - as Robertson neatly summarizes - neglects two important issues. First, it fails to recognize the extent to which what is called 'local' is constructed on a trans- or super-local basis. In other words, globalization-as-homogenization assumes a pre-existing autonomy upon the local (which the global then 'overrides'). In the case of the Ahousaht, the trans-local negotiation of identity does not begin with the arrival of adventure travelers any more than it did with contact with a 'European' modernity in the late eighteenth century. The \"Walk on the Wild Side\" simply represents one moment of local/global exchange among many, both contemporaneous and historical. And, second, it fails to account for the various temporalities and spatialities that are at play simultaneously in 'modernity', and that therefore make it difficult to speak in terms of a universalism that is counterpoised to particularism. This is the case in part, Robertson contends, because the world has experienced the development of different or multiple modernities rather than a singular 197 modernity. Each contains its own 'interlacing' of events and relations 'at a distance' with local contextualities. Let me recap the arguments of this chapter, since the travel trunk that I so neatly packed at the outset of this journey has now been opened many times, objects have been removed and replaced, and its contents thoroughly shuffled. In the re-invention of adventure at the end of the twentieth century we can locate one of the many practices producing nature in Clayoquot Sound. Like the others, it carries its own logics within it, and responds to temporal rhythms and spatialities that do not originate in the Sound alone. The paths of kayakers circumnavigating Vargas Island simultaneously map a further series of discursive, technological and institutional relations that draw the 'nature' of Clayoquot Sound into the libidinal economies of metropolitan subjects: Clayoquot Sound becomes part of how imagination and identity are lived for subjects living in New York and Albuquerque. As I showed through reference to Levi-Strauss, Adorno and Marcuse, the form that this takes is crucially related to a series of narratives of modernity which validate the search for 'origins', yet, paradoxically, it is precisely through modernization that the 'dream-images' of adventure travel are given concrete form. None of this is without effects in the political world. The journey towards 'ground zero' is not innocent, it reterritorializes social, cultural and ecological relations. As I explained in relation to Clayoquot Sound, adventure travel brings a visual logic to bear on the region's landscapes such that production of nature (including forestry) becomes reorganized around the activity of the eye. Yet - all too comfortable with core-periphery models of cultural and economic exchange - we miss part if not most of the picture if we fail to recognize that the flows of people and capital that accompany adventure travel never occur in isolation but are always articulated with other forms of globalization and localization. As is evident with the Women of Ahousaht, it is not simply the case that local sites and local natures are passively re-inscribed according to the visual and cultural logics of adventure, but rather 198 that, with change as one site, the terms and identities through which life in Clayoquot Sound is known and experienced are shuffled and redefined, including 'adventure' itself. 199 CHAPTER 5 PURIFYING NATURE AND CULTURE: EMILY CARR'S BC SEEING The wild places and primitive people claimed me (Carr 1966: 315). There is a history not simply of what was seen, but of what could be seen, of what was seeable, or visible....The visibility of a period may be invisible to it, but not as something hidden or kept from sight. What is invisible is just the light which illuminates things or makes them visible (Rajchmann 1988:91). Framing Carr No artist is as closely associated with Canada's west coast as Emily Carr (1871-1945). Nor has the work of any artist from the region been so widely exhibited and reproduced. For Canadians at the end of the twentieth century, it is difficult to imagine west coast landscapes without reference to Carr's brilliant canvasses - her mysterious, almost surreal totem poles, her dark brooding forests, her expansive and expressive skies. This chapter explores her work as part of a larger archive of images through which Canadians today construct their imaginative geographies of the west coast. Carr's images were as partial as they were brilliant. Thus, it is important to attend to the cultural and social practices that informed her vision. In particular, as I hope to show, the vibrant, highly evocative forest paintings that Carr produced in her last years are infused with social and political content. Yet, this remains 'unseen' so long as critics - in many ways following Carr herself -interpret her work as capturing the 'essence' and 'spirit' of the coast. Without denying the formal aesthetic qualities and creativity that mark Carr's work, I will argue that it purifies nature and that this in turn is inextricably related to a second practice of purification that runs through her entire life and work - the purification of native culture. Carr as organic artist. Carr's association with the west coast is in part the product of interpretations that have framed her art in terms of an 'organic' relation with the landscape. Carr's most prominent biographer and critic, Doris Shadbolt, begins her book-200 length study of Carr with a simple heading: \"Artist of the Canadian West Coast\". The double meaning of the 'of is not, I suspect, entirely accidental. In Shadbolt's eyes, Carr was at once an artist who portrayed west coast landscapes, and an artist who was of the west coast. Moreover, the two are seen to have a necessary relation: one could only truly be an artist of west coast landscapes if one was of the coast. Immediately following the heading is a remarkable paragraph that frames Shadbolt's subsequent account of Carr's life and work. Emily Carr was born in Victoria on Vancouver Island 13 December 1871, died there 2 March 1945, and lived most of her life within a few blocks of the house where she was born in the James Bay district of that city. Her genius throve in the island's isolation from mainland British Columbia and in the province's isolation from Canada and the world. The two great themes of her work derived from the most characteristic features of that region - a unique and vanishing Indian culture, and a powerful coastal nature. It is logical to think of Carr and the Canadian West Coast at the same time, for her paintings and her writings bear the indelible imprint of her long attachments to the place where she was born and where she chose to remain (1979:11). On the surface such a statement simply confirms what is usually taken as common-sense: Carr's 'vision' was a product of a long and sustained encounter with west coast landscapes, landscapes that left their 'indelible imprint'. Carr (1946:321) herself referred to her work as \"BC seeing\", and implied that this was somehow different from the vision of other Canadian artists.' Yet, in this opening paragraph, Shadbolt goes far beyond what Carr ever claimed, tightly binding this 'seeing' to notions of rootedness, and an acquaintance that only comes with time. Carr, after all, \"lived most of her life within a few blocks of the house where she was born,\" and where \"she chose to remain.\" If one looks long and hard enough, one begins to see completely; if one remains 'in place', one's vision remains unpolluted by 'outside influences'. In short, one sees behind 'mere' appearances. Yet, as if uncertain that Carr's \"long attachment\" to the region was not itself 'Although significantly influenced by eastern Canadian artists after 1927, Carr continually remarked upon these artists' inability to feel the BC landscape, and, concurrently, her own deep attachments to the place. 201 enough evidence for a pure \"West Coast\" seeing, Shadbolt goes on to remove from outside contact not only Carr but the communities in which she lived. For Shadbolt, Carr's vision is the product of more than a sustained encounter; it is the product of a solitary attentiveness. Carr inhabits a pure space isolated from, and uncontaminated by, the metropolitan worlds and artistic communities of eastern Canada and beyond. \"Her genius,\" Shadbolt writes, \"throve in the island's isolation,\" and in \"the province's isolation from Canada and the rest of the world.\" This chapter questions the unmediated nature of Carr's \"BC seeing\" and the self-evidence of her landscapes. It is well known, for instance, that Carr spent many years studying art abroad (San Francisco 1890-93; London, 1899-1903; Paris, 1910-1912) and that later in life she became acquainted with the Group of Seven2, with Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism among other streams of post-impressionist modernisms, read Walt Whitman religiously, and struggled to come to terms with and incorporate the spiritual vision of theosophy. Far from unmediated by contact with a wider world, Carr's art (and journals) show many references to the work and writings of others. Even Shadbolt makes reference to her foreign studies almost immediately after her depiction of Carr as an organic artist. Yet, rather than taking this as a point of departure for exploring how Carr's vision was forged within social and cultural discourses, she reconciles Carr's apparent worldliness with her 'pure seeing' by appealing to a common 'inner isolation' that sets apart all artists from the everydayness of the social world. 2 The Group of Seven was a loosely organized group of seven male artists in Eastern Canada whose work both contested conventional landscape traditions and which was also taken to express a uniquely Canadian landscape tradition in contrast to other 'national' schools. This view was licensed by none other than the Governor General of Canada, Vincent Massey (1948). [This] group of gifted artists...turned their backs on Europe - quite deliberately - and surrendered themselves to their own environment, striving to uncover its secret. The inevitable happened. The Canadian landscape took possession of them. The abandoned the methods and techniques which were alien to Canada, and recorded its beauty faithfully in the clear lights, bold lines and strong colours which belong to it. After the 1927 exhibition at the National Gallery, Carr would become acquainted with a number of its members, most significantly Lawren Harris, and would be widely discussed as the Western counterpart of the group, expressing a uniquely \"BC\" landscape aesthetic in the same way that the Group of Seven expressed a uniquely \"Canadian\" tradition. 202 Emily Carr was an individual who did not sit comfortably in close company. Like any artist, she drew on whatever art sources were available to her, but she was never truly in step with any group, movement, or trend. She was inspired by the strong fresh look and the vigorous nationalist sentiment of the Group of Seven. She did not, however, adopt their painting conventions and she was fundamentally different from them in the degree to which she finally made her work the vehicle of feeling, and in the strong mystical tendency she shared with [Lawren] Harris alone....Because of the quality of Carr's painting and its originality...affinities are bound to suggest themselves and to hint at a larger relationship with other artists whose strength, like hers, grew out of isolation, particularly an inner isolation. (pp. 194-195, emphasis mine)3 Such a narrative has important consequences. Once firmly established as an \"Artist of the Canadian West Coast\", it becomes possible to map Carr's 'seeing' onto ' B C , such that the two 'great themes' of her work - \"a unique and vanishing Indian culture, and a powerful coastal nature\" - appear simply as the result of this dedicated attention, derived from the \"most characteristic features of that region\", those features that are self-evident* If Carr's 'seeing' is placed in question - seen to be forged within the world rather than pre-existing her engagement with the world or located outside its everydayness, then Similar rhetorics are found in Shadbolt's (1975) earlier account of Carr's life, where, after tracing Carr's international contacts, she concludes that, Despite all this, the popular view which sees her as simply the west coast painter of Indian subjects and rainforests is, though incomplete, justified....She remained a non-intellectual who responded primarily to the spirit of things and people and had to learn intuitively....viewed in its entirety, her work is seen to be the expression of her own existence and necessities: the end product of a life filled with struggle, hardship, sometimes with joy, and above all, a compelling drive for expression. (1975:4). 4Such an interpretation of Carr's work and life was not new when Shadbolt wrote the first of several biographical sketches of Carr that accompanied major exhibitions of her work. Gerta Moray (1993) writes that the widely held view that Carr had an organic relation to her environment could already be found in the writings of critics in the 1930s and 1940s who, she claims, established Carr as a virtually shamanic figure, in touch with the timeless forces of the BC environment. Examples abound, but I will quote but one. In a 1939 review for Canadian Forum, Eric Newton explained (1939:345): She belongs to no school. Her inspiration is derived from within herself. Living among the moist mountains and giant pines of British Columbia, she has had to invent a new set of conventions, a personal style of her own....she has symbolized its inner meaning, and in doing so has, as it were, humanized it. Her trees are more than trees: they are giants, and slightly malevolent giants at that. The totem poles she often paints are haunted by the Indian deities they represent. Shadbolt's account no doubt draws its conceptual bearings in part from this already well-established narrative. However, her account - the first extensive account of Carr's work and life - has probably been the most widely read and thus the most influential. 203 it also becomes possible to place in question the self-evidence of her central themes, to see these not as the region's most characteristic features, but as the product of particular modalities of vision and visuality. \"That which is,\" Martin Heidegger (1971:53) wrote, \"can only be, as a being, if it stands out within what is lighted in this [forest] clearing.\" The metaphor travels well between Heidegger's Bavarian home and the temperate rainforest of Canada's west coast. By 'thinking the clearing', as Heidegger extolled his readers to do, it may be possible to make visible precisely that which remains invisible in Carr's work, and thus to listen to other claims about what is significant in BC's landscapes. Rhetorics of an organic seeing forget the very ground of disclosure (Fell 1992). This is not simply a matter of historical revisionism by which a more 'truthful' picture of the west coast can emerge. Nor is it a matter of disinterested critique. Today, Carr's work appears regularly in the nation's galleries and museums, in art books, postcards, posters and calendars, and in the pages of textbooks, and other school curriculum. Poetry, children's stories, dramas and documentary films are inspired by her work and life. Fifty years after her death, major exhibitions of her work continue to be held.5 Aside from these temporary or traveling exhibitions, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) maintains a permanent collection of Carr's work, a portion of which is continuously displayed in its Emily Carr gallery, the only exhibition in the popular public 5Perhaps the most significant exhibition of her work occurred at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1971 on the centenary of her birth. Not only did this exhibition firmly establish her reputation as the \"Artist of the Canadian West Coast\", but the catalogue and commentary that was produced by Shadbolt in conjunction with the show has in many ways established the main lines of interpretation through which Carr's life and work have been known. Among several recent exhibitions, a show at Canada's National Gallery in 1990 reasserted Carr's place near the center of a \"Canadian\" landscape tradition as BC's 'representative'. Its introductory panels described Carr as \"a child of BC [who] forged a deep bond with the native heritage and natural environment of that province\" (quoted in Crosby 1991: 277). In 1994 Carr's work was given a prominent place in a popular Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) show that established affinities between artists of the west coast and the American southwest, and in summer 1996, two shows, one at the University of British Columbia, and a second at the VAG (Group of Seven: Art for a Nation) again made Carr a representative of a unique BC seeing. 204 institution which remains constant.6 Such attention to her work is not unjustified: her monumental, vibrant, and often vitalistic rendering of the province's natural and cultural landscapes remain striking artistic statements. At the time of their production they were in many ways responsible for introducing modernism to a peripheral settler society many thousands of miles from the centers of European art and culture. But the effect of their continual exhibition, and Carr's permanent presence on the walls of BC's most popular public gallery has been to further associate Carr's 'vision' with the 'essence' of the region^ in short, to propagate a mythology of Carr as the region's representative. While other exhibitions at the V A G come and go, reinforcing for city residents both the particularity of each artist's vision and the ever-changing face of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, Carr's work is given a very different treatment: as a fixed point of reference it appears to transcend history and thus comes to represent a 'pure' vision, free from the mundane details of everyday life.7 In the face of her continual display, it is not unreasonable to suggest - as do her biographers - that Canadians' views of west coast landscapes are significantly influenced by Carr's unique vision of the region. Dividing Carr. A second narrative has also been woven around Carr's life and work. Curators - like Shadbolt - regularly frame Carr's life in terms of a chronological and artistic progression that moves from her 'early accomplishments' to her 'mature years' (those that followed after her trip to Eastern Canada in 1927). In essence, Shadbolt divides 6Although Carr's work is continuously displayed, what is exhibited at any one time accounts for only a portion of the gallery's Carr collection, and thus the content of the exhibition is occasionally modified. 7In the past years BC's landscape traditions have been increasingly challenged in a number of exhibitions. These included, among others, two shows at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery on the UBC campus: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations which featured the work of Coast Salish artist Yuxweluptun (see below), and Capitalizing the Scenery: Landscape, Leisure and Tourism in British Columbia 1880s-1950s, an exhibition organized by art historian John O'Brian and his students. Another recent show, Out of the Garden: The Contemporary British Columbia Landscape - curated by Christopher Brayshaw -shifted the gaze from romantic and lyric landscapes to modern, humanized and technologized ones. Yet, as important as these shows have been for refashioning 'seeing' in BC, one of their paradoxes has been to reassert the central place that Carr holds. In essence, in the high-stakes game of artistic innovation, Carr becomes a stable reference point from which other productions can measure their difference. 205 Carr's life into three periods. The first (1907-1913) corresponds with what has come to be considered Carr's ethnographic period, during which Carr produced over 200 sketches and paintings of west coast totem poles. The second (1914-1927) corresponds to a period of relative inactivity following Carr's unsuccessful attempt to sell this 'ethnographic record' to the newly established Provincial Museum, and during which time Carr ran a boarding house in Victoria and turned her hand to producing 'native' artifacts. The third (1928-1945) Shadbolt identifies as Carr's 'mature' period, wherein Carr shifted from her 'documentary' approach to an encounter with native artifacts and west coast natures that was influenced to a much greater degree by modernism and by contact with Eastern Canadian artists, but which Shadbolt essentially understood as growing out of a 'deeper vision' of the essential spirituality and formal aesthetic properties found in west coast native artifacts and natural landscapes. In Shadbolt's 1979 biography and catalogue, fully four-fifths of her text and plates focus on the period after 1927, precisely those years in which Carr distills BC's landscapes most distinctively into what Shadbolt considers the region's 'two most characteristic features' - 'a vanishing culture and a powerful, all-encompassing nature' - even though Carr in that year was already fifty-six and had prior to this period produced hundreds of canvasses and sketches. What underwrites this account is, first, an aesthetic discourse whereby Carr's early work as seen as mere 'documentation' while her later work is seen as a fully-developed 'artistic expression', and, second, a strategy common to intellectual and cultural history that divides work into 'early' (adolescent) and 'later' (mature) periods. \"It was not until she was in her late fifties,\" Shadbolt writes, \"that she came to understand the Indian's carvings as the expression of his experience in a primordial environment and was led in turn to a bolder perception of the forests and coastal landscape. When she finally was able to identify the primal energy she found in nature with the spiritual energy she was seeking as the manifestation of God, the elements in her art became integrated at a higher level....At this point her art reached its full range of effectiveness.\" (1979:195, emphasis mine). 206 The effect of this temporal narrative is that only work from one period in Carr's life has been cloaked with the mantle of artistic excellence. Works from this period circulate more widely and more frequently than others. Thus, when we think of 'Carr' today, certain images come to mind more readily than others. Kitwancool (Figure 5.1), painted in 1928, for instance, corresponds with one half of what Shadbolt considers Carr's dual vision. Here Carr is at the height of her monumentalist depictions of native cultures, decontextualizing the exoticized artifacts of west coast native cultures, finding in them formal aesthetic qualities, and often resituating them in an all-encompassing nature. Cedar (Figure 5.2), painted in 1942, three years before her death, corresponds with the other half, stepping deep into the otherwordly spaces of the temperate rainforest; finding there an overwhelming, brooding presence, movement and power, and a primal realm that stands completely external to modern cultures. Combining a temporal narrative with an image of an organic artist, Shadbolt finds paintings like these to be the most sophisticated expression of a uniquely \"West Coast seeing\". For many Canadians, I suspect that this is Emily Carr. Revisiting Carr In the remainder of this chapter I offer a reading of Carr's work that is sensitive to its role in worlding the west coast at the same time as it pays attention to the worldliness of her vision. In other words, I seek to make visible the histories of seeing and making things to be seen that are woven into her work; histories that were at once material and cultural, and which in turn, through the dissemination of Carr's work in Canadian society today, become woven into our own encounters with BC landscapes. Let me briefly sketch the path that my account will follow. After 1931, when Carr turned 60, and until illness reduced her mobility in the early 1940s, Carr produced an extensive archive of remarkable rainforest images, precisely those for which she is now so acclaimed. In many ways these have been seen as a departure from Carr's earlier interest 207 Figure 5.1. Kitwancool [1928] Emily Carr. 208 Figure 5.2. Cedar [1942] Emily Carr 209 totems, prompted in part by other artists, by her explorations of theosophy and the writings of Walk Whitman, and by friends like Lawren Harris who encouraged her to look to the forest for her inspiration.8 Carr's \"Indian\" paintings have recently become objects of considerable controversy, centered primarily on questions of cultural appropriation and whether her images contested or contributed to colonial power (Crosby 1991; Moray 1993). Less attention has been paid to Carr's rainforest images. This is due in part, I suspect, to their 'natural' as opposed to 'cultural' content. Yet, as I hope to show, these images are themselves deeply cultural. In this chapter I argue these rainforest images share (and build on) many of the same assumptions that organized her earlier focus on native artifacts. Precisely because Carr's vision was, from the beginning, 'artifactual' (focused on artifacts rather than native life), I argue that her shift from native imagery to nature imagery should be seen much less as a departure than an extension of a particular way of seeing. Thus, although my interest lies in representations such as Carr's Cedar, my account will focus far more extensively on periods earlier in Carr's life when her 'BC seeing' took shape. This will require that I also engage with a series of critical reassessments of Carr's work. Emily Carr and cultural appropriation. Doris Shadbolt's portrayal of Carr as an 'organic' artist obscures the social context of Carr's life and the relation of this to her painting. Although they come to very different conclusions, two recent critiques have begun to challenge Shadbolt's account. In the first - a wide-ranging essay by Marcia Crosby (1991), a Haida/Tsimshian woman - Carr's work is examined along with a number of other non-native Canadian writers, curators, artists and art historians who \"appreciated and supported 8Carr's advancing age and deteriorating health must also be seen as important factors which made it difficult for her to continue her study of artifacts in the native villages of the coast. Yet, this is not explanation enough for why her native themes ended. The region surrounding Victoria contained ample native material in the 1930s, only, just as when Carr began her career decades earlier, it was difficult to depict these native groups in the same romantic and nostalgic registers that Carr used on her northern material. In the early 1940s, confined to her studio, Carr returned to native themes, drawing again on her already large archive of images from earlier trips north. 210 indigenous art forms and culture at a time when no one else did (p. 270).\" Far from celebrating this appreciation and support, Crosby shows its paradoxical nature. These representations, she writes, resulted not in undistorted accounts and images of native life, but instead led to work \"that ha[d] more to do with the observers' own values\" than with the situation of individuals or tribal groups or the character of sites visited and depicted (p. 270). In brief, Crosby claims that the 'Indians' of white-Canadian artists were always, and essentially could only be, 'imaginary' Indians since these artists were never able to step outside their own cultural frames. Thus, when she turns her attention to Carr, Crosby finds that the Indians whom Emily Carr claimed to 'love', were essentially the same imaginary Indians that most white settlers 'hated'. Love and hate simply become the emotions that accompanied romantic notions of the noble savage on the one hand, and racist assumptions of European and Christian superiority on the other. Crosby's interventions in 1991 came at a time when First Nations land rights had moved to center stage in British Columbian politics.9 Crosby's critique thus articulates a native claim to a cultural heritage that parallels a native claim to territory. She entails two moves. First, by showing how 'sympathetic' portrayals of native peoples were not free from relations of power and knowledge that were deeply implicated in colonialist practices, Crosby radically undermines any claims for a 'disinterested' literary or artistic expression, or, for that matter, a 'love' for 'Indians' that stood apart from the cultural discourses that organized how native peoples could be viewed and represented. Crosby suggests that all representation is forged within and implicated in a series of wider cultural dynamics that extend far beyond the stated intentions of artists. To 're-present' natives is thus to appropriate natives, their stories and their artifacts, into the frames of reference of the 9British Columbia is one of the few areas in Canada where aboriginal title was not extinguished through a treaty process. However, until the early 1990s when the Province finally agreed to open negotiations, it had been virtually alone in refusing to negotiate land claims. Much has hinged on whether the Royal Proclamation of October 1763, which recognized Indians as \"Nations or Tribes\" and acknowledged their ownership of lands, applies west of the cordillera. See Tenant (1990) for a discussion of the land claims question up to 1989. 211 artist, essentially 'claiming' natives aesthetically, and, by extension, politically. Art becomes cultural dispossession just as land policy leads to territorial dispossession. Second, Crosby raises questions about how representations of 'imaginary Indians' actively contributed to the colonization of First Nations people and territory. In other words, to what extent was the 'interest' that artists and writers had in natives and native cultures already part of a broader colonial consciousness that seized upon and represented differences between natives and non-natives, thereby locating native peoples in a world 'outside' that of the modern nation and its social and cultural economies? Images of natives - even sympathetic ones - could thus be colonizing in their own right, authorizing the dispossession of lands and heritage on the basis on the essential differences that were made 'visible'. 1 0 Crosby's argument is commonplace in much postcolonial scholarship, but she articulates it forcefully and eloquently in the context of some of Canada's most renowned and revered artists: art and power occupy the same space simultaneously.11 Yet, in accounts like Shadbolt's, this interweaving of art and power can be difficult to see. According to Crosby, the invisibility of colonialist tropes results from how critical inquiry has framed discussion of the visual arts and literature only in reference to traditions of European Art. Far from raising questions about who is able to represent whom, the subject matter that these images portray, how these objects and relations are made to appear, and the way that these images might be implicated in relations of power and knowledge, Canadian art criticism has turned more readily to questions of influence and style, tracing the journey of artists into the 'inner self, or into 'aesthetics' rather than into 10Romantic and picturesque images of native peoples, for instance, could easily be incorporated into narratives of European progress and the 'fading away' of native peoples and tradition before the 'light' of civilization. \"A similar point is made by Maureen Ryan (1992). Surveying a number of nineteenth-century representations of native peoples in North America, Ryan argues that these images claimed \"aesthetic proprietorship\" over native lands, and \"could naturalize in aesthetic forms a racial theory that had served to marginalize a population of the country whose presence and title to the land had been at odds with Anglo-European expansion and settlement within the colony.\" (p. 145). Along a similar vein, Heather Dawkins (1986) in a discussion of the work of Paul Kane, explores the relation of art and Canadian art history to colonialism, imperialism and racism. 212 a highly social and highly politicized field of objects and their representation. In the case of Carr, this has resulted in less attention paid to the way that native cultures were 'made present' and much more to how her style 'matured' from her early years to her later life. In contrast, Crosby draws attention to the narrative content in Carr's images and the effect that these images might have on how people today understand native peoples and cultures. Crosby argues that Carr's paintings are notable for their 'produced authenticity', portraying only a 'pre-contact' or 'uncontaminated' native life. As much as Carr paid tribute to the Indians she 'loved' in her writings, Crosby suggests that these Indians were nostalgic figures rather than the people who took her in gasoline-powered boats to the abandoned villages that she painted. Crosby finds Carr's paintings and sketches equally nostalgic and claims that they \"intimate that the authentic Indians who made them existed only in the past, and that all the changes that occurred afterwards provide evidence of racial contamination, and cultural and moral deterioration\" (p. 276). Such portrayals -what Rosaldo (1989) describes as an 'imperialist nostalgia' - perpetuate a subtle racism that devalues present-day native cultures in the guise of celebrating their 'past'. Although unstated, Crosby implies that it is precisely the continuing taken-for-grantedness of these nostalgic tropes that allow art to naturalize the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism. Shadbolt's claim that Carr 'understood' and 'felt' native art (1975: 31) thus obscures Carr's ideological lens. This is not mere quibbling over an artist and her work, moreover, one who painted over half a century ago. The importance of Carr's work is heightened in the context of political struggles by First Nations people for aboriginal rights and self-identity, including rights to 'speak for' the same nature that Carr represents. In this light, Carr's representational practices - and furthermore, the celebration of Carr for having 'saved' relics of Canada's heritage and captured the 'essence' of Canada's west coast environments - essentially dispossesses present-day native people of their own history and their own lands. 