Panel: “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape”
Center for Great Plains Studies
Author
02/28/2023
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36
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Description
Nebraska is home to the largest hand-planted forest in the Western Hemisphere, the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands. The Great Plains Art Museum is currently displaying an exhibition of photographs of the forest by UNL Art Professor Dana Fritz through March 11. The forest and the photographs was the topic of a panel discussion at the Museum on Feb. 23. Fritz’s new book, “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape,” combines her photos with environmental essays, maps, and historical photographs that delve into the natural history of the site. It also features essays by Katie Anania, assistant professor of art history; Rebecca Buller, associate professor of practice in geography; and Rose-Marie Muzika, director of science at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, as well as maps and a timeline by Salvador Lindquist, assistant professor of landscape architecture. The panel, featuring Fritz, Anania, Buller, Muzika and Lindquist, will be moderated by author and journalist Carson Vaughan, who covered the Bovee Fire which burned more than 18,000 acres in and around the forest in 2022. This event received funding support from the UNL Faculty Senate Convocations Committee.
Searchable Transcript
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- [00:00:04.260]My name is Ashley Wilkinson,
- [00:00:05.940]I am the director and curator
- [00:00:08.310]of the Great Plains Art Museum, which you're in right now,
- [00:00:11.190]inside the Center for Great Plains Studies.
- [00:00:13.620]Welcome to you all,
- [00:00:14.820]thank you so much for joining us tonight,
- [00:00:17.490]we're here to discuss the book and exhibition,
- [00:00:19.687]"Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape."
- [00:00:22.230]This program has generously been supported
- [00:00:24.360]by the UNL Faculty Senate Convocations Committee
- [00:00:27.330]and the Charles W. Guildner
- [00:00:28.890]Great Plains Art Museum Excellence Fund.
- [00:00:32.160]I'd like to begin by acknowledging
- [00:00:34.110]that the University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution
- [00:00:37.770]with campuses and programs on the past, present
- [00:00:40.710]and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
- [00:00:45.210]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne and Arapaho Peoples,
- [00:00:50.820]as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox
- [00:00:54.600]and Ioway peoples.
- [00:00:56.280]The land we currently call Nebraska, has always been
- [00:00:59.670]and will continue to be an indigenous homeland.
- [00:01:03.150]Please take a moment to consider the legacies
- [00:01:05.640]of more than 150 years of displacement,
- [00:01:09.030]violence, settlement and survival that bring us here today.
- [00:01:16.560]This acknowledgement and the centering of Indigenous Peoples
- [00:01:19.890]is a start as we move forward together.
- [00:01:23.280]So tonight, you're gonna hear from everyone up here
- [00:01:26.250]and then you'll also have a chance to ask them questions
- [00:01:29.010]at the end.
- [00:01:29.910]So I'm gonna start by introducing Dana Fritz,
- [00:01:32.100]who's right there at the end of the table,
- [00:01:34.830]she's going to then introduce our panelists
- [00:01:37.530]and our moderator for this event.
- [00:01:40.350]Dana Fritz's Photography helps us see how we shape
- [00:01:43.230]and represent the natural world
- [00:01:45.210]in cultivated and constructed landscapes.
- [00:01:47.820]Dana holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute
- [00:01:51.030]and an MFA from Arizona State University
- [00:01:54.030]and she is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art
- [00:01:56.430]in the School of Art, Art History& Design
- [00:01:58.860]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
- [00:02:01.680]Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally
- [00:02:05.040]in over 140 venues, and her prints are held
- [00:02:08.340]in several collections,
- [00:02:09.930]including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City
- [00:02:13.290]and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
- [00:02:16.530]Dana is the author of 2017's "Terraria Gigantica:
- [00:02:20.730]The World Under Glass,"
- [00:02:22.050]from the University of New Mexico Press,
- [00:02:24.420]and the recently released,
- [00:02:25.537]"Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape,"
- [00:02:27.390]published by the University of Nebraska Press.
- [00:02:30.480]Please join me in welcoming Dana Fritz.
- [00:02:33.199](audience clapping)
- [00:02:39.990]Thanks, is this on?
- [00:02:42.690]Are we good?
- [00:02:44.490]Now we are, okay, great.
- [00:02:46.230]Thank you so much, Ashley, it's such a pleasure to be here
- [00:02:49.620]doing this panel and to have my exhibition up,
- [00:02:53.010]which is downstairs, through March 11th
- [00:02:56.310]and it's been up for a really long time,
- [00:02:58.620]so thank you for being so generous with that.
- [00:03:02.370]Well, I am so delighted that you're all here,
- [00:03:05.250]thank you for coming
- [00:03:06.210]and I wanna introduce my contributors first.
- [00:03:09.420]So to my right, Dr. Katie Annia
- [00:03:12.990]is assistant professor of art at UNL
- [00:03:15.330]and I've gotten to know her since she arrived in fall 2019,
- [00:03:20.250]assistant professor of art history,
- [00:03:21.930]thank you, very important.
- [00:03:25.680]She arrived in fall 2019,
- [00:03:28.440]especially through our regular walking conversations,
- [00:03:31.200]which if you know us, you know how important those are.
- [00:03:34.260]I invited Katie to contribute an essay
- [00:03:36.180]because she's an incredibly expansive thinker,
- [00:03:39.030]who incorporates queer and eco-feminist theory,
- [00:03:41.460]as well as indigenous perspectives
- [00:03:43.140]that are grounded in history and look to the future.
- [00:03:46.650]And Dr. Becky Buller is associate professor
- [00:03:50.340]of practice in geography at UNL
- [00:03:52.290]and a sister, Center for Great Plains Studies Fellow.
- [00:03:56.700]I invited Becky because of her focus on the Great Plains
- [00:03:59.970]and the American West through a lens of gender studies,
- [00:04:03.660]and in the tradition of great geographers,
- [00:04:05.910]her essay draws from many disciplines, including geology,
- [00:04:09.150]history, biology and play studies
- [00:04:11.970]to bring forth multiple visions
- [00:04:13.860]of the Bessey Ranger District.
- [00:04:16.200]And Salvador Lindquist is assistant professor
- [00:04:19.650]of landscape architecture at UNL,
- [00:04:22.770]whose practice focuses on spatial justice and mapping,
- [00:04:26.040]I invited Sal for his particular genius with GIS
- [00:04:29.520]and his ability to design beautiful and readable maps
- [00:04:33.000]with specific information and you'll see them throughout,
- [00:04:35.940]there's one of my favorites right there on the slideshow
- [00:04:39.030]and in the book.
- [00:04:40.230]And Dr. Rose-Marie Muzika, director of Science
- [00:04:43.890]at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh
- [00:04:47.130]and Professor Emerita at University of Missouri,
- [00:04:50.490]came highly recommended by a dear friend, Margaret LeJeune,
- [00:04:54.720]who had been in residence with her
- [00:04:56.460]at a long-term ecological research station.
- [00:04:59.100]And so we instantly connected about the hand-planted forest
- [00:05:03.000]and I knew her appreciation of art
- [00:05:06.090]and her scientific perspective as a forest ecologist,
- [00:05:09.540]would be essential for the book.
- [00:05:12.060]And Carson Vaughan, author of Zoo Nebraska,
- [00:05:15.660]is a freelance journalist from central Nebraska
- [00:05:18.240]who focuses on the Great Plains.
- [00:05:20.040]His environmental and investigative reporting
- [00:05:22.230]has included stories about the Sandhills region
- [00:05:24.840]for several years,
- [00:05:25.950]but he recently provided the best coverage anywhere
- [00:05:28.890]on the wildfires at Bessey Ranger District.
- [00:05:32.100]And I invited him because he is as obsessed
- [00:05:34.770]with the hand-planted forest as I am, a real kindred spirit,
- [00:05:39.630]and I knew he would be a fabulous moderator
- [00:05:41.610]and he would get the story from all of us.
- [00:05:44.250]So thanks, everybody and I'm gonna hand it off to you.
- [00:05:49.920]Well, I think we are (murmurs).
- [00:05:55.687]I'm gonna take it back, sorry.
- [00:05:58.350]So we are really gonna try hard
- [00:06:00.600]to kind of stay on time here,
- [00:06:02.610]so we're gonna give each of us short statements
- [00:06:05.760]and then we're gonna have Carson's questions
- [00:06:08.160]and then we're gonna have all of your questions, I hope.
- [00:06:13.108]So we're all here to sort of introduce our kind of take,
- [00:06:20.550]like our contribution to the book or our take on the forest,
- [00:06:24.570]the hand-planted forest and of course this is my project
- [00:06:27.867]and I invited everybody
- [00:06:29.320]and I kind of don't know where to start with this
- [00:06:31.320]but I'll try to be succinct.
- [00:06:33.600]So I spent five years working on this project
- [00:06:36.660]and it started with my fascination
- [00:06:38.370]about the big idea to plant a forest
- [00:06:40.500]in the grasslands of Nebraska.
- [00:06:43.020]It seemed ridiculous to me at first,
- [00:06:45.390]and in some ways it still is
- [00:06:47.310]but after lots of research, I began to understand
- [00:06:49.860]the philosophy and motivation behind such a great endeavor.
- [00:06:54.390]The environmental history of the hand-planted forest
- [00:06:56.760]is intertwined with evolving ideas about climate change.
- [00:07:01.860]The forest was planted to change the local climate
- [00:07:05.340]from one that was considered too dry and windy.
- [00:07:08.850]In the late 19th century,
- [00:07:10.080]the Sandhills had become overgrazed
- [00:07:11.940]and were seen as a disorderly and unproductive landscape,
- [00:07:15.960]as well as a kind of blank slate
- [00:07:18.240]that ignored centuries of indigenous stewardship.
- [00:07:22.590]Dr. Charles Bessey, a botany professor on our campus,
- [00:07:26.100]was alarmed at the pace of industrial deforestation
- [00:07:29.430]in the United States...
- [00:07:33.090]It sounds like something's happening.
- [00:07:37.470]And he was certain that planting a forest
- [00:07:40.200]would be easier than cutting one down.
- [00:07:43.290]He was among the arboreal evangelicals
- [00:07:46.680]who helped Nebraska earn our previous moniker,
- [00:07:49.500]the Tree Planters' State,
- [00:07:51.900]but that path was already cleared by J. Sterling Morton,
- [00:07:54.900]who founded Arbor Day and who could not abide what he saw
- [00:07:58.230]as a useless and empty grassland.
- [00:08:01.320]The first federal nursery was established
- [00:08:03.600]in the only treeless federal forest reserve
- [00:08:06.480]to provide seedlings
- [00:08:07.740]for what became the world's largest hand-planted forest.
- [00:08:10.800]And while afforestation basically stopped
- [00:08:14.100]after the Plum Fire in 1965,
- [00:08:17.250]the nursery has been producing seedlings for other purposes
- [00:08:20.610]almost since its founding
- [00:08:23.370]and it supplies the Nebraska Conservation Trees Program
- [00:08:27.360]and reforestation projects in native national forests
- [00:08:31.320]all over the West.
- [00:08:33.090]So these seedlings are planted after catastrophic wildfires
- [00:08:37.200]and beetle infestations that are now increasingly widespread
- [00:08:40.410]due to historic drought and climate change.
- [00:08:43.230]So I wanted to focus my photography
- [00:08:45.690]on a landscape closer to home
- [00:08:47.520]than projects that I have been doing,
- [00:08:49.770]and I wanted to understand it
- [00:08:51.900]through the lens of climate change.
- [00:08:54.510]And so with with so many picture files,
- [00:08:56.250]I needed a structure to organize the book
- [00:08:58.290]and I settled on a novel taxonomy of the human
- [00:09:01.890]and non-human forces that shaped the hybrid landscape.
