Category: Excerpt

An Excerpt from Fire Survey of California by Stephen J. Pyne

Posted on August 10, 2018August 10, 2018 by Abby Mogollon

August 10, 2018

In the To The Last Smoke series Stephen J. Pyne describes the nation’s fire scene region by region. Today we offer an excerpt from California: A Fire Survey. Pyne is a historian in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of many successful books, mostly on wildland fire and its history, but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.

Conflagrating California
By Stephen J. Pyne

California burns, and frequently conﬂagrates. The coastal sage and shrublands burn. The mountain-encrusting chaparral burns. The montane woodlands burn. The conifer-clad Sierra Nevada burns. The patchy forests of isolated Sierra basins; the oak savannas, on hillsides turning golden in summer; the seasonal wetlands and tules; the rain-shadowed deserts, after watering by El Niño cloudbursts; the thick forests of the rumpled Coast Range; the steppe grasslands of the Modoc lava ﬁelds; sequoia, exotic brome, chamise, sugar pine—all burn according to local rhythms of wetting and drying. The roll call of combustible plants and places goes on and on. An estimated 54 percent of California ecosystems are ﬁre dependent, and most of the rest are ﬁre adapted. Only the most parched of Mojave deserts, stony summits, perennial wetlands, and fog-sodden patches of the coast are spared. Not only do ﬁres burn everywhere, but they can persist for weeks and can, from time to time, erupt into massive busts or savage outbursts. Fires can burn something every year. Fire season, so the saying goes, lasts 13 months. Like earthquakes, California experiences a constant background of tremors occasionally broken by a Big One.

This is not news. Anyone even casually familiar with California knows it burns, whether those ﬁres be conﬂagrating chamise or gas-combusting autos. In fact, most of the United States burns, or can burn, or has burned historically, and virtually every California ﬁre regime resembles those nearby. The northern Coast Ranges and Cascades burn like those in Oregon. The Central Valley is a larger, drier version of the Willamette. The Sierra Nevada looms like a gargantuan Sky Island, the lithic anchor for the Basin Range. The Mojave Desert laps into the Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts. California’s shrublands are Arizona’s on steroids. Each biota, in brief, has an echo elsewhere. Northern California has lightning ﬁre busts; so do the Cascades. Southern California has extensive burns; so does central Nevada. California slams disparate regimes together; so do most west-ern states. Eastern and western Washington, or northern and southern Idaho, have as little in common as the California’s postmodern pastiche.

Rather, what makes California’s ﬁre scene distinctive is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system and how its ﬁres burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state’s size and political power. California has not only a ferocity of ﬂame but a cultural intensity that few places can match. In the early years Northern California commanded the scene; after World War II, South-ern California; but the state as a whole has a concentrated ﬁrepower without parallel elsewhere. Northern California beat back the challenge from light-burning by devising systematic ﬁre protection: Southern California dampened the movement to restore ﬁre by pushing ﬁre management into an urban ﬁre-service model. In the pyrogeography of America, California is the great disturbance in the Force. In ways unmatched by any other region it has projected its presence—its ﬁres and ﬁre practices—throughout the country.

The reasons involve more than bigness alone. In some years Alaska has immense ﬁres, some the size of northeastern states, yet they do not upend national policies. Texas holds more land, and in recent years has been overrun by ﬁres larger in area than those that sweep California, yet those ﬂames have not bonded with a national agenda. New York has a similarly split geography between concentrated metropolis and rural countryside, with the “forever wild” Adirondacks as a wilderness backdrop, yet it remains invisible on the national ﬁre scene. By contrast, California’s ﬁres are instantly and hugely broadcast, they infect national institutions, they have repeatedly deﬁned the discourse of ﬁre’s history. No other state has so shaped the American way of ﬁre.

Along with Texas and Alaska, it has long behaved as a state-nation. The issue is more than size: Nevada is large, but until recently it grew as an appendage to California; its ﬁre busts pass through the national consciousness with no more eﬀect than wind gusts over a salt playa. The state-nations, by contrast, have unusual political histories, land owner-ship patterns, and creation stories that make them exceptional. Texas was a latent nation for nearly 10 years, although eﬀectively a protectorate of the United States; and when it entered the union, it did not surrender its unpatented lands. A large place with a small population, it never developed adequate institutions, relied on “big men” (large landowners or cattle or oil barons) to run society, and evolved a lively folk culture. Alaska was a territory for 90 years, geographically and politically isolated from the rest of the country, and when it was admitted, it was able to negotiate a division of lands and retain many federal subsidies not available elsewhere. Like Texas a high culture never took root and it had a distinctive origins myth. Unsurprisingly, both voice secessionist tendencies during times of stress. Texas tends to view the United States as France does the European Union, as a means to amplify and project Texas values. Alaska sees the United States as a source of economic subsidy, often behaving more like a country bonded under a commonwealth than like one of the 50 states.

California shares their size, political isolation, and sense of separate selfhood. It began—almost—as a separate country during the Bear Flag republic; by agreeing to accept existing Mexican land grants with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it carved out the choicest lands and created a pattern of large landowners; with the gold rush it has an origins myth founded on a peculiar dynamic of untrammeled individualism and in its early moments of unfettered exploitation. Unlike Alaska it has a fully functioning economy, although one sharply subsidized. Unlike Texas it has never confused size with signiﬁcance. It has been independent but never secessionist. Unlike Texas, too, it has a bond to high culture; from its onset it has attracted an urban and intellectual society, rich in literature, painting, and later ﬁlm, which it has reshaped and broadcast back across the country. And unlike Texas it has not exploited the national scene to magnify California sensibilities, but has seen itself as coalescing and shaping a national story, and even an international one. California’s is, paradoxically, a cosmopolitan parochialism. All this is reﬂected in the character of its ﬁres.

