Storming the Gates of Paradise
Praise for the author
“Rebecca Solnit has the wide-foraging mind of a great essayist and the West-besotted soul of the recording secretary for your local historical society. . . . A San Franciscan, she’s who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan. . . . Solnit’s prose combines the imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred, and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive.”
David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
“Solnit has emerged as one of our most gifted freelance intellectuals.”
Philip Connors, Newsday
“Like a Mike Davis, Marshall Berman, or Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies.”
John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine
“A guide of tremendous erudition and just as much common sense, capable of slipping almost imperceptibly from the personal mode to the analytical and back again without appearing self-indulgent.”
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
“Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit’s polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best.”
Publishers Weekly
“An extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety, and grace that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before the book appeared in the world.”
Jim Lewis, New York Times Book Review
“An inspired observer and passionate historian, Solnit, whose River of Shadows (2003) won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of the most creative, penetrating, and eloquent cultural critics writing today.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Her gift for synthesis, her supple grasp of history, and her ability to shift smoothly from fact to metaphor without warning recalls another artful American writer: Henry Adams.”
Mary Panzer, Chicago Tribune
STORMING THE GATES OF PARADISE
STORMING THE GATES OF PARADISE
LANDSCAPES FOR POLITICS
REBECCA SOLNIT
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2007 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solnit, Rebecca.
Storming the gates of paradise : landscapes for politics / Rebecca Solnit.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25109-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Political ecology—United States. 2. Human ecology—United States. 3. Landscape assessment—United States. 4. United States—Politics and government. I. Title.
JA75.8.S65 2007
304.20973—dc22 2006035367
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ASTM D5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous
support of Peter Wiley and Valerie Barth as members of
the Literati Circle of University of California Press.
Contents
List of Photographs
Introduction: Prisons and Paradises
1 UNEVEN TERRAIN: The West
The Red Lands
The Postmodern Old West, or The Precession of Cowboys and Indians
The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence: Creating, Revising, and Recognizing Native American Monuments
The Garden of Merging Paths
2 BORDERS AND CROSSERS
A Route in the Shape of a Question
Thirty-Nine Steps Across the Border and Back
Nonconforming Uses: Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border
3 TROUBLE BELOW: Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste
The Price of Gold, the Value of Water
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
Poison Pictures
4 REACHING FOR THE SKY
Excavating the Sky
Drawing the Constellations
Hugging the Shadows
Justice by Moonlight
5 LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION
Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami
Jailbirds I Have Loved
Making It Home: Travels outside the Fear Economy
Mirror in the Street
Liberation Conspiracies
Sontag and Tsunami
6 GARDENS AND WILDERNESSES
Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist
The Botanical Circus, or Adventures in American Gardening
A Murder of Ravens: On Globalized Species
7 WOMEN’S PLACE
Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples
Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path: A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender
Other Daughters, Other American Revolutions
8 INFERNAL MUSEUMS
California Comedy, or Surfing with Dante
The Wal-Mart Biennale
The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans
Locked Horns
9 CITY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
The Orbits of Earthly Bodies
San Francisco: The Metamorphosis
The Heart of the City
The Ruins of Memory
Gaping Questions
CODA: The Pacific
Seashell to Ear
Acknowledgments
Notes
Permissions
Index
Photographs
Frontispiece
Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao, “Ms. Homeland Security: Illegal Entry Dress Tent, installed at the border between the US and Mexico,” 2006. Original in color.
1 UNEVEN TERRAIN: The West
Mark Klett, “Casa Grande ruins with protective rain shelter, Casa Grande National Monument,” 1984. Gelatin silver print.
2 BORDERS AND CROSSERS
estudio Teddy Cruz, “Border Wall Sequence,” 2004. Digital photography, originals in color.
3 TROUBLE BELOW: Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste
Michael Light, “Spur of the Bingham Copper Mine, Utah; Earth’s Largest Excavation,” April 2006. Black and white photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York.