- [00:09:05.640]The photographs are grouped into chapters
- [00:09:08.070]that you'll see headings for up there,
- [00:09:12.120]entitled sand, wind, water, planting, thinning, fire,
- [00:09:17.970]decomposition and sawing.
- [00:09:20.640]And there are panoramic photographs
- [00:09:22.560]that provide more of an introduction and overview
- [00:09:25.560]and dip-tick page spreads that form the chapters like that.
- [00:09:30.690]And while it was always a possibility,
- [00:09:33.960]I never imagined that my book would be the last
- [00:09:36.690]and most comprehensive visual and historical examination
- [00:09:40.560]of the hand-planted forest
- [00:09:42.360]before half the living trees burned in 2022.
- [00:09:47.130]So I'm gonna pass it to Katie.
- [00:09:50.790]Hi, everyone, this is on, right?
- [00:09:53.610]This is...
- [00:09:54.443]Okay, great.
- [00:09:56.040]So I'm an art historian contributing to this project
- [00:09:58.800]and it was such a privilege
- [00:09:59.820]to be brought into this conversation
- [00:10:02.130]with so many fascinating interdisciplinary thinkers,
- [00:10:05.640]I think my own work, I was really nourished
- [00:10:09.360]by this kind of project
- [00:10:10.710]because my own work proceeds from this idea
- [00:10:13.950]that a work of art isn't just a representation of the world,
- [00:10:18.600]that it is the world.
- [00:10:20.700]So the basic premise of art history is this question,
- [00:10:25.530]why does that thing look like that?
- [00:10:29.580]And so overlaying and underpinning that question
- [00:10:32.610]is what kind of world is this?
- [00:10:35.940]What kind of world is possible through this proposition?
- [00:10:40.170]And I think that becomes especially interesting
- [00:10:42.570]in the part of the field that I write and teach on,
- [00:10:46.410]which is this region known as the Americas,
- [00:10:50.220]North, Central and South America, this whole hemisphere
- [00:10:54.570]that is fraught with conflict
- [00:10:56.220]but also like very intimately linked,
- [00:10:58.710]it's a part of the globe
- [00:10:59.820]that I think has long been interconnected
- [00:11:02.790]in complicated ways, often artificially seen as separate
- [00:11:08.310]and consisting of separate historical phases
- [00:11:13.320]or geographic locations,
- [00:11:16.470]but in the case of things like trade, agriculture
- [00:11:20.580]and forest making, those things are pretty inextricably,
- [00:11:25.560]these regions are inextricably linked.
- [00:11:28.020]So when I was invited to work on this project,
- [00:11:33.150]in thinking about my interests
- [00:11:35.430]in just the comparative interests,
- [00:11:37.200]sorry, comparative histories of things that people make,
- [00:11:41.730]some of the things that I work on and like to think about,
- [00:11:44.580]are easily understood as art.
- [00:11:46.710]Like Dana, your photography is,
- [00:11:49.410]I think operates within this traditional framework
- [00:11:52.050]of fine art photographs.
- [00:11:55.350]But a lot of my work also looks
- [00:11:57.030]at these kind of more ordinary
- [00:11:59.190]or cursory objects like drawings or little notes to oneself
- [00:12:05.130]or botanical samples which appear in the book
- [00:12:11.280]or maps or field guides themselves
- [00:12:14.730]as evidence of what you might call assemblages of relation.
- [00:12:20.280]And I find that walking really carefully
- [00:12:23.100]through these assemblages and thinking about how they work,
- [00:12:27.120]can lead to these astonishing insights
- [00:12:29.850]about knowledge itself.
- [00:12:32.430]How we make distinctions between categories of human
- [00:12:36.480]versus other than human, how we can learn from
- [00:12:41.430]or think through information that's not pictured in an image
- [00:12:45.480]or a photograph, to talk about the broader ways
- [00:12:48.900]in which things in general are made invisible.
- [00:12:54.330]And so, Dana, I think your work really trains its lens
- [00:12:59.850]in this project, on a very human intervention
- [00:13:04.110]onto the landscape.
- [00:13:05.400]And so it was really stimulating to think of this project
- [00:13:10.260]as artwork about a made thing that was also landscape.
- [00:13:17.340]And so this framework of the field guide,
- [00:13:20.370]I think it intersects in really exciting ways
- [00:13:23.130]with photography's potential to reveal these things.
- [00:13:27.480]What are we looking at, what aren't we looking at,
- [00:13:29.970]what are we asked to imagine when we look at a picture?
- [00:13:33.180]I think all of that stuff is really present.
- [00:13:39.660]Can I just take this moment to say,
- [00:13:41.550]I wish this project would never end
- [00:13:43.680]because these are just amazing people
- [00:13:46.320]and it's been such a privilege to work with you,
- [00:13:48.570]so thank you.
- [00:13:50.010]So as we know, it's important to know
- [00:13:53.550]a researcher's positionality
- [00:13:55.200]to understand how they approach subjects,
- [00:13:58.080]so I am a born and raised rural Nebraskan
- [00:14:01.710]and one that still lives in the country,
- [00:14:04.050]I grew up near a small town
- [00:14:05.730]on the northern edge of the Sandhills,
- [00:14:07.860]so shout out to Atkinson, my friends and family then
- [00:14:12.450]and still do spend much of our free time recreating
- [00:14:15.240]in the outdoors on private and public lands,
- [00:14:18.270]fishing, camping, hunting, hiking, swimming, skiing,
- [00:14:21.750]tubing, tanking, if you want a fun tanking story
- [00:14:24.900]in the winter in Nebraska, read Carson's Outside article.
- [00:14:30.000]I am steeped in place and afflicted by adventure in nature
- [00:14:33.000]and topophilia.
- [00:14:34.590]It was only recently that I realized that Charles Bessey,
- [00:14:37.470]the originator of these forestry experiments,
- [00:14:40.680]has always been in my life from my childhood growing up
- [00:14:44.190]near the original test plot, to my adulthood,
- [00:14:48.120]educating students just north of here
- [00:14:50.460]in our UNL's Bessey's Hall.
- [00:14:53.610]Professionally, I'm a cultural and historical geographer
- [00:14:56.580]with interest in the Great Plains, American West
- [00:14:59.340]and gender studies, I greatly appreciate qualitative methods
- [00:15:03.690]in this work, for example, I filtered scenes through lenses
- [00:15:06.870]like discourse analysis, visual methodologies
- [00:15:10.650]and feminist approaches,
- [00:15:12.780]I don't pretend to be comprehensively and objectively total,
- [00:15:18.000]arguably my essay's approach
- [00:15:19.920]was in embodied imaginative geography,
- [00:15:23.490]and so all these characteristics together help to shape
- [00:15:27.120]how I see and interpret the world,
- [00:15:29.460]including the hand-planted forest.
- [00:15:34.530]All right, thank you.
- [00:15:37.410]Yeah, I'm really excited to be here in such great company.
- [00:15:41.280]As Dana mentioned, I'm a landscape architect,
- [00:15:44.250]which is not to be confused
- [00:15:45.660]with a recent Super Bowl commercial's characterization
- [00:15:48.600]of a landscape architect as one who shears hedges,
- [00:15:52.080]nothing against hedges,
- [00:15:53.130]but we are interested in the landscape
- [00:15:57.150]as a general field of study
- [00:15:58.410]and in particular to the Nebraska's hand-planted forest,
- [00:16:02.610]as something that contains narratives
- [00:16:04.350]that carry implications of far beyond its borders,
- [00:16:08.550]these narratives often remain latent threads
- [00:16:12.270]waiting to be unraveled and woven
- [00:16:14.550]into the way that one experiences place.
- [00:16:17.550]And this story is about a forestry experiment,
- [00:16:20.556]a (murmurs) logical anomaly,
- [00:16:22.740]colonization and ecological hybrid
- [00:16:25.590]at the center of the Sandhills,
- [00:16:27.030]which is the largest intact temperate grassland
- [00:16:31.020]in the world, the history and emergence of this experiment
- [00:16:34.470]is complex and it's layered,
- [00:16:37.560]the maps in this book are a way of spatially contextualizing
- [00:16:41.070]the various forces that shaped
- [00:16:43.080]and are still shaping this hybrid landscape.
- [00:16:46.440]So sand, land, water, planting, thinning,
- [00:16:49.650]fire, decomposition and sawing,
- [00:16:52.410]and because landscape architecture seeks out ways
- [00:16:55.080]of designing how we experience landscapes,
- [00:16:58.020]these stories are super important.
- [00:17:00.570]So last year in my design studio,
- [00:17:03.210]which those of you that have a degree in art
- [00:17:06.060]or design-related field, you're familiar with this format,
- [00:17:08.760]but it's basically for those unfamiliar,
- [00:17:10.890]it's a hands-on immersive project-based course,
- [00:17:15.570]and our project in that studio was to critically examine
- [00:17:18.630]the ecological and cultural implications of the forest
- [00:17:21.360]and how visitors can engage with its legacy
- [00:17:24.450]through the design of an interpretive trail system
- [00:17:26.610]in partnership with the US Forest Service.
- [00:17:29.220]Our role in this process
- [00:17:30.840]through the interpretation of the palimpsest
- [00:17:33.810]that is the Bessey Ranger District,
- [00:17:35.970]was to design ways to experience the landscape
- [00:17:39.300]and to learn about what makes it so interesting,
- [00:17:42.030]what makes it a hybrid landscape,
- [00:17:44.580]and how do people navigate the forest
- [00:17:46.800]in a way that begins to reveal the themes
- [00:17:48.780]uncovered by the contributors of this book.
- [00:17:51.990]The landscape is always reinventing itself,
- [00:17:54.900]landscape is a process and not merely an object
- [00:17:58.350]just to observe.
- [00:17:59.940]The recent fire is living proof of that,
- [00:18:02.100]it's always changing
- [00:18:03.270]and that's what I found so interesting
- [00:18:05.757]about the way that we've all positioned the complexity
- [00:18:08.400]of something that is on the surface,
- [00:18:11.430]just a forest in the middle of a prairie,
- [00:18:13.920]but by understanding and revealing the narratives
- [00:18:16.590]of a place, visitors can gain a more nuanced perception
- [00:18:20.370]of the landscape and the people
- [00:18:22.260]and forces that have shaped it.
- [00:18:24.720]So thank you, Dana for including me in this process
- [00:18:27.690]and thank you to all of you
- [00:18:29.457]who have kind of provided perspectives
- [00:18:32.340]on this hybrid landscape, thank you.
- [00:18:37.890]Thanks.
- [00:18:39.390]To borrow Becky's term, topophilia, I'm a topophil,
- [00:18:42.960]I love landscapes, I don't think I've met a landscape
- [00:18:45.930]I haven't appreciated,
- [00:18:47.670]although some were aesthetically challenging at times,
- [00:18:50.220]I always take the window seat in an airplane
- [00:18:53.010]and spend the entire time looking at landscapes,
- [00:18:55.800]asking what caused this, who made this, why?
- [00:19:00.060]I mean, regardless of how many times I've flown
- [00:19:03.090]across the country, it's just fascinating.
- [00:19:05.490]So naturally, I was drawn to this project
- [00:19:08.160]when Dana and I met and discussed it
- [00:19:10.350]and thought it was just such an intriguing,
- [00:19:13.290]fascinating place, a place I've driven by before
- [00:19:16.350]on Highway 2, but never bothered to stop.
- [00:19:18.780]So thank you, Dana for taking me there
- [00:19:20.640]and showing me this wonderful landscape.
- [00:19:23.340]So this hybrid landscape that Dana so beautifully documented
- [00:19:26.670]in her photographs, also reminds me of our human flaw
- [00:19:30.960]to categorize, to assign a name or a class or a group.
- [00:19:37.290]And in so doing, we kind of lose the sense
- [00:19:39.990]of the hybrid nature, of what a transition is.
- [00:19:44.460]We don't often recognize transitions
- [00:19:46.710]because we can't call them anything,
- [00:19:49.590]but in fact, transitions are where the action happens.