California is, in Wallace Stegner’s oft-repeated remark, like the rest of America only more so. Today, nearly one in nine Americans lives in California; the California economy is the eighth largest in the world; and depending on perspective California either anchors or weighs down national trends. The California ﬁre scene boasts commensurate dimensions. Southern California holds one of the three dominant wildland ﬁre cultures in the United States; it commands 50 percent of the national ﬁre budget, and an inordinate fraction of the nation’s fuels management funds; it claims most ﬁreline fatalities, 35 percent; it has one of two national ﬁre research labs and one of two ﬁre equipment development facilities. Of the 11 coordination centers that make up the national ﬁre dispatching system, two lie wholly within California. That profound distortion is also historical: California was where the debate between ﬁre ﬁghting and ﬁre lighting as alternative national policies was fought out, where systematic ﬁre planning was ﬁrst devised, where presuppression schemes achieved their most grandiloquent expression, where air attack and the interregional hotshot crew emerged, and where the modern organizational structure for ﬁre—the incident command system—was hammered out before going national, and then global. The California model proved portable in ways the Florida model or the Great Plains model never did.

California is indeed like the rest of the country only more so.

Stephen J. Pyne is a historian in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History, and Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, published by the University of Arizona Press.

Latinas/os, Hipster Racism, and Post-Racial TV

Posted on June 14, 2018June 15, 2018 by Rose Brandt

June 14, 2018

Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these prime-time sitcoms communicate difference in the United States. Understanding the complex ways that audiences interpret these programs, Molina-Guzmán situates her analysis within the Obama era, a period when ethnicity and race became increasingly grounded in “hipster racism,” and argues that despite increased inclusion, the feel-good imperative of TV comedies still inevitably leaves racism, sexism, and homophobia uncontested:

Colorblind Humor

Given the imperative to avoid controversy and broadcast programming able to attract the largest audience possible, the social and political context in which post-racial era comedy airs is central to understanding the role of colorblind ideology. For example, the first season of The Office was created, produced, and broadcasted at the peak of post–September 11th ethnic and racial tensions toward immigrants. Indeed, two months after “Diversity Day” aired, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Sensenbrenner Bill,” H. R. 4437, a bill targeting the U.S.–Mexico border and Mexican immigration as potential sites of terror. In this context, Carell’s deadpan delivery and Oscar’s angry but muted response potentially reinforce the show’s colorblind humor, a type of comedy that depends on audiences’ agreement, or at least familiarity, with the national anti-immigrant discourse and the white heteronormative values of the show. The network’s censorship decisions in this episode further illustrate the social boundaries of racial humor.

By the logic of the network’s censors, it is permissible to air comedy grounded in racist views about Mexicans, but it is not acceptable to equate racism with sexual aberrance and class on the air. Within the story arc of the series, Carell’s character is never demoted and rarely disciplined for his socially inappropriate and legally questionable actions.

The episode illustrates Doane’s (2014) observation that colorblind ideology in U.S. popular culture depends on the ability to see skin color and understand socially appropriate behavior even as audiences ignore the significance of color, race, or ethnicity to U.S. political and cultural life. As “Diversity Day” illustrates, the joke depends on Oscar’s ethnic identity as a Mexican American. The only two supporting characters originally written into the pilot were Kevin and African American office mate Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker). Although Nuñez is Afro-Cuban, the writers specifically developed his character as Mexican American. It may be reasonably concluded that the writers saw the actor’s and character’s ethnic identity as central to the production of the show. In another episode considered central to the development and success of the series, the character of Oscar, whom the writers decided to depict as a gay man after season 1, is accidentally outed by Michael (“The Gay Witch Hunt” 2006).

Colorblind humor is particularly effective for network television because it shifts social responsibility from the text and its production to the audience and its reception of the text. It is not the executives’ or producers’ problem, after all, if the biases of mainstream white audiences shape how they read the text. Yet, as Kristen Warner (2015) notes, colorblind ideology in U.S. popular culture depends on the everyday invisibility of white privilege, even as ethnic and racial inequalities persist. Changes in the writing of Michael’s character from the first season to the third further contribute to the erasure of whiteness and white male privilege. Throughout the first three seasons, the rudeness and more explicitly racial and ethnic prejudices of Michael’s character made him more culpable and less likeable to audiences. As the series progressed, Carell’s depiction of Michael softened, eventually giving way to a more sympathetic, well-meaning character who through no fault of his own is an ingénue when it comes to ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual difference. Michael’s character is, as Warner describes, the result of white prejudice as “rare and aberrational rather than systemic and ingrained” (8). Michael’s character becomes the symbol of implicit individual bias rather than the racist production of white privilege. By the end of the series, it is the character’s ridiculous behavior (and not his status as a white heterosexual man) that is the primary source of laughter. The success of The Office’s comedy depends on the mainstreaming of colorblind ideology on entertainment TV.

Hipster Racism

Post-racial-era TV comedy is characterized by the absence of the laugh track and the colorblind approach to ethnic and racial difference that provide the setup for the comedy of hipster racism, a colorblind form of comedy that depends on racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. Hipster racism reinforces the colorblind values even as the characters’ differences are increasingly central to the production of laughter. The colorblind values of contemporary comedies together with the use of hipster racism make it possible for audiences to hold contradictory readings of television scripts, interpretations that release audiences of white guilt or social discomfort yet create a contested space of visibility and subversive pleasure for audiences of color (Doane 2014).