213 Carr as 'defender' of native culture. For Marcia Crosby, then, Carr's vision is one that is profoundly colonialist, deeply imbued with images of a mythological Indian that has no necessary relation to the experience or self-understanding of the people with whom Carr relied in order to proceed with her work - the Indians in 'gas boats'. A second re-evaluation of Carr and her work argues that the issue of whether Carr's art was colonialist is far more complex than Crosby allows. In a lengthy account of Carr's social context in post-colonial Victoria(n) British Columbia, Gerta Moray (1993) finds degrees of ambivalence where Crosby had located a simple (and singular) dynamic of cultural appropriation. Moray's discussion pivots on two crucial points. First, she demonstrates that settler society in early British Columbia was heterogeneous, both in terms of its population and in terms of political opinions. And, second, Moray argues that Shadbolt's temporalizing narrative has led to the suppression of Carr's most 'anti-colonial' canvasses and the circulation instead of work from a period when Carr's interests had changed. In terms of the first point, Moray suggests that Carr's paintings - far from a reflection of a singular colonial discourse shared by all non-native residents of the province - were produced in and circulated through social worlds that were both plural and fluid. Victoria, and the province more generally, even in the early years after joining the Dominion of Canada, was split along ethnic, class and religious grounds, such that significant differences existed between missionaries, Hudson Bay Company employees and their families and the British gentry that dominated much political and economic activity in the province (see also Harris 1996). This allows Moray to set forth her central claim that since \"images are generated within a field of political and psychological interests, not all such imagery is equally closed, unsympathetic or reductive.\" (p. 9). Her point is essential. While Crosby showed the political nature of representation, her argument foreclosed on the possibility of representational practices by non-natives that contest colonialist rhetorics. Yet, if both the social and subjectivity are overdetermined, as much poststructuralist and 214 postcolonial theory argues, then the 'artist' is never only a repository of a dominant ideology (or vision) but precisely the site where contesting and contradictory discourses are brought into relation. It follows, then, that images must necessarily carry in them histories and perspectives that are multiple and thus irreducible to a single 'ideology'. Locating differences between images, and ambivalences within images, is important, for in so doing we can begin to see how the 'image' achieves both its openness and its closures, and it becomes possible to locate or imagine practices that contest racist or colonialist views. This ambivalence can be illustrated by comparing four images of Blunden Harbour, a Kwakiutl village located near Alert Bay and a site that Carr depicted in one of her most celebrated paintings. A l l were produced by non-natives in the first decades of the twentieth century. C .F . Newcombe's photograph, taken in 1901, positions the observer with a view of the length of the boardwalk running between the village and the water (Figure 5.3). From this perspective the eye is drawn to two aspects of the photo: the carved figures which dominate the scene, and the activity occurring along the boardwalk and between these figures. Not only in relation to other images, but also within its own 'frame', this is a highly ambivalent image. On the one hand, the perspective emphasizes the carved figures over the activity of villagers, in essence exoticising the scene. As I will later show in respect to Carr, this focus is in accord with an early twentieth-century fascination with exotic and 'heathenish' artifacts that could appear wholly 'other' to a rational and modern West. In Newcombe's photograph, individual houses merge into a common 'front', removing signs of heterogeneity, and allowing native culture to appear as a cohesive, singular 'unit'. Yet, different readings are possible. The inclusion of native activity, for instance, refuses to let the totems be abstracted entirely into aesthetics or mythology. A blanket left casually on the stairs; pots and bowls placed randomly on the boardwalk; logs floating in the water; small knots of people engaged in various activities; a child addressing an adult while another observes: eventually the eye shifts from the totems and turns to the life that swirls in and among them. In other words, these'monumental 215 Figure 5.3. Blunden Harbour. Photographer, C .F . Newcombe.-1901. 216 forms - although the focus of the image - remain tied to the daily life of village inhabitants. How are we to read Newcombe's image? Is this a case where native artifacts are decontextualized and relocated into the space of European primitivism such that they become elements in narratives that have little to do with the details of native life, and far more to do with a set of distinctions and anxieties (modern-primitive; civilized-savage) that organize and regulate the identity in the West? Or, in light of the prevailing view in the early 1900s that native cultures were 'dying off does the image bring to light a vibrant native culture whose present is continuous with its past? And, moreover, how does this image appear today, almost a century after its production? Other images may provide clues as to how Newcombe's image was understood at the time. Newcombe's image reappears in the memoirs of the Anglican missionary Thomas Crosby, published in 1914. Significantly, it is placed in juxtaposition to a second photo of the \"new Bella Coola\" (Figure 5.4). Here Newcombe's image is ascribed with new meanings. While the new Bella Coola with its individual English-style mi lied-wood homes and linear street plan is set up as an example of a \"Christian\" village, Blunden Harbour, with its carved figures, is portrayed as a \"heathen\" village, \"in need of the gospel.\" At one level, presumably Newcombe's image would have reminded the viewer at the time that a native heritage continued to exist along the coast, despite the attempts by missionaries and the state to extinguish native traditions and assimilate native people into the growing settler population. Yet, at the same time, Newcombe's perspective and choice of objects allows the scene to be exoticized, and thus seen through a binary logic -'primitive-modern', 'heathen-Christian', 'savage-civilized' - that authorizes the exercise of colonial power. Newcombe's perspective is not innocent; it enframes Blunden Harbour through a particular optic. Indeed, the partiality of Newcombe's perspective becomes apparent when placed against yet another view of Blunden Harbour taken by members of Edward Curtis's 217 N E W B E L L A B E L L A \u00E2\u0080\u0094 A CHRISTIAN V I L L A G E . A H E A T H E N VILLAGK\u00E2\u0080\u0094AN A P P E A L FOR T H E GOSPEL. Figure 5.4. A Christian Village - A Heathen Village. Newcombe's photograph enrolled by Christian missionaries. Source: Crosby (1914). 218 filming crew around 1915 (Figure 5.5).12 Here Blunden Harbour is framed from an oblique angle, a perspective that provides depth. In contrast to Newcombe, it permits the differentiation of individual buildings while at the same time diminishing the importance of any 'exotic' artifacts, which, if still present in 1915, simply blend into the scene. Far from completely 'traditional', frame buildings made from milled lumber are set among cedar plank houses. Although no villagers are present (the village was being used as a set in Curtis's film) the perspective does not permit the easy assimilation of the scene into a primitivist discourse. How, then, are we to interpret Emily Carr's painting from 1930 (Figure 5.6)? She never traveled to Blunden Harbour, and her image is obviously derived from Newcombe's photograph. Here Carr not only monumentalizes the native artifacts, but abstracts them entirely from their cultural and social surroundings. The boardwalk and canoes are empty. What little differentiation between buildings that could be found in Newcombe's photo is removed; all that remains are the sad relics of a passing race, aestheticized and presented as metaphors for a deeper spirituality, a more original and primal experience and the inevitable decline of the native in the face of modernity. In his memoirs, Jim Spilsbury (1990), an early aviator along the BC coast, mentions that whenever he flew into this village, about the same time that Carr painted this canvas, he would find several hundred people. Carr's image shows the grand scale of native art, but native life is simply removed. The point is not to foreclose prematurely on Moray's discussion of Carr's work as contesting colonialist views. Rather, I have brought these images together to show that any binary distinction between colonialist and anti-colonialist representational practices is necessarily problematic. Both the production and consumption of images must be placed within complex social contexts. By doing this with Carr's early 'documentary' work, 1 2 At the time, Curtis, who I discuss later in conjunction with Carr's 'ethnographic project', was salvaging native traditions and ceremonies by recording them on film. The photograph was likely taken by Edmunde Schwinke, Curtis's photographic assistant. See Holm and Quimby (1980). 219 Figure 5.5. Blunden Harbour. Photographer. Edmunde Schwinke (?) circa. 1915. Source Holm and Quimby (1980). 220 Figure 5.6. Blunden Harbour. [1930] Emily Carr. 221 Moray argues that Carr's images may have contested the discursive frameworks that underwrote colonial power. Like other of Carr's biographers, Moray suggests that Carr's self-image as a 'colonial' or as a 'Canadian' rather than as part of the British gentry (despite her family arriving from Britain and her father becoming a wealthy member of the community) led her to remain eccentric in both her views about native people (and settler society) and also her representations of them. Moray explains in detail, for instance, the very different paths that Carr's art took from that of other women who worked in the region at the same time, and who remained more closely bound to notions of the 'picturesque' and to subject material drawn from the garden or scenes from town life. Likewise, Moray contends that while many of Carr's contemporaries considered native life and native peoples to be culturally inferior, and thus destined to whither before the brightness of European civilization 'as rays of the sun put out a common fire' (Sproat, quoted in Ballou, 1890:206), Carr inverted this narrative, emphasizing instead the vigour and scale of native life, and evaluating the impact of settler society in far less favorable terms. Hence, Moray writes, Carr's paintings not only ventured into subject matter that most women painters (and many men) were either unwilling or unable to depict, but were also often intended to stand as a vindication of native traditions against accounts by missionaries and administrators who condemned what they saw as the Indian's dark, heathen past (p. 12). She concludes, \"through her choice of images, her style of representation and her textual exploration of her works, Carr took quite specific issue with certain views of native culture being propagated at the time by missionaries, government agents, anthropologists and the press\" (p. 107). I will return to these issues later and in particular, to Moray's second point that an 'anti-colonial' moment can be found in Carr's early work. But I have specific reasons for juxtaposing Crosby's and Moray's work in this way. First, in contrast to Shadbolt, both point to the explicitly political nature of Carr's work and its display, and furthermore -although only implicitly in the case of Moray - both link this with contemporary politics. 222 Carr's work is not only a product of past practices, but informs vision and visuality on Canada's west coast today, and, perhaps more important, draws the past into the present in multiple and complex ways. Thus, critical approaches to Carr's work must think carefully about the histories from 'afar off that her canvasses carry with them. But there is another, equally important reason why Crosby's and Moray's rethinking of Carr's work and life are noteworthy. For all their differences, they share one thing in common. Both focus almost exclusively on Carr's 'native' themes, leaving Carr's extensive paintings of 'natural' landscapes relatively undertheorized, and thereby allowing these to stand separate from Carr's interest in native artifacts and villages. While it is important not to reduce Carr's many paintings to a singular vision (i.e. it is entirely possible for Carr to move between several different psychic and political levels simultaneously, and for these to change over time) this aporia seems peculiar. The effect is to see Carr's representation of the forest as unaffected by social and political life, whereas the politics of 'social' scenes, like those of native villages, is more immediately apparent. In the remainder of this chapter I want to place this distinction between Carr's 'native' and 'nature' paintings in question. Rather than seeing the shift from one theme to the other as a departure I wish to trace continuities and paths between them. Moreover, I argue - contra Moray - that Carr's early documentary project shares a common visuality with her later work, such that the latter can be seen to incorporate and elaborate aspects of a 'seeing' that is already evident in the former. Far from being transcended (or for that matter 'corrupted') by modernist aesthetics in her later years, as Moray implies, this early work laid the groundwork for the abstraction of the native artifacts into the space of Western aesthetics and, significantly, from the village into 'nature', eventually leading to the disappearance of the poles entirely and a new focus on nature itself as even more original or primal than native art. Far from a departure, then, I argue that Carr's focus on 'nature' in and of itself in her last years is consistent with her earlier interest in recording totems, and shares many of the same assumptions. To make this argument I move away 223 from the canvasses themselves, and into the social, cultural and technological dynamics that organized life on Canada's west coast in the first decades of the twentieth century and allowed for and shaped Carr's \"BC seeing\". Mapping \"BC seeing\": society, space and visuality If it could be said that there is an observer...it is only as an effect of a heterogeneous network of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations. There is no observer prior to this continually shifting field; the notion of an observer has meaning only in terms of the multiple conditions under which he or she is possible. (Crary 1988:48). Between 1907 and 1913 Carr engaged on a project to record totem poles in native villages. Along most of the coast the practice of erecting such poles had declined, and in the two decades prior to Carr's trip, a great number of these poles had been removed by collectors and relocated into various museums and fairs (see Cole 1985). Those that remained often showed signs of deterioration and decay. Carr would later write that in the face of these rapid changes, her project was to record what remained before they too suffered a similar fate. Moray argues that Carr's work from this period was framed by a scientific and political 'interest' more than an aesthetic one, and thus sees it less in terms of cultural appropriation and more in terms of documentation. By comparing Carr's village paintings with photographs of the villages taken during the same period, for instance, she demonstrates how Carr strove for accuracy and detail. Mapping Carr's vantage points, Moray shows the way that Carr moved back and forth between points of view 'outside' and 'inside' each village. From points outside the villages, Carr painted 'panoramas' designed to place each pole in relation to each other (Figure 5.7), and in relation to the village as a whole. From 'inside' the villages, Carr engaged in detailed studies of individual poles (Figure 5.8). Thus, Carr documented a detailed geography of all of each village's totem poles, and an equally detailed iconography of each pole. Moray's contention that Carr 224 225 Figure 5.8. Skidegate [19121 Emily Carr. 226 conceived of her project more in scientific terms than artistic ones is, I think, essentially correct, an interpretation which finds more credence in Carr's attempts to have the provincial government purchase the paintings for the new provincial museum as a permanent 'record', and also in the public lecture that she gave on the event of their display in Vancouver in 1913. While it is true that Carr's work could be seen as suggesting a significant native presence in the face of settler hostility and assumptions of cultural superiority, it is, I think, somewhat problematic to view Carr's work from this period as anti-colonial to the degree that Moray does. It is clear that Carr's depiction of native artifacts changed after 1927 when Carr became more interested in formal aesthetic qualities and spiritual essences (compare Figure 5.1 with Figure 5.8). Viewed from the perspective of her later work, her earlier work appears to show more attention to specific sites. Details of villages are often present, just as the details of the poles are more carefully reproduced. Moray writes that Carr intended her early Indian paintings to be a 'record' and quotes - relatively unproblematically - Carr's later explanation that she set out to \"picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection as I could.\" (1946:211).13 The images that Carr produced, and her accompanying lecture (Carr, 1913) Moray therefore construes as \"a vindication of native traditions\" (p. 12). According to Moray, only later, after her discovery and reception by the National Gallery and eastern Canadian critics as a modern artist and as the western counterpart to the Group of Seven, would a powerful myth emerge of Carr as a mediator between a native heritage and modern Canadian culture, a myth that would serve to appropriate native art into Canadian art history.14 Likewise only 13In her Lecture on Totems (Carr, 1913), delivered at the time of the exhibition of her totem pole paintings in 1913, Carr described her intentions in similar terms. The object in making this collection of these totem pole pictures has been to deposit these . wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting. The identical spots where they were carved and placed by the Indians in honour of their chiefs. 14One of the objectives of the 1927 exhibition, planned by Maurius Barbeau and Eric Brown and entitled Exhibition of West Coast Art, Indian and Modern, was to display 'exotic artifacts' of the West Coast native people as part of the art history of Canada, and thereby to offer them as inspiration to modern Canadian painters and as a resource for designers. As Moray explains, Carr's Indian paintings fitted the exhibition 227 with the extensive contact with eastern artists and critics that followed would Carr's work turn towards more formally aesthetic and spiritualized approaches to native artifacts. Essentially then, Moray makes two claims. First, that Carr's early work operates in a considerably different register than her later work (precisely the work that her critics and curators valued). And, second, that the image of Carr formed by critics and curators has made Carr out to be something that she was not, and, implicitly, that this has allowed for the kind of totalizing anti-colonial critique written by Crosby. Yet, in her eagerness to excavate an 'anti-colonial' Carr, Moray, I think, overemphasizes her intentionality at the cost of understating how Carr's vision was always already constituted within particular social and spatial relations. What is remarkable about Moray's account is that it leaves entirely unquestioned the objects upon which Carr's gaze comes to rest. Why should totem poles have stood out as significant while other objects and figures in the landscapes of native villages did not? Why does recording the poles represent a 'defense' of native culture? In what ways does this differ from the written accounts, sketches and photographs produced by countless other travelers that moved up and down the coast in the first decades of the century, collecting specimens and producing images of a primitive and savage people? Far from the product of an individual vision, and a passion for asserting the continuing viability of native life, I argue that Carr's focus on the artifact and her desire to record these - what I will refer to as her 'artifactual vision' - finds its conditions of possibility in a series of cultural discourses and social and economic practices, together with a series of important technological changes, that gave form both to the possibility of Carr's seeing and to the visual fields in which things could show up as objects of interest. Further, there are good reasons to see this as bound up perfectly, and could be displayed and discussed as a bridge between a primitive native past and a modern Canadian present. In essence, Carr's work - displayed among other 'primitive art objects' from native communities (masks, painted hats and oars, ceremonial robes, etc.) - was made out to be the most advanced moment of a primitive tradition. 228 with, and implicated in, ways of seeing that were based in, and served to reinforce colonial practices. In the following section, then, I focus on two separate moments that are conjoined in Carr's early work and which gave rise to her unique 'BC seeing'. First, the emergence of modern transportation networks along BC's coast (and the concurrent growth of a tourist industry up the Inside Passage); and, second, extensive activities by ethnographers -including many from outside the region - who were intent on salvaging 'relics' of a dying race. By focusing on these two moments, Carr's 'BC seeing' can be seen to find its conditions of possibility in social, cultural and technological networks that not only were shared but which extended far beyond BC itself. \"The wild places and primitive people claimed me,\" Carr wrote shortly before her death in 1945. But what was the nature of this claim? Emily Carr and the tourist gaze: traveling the Inside Passage. Fort Wrangel has several demon-like totem poles. There is a sort of fascination attached to these awkward objects which leads one carefully to examine and constantly to talk about them. (Ballou 1890:228). We passed along Indian villages on our way down the coast. The Indian people and their art touched me deeply....By the time I reached home my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could (Carr 1946:283). After a period of study in London between 1899 and 1904, Carr moved first to Victoria and then to Vancouver, drawing cartoons for a Victoria weekly newspaper, teaching art, and painting local landscapes. Beginning in 1907 and extending to 1913, Carr worked almost exclusively on what Moray describes as her 'ethnographic project'. In the following five years, Carr would produce over two hundred works on native themes, and many of these would provide further material for her work after 1927. 229 In one of her autobiographical works Carr (1946) writes that her Indian paintings emerged out of a trip to Alaska through the Inside Passage with her sister Alice in 1907. Traveling the popular tourist route from Vancouver to Skagway and on to Sitka, Carr encountered for the first time many of the native artifacts that were to become such an all-encompassing passion for much of the remainder of her life. The notes accompanying the National Gallery's 1990 Carr exhibition claimed that Carr forged her 'deep bond' with native peoples and the natural environment against many odds, only after she had fought her way through to her subjects, responding intensely and openly to their message. Like Moray's recuperation of an anti-colonial Carr, however, this ignores the formation both of visual fields and possibilities of 'seeing' in BC at the beginning of the twentieth century. With Carr's trip to Alaska, we can begin to sketch some of the social, cultural and technological dynamics within which Carr's 'seeing' took form. By so doing, Carr's vision can be shown to be as partial as it was brilliant. The relation between technology and vision has been an important theme in accounts of vision and modernity. Crary (1990) for instance, has shown the centrality of visual technologies and scientific discourses to the construction of 'observers' (including, importantly, medical technologies and discourses which were crucial to the disciplining of the 'eye' within apparatuses of production). But the relation between technology and vision, can, I think, be seen to extend beyond devices which operated directly on the body or which appeared as technological 'extensions' of the eye. As Nicholas Green (1990) has shown, new transportation technologies were central to the reconfiguration of vision and landscape in Paris and its environs in the nineteenth-century. The same was true, I think, for British Columbia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Cole Harris (1996) has usefully sketched the outline of emerging systems of transportation and communication in British Columbia during the first decades of the twentieth-century. Drawing on Innis, Deleuze and Guattari, among others, he links these emerging systems with the extension of imperial and colonial power. Harris's argument is nonetheless 230 relatively straightforward: technological and spatial transformations, he writes, are never cultural or politically innocent; they reposition people and things. Time-space compression in early B C , for instance, resulted in new possibilities for capital to colonize space. From wagon-roads to railroads, postal service to telegraphs, technological innovation opened new paths, drew together formerly distant places and reconstituted social and cultural relations. In short, these transformations reterritorialized BC space.15 The same could be said, I think, for how landscapes were seen and made available to vision. In other words, far from 'seeing' being a matter of simply opening one's eyes, what was 'visible' and 'invisible' and how these were made visible was transformed along with transformations in technological networks. On the coast, steamship service radically reconfigured both the spaces and the optics of social life in the late nineteenth century. Although service began in the south as early as 1836, and in the north by 1860s, service along coastal routes accelerated rapidly only during the 1880s.16 This new spatiality differed in important ways from that which existed only fifty years earlier and resulted in new ways of seeing the land. By drawing 'outlying' regions into the orbit of Vancouver and Victoria, for instance, these networks had the paradoxical effect of strengthening distinctions between the city and its surrounding country, and enabling the latter to become a visual resource for the former.17 Further, the extension of regular and rapid service Harris draws upon Deleuze and Guattari (1977) for his notion of 'deterritorialization'. Bruno Latour's (1993) insistence of the materiality of the 'social' - that is, the way that relations between people and social groups are stitched together by things - is, I think, of equal value for thinking about the changing configurations of social life and political relations in early BC. 16The growth of steamship service occurred for several reasons. First, by the close of the nineteenth century, advances in technology had made such travel relatively inexpensive, and far quicker than before. Second, in conjunction with improving transportation links, lumber camps and fish plants grew in number along the coast, resulting in a growing network of towns and villages stitched together by new social actors - machines. There is a wealth of material on these early steamship routes, much in the form of memoirs, others in the form of histories of individual companies, (see O'Neill, 1960; Turner, 1977; Rush ton, 1969, 1974, 1980; Munro, 1988; Hacking, 1974). However, with the exception of Harris (1996), who focuses primarily on interior routes, few attempts have been made to systematically organize this material into a critical study of time-space compression and the reorganization of social, cultural and economic relations that follows upon these routes. 17Again, Nicholas Green (1990) provides an excellent study of how transportation mediated the 'spectacle' of nature. 231 along the coast altered what was significant in local landscapes. Whereas earlier encounters between Europeans and natives were specific and necessary, by the early 1900s, following the appropriation of native lands by colonial and later national authorities and the removal of native populations to clearly demarcated reserves, European movement along the coast was increasingly distanced from encounters with a heterogeneous native population and reorganized instead around the spatial and social logics of resource extraction and trade. No longer reliant upon native knowledge and labour, native villages and native people were increasingly displaced from social and economic exchanges and relocated as elements of a visual economy - aspects of a landscape that could now be moved through and passively viewed, but which no longer required close or sustained contact.18 Let me draw out some of the consequences in more detail. In a study of railway travel in the nineteenth-century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) argues that new transportation technologies led to 'panoramic travel'. As he explains, where before travelers belonged to the same space as perceived objects (the space of 'landscape'), new transportation technologies resulted in travelers seeing objects through the apparatus which moved them through the world ('geographical' space). Modern transportation technologies, he wrote, ... choreographed the landscape. The motion ... shrank space, and thus displayed in immediate succession objects and pieces of scenery that in their original spatiality belonged to separate realms. The traveler ... acquired a novel ability ... to perceive the discrete ... indiscriminately, (p. 60). Significantly, this involved a degree of detachment that made the relation of the traveler to the landscape predominantly visual, further accentuated by an array of popular and widely available visual devices - binoculars, cameras - that accented the visual appropriation of sites/sights. Harris summarizes this thus: \"Improvement in transportation and communication enabled the world economy to use BC's space not through Native intermediaries, as during the fur trade, but by distributing Western technologies, labour and settlers across the land\" (1996: 183). 232 In a similar way steamship service at the turn of the century remade the coast as a succession of sites/sights. Self contained, no longer dependent upon local intermediaries, insulated from the hardship of travel, and rationalized into a regular itinerary of fixed stops and predictable arrivals, one could view the passing spectacle from the comfort of the ship deck. The effect of such 'distancing' of course, was to evacuate specific meanings assigned to places and resituate these places into economies of signification that had little to do with the specific details of individual sites, essentially resituating these spectacularized landscapes as wish-images for bourgeois travelers and reconstituting them in the dreamtime of the Nation and History. It is not insignificant, I think, that native villages were far more frequently appraised aesthetically than non-native settlements during this period. 1 9 Seen from afar, native villages could be situated in a pre-existing and timeless nature, apart from the maelstrom of modernity and made to stand in as place-markers in narratives of Western progress.20 By the 1870s the route to Alaska was already growing in popularity among tourists, many from the United States (Figure 5.9).21 This accelerated, until by 1890 travel along White communities were more likely to be described in terms of their level of development, pace of growth and services available; in other words, by the distance they had traveled toward an imagined destination - the metropolitan center. Native villages were appraised through an entirely different lens. Ballou's (1890:194) description was in many ways typical: From time to time small native villages are seen on the islands and the mainland, all typical of the people, and quite picturesque in their dirtiness and peculiar construction. Some of the cabins are built of boards, but mostly they are rude, bark-covered logs. In front of these dwellings stand totem poles, presenting hideous faces carved upon them in bold relief, together with uncouth figures of birds, beats, and fishes. A portion of these tall posts are weather-beaten and neglected, significantly tottering on their foundations, green with mold, unconsciously foreshadowing the fate of the aboriginal race. 20Linda Nochlin (1989) notes that the picturesque in nineteenth century art found its themes in the 'marginal' and the 'peripheral', the 'rough and ready' and the 'unrefined'. It is important to recognize, then, that the picturesque was not necessarily the 'pretty'. Thus, at one level, the picturesque was subversive of dominant culture (and classical painting). Yet, it could just as often be deeply nostalgic, focusing on that which was 'vanishing' or becoming 'obsolete'. 2 1 Among the first 'tourists' was John Muir, the noted conservationist, who traveled the passage in 1879 and subsequently wrote 'half-booster, half-scholarly' articles in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. For a good summary of the trade, see Ted C. Hinckley, \"The Inside Passage: A Popular Gilded Age Tour\" Pacific Northwest Quarterly, April, 1965:67-74. These trips were popular with 'educated classes' and artists, a point remarked upon in the memoirs of many travelers. Nor were women excluded from these paths. This is borne out in the description provided by Septime M. Collis who traveled the route in 1890. 233 Figure 5.9. Map showing route of Grafton's tours to Alaska. 