- [00:19:54.360]The transition in ecological communities or ecotones
- [00:19:57.840]where two different biological systems converge,
- [00:20:01.770]is really where plants change distributions,
- [00:20:04.710]animal habitat is modified,
- [00:20:06.570]and so it's fascinating to think of that,
- [00:20:08.790]but we can't always capture it.
- [00:20:10.620]And the glorious thing about Dana's photographs,
- [00:20:13.710]is that we see those processes going on,
- [00:20:16.980]even though she captures landscapes,
- [00:20:19.080]we see what's going on within them, decomposition, thinning,
- [00:20:22.800]fire, all that activity.
- [00:20:24.960]And this entire area is in fact a transition,
- [00:20:28.500]a hybrid and a blend.
- [00:20:30.510]But again, a scientist especially, we're gonna say,
- [00:20:32.917]"Oh, is it a forest, is it a grassland?"
- [00:20:35.850]Well, this upends those categories.
- [00:20:38.250]I mean, we have put a forested landscape, a parcel,
- [00:20:42.030]into the grassland biome, right?
- [00:20:44.790]So why do we bother calling things name?
- [00:20:47.040]Why do we bother categorizing?
- [00:20:50.460]Is it human, is it natural, is it native, is it not native?
- [00:20:54.150]So we are just kind of obsessed with that,
- [00:20:56.700]but there's all this in between area.
- [00:21:00.720]So the transition evokes the...
- [00:21:04.380]it naturally evokes the dichotomous
- [00:21:06.660]when we think this should be there or should it there,
- [00:21:09.510]but actually defies the dichotomous, the categorization.
- [00:21:14.790]Is it natural or not, is it grassland, is it forest,
- [00:21:17.490]is it hybrid or is it gasoline?
- [00:21:20.760]Is it a functional ecosystem after 100 years
- [00:21:24.750]or is it destined toward extinction?
- [00:21:27.360]Have species gone extinct there already?
- [00:21:29.820]We don't really know.
- [00:21:31.020]We don't know about its ephemeral nature
- [00:21:33.030]or its perpetual nature.
- [00:21:35.610]So transitions are beautiful, unpredictable, dynamic,
- [00:21:39.120]difficult to define, but we can appreciate all this,
- [00:21:43.890]we can appreciate through the lens of artistry, of science,
- [00:21:47.400]of cultural change, and we can try to answer
- [00:21:50.520]all those questions
- [00:21:51.780]through this wonderful multidisciplinary group.
- [00:21:54.780]So I am so excited to be part of this
- [00:21:57.180]and to have been part of this project, thank you.
- [00:22:00.930]Sit down because we have two here we gotta get.
- [00:22:05.010]This is gonna be a challenge for this...
- [00:22:07.320]Okay, you're on.
- [00:22:09.450]Well, good evening, folks, as Dana mentioned earlier,
- [00:22:12.780]my name is Carson Vaughan and I'm a freelance journalist
- [00:22:15.390]and author currently based in Chicago,
- [00:22:18.450]but if I were out reporting in the Sandhills right now,
- [00:22:20.700]I'd obviously scrap the part about Chicago
- [00:22:22.740]and remind you that I'm from Broken Bow, Nebraska
- [00:22:25.200]and yes, I know the Petersons
- [00:22:27.120]and yeah, sure the Tierneys too,
- [00:22:29.670]and yeah, that's right, my dad was the local optometrist,
- [00:22:32.970]he was, yeah, and I'll be sure to tell him you said hello,
- [00:22:36.540]and if I'm lucky and I passed the Sandhills entrance exam,
- [00:22:39.360]then we're off to the races and I can start asking
- [00:22:41.460]some hard-hitting questions of my own,
- [00:22:43.740]like, oh, you're from Taylor, you know the Dunbars then,
- [00:22:46.617]the Krauses, Lawrence Sandos, the science teacher?
- [00:22:49.410]I kid sort of, in all seriousness,
- [00:22:53.010]I am incredibly honored to be here,
- [00:22:54.780]and I wanna briefly thank Dana
- [00:22:56.430]for asking me to moderate this event.
- [00:22:58.530]I chose the freelance route
- [00:22:59.850]as a way to sort of monetize my very bad habit
- [00:23:02.880]of falling into obscure rabbit holes,
- [00:23:05.070]and a couple years ago I fell into another one,
- [00:23:07.140]wondering what happened
- [00:23:08.250]to the old Bruner Brothers' plantation in Holt County.
- [00:23:12.420]I just started researching this story
- [00:23:13.950]for Nebraska Quarterly,
- [00:23:15.090]which is the alumni magazine here at UNL,
- [00:23:17.550]when I stumbled upon some of Dana's work.
- [00:23:20.010]My editor and I quickly roped her into the project
- [00:23:22.650]and her photography and the way she so adroitly handles
- [00:23:26.700]the contradictions of place,
- [00:23:28.230]has since proven an inspiration to me
- [00:23:30.270]as I continue to write about this strange hybrid landscape
- [00:23:33.450]that is the Bessey Ranger District.
- [00:23:36.060]But my first relationship to the forest
- [00:23:38.490]was not as a reporter at all.
- [00:23:40.170]As both a Boy Scout, and I will admit it,
- [00:23:42.900]a pretty half-assed forager,
- [00:23:44.520]I grew up making semi-regular visits to the Halsey,
- [00:23:48.990]I zip lined through the pines
- [00:23:50.670]and climbed the Scott Lookout Tower
- [00:23:52.380]and felt that same sense of wonder that most of us feel now
- [00:23:55.470]when hiking through other larger, more natural forests
- [00:23:58.650]throughout the world.
- [00:24:00.360]Despite touring the nursery as a kid
- [00:24:02.820]and learning about the trees that were supplied there,
- [00:24:04.950]I didn't at that age,
- [00:24:06.660]question the authenticity of the landscape,
- [00:24:09.210]I simply accepted the trees
- [00:24:11.070]for what they seem to be, a forest.
- [00:24:15.270]In her essay for Dana's "Field Guide,"
- [00:24:17.010]Professor Buller over here,
- [00:24:18.450]Becky reminds us that perception is reality
- [00:24:20.880]and that within the Nebraska National Forest,
- [00:24:22.710]hundreds of narratives and experience
- [00:24:24.330]is a place to exist simultaneously then, now
- [00:24:27.030]and in the future.
- [00:24:28.440]She writes about the indigenous peoples
- [00:24:30.060]who had long traveled through it prior to afforestation,
- [00:24:32.520]she writes about the farmers who struggled to plant crops
- [00:24:35.310]and the ranchers who ultimately succeeded
- [00:24:37.290]on appropriated land,
- [00:24:38.670]and so many others who have ultimately mingled
- [00:24:42.720]through this stretch of the Sandhills.
- [00:24:44.520]And to that diverse list joining the ATV enthusiasts
- [00:24:48.000]and horseback rider and forest bathers, I might add youth
- [00:24:52.170]and the simple acceptance that kids so often gift
- [00:24:54.840]to their surroundings.
- [00:24:56.430]I loved the Nebraska National Forest as a kid, still do,
- [00:25:00.030]and then I dismissed it so much smaller and scrappier
- [00:25:03.060]than old growth forest elsewhere,
- [00:25:04.740]and then finally curious again, I returned
- [00:25:07.410]and a new sort of wonder washed over me.
- [00:25:09.990]Not just that trickle of serotonin
- [00:25:11.880]that so often eludes us in the city,
- [00:25:13.770]not just that sense of outdoor adventure,
- [00:25:16.350]but a more intellectual curiosity that has sustained me
- [00:25:19.290]and kept me engaged in this particular forest ever since.
- [00:25:23.250]Here in the middle
- [00:25:24.083]of what some have called the last prairie,
- [00:25:25.800]in the heart of the largest intact temperate grassland
- [00:25:28.260]on earth, grows the largest hand-planted forest
- [00:25:30.830]in the Western Hemisphere, and once perhaps the world.
- [00:25:34.050]From those initial facts,
- [00:25:35.130]the pieces don't suddenly fall together,
- [00:25:37.740]they explode into a constellation of other questions.
- [00:25:41.250]When the Bovee Fire ignited last October,
- [00:25:43.860]I raced out to Halsey to cover the story
- [00:25:45.480]for NPR's Midwest Newsroom,
- [00:25:47.730]of immediate concern of course, was the safety
- [00:25:50.130]of those fighting the fire and the tragedy of the life
- [00:25:52.830]and the property lost.
- [00:25:54.480]But once the fire was contained,
- [00:25:55.950]all of those questions bubbled up to the surface.
- [00:25:58.950]Should one replant a forest in a native grassland,
- [00:26:01.830]or should one let nature take its course?
- [00:26:04.050]Then again, what does letting nature take its course mean
- [00:26:06.540]in a man-made environment?
- [00:26:07.950]Should the forest service cut and sell
- [00:26:09.600]the snag that remains, prioritizing grassland species,
- [00:26:12.780]or let the snag stand as snag forest habitat,
- [00:26:15.990]prioritizing woodland species?
- [00:26:18.510]While reporting these stories,
- [00:26:19.710]I spoke at length with Greg Wright,
- [00:26:21.750]who is a wildlife biologist at the US Forest Service,
- [00:26:24.270]and at one point in our conversation he emphasized
- [00:26:26.790]that there is no, quote unquote, reference condition
- [00:26:29.790]for a 120-year-old forest in the middle of a native prairie.
- [00:26:33.607]"In a forest without precedent," he said,
- [00:26:35.437]"The outcomes are also without precedent."
- [00:26:38.160]And when he said that, an acute sense of deja vu
- [00:26:40.410]kind of washed over me.
- [00:26:41.940]More than a century before that,
- [00:26:43.230]Charles Scott, who surveyed the boundaries of the forest
- [00:26:46.230]and later the construction of the Bessey Nursery,
- [00:26:48.720]said essentially the same thing.
- [00:26:50.407]"No one in the Bureau of Forestry could advise us
- [00:26:52.740]and the commercial nurseryman of the country
- [00:26:54.420]had no experience with this type of work," he said,
- [00:26:57.127]"And we were told we would have to use our own judgment
- [00:26:59.340]and do the best we could."
- [00:27:01.140]So here we are in 2023, still pushing ahead
- [00:27:04.020]and doing the best we can
- [00:27:05.130]without any reference conditions to guide us.
- [00:27:07.890]Certainly our understanding of grasslands and forest ecology
- [00:27:10.860]has evolved and progressed,
- [00:27:12.780]but in some sense, we're nursing a forest on the moon.
- [00:27:15.300]One thing every party seems to agree on,
- [00:27:17.250]is that the Bovee Fire and every major disturbance
- [00:27:19.740]at the Nebraska National Forest,
- [00:27:21.780]provides a critical window for observation.
- [00:27:24.180]The biggest mistake would be to let it pass
- [00:27:25.890]without studying how this ecosystem responds.
- [00:27:29.160]And the more I learn about the forest,
- [00:27:31.260]the more I find myself reverting
- [00:27:32.640]to those childhood instincts,
- [00:27:34.140]the more I find myself accepting
- [00:27:35.640]the fact that whether you're a grassland enthusiast
- [00:27:37.710]or a forest advocate, perhaps there's no perfect
- [00:27:39.900]or right answer, given the history behind us.
- [00:27:42.840]The more I find myself accepting the forest for what it is
- [00:27:45.720]and has become a fascinating quirk in time and in ecology
- [00:27:50.100]and an important opportunity
- [00:27:51.750]for learning in this era of climate change and disruption.
- [00:27:55.020]And so with that, I hope I haven't gone too long,
- [00:27:57.360]and I thank you all for coming
- [00:27:58.560]and I think it's time for some Q&A
- [00:28:00.210]with these wonderful panelists.
- [00:28:03.459]Yeah, I think we're good.