4 REACHING FOR THE SKY
Meridel Rubenstein, “Home,” 1987. Four palladium prints in steel frame, 80 in. × 32 in. × 2 in.
5 LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION
Eric Wagner/basetree.com, “Non-Lethal,” activists and police, ChevronTexaco Refinery, Richmond, California, 2003. Original in color.
6 GARDENS AND WILDERNESSES
John Pfahl, “Bare Trees and Topiary, Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, PA,” 2000. Detail; original in color. Courtesy of Janet Borden Gallery, New York City.
7 WOMEN’S PLACE
Meridel Rubenstein, “Woody Wrapped in Russia,” one panel of triptych, 1987. Original in color.
8 INFERNAL MUSEUMS
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Terry Evans, “Ravens, Field Museum, Wyoming, 1871; Oklahoma, 1964,” 2000.
9 CITY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Susan Schwartzenberg, “Globe, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library,” 2003. Original in color.
CODA: The Pacific
Lukas Felzmann, untitled, 2004. Gelatin silver print.
Introduction
Prisons and Paradises
I
It was a place that taught me to write. I had begun going to the huge antinuclear actions at the Nevada Test Site, sixty miles north of Las Vegas, in the late 1980s. The next few years of camping and committing civil disobedience by trespassing into this most bombed place on earth—the site of more than a thousand nuclear explosions that were only nominally tests—taught me other things as well.
Maybe the first was that the very term place is problematic, implying a discrete entity, something you could put a fence around. And they did: three strands of barbed wire surrounded this 1,375-square-mile high-security area—but it didn’t keep in the radiation or keep out the politics. What we mean by place is a crossroads, a particular point of intersection of forces coming from many directions and distances. At the test site, some of the more obvious convergences or collisions involved the history of civil disobedience since Thoreau and the history of physics since it became useful for atomic bombs, along with the Euro-American attitudes toward the desert that made it possible to devastate it so wantonly, and the counter-history of the indigenous people of the region. During the decades of detonations, the radioactive fallout reached New England and beyond; protestors came from Japan and from Kazakhstan, as well as from New York and rural Utah. So much for fences.
The challenge of describing the austere sensuality of living outdoors in a harsh and possibly radioactive desert under a spectacular sky, of doing so while contemplating the fate of the earth and playing tag with assorted armed authority figures, called forth a great collapse of category for me. I realized that in order to describe the rich tangle of experience there, I needed to describe, to analyze, to connect, to critique, and to report on both international politics and personal experience. That is, I needed to write as a memoirist or diarist, and as a journalist, and as a critic—and these three voices were one voice in everything except the conventions that sort our experience out and censor what doesn’t belong. Thus it was that the distinct styles in which I had been writing melded. My 1994 book Savage Dreams (later reissued by the University of California Press) came out of this, but that was only the start.
Since then, I have been fascinated by trying to map the ways that we think and talk, the unsorted experience wherein one can start by complaining about politics and end by confessing about passions, the ease with which we can get to any point from any other point. Such conversation is sometimes described as being “all over the place,” which is another way to say that it connects everything back up. The straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it. I wanted more, more scope, more nuance, more inclusion of the crucial details and associations that are conventionally excluded. The convergence of multiple kinds of stories shaped my writing in one way; this traveling by association shaped it in others. Early in my history of walking, I wrote that “if fields of expertise can be imagined as real fields, fenced off and carefully tilled, then the history of walking is a path that trespasses through dozens of fields.” So are most unfenced lines of inquiry. I learned two kinds of trespassing at the test site, geographical and intellectual.
