Beyond Control: writing the desert landscape

I’m interested in considering how far it was possible, during the late nineteenth century, to move outside the rhetoric of ‘manifest destiny’ or the Naturalist language of ‘forces’ in order to examine the interplay... [ view full abstract ]

I’m interested in considering how far it was possible, during the late nineteenth century, to move outside the rhetoric of ‘manifest destiny’ or the Naturalist language of ‘forces’ in order to examine the interplay between men and the landscape in the American west. Who, for example, was exploring issues and implications of climate and weather in desert regions (rather than questions of destruction of the landscape alone) and how did they do so? One woman who stands out in terms of the way that she grapples very directly with issues of human impact, especially male delusions of control is the novelist and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. Her attitude to the development of irrigation in Idaho unfolded over many years and within a lively, shifting discursive arena of national debate as to the wisdom and even desirability of creating artificial farmland in the arid zones of the western states and territories. But her engagement with the deep time of geological turmoil and her interest in a sense of intimacy with the world beneath the ground stand out.

Foote’s intervention has failed to register as an intellectual engagement with questions of human-Nature relationality across time and space.  At one level this is a matter of sexism: women have been judged either indifferent or hostile to the technologization of the landscape. But the failure, too, of Foote’s work to resonate in debates about ecology also has to do with twentieth and twenty-first century discursive traditions of writing environmental destruction. I would like to discuss what happens if we use Foote’s work to try to construct a different tradition of ecological understanding?