- [00:28:04.670]Okay, should we just dive right in here?
- [00:28:06.870]Well, I'm hoping, Katie, that we might start with you.
- [00:28:09.690]You had a line in the "Field Guide" in your essay,
- [00:28:12.690]you said that Dana's work disrupts the idealizing naturalism
- [00:28:16.200]of photographers like Ansel Adams,
- [00:28:18.450]which I found to be a wonderfully provocative way
- [00:28:21.180]to think about these photos,
- [00:28:22.410]it kind of reshaped the way I was looking at Dana's work.
- [00:28:24.810]Would you mind unpacking that notion for us?
- [00:28:26.790]Of course, sure, let's begin the panel
- [00:28:30.570]by undermining landscape
- [00:28:34.080]and this whole notion of landscape aesthetics.
- [00:28:38.158]So Ansel, when you see Ansel Adams,
- [00:28:39.690]you're of course referring to the American photographer,
- [00:28:42.570]the 20th century American photographer,
- [00:28:44.310]whose work is synonymous with landscape photography.
- [00:28:48.150]He was a co-founder of and worked heavily
- [00:28:51.210]with the Sierra Club in the mid 20th century,
- [00:28:55.560]is considered a master of the medium,
- [00:28:59.220]and he had a very specific way of positioning landscape
- [00:29:03.420]for the viewer.
- [00:29:05.220]And this way was...
- [00:29:09.000]by exploiting the full tonal range of the medium,
- [00:29:12.930]by making what seemed like these crystalline,
- [00:29:16.170]perfect photographs of landscapes,
- [00:29:20.160]he fashioned the landscape
- [00:29:22.320]not just into something really precious and worth saving,
- [00:29:27.090]but also something that's inherently distant
- [00:29:29.700]from the viewer, that's how value starts to accumulate
- [00:29:34.710]for the landscape in Ansel Adams' photographic terms.
- [00:29:39.690]And Dana, what was so interesting about your pictures
- [00:29:44.670]is that they don't work that way.
- [00:29:47.220]The landscape gets in the way of some of these pictures,
- [00:29:51.330]there are often two images juxtaposed against one another
- [00:29:54.930]that undermine any illusion
- [00:29:58.170]that something is a natural process
- [00:30:01.320]or that something is an ongoing process
- [00:30:03.300]with a defined beginning, middle and end, so in terms of...
- [00:30:08.520]there's a sense that these two photographers
- [00:30:12.930]we're talking about are formally similar to each other,
- [00:30:16.380]but aesthetically and rhetorically,
- [00:30:19.380]they couldn't be more different.
- [00:30:22.170]So that's my, I don't know, those are my first thoughts,
- [00:30:25.560]is that the whole notion of landscape,
- [00:30:28.200]and this became so clear to me
- [00:30:29.760]as I was listening to everyone narrate
- [00:30:32.070]their experience of landscape,
- [00:30:33.810]but the whole notion of landscape
- [00:30:35.280]is kind of a manufactured idea.
- [00:30:38.310]I mean, it's codified mostly from French
- [00:30:41.460]and British aesthetics theory in the 18th century,
- [00:30:45.000]the idea of the sublime was designed
- [00:30:47.220]so that people would have a way to describe
- [00:30:51.870]a feeling of seeing nature that was so beautiful,
- [00:30:54.300]it was almost scary, and I think actually that's not the way
- [00:30:58.680]that we all like sense our way
- [00:31:02.580]through these spaces and practice,
- [00:31:05.460]so it was a very exciting tension there.
- [00:31:10.620]Well, Katie, I wanted to start with you
- [00:31:12.085]because I was hoping...
- [00:31:13.118]Can I get that mic back?
- [00:31:14.515]Oh, sorry.
- [00:31:15.630]I was hoping that we could kind of bounce off that
- [00:31:17.760]and go to Dana too, because I'm wondering if either...
- [00:31:21.210]I don't wanna give Ansel Adams too much time here,
- [00:31:23.550]no, it was his birthday a few days ago, I see.
- [00:31:26.340]But I am curious, for lay people like me
- [00:31:28.980]who see black and white nature photographs,
- [00:31:31.770]Ansel Adams is gonna come to mind
- [00:31:33.510]and I'm curious if when you were working
- [00:31:35.670]he had any influence, either positive or negative.
- [00:31:39.270]Were you working against his aesthetic,
- [00:31:41.790]were you working towards it,
- [00:31:42.960]what role did he play at all in this process?
- [00:31:46.470]Thank you for that question
- [00:31:48.120]and thanks, Katie for setting me up.
- [00:31:50.490]So speaking of...
- [00:31:56.220]Well, author Rebecca Solnit, who I hope some of you know,
- [00:32:00.840]she describes Ansel Adams as the Oedipal father
- [00:32:03.480]that every subsequent landscape photographer
- [00:32:05.550]must find a way past, so he's in the way.
- [00:32:11.160]I think he still looms large,
- [00:32:13.260]especially because of his involvement
- [00:32:14.970]with the Sierra Club's conservation work
- [00:32:17.430]and their publication of his photographs and books
- [00:32:20.040]and calendars for decades,
- [00:32:21.330]so we're all familiar with that work,
- [00:32:24.210]but I also wanna give Ansel Adams credit where it is due,
- [00:32:27.360]for his technical innovations.
- [00:32:29.190]And while they were with analog photography,
- [00:32:32.820]they've certainly influenced the way I learned to print
- [00:32:35.280]in the darkroom,
- [00:32:36.150]and the way I envision my digital prints now
- [00:32:38.940]in terms of contrast and light.
- [00:32:40.470]So I will be honest in thanking him for that.
- [00:32:44.430]But I think that's where we diverge.
- [00:32:46.350]So to be specific,
- [00:32:48.330]Ansel Adams most famous photographs show grand high views
- [00:32:52.530]of seemingly pristine landscapes that are empty of people,
- [00:32:59.910]but deemed worthy of preservation
- [00:33:01.560]and of course, I always point out in my classes
- [00:33:04.440]that he's photographing standing on the top of his car
- [00:33:07.950]from the highway or the road.
- [00:33:10.140]So like people are all around him,
- [00:33:12.720]they're just not in his pictures.
- [00:33:16.680]So my photographs are meant to be seen not singularly
- [00:33:20.910]like I think a lot of his were,
- [00:33:23.310]but together to show multiple perspectives
- [00:33:26.250]of how the land was shaped by human and non-human forces
- [00:33:29.310]and that we are part of the land and not separate from it.
- [00:33:34.800]So Ansel Adams was deeply influenced
- [00:33:37.560]by early survey photographers such as Carlton Watkins,
- [00:33:41.010]who in turn were influenced as Katie said,
- [00:33:43.230]by your American romantic paintings
- [00:33:45.360]and ideas about wilderness,
- [00:33:47.310]and working so many decades later,
- [00:33:49.860]I really benefit from a more critical and integrated look
- [00:33:52.830]at the land that hopefully untangles problematic ideas
- [00:33:56.190]about wilderness and encourages a more holistic view
- [00:34:00.300]that combines environmental history and futures
- [00:34:02.970]with ecology and human interaction.
- [00:34:05.880]And while I'm very interested in the history
- [00:34:08.160]of landscape photography
- [00:34:10.110]and how it reveals philosophical motivations,
- [00:34:13.350]I see my work more in dialogue
- [00:34:14.940]with contemporary photographers,
- [00:34:16.830]who also focus on people and land.
- [00:34:20.130]And I could talk about them, but I think I'm gonna move on
- [00:34:24.450]and just, if we have time we'll come back.
- [00:34:25.860]Sure. Okay.
- [00:34:27.290]Do you mind if we stick with you just really quick, Dana,
- [00:34:30.240]because you mentioned early survey photographers,
- [00:34:32.610]and I love a lot of the early photos you dug up
- [00:34:35.490]from the Forest Service at Halsey,
- [00:34:39.150]did you dig into those archives before doing your own work,
- [00:34:41.910]and did that photography influence what you were doing?
- [00:34:44.940]I loved that Charles Scott photo underneath.
- [00:34:47.578]Oh, it's the best.
- [00:34:48.590]It's the best.
- [00:34:49.423]Yeah, it's the best.
- [00:34:51.120]I think it was like concurrent
- [00:34:52.650]because Rich Gilbert who runs the nursery said,
- [00:34:55.777]"Oh, well, we have all these photographs
- [00:34:58.020]and why don't you just bring a hard drive?
- [00:35:00.930]You can get copies of them,"
- [00:35:02.880]because they're USDA Forest Service archives
- [00:35:06.780]and they're like things in the national archives,
- [00:35:09.450]you give credit, which you're seeing the credit up there,
- [00:35:12.120]if we know who the photographer is, but they're free to use.
- [00:35:16.080]And so they gave me information,
- [00:35:20.790]I think maybe some inspiration,
- [00:35:22.350]I love the one in the pre-greenhouse,
- [00:35:25.980]like the proto greenhouse, I guess, the shade structure,
- [00:35:29.820]and there are some others that are really fascinating
- [00:35:32.730]that I'm using in a project for plat-based and time-lapse,
- [00:35:35.880]there's a great one of a couple of guys
- [00:35:38.610]with buckets full of little seedlings
- [00:35:41.250]planting them with little shovels
- [00:35:43.710]just in the Sandhills horizon.
- [00:35:46.740]So yeah, I mean, I love those archival photographs.
- [00:35:55.050]Becky, this next one's for you.
- [00:35:57.450]You mentioned that you were from near outside of Atkinson,
- [00:36:01.860]I'm wondering, and you also talk about in your essay,
- [00:36:04.920]the symptoms of the condition of topophilia
- [00:36:06.900]that are on display at the Nebraska National Forest.
- [00:36:09.090]Can you talk about your own upbringing in the Sandhills
- [00:36:12.270]and how you related to the Nebraska National Forest?
- [00:36:14.875]Yeah, absolutely.
- [00:36:17.067]Excuse me.
- [00:36:18.038]Got it? I think I got it,
- [00:36:19.293]yep, I got it.
- [00:36:20.767]So we're mixing questions here, not fair.
- [00:36:29.880]So back to where my childhood, right?
- [00:36:34.440]The short answer about how I related as a child
- [00:36:38.790]to the Nebraska National Forest Bessey division,
- [00:36:43.170]is that I didn't, not directly anyway,
- [00:36:46.620]even though our family spent
- [00:36:48.270]a lot of time outside doing things,
- [00:36:51.000]it wasn't part of my adult family and friends topophilia,
- [00:36:56.400]the place didn't pull them in,
- [00:36:57.930]and so as kids we didn't spend time there
- [00:36:59.850]because it wasn't part of their activity spaces.
- [00:37:02.580]So as a child, my indirect connection to Bessey Division
- [00:37:05.730]was through the original test plot that you talked about
- [00:37:08.190]near Swan Lake in Southern Holt County,
- [00:37:11.010]we'd go to Swan Lake ice fishing
- [00:37:12.660]or pass it while out traveling on Highway 11
- [00:37:15.780]on our way to Burwell or Calamus Reservoir
- [00:37:18.030]and the adults would say, "Oh look over there,
- [00:37:19.770]there's that hand-planted forest from long ago."
- [00:37:23.550]And I specifically have memories
- [00:37:25.050]of an early morning New Year's day ice fishing with dad
- [00:37:27.540]and my sister at Swan Lake,
- [00:37:29.040]feet wrapped by bread plastic bags
- [00:37:31.350]and multi-colored moon boots,
- [00:37:33.390]looking north to the novel pine tree island forest
- [00:37:37.040]at the top of the Sandhills, and then skunked fishing,
- [00:37:40.470]we soon returned home yet that morning to warm ourselves
- [00:37:43.200]with mom by the wood stove
- [00:37:44.640]and in a time to catch the Rose Parades ending,
- [00:37:47.910]so it wasn't until this project that I actually realized
- [00:37:50.490]that little, mini pine tree forest was the precursor
- [00:37:55.530]and because it was successful,
- [00:37:57.180]made the whole Bessey Forest happen.