1894. Source: Grafton (1894) The pleasure is much enhanced to by the fact that those who are your fellow-passengers are apt to be ladies and gentlemen, by which I mean persons whose good breeding naturally tends to a regard for the comfort of their companions; and among them you will find men and women, young and old, of bright intelligence, who, devoting their time to travel, are full of fact and anecdote - scientists, savants, authors, and artists of renown from all part of the earth (Collis, 1890: 193) It was the practice on some of these inland cruises to segregate social groups. While native men and women were provided only with deck fare passage, and this was also available to non-native men should they wish to travel in this manner, non-native women were permitted only to purchase cabin fares. 234 the Inside Passage had become a routine affair, with over 5,000 excursionists moving along the route in that year alone. By the time Emily and her sister 'explored' the region, some thirty-eight steamships were operating along the coast, with departures from Vancouver occurring almost daily. So extensive was the trade that by the turn of the century itineraries had been altered in order that the most spectacular scenery was passed during daylight hours (Turner 1977). It is important to situate Carr's movements within these dynamics. Already by the 1890s numerous guidebooks and accounts of the Inside Passage were in circulation, not only in B C , but among members of the monied classes in the cities of the eastern United States, for whom the Inside Passage provided a remote yet accessible site of adventure.22 These guides outlined important sites/sights, in a sense scripting in advance an iconography of landscape that viewers would 'recognize' as they passed through these unfamiliar waters. Grafton's 1894 guide (Figure 5.10), for instance, distilled the passage into two images - glaciers and totem poles - upon which travelers could gaze at leisure, entertained and informed by helpful tour employees. Nor did these guides spare detail. Grafton's guide ran to some eighty-seven pages. Other guides, like Badlam's The Wonders of Alaska - already by 1891 in its third edition - explained to readers that they could \"follow these pages and be fully informed of all the principle points of interest along the Inland Sea, with its innumerable islands, the great resources of this wonderful country, its native villages, the grandeur of its scenery, the traditions of the Indians, the success of its mission schools and the extension of its civilization\" (1891 :iv). Likewise, Grafton's guide (1894) explained to clients that these tours offered \"an excellent way in which to journey and see strange lands under auspices which will enable [travelers] to learn and see more This corresponded more generally to the growth in travel to 'natural' or 'primitive' destinations that marked the end of the nineteenth century and was related to a series of deeply held anxieties over modernization and industrialization. See Jasen (1995) for a good description of how the 'wilds' of Eastern Canada were \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 incorporated into the cultural economies of American travelers. 235 Figure 5.10. Cover of guide for Grafton's tours to Alaska. Source: Grafton (1894). 236 than if they should go alone. Where to go and what to see has all been arranged,\" the guide explains, \"they only have to keep their eyes open and look (p. 8).\" 2 3 Clearly, this was a well-organized, disciplined gaze that found certain objects and scenes to be of 'interest' and others not. What travelers 'saw' along the Inside Passage had as much to do with a series of discourses at home, and the organization of the view from on board, than it did with the land and the people themselves. Against the rapid changes enveloping metropolitan centers in the east, native villages could be encountered as 'picturesque'. As Linda Nochlin (1990) notes, throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly after industrialization, the picturesque had been pursued like a form of elusive and threatened wildlife, requiring increasingly skillful tracking as this delicate prey disappeared farther and farther into the hinterlands. The picturesque was, then, a response to modernization. At times of turbulence, Nochlin explains, \"the comforting emblems of a simpler, vanished way of life and the apparently unchanging verities of nature...seem particularly appealing\" (p. 28). Such an 'imperialist nostalgia' was therefore also deeply ironic; the same society that was engaged in wiping out local customs and traditional practices was also avid to preserve them in the form of records (travel accounts or archival material; the recording of folk songs; the study of dialects or folk tales; or through photography and painting). In this light, Marcia Crosby's inference that whether one 'loved' or 'hated' Indians mattered less than the fact that these were 'imaginary Indians', is worth repeating. Even if romanticized, such aesthetic conventions worked to certify that the people encapsulated by it were irredeemably different from and culturally inferior to those who were constructing and consuming these images. Much of Carr's early work operates within this register. \"Kodaking\" became popular along the Inside Passage during this period, not only because the technology had democratized photography, but also because the region could now be appropriated as a visual resource, framed and captured as a 'sign' of the 'primitive' and 'pristine'. See Collis (1890) for a description of 'kodaking'. 237 What her images mark, then, is a distance between a modernizing world and a traditional lifeworld prior to and threatened by modernity. To what extent did Carr share the nostalgic gaze of the tourist? In her writings Carr was often disparaging of tourists, complaining about their fabricated experience and decrying their 'impact' on native villages.24 Yet, this was often self-serving - given that she almost always traveled the same routes - and should not be taken as evidence that Carr somehow stood outside this mode of encountering landscapes.25 Here Carr's Alaskan journey is illustrative. The town of Sitka was an important stop along the popular tourist route and Carr has left a number of accounts of her visit there. In the early years of the century a 'totem pole walk' had been established for travelers. Along a path in the forest were displayed a series of poles that had been removed from their village settings and relocated as purely visual artifacts amid the tall trees. More remarkable yet, these same poles had already been exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and again at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland Carr's denigration of tourists, and her belief that tourism degraded native traditions appears frequently in her work. The following passage from Heart of a Peacock (1953:60-61) is typical. Hazelton was a tough little mining town. It had three hotels, rough and turbulent as the rivers....The coming of rail eased travel and gentled Hazelton's hotels. Tourists came. The G.T.P ran its line close to several of the Indian villages and the tourists looked curiously to see how our Aborigines lived. They did not see real Indian life, the original villages, or the grand old totem poles because, flattered and boastful, the Indians tore down their crude but grandly simple old community houses, built white man's houses - shoddy, cheap frame buildings. They turned the totem poles that had faced the river, welcoming visitors who had come by canoe up Skeena: they turned them to face the railroad by which visiting tourists now came. They loaded garish commercial paint over the mellow sincerely carved old poles till all their meaning and beauty were lost under gaudy, bragging show off....The Indians hurriedly made baskets and carving too - careless, shoddy things to catch the tourist's eye - which brought in a few dollars but lowered the standard of their handicraft.... Everything was changed, cheapened. 25Carr's anxiety to define herself as a traveler rather than a tourist invokes a rhetoric common at the turn of the century (see chapter 4) and belies that fact that during part of the time that she worked on her 'ethnographic' project she was paid by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to travel on their trains and steamships. See Tippett (1978:289nl3). As important, accounts that emphasize Carr's travels and work as a challenge to conventional roles for women at the time need also to be tempered. In many ways Carr traveled paths that were readily available to women, especially women from among the British gentry (even if Carr disowned her class associations). Even when she departed from these paths, she was usually under the (paternal) 'care' of white traders, missionaries and relatives (see Tippett 1979). This does not mean, however, that Carr's gaze was not marked by issues surrounding gender and sexuality nor - especially in her later nature canvasses - that it did not challenge a masculinist 'possession' of the landscape (see below). 238 (Cole 1985). The irony - that these poles were 'repatriated' not by local natives, but by the white population of Sitka, and only to yet again be set up as objects to be viewed by tourists - was not lost on Carr. In a later collection of stories Carr expressed profound disdain for this walk. When in delicious remembering my mind runs back to Sitka, what does it see? Not the... .Totem-Pole Walk winding through trees beside a stream named Indian River, named for the pleasing of tourists but really the farthest possible distance from the village of Indian shanties - a walk ornamented at advantageous spots with out-of-setting totem poles, transplanted from the rightful place in front of an Indian chief's house in his home village, poles now loaded with commercial paint to make curiosity for see-it-all tourists, termed by them \"grotesque\", \"monstrous\", \"heathenish\"!....Tourists came back from their twenty-minute stopover at Sitka and lectured on Indian totem poles and Indian wnculture, having seen a few old Indian squaws who spread shawls on the end planks of the wharf and sold curios....Soldiers and tourists broke Sitka's peace. Civilization cheapened her Indian. (1953:80,82). Although Carr (1946) mentions producing studies of totems only in the nearby 'traditional village' (this is the first record we have of such studies), the poles at the walk made a strong impression on her. Significantly, it is not the attention paid to totem poles (rather than native culture) that Carr decried, but instead their displacement from their 'rightful place' and the application of 'commercial paint'. Her anxieties surrounded authenticity. No doubt this explains, in part, her decision to paint in the 'real' Indian village. At first, seen in relation to this 'tourist gaze', Carr's desire to record poles \"in their own village settings\" appears to salvage them from their fate as curios, and to return them to their rightful place \"in front of a chief's house in his home village.\" But this is precisely where Moray's argument loses its way. What gets lost if we focus on this desire to return the artifact to its 'original' site is that Carr's gaze lay not in the village settings, as her statement implies, but in the cultural artifact, reproducing the same abstraction and commodification of the object that she herself experienced at Sitka. Conceived as a documentary project, Carr went to great length to be exhaustive and representative, 239 painting village scenes which located the poles in the \"correct\" places and studies of individual poles which focused on detail. While these paintings do depict the details of houses and villages (something that disappears entirely in her later work, where villages -if they appear at all - are structurally formalized - see Figures 5.1 and 5.6), they remain secondary to the primary documentation of the artifact, much like dioramas are used to authenticate museum displays (Haraway 1985). When people are present they are often little more than placeholders in a background scene; we learn nothing about their activity. Secondary to the artifact, they simply tell viewers that what is portrayed is the 'real' artifact. As much as she hated the 'inauthenticity' of the tourist spectacle, her 'interest' in Indians was channeled along similar lines.2 6 Like the tourist, Carr found that these 'awkward objects' led one carefully to examine and constantly to talk about them. Carr inverted the tourist gaze, but, in her choice of objects she remained firmly within its bounds. Salvage anxieties and primitivist fantasies. The Bella Coola have very big totem poles and house-posts, and we must try to get these (Franz Boas, instructions to George Hunt, April 1897). Carr (1966:185) would later write that \"a picture equals a movement in space\". Although Carr was referring to her desire to express movement (such that the whole of her canvas would be articulated together and the eye would \"swing through the canvas with a continuous movement and ... not find jerky stops\") the phrase applies equally as well to her own movements. Carr's vision was constituted in part through her movement through and along particular paths. 26Certainly Carr's portrayal of native art was more favorable then many of her fellow travelers. Accounts like Ballou's (1890) were numerous, dismissing native carvings as containing \"hideous faces, uncouth figures, grotesque and heathenish\" ... \"poor, primitive attempts to represent nature\", etc. In this way Carr valorizes what others devalued. My point, however, is somewhat different. Like other tourists traveling the coast, Carr was fascinated by the artifact, and less by its relation to the lives of contemporary native communities. Totem poles 'signified', and they signified the appropriate level of 'primitiveness' for a North American cultures anxious to view itself as at once 'modern' and also 'historical'. 240 Tourists were not the only travelers following these paths. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Pacific NW had become the site of much ethnographic activity. Already in the 1880s, Franz Boas was working in the same Kwakiutl settlements where Carr would find many of her early subjects. Numerous others also moved along the coast: members of the GSC such as George Dawson; the Drause Expedition for the Bremen Geographical Society; J .A. Jacobsen for the Berlin Museum; Dr. Sheldon Jackson in Sitka; the Jessup Expedition, a major collecting and ethnographic project for the American Museum of Natural History; a series of collectors working independently for the Smithsonian, others for museums in Princeton, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York; missionaries like Crosby and Hall; individual local collectors like C.F. Newcombe; and many other traders, colonists, artists and photographers (Cole 1985). A l l were concurrently moving up and down the coast, tracing social and spatial networks that included and related native villages, the British gentry and Hudson Bay employees in Victoria, and academic, artistic and business communities in the East. The non-native population in BC at the time was still relatively small. 2 7 Many of these collectors and artists would have shared boats with Carr, used the same white contacts in non-native settlements nearest to the native sites of interest, and employed the same native guides. Carr's desire to \"picture totem poles in their original setting\" resonates with the rhetorics of 'salvage' - the 'recording' (and thus preserving through images) of relics of a vanishing world from a destructive history (see Rosaldo 1989; Clifford, 1988). Carr's gaze must be seen as more than just a response to the dislocation of artifacts into the spatial and visual economies of tourism, but also in terms of an expansive project of salvage ethnography that was concerned to record and collect the artifacts and customs of primitive peoples before it was too late. Carr's Lecture on totems (1913) delivered at the end of her The 1901 census listed BC's population as 178,000 of which only 29,000 were 'Indian' or 'half-breed'. However, along the coast north of Vancouver almost all regions had significantly larger native than non-native populations. 241 documentary project is perhaps more telling than her reminiscences written almost 20 years later. Soon, soon, the old villages will be a thing of the past. Even in the north it is the same. Settlers are pouring into the new country; silently, gradually the old is slipping away. We hardly know where or how long till we wake to the fact that they used to be and now are not...[The] object in making this collection of totem pole pictures has been to deposit there wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting. The identical spots where they were carved and placed by the Indians in honour of their chiefs.\" Where native culture was 'slipping away', Carr, like her contemporaries, conceived of her act of collecting as resulting in a 'permanent record'. The rhetorics of authenticity and loss so permeate this passage that it is hard to see how Moray rescues anything anti-colonial from what amounts to a bold, metropolitan-derived salvage ethnography. Carr's acquaintance is not with the ongoing life and adaptation of native peoples in modernizing societies but with the (artistic) detail of poles that are relics of a passing people. It is not native people that are made highly visible, but the past glory of once-proud peoples. It brings into view no scenes of modern labour, no evidence of the negotiation of culture and identity that were occurring within the dynamics modernizing both native and non-native communities. Even though many natives were employed in precisely those industries whose activities were re-organizing social and economic life in the region, natives appear only as 'traditional'. \"Real Indians\" - as Crosby notes - were not those who transported Carr in modern boats to the sites of her sketching. Carr's project was further inflected by a nationalism and regionalism that was latent in much salvage ethnography. Clifford (1988) notes that the 'primitive' has often been incorporated into the origin stories of modernity. Equally, and especially in settler societies without 'ancient' histories, 'primitive' peoples were incorporated into origin stories of the nation. Carr often framed her work in these terms. Like others in the province, she was concerned about the export of many native artifacts by collectors to 242 locations outside Canada. Already in 1892 the Provincial Government had expressed concern over the loss of what many considered the province's 'heritage'. With regard to Indian curios, it is much to be regretted that so many are being exported from the Province. The funds at the disposal of the museum are quite inadequate to meet the high prices demanded by the dealers, so that it is to be hoped all who can will assist in securing rare specimens, and that persons visiting the outlying districts will avail themselves of their greater facilities for bartering with the Indians, and add to the, at present, somewhat meager collection now in the museum (quoted in Chorley-Smith 1989:142). In 1905 the province established what was to become the now renowned Royal British Columbian Museum. It's beginnings were far from auspicious. It began at first as a museum of Natural History. Even as native artifacts were added, its collection was incomplete and, in relation to other museums, relatively unimpressive. Only a few native groups were documented in anything nearing a comprehensive manner (Newcombe 1909). Obviously influenced by the public interest in the museum, the activity of ethnographers, and the 'export' of artifacts, Carr conceived of her project as a 'lasting record' and hoped to interest the Province to buy the collection (the paintings were formally evaluated by provincial authorities to ascertain their 'scientific' value). Again, her Lecture on Totems is instructive. In her concluding remarks, she clearly articulates salvage ethnography with the search for a national 'pre-history'. I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past (p. 53).2 8 'The similarity with Robert Bateman's preface to Clayoquot: On the Wild Side should not go unrecognized. The world recognizes Canada as containing one of the last great remnants of wilderness and we Canadians have always prided ourselves in our natural heritage. However this belief is largely a myth at the close of the 20th century. We have allowed our wildlife, waters and forests to be ravaged by carelessness and greed. Compared to the total map of Canada the precious fragments are few. This decade will see them saved or lost. Our generation must draw the line for all of them. 243 Viewpoints. As interested as Carr may have been in Indian people and their art, her interest did not simply emerge from her 'love' of Indians, nor was her vision and the objects that she drew within her visual frame, separate from the discursive, social and technological networks that organized what could be seen on Canada's west coast. The popular image of Carr as an adventurous woman alone among the wild forests and native communities, an 'isolated' artist driven by the desire to capture the 'essence' of BC's cultural and natural landscapes and to defend native cultures must be reconsidered. Carr moved along and shared well-trod paths - both discursive and spatial. Perhaps nowhere is this shared perspective more starkly evident than in the remarkable similarities in viewpoint and subject matter between Carr's painting of a stairway and longhouse in 1912 (Figure 5.11) and a photograph of the same scene by Edward Curtis around 1914 (Figure 5.12). Curtis is best known for his twenty volume photographic/ethnographic catalogue of the \"North American Indian\" in which he defined, delineated and distributed 'types' and 'characteristics' across the pre-European terrain of western North America. 2 9 There is no evidence that Carr and Curtis ever met, or that either had seen the other's work. But in many ways this is beside the point, for what is remarkable is that both found the same objects 'ready-at-hand', and apprehended them from almost exactly the same site (although Carr identifies the site incorrectly, another sign of her lack of attention to differences among and between native groups that she shared with other tourists). Like Carr, Curtis was concerned to document \"Indians\" in their pre-contact form before it was too late. Closely paralleling Carr's attempt to produce as complete a record of totems as possible, Curtis attempted to produce as complete a record of types. Thus, not only did both share the same \"viewpoint\" - quite literally - with other travelers and Curtis' fascinating images have not yet received the critical attention that they deserve. Initial studies include Davis (1985) and Holm and Quimby (1980). 244 Figure 5.11. Memalilaqua. Knight's Inlet. [1912 or 1913] Emily Carr (Mimalilaqua was the name of the people. Shadbolt writes that the town's name was Mimquimlees) 245 Figure 5.12. Tenaktak House. Harbledown Island. Photographer. Edward Curtis. 1914. 246 artists, but both deployed similar rhetorics. The striking similarities between Carr's and Curtis's project becomes evident in Curtis's (1907:1) \"General Introduction\". Months of arduous labour have been spent in accumulating the data necessary to form a comprehensive and permanent record of all the important tribes of the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their primitive customs and traditions. The value of such a work, in great measure, will lie in the breadth of its treatment, in its wealth of illumination, and in the fact that it represents the result of personal study of a people who are rapidly losing the traces of their aboriginal character and who are destined to become assimilated with the ^superior race'. (emphasis mine)30 Thus, Moray's painstaking reconstruction of Carr's viewing sites (by which Moray establishes the documentary nature of Carr's work) may be used to tell a different story from the one intended. As I earlier noted, Moray maps the place from which Carr sketched each pole in order to show the care Carr took to \"accurately\" represent each individual totem and the ensemble of totems in their \"original settings\". Moray writes, \"These maps, together with an extensive study of ethnographic photographs in museum archives, and of secondary literature on the sites, have been used to reconstruct what Carr would have seen on her visits and her activity on each site\" (p. 6, emphasis mine). Yet, what Carr would have seen, as I have argued, was made possible by her construction as an observer. With these maps, Moray simply reproduces Carr's ideological positioning without attending to the wider geographies of the visual fields in which she was placed. Hence, these maps, and the historical photographs from which they are based, attest less to The preface to Curtis' (1907) collection was written by none other than Theodore Roosevelt, the American president most associated with the 'frontier' and a 'heroic' masculinity. In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and trained observer, whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful. All serious students are to be congratulated because he is putting his work in permanent form; for our generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis has done. The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life has been lived under conditions through which our own race passed so many ages ago that no vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions were not kept....[Mr. Curtis] is a close observer, whose qualities of mind and body fit him to make his observations out in the field, surrounded by the wild life he commemorates. He has lived on intimate terms with many different tribes of the mountains and the plains. 247 a scientific and political intent, I think, and more to a particular visuality grounded in the discursive and spatial organization of colonial culture. Carr's viewing sites are chosen specifically to capture totems, not village life. Furthermore, these sites/sights are always distant, where possible on the beach leading to or fronting the village, reproducing the sovereign gaze of the European approaching the village and gaining a sense of the whole from afar rather than giving attention to the village 'interiors'. Curtis went to great lengths to 'frame' native scenes (Figure 5.13). In many ways Carr's perspective is little different (Figure 5.14). With few exceptions, Carr never moved her easel or sketching pad into the village in order to record daily life in the complex native worlds of the early twentieth century. Despite Moray's assertions, Carr's vision presented a 'distilled' landscape from the beginning. Portraying native culture from a distance, Carr's gaze fell on those elements which signified an ideal, pre-contact state. Totem poles became metonyms for a primal realm that pre-existed the modernity in which she lived. Thus, her focus on the artifact could just as easily fortify and entrench colonial assumptions of native cultures in decline, as it could tell a story of modern presence. By separating the artifact from contemporary village life, Carr set the stage for appropriating these objects entirely within a European aesthetic discourse in the years that followed. Going deeper: from primitive artifacts to primal nature A n ignorance of cultural context seems almost a precondition for artistic appreciation. In this object system a tribal piece is detached from one milieu in order to circulate freely in another, a world of art - of museums, markets, and connoiseurship (Clifford 1988:200). Moving behind appearances. Not all images are equally colonizing. Accompanying Curtis was a photographic assistant, Edmund Schwinke, who made his own private record of Curtis documenting natives. Although only Curtis's ideal-types appeared in his 248 Figure 5.13. Emily Carr painting in 1913 ('.'\u00C2\u00BB (visible lower left) 2*9 Figure 5.14. Reconstructing pre-contact native societies. Edward Curtis in Blunden Harbour, circa 1915. Photographer. Edmunde Schwinkc (?). 250 voluminous The North American Indian, many of Schwinke's photographs have survived. Figure 5.15, shot by Schwinke during a break in Curtis's filming, shows a very different world from that which appears in Carr's and Curtis's work. Not only is Curtis (center left) playing to the camera, swinging on a beam that is also part of the set, but the native actors hired to portray their culture are fully aware of the staged and anachronistic character of the project as a whole. Clowning for the camera, a native actor to the left of Curtis holds a decapitated 'trophy head' while others have crowned a second head with a spruce-root hat and adorned it with eye-glasses. Far from 'traditional' and 'dying', native peoples - like those in this image - found themselves negotiating paths of modernization, paths that included Carr, Curtis and the many others that traveled the coast, but paths that were not permitted to enter the frame of either artist's 'record'. I have argued that from the beginning Carr's 'artifactual' vision was infused with colonialist rhetorics. In later years, the material that Carr collected during her 'ethnographic' period would be reworked in different ways as Carr's own artistic sensibilities and aesthetic influences changed. After her return from France in 1912 her work showed a definitive rejection of naturalism and the picturesque in favor of a more individual, subjective vision, and a more explicit, intentional exploration of colour, line and composition (Moray 1993). Her work would undergo further modifications towards the end of the 1920s. Many have seen Carr's trip to France as the beginning of a move away from the supposed objectivity of her earlier work, and Moray in particular hints broadly that Carr's work now begins to lose some of its anti-colonial intentions.31 Her years in France, she wrote, \"would cause a major shift in her conception of what was significant about native culture\" (p. 240). And yet, perhaps a different point can be made - that this new aesthetic 3 1 While in France Carr studied with a number of artists, including one - William Gibb - who became her mentor, and who was in turn a friend of Picasso and Matisse. During her stay Carr abandoned the documentary, naturalist and conservative realism that characterized her early work in favour of a newly acquired knowledge of post-impressionism, particularly Fauvism, and the early stages of modern primitivism. Carr's years in France have been documented by Tippett (1979), Shadbolt (1979) and Moray (1993). 251 Figure 5.15. Edward Curtis and Indian actors clowning for camera. Photographer. Edmunde Schwinke 11914(?)j 252 simply draws upon and reinforces the 'artifactual' nature of Carr's early work. Indeed, that the objects that Carr represented were already abstracted and aestheticized in her early work (despite her claim that she was making a record) only became more evident in France. Carr brought with her certain sketches, and after her introduction to contemporary currents in European aesthetics she began to rework them, bringing her newly reconfigured aesthetic sensibilities to bear on them. Carr appears to have had no serious misgivings about moving from an ethnographic 'objectivity' to a more aesthetic 'subjectivity'. More likely the opposite was the case, and in this she was consistent with modernist aesthetics. Among the many post-Impressionist movements that emerged in Europe during the first decade of the twentieth century, Expressionism, Fauvism and early forms of Modern Primitivism - despite differences -shared one assumption: that in their move away from realism lay a movement towards a less normalized vision whereby, paradoxically, a more fundamental, perhaps primeval 'form' and 'spirit' could be apprehended. Perhaps more than any other time in the history of Western art, in the first decades of the twentieth century, artistic expression was seen as an attempt to express a reality that lay behind mere 'appearances', a search for informing principles that transcended culture, politics and history (Clifford 1988).32 Primitivism, in particular, sought after the 'elemental'. In other words, Carr's movement away from ethnography - already evident in France - was done in the name of a purer vision. 3 3 The German critic Kasimir Edschmid summarized this well in 1918. Writing of Expressionism, he explained that where previous art described, in Expressionism, We no longer have the concatenation of facts: factories, houses, illness, whores, outcry and hunger. Now we have the vision of them. Facts have significance only so far as the artist's hand, reaching through them, grasps at what lies behind. Art, which seeks only the essentials, excludes the incidental. (Quoted in Sotriffer 1972:6). 3 3Carr often portrayed herself - and has been portrayed by critics and historians - as \"non-intellectual\", and therefore \"unconcerned\" with the changing currents of aesthetic theory. Her paintings and at times her writings belie this, but it remains a powerful source for a Carr myth of a painter who, in the words of Shadbolt, \"responded primarily to the spirit of things and people and had to learn intuitively\" (p. 4, 1971). This \"non-intellectual\" posture is quite in line with other post-Impressionist and modern primitive painters. Writing of Primitivism in 1922, Wilhelm Hausenstein explains that, ... illiteracy is the essence of art. People who can read do not create shapes, they write the alphabet....It follows that among the savages who are still worthy of the name, art is not 253 Realism only reproduced surface to the disregard of depth; modernism assumed greater depths beneath surface appearances. Moray argues that Carr \"successfully combined these apparently conflicting goals [ethnography and modernism] into a heightened form of documentary painting\" (p. 412). This combination, I suspect, only led Carr to abstract the artifact from the social and cultural context of its production in new ways, finding in the totem itself the. examples of the formalized rules of modernist representational practices, and, later, the spiritual essences of a vitalism mediated through her explorations of the work of Walt Whitman. Although when Carr returned from France she continued her project, her post-France work shows the evidence of her new aesthetic concerns. By the time she exhibited her work in Vancouver in 1913 and made her bid to have the provincial government buy them as a permanent record of a passing culture, her totems had become increasingly detached from the everyday life of these village settings. From abstract artifacts to primal nature: purifying nature through purifying culture. Can-displayed her 'record' of totems to a less than enthusiastic audience in 1913, and later that year her attempt to have the Provincial museum purchase her work failed. With the outbreak of war, Carr entered a relatively unproductive period.34 Although Carr did not stop painting entirely, and also produced a large number of rugs and pottery with native motifs, most of her energies were turned to running a boarding house in Victoria. This period ended in 1927, with Carr's inclusion in a National Gallery exhibition entitled Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern. The Gallery curator - Eric Brown - had been introduced to Carr's work in the early 1920s and in 1927 asked Carr to submit certain works to the exhibition. These were subsequently displayed alongside \"authentic\" native artifacts - masks, painted hats and oars, ceremonial robes - as a further confined to a professional class which is a kind of lateral excrescence, and which one might call the artistry. (Quoted in Sotriffer 1972:12). 