World Congress of Environmental History - 2014
Paper Presentation
7/7 – 7/14/2014 University of Minho Guimares, Portugal
Smooth Brome: History, Policy and Place-making in the Post-Industrial Prairie
Elizabeth Walden [email protected]
Kevin Lair [email protected]
It is perhaps unavoidable to think of the Westbrook site within a grand historical narrative of the prairie. Carolyn Merchant, in American Environmental History, notes two dominant and conflicting such narratives. The first is a story of progress: the prairie “initially conceptualized” as a vast “desert… (was) gradually brought under control and transformed into a garden” that would feed the world (Merchant 100). On the other hand, is a “declensionist” narrative, which relates the history of the prairie as one of environmental decline. “A pristine grassland, at first uninhabited, was then occupied by nomadic bands of Indians. White settlers who came into this…nearly pristine nature, transformed it over a period of 150 years into a desert, exemplified by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s” (Merchant 100).
Poster Presentation
7/7 – 7/14/2014 University of Minho Guimares, Portugal
"The Dinner Party" - a celebration of nature’s abundance and a recognition of our mutual dependence.
Kevin Lair [email protected]
Elizabeth Walden [email protected]
The poster depicts a particular piece from Horror Vacui, entitled “The Dinner Party”. The Dinner Party explores a politics of consumption by making the America bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus, formerly Rana catesbeana), an honored guest while also respecting the paramount role of interconnectivity of humans and non-humans in transforming our environment. The honored guests are currently residing in a pond at WAS. The pond, man-made thirty years ago for summer recreation and a respite from the heat was once stocked with bluegill small mouth bass and channel catfish. It is now densely populated with bullfrogs. The bullfrog, like many other organisms (both human and non-human) in the area, is a migrant from elsewhere that aided by humans has flourished in its new environment and so is a perfect symbol of nature’s plenitude in the post-industrial rural landscape: it is at once a sign of the land’s persistent fecundity and an infestation, a wild animal and an escaped food source, a source of delight that brings music to the evening and a scourge that eats everything in sight and spreads the chytrid fungus killing other amphibians. Nature abhors a vacuum. What do we make of its plenitude?
Peneda-Geres National Park – Portugal
The WCEH offered us the chance to explore Portugal. A tour to the only National Park in Portugal, Peneda-Geres was only a couple hours north of the conference city, Guimares. We took the opportunity to explore our interest in the creative potential of the post-industrial rural environment. The small farming communities were taking part harvest celebration. I am not sure if this was part of the Festival of Trays or just some local celebration but the music played on ... The walk went for a couple of miles through the farming village and into the abandoned farms now populated with Eucalyptus trees. The Eycalyptus has crowded out native Oaks (English) and created a terrible fire hazard. The notion of experiencing "nature" is generally unrecognizable to the farmers who tend to wonder "where are you going?"
The WCEH offered us the chance to explore Portugal. A tour to the only National Park in Portugal, Peneda-Geres was only a couple hours north of the conference city, Guimares. We took the opportunity to explore our interest in the creative potential of the post-industrial rural environment. The small farming communities were taking part harvest celebration. I am not sure if this was part of the Festival of Trays or just some local celebration but the music played on ... The walk went for a couple of miles through the farming village and into the abandoned farms now populated with Eucalyptus trees. The Eycalyptus has crowded out native Oaks (English) and created a terrible fire hazard. The notion of experiencing "nature" is generally unrecognizable to the farmers who tend to wonder "where are you going?"