- [00:37:59.190]So topophilia, love of place and I cannot at all claim that,
- [00:38:05.970]it's experienced in lots of different ways,
- [00:38:08.430]and I think, Carson, you very much captured that
- [00:38:11.550]in your recent article about the fire,
- [00:38:14.760]just the way that the sense of community,
- [00:38:17.520]the way that people fought the fire
- [00:38:19.590]and are coming together after it
- [00:38:21.900]to, quote unquote, heal different things,
- [00:38:25.530]the very emotional way that they talked about the place
- [00:38:29.430]before and during and after the fire,
- [00:38:31.230]in your article, you very much captured that, so well done.
- [00:38:36.120]Before the fire, everyone's experiences are different,
- [00:38:40.350]everyone has a different sense of topophilia,
- [00:38:43.230]so people interpret it in different ways.
- [00:38:50.010]During that sense of community even before the fire,
- [00:38:53.220]you could have people experience it in different ways,
- [00:38:57.540]they would go for restorative times,
- [00:39:00.690]the nursery itself, if we talk about more than human,
- [00:39:03.510]is certainly it's restorative,
- [00:39:05.490]the nursery creates restorativeness,
- [00:39:08.310]not just in that small little space,
- [00:39:10.230]but in the whole Rocky Mountain
- [00:39:11.940]like five-state division that it works
- [00:39:15.000]to help the seedlings go
- [00:39:17.010]to the state's natural resource districts for soil,
- [00:39:19.470]flora, fauna conservation efforts
- [00:39:21.660]in the form of windbreak, shade trees, habitat, plantings.
- [00:39:27.600]If we talk about more than human ways that it's restorative
- [00:39:30.630]and topophilia, the forest was restorative
- [00:39:35.070]for an albino porcupine, made famous by Joel Sartore,
- [00:39:41.010]hit by a car and nearly killed local biologist tourist
- [00:39:43.860]in Facebook and Joel Sartore took note of that porcupine
- [00:39:48.420]and eventually relocated it to a wildlife rehab
- [00:39:51.720]and effectually named the animal Halsey
- [00:39:54.630]after the nearby town
- [00:39:57.150]and technically like the geography of Nebraska students
- [00:40:00.480]will remind you that I do not...
- [00:40:03.750]I'm adamant it is not Halsey, the forest is not Halsey
- [00:40:06.870]it's the name of the town, right?
- [00:40:08.580]So map quiz, they know that it's Nebraska National Forest
- [00:40:11.580]Bessey Division,
- [00:40:13.290]and then the forest can be restorative figuratively
- [00:40:15.960]for humans, right?
- [00:40:16.793]There's that beauty, that peace, that excitement,
- [00:40:19.440]that topophilia, the rejuvenation and the quiet,
- [00:40:22.050]the unexpected, so people go there intentionally
- [00:40:26.310]to soak it in slowly in their various ways,
- [00:40:28.770]kayaking, walking, bird watching, whatever.
- [00:40:31.710]And especially during COVID, it was amazing space
- [00:40:35.880]in a new way, in that with COVID travel restrictions,
- [00:40:40.410]the wonder of place helped to provide the opportunity
- [00:40:43.380]for people to forest bathe
- [00:40:45.120]whether they wanted to use that term or not,
- [00:40:47.610]and help to refill their resilience tanks.
- [00:40:51.870]I guess, can I add a quick follow on there, Becky?
- [00:40:55.920]Is there a way to...
- [00:40:56.753]everybody comes to that topophilia
- [00:40:59.130]from a different angle, right?
- [00:41:01.770]And if we're trying to preserve this forest
- [00:41:04.440]or continue its legacy, I suppose,
- [00:41:07.140]I assume that some should maybe take priority over others,
- [00:41:12.060]somebody might love the forest for its ATV usage, say,
- [00:41:15.360]but that ATV usage just got us in trouble.
- [00:41:18.210]So in your mind, do you think of...
- [00:41:21.480]do you think there need to be limits
- [00:41:22.950]or structures put around what people love
- [00:41:25.347]and which should come first?
- [00:41:28.440]Well, it's all about the decision makers
- [00:41:30.360]and who the decision makers are and what their influence are
- [00:41:34.050]and what parameters they get to stay in,
- [00:41:36.210]so everybody can have their own topophilia
- [00:41:39.540]but ultimately at the end of the day,
- [00:41:41.010]it's about culture change and those who have the influence
- [00:41:44.760]of the culture change over the decision makers.
- [00:41:49.050]I'd like to move on to Rose-Marie for just a little bit.
- [00:41:52.770]I was really glad to see in your essay, Rose-Marie,
- [00:41:54.870]that you discussed the spread of the Eastern Red Cedar Tree,
- [00:41:58.080]which some people have started calling the Green Glacier,
- [00:42:01.140]I've been working on a story about this myself
- [00:42:03.150]for over a year now,
- [00:42:04.380]so I've fallen into another rabbit hole here,
- [00:42:06.810]but I was hoping that you could discuss
- [00:42:08.520]how that unruly, scrappy Eastern Red Cedar has influenced
- [00:42:14.400]the Bessey Ranger District and our response to it.
- [00:42:19.230]Eastern Red Cedar is a fascinating species
- [00:42:22.320]because it has a vast distribution.
- [00:42:24.630]We could find it from Maryland to Michigan to Missouri
- [00:42:27.930]to the Sandhills where it slowly integrates
- [00:42:31.740]with Rocky Mountain Juniper, a close relative,
- [00:42:35.730]also evoking the hybridness,
- [00:42:38.310]it forms maybe a hybrid swarm genetically.
- [00:42:41.280]So it's a fascinating species
- [00:42:42.750]because we think about it coming into an area
- [00:42:45.990]that has recently been cleared or maybe burned
- [00:42:49.800]or an area where other species don't grow very well,
- [00:42:53.370]it could be very fast-growing species,
- [00:42:56.430]or we can find it as a 400-year-old tree on cliffs
- [00:43:00.690]in the Ozarks of Missouri or Arkansas.
- [00:43:03.750]So it has this wide ecological amplitude,
- [00:43:07.410]we find it in many places,
- [00:43:08.640]and it has this wide sort of behavior
- [00:43:12.090]to anthropomorphize a bit, it could be early successional,
- [00:43:15.510]coming early, or it could live for hundreds of years.
- [00:43:18.360]And so that is one
- [00:43:19.350]of those defying ecological characterization species.
- [00:43:23.610]When it's young and small,
- [00:43:25.290]a fire could just sort of burn it up easily,
- [00:43:27.510]but once it gets a certain age and a certain size,
- [00:43:30.660]it could withstand fire.
- [00:43:32.490]So there it has that very complex interaction with fire,
- [00:43:36.630]and now as we know, fire is used to reduce its spread,
- [00:43:41.670]could be used to reduce its spread,
- [00:43:43.380]even though it was planted early
- [00:43:45.750]because it did spread so well
- [00:43:47.610]and it established and stabilized the soil.
- [00:43:50.460]So it has this relationship people have
- [00:43:53.910]and the environment has with Eastern Red Cedar,
- [00:43:56.070]is one that has to be looked at very carefully
- [00:43:58.680]and is very much dependent on what our objectives are,
- [00:44:02.460]what the desirable condition of the forest is
- [00:44:06.570]from human standpoint, and also understanding
- [00:44:09.720]what the tree species will respond to.
- [00:44:12.930]So not a distinct answer for you,
- [00:44:14.760]but it has to be looked at sort of very carefully.
- [00:44:18.150]I love it, thank you, Rose-Marie.
- [00:44:19.980]I'm also curious, I spoke to a researcher
- [00:44:23.820]for the follow up story I wrote on the Bovee Fire,
- [00:44:26.190]and for so long my questions were geared
- [00:44:28.320]towards do we replant, do we let it return to grassland?
- [00:44:32.220]This either or a contrasting situation,
- [00:44:34.950]and this researcher told me that essentially,
- [00:44:39.120]the Nebraska National Forest is a plantation
- [00:44:41.550]and the more disturbances we have, the more Bovee Fires,
- [00:44:44.880]the more lightning strikes, whatever,
- [00:44:46.620]the closer we're getting to it becoming a true forest
- [00:44:49.680]and I'm curious what you make of that idea
- [00:44:52.410]and how disturbances like this
- [00:44:53.760]can sort of improve the resiliency in the long run.
- [00:44:56.820]Seeing a forest, I was fascinated
- [00:44:58.530]by the fact that it is self-perpetuating in some regards.
- [00:45:02.070]It started as a plantation,
- [00:45:03.540]but it's acting now like a real forest
- [00:45:06.120]because it is regenerating, there's those forest processes
- [00:45:09.450]that Dana has documented so well, they're going on.
- [00:45:12.360]So it's kind of like a forest
- [00:45:14.210]in a place that a forest doesn't belong.
- [00:45:16.470]So these disturbances, whether they're human or natural,
- [00:45:20.160]certainly will affect what happens
- [00:45:22.740]to that species composition in the mix,
- [00:45:26.220]so a tenent of ecology
- [00:45:28.440]is that a certain amount of disturbance is good
- [00:45:31.440]to promote species diversity,
- [00:45:33.810]but disturbance is not sort of a monolithic idea,
- [00:45:38.190]the disturbance regime of any area
- [00:45:41.160]is one that's characterized by the kind of disturbance,
- [00:45:43.800]is it wind or is it fire, is it flooding,
- [00:45:46.260]how much damage it causes,
- [00:45:47.820]how frequent this disturbance occurs,
- [00:45:50.430]so that too is a very sort of complicated formula
- [00:45:54.030]to understand how it affects the ecological system.
- [00:45:57.300]So a fair number of probably small scale disturbances
- [00:46:01.500]in the forest, will result in maybe new species developing
- [00:46:05.340]or regeneration of existing species,
- [00:46:07.710]large scale disturbances like we just saw
- [00:46:10.260]could be on the other hand, very devastating
- [00:46:12.810]and could result and basically push it
- [00:46:15.480]beyond this sort of pivot point, where it doesn't come back.
- [00:46:19.110]So it's really a function of how much damage and where,
- [00:46:23.610]what species are affected and how frequently
- [00:46:26.040]that type of damage disturbance might happen.
- [00:46:29.910]I feel like I have to ask
- [00:46:31.290]even though I might know the answer,
- [00:46:33.300]but I mean, do you have any gut instinct, Rose-Marie, for...
- [00:46:37.410]I kept asking this question and nobody has a great answer,
- [00:46:39.720]but what do you wanna see happen
- [00:46:41.610]with this forest post-Bovee Fire?
- [00:46:43.560]I mean, other than keeping a close eye on it
- [00:46:45.960]and studying it, what else can we do or should we do?
- [00:46:48.053]I think it's a fun natural experiment
- [00:46:50.400]and I think we should just see what happens.
- [00:46:52.530]Okay, I'll take it, I accept.
- [00:46:55.920]Sal, this is a very broad question
- [00:46:58.380]and I'm just gonna throw it out,
- [00:47:00.030]how did you and Dana get hooked up on this project
- [00:47:02.640]and what was that process of collaboration like here?
- [00:47:05.040]'Cause you're both in some way, a visual artist,
- [00:47:07.890]but you're coming at it from a much different perspective,
- [00:47:09.930]I would assume.
- [00:47:11.370]Yeah, that's a good question.
- [00:47:14.490]When Dana originally approached me about the project,
- [00:47:17.100]I wasn't really sure what to make of it at first,
- [00:47:19.590]because a lot of what I do is designing the spaces
- [00:47:23.400]and so this is much...
