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April, 2007
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SPECIAL FORUM: films EVERY ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIAN SHOULD SEE

 

The following thirty-seven essays appear in alphabetical order based on the author's last name. On pages 391–393 readers will find a bibliography, which also serves as an index, of the films discussed in the essays.


 
Figure 1
    Photo by Jérôme Maison; © 2005 Bonne Pioche Productions / Alliance De Production Cinématographique.

    Behind the scenes of March of the Penguins, directed by Luc Jacquet.
 


 

 

the human side of deforestation

RENATA MARSON TEIXEIRA DE ANDRADE-DOWNS

"WE FEEL REMORSE in cutting one-hundred-year-old trees in three minutes, but we must do it to survive," a charcoal worker sighs. The Charcoal People is a beautiful documentary based on a rich ethnography of charcoal production for pig-iron, and was filmed on the frontier of forests in the states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, Pará, and Amazon in Brazil. When I first saw The Charcoal People last summer, I immediately added this film to the syllabus for my graduate seminar on the environmental history, policy, and culture of Latin America. Whereas many academic studies of charcoal production have concentrated on economic, energy, and environmental issues, this film focuses on the human side of the human-nature interaction as related to forest destruction for pig-iron and steel production in Brazil. What makes this film so interesting is that it shows how consumption of steel-products, such as cars, in the United States, Europe, and Japan is deeply tied to the lives and struggles for survival of charcoal workers (carvoeiros) in the hinterlands of Brazil. The Charcoal People portrays carvoeiros' lives through nuanced biographies, focusing on the socially produced identity of the carvoeiro as an inherent part of the destruction of forests, and on their bodies as an anachronistic technology, rooted in mid-nineteenth century charcoal production. 1
      With no voices other than those of the carvoeiros and their families, the film depicts the hardships in the lives of adults, teenagers, and children, while focusing on their social identity, morals, and bodily engagement in a series of specialized activities related to the production of charcoal in brick beehive kilns. The film starts with familiar scenes and noises of trees falling as large chains attached to them are pulled by the engine of a very old truck, driven by a young subcontractor who owns the truck and works for the landowner who leased the lands for the steel mill. The next scene extracts a short conversation, during the delivery of wood for burning inside the charcoal kilns, between the young truck owner and a seventy-six year-old African-Brazilian carvoeiro who helps him to unload the wood at the site: "Not much wood! Have you tried that lot there," points the carvoeiro. "The road access is closed and the forest is protected by law and now fenced," responds the truck owner. From that moment on, the film focuses on short biographies of carvoeiros, both adults and children, portraying how people of different races share a common past and a contemporary struggle to survive by producing charcoal. The images of the many different bodies exposed to the elements, heat and smoke are compelling, and clearly depict health hazards and unsafe work conditions to which these people are subjected. 2
      The film adds a historical perspective on the anachronism of current charcoal production by connecting the bodies of carvoeiros with those of Brazil Indian and African slaves who produced charcoal during the peak of mid-nineteenth- century smelting and forging in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. 3
      This film also helps us to understand the role of family, child labor, government, and steelmakers in the production of low-cost charcoal and low-waged carvoeiros. For example, generations of carvoeiro families, many times compared to "gold miners," have had to migrate toward eucalyptus plantations or pockets of open access forests in order to harvest them and produce charcoal. This situation has aggravated their working conditions, as one of the carvoeiros observes: "Charcoal used to be a good business, but today pays almost nothing." 4
      The film also poses a historical question about why steelmakers in Brazil have chosen charcoal instead of coal to reduce iron into steel. There is not a simple answer, but I wished that the film had also touched on macro-economic and political factors that have contributed to charcoal choices. First, the fact that domestic coal production has been so small while the cost of imported coal so high has historically forced the Brazilian government to create incentives to use regulated quotas of primary forest to produce low-cost charcoal. Second, the economic volatility of the U.S. pig-iron price has historically dampened long-term investment in reforestation for charcoal production in Brazil. Instead, the film avoids those discussions by focusing primarily on the lives of the carvoeiros. 5
      With astonishing and sensitive photography of the human dimension in charcoal production, The Charcoal People complements and expands related sections on "Instruments of Devastation" and "The Development Imperative" found in Warren Dean's classic account of the destruction of Brazil's Atlantic Forest, With Broadax and Firebrand (California, 1995). While Dean briefly describes the role of itinerant workers in charcoal production, this documentary alerts us to what could happen to the Amazon forest if sixty-thousand carvoeiros migrate to the Amazon region to produce charcoal where new iron ores have been found and steel mills have been constructed. However, this film also presents an in-depth perspective on what sort of hardships those sixty-thousand carvoeiros face in Brazil, with vulnerable and volatile work contracts, child labor, and worsening living and working conditions, as they migrate and follow multinational steelmakers toward the Amazon forest. In the bodies of the carvoeiros, forests have a purpose: to produce their livelihoods. 6
      Environmental history as a discipline is incorporating the roles of race, gender, and class in environmental transformations by focusing on anachronistic and subaltern histories, borrowing from concepts in political ecology, environmental anthropology, and environmental justice. By situating the history of deforestation and charcoal production in the carvoeiros' bodies, environmental history gains insights beyond the traditional political-economy framework of energy production and deforestation. By connecting the carvoeiros' bodies and the hardships of their lives to the global consumption of steel for automobile production, for instance, one gains a new understanding on how the environmental history of tropical forests is deeply intertwined with global consumption and technological choices in a non-deterministic account of change. 7


Renata Marson Teixeira de Andrade-Downs is a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, and research affiliate with the University of Sao Paulo, on environmental history of energy (hydro, charcoal, biofuel and oil), water and fisheries, and is currently preparing a manuscript on the saga of the SãoFrancisco River in Northeast Brazil.