Returning to “Diversity Day” as an example, the ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual humor in The Office almost exclusively revolves around Michael’s socially inappropriate behavior and beliefs and the ensemble’s improvised responses or lack of responses to Michael’s prejudicial assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. The focus on Michael’s individual ethnic, racial, and sexual transgressions is one of the main adaptations the U.S. writers of The Office made to the original British comedy. Throughout the series, the writers position Carell’s character in opposition to his unwilling antagonist, the socially conscious human resource officer Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein, a writer on the show). In the series, Lieberstein’s subdued and apathetic Toby is routinely called in to legally intercede with regard to the racist, sexist, and/or homophobic behavior of Carell’s emotionally exaggerated Michael. In the series narrative, the hostile work climate created by Carell’s character is never depicted as the institutional result of white patriarchal culture and heteronormative privilege, but rather as another joke to illustrate the individual flaws of Michael Scott, the self-centered boss.

The comedic writing that surrounded Carell’s character points to a key characteristic of the post-racial TV era: the normalizing of hipster racism. A central component of the normalization of hipster racism is the development of sympathetic yet socially flawed white lead characters. Using racism as a form of comedy is not a new convention. As Angela Kinsey, who played Angela on the show, recognized of “Diversity Day”: “Whenever I read our scripts, there were so many that we did that were part of the cringe humor. I think Archie Bunker did that on All in the Family, which is a super old call-back because I’m an old lady [laughs]. But one of your lead characters is inappropriate, you get to call them out on their crap. Say, ‘No, that’s wrong, dude!’” (Burns and Schildhause 2015b). Evoking All in the Family as a referent is interesting because communication research on the program documented the way audiences read the show as both a critique of racism and as an affirmation of racist views (Wilson, Gutiérrez, and Chao 2013). The primary difference is that while the laugh track on All in the Family (1971–79) directly cued audiences to when it was socially acceptable to laugh, post-racial era comedies do not provide any explicit cues. In The Office there are no such explicit cues, and Michael’s character is rarely explicitly called out for his assumptions. Indeed, most of the time his transgressions are met with silence and stares of disbelief by the characters.

Instead, the use of racism, sexism, and homophobia as humor in post-racial era comedies depends on a more ambiguous set of codes to signal socially appropriate laughter. For example, the humor around the famously improvised kiss between Carell and Nuñez is dependent on the actors’ physical performance, audiences’ familiarity with the narrative and character history of the show, prior knowledge of the relationship between the characters, and their own experiences and ability to relate to the characters in the scene (see figure 2). In the season 3 episode “Gay Witch Hunt,” Michael is unaware of Oscar’s sexual identity until Toby disciplines him for using the word “faggy.” The next scene cuts to Michael’s confessional interview: “I would have never called him that if I knew. You know. You don’t call retarded people retards. It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded. And I consider Oscar a friend.” The creative decision to depict the show’s lead character as equating gay people to people who are developmentally delayed is an example of the normalization of hipster racism.

Carell’s emotionally sincere delivery of the potentially offensive monologue effectively produces sympathy for Michael. Where some audience members might cringe at the comedic use of the socially charged term “faggy,” others might welcome the term as a critique of progressive demands for “political correctness.” Published interviews with the show’s creators, writers, and actors make clear their awareness of the social boundaries around diversity and inclusion. For audiences familiar with gray-and white-collar workplace policies regarding sexual harassment and discrimination, Carell’s performance pokes satiric fun of the institutional privileging of multiculturalism. At the same time, the effectiveness of hipster racism depends on a shared agreement that the white lead character’s flaws are socially innocent and not institutionally and intentionally systemic. Doing so reaffirms television comedy’s commonsense logic of colorblindness as it reduces racism, sexism, and homophobia to individual pathology rather than the effect of systemic and structural inequalities.

Hipster racism in a workplace comedy provides the producers increased agency to portray socially unacceptable and legally actionable behaviors and language, and it is that cultural transgression that produces the humor. The production of hipster racism depends on scripting potentially controversial or politically risky moments of humor, such as having Michael apologize to Oscar for calling him “faggy” in front of his fellow office workers, thereby outing the socially conservative Oscar. The editing and nonverbal performances of the ensemble cast reinforce the transgressions. First, the camera cuts from Carell to observe the religious and socially conservative Angela sanitizing her hands as she glares at Oscar. Then the camera pans to Oscar’s silent response of disgust and disbelief. In published interviews on the improvisational nature of The Office, Nuñez points to the above scene as an effective example of the ensemble’s collaborations around socially inappropriate comedy. For the socially conscious humor embedded in the nonverbal interactions between the actors in this scene to work, it depends on some audiences’ familiarity with homophobic stereotypes of gay men as diseased and homosexuality as physically infectious. In this reception context, Angela’s display of prejudiced ignorance is the butt of the joke. But it is the silence that also produces hipster racism, or in this instance hipster homophobia. The writers’ decision to make the interaction nonverbal enhances the comic ambiguity necessary to produce hipster racism or in this case hipster homophobia. In the episode’s concluding interview, Oscar reveals that he was more amused than offended by Michael’s public apology and that he filed a grievance against Michael for which he was compensated with paid leave. The scripting of the episode and the way that Nuñez’s character ultimately benefits from being the target of homophobia further justifies post-racial values by shifting the social burden of prejudice and discrimination to the individual and highlighting the ways the system benefits and protects minorities.