- [00:47:24.546]was much more of a reflective process
- [00:47:26.790]of understanding place and narrative,
- [00:47:30.000]and so I thought that was a really interesting approach
- [00:47:34.110]and taking the things that I'm doing with my mapping
- [00:47:36.330]and then contextualizing it of something
- [00:47:38.940]that I haven't really looked at before
- [00:47:41.340]and having grown up in Lincoln, Nebraska,
- [00:47:43.560]I was super surprised that I hadn't heard of the forest.
- [00:47:46.890]So I was interested to learn more
- [00:47:48.690]and the more I learned about it, the more intrigued I was
- [00:47:51.150]by the various layers
- [00:47:52.740]that you guys were starting to uncover,
- [00:47:54.630]all the things that Dana found out through the research,
- [00:47:59.880]and so, yeah, I think a lot of the legwork
- [00:48:03.060]in terms of the production of the maps
- [00:48:06.090]had already sort of been done in a way
- [00:48:08.970]because the challenge with producing the maps
- [00:48:11.940]is data exists, it's out there
- [00:48:14.520]and it's just a constellation of this disparate,
- [00:48:18.540]these disparate things,
- [00:48:19.890]and so the challenge is in sort of wrangling those things
- [00:48:23.550]and in a way that produces the coherent narrative
- [00:48:27.330]that we now see the book.
- [00:48:29.130]But at the beginning of the process,
- [00:48:30.810]the themes that the maps sort of align with were emergent,
- [00:48:35.850]but they were sort of there and so the maps responded
- [00:48:40.380]to the way that we were situating things,
- [00:48:41.940]but it also, I think in a way, helped us
- [00:48:44.370]to situate it even further,
- [00:48:45.570]it was part of the process of developing
- [00:48:47.760]some of the narratives within the book
- [00:48:49.710]and the structure of the book.
- [00:48:51.450]And so yeah, that's how it kind of came to be
- [00:48:54.270]was using the maps as a way to sort of render legible
- [00:48:57.420]these latent narratives
- [00:48:59.070]in a way that makes something maybe abstract
- [00:49:02.610]or maybe is a process and spatializing it
- [00:49:05.970]in this pretty, pretty large and monumental landscape.
- [00:49:11.700]I mean, if you haven't looked at the maps
- [00:49:13.260]in the "Field Guide," they really are incredible
- [00:49:15.300]and can you sort of walk us through maybe like one anecdote,
- [00:49:18.450]like choose a map
- [00:49:19.283]and tell us like where did that data come from,
- [00:49:21.210]how did you arrange it,
- [00:49:22.170]like what's that process actually like for you?
- [00:49:24.540]Yeah, it's tough
- [00:49:25.530]because data isn't like a super neutral thing,
- [00:49:28.020]it's always, it's produced and it's created
- [00:49:30.630]and so it's hard to deal, it's hard to work with the data
- [00:49:35.460]because you have to understand where it's coming from
- [00:49:37.650]and what the intention was behind the creation of that data,
- [00:49:41.520]and so I think the maps were both reflective,
- [00:49:46.170]but they were also projective
- [00:49:49.350]in the way that we started to understand
- [00:49:50.700]the forest ourselves, and so one map in particular
- [00:49:54.720]is the fire map.
- [00:49:57.030]So the forest is big,
- [00:49:59.610]it's a collage of these different stands of trees,
- [00:50:03.150]in some places the original planted rose,
- [00:50:05.940]they reveal themselves, in some places they don't,
- [00:50:08.850]and so the one map in particular, the fire map,
- [00:50:12.570]was really interesting because it showed us
- [00:50:14.700]where these disturbances occurred and it started to validate
- [00:50:18.360]what we were experiencing in persons.
- [00:50:20.580]So in some places we were like,
- [00:50:21.840]why does it look the way that it does?
- [00:50:23.940]But looking at the way that the US Forest Service
- [00:50:26.760]and USDA has sort of captured this data over time,
- [00:50:29.640]started to reveal some of those things
- [00:50:31.500]that we were experiencing in person,
- [00:50:33.840]but it's sort of just, it puts it on paper, it reveals it,
- [00:50:36.630]maps make reality in a way, or they sort of redefine it,
- [00:50:40.320]and so there's a lot of power
- [00:50:41.610]in the way that we visualize things in space
- [00:50:43.770]and I think it did a lot
- [00:50:44.940]for the way that we thought about these systems
- [00:50:46.740]and processes as part of the book.
- [00:50:49.650]Yeah, thank you, Sal.
- [00:50:50.880]I guess we'll return here to Dana quick
- [00:50:52.980]before diving into audience Q&A,
- [00:50:55.230]but I'd love to hear from you, Dana more about your own...
- [00:50:58.650]You talk about it in the intro to the "Field Guide"
- [00:51:00.780]a little bit, but your own relationship
- [00:51:02.760]to the more traditional field guides,
- [00:51:05.070]and I ask that because I imagine there was a moment in time
- [00:51:07.860]early on in this project
- [00:51:09.150]when you maybe knew you wanted to focus
- [00:51:11.430]on the Nebraska National Forest,
- [00:51:12.690]but didn't know in what form
- [00:51:14.370]or what approach you might take there,
- [00:51:16.410]so can you talk about how you came to that final conclusion
- [00:51:19.080]and were off to the races?
- [00:51:22.200]Yeah, I remember having like almost 2,000 files
- [00:51:27.180]and I hadn't printed them all, of course,
- [00:51:29.190]but they were all over,
- [00:51:32.370]like little prints all over my tables in my studio,
- [00:51:35.310]and I think Katie might have come for a studio visit
- [00:51:37.830]and she had been like, "Oh, this is overwhelming,
- [00:51:40.830]what is all this?"
- [00:51:42.090]And then I don't know exactly how it happened,
- [00:51:45.180]but I think at some point,
- [00:51:47.490]I was probably starting to explain some things
- [00:51:51.810]and then I realized that I had maybe stumbled upon this idea
- [00:51:57.270]of the forces that shaped the landscape
- [00:52:01.560]and those were human and non-human forces,
- [00:52:04.440]and that's kind of how I structured it.
- [00:52:07.830]And I didn't include all the forces, so grazing is a force,
- [00:52:12.810]it's not it...
- [00:52:15.149]there's one picture with cows in my book,
- [00:52:18.000]but that's not one that I spent a lot of time on,
- [00:52:20.190]I kind of gravitated to the six forces
- [00:52:23.220]that I felt were most powerful
- [00:52:26.820]and made the most sense to me.
- [00:52:30.000]I mean, in the end, this is my field guide,
- [00:52:32.790]there was no field guide for this place, so I made one
- [00:52:36.150]and this is the kind of field guide I want.
- [00:52:37.830]It has pictures, it has maps, it has history,
- [00:52:42.750]it has philosophy, and it has all...
- [00:52:46.410]it comes from lots of different ways.
- [00:52:48.090]And so I think pretty early on
- [00:52:50.850]I knew this project had to be a book
- [00:52:52.590]because it was too complex,
- [00:52:55.110]so there's the exhibition downstairs,
- [00:52:56.640]I hope you've seen it or will see it,
- [00:52:58.410]but what's nice about it is that the pictures are bigger,
- [00:53:02.670]you can see a lot of information,
- [00:53:04.440]but it does not include the amazing contributions
- [00:53:08.520]of all these folks, and their essays, their maps
- [00:53:11.910]and their perspectives that I think help round out ways
- [00:53:18.210]of understanding the forest.
- [00:53:20.040]And so, yeah, and this I...
- [00:53:22.650]Yeah, it really started as like, I need a field guide,
- [00:53:25.050]I can't find one.
- [00:53:28.110]I guess I might add that before I came here,
- [00:53:31.740]for all his faults and he had plenty of them,
- [00:53:33.870]I've always liked H. L. Menckens essay,
- [00:53:36.817]"Criticism on Criticism on Criticism,"
- [00:53:39.390]in which he talks about the role of the critic
- [00:53:40.980]being sort of like a third-party
- [00:53:42.330]that allows the audience to connect with the art
- [00:53:44.340]if they didn't instinctually have that connection
- [00:53:46.200]to begin with.
- [00:53:47.040]And I thought all of the essays in this book
- [00:53:49.080]did exactly that, I found myself looking at your photos
- [00:53:51.450]in four different ways,
- [00:53:53.190]going through it again and again and again.
- [00:53:54.450]So I really do hope you all buy a book before you leave
- [00:53:57.420]or get it signed if you have one already,
- [00:53:59.700]but I think we have approached audience Q&A time,
- [00:54:04.290]unless any other questions wanna happen up here first.
- [00:54:09.090]Okay, it's off to you.
- [00:54:11.913]Oh, no, (murmurs).
- [00:54:12.993]Okay.
- [00:54:14.493]I've got a question for Sal.
- [00:54:16.740]Hey, what was your favorite part of a Lincolnite
- [00:54:20.580]working on this sort of project?
- [00:54:21.840]This is pretty cool to see you up there, man,
- [00:54:25.620]I'm proud of you.
- [00:54:27.502]Aw, thanks, Ty.
- [00:54:28.710]Ty and I go way back, so it's, thanks for coming.
- [00:54:32.400]What's that?
- [00:54:34.221](giggling lightly)
- [00:54:36.600]So coming back to Lincoln after having left for a while,
- [00:54:41.190]I left to go to graduate school and to work for a bit,
- [00:54:44.940]but coming back and finding and unearthing these landscapes
- [00:54:48.690]that I hadn't been, like hadn't been familiar with
- [00:54:51.780]or didn't know about, and then employing the skills
- [00:54:54.840]that I learned through my education to reveal certain things
- [00:54:58.590]that like I wouldn't have been able to do
- [00:55:00.720]when I was growing up here,
- [00:55:02.127]and so it's like it's added another layer of depth
- [00:55:04.890]to the landscapes that I have been somewhat familiar with
- [00:55:08.100]but not really and so now it's nice to kind of view them
- [00:55:10.530]in a different, in new light.
- [00:55:12.360]So thank you.
- [00:55:23.400]Well, there's obviously
- [00:55:24.240]a lot of creativity up there,
- [00:55:26.220]I wonder if any of you could help us understand
- [00:55:29.520]the original creative impulses
- [00:55:32.130]that led to the creation of this forest.
- [00:55:34.800]Was it Bessey's idea or who did Bessey crib off of
- [00:55:39.870]and how did this jump from a university professor
- [00:55:42.810]to a federal government project?
- [00:55:48.738](Carson murmuring)
- [00:55:50.430]Does anyone else wanna try this?
- [00:55:53.348]You start.
- [00:55:54.181]Okay, I'll do my best.
- [00:55:55.095]We point to you.
- [00:55:55.928]Yeah, I think it was Bessey's big idea
- [00:55:59.340]and he was, I don't know if you can find this on YouTube,
- [00:56:03.750]but there was an amazing recorded
- [00:56:06.630]sort of conversation performance
- [00:56:10.320]where Dave Woodin plays Bessey, has anyone seen this?
- [00:56:14.160]It's really great,
- [00:56:15.870]but he is reading from some of Bessey's writings
- [00:56:20.070]that are recorded
- [00:56:21.000]from like the Nebraska horticultural meeting or whatever,
- [00:56:24.660]and he is probably pounding on the podium,
- [00:56:30.967]"Plant trees, we have to plant trees,
- [00:56:33.120]there's all these reasons to plant trees
- [00:56:35.310]and everyone is cutting down all the trees,
- [00:56:37.800]we're going to run out of trees, so we need to plant trees.
- [00:56:40.860]There's plenty of space here, we could plant trees.
- [00:56:43.470]We need shade, we need wood, we need protection from wind,
- [00:56:47.460]we need all of these things, we absolutely must have trees."
- [00:56:50.340]So he just would not stop on the afforestation
- [00:56:53.940]and he convinced President Roosevelt, I mean, it was Bessey.
