Tag: American West
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Mapping the Social Lives of Rattlesnakes
For many people, rattlesnakes are scary at worst, mysterious at best. Amber Aumiller maps rattlesnakes’ social lives and where they intersect with humans’ in Utah’s San Rafael Swell. These desert kin, she shows, are much more complex than most people imagine.
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Lukas Marxt Lets the Toxins Speak
Juntao Yang examines how Lukas Marxt renders the specter of toxicity visible and knowable in his experimental film, Among The Palms The Bomb (2024). The film, they argue, is a study of the technology of witnessing and a call for deep attunement to the land.
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Camera Trap Poetics
After the Woolsey Fire devastated the Santa Monica Mountains in California, researchers placed trail cameras to observe the return of wildlife. Chase A. Niesner composed and performed “Signs of Life” from the images captured. In this exhibit, he reflects on the essence of being and the passage of time captured in this great return.
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Precarity and Entanglement in the Wild Christmas Tree Harvest
in ExhibitsIn this volatile (political) climate, wild Christmas tree harvest is more precarious than ever. Allen Myers photographs migrant laborers in northern California as they navigate local ecologies and global economies.
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Reforging Gun Culture in the American West: A Conversation with Bryce Andrews
in PodcastsWriter, rancher, and farmer Bryce Andrews discusses his newest book Holding Fire, which traces his personal story of grappling with the history of guns and violence in the American West.
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Grappling with the Drying Riverbeds of the Agua Fria
in EssaysAs the once flowing Agua Fria river runs dry, Rachel Howard discusses how Arizona communities are living with climate change.
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Badwater (a Kinship Series Essay)
in EssaysDaegan Miller recounts his close encounter with a buffalo herd and the fraught political history of the Badlands in this essay with audio narration excerpted from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, a five-volume book series.
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Seeing Beyond the Joshua Trees in the East Mojave
in EssaysTracing the ecological history of the Mojave National Preserve, Julia Sizek questions what was really lost in the Cima Dome Fire that killed swathes of Joshua trees.
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John Wesley Powell’s Settler-Colonial Vision for the West
in EssaysJohn Wesley Powell is celebrated for his proposed land use reforms in the American West. But his vision did not include Indigenous peoples.
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The WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans Is an Environmental Story
in ReviewsThe environmental conditions of Japanese American incarceration camps in World War II were pivotal to the way detainees navigated their experience. But these histories are as diverse as their landscapes.