Colorblind comedy produces a marketable interpretative ambiguity through contradictions in the show’s writing and character development. Indeed, part of NBC’s investment in The Office was the program’s ability to bring in a young, highly educated audience, similar in profile to the Scrubs audience but consistently larger. Such an audience might not care about or be concerned with contemporary social norms and mores, but these audiences are at least aware of socially appropriate behavior and contemporary identity politics. It must also be recognized that audiences of post-racial era comedies are not likely to identify as white supremacists, because white supremacist audiences do not generally watch mainstream television programming (King 2014). Rather, audiences of post-racial era comedies are the type that understand hipster humor is socially inappropriate and see themselves as socially conscious, even though they may also be equally uncomfortable with changes in sexual culture, ethnic and racial demographics, and the ever-shifting terrain of identity politics in the United States. Much the way All in the Family did for its audience, post-racial era comedies allow white audiences to laugh at or even sympathize with racist, sexist, or homophobic language and behavior as these are normalized as the result of individuals’ inability to adjust to the “new” mores of a more socially conscious culture.

Isabel Molina-Guzmán is an associate professor of media and cinema studies and Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era was published this spring through our Latinx Pop Culture Series.

Q & A with Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga

Posted on May 8, 2018August 24, 2018 by Abby Mogollon

May 8, 2018

Born in Sonora, Mexico, Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga is a scholar of Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenous literature and culture. He has a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California Los Angeles. His book Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity , published in March, is the first book-length study of the representation of the Yaqui nation in literature. Last month Ariel sat down with Ed Battistella and the blog Literary Ashland for a Q & A about his work:

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on your book. Can you tell our readers a bit about it? What fascinates you about Yoeme Identity and the trope of the Yaqui warrior?

Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga: Thank you Ed. Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity is a study of the representation of the Yoeme (or Yaqui) indigenous nation in Mexican and Chicana/o (Mexican American) literatures. In it, I study Native depictions with an emphasis on Yaqui history and culture. Until now, there has not been a book length study on this community’s representation in literature, despite their historical and political importance in Mexico, and their presence in the United States. Yaqui Indigeneity is also unique in that it looks to Yoeme history, cosmology, and traditional ceremonies (oral tradition known as etehoi and dance) as a basis for its literary analysis. Finally, it identifies a group of authors that I call Chicana/o-Yaqui writers, who are the sons and daughters of the Yoeme diaspora, often a direct result of… see the complete Q & A.

A Way Forward in the Mojave Desert

Posted on March 30, 2018April 3, 2018 by Abby Mogollon

March 30, 2018

Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau are plant ecologists who have 65 years between them living in the Mojave Desert. Together, they co-wrote A Natural History of the Mojave Desert. Today, they share what they see as the future for the desert they love, and why they embarked on writing the book.

Protected areas are marked with lines on a map. However, many disruptions, whether natural or anthropogenic in origin, are unaffected by boundaries. The construction of roads or solar power plants might be stopped by a fence, but the spread of droughts, fires, or climate change is not. Invasive plant and animal species could, theoretically, be controlled at boundaries, but in practice the invasion front is usually too diffuse to monitor closely. In addition, species ranges are now shifting with climate change, further complicating designations on a map. Therefore, natural resource protection must be addressed at regional and broader spatial scales. Further, such protection is most successful when it represents an integrated response from multiple groups. Government and nongovernment agencies, scientists, managers, residents, and visitors all have a vital role in the creation of a best-case scenario for the future of the Mojave Desert. Government leads public discussions and then sets policy; nongovernment groups act as watchdogs for the development and implementation of policy; scientists ask questions, conduct research, and supply knowledge to guide policy choices; managers integrate many demands into practical approaches; residents lobby for permanent, balanced compromises between resource use and abuse; and visitors support wise management choices when they pay to visit natural areas. Finally, educators inform about process, decisions, and policy and lead the promulgation of values to the next generation.

The future of the natural resources of the Mojave Desert is hard to predict. Certainly, challenges lie ahead as the region likely becomes hotter and drier but possibly sees more frequent summer rains. Depending on their intensity and duration, these monsoonal rains might lead to increased erosion. Organisms that can move rapidly enough will move, north or to higher elevations, for example. Focused mostly on our own needs, humans will also adapt to the future. We have technological tools that will help us improve water extraction and conservation. We have social tools that will help us reconfigure our societies around a hotter, drier climate. But what we hope will also be utilized are the ecological tools that natural systems provide. Our human creations are often based on natural models: dam construction and consequences from beavers; flight mechanics and efficiencies from birds; cooling techniques from colonial insects and leaf anatomy. It is our hope that we can also take the lessons of our senses, our aesthetic appreciation of the Mojave Desert to help mold a livable, inspiring future for ourselves. Finally, we hope that the future that we help shape keeps as many as possible of the myriad desert organisms and their ecosystems intact.

In A Natural History of the Mojave Desert we attempted to convey our enthusiasm about the natural history of the Mojave Desert. We hope that we succeeded. We used the writing process as an excuse to reexamine our relationship with our environs, visiting old haunts and discovering many new ones. What follows are some final musings, including our hope that you begin or continue your own personal exploration of this remarkable Desert.

Death Valley dunes near Stovepipe Wells. Photo by Cindy Phillips.