- [00:56:59.774]So he thought it was like an arboreal emergency, I think
- [00:57:07.470]and he just wouldn't relent
- [00:57:10.200]and because of J. Sterling Morton Arbor Day,
- [00:57:13.350]I think there was a lot of back and forth
- [00:57:14.850]and the federal government was like,
- [00:57:15.757]"Well, what do the people of Nebraska think?"
- [00:57:17.910]And guess what?
- [00:57:19.260]They were into tree planting, that was already...
- [00:57:21.450]Arbor Day was already a thing, and so there were...
- [00:57:24.540]They were territorializing with trees here
- [00:57:28.350]and it was an easy sell maybe for the people that he asked,
- [00:57:33.607]"I took a survey, they all want more trees,
- [00:57:36.540]that's what it seems like from now."
- [00:57:38.910]I hope that sort of gets close, Mike?
- [00:57:45.000]Anyone wanna add?
- [00:57:45.833]Actually, yeah.
- [00:57:46.666]Okay, (murmurs). 'Cause in my essay,
- [00:57:48.600]I note at the very beginning
- [00:57:50.670]that this framing of the Nebraska landscape as unruly,
- [00:57:57.330]as recalcitrant, as not having enough trees
- [00:58:00.690]and in general just not being enough,
- [00:58:03.120]was the result of not quite being able to perceive
- [00:58:06.780]the different kinds of abundance of the grassland biome.
- [00:58:10.440]So a lot of the tall and powerful grasses
- [00:58:14.880]that are native to Nebraska that are now essential
- [00:58:17.250]in environmental remediation, were understood as weeds
- [00:58:20.820]that would wreck the tilling materials and the tilling tools
- [00:58:25.320]of most like human farmers and homesteaders,
- [00:58:30.630]so this became this advantageous
- [00:58:34.020]kind of public relations Cri de coeur,
- [00:58:36.930]where because there weren't enough things around
- [00:58:41.220]that were suitable to the extractive understanding
- [00:58:45.390]of American expansion,
- [00:58:47.190]that's why there was this call for trees.
- [00:58:49.770]I mean, don't get me wrong, I love trees,
- [00:58:51.570]but it's a very interesting way of studying
- [00:58:56.820]and thinking about perception, I think.
- [00:59:00.120]I can add to that a little bit.
- [00:59:01.470]If we think about the Eastern United States at that time,
- [00:59:04.470]it was kind of depopule of trees
- [00:59:07.230]because so much logging had gone on,
- [00:59:09.420]so that sort of grew and developed
- [00:59:12.420]into other areas of the country.
- [00:59:14.910]Also there were environmentalists at the time,
- [00:59:17.010]like George Perkins Marsh or Marsh Perkins,
- [00:59:20.460]who actually said, "It's time to re-cloth the world
- [00:59:23.010]with trees," and there were European scholars
- [00:59:25.650]saying the same thing.
- [00:59:26.820]So if there was something about that time period
- [00:59:28.980]where it was recognized that we needed trees
- [00:59:31.650]for all the reasons that we stated
- [00:59:33.210]and maybe just mostly because they were gone.
- [00:59:37.560]I think it's also important to remember
- [00:59:38.760]that when Charles Bessey got here, he came from Iowa,
- [00:59:41.670]where he was already teaching, I think,
- [00:59:42.930]and then became the first Dean of the College of Agriculture
- [00:59:45.360]here at UNL, and that was at a time in the late 1880s,
- [00:59:49.050]I think, when it was not only rain follows the plow,
- [00:59:52.500]but rain follows the trees,
- [00:59:53.910]and so at the time, everybody was on board with this idea
- [00:59:56.850]that we were gonna plant a forest
- [00:59:58.110]and the rain was gonna come
- [00:59:59.070]and obviously that didn't pan out.
- [01:00:01.080]And even by, Bessey was hellbent,
- [01:00:03.600]he campaigned for this idea for 12, 13 years
- [01:00:06.240]before it got any serious traction,
- [01:00:09.510]and by that point, everybody kind of realized
- [01:00:11.460]that rain was not gonna follow the trees,
- [01:00:13.440]but he kind of pivoted to the aesthetic value
- [01:00:15.900]or the wood source or all these other ancillary effects
- [01:00:18.780]that would come along with planting the forest.
- [01:00:20.520]It's so endemic to 19th century science.
- [01:00:24.440]So was Bessey influenced
- [01:00:26.340]by Samuel Aughey?
- [01:00:31.260]That's a great question.
- [01:00:33.870]I mean, they were here at the same time
- [01:00:35.610]from what you just said,
- [01:00:36.780]and Aughey was the first head of Morrill Hall
- [01:00:39.720]for the State Museum, and he promoted rain follows the plow.
- [01:00:48.325](all laughing)
- [01:01:00.630]Thanks, everyone, that's great.
- [01:01:03.270]I was just thinking, you said you didn't follow grazing,
- [01:01:05.340]but I read an article
- [01:01:06.210]about the federal government wanting to take helicopters
- [01:01:09.690]with high-powered rifles and shoot cows
- [01:01:11.700]in the New Mexico desert that are feral,
- [01:01:14.250]and so like we always create problems
- [01:01:16.680]in almost any environment and ranchers are upset about it
- [01:01:20.670]'cause they would leave 65 tons of dead cows
- [01:01:23.910]to decompose over the next year,
- [01:01:26.070]but how do you, like from a geological perspective,
- [01:01:29.610]how do you avoid being a cynic
- [01:01:30.810]because 10 million years ago it was the ocean, right?
- [01:01:33.870]Or like what's the short, what is a real short term
- [01:01:41.070]and a real long term for it, Dana?
- [01:01:44.130]Me, I think this is a question for Rose-Marie.
- [01:01:46.561](all laughing)
- [01:01:48.386]Or Rose-Marie.
- [01:01:49.860]Absolutely, there are no reference systems.
- [01:01:52.800]We like to believe there are, that...
- [01:01:55.440]but it depends where we identify.
- [01:01:57.900]Is it 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago?
- [01:02:03.000]That's why humans are flawed
- [01:02:04.860]to think that we could basically usurp
- [01:02:07.560]some natural processes, but we do it anyway.
- [01:02:10.290]So there's no easy answer to this,
- [01:02:17.298]but we deal in the current day
- [01:02:19.740]with the objectives that might be objectives
- [01:02:22.590]of ecological integrity or sustainability,
- [01:02:26.460]or how do we manage the current capacity for cattle,
- [01:02:29.610]so all sorts of possible objectives exist there,
- [01:02:32.940]but I would say that there's really no good reference
- [01:02:36.900]because the earth has always changed
- [01:02:39.330]and everything's changing now as we speak.
- [01:02:48.690]This is sort of an opinion question,
- [01:02:52.470]so we're noting how unique this, one of the last prairies
- [01:02:57.810]of this size is, and I'm a native Nebraskan
- [01:03:00.870]and I like the Halsey Forest, we always went up there,
- [01:03:04.410]so is there any opinion regarding if this is such a valuable
- [01:03:09.600]and rare thing, this prairie, putting a forest there,
- [01:03:14.040]putting large turbine windmills there, any thoughts on that?
- [01:03:17.880]Or any comments anybody wanna share, you might know?
- [01:03:24.507](panelists chattering)
- [01:03:27.780]I can try.
- [01:03:28.620]I mean, I can tell you what I've heard
- [01:03:30.270]from a lot of people when reporting out there,
- [01:03:33.270]and I've talked to plenty of even ecologists and biologists
- [01:03:37.860]who say, should this forest be there?
- [01:03:42.540]No, should we have planted it?
- [01:03:43.860]No, but is it there now?
- [01:03:45.390]Yes, and has it become a cultural landmark in the Sandhills?
- [01:03:49.890]Yes, it has.
- [01:03:50.723]Does it mean a ton to a lot of people?
- [01:03:52.770]Yes, it has.
- [01:03:53.603]Is it tiny in comparison to the Sandhills at large?
- [01:03:57.420]Yes, it is.
- [01:03:58.253]So there are some people who look at it
- [01:03:59.190]almost like a city park within a much larger ecosystem,
- [01:04:04.020]there are some, I talked to a rangeland ecologist,
- [01:04:06.780]Oklahoma State University, who's given a couple talks
- [01:04:09.570]at Halsey and he told them they should cut it all down
- [01:04:12.000]and he was not asked to return,
- [01:04:14.070]but his point was that it's a giant seed source
- [01:04:17.340]for the Eastern Red Cedar, which is gobbling up
- [01:04:19.410]all the surrounding native prairie around that.
- [01:04:21.870]And so like there really is no one overwhelming opinion,
- [01:04:25.530]the problem is that there's so much culture
- [01:04:27.030]and history wrapped into this forest
- [01:04:28.860]that there's no simple answer at this point.
- [01:04:34.186]Thank you.
- [01:04:39.720]I have a question,
- [01:04:40.553]I guess for Rosemarie, can you...
- [01:04:42.180]You talked about the concept of disturbance
- [01:04:45.390]and I'm wondering if you could define that
- [01:04:47.190]because it seems to me that we talk about fire
- [01:04:48.990]being a disturbance, but if it's a natural process,
- [01:04:51.480]is that a disturbance?
- [01:04:55.110]And maybe it's just me overlaying too much definition
- [01:04:58.560]into the word disturbance, but I don't know, riff.
- [01:05:04.728]Okay. (all giggling)
- [01:05:06.630]Are you sure you want me to do that?
- [01:05:09.780]So it's an excellent question and an excellent point
- [01:05:12.990]because it's too easy to paint broadly,
- [01:05:15.660]and that's what we must avoid when we talk about disturbance
- [01:05:18.390]in natural systems.
- [01:05:19.680]There are many types of disturbance, as I mentioned,
- [01:05:21.630]fire is just one, wind is very important,
- [01:05:24.300]it's probably the most important form of disturbance
- [01:05:26.310]in the Eastern forest,
- [01:05:27.780]fire is arguably the most important form of disturbance
- [01:05:30.780]in the Western forest in North America,
- [01:05:33.240]but there's many other disturbances, bark beetle outbreaks,
- [01:05:36.990]floods, so those are all disturbances,
- [01:05:39.000]anything that sort of disrupts the processes.
- [01:05:41.880]But sometimes that disruption is minor
- [01:05:44.280]and is actually rejuvenating.
- [01:05:46.020]Fire as an example, think about the Yellowstone fires
- [01:05:49.260]of 1988, which changed the whole paradigm of fire,
- [01:05:54.480]so they realized this was devastating
- [01:05:57.330]in Yellowstone National Park, but in two or three years,
- [01:06:01.140]there was a new forest developing,
- [01:06:02.730]it was actually rejuvenating.
- [01:06:04.710]So that suggests we need to understand
- [01:06:07.560]the disturbance regime of a particular area.
- [01:06:10.770]That's pretty challenging, but that was an...
- [01:06:12.870]Yellowstone provide an example for us
- [01:06:14.460]that, oh, fire's important,
- [01:06:16.350]we should allow natural fires to happen.
- [01:06:18.720]So natural disturbance is one thing,
- [01:06:22.050]other disturbance, non-natural disturbance is another.
- [01:06:25.470]So ecologists have defined disturbance regimes of areas,
- [01:06:30.270]and we want to understand how much we can keep that
- [01:06:34.770]in a balance.
- [01:06:35.790]So for example, if we understand
- [01:06:38.190]that the natural fire interval in a forest anywhere,
- [01:06:42.720]let's say North Dakota or near Medora
- [01:06:45.690]or Teddy Roosevelt National Park,
- [01:06:48.180]is a surface fire every five years,
- [01:06:52.110]that's sort of a rejuvenating phenomenon.
- [01:06:54.630]But can we make that happen?
- [01:06:56.160]If somebody starts a fire and there's lots of fuel,
- [01:06:58.770]then it's gonna be more than a surface fire,
- [01:07:00.630]it's gonna be devastating.