34The precise reasons why Carr discontinued painting remains speculative, although certainly the cool reception to her art and the lack of interest by the Provincial museum must be seen as contributing factors. 254 refinement of a west coast, albeit primitive, aesthetic. In this exhibition native art was incorporated (as 'art' and not simply 'artifact) into a \"distinctive Canadian art\" and Carr was quickly made to stand as the modern artist who had captured this primitive expression in its purest ideal forms.35 The Toronto Star hailed the show as a \"wealth of aboriginal Pacific culture\" and laid claim to its art/artifacts as \"a Canadian tomb of Tutankhamen\".36 Carr's village paintings were found by critics to be a logical extension of the Group of Seven's landscape imagery to the shores of the Pacific, the final piece that completed a specifically Canadian school of landscape painting. As Moray correctly notes, Canadian art critics and historians were quick to celebrate the discovery of Carr and her 'west coast' aesthetic, even installing her as the mediator between a dying native heritage and modern Canadian culture. Carr's appropriation of native culture is thus, in part, a product of a Canadian art establishment that cast Carr's work and her artistic significance in ways that appropriated native art into Canadian art history, while simultaneously draining local cultural meanings from the artifacts. Yet, as I noted earlier, critics did not magically conjure up this narrative - Carr's depiction of the totem and its village site can be seen to make such an appropriation possible. For my purposes, the significance of this later period lies both in the transformations in Carr's representational practices and in the visual objects that now became subject to her gaze. The show, and its success, brought Carr into sustained contact with the broader art world which, from this point on, would shape her work in important ways. Lawren Harris acquainted Carr with theosophy and with the transcendentalism and 35Scott Watson (1995:62) summarizes this succinctly. In order to create an authentic, modern art, reasoned the early modernists, Canadian art must have a rooted relationship to place, it must assimilate the native arts of what was Canada before Europeans came - Canada's 'timeless' past. In turn, those arts must be contextualized as high art within a modern discourse about art; their purely aesthetic qualities must come to the fore. Native art was accordingly stripped of local meaning and placed within the horizon of universal expression and timeless form. In contrast to Moray, however, Watson sees Carr as feeling the urgency of bringing native art into the fold of modern contemplation and thus implicated in the same discourse that organized the exhibition. 36Toronto Star, 9 Jan 1928, quoted in Moray (p. 25). 255 vitalism of Walt Whitman. Other Group of Seven painters provided inspiration or competition. After viewing A . Y . Jackson's Skeena River paintings, for instance, Can-began to realize the many ways BC landscapes could be approached through an aestheticized and stylized vision. I loved his things, particularly some snow things of Quebec and three canvasses up Skeena River. I felt a little as if beaten at my own game. His Indian pictures have something mine lacks - rhythm, poetry. Mine are so downright... .1 worked for history and cold fact. Next time I paint Indians I'm going off on a tangent tear. There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness, the Western breath of 'go-to-the-devil-if-you-don't-like-it', the eternal big spaciousness of it. Oh the West. I'm of it and I love it (1966:5). The American painter Mark Tobey would add cubism to Carr's repertoire, an aesthetic form that Carr used to great success in her depiction of both artifact and forest.37 The totems and other artifacts that preoccupied her in her earlier work are still present - at least until the early 1930s - but they are now seen in new ways. Influenced by vitalism, Carr brings a new attention to movement, space, and spirituality. The totems lose almost all detail as they become monumentalized and metaphorical. Between 1928, when Carr again traveled north to many of the sites that she had visited earlier, and 1932 when Carr shifted her gaze away from totems and to the forest itself, Carr no longer conceived her work as a 'record'. As Moray notes, she instead found in the totems expressions of what she believed to be the insights and values of native culture, and also resituated these artifacts as symbols of the spirit of the Canadian west. It is Shadbolt's (1979:30) summary of this period (1928-1931) that I think unwittingly captures best this shift, and institutionalizes a narrative that sees these works as the culmination of Carr's 'feeling' for native art. Her understanding of Indian art is not in fact reflected in her work until after 1927, when she strips the poles of excessive detail, removes them from distracting 37Shadbolt notes that Carr owned a 'well-thumbed' copy of Ralph Peason's How to Look at Modern Paintings, which gave particular attention to Cubism. 256 settings and concentrates on their sculptural strength and expressive energy (italics mine).38 In these last native paintings, villages lose all specificity, often simply incorporated into the enclosing forests such that Carr's paintings now present totems surrounded only by a threatening wilderness, eventually without any 'cultural' context remaining. The irony hardly bears mention: in her later works, Carr reproduced the same abstraction that she so stridently decried in Sitka, placing the totems in the forest (Figure 5.16), resituating them solely in an aesthetic and spiritual realm that their makers likely never intended. Equally as important, I think, is that in these powerful, evocative works Carr increasingly drew the totem and the forest into the same horizon of meaning. Native cultures appear to emerge from nature itself. In a remarkable passage, Shadbolt (1975:33) codifies this reading of Carr's work, but like Thomas Crosby's appropriation of C.F . Newcombe's photograph of Blunden Harbour, Carr's canvasses bear this narrative lightly. \"[Carr had] long since known and felt the art of the Indian ... there comes a moment of insight when she sees its profound and inevitable relationship to the environment in which it developed. The totem poles literally come out of the giant trees. But as brooding silent watching presences they involve a more profound generic relation to the hostile world of the rainforest.\" (italics mine) Shadbolt claims to find here the moment when Carr recognizes the essential and eternal bond between native and nature wherein the artifact of the native stands metonymically for a more original natural identity, expressing the essential bond with nature that was part of a general west coast \"Indianness\". Thus, Shadbolt declares that Carr, in her last Indian works and subsequent forest paintings, recognized that \"the Indian carved into his pole the Shadbolt essentially reproduces a primitivist discourse that can be traced back to the eighteenth-century and which finds it 'modern' form in the first decades of the twentieth. Kandinsky, writing in 1911, links the 'spiritual' with 'primitive art'. There exists...another outward similarity of artistic forms that is rooted in a deeper necessity. The similarity of inner strivings within the whole spiritual-moral atmosphere -striving after goals that have already been pursued but afterword forgotten - this similarity of the inner mood of an entire period can lead logically to the use of forms successfully employed to the same ends in an earlier period. Our sympathy, our understanding, our inner feeling for the primitives arose partly in this way. Just like us, these primitive artists wanted to capture in their works the inner essence of things, which of itself brought about a rejection of the external, the accidental. (Quoted in Harrison and Wood 1993:87) 257 Figure 5.16. Totem and forest. [1931] Emily Carr. 258 same silences, mysteries, orifices and excrescence as nature has in hers.\" (1975:36). Carr had discovered the way that native life \"mirrored\" nature, and in this account native art leads Carr to its underlying primeval origins in nature. The totem poles, Shadbolt (1979:76) writes, took her deeper into the primeval woods, and revealed to her a more comprehensive world: \"a nature vast and rich enough to provide her with pictorial metaphors for all the expression she wished to express.\" Carr's new visual interest can already be detected in her early 1930s work, where the totem poles are increasingly represented as an aspect of nature, often at the moment of their reclamation by the irresistible force of an all-encompassing nature. Totems lose their verticality, they become overwhelmed by the encroaching growth, they are, finally, vanquished (Figure 5.17) and with them, the last vestiges of an authentic native culture. Eventually native themes disappear entirely, replaced by nature itself.39 Carr's nature paintings from this period have been widely celebrated. Shadbolt, for instance, finds her forest images to be 'dramatic', 'vital', 'poetic' and 'mystical'. Others find them to be works of 'social protest'. It is not difficult to see why one critic has described Carr's paintings of clearcuts (Figure 5.18) as among \"the great political protests of BC's short history\" (Linsley 1991:236), nor why her work has, on occasion been used by BC's Green movement.40 Specifically, Linsley links this 'protest' to the manner that 39Indeed, the manner that the corpus of Carr's work has often been exhibited has permitted a further temporalizing in which Carr's work appears to follow a natural progression that could be \"seen\" in the landscape itself - a dying culture returning to its essential form: nature. Shadbolt's catalogue presents Carr's work through precisely this progression. Cultural artifacts, already abstracted in Carr's early work as part of an \"ethnographic\" impulse, are resituated as relics of a \"natural\" culture: a culture with no future, only a past, destined to become, again, the nature they always were. It is important to stress that while this temporalizing narrative of decline is one constructed by art historians and critics, it is a narrative that can be supported by Carr's own representational practices. 40Carr's critique of logging in her writings was highly aestheticized (and anthropomorphic). There's a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the \"screamers\". These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree's heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws and axes resting and watch. It's a horrible sight to see a tree felled, even now, though the stumps are grey and rotting. As you pass among them you see their screamers sticking up out of their own tombstones, as it were. They are their own tombstones and their own mourners (1966:132-133). 259 Figure 5.17. Vanquished. [1931] Fmily Carr. 260 Figure 5.18. Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky [1935] Emily Carr. 26! Carr eroticized the landscape. Linsley locates in these paintings \"an obvious pleasure in the sensuous plasticity of paint\" (p. 230) and he suggests that they therefore contain the potential of an 'emancipatory' shock value. Her sexualized landscapes could be read as a literal loving of nature, and as such an expression of an antitechnocratic, life-affirming critical position that still has the capacity to offend bourgeois proprieties....Carr's work opens up...the dream of reconciliation, of closing off that distance from the exploitive relationship to nature (p. 231, 232). Carr's images - in part through their eroticization - depict a nature that has value apart from its commodification as resource. This merits further attention. The intimate relations between landscape, vision, gender and sexuality are, of course, central to much feminist and postcolonial scholarship (see Kolodny 1975; Pratt 1992; McClintock 1995; Demeritt 1996). But these relations are rarely straightforward and Carr's work is no exception. Shadbolt (1979:140), for instance, locates much 'sublimated eros' and 'imagery of strong sexual connotation' in her forest paintings: hollows and openings in the woods, phallic poles, stumps and tree trunks, openings and enclosures that 'vibrate' with light and movement, trunks that 'thrust' upward into the sky, an earth that 'fecundates', and so on. Yet, for Shadbolt, this is simply the result of Carr 'painting out of her deepest self, whereby the expression of 'primary content' becomes inevitable. Rather than explaining Carr's sexual imagery as an expression of a more essential Carr (part of Shadbolt's narrative of Carr's development from an 'early' to a 'mature' artist whereby her art eventually reached its 'full range of effectiveness'), I wish to highlight instead the ambivalence of Carr's gendered and sexualized imagery. On the one hand, Carr renders her landscapes through familiar tropes of gender and sexuality. The interiors of her forests appear 'mysterious' and 'veiled', much like Truth before the penetrating male gaze. In this sense, Carr sets up the forest as the passive counterpart to the male thrust of discovery. Yet, it seems to me that few of 262 Carr's forest images invite 'possession' by the viewer. Her forests more often appear impenetrable, to the point where they threaten instead to engulf the viewer. In Imperial Leather, McClintock (1995:27) suggests that such imagery belongs to the same (anxious) masculinist vision - a fear of engulfment and a fantasy of (male) dismemberment and emasculation simply being the inverse of a fantasy of unstoppable rapine. Although persuasive in the examples McClintock chooses, it strikes me as a problematic argument. Carr's eroticized landscapes are not, I think, easily contained within the economy of an anxious male gaze. Hers is not the fear of engulfment so much as the celebration of an energetic eroticism that exceeds and subverts fantasies of possession or fears of emasculation. Seen in this light, I think Linsley is correct to find in Carr's paintings both a cry of protest at the 'rape' of the land, and a Utopian statement of hope. Indeed, in light of the scale at which BC forests are today being remade in the image of extractive capital, the manner by which Carr eroticizes the landscape is not an insignificant matter. Yet, if we attend to this alone, we miss an important aspect of her later works. By framing these last paintings only in terms of their representation of the forest, critics have failed to consider the histories of vision that brought Carr to the point where the forest could stand for primal energies and forces, and stand apart from its cultural surrounds. La wren Harris is often credited with prodding Carr to end her fascination with totems and move to the more elemental forces of wild nature of which the totems were only an expression. In one of most quoted letters in Canadian art history Harris wrote to Carr that, .. .the totem pole is a work of art in its own right and is very difficult to use it in another form of art. But how about seeking an equivalent for it in the exotic landscape of the Island and coast, making your own form and forms within the greater form. Create new things from the landscape (Quoted in Shadbolt 1979:76, italics mine) Yet, the fact that Lawren Harris and Emily Carr could find in nature an equivalent for the totem pole suggests that in important ways they belong to the same visual economy as her 263 earlier native themes. Once native culture is 'purified' as a natural culture - the artifacts no longer part of the life of a modernizing people but symbols rather of the native's unity with nature - it is a simple matter to conflate the two. By 'purifying' culture, nature itself appear 'pure'. Native culture (past) and nature (present) are, essentially, the same. There is no need, therefore, to mark a contemporary native presence in a natural landscape. What I am arguing, then, is that Carr's forest paintings - like her images of native artifacts - retain aspects of a colonialist visuality. This differs from other accounts that understand Carr's shift to the forest as the result of either an 'inner journey' (whereby her journey into 'nature' mirrors her increasing maturity as an artist) or as a result of 'influences' (her immersion in Walt Whitman, her introduction to Theosophy, the prodding of Harris, and so on). These influences were important. Yet, they did not lead Carr to abandon a 'love' of natives for a 'love' of nature. If anything the latter complemented the former. If we attend to the development of Carr's own vision, we can locate continuities between her 'early' and 'later' periods such that her earlier abstraction of the artifact from its cultural surrounds permitted and in some measure anticipated her later conflation of native culture with a surrounding 'nature' and her depiction of a 'wild' eroticized nature entirely separate from the people who still lived in, claimed and transformed it. Carr's forest paintings, although only painted in the last decade of her life, have become some of the most important exhibitions of nature in Canadian art and culture: they have come to be seen as expressing the spirit and essence of British Columbia's 'natural landscape'. Yet, like the photographs of Adrian Dorst, and in many ways prefiguring these, Carr purifies 'nature' only by first 'purifying' native culture. Thinking the clearing Given Carr's journey into the primal forest in her last decade, Heidegger's metaphor of the forest clearing (Lichtung) as an epistemological opening in which things 'come into 264 presence' or a field in which things are 'disclosed' is, I think, particularly appropriate. As anyone living on the coast knows, clearings permit visibility. But, crucially for Heidegger, clearings are themselves historical, and 'seeing', although individual, occurs only within these. Indeed, in Heidegger's discussion of the 'clearing', we can begin to trace the relation between the individual - as a Dasein (being-there) - and vision. Persons, simply by virtue of their 'care', or, their 'orientation' to the world, engage in the act of 'clearing'; human activity brings things into presence. However, the result is a shared situation, in much the same way that we can distinguish between clearing as an activity and the clearing as that which results from this shared activity (see Dreyfus 1991:163-167). While things are disclosed as a result of human activity, we are mistaken if we assume that this activity occurs independent of the clearing as a whole. Although it is our comportment in the world that results in 'things' having an 'ontic' existence, this occurs only within a shared context or a 'horizon of intelligibility'. Thus, as Heidegger (1962:171) explains in a cryptic sentence, Dasein \"is cleared in itself ... in such a way that it is itself the clearing.\" 'Being there' is perhaps more correctly 'being-in-the-clearing'. What Carr saw in the temperate rainforest was not the result solely of 'openness'; it was not a product of a 'pure vision'. Rather it was a seeing forged within, and at the intersection of various 'clearings' (as activity) that made possible a clearing (as field) at the turn of the century: technological networks; ideologies of the 'picturesque'; the displacement of native peoples from their lands; modernist aesthetics; the search for a deeper, spiritual realm; and so on. In other words, to the extent that the social and cultural geographies of coastal BC were continuously reconfigured in the face of local and global dynamics, Carr truly was an artist of the west coast - her vision was forged not through a sustained encounter, but through the various discourses and practices that organized life and vision on the coast. The point is not that the 'wild places' and 'primitive people' didn't 'claim' Carr, but precisely that they did. Where we go wrong is that we mistake these identities for the things themselves and thus misunderstand the nature of the 'claim'. 265 What is the relation, then, between the histories that informed Carr's 'seeing' and present-day imaginative geographies? Carr's canvasses, I noted earlier, are products of a particular 'seeing' and were themselves distilled into 'periods' by which only certain work has been widely viewed, the two components of 'Carr' coining together to form part of the material 'ready-at-hand' by which Canadians are able to apprehend west coast natures. In a sense Carr forms part of the 'clearing' in which things can 'show up' for us. Indeed, the resemblances between the work of Adrian Dorst and Emily Carr are almost uncanny.41 Recall, for instance, two photographs taken by Adrian Dorst in Clayoquot Sound (Figures 3.8 and 3.4) and compare these with two paintings from Carr's later period (Figures 5.16 and 5.2). The single totem lost in the forest, the images of the forest's 'interior'. To talk about 'influence' is, of course, tricky. Dorst and Carr, after all, are separated by fifty years and many cultural, economic and political changes. Only a critical biography could begin to unravel the many strands that have given shape to Dorst's landscape imag(in)ary, an effort that would no doubt result in the tracing of discursive, social and technological networks as complex as those which I have suggested produced the 'clearing' within which things could be brought into presence by Carr. The similarities between Dorst and Carr underlie a general point that does not require mapping one onto the other: To the extent that seeing - like the individual subject -is constituted within the world, vision occurs only within multiple, partially shared and occasionally divergent visualities. Not all seeing is the same. But there can be no seeing that occurs outside the clearing, just as there can be no observers that exist prior to the techniques by which vision is made possible and practices through which what is seeable is made visible (Crary, 1990; Rajchmann, 1988). In Canada at the close of the twentieth century, the work of Emily Carr is one strand among many that informs seeing and what is seeable. Her canvasses carry histories in them, histories that lie buried in the rhetorics of 4 1For Heidegger the 'uncanny' was precisely that which made of Dasein an issue, or placed in question both the 'disclosure' of things, and the 'clearing' in which this occurs. This is precisely why Heidegger places so much attention on 'anxiety'. For discussion see Fell (1992). 266 pure vision . By placing in question the 'clearing' in which Carr's vision occurs (making visible what remains invisible in her work), it may be possible both to contest its particular form and the objects on which it falls.4 2 In the context of present-day struggles over land and environment, this is an urgent task. Postscript: Painting land claims - The Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun. I suppose that, if I am to talk about my work, I will have to start with the past (Lawrence Paul [Yuxweluptun] 1995:1). Let me close by turning to the work of an artist who actively subverts BC's landscape traditions. If Doris Shadbolt begins her discussion of Carr's work in a biographical mode in order to tell a story of a seeing that is organic, Lawrence Paul (Yuxweluptun) begins his own 'artistic statement' with a similar turn to the biographical; only here biography is infused with history. Yuxweluptun's vision - as he explains clearly himself - is best understood not in terms of the solitary and attentive gaze of an individual located somehow outside of history, but in terms of a past that informs every glance in the present, and against which every brush-stroke is a measured and reflexive encounter with the changing configurations of native identity and environment as they are lived and experienced today by natives and non-natives. Thus, Yuxweluptun's 'artistic statement', written for an exhibition of his work at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at UBC in Vancouver, speaks of genocide, despotism and concentration camps rather than an 'inner vision' or 'aesthetics'. Over the past number of years the work of Yuxweluptun has become widely exhibited, and thus has emerged as an important site in the reformation of vision on Canada's west coast. I wish to close by turning briefly to his work, for with it we can For Heidegger, what remains invisible to such topics as 'ethics' and 'science' are precisely the 'frame' within which these occur. Positive knowledge is obtained at a high price; essentially, the forgetting of the very ground of disclosure. For Heidegger, then, the task of 'thinking' is neither calculative (scientific) or metaphysical. Rather, it is to think on the opening in which things occur (Heidegger 1977b). 267 begin to imagine other paths through the complicated terrain of vision and landscape in postcolonial British Columbia. Born of an Okanagan mother and Coast Salish father, Yuxweluptun grew up in Kamloops and in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond. Both parents were heavily involved in native politics, not only locally, but intra-provincially. Hence, Yuxweluptun fits uncomfortably into the traditional image of the 'native'. His life has been as urban as any other non-native metropolitan; his experience, far from constituted around a single place, has crossed the extent of the province. Yet, he identifies deeply with native traditions (particularly Coast Salish) and native politics. The social and cultural fields through which Yuxweluptun has lived and moved are further complicated by his artistic training. Eschewing schools established for native artists where 'traditional' methods and techniques are learned, he attended the Emily Carr College of Art and Design from 1978 until 1983. Here he became acquainted with currents in European modernism, and here also he forged a unique hybrid vision that has been radically unsettling to received modes of 'seeing' the BC landscape. Combining the cosmologies and visual motifs of Coast Salish culture with the modernist tradition of surrealism - the influence of Dali is pronounced - Yuxweluptun's work is at once sufficiently aesthetically sophisticated by 'Western' standards (i.e. not simply 'primitive' art) to garner considerable critical attention, yet resolutely grounded in the traditions and politics of west coast native life. Already an industry of critique has emerged to weave stories around his art, debating its relation and points of intersection with traditions of 'West Coast Indian Art' and 'European modernist' traditions, questioning its position vis-a-vis the institutions of artistic production in Canada, and worrying over the wedding of aesthetics and politics.4 3 For my purposes, what is intriguing about Yuxweluptun's 'salvation art' (the phrase is his) is the manner that his art consciously combines politics and art in a landscape vision 4 3 A number of critical essays accompany the exhibition catalogue from the Belkin Gallery show of 1995 (Paul, 1995). See, in particular the essays by Townsend-Gault, Linsley and Watson. 268 that destabilizes accepted renderings of nature on the west coast. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault (1995) notes, Yuxweluptun paints not landscapes but land claims. If Emily Carr purified coastal landscapes into two elements: the decaying artifacts of a dying native culture and a brooding, spiritualized, all-encompassing nature, Yuxweluptun does the opposite. Nature in his work does not overwhelm a vanquished culture; rather, the 'natural' landscapes that he paints are built from west coast native motifs. His Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Lands, Shaman Coming to Fix (Figure 5.19), for instance, must immediately be seen as a political statement on a number of levels. On the one hand it can be read as a critique of the ecological violence of industrial forestry. The land literally weeps, as does the sun and a human figure resting on a distant hill . But this painting articulates much more, for as Townsend-Gault notes, Yuxweluptun does not simply paint a 'green' critique, but asserts native rights to a land being destroyed. The various components of the landscape itself - trees, mountains, the sun, even tree-stumps - are constructed out of Coast Salish motifs. There is no nature apart from these. In a similar way, Clayoquot (Figure 5.20) depicts the violence of clearcuts as the interruption of native culture, as gaping wounds in a cultural landscape, the square rational spaces of the clear-cut gouged into hills formed from Coast Salish ovoids. Yuxweluptun articulates a landscape politics that refuses recuperation within colonialist rhetorics, his image of the land refuses to let it settle as only a resource landscape or as only wilderness. In essence, Yuxweluptun refuses to let the land appear as an entity without a constitutive native presence. His vision is of a social nature, one without pure essences.44 Placed against the paintings of Emily Carr, the implications of Yuxweluptun's work for a \"BC seeing\" are, I think, considerable. Let me sketch these briefly. To begin, Yuxweluptun subverts and displaces a rhetoric that locates and divides a 'traditional' native i ^Robert Linsley (1995) makes the point that Yuxweluptun's landscape paintings recall multi-coloured resource and land-use maps. What makes his paintings remarkable, then, is precisely that these resource landscapes are no longer seen to exist outside social relations as 'natural' resources, but are infused with social relations and colonial legacies. 269 Figure 5.19. Scorched Earth, Clear-cut Logging on Native Sovereign Lands, Shaman Coming to Fix. [1991] Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun 270 Figure 5.20. Clayoquot. [1993] Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun 2 7 1 culture from a modern non-native world. This operates at several levels. Where Emily Carr claimed to be establishing a permanent record, Yuxweluptun claims something entirely different: \"my work is to record\". The shift from noun to verb is subtle, but the consequences are great. Carr's 'record' was rooted in an ideal past, capturing romantic images and last vestiges of a culture whose glory had apparently come and gone. Yuxweluptun, on the other hand, 'records' the continuing struggle for identity and rights by First Nations in the present, and with this, the social, political and environmental dynamics in which these struggles are fought. Carr's and Yuxweluptun's lenses are forged through very different rhetorics. Where Carr's landscapes are static (or, if not, simply the depiction of a 'primal' nature overtaking a dying culture), Yuxwuluptun's are dynamic, sites of struggle, continually reconfigured in a matrix of economic, social and cultural changes where native identity, and physical environments are never 'fixed'. Carr's canvases erased the presence of modern life, focusing primarily on the artifact. Yuxweluptun, on the other hand, integrates figures and landscapes. Further, far from artifacts being represented as 'relics', he brings them to life - like the carved poles in First Nations longhouses - as crucial actants in contemporary native culture (see detail, Figure 5.21). As important, his work refuses to endorse 'recoveries' of a native tradition conceived as static or timeless.45 Yuxweluptun's conscious appropriation of surrealist techniques flies in the face of distinctions that relegate native art to a conceptual and aesthetic space outside and prior to Western aesthetics. More disquieting yet, Yuxweluptun inverts the conventional history - far from modernism 'discovering' its primitive antecedents, here a so called 'primitive' cultural tradition recalls modernism. By incorporating these techniques into paintings that also draw extensively on native 45Scott Watson (1995:67) explains that in the 1960s and 1970s \"the vocabulary of a revived [native] tradition became the overwhelming dominant language of native artists. This tradition had been 'revived' in a Modernist context that yearned for universal and timeless values in native art, not news of contemporary life and politics.\" 272 Figure 5.21. Untitled (Longhouse Interior) detail. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. 273 cosmologies and native aesthetic forms, Yuxweluptun refuses another rhetoric of dispossession - that the appearance of non-native objects, commodities or images signals the 'end' of an 'authentic' native tradition (see Chapter 3). 4 6 Indeed, the story of cultural exchange in Yuxweluptun's work is highly complicated. Townsend-Gault (1995), for instance, notes that Surrealism drew extensively on aboriginal and non-Western art for certain ideals and de-contextualized objects, including from Northwest Coast native groups. Yuxweluptun's work is thus a deliberate act of 'reciprocal appropriation'. This is both appropriate and subversive at a number of levels. At one level, Yuxweluptun explains that his experience as a First Nation person in BC has been surreal. Surrealism thus provides an entirely appropriate means through which to express the abstractions and displacements that have been such an important aspect of native experience - in short, the continual disorientation that First Nations have experienced at the hands of colonizers operating under the sign of Reason. As Yuxweluptun explained in notes for an earlier exhibition, he gives us \"a picture of what despotism looks like.