We traveled the edges of the desert, trying to sort out where to draw a boundary line. We asked people at those amorphous edges: “Do you live in the Mojave Desert?” We got lots of interesting answers, reinforcing our original belief that such edges are mostly artificial human constructs. But just like so much in ecology and natural history, what cannot be easily delineated or defined still has a distinct reality. That reality is shaped by geology, geography, climate, and organisms, including humans. On big spatial scales, the collisions of crustal plates shaped our mountains in long, linear, north-south rows. Wetter climates in the past filled the basins between the mountain ranges with vast lakes interconnected by rivers. All of those lakes eventually dried up and are now salt flats. Three of the rivers that are fed from wetter uplands outside the Mojave Desert still flow. The largest, the mighty Colorado River, has been damned to create three new lakes or reservoirs that impact aquatic and terrestrial organisms and many human activities in the region. The Mojave River is dammed near its source and rarely reaches its onetime outlet, Soda Lake. The Amargosa River, as intermittent as it is, still supports a national hotspot of biodiversity, Ash Meadows.

These deserts are vast open spaces, mostly unobstructed by buildings or even trees. At night, the stars are pinpricks of silver light, pulling us to muse on what lies beyond. By day, we are presented with the gentle pastels of the surrounding environments: the coral-colored hills, the dark, tear-stained streaks of desert varnish, the red sands of eroded Aztec sandstone, and the striking black of rugged basalt. The Mojave Desert is a spare place. The land will not support the people, animals, and plants that other lands can. But it is a place where one can breathe deeply, and be unhurried and inquisitive. As Joseph Wood Krutch has written, deserts are a place where one kind of scarcity is compatible with, and maybe necessary for, another kind of plenty.

Our book mentions many of our observations and joys while exploring the Mojave Desert and we will continue our adventures into the future. But now we urge you to step away from your computer and explore. Take a water bottle and your own curiosity and, whether it is your first or one hundredth time on this terrain, parts of the Mojave Desert will open up to you as if for the first time. We hope that you go out and experience the peaceful satisfaction that comes from a walk in the desert.

Lawrence R. Walker is a professor of plant ecology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of nine previous books, including The Biology of Disturbed Habitats. Frederick H. Landau is a research associate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Walker and Landau have twenty-five years of scientific collaboration that includes projects in Nevada, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico. They both enjoy hiking and back-road adventures throughout the Mojave Desert.

Cover photo courtesy Cindy Phillips

Revealing the Very Real Human Impact of Deportation Policies

Posted on February 21, 2018July 20, 2018 by Rose Brandt

February 21, 2018

Mass deportation is currently at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. Edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford with photographs by Murphy Woodhouse, The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border. Today we feature an excerpt from the book’s introduction, in which the editors explain their work to reveal the real impact that mass removal to Mexico has on people’s lives:

Requests for $30 billion in additional border and immigration enforcement spending under the Hoeven-Corker amendment to Senate Bill 744 of 2013, Donald Trump’s absurd call for a “wall” along the nearly two-thousand-mile southwestern border, and an additional fifteen thousand immigration agents are mainstays of today’s political debates. However, because the United States already spends more than $18 billion per year on border and immigration enforcement (Associated Press 2013), it is important to examine more closely what this spending entails. Calls for more enforcement are rarely, if ever, followed by a critical understanding of what is actually being spent and what it is doing to the border. Because of this, a more progressive response—one that asserts the border is already secure—is almost as problematic in that it gives carte blanche to continue the activities currently occurring in the name of border enforcement as if they are successful. The very policies and practices taking place along the border have produced unheard-of levels of violence, higher death rates, and a mass incarceration machine that has been criminalizing migrants and locking up asylum seekers in for-profit prisons that lobby for increased enforcement and harsher penalties.

The implementation of the Consequence Delivery System (CDS) in 2011, a program designed to guide agents into delivering punishment based on the level of offenses committed by migrants, is an appropriate lens through which to view contemporary border and immigration enforcement. The CDS generates escalating punishments for those with more apprehensions in the hopes that they will not return. While it is important to note that the dangers of the physical geography of the border are certainly still an important part of the strategic plan, the CDS is a significant shift in policy. The strategy has changed. The “Gatekeeper Era,” characterized by the “prevention through deterrence” strategy in the 1990s and early 2000s, was predicated on a general deterrence strategy. Instead of relying solely on physical barriers, the extreme temperatures, long walks, and other natural hazards of the desert and river to deter migrants, the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) now wields the full force of the carceral state against migrants.

Deportees being dropped off at night at the Nogales port of entry. Photo by Murphy Woodhouse

It is hard to assert that the main goal of the CDS is the prevention of would-be migrants in Mexico who may be contemplating a journey. Rather, the focus on an individual punishment, designated by special rubrics given to agents, makes it obvious that the goal is preventing repeat migration. Thus, the CDS is in many ways an actuarial approach to immigration enforcement; it cites the prevention of future “crimes” (i.e., unauthorized migration) as rationale for increasingly severe punishments for a select subpopulation—those with strong social ties and place attachment to the United States who are the most likely to be repeat border crossers. This has significant implications for people who have put down roots in the United States. As interior enforcement has ramped up significantly since the establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, a greater number of people have been removed despite having spent years living in the United States and now have few options other than to return to their families in the United States. While some scholars have noted negative migration flows in Mexican sending regions for the first time and have begun to discuss the end of mass labor migration to the United States (Durand 2013), we argue that many deportees do not return to their cities of origin. Rather, many stay near the border and attempt to return to their lives and families in the United States. In many ways, interior immigration enforcement and deportation have themselves become the new drivers of unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States.

