Ethno-territorial conflict/Political Geography
Nature-Environment-Capitalism/Political and Cultural Geography
First a look at some of my current work, then a bit about past projects.
CURRENT WORK
My current ethno-territorial project involves developing the language and methods of international river basin dispute resolutions for use in land-based conflicts. David Frank of the University of Oregon Honors College is my collaborator in trying to apply the lessons of river treaties to conflicts over land, using the cities of Jerusalem (Israel/Palestine) and Derry/Londonderry (Northern Ireland) as case studies. Our 2002 article "Jerusalem and the Riparian Conflict Simile" (Political Geography 21(6):745-765) lays out the conceptual framework for this project. We are building from the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database and collecting material from these two cities to explore the potential in thinking about disputed land as if it were disputed water. Though grounded in issues of territory and space, this project ranges into questions of identity, citizenship, symbol, and historical narrative/memory. An example is my article "Winning While Losing: The Apprentice Boys of Derry Walk Their Beat," in Political Geography 26(8):951-967 from 2007.
Another major project at this time is entitled Doing Dirty Work: Land, Labor, and the Ungrounding of America. It deals with sectors in American society that have been examined in relation to labor and health issues, but it uses them as a way of understanding and demonstrating the alienation from nature that is prevalent in modern life. The three key sectors I'm dealing with are farm labor, tree planters, and professional urban gardeners. The book will probe the valorization of land and farming that is a part of the American ethos enshrined since at least Thomas Jefferson, and show that while we continue to maintain this discourse, those that engage in working the land are often marginalized in society to the point of invisibility. I probe the tension between the myth and the reality of land in our culture through images, texts, and interviews as part of my ongoing examination of capitalism, nature/environment, and culture.
A third project is the writing of a multi-disciplinary
text for the Middle East. I'm doing this along with University of Oregon
anthropologist Diane Baxter. This
book will include our own descriptive and analytical material and original
stories, poetry, and other materials translated from Middle Eastern
languages. This project is taking longer than I would hope, but will be
worth the effort.
PREVIOUS WORK
Some of my earlier work looked at tree planting in various places and contexts. All over the world people are being encouraged to plant trees. The reasons for tree planting range from the aesthetic of landscape to the imperative of mitigating global warming, and everything in between. Many of the individual benefits of tree planting are bundled together so that trees become the "do-all" wonders at the interface of society and nature. My work explores the power of trees in human cultures, and the ways that this power is harnessed for political ends. I study tree planting at a variety of scales, and for different purposes, and I examine citizen and non-governmental group, timber industry, and governmental planting.
In my book Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America (University of California Press, 2004) I examine the role of non-profit planting organizations as a bridge between citizens and power brokers in the United States as a manifestation of Gramscian hegemony in the environmental realm. I'm also developing a study focused a bit closer to what, these days, is home. I'm looking at the attitudes surrounding the replanting and current/future disposition of the Tillamook forest in NW Oregon. The Tillamook was ravaged by fires in 1933, 1939,1945, and 1951. Ultimately it was replanted in a massive effort that enlisted the labor of many "volunteers" including school children, civic groups, prisoners, and others. Today many of the trees planted by such conscripts are diseased, while far more face imminent harvest. Attitudes towards the Tillamook have evolved since the trees were planted, however, and I'm using this case to examine issues of sustainability and ethics.
I also dealt with the links between these sectors in "Promoting Eden: Tree Planting as the Environmental Panacea" (Ecumene 6(4) 1999). In that article I traced the use of an Edenic metaphor that suggests that we have an unlimited ability to remediate harmful impacts on the environment via tree planting. By fetishizing the numbers of trees planted and touting their many benefits, tree planting groups, the timber industry, and the federal government create a discourse of empowerment that actually speaks to symptoms rather than causes, and encourages an abdication of control of nature to the "experts" who plant more trees. I brought many examples in the article that illustrate that this is a shared discourse, with mutual benefit among the non-profit, profit, and governmental sectors, an argument that is supported by the functional links between the sectors that I described as well.
In The Politics of Planting (University of Chicago Press 1993) I examined the way that trees were employed by the Israeli government and Palestinian villagers in their conflict over land in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Under legal codes that have existed since Ottoman reforms in the 19th century, planting trees is a fast-track method to establishing usufructury rights to land. After tracing the "roots" of arboreal symbolism in both cultures, I examined the evolution of the legal codes that give trees their current power. I then described several conflicts where planting is being used by one side and/or the other in villages in and around the city, looking at the case as it is represented by each side. For those studies I drew upon Ottoman, British, Jordanian/Palestinian, and Israeli documents, and interviews with Palestinian and Israeli participants.
The Israeli planting was part of an effort to ring the city in a green swath, separating it from its immediate landscape, both Israeli and Palestinian. The origins of that effort led me to write an article titled "Greenbelts in London and Jerusalem" (Geographical Review 84(1) 1994). In that article I look at Greenbelts as a mechanism of spatial domination (and urban beautification) that was developed by British planners for London, and later applied to many cities that came under British colonial influence. Jerusalem was one such city, and Israeli planners inherited the concept of the greenbelt from their English predecessors. Once again, the lines of ethnic conflict as manifested in the landscape had been drawn for Israelis and Palestinians through the policies of an earlier (and foreign) ruler that were played out in the local environment.
My most recent work dealing with trees in that part of the world was published in Society and Space in (20(2):209-230 2002). "As a City Besieged: Place, Zionism, and the Deforestation of Jerusalem" involves the decline of the Jerusalem Forest, a small area to the west of the city that was planted in the 1950s. In attempting to prevent the ongoing encroachment of urban development on what remains of that forest, a newly-formed coalition of "green" groups and agencies has taken on the Jerusalem municipality. The discourse of the dispute is anything but local, however, and an interesting dynamic emerges from the linkage of this small-scale dispute with national issues. The municipality represents the effort to block expansion of the city as a threat to permanent Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. The green groups, in turn, implicitly link -through word and image- damage to the forest with terrorist attacks, thus casting the municipality in the role of the terrorist. I discuss this dynamic in relation to emerging implications of nationalism and class in conjunction with disputes over space, place, and the environment.
Of course it can't always be about trees. In "An Absence of Place: Expectation and Realization in the West Bank" (Murphy and Johnson, eds., Cultural Encounters With the Environment: Emerging and Evolving Geographic Themes, Rowman Littlefield, 2000) I looked at the concept of place and how the desire for place created a complex dynamic for Palestinians in the West Bank. Beginning with the poetry of dispossession and the genesis of an ambitious rhetorical Palestinian nationalism, I trace the evolution of the political map of the West Bank and its reflection of stymied Palestinian hopes for an ideal homeland. I argue that the dissonance created by the disjunction between territorial expectations (based on unfulfillable political/military agendas) and the current situation make it harder for Palestinians to truly feel "at home" - an already remote prospect given the on-going manifestations of Israeli occupation. I look at some of the recent dynamics of (not) sorting that place out in an article with the unprosaic title "Israel's West Bank Barrier: An Impediment to Peace" in Geographical Review, 96(4):682-695, 2006.