\" At another level surrealism provides a means of reclaiming native traditions, only now newly inflected with elements of European modernism. The incorporation of other traditions does not render the existing tradition dead. The appearance of modernity is not the sign of decline and extinguishment of a native culture and native rights. As Yuxweluptun (1995:1) explains in his artistic statement, \"I work from the native perspective that all shapes and any elements can be changed to anything to present a totally native philosophy. It allows me to express my feelings freely and show you a different view.\" Thus, both Coast Salish and Surrealist traditions provide resources rather than a rule book. Non-traditional but still native. Social nature but still ecological. Yuxweluptun's work refocuses attention on the landscape (and culture) as contested territory. As Scott Watson notes, Canadian artists have treated native artifacts as the nation's pre-history, the 46Among Yuxweluptun's earlier works are a series of stylized hamburgers, hot dogs and automobiles that incorporate native motifs. The intent of these is clear: the appearance of 'Western' fast food or technologies can easily be incorporated into an evolving native culture. 274 'wish-imagery' of Canadians for uninterrupted access to a past that is not their own. Likewise, Canadian landscape traditions have worked as a wish-imagery of Canadians for access to lands and natures over which others have previous claim. The result, as Yuxweluptun shows clearly in much of his work, has been toxicological: environmentally and culturally. By subverting these rhetorics, he opens space for the articulation of a cultural and environmental vision that contests colonialist visualities without falling back into the 'traditional' as a realm of the timeless and the ahistorical. Yuxweluptun's landscapes are at once fully native and fully modern - and still deeply ecological. 275 CHAPTER 6 PICTURING THE FOREST CRISIS: IMMUTABLE MOBILES, CONTESTED ECOLOGIES AND THE POLITICS OF PRESERVATION Canada's forests are disappearing. (Greenpeace n.d.) We need...to look at the way in which someone convinces someone else to take up a statement, to pass it along, to make it more of a fact. (Latour 1986:5) Images of the 'temperate rainforest' are pervasive in Canada. Some - like the paintings of Emily Carr - have become part of many people's imagined geographies of the west coast: dark brooding forests, decaying totems, spiritual places inhabited by the ghosts of a passing people. Displayed in galleries and museums, reproduced in postcards, calendars and school curriculum, Carr's work has contributed to the romance and mystery of the 'West', to its essential difference from that which lays east of the cordillera. Landscapes can't move. Representations can. Thus, Carr's images and others like them, could link far away locations to local places: one could grow up in the Red River Valley of Manitoba, as did British Columbia historian Jean Barman (1991 :vii), and imagine the West. While all images are enmeshed in relations of power and knowledge, not all images are so equally or in the same way. Certainly all paintings, photographs and maps enframe; they create the effect of an external order that can be known and grasped. But, in the rush to show how every image is social, how each creates a picture through exclusion, it is easy to lose sight of the differences between representational practices, to the differential effects of each and to how we have grown accustomed to viewing different forms in different ways. This can be best illustrated, perhaps, by turning to some of Carr's later works. In the late 1930s Carr produced a series of paintings set in the landscapes surrounding Victoria. By this time, large tracts of timber in the region had been felled, leaving gaps in 276 the forest. Together with her new interest on expressing movement in her canvasses, this would lead Carr to shift her gaze away from the dense understory of the 'undisturbed' rainforest and instead to the open spaces of the modified landscape. Here Carr produced a series of remarkable paintings of expansive and expressive skies (see Figure 5.18), works that stand in marked contrast to the enclosed silence of her forest interiors (compare Figure 5.2). But Carr's paintings are also notable for as a response to the transformations wrought by forestry. For a time, her depictions of pristine nature were replaced by paintings of a 'wounded' landscape which, like her nostalgic Indian paintings, marked the passing of the primeval forest. Viewed in the 1990s, Carr's statements and images reverberate with the rhetorics of late twentieth-century North American environmentalism. Indeed, Carr's images have often been enrolled by local environmental groups in anti-forestry campaigns. For my purposes, however, what is remarkable about Carr's images and writings is not their anti-logging sentiments alone, but that - if measured by public opinion - they had little impact as explicitly environmental statements at the time they were first produced and exhibited. Several explanations can be given. First, even during the last years of Carr's life, forest resources were seen by many - except, ironically, foresters - as limitless.1 In the wilderness was found the nation's wealth, not the preservation of the world. Second, in a province built on the exploitation of natural resources, a wilderness aesthetic rubbed against an aesthetic of production and progress where smokestacks and industry were as likely to be represented on postcards as forests. Finally, her images could be - and often were - viewed as the product of an individual perception: as, in short, interpretations. They neither promised, nor had ascribed to them, certainty or universality. 'it is worth noting that it was precisely during this period that professional foresters in British Columbia began to concern themselves with the forest's limits. During the 1920s and 1930s, a new forestry vocabulary emerged centered on terms like 'inventory', 'mean annual increments', 'sustainable yield', and so on and which mirrored worries over the depletion of what was once seen as limitless (see Mulholland 1937). Carr's death in 1945 coincided with the Sloan Commission which institutionalized and popularized the vocabulary of 'sustainable yield' and, ironically, also set in motion the spatial and temporal regime of timber production that would lead to Clayoquot Sound being the center of controversy today. 277 If today Carr's paintings can be allied with environmentalism as powerful anti-logging statements, it is not because aesthetics has somehow taken on new significance at the end of the twentieth century. Rather, it is because Carr's work can be seen to be less interpretive and more illustrative - no longer viewed as singular, her canvasses appear to capture a more general and systematic change. But for this to occur required other representations, more 'accurate', 'scientific' ones, which established the truth of the 'crisis' in the rainforest. The 'Disappearing' Forest. Vision is always a question of the power to see (Haraway 1991:192). This chapter is a story of the forest's 'disappearance'. It is about how this 'truth' has been built, taken up, passed along and made a nexus of international political mobilization. It is also about whether this is the most pressing story, or, indeed, whether its terms are the ones we wish to accept. To tell this story we will leave Emily Carr behind and turn instead to another image that will be our companion throughout the chapter. Few images from B.C's 'war in the woods' have been as significant as one produced jointly by two environmental groups in the early 1990s (Figure 6.1).2 The image consists of what appear to be two satellite images. The first, located on the right, is dominated by the deep hues of forest green and shows the extent of 'ancient temperate rainforests' on Vancouver Island in 1954. On the left, a similar image - pale yellow in comparison - shows the remaining 'ancient forests' in 1990: a fragmented, discontinuous patchwork of green surrounded and dissected by the yellow of modified landscapes (clearcuts, burns or second growth). Placed together, the two images combine to tell an alarming story of the liquidation of the rainforest. The yellow of humanly modified landscapes, like a blight spreading across a field, has insinuated itself across almost the 2The image was jointly produced by the Sierra Club of Western Canada (Victoria BC) and The Wilderness Society (Seattle). 278 VANUH \ i K ISLAM) ANCIENT TEMPERATE RAINFORESTS 279 entire extent of the island. The forest is disappearing. Where in 1954 only the eastern shores and south-east corner of the island showed extensive 'modification', by 1990 what patches of green remain appear as ever-shrinking islands in a sea of yellow - the last 'stand(s)' of untouched nature now under threat, or, in those areas almost entirely engulfed in yellow, sad relics of a once extensive and unmodified forest laid bare by the logger's axe.3 It is difficult to look at these images and not be moved by a sense of urgency.4 A temporal progression is assumed which suggests for the viewer the possibility of two additional images which complete the picture. One, preceding the 1954 image, is the 'original' forest - that which existed before human (European) intervention.5 As viewers, we are invited to imagine the island bathed in the dark green of ancient forest, appealing to an edenic narrative of nature before the fall. One imagines it still 'whole' - a harmonious and timeless unity untouched by the disruptive presence of humans. The other, situated sometime in the (near) future, completes the tragic narrative. In this case, we are invited to imagine the 'end' of the ancient forest, the moment that the last green area disappears and the island appears uniformly yellow. Lest anyone doubt the moral of this tale of industrial nostalgia, the guide that accompanies it translates the images into a series of In a sense this maps replaces 'imperialist nostalgia' with an 'industrial nostalgia' where the same society engaged in transforming 'first' nature into 'second' nature mourns its passing. It is worth noting that much the same progression interests industry. Both the environmental movement and the forest industry are interested in drawing the same kinds of distinctions (old-growth - second-growth; 'bog' and 'alpine' versus 'temperate rainforest', etc.) but for very different reasons. 'Old-growth' forests show little or no annual increase in wood fibre (indeed decreases are possible with decay) while the mean annual incremental increase of wood-fibre in 'second-growth' forests increases rapidly until a certain age. Thus, since the forest industry seeks to capitalize on the forest's production, the forest industry is most interested in transforming the same 'decadent' old-growth forests that environmentalists seek to preserve into highly productive second-growth forests. A rational progression from 'dark green' to 'pale yellow' is therefore seen as a corporate (and public) good. The evocative power of this image became evident in a public meeting held in 1993 to garner support for calls to halt logging in Clayoquot Sound. When a slide with this image was displayed - without comment -the audience erupted into applause. The message was clear - the map showed, incontrovertibly, the devastation of the forest and the pressing need to preserve that which remained. 5 A map that estimates this 'original' forest cover is used by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in its promotional material, together with a map that shows how little of the forest would be 'preserved' under a Vancouver Island land-use plan, in a sense completing the teleology of the Sierra Club images. 280 figures, calculating the extent of the remaining ancient forest, its rate of 'liquidation' and estimating the number of years before it is gone. If logging continues to occur on Vancouver Island at historical levels, the Island's entire unprotected forest landscape will be completely denuded of its ancient temperate rainforest by the year 2022. Effectively, the end of the ancient rainforest will occur much earlier, when the last of the remaining intact watersheds are opened to development....Of the 174 primary watersheds in southern British Columbia larger than 5,000 hectares in size only six remain completely undeveloped today.\" (Sierra Club 1991: 4,6, italics mine). In the face of such a loss, who could suggest anything else but to preserve what remains? It is important not to lose sight of the political issues at stake in images like these. Forestry is not benign, even if new trees replace those harvested. In a province where information of forestry has often been difficult to obtain, these images allow viewers to 'see' the forest's transformation, providing an effective counterpart to the comforting images of scientific management offered by industry. However, it is equally as important that we approach images like the Wilderness Society/Sierra Club maps in a critical way, for at the same time as they purport to mirror nature, they frame a crisis, position us as observers and call us to act. In short, these images establish an object of political calculation - the vanishing rainforest - and this becomes part of nature's materialization on Canada's west coast, with all the accompanying social and ecological consequences. In what follows I explore the construction of this image. I will therefore proceed in an agnostic manner, suspending for the moment belief in tragic tales of the 'liquidation' of the ancient forest and their accompanying political imperative. Instead, I will use this image to raise a series of questions about how the 'crisis' in BC's forests has been framed. Bruno Latour (1987) refers to such images as 'black boxes' - representations that have achieved status as facts. In the remainder of the chapter I 'open' this black box, first, by showing how it is built, and then by turning to what principles inform its representational logics. I will argue that the 'lines in the forest' that appear in these,images find an 281 important source in the concepts and histories of ecosystem ecology. Yet, ecology is far from a unified science. By turning to recent work in 'dynamic ecology' I raise questions about whether the nostalgic account of the forest's 'disappearance' that these Sierra Club images relate is the only or best story to tell. Before I begin, let me clarify my intent. The purpose of showing images to be constructions is not to reveal them as 'false' but rather to question the certainty and obviousness of their 'truths'. The point bears repeating: to read images as misrepresentations is to tacitly accept what Timothy Mitchell (1988) has called a 'modern enchantment' that assumes that truth lies outside and beyond representation. In such a metaphysics, truth is an issue of accuracy. Yet to assume that power operates through razs-representation (or mystification) is to leave ^-presentation itself unquestioned; it is to forget that 'truth' is not prior to, but always an effect of, representation. Here I follow a practice and politics of deconstruction rather than demystification (or what Bruno Latour calls 'denouncing'). Demystification assumes the possibility that the demystifier stands on the solid ground of pure vision. Deconstruction - always in the name of something, always done from somewhere - inquires after the mechanisms by which the representation obtains facticity, it locates and identifies the absences and silences that allow a representation to appear complete and certain. In short, it questions the unity of the image in order to suggest the possibility that other stories can be told. These are important political questions. Images - and not just people - do social work. Representation begets intervention; the world 'inside' the computer mapping lab threatens to become the world 'outside' the laboratory. Criticism focuses attention on precisely this dynamic and asks whether stories like those told in the laboratory are indeed those that we wish to tell and whether these are the worlds we wish to raise. 282 Building the mirror of Nature Seeing work in the 'view from above'. Let us return again to the images of Vancouver Island. At first glance these resemble satellite photographs. The viewer is positioned in 'space' and the islands - with their irregular blue borders - appear as if they were cut out of a larger global picture and glued to the page. Indeed, the 1990 image even includes clouds and their shadows. The result, of course, is that they appear 'objective'. Literally an 'eye in the sky', the satellite's camera is passive, a modest witness to the drama unfolding below. It is now commonplace to note the effect of this perspective, how it positions the viewer as a disembodied subject, provides the viewer with a sense of certainty, and invites the viewer to grasp the scene below as a totality, allowing fantasies of 'mastery' over the object. Obviously, as viewers, we are not 'in' (outer) space, we are simply invited to forget that we are looking at a two-dimensional image on the page and asked to imagine instead that we are looking down on the world itself.6 Haraway (1991) refers to this 'seeing everything from nowhere' as a 'god-trick' - an illusion of being able to transcend embodiment and occupy an unmarked position that escapes representation. In short, vision appears 'pure'. In what follows I show how this image - like all images - is resolutely social and historical, produced in a matrix of scientific, technical, cultural and political networks. Let me summarize, briefly, how these images were made. To begin, although at first glance these images have the appearance of satellite photographs (including clouds and their shadows), closer examination shows that they are in reality computer-generated maps 6I must give some credit to at least one anonymous actor for this argument. As I wrote this chapter I had a copy of the map pinned to a wall behind my computer monitor. Earlier, while it still lay folded on my desk, I unwisely left a window open overnight. Squirrels - always on the lookout for such opportunities - chewed selectively on various texts, reports and maps. Now, when unfolded, the map contains their traces in a regular pattern. These squirrels were de(con)structive in the most literal sense: at the same time as I am invited to 'see' the island from space I cannot help but be reminded of the object's somewhat more banal physical existence as paper. 283 in which satellite photographs are simply one among several 'inputs'.7 Satellite photographs were only important in the initial stage of their construction where the Seattle-based Wilderness Society's mapping team used 1990 Landsat 5 Satellite imagery to begin to determine the ground cover on the island for that year. (Since no single Landsat image contained the entire island, five separate photographs had to be processed and classified individually and then combined in order to create the single image.) Already at this stage an important translation occurs - the complex, three-dimensional spaces of Vancouver Island are transformed through technologies of inscription into a two-dimensional representation that can be read and, perhaps more important, related and combined with other inscriptions. By itself, however, this aggregate image was inadequate to represent the 'ancient rainforest'. With the many shades of green that satellite photographs show, 'ancient rainforests' do not 'stand out'. Indeed, in order to distinguish between 'pristine' and 'regenerated' forests, technicians had to mobilize other resources (usually BC Ministry of Forest inventories), and from these sites more bits of information were gathered, that could be related and combined with the information from the satellite photographs in order to clarify what the computer cartographers were looking at on their screens. Since the initial image was digitized - thereby allowing specific sites to be isolated and the information within it manipulated - it was possible for cartographers to inscribe this information back onto the image in new forms, coding specific sites according to type of forest cover. Of course, if one is going to map the remaining extent of the 'ancient temperate rainforest', it is best to be clear about what belong to these forests. Obviously not modified forests, but what about mountain hemlock forests? Or bog forests? Both have somewhat different species compositions, and, perhaps more important, smaller trees. How does one distinguish these? To further refine the image thus required yet other 7By showing how these images incorporated far more than satellite images I do not mean to imply that this entails a move away from 'objectivity' to 'subjectivity'. Like all photography, satellite images are simultaneously social, technological and semiotic. 284 resources: studies differentiating vegetation zones, maps of biogeoclimatic units, and so on, and these were called upon to locate, map and code areas of forest that would be excluded from the 'ancient temperate rainforest' . 8 Only after these data were translated and combined was the final image possible. The result is that what appears as a single image instead combines thousands of individual inscriptions from various sources that are combined and related. I will return to these 'inscriptions' momentarily. Because the satellite images were digitized their final appearance could be manipulated. As already noted, satellite photographs differentiate poorly between 'ancient' and 'modified' forests - at best the differences show up as various shades of green. Since retaining the original colours of the photographs would reveal the island to be almost uniformly green - quite the opposite of the effect desired - the cartographers introduced a colour scheme that clearly distinguished 'ancient' forests from 'modified landscapes', 'mountain hemlock forests', 'developed areas' and so on. 'Ancient forests' were coded with a deep forest green, 'modified landscapes' transformed to a light yellow, 'bog forests' to orange, 'mountain hemlock forests' to red, 'urban' areas to gray, and so on (resulting, of course, in an alarming absence of green from the 1990 image). The 1954 image has the same form. However, it was built in an entirely different manner. To begin, no satellite images were available. Instead, cartographers had to rely on maps of forest cover produced by the Ministry of Forests from aerial photographs taken in that year. Again similar processes of translation occurred whereby aerial photographs (already an inscription) were evaluated according to specific criteria for determining the height of trees and relating this to their age. The results for specific sites could then be combined for larger areas. Since the 1990 satellite photographs were digitized, they could Obviously is has been in the interest of wilderness preservation groups to work with a restrictive definition of what entails 'ancient rainforest'. 285 be used as a 'base', allowing 1954 data to be translated into the same form as that from 1990. Of course, these images - 1990 and 1954 - are produced in the same form not simply because the technologies of translation allowed for different 'data'9 to be combinable, but for a simple reason: it permits ease of comparison. For the image to do the work that the Sierra Club seeks it to do, it has to be legible, and more important, able to be 'taken in' at a glance. By relating the two periods in the same form a teleology is constructed: the viewer can quickly shift between the two images, attending to the differences between them. Although not immediately evident, this teleology is constructed retrospectively. The 1954 image had no prior existence. It was not 'found' in an archive. I have moved from the present to the past in my account in part because this is the same path that the Wilderness Society technicians followed, using images and technologies in the present to construct an image that could not have existed in 1954! Equally as important, it is by reconstructing this forest cover retrospectively that the Sierra Club is able to construct a story that makes an issue of the present, placing the present in relation to both a past, and, more important, an implied future. The images do not 'mirror' nature, but place it in motion: \"For the South Island, the end of the rainforest will occur in 2001\" (Sierra Club 1991:14). That both images - one dating from before the space age, the other from after -retain the appearance of satellite imagery is no doubt strategic, playing on the commonly-held distinction between a 'map' and a 'photograph' where the former is increasingly viewed as a product of labour - and thus less able to appear 'objective' - while the latter, trading on the supposed 'innocence' of the camera, appears unmediated.10 Indeed, these 9 Latour (1995a) cautions readers to always think of 'data' as something achieved. There can be no 'data' prior to practices of inscription. l0While 'maps' - like all representations - achieve 'truth-effects' (Harley 1992), they do so in different ways from other media. As we move further into the age of simulated vision through technological innovation, representations that appear as 'maps' will increasingly lose their authority and increasingly be seen as the product of work rather than passive observation. Think, for instance, of the shift in news broadcasts from the weather map to the satellite image. Whereas the weather map represented through symbols (fronts, pressure 286 images achieve a further level of 'authority' simply by dint of their status as techoscientific objects which - at the end of the twentieth-century - ascribes to such images magical powers. Technology, it is assumed, helps us see better. Translating these inscriptions into the form of a satellite image, therefore, provides the sense that these images 'mirror' nature. This does not mean that the images are 'inaccurate' or 'misleading'; all representations of the forest involve practices by which the forest is turned into a code that can be read. Let me summarize the discussion so far. Far from 'mirroring' nature, these images construct a picture of the rainforests of Vancouver Island through a series of practices and technologies of inscription that translate what Bruno Latour (1987; 1993) calls the 'testimony of non-humans' into representations that can be read, compiled, compared and translated. The end result is to displace and simplify the complex landscapes of Vancouver Island into a code that can be read and understood at a glance - in essence, objects are turned into signs. None of this means that these images are untrue, or that the technicians that built these images were duplicitous, deliberately misleading viewers by falsifying data. It simply situates these images in the realm of practice - as a product of decisions made by actors in the midst of a variety of discursive, social, technical and institutional relations. Immutable mobiles: the virtual forest and its publics. Images like these are socially useful at various levels. It is simply impossible to bring along the forests of Vancouver Island every time one wants to talk about them. One can only appeal to the 'virtual forest' -maps, figures, diagrams and photographs. Inscriptions like these allow us to point to things in the 'larger world'. Hence, part of the 'work' that this image does is allow us to grasp the forest as a whole. At any one location in the forest we would be unable to see systems, etc.) the satellite images appears to present the referent itself in its full presence. Indeed, today symbols are often superimposed on these satellite images as if to clarify nature's complexity for the viewer. But there is a built in assumption here: provided with enough training in reading 'nature itself we too would be able to understand the image without an iconography that increasingly appears anachronistic. The Weather Network, for instance, now often shows satellite images accompanied only by music. 287 patterns. Like Emily Carr, we would be left with 'impressions' and 'interpretations', not facts. Indeed, we are so familiar with talking about the 'forest' that we forget that if we took away these inscriptions the 'forest' would disappear - we would have only the trees that surrounded us.\" Inscriptions, then, produce the 'objects' around which further decisions and calculations can be made. As Latour (1995a) explains, in order to have knowledge of the forest we first must lose the forest, we must turn it into a code that can be read. Part of the social power of such images, of course, is that they have the property of being mobile. I can't bring along the forest, but I can bring along a representative. Moreover, even if one did succeed in moving part of the forest, a single tree perhaps -roots, soil and all - one would be limited by the fact that it could only be at one place at any one time. Thus, a further significance of images like these is that they can be reproduced and thus be in many places at once. Finally, moving trees can be a risky business; they often die. Even if we succeed, they often are transformed en route -branches break, leaves turn yellow, others fall off. The final product is often disappointing. The third notable aspect of these images is that they can move and remain unchanged - in other words, they can be immutable as they move.12 Thus, inscriptions like the Sierra Club images are important because, once 'fixed' (such as the poster that I have above my computer) they can have the quality of being at once mobile and immutable. Latour points to the printing press as perhaps the prime example of the production of immutable mobiles, but the same can be said of all forms of mechanical reproduction. What the printing press provided was the possibility of both increased immutability (many identical copies) and increased mobility (an exponential increase in the number of copies). 1 1 By extension, of course, a discourse of conservation could emerge only subsequent to the technologies and practices that made any one resource visible. 12Because Latour finds his examples in print culture he misses one of the important ways that immutability is itself a construction. With the global spread of electronically mediated communication, data bases and computer programs, images can be changed. More often than not, immutability is now a result of political considerations. 288 The significance of such immutable mobiles then, is not that they mirror a reality - a point to which I will turn shortly - but that they permit movement across space: The links between different places in time and space are completely modified by this fantastic acceleration of immutable mobiles which circulate everywhere and in all directions....For the first time, a location can accumulate other places far away in space and time and present them synoptically to the eye; better yet, this synoptic presentation...can be spread with no modification to other places and made available at other times. (Latour 1986:11, italics mine) Previously - as in the case of texts copied by hand - representations remained local and temporary simply because there was no way to move their results elsewhere without new corruptions or errors being introduced. However, it must be noted that immutable mobiles - despite appearances - are neutral on the question of accuracy. Rather, they are about consistency: \"no matter how inaccurate these traces might be at first, they will all become accurate just as a consequence of more mobilization and more immutability\" (Latour 1986:12). This is not to suggest that accuracy or adequacy are not important, only that -as Latour notes - to show an inscription to be inaccurate requires the mobilization of resources and allies by which to produce other, more convincing inscriptions. The consequences of such immutable mobiles in the context of British Columbia's environmental disputes are easily seen. What images such as the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society maps provide for is the possibility of mobilizing resources around the image. This is in part the effect of the map's perspective which enables the viewer to grasp the scene as a 'whole'. Moreover, the images facilitate the mobilization of publics and resources mfar away places - whether members of the Green Party in Germany or members of the actors guild in Los Angeles.13 At every site to which these immutable mobiles are disseminated, it becomes possible to 'see' the 'liquidation' of the ancient forest. It is something that we can point to with certainty; it is there in the pictures. Activists, students, newspaper 1 3 Immutable mobiles, like the Sierra Club images - can link Oliver Stone in Hollywood, with Robert Kennedy Jr. in New York and the band Midnight Oil in Australia. All have become involved in efforts to 'save' BC's 'ancient temperate rainforests'. 289 publishers, consumers: all can see that the forest is disappearing.u Indeed, without such inscriptions, the object - 'the ancient rainforest' - remains outside politics. Convincing allies, then, is all about inventing objects that have the properties of being mobile, immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another. Maps, tables, graphs, texts: in the midst of the conflict over B.C's temperate rainforests, these make an agonistic situation more favorable for different social actors. Into the Black Box: Cascades of Inscriptions. Describing these maps as inscriptions, however, is significant not solely because it allows us to see how the object defines a public and a space of politics. In addition it places attention specifically on how the image is the product of specific practices, instruments, competencies and negotiations. Most immediately, as we have seen, the image combines and translates material from multiple sources (satellite photographs, biogeoclimatic maps, forest inventories, air photographs), mixes these with the skills of technicians, the competencies of various instruments (computers, software, satellite technologies, cameras, printers) and the guiding metaphors and concepts of sciences like ecology (about more later). Moreover, behind each inscription lies a further 'cascade' of inscriptions. Forest cover inventories - which cartographers combined with satellite photographs to produce the 1990 image - were built in part from aerial photographs. From these Forest Ministry personnel were able to determine the age of trees. Yet, these photographs would by themselves tell technicians little if it were not for stereoscopes and a set of techniques and calculations that enable air photo interpreters to estimate the height of individual trees. In other words, before these I4In his Beyond Sovereign Territory, Kuehls (1996) suggests that environmental issues undermine notions of national sovereignty. In short, Kuehls argues that \"descriptions of political space that isolate politics to particular institutions that contain sovereign authorities and are themselves contained within particular territories barely begin to capture the diversity of the space of (eco)politics.