Not all deportations are created equally. Disentangling these differences is essential for engaging with current debates in policy and advocacy. We must dispel notions that border enforcement is simply the product of agents patrolling select areas of the border zone. When we discuss the immense costs of enforcement, it includes the various types of immigration checkpoints, mass trial programs such as Operation Streamline, arrangements with local and state law enforcement, incarceration in immigration detention as well as federal prison, and the myriad private agencies tasked with transporting, detaining, and processing migrants.

The complicated processes of apprehension, processing, detention, deportation, and criminalization as well as extensive ties to family in the United States and a deep resolve to return despite the involved costs, hardship, and pain typify the contemporary migrant experience.

Deportees leaving the Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales, Sonora. Photo by Murphy Woodhouse

Through postdeportation surveys, interviews, and ethnographic work along the U.S.-Mexico border, we chronicle the lived experiences of people who have gone through this escalated, punishment-focused immigration enforcement apparatus. We examine the specific components of border enforcement and their effects on people who no longer call Mexico their home, concluding that those with extensive ties to the United States are highly determined to return. We have produced novel data about what it is like to cross the border in the post-Gatekeeper, DHS era of enforcement. The CDS approach is predicated on an increasingly punitive approach to immigration enforcement that has also played a part in fomenting violence in Mexico. The border zones where almost half a million Mexicans are deported each year have experienced tremendous violence. Migrants often interact and witness this violence on another level, as they frequently cross the border side by side with drug traffickers and are often the victims of kidnapping, robbery, or extortion during their journeys and upon return to Mexico. We explore how the relationships between organized crime and the state exacerbate the violence migrants experience on both sides of the border during migration, deportation, and the subsequent trauma of separation from one’s family.

The Shadow of the Wall is an attempt to bring everyone in, to understand the big picture of who is being removed from the United States and what this is causing, not only for the individuals themselves but also for their families in the United States and Mexico.

Jeremy Slack is an assistant professor of geography in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. Daniel E. Martínez is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Scott Whiteford is the director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Mexico Initiative and a professor emeritus at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. Murphy Woodhouse is the Pima County reporter and Road Runner columnist for the Arizona Daily Star.

January 17, 2018

Discrimination is rampant, and working conditions are poor. Safety, pay, and class-war all threaten the future of one of the highest producing copper mines in the United States. Workers are pitted against owners, as the rich receive their keep and leave the bees to fend for the mighty Copper Queen Mine. This may sound like a recurrent story, and it is! For the town of Bisbee, Arizona, it’s actually a centennial of truths reenacted every July.

Such is the basis of Robert Greene’s new documentary film, Bisbee ’17, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah:

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die.

Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

Filmmaker Robert Greene confronts the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage, and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle. With consummate skill and his signature penchant for bending the boundaries of documentary, Greene artfully stirs up the ghosts of our past as a cautionary tale that speaks to our present.

But this isn’t the first time Bisbee’s secret has been told. In 1999, the Press re-released Robert Houston’s Bisbee ’17, for which the new film takes its name. Houston, a novelist and professor emeritus in creative writing at the University of Arizona, vividly re-creates a West of miners and copper magnates, bindlestiffs and scissorbills, army officers, private detectives, and determined revolutionaries in his historical fiction novel.

The protagonists in a bitter strike: the Wobblies (the IWW), the toughest union in the history of the West; and Harry Wheeler, the last of the two-gun sheriffs. In this class-war western, they face each other down in the streets of Bisbee, pitting a general strike against the largest posse ever assembled.

Against this backdrop runs the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, strike organizer from the East, caught between the worlds of her ex-husband—the Bisbee strike leader—and her new lover, an Italian anarchist from New York. As the tumultuous weeks of the strike unfold, she struggles to sort out what she really feels about both of them, and about the West itself.

What Have I Gotten Myself Into? Insights from Biosphere 2

Posted on January 4, 2018January 30, 2018 by Rose Brandt

January 4, 2018

Mark Nelson, one of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world. In his forthcoming book Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2, Nelson clears up common misconceptions as he presents the goals and results of the experiment and the project’s implications for today’s global environmental challenges.

On a winter night in January 1993, by opening a doorway we experienced a stunning physiological revival. We left a world with an oxygen level around 14 percent; equivalent to being on a 15,000-foot-tall mountain. In fact, we were at a 3,900-foot elevation in southern Arizona. Oxygen had been slowly disappearing for sixteen months. No one knew where it had gone. We were slowly climbing a mountain but going nowhere. Mission Control had pumped oxygen into a chamber on the other side of the door. Our atmosphere suddenly contained 26 percent, which was 5 percent higher than Earth’s air. In minutes, we felt decades younger. For the first time in many months, I heard the sound of running feet.

So many strange, disturbing, marvelous, powerful, and profound experiences unfolded during our two years as “biospherians.” The eight of us felt extraordinarily lucky to be the initial crew to live inside a miniature biosphere. We had to learn how to be its first natives.

Biosphere 1 (B1) is our Earth’s biosphere. Biosphere 2 was a three-acre world. B1 houses the global ecosystem, which includes all life. B1 is our planet’s life support system. Biosphere 2 was built to study how biospheres work, creating a laboratory for global ecological processes, to help ecology become an experimental science. It could also provide baseline information to design long-term life support systems for space.

The facility included people, farming, and technology. Earth’s biosphere has supported life for four billion years. Only quite recently have billions of people and modern industries been added. Living in Biosphere 2 might give new perspectives on whether—and how—harmony can be forged between humans and the global biosphere. Our two-year experiment began on September 26, 1991. We’d have two seasonal cycles to study how Biosphere 2 functioned. For comparison, a human spaceflight to explore Mars would also take two years. No one knew if we could stay inside for two years; so many things could go wrong. The facility was optimistically designed for a one-hundred-year operation.