- [01:07:01.980]So it's impossible to control
- [01:07:03.990]but it's also important to realize
- [01:07:06.480]sort of the range of variability
- [01:07:10.290]that that disturbance can have
- [01:07:12.810]that will not disrupt the system.
- [01:07:14.880]So it's all about understanding the system very carefully.
- [01:07:18.690]Fires happen in Maine, for example,
- [01:07:21.300]but they only happen naturally probably once every 500 years
- [01:07:25.398]and that's okay.
- [01:07:27.120]But we as humans have done a great job of disrupting
- [01:07:30.360]what we consider natural disturbance regimes
- [01:07:32.940]and that's kind of the heart of the problem.
- [01:07:35.730]So we cannot paint broadly and say fire's good or bad,
- [01:07:38.970]we have to understand the system.
- [01:07:40.710]We can't paint broadly and say wind is good or bad,
- [01:07:43.650]it could be rejuvenating as well
- [01:07:44.960]or it could be very damaging, right?
- [01:07:47.460]So again, I haven't answered any questions here,
- [01:07:50.430]I just say there's no solid answer to that
- [01:07:53.550]but do you understand?
- [01:07:54.540]We need to define it very specifically.
- [01:07:56.760]Could we also argue
- [01:07:57.840]that planting a forest in a grassland
- [01:08:01.770]was the ultimate disturbance?
- [01:08:04.020]It's the ultimate disruptor, absolutely,
- [01:08:06.840]it disrupted and changed that ecosystem, so there it is.
- [01:08:10.050]And I agree, Carson, it's there,
- [01:08:12.330]it is kind of like Central Park in a grassland,
- [01:08:16.260]so allow those processes to go on
- [01:08:20.160]because again, it's always changing.
- [01:08:24.060]Yes, Katie has more to say.
- [01:08:26.370]Yes, exactly...
- [01:08:27.300]Here you go.
- [01:08:28.290]Oh no.
- [01:08:31.350]So I have a sledgehammer to hit that with
- [01:08:35.880]because what I found quite interesting
- [01:08:38.670]was to think about these questions
- [01:08:40.830]through the lens of queer theory,
- [01:08:44.100]because queer theory is kind of organized
- [01:08:46.650]around the premise that loss and destruction
- [01:08:50.730]are always omnipresent,
- [01:08:52.260]that there are certain kinds of creatures
- [01:08:54.780]for whom destruction is so omnipresent
- [01:08:57.900]that it has to be generative, it has to...
- [01:09:01.467]And so that you can have these relationships
- [01:09:06.960]that are organized around these arcs of the imaginary,
- [01:09:09.360]you can have a topophilic relationship with something
- [01:09:11.940]that's ruined or fictional or temporary
- [01:09:15.660]or something that was never supposed to be there
- [01:09:17.460]in the first place and that's because it presumes loss
- [01:09:23.940]in throughout understanding the body
- [01:09:26.820]as this kind of already lost thing.
- [01:09:28.410]So that's a...
- [01:09:30.999]I feel like a weird twinning there.
- [01:09:33.147](panelists chattering)
- [01:09:34.512]Yes.
- [01:09:39.060]I'll go with one more,
- [01:09:41.430]chew on this if you wanna talk about disturbance,
- [01:09:45.870]cross fencing, windmills and stock tanks,
- [01:09:50.190]are the biggest disturbance in the Sandhills.
- [01:10:03.270](all laughing)
- [01:10:04.103]Yep, well, chill.
- [01:10:06.360]I have maybe a multi-sided question
- [01:10:08.670]that touches on what we were just talking about with...
- [01:10:13.680]No, get that out of here.
- [01:10:14.845](all laughing)
- [01:10:16.860]So I'm really interested in the idea
- [01:10:18.060]of kind of nature as chaos, we talked about the Great Plains
- [01:10:22.050]as being unproductive
- [01:10:24.000]and thinking about the need to control like landscape
- [01:10:29.460]and to categorize and to contain.
- [01:10:32.550]So I'm really interested in like ideas of world making
- [01:10:36.840]and world destruction.
- [01:10:38.130]So I think of Halbert Shram's lecture last year,
- [01:10:41.760]which is they're kind of tied together.
- [01:10:44.700]So if we're making a world,
- [01:10:46.440]we're also destroying one at the same time, right?
- [01:10:48.600]So I'm wondering, is this a form of architecture
- [01:10:55.230]rather than like just a general construction?
- [01:10:59.310]And if so, actually I don't know if there's an if so
- [01:11:02.550]but is it actually making something
- [01:11:06.900]or are we just kind of destroying something
- [01:11:09.180]in order to create...
- [01:11:10.350]So then again, this is where
- [01:11:11.960]it kind of gets complicated to me,
- [01:11:14.580]I think about "The Overstory" by Powers
- [01:11:18.030]where there's such a problem with deforestation
- [01:11:21.720]that they have to clean it up,
- [01:11:22.590]which is actually kind of rejuvenating,
- [01:11:25.770]so this need to control
- [01:11:28.290]beyond what actually needs to be controlled, right?
- [01:11:33.210]I feel like I'm maybe starting to ramble,
- [01:11:36.780]but maybe I should end it there.
- [01:11:39.318]So I don't know if that's actually a question,
- [01:11:40.680]but is it a form of architecture
- [01:11:42.630]or is it just a way of controlling something?
- [01:11:49.890]I don't know, I kind of got lost there, I think.
- [01:11:52.590]I'm not sure.
- [01:11:53.928](all laughing)
- [01:11:56.190]I don't know because in architecture,
- [01:11:59.550]just hang on, in architecture, yeah, it's about projecting
- [01:12:05.910]some sort of, it's world making in a way, right?
- [01:12:09.270]It's like a lot of what we do is we draw
- [01:12:12.180]and like we vision and we try to outline
- [01:12:16.620]some sort of speculation
- [01:12:17.940]of what we imagine the future to be,
- [01:12:20.070]and so in a lot of ways, I think the forest from the get-go
- [01:12:22.740]was a form of architecture in a way
- [01:12:24.750]because it was a vision put forward by Bessey and others,
- [01:12:29.316]to create some ideal of like territorialization
- [01:12:33.420]or of climate, microclimate change,
- [01:12:36.300]I mean, all of these different things,
- [01:12:38.040]and now it's like, to look at that
- [01:12:40.410]through the lens of architecture again,
- [01:12:43.020]as something that might be considered architecture
- [01:12:45.720]is like, how do we situate
- [01:12:47.280]the way that people experience it now,
- [01:12:50.340]and what's the role of that and all of these narratives,
- [01:12:53.400]and how do you select
- [01:12:54.240]for what is the most appropriate narrative
- [01:12:55.890]and what is right for people to experience,
- [01:12:57.870]and how do you lay that out there,
- [01:12:59.490]which is what I think is so interesting
- [01:13:00.780]about the "Field Guide," is it's not a linear
- [01:13:02.970]sort of form of narrative building,
- [01:13:05.640]it's the narratives exist in and around each other
- [01:13:08.100]and the way that you sort of perceive that
- [01:13:09.720]and weave your own sort of idea
- [01:13:12.150]within that kind of complex layering,
- [01:13:14.130]is I think super, super interesting.
- [01:13:16.500]And I just wanna add to that or touch on that.
- [01:13:18.360]So again, thinking about architecture as...
- [01:13:22.590]So I'm thinking of like Dar Luz,
- [01:13:24.000]who considers architecture like the first form of art,
- [01:13:26.880]it's like the way of controlling
- [01:13:28.860]and keeping the natural world out,
- [01:13:31.260]so the hut is like the first form
- [01:13:33.720]and so I think about this as a form of hut or structure
- [01:13:39.510]that's meant to contain or protect or generate something.
- [01:13:44.070]So maybe, I don't know.
- [01:13:45.060]Yeah, it's a hut but it's a very...
- [01:13:47.910]it's rooted because there's this interaction with the soil
- [01:13:51.900]that's fundamentally biological.
- [01:13:54.390]There's a difference here that I think is really interesting
- [01:13:57.810]and in my essay, I tried to think about that very thing
- [01:14:03.240]along the lines of...
- [01:14:05.580]So the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida has this device
- [01:14:10.380]that he calls the supplement.
- [01:14:12.540]And Derrida is really interested in linguistic theory
- [01:14:16.140]and so when Derrida talks about language,
- [01:14:19.200]he says that a supplement
- [01:14:21.120]is something that you attach to something else,
- [01:14:24.600]imagining that you're going to improve it,
- [01:14:27.150]but what you actually do is change both of the components.
- [01:14:31.080]You reveal the inherent platitudes that were there before,
- [01:14:36.180]you create this difference that is productive
- [01:14:40.170]and interesting and that necessarily is boundaryless
- [01:14:45.406]as a relation.
- [01:14:46.239]So this is a question
- [01:14:49.050]that I think we could all think about more,
- [01:14:52.110]especially in the context of this like research-driven,
- [01:14:55.050]land-grab STEM university,
- [01:14:57.030]where so much of the fiscal support comes from,
- [01:15:01.560]definite ideas about what the best way
- [01:15:04.170]is to make agriculture and architecture.
- [01:15:08.250]But this is definitely a difference
- [01:15:12.900]that this can help us think more about.
- [01:15:18.150]Thanks.
- [01:15:26.490]There's time for one more quick question
- [01:15:29.748]if anyone has one.
- [01:15:37.340]So the last part of that question got
- [01:15:39.480]at a question I had,
- [01:15:40.320]so we talk about this as being sort of a cultural response,
- [01:15:44.610]but Bessey and Roosevelt were part of a power structure
- [01:15:48.540]and so I wonder about at the time of founding,
- [01:15:50.790]like were there dissenting voices?
- [01:15:52.170]Were there folks that were like, "What are you doing?
- [01:15:54.330]This doesn't make any sense."
- [01:15:55.380]I mean, government choices are very often a product
- [01:15:58.530]of who has political power
- [01:15:59.910]and I wonder what the political power was at the time,
- [01:16:03.060]whether that's changed now,
- [01:16:04.440]whether the sort of like cultural, I don't know, affinity
- [01:16:08.790]that we have now, whether that would've been
- [01:16:10.920]sort of widely shared at the time
- [01:16:12.630]and sort of how things have changed.
- [01:16:14.280]So if you could shed any light on that, that'd be great.
- [01:16:19.110]I mean, I can sort of answer it,
- [01:16:21.540]I mean, there were some Sandhills ranchers
- [01:16:24.870]who didn't wanna see that land taken
- [01:16:26.490]into the federal domain, so there was that,
- [01:16:29.580]but to say that there were suppressed voices,
- [01:16:31.920]not anywhere close to accurate.
- [01:16:34.860]I think it's also important to remember
- [01:16:37.080]that Bessey was an interesting man
- [01:16:39.060]and on plenty of occasions, waxed philosophical
- [01:16:41.730]about prairie life and wildflowers in the prairie
- [01:16:44.580]and the native ecosystem that was already there.
- [01:16:46.680]So it wasn't like he didn't understand
- [01:16:49.410]the value of a native prairie,
- [01:16:51.450]he just really did want those trees, I suppose.
- [01:16:55.950]But in terms of like other dissenting voices,
- [01:16:59.520]I mean, I dug through a lot of old like USDA, USFS records,
- [01:17:05.550]reading everything that Bessey had ever written
- [01:17:07.410]and rarely did I come across somebody
- [01:17:09.390]who was just adamantly opposed to Bessey,
- [01:17:11.427]and I'm sure they existed,
- [01:17:13.200]but they didn't get a lot of airtime.
- [01:17:15.450]Well, thank you to our panelists
- [01:17:17.760]and to all of you and your great questions tonight,
- [01:17:20.730]they will be available to sign books
- [01:17:22.920]if you wanna get a book or you have one,
- [01:17:24.660]so thank you to all of you.
- [01:17:27.120]Thanks, everybody for coming.
- [01:17:28.572](all clapping loudly)
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