\" (p. x). Kuehls argument is an important ecological challenge to traditional notions of how the land is made an object of sovereignty. However, it is equally true that in ecopolitics sovereignty is undermined by immutable mobiles whereby 'local' ecological issues are displaced into global arenas. The transnationalization of Clayoquot Sound, for instance, was facilitated in large measure by the circulation of images like those produced by the Sierra Club. 290 photographs can be used to compile forest cover inventories, they must themselves be reduced and simplified into inscriptions that can be read. In turn, height measurements must be compared with tables that relate height with age for individual tree species, and that are based on yet further practices, including the field observations of forest mensurationists. For forest mensurationists, climbing each tree with a measuring tape is impractical (not to mention dangerous). Even at this level we find the use of further instruments. Thus, at every level and behind every inscription one finds yet another set of instruments and inscriptions that can be related, combined, and translated. Why emphasize that behind any one inscription lies a 'cascade' of inscriptions? First, and most obviously, as much as images speak of the world, they are resolutely the product of many specific practices. This does not mean that they are only a social construct, but rather that at every level can be found the mixing together of the testimony of non-humans, the witnessing of humans (or their delegates) and practices and technologies of writing (Latour 1987): in short, the images reflect nature less than they define a network of actors. Second, at each step we find an inscription that has obtained the status of 'fact', or, in other words, that has become a 'black box'. For every 'fact' there is a hidden history of agonistic struggles that involved mobilizing allies (instruments, other inscriptions, texts) so as to solidify the 'truthfulness' of one statement over and against others. Thus, third, the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society image - itself attaining the status of a 'black box' - combines and relates a series of other inscriptions whose histories are condensed into the 'now-time' of the single transparent object. Histories and practices recede from the two dimensional field, and in their place appears the object itself. Yet, should any of these black boxes be opened and its contents questioned - for instance, should the ecological differences between mountain hemlock forests and western hemlock forests are shown to be insignificant in contrast to their similarities - then the cascade of inscriptions is suddenly shown for what it is: a series of statements that had at some earlier point had simply become too costly to contest. By describing the Sierra Club/Wilderness 291 Society map as an inscription that mobilizes other inscriptions, it becomes possible to trace and thus contest specific sites along the way. This can occur, of course, only through yet another process of mobilizing allies. (Re)drawing lines in the forest. Let us return again to the images of Vancouver Island. As I explained before, the map consists of a series of colour-coded regions. Each colour represents a type of 'ground cover'. There are only 'solid' colours and no 'shades'. This is significant for several reasons. First, the effect of these images is that specific island landscapes are made to appear as if characterized more by their differences than by their similarities. Urban areas - even though often highly vegetated - appear as entirely 'unnatural', 'bog forests' - even though they may contain many of the same species - are presented as having no relation to contiguous tracts of 'ancient rainforest'. Reinforced by illusions of objectivity built into the 'view from above', the viewer is left with the impression that these stark divisions can be found in nature 'itself. This is worth emphasis. One does not simply step across a line from one 'biogeoclimatic' type to another. Certainly, when one ascends a mountain one is surrounded by gradients of change, yet a variety of ecological relations occur between different plants, animals, soils and water at different scales. Likewise, a whole series of physical exchanges occur between cities and their surroundings. 'Communities' and 'ecosystems' do not pre-exist their construction. Keeping in mind Haraway's (1992) injunction that biology is a discourse, not the world itself, we can recognize that the lines drawn on the biogeoclimatic maps which were enrolled in the construction of the Sierra Club images are those of biogeographers (and their technical, technical and often tenured allies), not nature. As Haraway has shown in the case of biology, this raises a series of important questions about what informs how these distinctions are drawn, an issue I will turn to in more detail later (see section 6.3). 292 Second, if we look closely we will see that there is only one significant difference between the two images: the proportions of the map coloured green or yellow. The other coloured regions - bog, mountain hemlock forest, bare rock, water - remain the same. 'Developed' areas expand, but since the growth of these areas is at the expense of 'already modified' lands this is considered inconsequential. The eye is not drawn to these areas which are coded dull gray (perhaps appropriately, given the dreary compromised places that preservationists assume cities to be), and with insufficient contrast from the light yellow of modified regions, the observer must make an effort to note changes in its extent. Put simply, developed areas do not 'threaten' ancient forests; they threaten already 'modified' landscapes and since the ecological integrity of these areas is supposedly already compromised, there is little reason for alarm. The difference between 'modified' and 'developed' is thus not thought to matter as much as that between 'intact' and 'modified' (although, as I will argue later, it may be precisely the former boundary around which resources should be mobilized). In short, the map has one preoccupation - the line separating 'ancient' forests from 'modified landscapes'. The distinction drawn is stark. Yet, as I noted earlier, satellite photographs of Vancouver Island from space would reveal the island to be almost uniformly green -conveying the opposite from what the two groups desired. The various colours used to distinguish 'ancient' forests from 'modified' land, 'mountain hemlock forests', 'ice', 'rock', 'cities', and the like, have therefore been chosen by the Wilderness Society's computer cartographers in order to draw attention to some distinctions and not others. This means that the map is neither inaccurate nor merely ideological.15 It is, after all, 15This is an important distinction that bears restating. To claim that the map is inaccurate or ideological is to accept was Timothy Mitchell has called a 'modern enchantment', that 'truth' lies outside and beyond representation, rather than explore how 'truth' is always an effect of representation. It is precisely through this modern metaphysics, Mitchell argues, that power operates. It is important not to take this to mean that the Sierra Club images are untruthful, that we should not construct aggregate images that suggest totalities across which change can be observed and measured, or even that individuals should not be concerned about environments that are not immediate contiguous. It simply means attention must be paid to the production of the image and its effects - to how these images creates the 'effect' of the real and to the play of power and knowledge at work in any such representation. Here is the crux: to claim the image to be not untruthful is not 293 deeply empirical - the distinctions that are made, the boundaries drawn, the colours chosen, are all based on differences that are 'out there', that can be located, mapped, counted, represented. What is important is not whether these distinctions can be drawn, but rather, how these differences are constructed, how it is that one set of objects is identified and set apart from others, and how it is that these are considered the differences that matter. It is to this that I wish to now turn. If the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society images narrate a highly specific account by locating and marking particular boundaries, this is not because they are built on sentiment rather than science. The opposite is just as likely true. Most preservationists would say that the map draws the distinctions it does because ecology tells us that these are the ones that are important. Indeed, since Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring, ecology has often been the court of appeal for preservationists. Yet, ecology is a discourse, not nature itself; its knowledges are at once cultural, political and contestable. It has its own histories. So, while these images assume an unambiguous ecological foundation, ecology, it turns out, can provide many different accounts of which differences matter and why. In the next section I open up this 'black box' in order to explore how certain strains of ecology inform these images, and, in particular, the boundary that is drawn between 'ancient' and 'modified' forests. to say that the image is true. To critique the image is not to fall into a debate about (mis)representation. Rather the question of truth is continuously displaced in favour of a series of other questions. In what way does the image build its 'truth-effect'? What is left 'outside' the frame? In other words, what is excluded in order to make a coherent picture? What stories does the image permit us to tell, and which are made mute? Are there other stories that could be told that, while no more 'mirrors' of an external 'reality' than any other, we may find more socially useful? 294 Dreams of unity: equilibrium, holism, and the tragedy of human perturbance Forests are interconnected webs which focus on sustaining the whole, not on the production of any one part or commodity... .Each group of organisms... is essential to the survival and healthy functioning of the forest. Plants and animals, the easily visible components of a forest, and microorganisms, the unseen components, are all manifestations of a fragile network of soil, water, sun, and air. (Hammond, 1991:15). The organicism of the Romantic movement leavened the early development of ecological thought. Strains of this nineteenth century romanticism persist in scientific concepts like ecosystem, climax, and equilibrium....By their very nature these ecological concepts are ready-made to highlight human disturbance of the natural order from which modern humanity is, by definition, alienated. (Demeritt 1994a:25). Ecosystems and equilibrium. Why does the Sierra Club draw its lines in the forest where it does? One of the principles organizing this, I argue, can be found in the central metaphors and concepts of ecosystem ecology. Joel Hagen (1992), in his book^4n entangled bank, traces the origins of ecosystem ecology to Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. To Darwin, Hagen suggests, modern ecology owes its understanding of 'life' as a 'web of complex relations' - the recognition that species do not exist independently, often form interacting groups and, even if indirectly, work to regulate the population of other species. From Spenser, modern ecology is said to derive its 'organismal' analogies, whether in the notion of plant 'communities' developed Frederic Clements, or later with the 'systems ecology' of Howard and Eugene Odum and the idea of self-regulating natural systems. Hagen might be faulted in the manner that he sketches a linear history of a discipline, emphasizing narrative continuity and conceiving the discipline as if it unrolled smoothly and inevitably from year to year, when, in reality, what is known as 'ecology' at the end of the twentieth century is perhaps more accurately seen as the product of multiple histories and practices (from US atomic weapons programs to cybernetics, including any number of technical innovations unrelated to the discipline, institutional structures that facilitated research and 295 cultural narratives that provided guiding metaphors).16 However, one of the strengths of his book is to show the surprising continuity of organismic metaphors in our understandings of plants, animals and their environments - from early ecologists to the present Gaia hypothesis.17 Indeed, in the Gaia hypothesis Hogan identifies two related ideas that he claims are woven through the modern history of ecology: that nature is self-regulating, and that this self-regulation is analogous to homeostatic mechanisms in organisms and cybernetic controls in automated machines. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Hagen claims, made the same claim about the biosphere almost half a century ago, and ecosystem ecologists, most notably the Odum brothers, have generalized this idea to apply to all ecosystems. It is possible to find these notions prevalent before Hutchinson. Clements is widely seen as most responsible for institutionalizing both the notion of 'community' and the sense that plant communities - like organisms - had life cycles (stages of succession which ended in maturity much like an infant matures into an adult). Plant communities, for Clements, were 'complex organisms' and their functioning could be explained in terms of the activities of its parts. Individual organisms acted on and reacted to each other (as did the physical environment) in a self-sustaining manner. Thus, nature tended towards equilibrium: first, because communities progressively stabilized their environments (became self-perpetuating), and because communities formed barriers to invasion. \"Such a 16The French historian of science, Gaston Bachelard, is perhaps most reponsible for the view that science cannot be understood through a progressive, linear history. Robert Young (1990:50) summarizes Bachelard as arguing that, The temporality of science cannot be accommodated to the rhythms of traditional historiography...[which understands history] solely in terms of precursors and anachronistic anticipations of modern ideas in early thinkers, as if science unrolled smoothly and inevitably from year to year. The problem with this approach is that it overestimates the extent of narrative continuity in the history of science which... works rather by sudden disruptions, discontinuities and entire reorganizations of its principles....Major transformations cannot be mapped onto the model of a continuous history, for its stress on putative anticipations fails to account for the way in which the whole form of knowledge can be transformed and a new understanding created. 1 7 A number of other intellectual historians have written histories of ecology. See Worster 1988, 1990; Botkin 1990; Bramwell 1989; Mcintosh 1985, 1987. 296 climax is permanent because of its entire harmony with a stable habitat,\" Clements (1928:99) wrote, \"It will persist just as long as the climate remains unchanged, always providing that migration does not bring in a dominant from another region. \" I 8 In other words, this 'climax' stage was capable of perpetuating itself forever unless something 'interfered'. Despite efforts by later biologists to dispense with Clements' organismic metaphors, his ideas of 'community' and 'stability' would remain influential, contributing a compelling intellectual approach to research for future ecologists, and, perhaps more importantly, a set of mobile and easily understood concepts that could move about in the social world. After World War II few ecologists continued to believe that a community or ecosystem was an organism, yet, in important ways, ecologists continued to believe that these 'higher level systems' behaved somewhat like organisms. Succession remained the paradigmatic example, but a host of other notions - the 'cycling' of energy and materials, 'specialization' and 'niches' within 'food chains', energy 'flows', 'metabolism' - permitted nature to be seen in terms of systems of interacting elements that formed a closely and intricately woven fabric.19. These metaphors did not disappear with attempts to place ecology on the level of other 'hard sciences' like physics in the 1960s. Rather they were reworked in new ways as ecologists drew on insights from cybernetics - the science for designing self-regulating machines such as guided missiles and thermostats - which was in a sense ready-made for picturing the 'budgets' and 'cycles' of ecosystems. Cybernetic devices - like thermostats -exhibit 'purposeful' behaviour continually regulating the operation through a set of feedback loops that keep the machine at equilibrium. Likewise, ecosystems, already l8Clement also stressed the dynamic character of plant communities. Yet, the point that bears stressing is that his writings gave themselves easily to such holistic interpretations and were often read this way. 1 9As Hagen notes, individual ecologists could often hold contradictory views. The animal ecologist Charles Elton, from whom we owe the term 'food chain' could write of nature as consisting of 'automatic balanced systems' while also holding that '\"the balance of nature' does not exist and perhaps never has existed.\" (quoted in Hagen 1992:57,58). 297 understood through notions of balance and self-regulation, could now be pictured as a 'feedback loop of energy flows' that kept communities in balance.20 Indeed, since the 1970s, countless North American biology students have been taught to see 'nature' through the now well-known diagrams of energy flows produced by Howard Odum (see Figure 6.2). A n exhaustive account of the history of ecology is not necessary to recognize the ways that holistic metaphors are woven into many of its central concepts, nor to show how the science of ecology forms a constellations of ideas and images that have in turn shaped the distinctions that we commonly 'see' in nature. In brief, organismic metaphors allowed nature to be understood in terms of: (Afunctional relationships, including at the level of ecosystems whereby the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts; (2) equilibrium, such that the introduction of change is seen as 'unnatural'; and (3) self-regulation, which allows equilibrium to be seen as internal to ecosystems. These concepts have not only influenced how we 'see' nature, but also how it is produced. Howard Odum's energy budgets, for instance, and the systems theory of the 'new ecologists' more generally, provided new and powerful ways of envisioning how nature works and which could be given a strongly managerial bent. This is true of the models of systems theory more generally, which invite the manager to see the world as regulated by a series of measurable relations and feedbacks that can be manipulated to achieve a desired result. In other words, for some, ecosystem ecology provided a picture of nature's 'machinery', and this authorized humans to become nature's 'mechanic', manipulating 'natural' ecosystems or creating 'artificial' ones (Hagen 1992). Howard Odum, for example, envisioned waste management schemes that circulated municipal waste water through existing local aquatic ecosystems. Nutrients, removed by microbes could serve as a base for vibrant food chains, including harvestable species like crabs. Clean effluent could then be reused as drinking water. The 'new ecology' Donald Worster writes 20See Alston Chase (1995) for a good discussion of cybernetics and ecology. 298 E X P O R T Figure 6.2. Nature as system. Howard Odum's conceptions of (a) Energy flows and (b) Material flows in a simple terrestrial ecosystem. Source; Stoddart (1994). 299 (1988:313) was 'almost perfectly tailored' for the needs of modern conservation: \"A traffic controller or warehouse superintendent could not ask for a more well-programmed world....it was perhaps inevitable that ecology too would come to emphasize the flow of goods and services - or of energy - in a kind of automated, robotized, pacified nature.\"2' Worster's critique notwithstanding, it is equally true that ecosystem ecology has been a rich source of images and concepts for the environmental movement, especially for those interested in the preservation of wilderness. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. To begin, systems ecology, with its functional view of self-regulating ecosystems, offered a new holism that was still deeply imbued with romantic and holistic tropes. Alston Chase (1995:7) suggests that it is precisely this holism that allowed North America's environmental movements to wed 'ecology' with 'preservation'. Instead of being reductionist, [ecology] was holistic; and rather than being morally neutral, it appeared to carry an important ethical message. Based on the notion that nature was organized into networks of interconnected parts called ecosystems, the new science seemed to say that conditions were good so long as ecosystems kept all their parts and remained in balance. Combining the ecosystem idea with the nature worship they had inherited from early preservationists, the more radical activists conceived a unique ideology, eventually called biocentrism. If everything is dependent on everything else, they reasoned, then all living things are of equal worth, and the health of the whole - the ecosystem - takes precedence over the needs and interests of individuals....The metaphor of the ecosystem revived the notion of nature as purposive and as the foundation of value. Since an ecosystem's \"health\" - that is, its stability - was the highest good, then any human activity that upset this balance was not merely mistaken but immoral. Second, ecologists - like biologists - studied external nature: natural systems from which by definition, people are excluded. Framed in these terms, people are seen as potential agents of disruption of nature's equilibrium. If natural systems were indeed intricate networks of relations where each part was dependent upon, and maintained, the 'fragile In an eloquent passage Worster (1988:313) captures not only the conservation ethic that systems theory could underwrite, but also its aesthetic: \"[In] Eugene Odum's flow-charts of an ecosystem, all the energy lines move smartly along, converging here and shooting off there, looping back to where they began and following the thermodynamic arrows in a mannerly march toward the exit points.\" 300 network', then 'outside' intervention of any sort in any place - however small - could be seen as altering the whole. Such views were popularized in the 1970s by writers like Barry Commoner. Commoner's four 'laws' of ecology - everything is connected to everything else; everything has to go somewhere; nature knows best; there is no such thing as a free lunch - drew explicitly on notions of nature's unity and externality and he has since argued (1990:14) that \"any distortion of an ecological cycle....leads unavoidably to harmful effects\" (emphasis mine). The ecosystem, after all - Commoner (1975:11) wrote - is \"consistent with itself\". Indeed, just as systems ecology could result in an aesthetic of efficiency - where the diagram of energy flows becomes an aesthetic object in its own right - so also the 'ecosystem', with its delicate, intricate relations and timeless equilibrium, could be aestheticized as a holistic order. It is important to recognize that Commoner's Romanticism is not something that ecology has been added to. Today's environmental movement in North America does not misuse ecology when they 'see' nature in this way. As Demeritt argues (1994a:25), \"the organicism of the Romantic movement leavened the early development of ecological thought.\" Nineteenth-century Romanticism - although far from a cohesive or unified aesthetic - circled around such holistic notions of 'interconnectedness' and 'balance', and this aesthetic can be seen latent in twentieth-century concepts like ecosystems, equilibrium, and self-regulation. Indeed, if the Romantics in the 1800s saw nature as a system of necessary relationships \"that cannot be disturbed in even the most inconspicuous way without changing, perhaps destroying, the equilibrium of the whole\" (Worster 1988:82), then it should not be surprising that these notions circle back into popular culture today through systems ecology, with its notions of an 'external' nature operating in a self-regulating homoestasis, and that this should provide a language that at the end of the twentieth-century valorizes 'untouched' nature and highlights human disturbance. Romanticism valorizes precisely that which can be seen to be 'free' of (modern) human influences - the 'pristine', the 'natural', the 'wild' , the 'primitive' and so on. Only 301 in places unmarked by the repressive constraints of civilization could the individual experience nature's higher order, the paradoxical freedom of nature's laws. Ecosystem ecology - with the legacies of Romanticism built in - helped a neo-Romantic environmentalism reaffirm its belief in a timeless natural harmony which lay external to human culture. Once 'spoiled': nature no longer had this essential unity or moral order. Nature 'spoiled' or Nature 'saved': Dividing BC's forests into binary poles. The Sierra Club/Wilderness Society images - with their alarming account of the forest's 'disappearance' - draw implicitly on holistic notions of equilibrium, and the allied assumptions that human disturbance is by definition - simply because it interrupts this homeostasis - bad. Indeed, if the forest is defined by its intricate balance, then following human modification, it is no longer a forest. It is, simply, a 'modified landscape'. In the stark line drawn between 'ancient' and 'modified' forests, the Sierra Club maps - quite literally - the rhetorics of a romantic ecology and an 'industrial nostalgia' onto the landscape: \"effectively, the end of the ancient rainforest will occur...when the last of the remaining intact watersheds are opened for development\" (Sierra Club 1991:4). These holistic rhetorics are common among BC environmental groups and advocates of the 'new forestry'. 'Ancient' temperate rainforests are seen as 'interconnected webs' and 'fragile networks' in which individual organisms and abiotic elements have specific 'functions'. As forestry critic Herb Hammond (1991:15) writes at the beginning of his widely-read treatise on wholistic forest use, \"each group of organisms... is essential to the survival and healthy functioning of the forest\" through a series of \"checks and balances\". Forest trees, for instance, can be seen to form the critical function of regulating the water cycle (and thus also maintaining healthy streams and wildlife populations). Hammond's holistic (and somewhat apocalyptic) imagery is worth quoting at length. 302 Trees are biological pumps which pull water out of the soil through deep root systems, use the water for growth processes, and finally return it to the atmosphere as water vapor. Large trees can pump more than 100 gallons of moisture into the atmosphere every 24 hours. Without forests and older trees to pump and distribute water vapor, many areas once forested become considerably drier. Parts of the Sahara Desert were once a forest. Tree cover slows the melting of snow in the spring in forested watersheds. Snow melt water is thus released later from ridges and mountain slopes that have a mantle of trees than from slopes that are open. This hydrological effect results in a more even flow of water from a forest than from an extensively cleared areas. Decaying wood in fallen trees and in the soil acts as a sponge. Water is slowly metered into surrounding areas from the forest 'reservoir'. Healthy tree cover avoids spring floods and fall droughts, and provides a water filtration system that far surpasses technological systems (p. 17, italics mine). Echoes of a planned and purposeful cosmos are more than faintly discernible: it is as if trees were made with a purpose. Drift from Nature's plan? Parts of the Sahara Desert were once a forest. Elsewhere in Hammond's text animals and plants are seen to have symbiotic relationships. Plants provide food and habitat, shade streams, reduce moisture loss, protect young trees and furnish nutrients for others - \"from bacteria to bears, slugs to salmon, earthworms to eagles, a wide variety of microscopic and macroscopic animals depend upon a diversity of forest communities\" (p. 18). Animals, on the other hand, provide functions needed to maintain the whole forest. The Columbia ground squirrel, we learn, contributes to soil enrichment. Its burrows consist of a variety of chambers connected by tunnels, these chambers are in turn used for \"food storage, sleeping quarters and bathrooms\", and the animal continuously brings vegetation to use for food and bedding. \"Plant matter is thereby mixed with soil and mineral matter to provide a balance of soil nutrients for the development of life throughout a forest. Organic material found in the bathroom chamber is 'redi-mixed'\" (p. 19). What emerges in the pages of Hammond's treatise, and others similar to it, is a picture of a complex, integrated, self-regulating whole. Every organism has a function, from the large trees to the smallest soil microbe (Figure 6.3). Change occurs - squirrels burrow, plants and animals die, rivers erode their banks, etc. - but the ecosystem maintains 303 Figure 6.3. Nature as harmony. \"Forests are an interconnected web which focuses on sustaining the whole\" (Hammond 1991:15). Source Hammond (1991). 304 equilibrium. In short, nature - even with its regimes of disturbance - maintains a regulated balance: the sum of any ecosystem is always greater than its parts. What is at stake here is not whether such physical relations exist - in other words, whether trees regulate hydrology, or whether ground squirrels mix plant matter with soil and mineral matter. No doubt they do. What I want to draw attention to is the manner in which concepts derived from ecosystem ecology underwrite rhetorics that see in the action of individual actors the unfolding of a greater, purposive whole (and to which humans are external). It is precisely this, I argue, that licenses environmentalists to draw stark categorical distinctions between 'natural' ecosystems and 'modified' landscapes. For groups like the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and the Sierra Club of Western Canada, once human activity modifies a landscape it is no longer a natural system, its equilibrium is disturbed and the consequences reverberate across a variety of sites and scales, from the local stream to the global biosphere. Everything, after all, is interconnected. It should come as little surprise, then, that BC's environmental movement has put considerable emphasis on clearcutting. Clearcuts - perhaps more than any other forestry practice - appear to disrupt (if not destroy) nature's balance. When juxtaposed against images of 'untouched wilderness', photographs of clearcuts play on precisely this notion that human activity interrupts 'natural' processes and that once disturbed nature will never return to its 'original' state. (See Figure 6.4). Yet, pictures of clearcuts tell us nothing about their ecology. Likewise, the Sierra Club map of 'ancient' temperate rainforests is not a map of ecological relations, or even of 'habitat' - it is a map that does no more than distinguish those areas that still show no signs of human activity from those where the 'original' nature - with its assumed equilibrium and balance - has been disturbed. It is only when a distinction like this is made that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (1993:B4), writing for the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council, is able to draw an equivalence between forestry (the use of forest resources) and deforestation (the destruction of forest 305 Figure 6.4. Clayoquot Sound: Clearcut Sound. The binary logic of industrial nostalgia. 306 ecosystems, usually through conversions to other uses). In British Columbia, Kennedy writes, \"deforestation rates rival those in tropical rainforests and threaten to exterminate North America's last accessible coastal rainforests and associated rivers and estuarine eco-systems\" (emphasis mine).22 The Western Canada Wilderness Committee (1994) makes a similar claim about the disappearance of the forest. \"Coastal temperate rainforests have always been a rare ecotype on Earth. After the last ice age they covered only 0.2 percent of Earth's land area. Today 90 percent of these wild forests are gone. The 10 percent that is left - one-quarter of it in B .C . - is disappearing at an accelerating rate.\" Or, in the words of the Sierra Legal Defense Fund (n.d.): \"The temperate rainforest in BC .... is rapidly being lost by clearcutting.