Analyze

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

What does 'reflective' mean? Impacts are seen by those who live/work there on the ground, in the dirt, in their yards...raising children, being in proximity day in/out. Like a farmer knows their land. These people recognize and acknowledge the (physical existence of ) impact, but may have different perceptions of what that impact actually is. These people are worrying and thinking. 

It seems that the people who have the power to do anything about the situation are physically removed from it and thus have a very different perception of the impact. The mound itself remains relatively unseen, or very rarely seen, and cursorily acknowledged if at all. 

My perception is that there are a number of individuals who have been engaged in federal public land use and management for decades who have an incredibly vast knowledge of and reflective perspective toward public lands issues, but that at the institutional/organizational level things get simplified into stakeholder language that flattens the complexities of the situation and that a variety of points of view get taken-for-granted as obvious, natural, or inherently right/good. From individuals who have sought to work within agencies I've heard tales of frustration of the obstacles to effective and flexible management created by bureaucratic structures and political timescales, as well as the frustration of working in a space where many visions of good governance and use exist and long-standing tensions seem to discourage desires to build alliances or compromises. These individuals, some retired and some still working, have opted for trying to further their own understandings of what good management is through their individual actions, aiming to do the best they can in the structures that exist, rather than trying to rock or restructure the boat they are in.

Many agency employees responsible for managing wilderness and other recreation areas seem acutely aware of the challenges of regulating land use that arise from misaligned and permeable boundaries in space and legal designation--that is, the rules guiding use in any particular space have the potential to affect other spaces that may or may not have the same designations. Beyond just wilderness/non-wilderness or monument/non-monument designations, land uses on prviate land can impact public lands due to the interconnectedness of ecosystems and watersheds.

The broader impacts of oil and gas drilling on public lands (e.g. through greenhouse gas emissions) and the impact of climate change on public lands ecosystems and future use appear in discourses produced somewhat distant to these spaces (e.g. at UC Irvine) and circulate online, but my perception is that this multi-directional connection to broader global and regional earth system processes has been thus far on the margins of public lands management debates in southern Utah.