Assistant Professor of American Studies, Jake Kosek hadn’t been in Truchas, New Mexico more than a couple of hours when one of his new neighbors fired a rifle at him. Kosek was cutting across the neighbor’s empty field to reach his rental house since the road was blocked by an overflowing irrigation ditch. That introduced him to the tension underlying the battle over forest management in northern New Mexico.
Kosek was there to research a book. As an environmentalist he wanted to understand how a disagreement over the way the U.S. Forest Service managed the forests of northern New Mexico had escalated into the most violent environmental conflict in the country. He quickly realized his curiosity had landed him on the front lines of a three way dispute among the local Hispanic population, outside environmentalists and the U.S. Government.
For nearly two years Kosek lived in Truchas, worked in the community and explored the contradiction of a Hispanic population that was becoming less dependent financially on the forest and more dependent on it for a cultural identity.
The dispute in northern New Mexico centered on how heavily the Santa Fe National Forest should be logged, and whether the public should be excluded from parts of the forest to allow native species to recover from the changes brought on by logging.
Kosek wanted to know why environmentalists seeking to protect the forest and its birds and animals were so hated by the local population who loved the forest. And he wanted to understand how the U.S. Forest Service, the agency charged with managing the forest came to be hated by nearly everyone.
Understories
The book that came from that experience, “Understories, the Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico” explores the simmering stew of race, culture and environmentalism that began boiling violently over something as dry and dull as a forest management plan.
One of the chapters in the book is “Smokey the Bear is a White Racist Pig.” Kosek says he remembers the images of Smokey the Bear from his childhood. “I grew up with Smokey. I loved Smokey. It’s been a part of my life, but there’s a history, and I trace this history out specifically by which the forest became nationalized. The nation was considered basically to be white folks. And the posters and ideas of Smokey were part of that. He was brought in by the forest service in a very paternalistic way and people learned to hate him.”
Kosek says New Mexico made him think about environmentalism in a different way. He considers himself a life long environmentalist, and came to New Mexico with assumptions about why people felt as they did.
He had just spent years working in Latin America and Africa on community development and poverty programs. When he looked at national parks in Australia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nepal and Costa Rica he began to see an under story to the environmental movement in the ways that native peoples had been excluded, sometimes violently from parks as governments moved to preserve land, and he became interested in that tension between environmentalists and native populations. So it didn’t seem a big stretch when he decided to come to northern New Mexico.
But as he spent time in the state and began to understand the people who live here, his thinking changed. “There’s a different history here which forces a different set of questions, which don’t allow you to talk about the clean notion of wilderness in the same way,” he says. “This land has such a long history. It’s still visible. It’s visible in the land grants. It’s visible in the reservations. It’s visible in the racial makeup and even in the landscape in here. So you can’t just say preserve wilderness for wilderness sake, it’s just not possible.”
He’s learned, Kosek says that you can’t think about environmentalism without thinking about race and class history and that is one of the fundamental conclusions drawn in the book.
Kosek’s book is attracting national acclaim. It has just been given the John Hope Franklin Publication Award, given by the American Studies Association for the best book in American Studies for 2007.
After the Story
Kosek’s book deals only with the conflict in northern New Mexico but he says the nature of the battle between the local Hispanic population, the local environmental organizations who have mostly white, wealthier members, and the U.S. Forest Service caused several national environmental organizations to go through an internal soul searching process about their positions and outlook on issues. He believes that re-examination is still in progress and will shift the entire national environmental debate in some unexpected ways.
New Research
Kosek is already working on a new book, this one about bees. The germ of the idea came from his research on “Understories”. He is a bee keeper and farmer on the side, and he’s interested in the relationship between people and bees. Now he’s researching bee history and looking at new and strange ways humans and bees interact. He’s still dealing with race and class and environmental politics, but the focus is now on understanding human nature in relation to bees.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at September 27, 2007 02:06 PM