\" Temperate rainforests grow back, of course, although, depending upon the forestry practices used, their ecologies will not be the same. The yellow areas on the Sierra Club map may be 'modified' landscapes, but they are predominantly forested. They are temperate rainforests. Yet, in the rhetorics of the environment movement, underwritten by the romanticist tropes of ecology, there are only two binary poles: either 'Nature spoiled' or 'Nature saved': either 'yellow' or 'green'. A l l eyes anxiously follow this shifting boundary. As I will explain shortly, there are good reasons to think carefully about types of human disturbance, especially in terms of their relation to the mechanisms and structure of any ecosystem. The environmental movement has placed necessary attention on the unique habitat that exists only with the structure of old-growth forests, and the problems encountered in sustaining old-growth dependent species when these forests become fragmented. These issues must be taken seriously, and in some cases - if sustaining specific populations or avoiding threats to extinction of specific species is our goal -forestry activity may need to be completely halted. However, as I will demonstrate in the next section, a concern over 'ecologizing' human activity - that is, modifying human 22This same discourse of disturbance as destruction underlies the comparison between Canadian forestry practices and Brazil's forest clearing for other land-uses. In this case the distinction 'modified landscape' is duplicitous. Not all landscapes are modified in the same way. 307 activities like forestry in accordance with knowledges produced by science - is, at the end of the twentieth-century, very different to calls to preserve 'intact' those areas not yet 'spoiled' by human activity.23 Perhaps an ecological vision can be forged that is not preoccupied with the line between the Garden of Eden and a fallen, humanized nature. Dynamic ecology When we clearcut or highgrade the forest, it becomes fragmented. The connections are broken....The flow of water and energy and the movement of plants and animals are disrupted. (Hammond 1991:90) We have tended to view nature as a Kodachrome still-life, much like a tourist-guide illustration of La Salute; but nature is a moving picture show. (Botkin 1990:6). A n ecology of chaos. If the Sierra Club map - imbued with a romantic ecology -distinguishes between 'modified' and 'intact' ecosystems, it also assumes a distinction between 'history' and a world of 'timeless' harmony. Like primitive cultures, those areas that remain green remain in a realm outside history. Like aboriginal people in power boats or wielding chainsaws, areas coded yellow are polluted by history and thus cut off from their natural existence. There is no middle ground. Such assumptions are increasingly under attack, and they are under attack from precisely the science that the environmental movement has derived so many of its central concepts: ecology. Recent research in ecology has begun to question whether equilibrium and homeostasis really do characterize how nature works. In place of the confident assertions of systems-ecologists about the ordered, self-regulating, and teleological nature of ecosystems, 'dynamic ecologists' have placed an increasing emphasis on contingency and change. One of the important consequences of the new interest in change has been that the 'old' ecology, from which many in the environmental movement have derived their 23Ecologizing society - which I take here to mean reorganizing aspects of social life in ways that are responsible to the ecological consequences of social activity (burning fossil fuels, draining wetlands, chemical pollution, rampant development, etc.) - must always be a reflexive activity that keeps a clear focus on the how ecological knowledges are formed, mobilized and interpreted. 308 guiding metaphors, increasingly appears thoroughly imbricated with culture.24 Moreover, critics of systems-ecology argue that the 'old' ecology tended to be ahistorical in two important respects. First, systems-ecologists rarely examined the history of ecology, borrowing many of their models and metaphors from the development and application of systems-theory in other disciplines. Thus, the argument goes, they failed to recognize the various debates around equilibrium and disequilibrium earlier in the century. Worster (1990:8) notes, for instance, that Gleason's critique of Clement's characterization of communities as 'super-organisms' was simply not read by systems-ecology and has only recently been recuperated. Second, and more importantly, systems-ecologists tended to ignore the role of history in ecological relations. This is true of systems theory more generally, which tended to calibrate its models in abstract time rather than history (see Gregory 1985). As Daniel Botkin (1990:9) argues, their models of energy flows and trophic regimes left no place for historical effects: \"Predominant theories in ecology either presumed or had as a necessary consequence a very strict concept of a highly structured, ordered, and regulated, steady-state ecological system. Change now appears to be intrinsic and natural at many scales of time and space in the biosphere.\" This rethinking of ecology's central concepts has hinged to a large degree on the reconstruction of historical climate change (local and global).25 In other words, in order to contest the models of the systems-ecologists, it was necessary to construct other As is common in histories of science the use of phrases like 'old' and 'new' is meant to imply a sharp break between discredited accounts and objective knowledges. In Bachelard's words, \"contemporary science is able to designate itself, through its revolutionary discoveries, as a liquidation of a past. Here discoveries are exhibited which send back all recent history to the level of prehistory.\" (Bachelard 1982.137, translated and quoted by Robert Young 1990:49). 2 5As important as paleontological records have been for the recent emphasis on disequilibrium, it has not been the only source for this change. Population and evolutionary ecologists, for instance, with their emphasis on individuals, have questioned whether 'ecosystems' exist 'in reality', or whether it is more accurate to see nature as a continually shifting mosaic of individual organisms. Seen in this light, it is difficult to see the 'ecosystem' through 'organismic' metaphors, not to see ecosystems as having 'goals' (i.e. stability). Finally, although Howard Odum was himself one of the strongest advocates of ecosystem ecology, his reduction of ecology to a network of energy flows opened the doors to the recognition that 'ecosystems' were not 'closed' - that is, that there were continual 'inputs' and 'outputs', and thus, that 'homeostasis' was not an essential component of ecosystems. 309 inscriptions that could sway participants in scientific debates to a different position. In this case, climate records - constructed from pollen samples and simplified into graphs of mean annual global temperatures provided a nexus from which to construct alternate accounts. These records, it is now asserted, tell us that \"for the last 50 years or 500 or 1,000 - as long as anyone would claim for 'ecological time' - there has never been an interval when temperature was in a steady state with symmetrical fluctuations about a mean....Only on the longest time scale, 100,000 years, is there a tendency toward cyclical variation, and the cycles are asymmetrical, with a mean much different from today\". (Davis 1986: 269). The focus on historical climate change has had far reaching consequences. First, ecologists have had to rethink whether the 'community' or 'ecosystem' was the logical level of analysis. Add time to the equation, and a good many other factors other than then self-regulating qualities of ecosystems suddenly seemed more important to why particular constellation of plants and animals are found in any given site at any particular historical moment. Second, attention became re-oriented away from equilibrium. Climate change became seen as simply the largest 'scale' of what was becoming the new fascination of ecologists: disturbance.26 Fire, windstorms, invading populations, soil movements, floods, volcanic eruptions, climate change, even the daily activities of individual organisms like squirrels introduced continuous change. Ecosystems, stripped of their self-regulating order, now became seen as 'mosaics of environmental conditions' characterized by heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, by change at every temporal and geographical scale rather than equilibrium or 'steady-state' climax communities. Forests without teleology. Seen through this lens, Pacific Northwest forestry conflicts take on a different look. Recent evidence from paleogeography, for instance, now suggests that Worster (1990:9), still fighting a rearguard action against the new 'ecology of chaos', complains that in the 1980s \"it was as though scientists were out looking strenuously for signs of disturbance in nature.\" 310 many of our assumptions about Pacific Northwest rainforests are untenable. Further, they undermine many of the notions of 'stability' put forward by preservationists. \" [Old growth forests] developed relatively recently on an evolutionary time scale and probably do not represent a coevolved complex of species bound together by tightly linked and balanced interactions....It is clear that vegetation has responded continuously to a varying array of climatic conditions....No millennium has been exactly like any other during the last 20,000 years.\" (Cathy Whitlock 1992:22, italics mine).27 These debates in ecology would matter little if, to borrow a metaphor from Emily Martin (1996), the citadel of science was not so porous. Yet, as Worster and Botkin note from opposite sides of the debate, the shift from notions of 'steady-state' ecosystems to one where change is the new catch-phrase, has opened a Pandora's box. At least since the 1960s, ecology has provided normative foundations for social life. If our long-standing notions of a divinely-ordered creation provided us with some sense of what was natural or normal and thus allowed us to, if not order human activities around the norms revealed by ecology, then at least to convene a debate over whether we should, then dynamic ecology raises a series of troubling questions about how precisely people are supposed to behave in such a universe. \"What, after all,\" Worster asks, \"does the phrase 'environmental damage' mean in a world of so much natural chaos?\" (1990:16). How does one measure the health of the planet as a whole if biological systems are inherently unstable and if evolutionary change continuously produces a constant steam of unique conditions? \"No single state of affairs,\" Alston Chase (1995:114) writes, \"can be either 'healthy' or 'unhealthy'. The earth can be 'healthy' for humans or 'healthy' for dinosaurs, but it is never just plain healthy. Habitat can be good for deer or good for owls, but never merely good for wildlife\". 27It should be noted also that evolutionary biology - with its emphasis on populations - has put in question the notion that an ecosystem is the site of 'coevolution'. Rather, an 'ecosystem' is no more than a 'snapshot' of multiple evolutions operating on various temporal and spatial scales. Since the concept of ecosystem treats historical entities through ahistorical models, it is possible to argue that 'ecosystems' exist only as freeze-frames, and that any map of 'interrelations' and 'energy flows' is outdated the moment it is fixed. 311 The 'ecology of chaos' makes it increasingly difficult to justify the stark boundaries between an untouched 'ancient forest' and 'modified landscapes' drawn by the Sierra Club. Industry, in response, has increasingly called upon the new 'ecology of chaos' to undermine the criticism of environmentalists and to justify their own actions. So, on the one hand, Herb Hammond (1991:90), a critic of present forestry, writes: \"When we clearcut or highgrade the forest, it becomes fragmented. The connections are broken....The flow of water and energy and the movement of plants and animals are disrupted.\" (italics mine) On the other hand, Hamish Kimmins (1992:20), a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia, and a self-styled demystifier of the 'misrepresentations' of the environmental movement, writes: \"So often the argument is about the present condition of a particular forest ecosystem rather than how that ecosystem will change over time... .The concerns of environmentalists about forests have frequently been presented in pictures of clearcuts, slashburned sites, or soil erosion taken in the initial weeks or months after the event, with little or no evaluation of how long such conditions will persist. This 'snapshot' evaluation of what are in reality dynamic and ever-changing ecosystem conditions can lead to a serious misrepresentation of the ecological impact of natural or management-induced disturbance. The images of 'ecosystem destruction' as they are often called, become framed, unchanging, in the back of people's minds, like pictures on a wall. In contrast, the ecological processes of ecosystem recovery in the real world steadily return the disturbed forest through successive serai stages back toward the pre-disturbance condition.\" Although Kimmins readily admits that the modified forest will always be different than that which is replaced, he suggests that this is not a travesty. What is being replaced, after all, is by no means a static, unchanging essence, but rather an accident of historical conditions: \"the single most fundamental characteristic of ecosystems is that they change over time\" (p. 88). The forest has no teleology which humans 'interrupt', change is neither 'unnatural' or 'bad'; moreover, if nature has no plan, then there is no 'nature' that can stand as the objective measure against which human interventions should be judged. 312 As important, Kimmins argues, the modified forest is no less an ecosystem than the forest replaced.28 Indeed, what is important for Kimmins is not whether ecosystems are disrupted by humans, but precisely what kind of disruptions take place. Here dynamic ecology provides Kimmins with an understanding of disturbance that refuses to make clear, unambiguous distinctions between 'natural' and 'human' changes. Kimmins notes, for instance, that forests - whether temperate rainforests, northern boreal forests, or the hardwood forests of the N E States - all have disturbance regimes. In the temperate rainforests of Vancouver Island, these disturbances come in a variety of forms and at a variety of scales. They range from autogenic change caused by the plants themselves, to large-scale windthrow on the scale of several hundred hectares and, ultimately, to climate change measured in the order of decades, centuries and millennium.29 The temperate rainforests on the island, for instance, are now thought to have first appeared only in 5,000 BP, after the retreat of the glaciers that covered the island during the last ice-age and the gradual build-up of soils in their wake (Whitlock 1992). Thus, these forests are relatively young, younger yet at higher elevations. The important issue, Kimmins concludes, is not whether disturbance is caused by humans or non-humans, but whether - if forest renewal is what is socially desirable - the ecological mechanisms for recovery have been damaged. \"Just because a clearcut looks ugly says absolutely nothing about whether these mechanisms have been impaired.\" (p. 85). The effects of clearcutting, Kimmins notes, can be considerable, ranging from large changes in microclimates, the alteration of soil microbes and organic matter, reduced soil stability on steep slopes, relative advantages and disadvantages for various species of wildlife, changes in the quality, quantity and timing of water flows in streams, even carbon storage and global warming. But, warns Kimmins, ecology cannot tell us whether these 28See Harvey (1993) and Ross (1994) for excellent discussions of how cities are just as much ecosystems as pristine river valleys. 9Most windthrow on the west coast of Vancouver Island are small in scale (individual trees or clusters). Fire, the main cause of disturbance in other temperate rainforests is rare, and where they occur, they are rarely extensive. 313 changes are good or bad - it is mute on whether an old-growth forest is better or worse than a young forest or a clearcut: \"there is no basis in the science of ecology for saying a spotted owl in an old-growth forest is better or worse than a sparrow in a clearcut\" (p. 28). 3 0 Kimmins suggests that attention should not be focused only on the removal of trees from the forest, something that occurs every day 'in nature'. Rather, he argues that it is changes to soils and climate that determine the biological potential of the forest environment, and thus it is these that are of more concern than shorter-term changes (often aesthetic) in plants, animals and microbes caused by natural or human disturbance. \"Urbanites\" Kimmins complains, \"have lost touch with nature and have little understanding of the ebb and flow of natural change and its time scales.... The challenge is to separate the changes that constitute a real threat to the sustainability of the biosphysical resources from those that do not....The view that a forest ecosystem is like an ancient art treasure that, once destroyed, can never be recreated needs to be analyzed.\" (pp. 22, 25). As a first step to renovating these assumptions, Kimmins introduces the need to think not only temporally but also spatially. Whether or not forest conditions are re-established - and colonization by animals and plants occurs - after any specific disturbance, depends in large measure on what is being done to the landscape as a whole. Critics like Hammond and other 'new forestry' advocates have placed considerable emphasis on the problem of the 'fragmented' forest, arguing that this makes the movement of species between habitats, or the possibility of re-colonizing habitats after regeneration more difficult. Fragmentation therefore threatens biodiversity. Kimmins paints a more complicated picture. Distinguishing between alpha diversity (the number of species in a 30Alston Chase (1995) presents a similar argument that questions the environmental movement's quick adoption of the notion of biodiversity. The preservation of such species as the spotted owl is necessary, preservationists argue, because the loss of any one species threatens the whole: \"biodiversity resembles a hammock\" writes prominent B.C. environmentalist Tzeporah Berman. \"As destructive industrial practices like clearcutting dramatically alter existing ecosystems\" she continues, \"species go exist, the hammock unravels. Eventually the hammock can no longer hold anything\" (Berman, 1994:6). Chase, on the other hand, points to numerous examples where ecosystems are relatively simple yet remarkably stable. 314 given ecosystem type); beta diversity (the difference in species composition between the different ecosystems found in a particular landscape); geographical species diversity (the variation in the species list across large regional geographical units); temporal diversity (the change in the species list and vegetation structure of a particular ecosystem over time); and genetic diversity (the amount of genetic variation within a particular species in a particular ecosystem and across its geographical range), Kimmins suggests that the question of the effect of clearcuts on biodiversity is invariably complex. By making these distinctions, Kimmins argues that alpha diversity at any given stage in the forest's development after a disturbance may not be as important to the functioning of ecosystems as some think. This is due in part to what he calls 'redundancies' between species, and in part because, given proper forest management that takes into consideration the spatial and temporal patterns of the forest, 'modified' forests can be re-colonized by species from other nearby forested regions as they advance through different serai stages. \"One is left to conclude\" Kimmins writes, \"that for most forests, the overall functioning of the ecosystem will generally continue regardless of a periodic loss of individual species because of disturbance.\" (p. 164). The implications are considerable. Kimmins concludes this discussion with a statement meant to undermine the holism of the preservationists' romantic ecology. Environmentalists have frequently suggested that we should maintain 'current' (or 'pre-European' in the case of North America) levels of biodiversity and species ranges. This implies that the present condition of the world's ecosystems is the way nature intended it to be, an implication that is scientifically insupportable. Climates have always been changing and will always change. Many species have occupied their present geographical distributions for only the past few centuries or millennia, and are still changing their range in the wake of the last glacial period, or at least of the 'little ice age' in the Middle Ages. Many ecosystems owe their present condition to wind, fire, and past timber harvesting or deforestation for agriculture. Their present species diversity and structure reflect human and natural history and not what the forest would look like after five hundred years of development in the absence of disturbance. 315 In most forests, biodiversity is not a fixed, God-given thing but a complex and ever-changing ecosystem and landscape characteristic. We must decide what biodiversity we want to have in our forests, and then design and implement management systems that will achieve this goal....We probably should endeavor to keep all the parts as we 'tinker' with forest ecosystems. This means maintaining species and species ranges wherever possible. It does not mean that the ecosystem will fail to function unless every species is present in every ecosystem all the time. A broad landscape view of biodiversity makes more sense than a very narrow local view.\" (p. 165). Is this simply an apologetics for industry? Worster worries that the new fascination with disturbance, disharmony and chaos has resulted in a situation where conservation \"is often not even a remote concern\" (1990:3). If for John Muir, the lesson of 'complexity' was that people ought to 'love and preserve nature', then Worster suggests that the lessons of the new ecology of chaos - although also concerned with nature's complexity - are far more ambivalent, if not politically regressive. \"What is there to love and preserve,\" he asks, \"in a universe of chaos\" (1990:16). Indeed, a focus on disequilibrium authorizes statements that would have been ignominious only ten years previous. Near the end of his book, a somewhat cavalier Kimmins writes, \"we know that nature periodically 'throws away' many ecosystem 'parts' as a result of disturbance. The resulting forests are often different to some degree from those they replace, but they generally work just fine.\" (p. 166). Ecology, it seems, can be mobilized to very different ends. Ecologizing forestry: the Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound Given the emphasis placed on scientific legitimations by actors on all sides of BC forestry debates, it was almost inevitable that a scientific panel convened by the provincial government in 1993 and charged with reviewing current forestry practices in Clayoquot Sound would have a substantial public profile. Faced with massive opposition to its 1993 Clayoquot Sound land-use plan, and the widely divergent claims of industry and 316 environmental activists over the consequences of logging the region's forests, the British Columbia government established a 'blue-ribbon' panel of 'scientific experts' to review current standards for forest practices in the region.31 Indeed, the Province put considerable effort into finding the 'best' available scholars for the panel, often individuals considered by their peers to be international leaders. Although such inquiries have often been criticized as ineffective or as little more than a form of state legitimation, this panel and its subsequent reports carried particular significance. Both the environmental movement, and industry, as we have seen, had appealed to the authority of science in their objections to, or advocacy for, industrial forestry. In essence, by so doing, both groups established a political terrain in which the findings of the panel would hold considerable weight. It would be difficult - given the wider appeal to 'ecology', and the stature of the panel's members - to find a higher court of appeal.32 To argue against the report would be to argue against science. When the final report was released in April 1995 it was an immediate bestseller. Managing the garden: locating the differences that matter. For the purpose of my argument it is unnecessary to go into the panel's ninety-seven recommendations in any detail. Rather, by drawing out some of the key issues addressed by the panel, it may be possible to imagine new maps of 'nature' on Vancouver Island that attend to nature's production rather than anxiously watching a line between the 'pristine' and the 'humanized'. As 31The panel was announced by Premier Mike Harcourt on October 22, 1993 and charged with \"scientifically reviewing current forest practices standards in Clayoquot Sound and recommending changes to existing standards to ensure that these practices are sustainable\" (Report 5:1). Most immediately, the panel was created in response to the recommendations of CORE commissioner Stephen Owen. Although the panel's terms of reference focus on defining sustainable practices for what is known as General Integrated Management Areas in Clayoquot Sound (those areas where logging would be permitted), the panel reports consider the region as a whole, and argued that planning could not be limited only to these regions, but had to take into account a wider landscape. 32This did not stop some in the environmental movement from arguing that the panel was compromised from the beginning by its mandate (forestry in the region was assumed) and by its tied to the state (which, the argument goes, has a vested interest in seeing logging continue in the region as part of its management and administration of local populations and regional economies). 317 important, the panel's findings - and wide public following - suggest that ecology (with all its internal disputes) is increasingly informing the organization of social life, including labour. Thus, by exploring the panel's recommendations it may be possible not only to see how changing conceptions in ecology are resulting in changing practices, but possible also to imagine an environmentalism for the twenty-first century that takes seriously social and cultural politics of nature's construction. Central to the panel's findings was a call to re-orient forestry from the management of sustainable yield to the management of sustainable ecosystems. In other words, the panel members equated the sustainability of resources and resource values with maintaining ecosystem productivity and connections. In practice, the panel argued that this should translate into levels of cut being seen as an output of a comprehensive planning and inventory program, rather than determined prior. Where previously the annual allowable cut (AAC) of any given tenure was based on existing timber inventories and a specified rotation age (the 'normal' forest), such that logging plans revolved around meeting annual quotas, panel members now suggested that the rate of cut be tied instead to a planning process that took as its first principle the maintenance of ecosystem mechanisms and that specific logging plans be made only subsequent to the determination of how the ecosystem 'works'. Although this emphasis on ecosystem sustainability appears at first glance to mirror the concerns of the environmental movement, it is, in effect, very different. First, although set resolutely against the 'timber bias' of current forest management, the panel's recommendations invoke ecology without at the same time wrapping it in the romantic notions of a timeless, balanced nature or in calls to preserve 'intact' wilderness. Consistent with recent work in the physical and earth sciences, panel members placed considerable emphasis on both interconnections and disturbance. So, while drawing attention to how energy and matter flow through the landscape, thereby relating what appear to be discrete organisms and geophysical elements and raising important questions 318 about disruption, the panel also argued that one of the most important distinguishing characteristic of any one ecosystem is its natural disturbance regime. Thus, they argue that, There is a continual turnover of living organisms - even in what appear to be stable ecosystems. Forest trees are long-lived but not immortal. (Scientific Panel 1995b: 17). Like Kimmins, the panel refuses to make a categorical distinction between human and non-human disturbance. Wild forests renew themselves naturally in a manner that depends on the natural disturbance regime of their region. Logging is a recent disturbance that inevitably alters the pattern of renewal. Ecological knowledge can be used, however, to ensure that the changes caused by logging, and the forests that regenerate after logging, are not dramatically different from those created by the natural disturbance regime. Forest practices that approximate natural disturbance regimes help to retain ecosystem processes and maintain ecosystem productivity and connections, (p. 17) There are several important implications that derive from this statement. First, attention shifts away from disturbance-as-destruction to disturbance-as-renewal. Given this, the question at issue is no longer how to limit human disturbance, but rather, whether human disturbance can be managed to fit within a broad range and scale (temporal and spatial) of disturbance regimes and patterns of forest renewal found in the region. Change may be natural, yet this does not keep the panel from suggesting criteria by which to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' change. This is done through returning to the questions of method and scale. Dividing the Clayoquot region into biogeoclimatic units (each further subdivided into 'zones', 'subzones', and 'variants'), the panel differentiates between different disturbance regimes in these units and subsequent forest renewal patterns. Disturbance regimes and their effects are seen to vary geographically. Thus, rather than generalizing all human disturbances as the 'same' (whether seen as good or bad), the panel suggests that forest planning must account for spatial variations in disturbance regimes. From ecosystem ecology, North American environmentalism has borrowed notions of 'function' and 'interconnectedness'. The whole is seen as more than the some of the 319 parts, such that any intervention has negative effects. The panel departs from this understanding in ways that of fundamental importance. By differentiating between the relative importance of different aspects of each ecosystem, panel members shifted attention away from halting human modification to that of paying close attention to how different actions at different sites have particular consequences. Hydroriparian ecosystems, for instance, are signaled out as of particular importance in areas like Clayoquot Sound. Not only are these areas the focus of activity for a large portion of all fauna, and contain the most diverse flora, they are essentially \"the skeleton and circulation system of the ecological landscape Events far upstream...can influence downstream characteristics and organisms\" (p. xiii). The scale of disturbance is equally as important. Most obviously this means the extent of any one disturbance (most 'natural' disturbances in the Sound are relatively small, while large stand-replacing disturbances occur with much less frequency). As important, dramatic change in the rate of disturbance must also be taken into account, as this may change the balance of available habitats and affect the viability of many species (p. 16). The lessons from ecology told by the scientific panel are thus somewhat different from both BC's environmental movement and writers like Kimmins. Ecology is the knowledge of interactions between organisms and their environment, and of flows of energy and matter. It says nothing about whether humans should be part of this. It makes no evaluation about whether 'wilderness' is preferable to 'modified' landscapes, or whether human disturbance is better or worse than natural disturbance. But neither does the panel equate human and natural disturbance. To say that they are not different in kind is not the same as saying that they are identical or that no statements can be made about which differences matter. The regenerating forest following logging is not the same as that which regenerates after windthrow, just as the latter differs in significant ways from that which emerges after fire or slope failure. Where Kimmins simply adds clearcuts to a long list of 320 forest disturbances, the scientific panel asks pointed questions about their differences without sliding into a romantic distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural' forces. One of the most significant aspects of the scientific panel's report is therefore found in its recommended re-organization of forestry planning. If, as the panel argues, the starting point for forestry decisions is the sustainability of the productivity and connections of any ecosystem, then planning must shift away from an approach that is organized around the maximization of timber values and which uses 'administrative' rather than 'ecological' boundaries (the legacy of the Sloan Commission), to one that begins with what might be called 'ecosystem' values and which adopts physiographic or ecological land units (such as watersheds) as the basis for planning. In turn, rather than plan for harvesting in terms of volume removed, the panel suggests that foresters recognize that the rate (percentage of area cut per unit time) and geographical distribution of timber harvesting are more important determinants of how forestry should proceed. Only after the analysis of existing resources and the development of area-based plans, will it be possible to determine the anticipated annual volumes of timber to be cut for watershed-level planning units (p. 154). Further, because ecological processes occur over time and space, planning for any one unit must always look beyond both the present and the specific boundaries of the site. Thus, the panel suggests that the greatest attention be paid to 'watershed level' planning, and that this be done on a hundred-year time horizon. This is the case, they argue, because it as this level that the 'cumulative effects' of specific land uses most impact ecosystems. Each watershed, then, can be planned in such a way as to 'maintain long-term ecosystem integrity' (see Table 6.1). Finally, site-level planning within watersheds permits the form and method of individual harvesting sites to be tailored to the general watershed objectives. For instance, various silvicultural methods can be employed, such as variable-retention, which allow the forester to integrate specific working units into the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole. 321 Table 6.1. Watershed planning, as outlined by the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel Steps: 1. the identification and description of the region's environmental resources, natural processes and cultural, scenic and recreational values. 