There I also learned that the sunset is no less beautiful when you are wearing handcuffs (or more so, as I discuss in “Justice by Moonlight”). That is to say, experience never gets sorted out, except by the mind that insists it must be, and the most truthful are the passionate impurists. One of the people I met at the test site was the landscape photographer Richard Misrach (whose pictures of clouds and skies are the nominal subject of “Excavating the Sky”). At the time, the early 1990s, he was making images that many people found deeply disturbing. I was told again and again that he was “glorifying violence” with his pictures of the ravaged military landscapes of Nevada’s endless expanse of military land. These critics wanted the beautiful to be synonymous with the good, beauty never to be seductive unless that seduction was the path to virtue, evil to be easy to reject, and pictures about politics to be able to fit into the dry sensibility of photojournalism rather than the voluptuousness of large-format color photography. The environmental magazines mostly obeyed these mandates, as I have been complaining ever since: oil spills were always in small, ugly pictures; and the big color pictures of pristine nature excluded any sense of history, violence, or even, for the most part, decay. (Photographer Eliot Porter was at the root of much of this, as “Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist” elaborates, but it wasn’t his fault; he was better than his followers.)
Richard’s work challenged us to feel the conflicts of being fully present in a complicated world, and I was trying to do the same. We were not alone: perhaps that struggle to put the world back together was the major mandate of the late twentieth century. And we have, in many ways, by learning to think about the politics of food; by becoming more sophisticated about where the material objects and energy we use come from and go (thus the lingerie in “The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans” and the nuclear waste and gold mines in the section “Trouble Below”); by learning to think about the world more in terms of systems than discrete objects; by pursuing ideas and histories across fields and genres; by remembering at last, those of us who are not indigenous, that all the terrain of the Americas has a human history as well. It was a long way back. I think of that fork in the road and the subsequent great divide as the Thoreau problem. It surfaces in considerations of his work again and again, and because Thoreau is so important to American thought (and to the writing in this book—he appears at least briefly in several of the essays), it seems worthwhile to revisit his seamlessness and the interpretive apartheid that divided up his territory.
II
Thoreau was emphatic about the huckleberries. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of his night in Concord’s jail with these words: “I was put in jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen.” He told the same story again in the other, Walden, this time saying that he “returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill.” That he told it twice tells us that he considered the conjunction of prisons and berry parties, of the landscape of incarceration and pastoral pleasure, significant. But why?
The famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nature, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn’t fit into Walden’s narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics.
Says the introduction to my paperback edition of Walden and “Civil Disobedience”: “As much as Thoreau wanted to disentangle himself from other people’s problems so he could get on with his own life, he sometimes found that the issue of black sla
very spoiled his country walks. His social conscience impinged on his consciousness, even though he believed that his duty was not to eradicate social evils but to live his life independently.” To believe this is to believe that the woods were far from Concord jail not merely by foot but by thought. To believe that conscience is an imposition upon consciousness is to regard engagement as a hijacker rather than a rudder, interference with one’s true purpose rather than perhaps at least part of that purpose.
Thoreau did not believe so or wish that it were so—and he contradicted this isolationist statement explicitly in “Civil Disobedience,” completed, unlike Walden, shortly after those years in the woods—but many who have charge of his reputation do. They permit no conversation, let alone any unity, between the rebel, the intransigent muse to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and that other Thoreau who wrote about autumnal tints, ice, light, color, grasses, woodchucks, and other natural phenomena in essays easily and often defanged and diced up into inspiring extracts. But for Thoreau, any subject was a good enough starting point to travel any distance, toward any destination. There were no huckleberries in his passionate defense of the violent abolitionist John Brown, but there were arguments about freedom in the essay on huckleberries written about the same time.
This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a small portion of a larger partition in American thought, another fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can also be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined that route for all of us, Thoreau’s short, direct route so few have been able to find since. This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site; it banishes not merely certain thoughts—chief among them that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland, a very social and political space indeed, then and now—but even the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and that Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail. That alone is a major route to and fro, and perhaps the most important one. We are usually in several places at once, and the ways our conversations and thoughts meander is a guide to the connections between all things or any two things. People in cities eat the fruits of the country; people in the country watch the strange doings of city-dwelling politicians and celebrities on TV.