Xenotopias

We lack –we need—a term for those places where one experiences a transition from a known landscape into new country or another world: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.

 I have for some time been imagining such transitions as ‘border crossings’. These borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them. Their traverse is generally unbiddable, and no reliable map exists of their routes and outlines. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there where you cross a certain watershed, treeline or snowline, or enter rain, storm, or mist, or pass from boulder clay onto sand, or chalk onto greenstone.

 Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographies, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within countries.

What might we call such incidents and instances – or, rather, how to describe the lands that are found beyond these frontiers? I suggest the term ‘Xenotopias’, perhaps, meaning ‘foreign places’ or ‘out-of-place places’, a term to complement our ‘utopias’ and our ‘dystopias’.

[A quotation from Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways]

BLM Wilderness Study Areas in NM

A clickable map with links to all 57 Wilderness Study Areas is available at the BLM Website.

This website has an online map of ACECs.

Happy 50-Year Birthday, Wilderness!

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, and one of the best celebrations, or obituaries, was just written in Orion Magazine by Jordan Fisher Smith.

In the article, he lays out the fundamental contradiction inherent in the Wilderness Act:  that wilderness lands should be managed so as to preserve their natural character, while at the same time remaining untrammeled and uncontrolled for human uses.  But at Smith points out, using examples from endangered species preserveration, carnivore reintroduction, and invasive species control, wilderness areas cannot remain "natural" in the face of omnipresent anthropogenic changes.

So managers are forced to make tough decisions to maintain the biotic integrity of the land at the price of intervening in the land where "man is a visitor, and does not remain", or allowing massive changes to snowball out of control while sitting on their hands.  The real choices are hard enough, but the temptation to meddle is even tougher.

I very much appreciate the comment of T. R. Shankar Raman

If the idea of leaving wilderness alone is outdated, so is the idea that there is some hard boundary between the wilderness and the rest of the world ‘outside’. To use this idea to justify highly intrusive gardening of wilderness reserves distracts from a more vital need of fostering positive change in human land use and behaviour outside. It is more crucial to buffer harmful impacts to wilderness areas by greatly expanding the space for conservation outward into surrounding countryside and city. That, too, can ease the disturbance footprint, allowing wilderness areas to recover along their own trajectory with less and less intervention, until land and life are free, which ultimately, is what ‘wild’ really means. And it is in bringing down that boundary, looking outward from the wilderness, that we will perhaps find the way to rewild ourselves.

Wilderness in the Inland Pacific Northwest

Looking into the void: the Wilderness of Dreams

When I sleep, I dream, and when I dream I wander the wildernesses I've visited in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and beyond. There are never any trails or roads, but just undulating space, pocketed with adventures. I like thinking that my feet somehow read terrain directly into my subconscious. Understanding the land is somehow different from looking at GIS or Google Earth 3D, or studying Landscape Ecology or Watershed Analysis. I like thinking that maybe mountains and streams fit together in ways only dreams can really fathom. I don't know, but I do enjoy looking down from dreamlit summits across verdant acres of potential adventure.

Aldo Leopold Centennial in the Southwest

100 years ago, in 1909, Aldo Leopold first traveled to the American Southwest. What he discovered there -- in the land and in himself -- would change the world. Here, he was inspired to conceive of and campaign for the first designated Wilderness:


Aldo Leopold: "Forester and wildlife manager - outdoorsman - ecologist - philosopher and practical idealist - interpreter of nature - pioneer in wilderness preservation. He taught an ethic of the land and by his teaching, writing, and example gave added depth, breadth, and insight to conservation. Overlooking the Gila Wilderness, which he helped establish - First National Forest area so designated - this tablet is here placed by the Wilderness Society, of which he was a founder. Dedicated as a tribute to him for the National Wilderness Preservation System he helped create - in the thirty-first year of this System, September 12, 1954."


"Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" -A. Leopold


"Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel...I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debtate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old." - A. Leopold

Climbing Dutchwoman Butte, AZ

From Dutchwoman Butte

Dutchwoman Butte is one of the few, original, intact wilderness areas in the country that have never been grazed by domestic livestock. The Butte, or mesa, is ringed all about by high cliffs...

From Dutchwoman Butte

Its base floats in a sea of Sonoran desert cacti, while its high flatlands support a lush grass-and-wildflower community.

From Dutchwoman Butte

Crucifixion thorn is a prominent shrub. While Agave stalks shoot up individually-unique pastels.

From Dutchwoman Butte

La Garita Wilderness Exploration

Trespassing on the Rio Puerco

Trespassing on the Rio Puerco
[at 120 CFS]



We put in just before the large culvert. Its top was filled with a colony of mud swallows' hanging igloo nests.



Guerrilla Rafting: n; Risking Life and Limb to Reinhabit your Local Wilderness.

Its simple. Find your local watershed and see how far it will take you. Dreams of floating to the sea? Forget it. Few undamned and diverted rivers remain. But you'll be surprised at what you can cover in a day. Here's a sample from our kayak on the Rio Puerco, through backyards and jungle thornbush.

big falls ... portage or run it?



Strainers.







picturesque views: Spiders showered down on us when we shook low branches. Squirrels scurried from branch to branch, flycatchers, tanagiers, and orioles...


The 'Sloppy Rapids' portage

Photos of Rio Puerco (from Cabezon Peak)

Ecological Drama in the Southwest

San Pedro River in 1984, from the Hereford bridge, before the removal of cattle in 1988.

A photo from same location in 1998, after 10 years of rest from livestock grazing. Source.

The Saharan desert, as evidenced by cave-paintings, was once a fertile grassland. The drama of ecological change is one of the greatest epics humans can imagine. We are so small and yet not insignificant: we have caused it and can cause it again. We can look at the Sahara and see how it is now: we can look at the Sahara and see how the American Southwest might be in the future. The BLM estimates that western rangeland soils have already lost one half of their organic carbon content; Arizona has less than a third of its organic soil remaining. When all of the soil is lost the land will no longer support life.

What is the cause of the desertification in an already-desert land? As long ago as 1938 Aldo Leopold wondered "whether semi-arid mountains can be grazed at all without ultimate deterioration. I know of no arid region which has ever survived grazing through long periods of time, although I have seen individual ranches which seemed to hold out for shorter periods. The trouble is that where water is unevenly distributed and feed varies in quality, grazing usually means overgrazing." The extent of the damage is far worse than when Leopold wondered, so much worse that the only wonder is that we allow it to continue.

It is a failure of memory that allows us to complacently watch our ecosystems dry out and turn to dust. That Tucson's rivers used to flow along tree-lined banks is recorded, but easily forgotten in the scorching heat, augmented by urban heat-island effects, of the Sonoran desert. In urban landscapes like L.A. the connection between man and the environment has been completely severed; there is no conception of wasting water since L.A.'s rivers are so long gone the city pipes water from the remote Sierras. In this completely altered landscape nothing remains to even suggest the possibility of an alternative to urban sprawl.

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds...An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. "
Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, 1972

Tucson is different. It changed me by opening the possibility of conceiving a past that has not been erased. In and around Tucson there are still places that have not been changed beyond memory. But it is only in truly wilderness areas that we can understand the contrast between what was and what we have created. Ironically, it is only in areas "untrammeled by man" that we understand that man is the agent of change in this great ecological drama, and learn therefore that we can change the course of history.

Sadly, most designated Wilderness areas in the U.S. are not true wilderness in the most important sense because they continue to be grazed by cows (due to "grandfathering" clauses), the most important cause of degradation. To seek out and better appreciate the contrast between the work of man (and his animals) and nature, I have begun compiling a list of true, ungrazed, wilderness areas in the contiguous U.S. states. Far and few between, organized by state, with years since last grazing in parentheses. Please email me with any suggestions or corrections.