The biospherian crew on closure day entering the front airlock, September 1991.

The first closure experiment was the “shake-down” mission; a trial run to find flaws, bugs, what we had to correct or change. We were also determined to collect as much data and to do as much research in collaboration with outside scientists as possible.

The odds, even from project insiders, heavily favored an early exit. Too many challenges—known and unknown—could end the experiment early. Some thought we wouldn’t even last three months. The world record in a closed ecological system was six months set by two-person crews at a Siberian research institute. Their basement facility powered by artificial lights was the size of a small apartment, their only companions were food crops. Our own sunshiny world contained a rainforest and a coral reef in a towering structure with seventy-five-foot-tall roofs. Every day we were able to stay alive inside, we would amass reams of research data.

We entered an untested facility in almost totally uncharted territory.

We included small chunks of Earth’s diversity inside the biosphere; bonsai rainforest, tropical grassland (savanna), desert, mangrove marsh, and coral reef ocean co-existed under one roof. Some of the world’s top ecologists and most innovative engineers worked to make this possible; no one knew how these biomes would develop. Ours was cutting-edge science, the greatest experiment in ecological self-organization ever conducted. To maintain biodiversity, we biospherians would intervene when we could. Our fog desert decided to go its own way and transformed during the experiment; maintaining the others took hard work and ingenuity, the coral reef in particular, was a nail-biter to the end.

In our nearly airtight world, we would experience the highs and lows of living intimately with seven other people. Outside politics and power struggles polarized and exacerbated in-fighting, though we entered as the best of friends and colleagues. I wouldn’t permit a bitter “To the traitors” as toastmaster at a Sunday night dinner where we enjoyed a precious bottle of home-brewed banana wine. There were no fistfights, but one crew member complained years later that she had been spit at. Twice. But we continued working unselfishly with one another. Whenever we feasted, partied, or enjoyed a rare delicacy like a cup of coffee from rainforest trees, tensions magically melted away. We’d relax and enjoy a temporary truce from group tensions. We acted mindfully in Biosphere 2, understanding that its teeming life was keeping us alive and healthy. We took care of her needs with tender loving care. She was our third lung and lifeboat. Some of us thought Biosphere 2 was the ninth biospherian.

Fish-eye lens photo of the Biosphere 2 farm. Photo by Abigail Alling, Biosphere 2, 1991-1993.

Eight Americans and Europeans suddenly became subsistence farmers. We lived off the land, eating what we grew, though we farmed in a high-tech, $150 million facility. Our small farm exceeded organic standards. We used nothing that might pollute our air, water, soils, or crops. We recycled our water and soil nutrients. Even our sewage was treated and recycled. We cared for our farm animals with affection, but they were slaughtered as needed. Our diet consisted primarily of fruits, grains, and vegetables.

We experienced hunger throughout the two years and plates were always licked clean. Almost all of us became much better cooks. Peer pressure for delicious food was a great motivator. I and many others ate our roasted peanuts whole, shell and all; we would eat anything to fill the stomach void. We were guinea pigs, the first humans extensively studied on an “undernourished but not malnourished” diet. This paralleled the pioneering research of Biosphere 2’s in-house doctor, who claimed a person could live 120 years on a calorie-restricted diet.

Periodically, project managers reminded us we were volunteers; the airlocks were unlocked, and we could leave anytime we’d had enough or if there were health dangers.

For safety, we had our resident doctor and a team of specialists on call at the nearby University of Arizona College of Medicine, and a fully equipped medical facility and analytic laboratory were inside the biosphere. Automated systems could detect potentially toxic substances in our air and water. We started with a biosphere as clean and unpolluted as possible. Chemical deodorants and cleaning supplies weren’t allowed because our world was so ensitive to pollution. Even a small fire would mean evacuating, so we didn’t light candles, even on a birthday cake. At winter parties, a monitor played a video of a wood-burning fireplace—we felt warmer sitting near it.

Though we didn’t intend it, the toes of dominant analytic, small-scale science were seriously stepped on. The reductionist approach seeks to analyze everything at the micro level, each variable being tested separately. Biosphere 2 used both analytic and holistic science approaches. The project violated unspoken taboos. Include humans and our technologies in the experiment? Heresy! We knew one thing for certain: Biosphere 2 would ignite plenty of controversy.

Systems ecologists and veterans of NASA’s Apollo Project 1960s glory days were allies from the beginning. To achieve the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA abandoned component-by- component testing and went to “all-up systems testing.” We followed a similar strategy to create this complex miniworld; it couldn’t be done piece by piece like Lego.

The six years from project conception until completion were exciting. Scientists, engineers, and hundreds of construction workers were very motivated. They were making history, doing the near impossible. Some doubted at every stage whether Biosphere 2 could be built, operated, or used for advancing human knowledge. Who were these mavericks behind the project?

Despite many world-class scientists and institutions consulting, the whole endeavor was way too ambitious, too daring. Even some friends and colleagues of the project thought it was fifty years ahead of its time.

Biosphere 2 was radical and revolutionary—a challenge to “business as usual.” The entire “technosphere” had one overarching goal: serve and protect life. Our engineers had to design technology to make waves, rain, winds; they had to control climate and mimic geological processes. And they had to use machinery and equipment that wouldn’t poison and pollute. Life ruled. Technology knew its place and obeyed and served, a radical notion. What would happen if we did that everywhere?

