Imagining deserts of North America. “Imperialist environmentalism.”
Caren Kaplan (1996, 66) argues that “mystified versions of the ‘romance of the desert’ remain with us in postmodernity, often in the supposed service of a ‘postcolonial’ critical practice. The desire to become like or merge with the periphery or margin that one’s own power has established demonstrates the pitfalls of theoretical ‘tourism.’” Those who read the desert as a blank slate for imaginative experimentation and liberation from the status quo can slide dangerously close to, and sometimes merge with, the agents of mastery and exploitation. Indeed, […] the very idea that the desert offers such freedom is embedded in the notions of emptiness that serve to legitimize colonization and exploitation in the first place. […] For a nation concerned with agricultural expansion as the primary civilizing force, hitting arid lands meant that “the project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a non-negotiable limit.” […] Nevertheless, even as the idea of the desert as ordeal […], the hardship the arid lands imposed on those who ventured into them served to confirm other aspects of Protestant America’s [disk horse] of spiritual mission […]. The well-off, educated middle classes made the deserts inviting as a purgative space of romantic sublimity and aesthetic purity. […] [A]esthetes like Rutgers art historian John C. Van Dyke were writing about the visual splendor of a land that should remain untouched by base economic interests. […] The conflict between contesting impulses toward either exploitation [”conservative”] or conservation [”progressive”] of the land is, then, present from the beginning of U.S. interest in its desert dominion, yet both positions derive at least part of their authority from the imposition of ideas of vacancy onto the terrain. Both read the space as empty and see this emptiness as its source of value, whether it be to extract from, build upon, or contemplate as evidence of some cosmic truth. Yet this notional vacancy functions also as a form of selective blindness that eliminates consideration of native inhabitants, indigenous traditions, and other, alternative spiritual and utilitarian values that may have prior claim to the land. Speculators and aesthetes alike need the tropes of emptiness and uselessness in order to validate their construction of the landscape as available space. Do the Pueblo Indians, for example, see the terrain they have inhabited for thousands of years as a gap, a vacancy, a howling wilderness?
Text by: John Beck. “Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain.” Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001, pages 63-83.
Desert landscapes have played an extraordinary role in the project of settler colonialism in the United States. As Traci Brynne Voyles argues in Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, deserts are sites where settler colonialism has superseded its logical extremes. […] [S]ettler colonialism has gone a step further in the deserts of the US Southwest by rendering these landscapes barren “wastelands.” […] Viewed as desolate, lifeless, and worthless places, desert wastelands extend the settler-colonial project by obscuring present Indigenous inhabitance, justifying state-sanctioned extractivist practices, and naturalizing the presence of the settler state. […] Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) observes that Indigenous places, in particular, are conceptualized by the settler state as barren, deserted regions: “Indigenous places are often imagined as isolated empty places, disposable, or usable places subordinate to national need. Indigenous peoples are not isolated, in a past […].“
Text by: Nathaniel Otjen. “Indigenous radical resurgence and multispecies landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turqoise Ledge.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 31, Numbers 3-4, Fall-Winter 2019, pages 135-157.
Entitled “Deserts Will Bloom Through Atomic Power,” this 1947 ad pictures a terraformed desert valley with a farm that runs on atomic power. […] The ad copy explains, “New ‘BREAD BASKETS’ of the world can grow where only sand and scrub had been. Harnessed atomic energy will transform deserts into rich fruit and grain country.” […] While these wasteland-to-farmland hopes appear in different circumstances with varying intents, […] they are instances of the Edenic recovery narrative that historian Carolyn Merchant identified in Western environmental discourse. […] [T]he promise of a renewed Edenic paradise has historically masked programs of conquest, exploitation, and destruction. Visions such as those from Seagram’s and General Electric offer idyllic, bucolic landscapes, but as with other pastoral art and writing, much is obscured. They mask possible or actual legacies of land seizure and other dispossessions, contamination, and pollution. Of course, there is also the fundamental assumption that these lands are no more than “waste” and only valuable when cultivated in designated ways. […] In his 1909 collected lectures, […] British chemist [F.S.] predicted that […] humans “could transform a desert continent … and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.”
Text by: Chirs Fite. “Imagining a New Eden in the Nuclear West.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2020), no. 9, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
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