Ungrazed Wilderness

NM
(ungrazed) part? of the Gila Wilderness in Gila National Forest
(?) White Sands National Monument

AZ
(2002-2007) Tonto National Forest, Mesa Ranger District, Sunflower Allotment
(ungrazed!) Dutchwoman Butte in Tonto National Forest
(2001- )Lower Campbell Blue Grazing Allotment, Apache Sitgreaves National Forest

OR
(2000- )Steens mountain, and (1997) Blitzen River, Burns District BLM
(1990- )Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge
(1999) Owyhee River, Vale District BLM
(? Some ungrazed, 2000- )Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, OR/ID
(1990) Warner Wetlands, Lakeview District BLM

ID
Bitterroot
Craig Wildlife

CA
California Desert Conservation Area
Peninsula Ranges Bighorn Sheep Critical Habitat, Santa Rosa National Monument (BLM) and San Bernadino National Forest

--------
Resources:
National Public Lands Grazing Campaign
Rangenet
Before and after photos from Forest Guardains

Hiking Barefoot?

"The Barefoot Hiker" A Book About Bare Feet
by Richard Frazine, BD [Bachelor of Divinity?]
1993, Ten-Speed Press, ISBN: 0-89815-525-8
Read the book. Join the club.

This is an excellent and well-written book full of irreverent spunk and practical advice for hikers who habitually go barefoot. It is also an interesting addition to my "What would caveman do" bookshelf (see: Anopsology and my analysis). But, this book is written by Easterners, and I must humbly take exception to the application of their advice to the west, particularly Tucson.

The authors would sore regret hazarding a single barefoot footfall, let alone an entire cavalcade of such vulnerable events, in the Sonoran Desert, a Desert incomparably well-equipped to puncture the inflated expectations of innocent trespassers. The rapacious wit and perspicacious criticism embodied in the hard reality of the Sonoran desert would soon render the author's philosophy moot as he became a human dumpling skewered on the spines of cholla, saguaro, fish hook, and porcupine cactus, not to mention the infinitely small, sharp, and numerous "glochids" of the prickly pear.

The idea that humans are fit to live in the environment uncouth and unshod is an admirable one, an idea dating back perhaps to Genesis and the Garden of Eden. But the beauty of wilderness, especially Sonoran desert wilderness, bursts such hubristic bubbles and skewers such dainty pedagogy. Aristotle's peripatetic circumlocutions aside, this shit is sharp. To take humble pride in the profligate-armed Saguaro, to know that we are outmatched and vulnerable at his side, is to know the true reality of wilderness: not unadorned freedom to trample as we wish, but careful respect for all creatures great and sharp, and a willingness to adapt our footprint to the landscape we inhabit.

The Wildlands Project

"We are ambitious. We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuaha have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska, when wolf populations are restored from Mexico to the Yukon to Maine; when vast forests and flowing prairies again thrive and support their full range of native plants and animals; when humans dwell on the land with respect, humility, and affection."

Contrasted with some environmental groups that fight to save "the last great places", the Wildlands Project (TWP) advance a positive vision: Rewilding.

Rewilding means "safeguard biodiversity where it is intact and restore the integrity of wild Nature where it has been compromised." For example, "as a first step toward protecting the extraordinary biological richness of Mexico's northern Sierra Madre Occidental mountains and the adjacent prairies, our Mexican staff identified ecologically significant areas, including critical habitat for jaguars, thick-billed parrots, and black-tailed praire dogs...We intend that Arizona and New Mexico will once again have jaguars in the arroyos and thick-billed parrots feeding on pine cones. But such intentions are only fantasies unless we first protect these animals' habitats in northwestern Mexico."

Note: Even with a positive vision, the best conservation plan needs be defensive in this time of explosive development of mineral resources and degraded agricultural land. Why do they capitalize "Nature"? Restore, rewild, revitalize, renew, rebalance, replenish, regenerate, reconnect.