The engineering goal was about 1 percent per month air exchange (leakage) from the biosphere. That’s thousands of times tighter than the most tightly sealed buildings and homes, far tighter than even the International Space Station. But, if this air-tightness was achieved we might wind up with a horrific “sick building syndrome” from a buildup of trace gases. We needed a way to ensure that those trace gases didn’t build up in a structure with two acres of farm and wilderness areas, hundreds of pumps, motors, and other equipment, and miles of piping. Our solution was to use our farm soil and plants as a biofilter to clean the air. We hoped it would work.

Carbon dioxide was called the tiger of Biosphere 2. We continually monitored its levels in our atmosphere since it could destroy our world, and it would be difficult to keep the levels from rising too high. Every cycle goes hundreds to thousands of times faster than normal in a tightly sealed, small, and life-packed miniature biosphere. Our ocean and atmosphere were tiny compared to Earth’s; we had entered a time machine. Would all the life inside Biosphere 2—with us humans doing everything we could to help—be sufficient to prevent a runaway rise in carbon dioxide, our tiny version of climate change? If CO2 levels got too high, our coral reef might die, all the plants (including our food crops) might slow their growth, and our health might be directly threatened.

By closing the airlock behind us and starting our two-year experiment, we pushed the limits and stepped into the unknown. It would be a roller coaster, with despair and sadness and euphoria and achievement. Every day, we worked to keep Biosphere 2—and ourselves—alive and healthy. For the eight of us, it was a profoundly personal and life-changing journey.

The author carrying fodder, sorghum stems after a grain harvest. Photo by Abigail Alling, Biosphere 2, 1991-1993.

Dr. Mark Nelson was a member of the eight-person “biospherian” crew for the first two-year closure experiment. He is a founding director and the chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics and has worked for decades in closed ecological system research, ecological engineering, the restoration of damaged ecosystems, desert agriculture and orchardry, and wastewater recycling. He is the author of The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One Flush at a Time and co-author of Space Biospheres and Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2.

Tucson Weekly: A Conversation with Tucson Author Tom Miller

Posted on December 4, 2017July 20, 2018 by Rose Brandt

December 4, 2017

In case you missed it, an excerpt from Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold donned the cover of the Tucson Weekly this past week. The feature story was accompanied by a Q&A between Tucson Weekly Managing Editor Jim Nintzel and Tom Miller, in which nothing was off the table. The two discussed how the CIA recruited Miller for a spy, his work in the underground press, and being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury for some of his work:

Cuba, Hot and Coldis an intimate look at Cuba and the people who live there. What do you hope people take away from this book?

When the U.S. and Cuba finally came to their senses and established this sort of detante, everybody said: “I gotta get there. I gotta get there before it changes. What I want them to take from the book is: You don’t have to get there before it changes. It’s gonna keep changing for the next five, 10, 20, 30 years. When people say they want to get there before it changes, they’re really saying they want to get there before McDonald’s gets there. But the changes have already taken place, and they’re going to continue to take place. I think that people who are so eager to get there are making a mistake. They can take their time and read up on it and enjoy it when they go.

You’ve been traveling to Cuba for 30 years now—what first drew you there?

It was partly political and partly journalistic. The journalistic part was that Cuba was and still is the best story in the Americas. And also political: I was part of the anti-war movement, and we would read underground newspapers not just from around the United States, but we would read Gramma, which was the communist party newspaper in Cuba. It was a terrible newspaper. It still is; it is an awful newspaper. But it tells you what is going on there. It tells you who is in charge and what their politics are. And in the anti-war movement, there was always a spot for Cuba at the table. It was at the far end of the table, but there was a spot for Cuba at the table. And because of the taboo, because of the embargo, it became more and more tempting to go.

Read the full feature Q&A and an excerpt of the book on the Tucson Weekly.

New York Times: Already My Lips Were Luminous

Posted on November 19, 2017November 22, 2017 by Rose Brandt

November 19, 2017

Terrance Hayes, current poetry editor for New York Times Magazine, selected Vickie Vértiz’s poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous” from her debut poetry collection Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut for the featured poem in this Sunday’s issue.

“I do not know the language of that place” underscores this poem’s striking balance of ambiguity and mystery. Much is said in the white spaces, caesuras, breaks. The unpunctuated five lines of the first stanza unspool suggestively creepily. The hands in car guts have a visceral intensity. The halting final couplet prompts a pause, a silence, a reread.

Read the full feature on the New York Times.

High Country News: In Line at the Great Wall

Posted on November 13, 2017July 20, 2018 by Rose Brandt

November 13, 2017

Author, poet, and Angeleno, Daniel A. Olivas is known for his provocative prose and cleverly crafted characters. Recently, High Country News featured an excerpt from his short story “In Line at the Great Wall,” from his collection The King of Lighting Fixtures. In this story, Olivas imagines a future where anti-immigrant sentiment is enshrined in a border wall:

Rogelio stood in the long line that snaked from the detention center’s barracks to the lookout point at the other end of the compound. He shifted from foot to foot, the heat making him perspire and feel lightheaded. He was a smart boy — one of the best students in Ms. Becerra’s fifth-grade class — so he figured that even though the cool winter weather still made San Diego’s evenings chilly enough to need a sweater, the lack of circulation combined with the body heat of thousands of children conspired to make the detention center’s air heavy and almost suffocating.

Read “The Great Wall” in its entirety on High Country News.

The University of Arizona Press