2. the mapping and designation as 'reserves' those areas within the watershed that a. contribute significantly to maintaining watershed integrity and habitats of aquatic and terrestrial organisms. b. are of special significance for First Nations people c. or have high recreational and scenic significance. 3. the mapping and designation as 'harvestable areas' those within the watershed where forest harvesting will not compromise the long-term integrity of the forest ecosystem 4. the development of management plans for harvestable areas that respect the 'sensitivity' of resources to harvesting and other development by: a. ensuring that rate-of-cut constraints are observed and determining appropriate watershed-specific rates for harvesting b. projecting an appropriate pattern and distribution of roads and cutting units c. identifying post-harvesting management and restoration activities. d. developing watershed-level plans for resources other than timber 5. the identification of species especially sensitive to human disturbance, the mapping of their required habitats, etc. 6. the design and implementation of monitoring programs. Source: Scientific Panel (1995b) Landscape ecology: nature after the 'end' of nature While I have gone into some detail to explain the panel's recommendations, the point has not been to initiate a discussion about whether these recommendations are the right ones. Rather, it is to mark an important shift in the language and vocabulary of human-322 environment relations, one that is ongoing and not without its own complications and contradictions and which is also in part a product of changing concepts in ecology. The panel's recommendations parallel developments in landscape ecology - a new and growing field of research and professional management. Founded to a large extent on the legacies of ecosystem ecology and its insistence on interconnections, landscape ecology seek to reintegrate 'landscape' within the horizon of planning and thus to move beyond the specifics of individual 'sites' in order to take a wider view that understands both natural and social processes across time and space. What this permits, as Alexander Wilson (1991) notes in his rediscovery of Ian McHarg's Design with Nature, are approaches that 'bring nature into the city', or, in other words, ecologize social life. In this light, Wilson points to 'restoration ecology' as a promising example of how landscape work is able to bring together communities and professionals around the questions of place, landscape and nature. Restoration ecology is, he writes, \"dedicated to restoring the Earth to health. Restoration is the literal reconstruction of natural and historic landscapes....[it] seeks out places to repair the biosphere, to recreate habitat, to breach the ruptures and disconnections that agriculture and urbanization have brought to the landscape\" (pp. 113, 115). If this sounds like an 'ecological imperative', it is not far off the mark, for even Wilson underlines that McHarg's work rests on a sort of ecological determinism. However, Wilson notes throughout his book that our ideas about nature are always 'culturally mediated' and thus the notion of organizing social life around 'ecological' knowledges emerges is far from unproblematic: what is an authentic landscape, what is native, or original, or natural? Thus, Restoring landscape is not about preserving lands - \"saving what's left,\" as it's often put. Restoration recognizes that once lands have been \"disturbed\" - worked, lived on, meddled with, developed - they require human intervention and care. We must build landscapes that heal, connect and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and with the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are 323 never without meaning. Nature parks cannot do this work. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea of nature that includes human culture and human livelihood....Unlike preservationism, [restoration ecology] is not an elegiac exercise. Rather than eulogize what industrial civilization has destroyed, restoration proposes a new environmental ethic. Its projects demonstrate that humans must intervene in nature, must garden it, participate in it. Restoration thus nurtures a new appreciation of working landscapes, those places that actively figure a harmonious dwelling-in-the world the boundaries of the garden have become less distinct (pp. 17, 115). Admittedly, Wilson's reading of restoration ecology is highly particular - many practitioners see their role as that of restoring 'pre-Columbian' natures, mirroring the same distinctions between 'pristine' and 'spoiled' natures that Wilson wishes to avoid. Indeed, the vocabulary often employed - exotic species, feral animals - reveal a preoccupation with a 'pre-contact' nature where America was 'pristine' prior to contact, and where agency in ecological transformation lay entirely with European settlers. When Aldo Leopold stated in 1934 that he wanted \"to reconstruct...a sample of original Wisconsin,\" he meant, \"what Dane County looked like when our ancestors arrived here during the 1840s\" (quoted in Chase 1995:112). Wilson's sympathetic rendering of restoration ecology is thus in itself an attempt to bend the new discipline away from such deeply nostalgic inclinations.33 Although in broad agreement with Wilson's beginning premise that \"North American nature is a socially constructed environment\", Neil Smith (1996:44-46) finds Wilson's appeal to 'restoration' problematic. First, Smith finds in Wilson's work \"a yearning for an unnecessarily nostalgic and one-dimensional re-immersion in nature\", betrayed by notions of repairing 'ruptures', 'mimicking' nature, and restoring a 'harmonious dwelling-in-nature'. \"If not quite elegiac\" Smith writes, \"this vision nonetheless embodies a romantic universalist view of human society and nature\", one that, further, \"utterly forgets the vicious extemalization of nature as object of capitalist labour. And forgets too that universal nature is every bit as much a capitalist as a pre- and post- capitalist project.\" The outlines of this critique are, I think, well-founded. Wilson often uses the language of ecology and some of its holistic inclinations uncritically, and, likewise, the significance of (global) capital in environmental change is often downplayed in favour of 'cultural' explanations (hence the 'modest localism' inherent in Wilson's new environmentalism which implies the possibility of 'delinking' local economies - and ecologies - from global capitalist relations). Yet, Smith's critique seems somewhat uncharitable: it is difficult to read in Wilson a nostalgic desire for return or retrieval, nor an unsophisticated ecologism. On the contrary, Wilson continuously brings us face-to-face with the paradoxical condition of nature at the fin-de-siecle: on the one hand, 'nature' is culturally mediated; yet, on the other, it is our home -it is, in Donna Haraway's terms - a 'common place' that we cannot not desire. In the complex world of local-global circuits, technological innovation and ecological relations to dwell is to never return, but to be always in some way 'out of place'. I read all of this into Wilson's statement that \"all of that calls for a new culture of nature, and it cannot come soon enough\" (p. 17). 324 Seen this way, the 'findings' of the scientific panel are highly significant. Despite the panel's report being a 'scientific' document, it is also a social document.34 It is about people living on the land, about working out an idea of nature that includes human culture and human livelihood. Nature is not external. Human activities are not 'unnatural', nor should they be seen as invariably 'destructive'. Back to the future? The problem of wilderness \"I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever Everything that exists in time runs out of time some day\" (Bruce Cockburn, \"Mighty trucks of midnight\") We mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture's problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem (Cronon 1995:70). Let us return to the Sierra Club image a final time. I have suggested that the image embodies a set of assumptions about how nature works, assumptions deeply marked by romanticism and a wilderness ethic, tied to notions of ecosystem stability and self-regulation: Nature's own plan, in which humans have their preassigned place. When preservationists claim that the forests are being 'liquidated' they are not referring to the reduction of temperate rainforest ecosystems (although that is what the image implies). Rather, they refer simply to the reduction of those areas of the ecosystem that show no visible signs of human alteration, those areas that can still be seen to operate by nature's own plan - undisturbed. Is this an environmentalism for the twenty-first century? A n increasing number of critics - many who consider themselves environmentalists - are saying no. The attempt to shift North American environmentalism away from its preoccupation with wilderness (\"big forests\" in the language of Earth Firstler Dave Foreman) takes 34Although a social document, the panel included no social scientists, re-inforcing a distinction between objective science and 'values'. 325 several forms. Most directly, some worry whether preservation - precisely because it is built on notions of stable environments - is 'anti-ecological'. In other words, preservation entails fighting change, yet change is precisely what many ecologists now claim distinguishes how nature works. The model of the steady-state ecosystem has in the past worked to confer legitimacy on the claims of those who sought to rescue wilderness, but today, the same science tells a different story - that the 'old' ecology was infused by aesthetics. Species go extinct every day we are now told, and this is not recent - they have done so for millions of years. How does one distinguish, then, between natural and human-induced extinctions? If change is the dominant characteristic, then the earth's history is one of distinctive historical conditions that favored different species. Take the whooping crane. Scientists have gathered considerable evidence that this bird was on the verge of extinction immediately prior to the arrival of Europeans on the western plains, with populations as low as 1,500 (Chase 1995). Indeed, populations of the species likely were highest in the period immediately following the last ice-age when vast regions of the continent were wetlands. With the drying of the continent, populations declined. No doubt hunters quickened the pace of the species' disappearance, but there are good reasons to believe that the millions of dollars being spent annually on maintaining or marginally increasing whooping crane populations in Alberta and Texas are in a sense fighting a 'natural' extinction. Likewise, preservation of 'unique' temperate rainforests ecosystems may draw boundaries around a forest that will look very different a century from now. As Cathy Whitlock (1992:22) has noted in relation to Pacific Northwest forests, \"conservation efforts that emphasize the preservation of communities or vegetation types will probably be unsuccessful because future climate changes quite likely will dismantle the community or vegetation type of concern.\" Indeed, preservation requires the active management of the nature preserved, contradicting the rhetorics of 'pristine' wilderness that underlies its preservation to begin with. After all, from Yellowstone in the United States to Tsavo National Park in Kenya, letting nature 'be' has resulted in an undesired nature! 326 More than this, though, by drawing together two separate ideas - that nature is 'external' and that nature is 'self-regulating' - and then locating authority in ecology, North American environmentalists may have given too much away. In the absence of an environmental critique that asks hard questions about what differences matter and how humans should inhabit working landscapes, the transnational forestry companies now working the BC forests can claim to be 'ecological', one among many 'natural agents' of change. By not taking seriously nature as dynamic, and humanized landscapes as not ontologically different from 'untouched' lands, environmentalists today find themselves holding an impoverished vocabulary and unable to adequately address a growing backlash against 'tree huggers' that has itself rallied behind 'dynamic ecology' to equate all change (human and nonhuman) as the same. What North American environmentalism desperately needs is a shift in focus from preserving 'intact' wilderness to talking about how different changes matter. Ironically, by focusing on 'pristine' nature, the environmental movement risks losing the battle for sustainable ecosystems. Finally, and equally as important, critics have raised other concerns about both the social and environmental consequences of romantic environmentalism. The focus on preservation, these critics argue, has been not only anti-ecological, but risks being anti-environmental. William Cronon has been among the most vocal (and most eloquent) in his criticism. By distinguishing between 'pristine' nature and 'fallen' nature, he argues, we evade more important responsibilities. If nature - to be truly natural - must be unhumanized, then those areas that are humanized are no longer of environmental concern. Issues around health and environment in urban settings, for instance, are deemed inadequately environmental (see DiChiro 1995). Thus, the focus on wilderness shifts attention away from how we live daily. In an age of greenhouse gases, global warming, chemical pollution and so on, 'wilderness' might well be to political consciousness what Marx thought religion was more than a century earlier. Cronon makes this point succinctly: 327 The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world....Wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall... .If this is so - if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God's natural cathedral - then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We therefore leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature night actually look like....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 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.\" (Cronon, 1995:80-81). Equally as disconcerting, a focus on 'wilderness' removes focus from other environmental problems whose victims are primarily humans, for such problems usually surface in landscapes that have already 'fallen' and are no longer wild. Problems of occupational health and safety in industrial settings, toxic waste exposure, poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner city, famine and poverty and human suffering in the so-called 'overpopulated' places of the earth - in short, issues of environmental justice simply are assumed to be of less importance. In subtle ways, the preoccupation of North American environmentalists with wilderness is bound up with issues of class, race and gender. This is not simply because recreation in nature and preservation of 'pristine' nature are primarily pursuits of the white middle class, but because the focus of political energies are diverted from what may be more pressing environmental issues that affect those with less chance to be heard. The Sierra Club map, with its stark division between the 'pristine' and the 'spoiled' falls victim to this romantic environmentalism. Those areas that are not 'green' are of no 328 concern. They have been lost. As Robert Kennedy Jr. (1993), one of the 'stars' fighting the so-called liquidation of the 'ancient' temperate rainforest recently explained, there was no need to move logging into the old-growth of Clayoquot Sound, because \"enough uncut timber remains in already disturbed watersheds\". Yet, ecologists increasingly suggest that it is not human intervention that is problematic, it is the rate, scale and distribution of human disturbance. Ecological processes continue. Humanized landscapes are ecosystem's that must be carefully considered. If this is the case, then Kennedy's vision is profoundly anti-environmental, amounting to the preservation of what remains untouched by destroying, perhaps irreparably, that which is no longer 'virgin'. 3 5 It is perhaps time to dispense with 'wilderness', with notions of a static, unchanging, pre-human nature and time to think carefully about the connections between landscapes, to see the forest as a shifting mosaic of differences rather than a static essence. Perhaps it is time to be more 'realist', returning the yellow regions of the Sierra Club images to the satellite photograph's subtle shades of green, shades that suggest both differences and similarities, ruptures and connections, and more important, responsibility and dialogue about what nature we wish to inhabit, and how we get to that place. \"We need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it,\" Cronon (1995:85,88) writes, \"If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks on a fallen world, then the dilemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave.\" 35It should come as no surprise that the environmental rhetoric of 'spoiled' and 'unspoiled' wilderness mirrors the distinction between 'virgin' and 'whore'. Only the former needs to be protected, its honour fought for. The latter is forever despoiled. 329 CONCLUSION What kinds of marks do we wish to leave? If nature is neither external nor purposeful, then environmentalism can be reconceived in terms of nature's production rather than its preservation. This is no less a matter of attending to ecological issues than a radical 'biocentrism', it simply refuses to see 'ecology' outside the human relations with which it is always articulated. Thus, far from beginning with the question of how we can hold culture apart from nature, the pressing issue becomes that of determining in what form, and with which social relations, we wish to continue remaking the natures of which we are a part. We may well decide to limit the role humans play in certain ecologies, but this will be seen for what it is (and always has been) - a decision that is social and political rather than solely ecological. The question of nature's production is shadowed by a second question: whose voices should be heard in debates over nature's remaking? In this study I have related nature's materialization in and through various discursive, social and technological relations with the delineation and delegation of authority. The ways that we 'enframe' nature becomes implicated in its material production, but it also licenses certain people and social groups to be nature's representatives. The Sierra Club maps that I examined in the last chapter make visible the 'disappearance' of the forest, position viewers as 'witnesses' to its destruction and thus call them to act. Around this image can be gathered both a constituency and a politics. What I intentionally left unremarked in the last chapter was the 'absence' that allows this position as the rainforest's 'defender' to be taken up so unproblematically by people living in Vancouver, Los Angeles and London. Not only does the Sierra Club's 'satellite effect' permit viewers to grasp the forest as a 'whole' - and thus recognize the 330 extent of the 'crisis' - but it locates authority in the viewer by virtue of erasing locality. In order for the image to tell a singular story about the forest's disappearance at the hands of a rapacious humanity, the forest had to be abstracted from its myriad local contexts and recombined into a single picture. There is no sense that what is happening at different places on the island may be the result of very different kinds of actors and relations. The story is simply humanity liquidating the forest - the death of nature. Worse, at no point are the local communities whose residents are closely tied to the forest resource allowed to enter the frame. The image (and the guide that accompanies it) speak of the forest alone, an object that has an existence entirely apart from the people who live in it. Everywhere and in every way the disappearance of the forest is the same. There are no contingencies. Placed against the Sierra Club images, the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel is remarkable for more than its refusal to embrace a romantic ecology. It also refused to abstract the forest from its cultural surroundings. Among the 'experts' chosen to sit on the Panel were four members from three Nuu-chah-nulth bands in the Sound. I cannot here take up the complex and difficult questions of how 'ethnoscience' and 'Science' were related and combined in the Panel except to note that the inclusion of Nuu-chah-nulth representatives went some way towards resolving the perennial problem of Science 'speaking for' both nature and indigenous people.1 Rather, I want to quickly summarize the significance of the Panel for re-figuring both 'nature' and 'resources' as always already cultural. The Panel, no doubt in part due to the presence of First Nations representatives, interpreted the Premier's call to \"make forest practices in Clayoquot not only the best in the province, but the best in the world\" to be attainable only if these practices were related 1 As Bruno Latour (1990) explains, a great divide is assumed to separate 'our' Science from 'their' ethnoscience, whereby it is the distance of their 'beliefs' from our 'knowledges' that must be explained. Thus, it appears entirely reasonable to write an anthropology of the sciences of the 'Other' (which relates their knowledges to 'social structure', 'religion', 'political organization', 'economy' and so on), but not of Science (see also Martin 1996). It is precisely this view which has allowed Science to proceed as somehow 'external' to society, and have also authorized 'our' scientists looking over the shoulders of 'other' societies in order to correct or align their 'beliefs' with truth. Only Western Science is not marked by culture. The inclusion of four Nuu-chah-nulth members made the operation of this ideological divide far more problematic 331 to and addressed the interests and concerns of the people living in the forest. In other words, the Panel argued that forest practices were poor if they abstracted the resource from its cultural surrounds and resituated it only in the realm of technical reason, precisely what occurs in the practices of transnational forestry companies and the Provincial forestry ministry (see Chapter 2). Ecologizing forestry was important, but ecology was defined widely in order to include rather than exclude people. Thus mapping ecological relations also meant mapping cultural relations. One of the important projects that the Panel initiated was an inventory of the plants and animals that were culturally important to the Nuu-chah-nulth and, also the cultural areas related to each resource use. In other words, the Panel mapped Nuu-chah-nulth territorialities back onto a landscape that had for many years been viewed in state and corporate planning as 'empty'. In turn, since the land was no longer wilderness, the Panel found that it could not make recommendations for revising forestry practices that did not include the Nuu-chah-nulth at every step. The resulting report was likely somewhat different from what the Premier first imagined. Not only did it recommend ways of ecologizing forestry (rather than continuing to abstract a single commodity from its physical relations), but it also re-visioned forest management in terms of the de-colonization struggles of local First Nations (rather than continuing to abstract the forest from its cultural relations). Thus, far from purifying 'nature' by rendering invisible the political, social and technical networks that are part of its production, the Panel began the difficult but crucial task of 'unthinking' the binary oppositions that have long underwritten colonial power in British Columbia. Rather than holding nature and culture apart, the Panel showed how nature was at every turn defined by a 'network' that mixed together politics with botany, native territoriality with watershed management, local communities with satellite photography. 332 The time/spaces of colonialism/postcolonialism At what point can we be said to have entered the 'post'-colonial? Certainly the experience of the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel suggests that steps have been taken towards de-colonization. Yet, at this study has shown, decolonization remains an uneven and uncertain process. For every Panel recommendation that disrupts a colonial visuality that separated First Nations from their lands, other representations that displace of the temperate rainforest continue to displace the land and its resources into the abstract spaces of the 'market', the 'nation', or even the 'biosphere'. Likewise, although the Nuu-chah-nulth now have far greater say over how forestry proceeds on their territories, they still retain few of its benefits. As I have shown in the various episodes that comprise this work, the 'post' in postcolonial must be deployed with care. Clayoquot Sound is still marked by the legacies of colonialism. Thus, as Stuart Hall (1996:247) explains, What 'post-colonial' certainly is not is one of those periodisations based on epochal 'stages', when everything is reversed at the same moment, all the old relations disappear for ever and entirely new ones come to replace them. Clearly, the disengagement from the colonizing process has been a long, drawn-out and differentiated affair. Yet, even if postcolonial societies are characterized by the persistence of the 'after-effects' of colonialism, its politics cannot be declared to be the same as they were during the time of direct colonial occupation, or assumed to take the same form across different sites. Hall's comments suggests the need to renovate our conceptions both of the 'time' of colonialism/postcolonialism and the 'site' of anti-colonial struggle. In the case of the former, if we are to comprehend how colonialist practices persist in the present while at the same time recognize the significant ruptures between the present and the past, it is necessary to disrupt our narratives of the contemporaneity and historical continuity of time. In short, the time of colonialism/postcolonialism is neither singular nor unified such that post-colonialism necessarily follows after and supersedes colonialism as a subsequent stage 333 in History. It is necessary, therefore, to be sensitive to the multiple temporalities of 'colonialism/postcolonialism', to the many condensations and ellipses that arise when these are convened in relation to each other, and the various temporal rhythms and spatialities that govern the emergence of colonialist or counter-colonialist representations and practices both in the past and the present. In short, the postcolonial present is not an 'essential section' with each level responding to the same historical dynamics. If there is no singular 'time' of colonialism/postcolonialism - but only the transient moment of many intersecting temporalities and spatialities drawn into relation - it is also impossible to speak of a singular colonial discourse. If we take colonial discourse to refer to the production and codification of knowledges that underwrite and legitimate the deployment of Western power over colonial subjects (Williams and Chrisman 1994), it must be recognized that this also occurs differentially through time and between places and cannot be approached as either a fixed or universal set of statements (see Thomas 1994). Quite the opposite - it can be argued that colonial power, far from monolithic, seizes upon, enlists and combines a range of discourses, knowledges and signifying practices (scientific, religious, aesthetic) which are not formally or ideologically aligned with colonial administration, but from which the demarcation and regulation of difference can be appropriated and used. In short, as Nicholas Thomas argues, there can be no global theory of colonial culture, only localized theories and historically specific accounts that provide insight into varied articulations of colonialist and counter-colonial representations and practices. Nor can there be global theories of decolonization. In either case, global theories are inattentive to the unevenness and particularity of specific colonial practices, processes of decolonization and continuing anti-colonial struggles, such that they project globally what are but local practices.2 It is precisely for this reason that attention must be paid to 2 This point has been made forcefully by a number of writers. See Mishra and Hodge 1991; McClintock 1992; Shohat 1992; Dirlik 1994; Thomas 1994; De Alva 1995. 334 the differences between and within postcolonial societies whereby the legacies of colonialism are experienced unevenly between social subjects and across space. Finally, to frame 'colonialism/postcolonialism' in this way also frames a politics. The persistence of the 'after-effects' of colonialism in the present is not the result of a singular unfolding history nor a unified colonialist system so much as the result of multiple mediations between a colonial past and a postcolonial present. Thus, a politics of decolonization must account for the different forms that colonialist practices take in the present and the many sites where they are found. This requires a dual strategy of differentiation - whereby the operation of, and resistance to, colonialist power is shown to be non-identical between different sites - and disruption - whereby the persistence of colonialist relations can be located and subverted in practices which may at first appear unrelated to the continued presence of the power relations generated by colonialism. Here I follow Shohat and Stam (1994), who have argued persuasively that 'residual traces' of European domination continue to organize and structure social life in North America in ways that are not always immediately visible. Rather, they take the form of 'buried epistemologies' or 'bad epistemic habits', informing many of the identities and categories that we take for granted in everyday life. As Mieke Bal (1991) has shown, disrupting the smooth working of these epistemologies is precisely what makes historical inquiry meaningful. Nature and colonialism/postcolonialism In this study I have argued that the materialization of nature on Canada's west coast is intimately related to the persistence of colonialist practices in the present and also to struggles of decolonization. In short the time/spaces of nature overlap and intersect with the time/spaces of colonialism/postcolonialism. This poses a problem for environmentalists and for geographers alike, who often take 'nature' to be a relatively unproblematic identity. 335 Indeed, geographers have only recently begun to recognize and interrogate the discipline's complicity with colonialism and imperialism (Driver 1992; Livingstone 1992; Godlewska and Smith 1994). This has take two forms. Some have mapped the links between individual geographers, geographical institutions and past colonial administrations, in essence, writing about how geographical knowledge was wielded in the interest of empire. Others, drawing on a very different concept of power, have explored in more detail the colonizing power inherent in particular ways of rendering landscapes 'visible': in other words, the intersection of modalities of power, knowledge and spatiality in specific colonial practices (Driver 1992; Gregory 1994; Ryan 1994). In the latter, the marginalization of colonial subjects is seen to occur in and through the production of space both by colonial officials, and by knowledge producing sciences like Geography. However, even though the motivation behind historical research resides resolutely in the present (see Driver 1988), in almost all of these cases colonialism is safely relegated to the past, or at most, the relation with the present remains only implied. Few attempts have been make to think about what might remain buried in contemporary concepts, knowledges and representations. Somewhat curiously, while geographers have paid considerable attention to the significance of the production and representation of space for (past) colonialpractices, less attention has been paid to the production and representation of nature.3 Geographers have had little to say about the role that the production of nature (rhetorically and materially) has played in the colonization of particular social environments, how natural scientists (including geographers) made visible and available to colonial administration a discrete 3 Geographers have written extensively on the representation of nature (for the classic account see Glacken 1967; Livingstone 1995 is one among many recent examples). One of the most important contributions of this literature has been to link the representation of nature with its transformation. However, although this study has also focused on these questions, its concerns are somewhat different. Rather than explore changing ideas about nature (which accepts nature as pre-existing its construction, and allows our representations to be evaluated in terms of accuracy), I have been most interested in the emergence of 'nature' as a discrete and separate object of aesthetic reflection, scientific inquiry and economic and political calculation. By attending to the mechanics of nature's construction, the cultural politics that accompany each and every staging of nature can be brought to the fore. 336 realm called 'nature' that could be seen as separate from colonized peoples, nor, perhaps more importantly, how what counts as nature today is often constituted within, and informed by, the legacies of colonialism, including precisely such representational practices as those engaged in by natural scientists. No doubt this is explained in part by the growing distance between critical human geography (concerned primarily with spatiality) and environmental geography (concerned mostly with the management of physical environments), such that both approaches all too often allow 'nature' to stand as anunproblematized, ahistorical 'object'. It may be necessary then - in light of the continuing presence of a colonial imagination in the present - to de-colonize common-sense notions of nature; that is, to locate, by attending to the 'mechanics' of nature's social construction, the operation of relations of colonial power in what has hitherto been seen as an inviolable identity. 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