the lion queen

WILLIAM BEINART

BORN FREE WAS a landmark film depicting the relationship between Joy and George Adamson and the lioness Elsa. Filmed in 1964–1965 and released in 1966, it was based on their experiences in Kenya in the late 1950s. George Adamson worked as a game warden at Isiolo, north of Mt. Kenya; Joy was an Austrian botanical illustrator who married him in 1944.1 It was always a troubled relationship, but it opened up great opportunities for both of them. In 1956 Adamson shot a lioness which was believed to have attacked an African homestead and brought home its three motherless cubs. It was not unusual for Europeans in Africa to semi-domesticate wild animals and Joy "took absolute possession of the cubs."2 Two were sent to zoos in Europe, but they kept the third, Elsa. At two years old, this lioness started hunting local livestock and they decided, after some conflict with the authorities, to put her back into the wild—a long and difficult process. 8
      Joy Adamson wrote about the experience in Born Free, which appeared in 1960.3 Its extraordinary photographs showed the Adamsons, in relaxed everyday interaction with the lioness. The Adamsons maintained contact with Elsa in the wild, where she gave birth to three cubs, and Joy wrote Living Free, Forever Free, and a children's book as sequels.4Born Free sold 1 million copies in England and 5 million copies overall; it attracted ambitious filmmakers. Columbia took it on, with Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for High Noon and was involved in Guns of Navarone and Doctor Zhivago, as executive producer.5 The lead actors, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, already animal-lovers, were determined that they should capture the spirit of the book as closely as possible. The film was made on location and lions of different ages had to be trained to mimic the relationship with Elsa. George Adamson again lived with lions on a daily basis, in order to habituate them to people: film gave rise to, and then reflected, a reality which was as extraordinary as the earlier events it was portraying. 9
      Partly because of the publicity around the books, the film had an enormous impact when it was released. Travers and McKenna, also a husband-and-wife team, found Adamson's "attitude towards lions, and indeed all living creatures, was our chief influence during those very difficult months of filming, and will always be a guiding light to us on questions of animal treatment, and animal-human co-existence in the world."6 Adamson repeated the process of restoring some of the film's lions to the wild. Travers filmed this as a documentary, The Lions are Free (1967), shown three times on prime-time U.S. television to estimated audiences of 35 million.7 Sequels included Living Free (1972), A Lion Called Christian (1972), and To Walk with Lions (1998). The latter depicted the relationships among George Adamson in his old age, his lions, and his disciple, Tony Fitzjohn, who became a leading protagonist for the Mkomazi park in Tanzania.8 The drama of Elsa's life and its aftermath played to a large Western audience. 10
      Born Free, as a book and a film, was not only a minutely observed record of a lion growing up in captivity; what made it so striking was the emotional interaction between Elsa and the Adamsons. We see hugs, caresses, smacks (by the lion), playfulness, and humor. Elsa's expressions were interpreted by the Adamsons and, in turn, she was seen to understand theirs. The words trust, love, and affection are expressed in print, and an attempt was made to show them on screen. The classic images of George show him walking with Elsa, and later the film lions Boy and Girl, his back to them while they followed. As part of training the lioness Mara, he moved his tent into her enclosure and "for the next three months she slept regularly in it, usually stretched out on the floor alongside my bed and sometimes on it."9 Similar preparation with another lioness enabled Travers to do a bedroom scene.10 Adamson—and the actors—talked to and made sounds like the lions. Born Free showed not just appreciation for other species, but for individuals among them. Naming all these animals was an essential element in their absorption into human households, or interactive contexts, where they could become the objects of warmth and care—and were implicitly accorded rights.11 11
      Born Free projects this emotion and this is a key to its success. But there are other currents. Both the Adamsons' project and the film aimed to be educational and conservationist. They saw themselves as representing animal behavior more accurately. In their strategies for handling lions, kindness had to be supplemented by study and experience of instinctive animal responses—especially how to avoid aggression. The film effectively transmits some of these ideas in a non-didactic way. The Adamsons were conscious of breaking boundaries and it is difficult not to marvel at the film's capacity to capture such interaction. That we know this to have been achieved with careful training, and a minimum of special effects, makes the film more memorable. Audiences could see a vastly enlarged scope of animal behavior which few had encountered in the flesh. 12
      The film seems overly sentimental at moments—the usual tendency in popular films about animals. This emerges partly from the role of McKenna, small, blond and vulnerable, who could convey only an element of Joy Adamson's combative and unpredictable personality. Foreman and his team clearly saw how natural history and drama could be married to make lions cozy. They projected animal families as a desirable state: Born Free ends, as does Foreman's short photo book of its making, with "the family—Elsa, her mate and the cubs relax[ing] on their rock."12 The film offered audiences the possibility of extending toward wild animals the protective impulses they felt toward pets. 13
      Sentiment was tempered by a sense of danger. David Attenborough, recalling his visit to film the Adamsons with Elsa around 1960, was struck both by Joy and George's smouldering relationship and "the violence that lay beneath the surface wherever we looked."13 In the Adamsons' view, aggressiveness had been exaggerated as a trait of large mammals, but part of the attraction of the film was the immanent threat of living with lions. Our imaginations, or better senses, tell us that wild animals are dangerous and this provides a dramatic and tense undercurrent to the film. Both in the making and in the film, injuries and attacks took place; in To Walk with Lions, Fitzjohn and Adamson are both mauled bloodily. This tension also helps to convey the message that the Adamsons were not simply attempting to domesticate wild animals, but believed that the best place for wild animals was in the wild, even if human care was sometimes necessary and justified by their special role at the interface between humans and animals. The wild by this time meant reserved areas. 14


 
Figure 1
    © Columbia Pictures. Courtesy Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

    Virginia McKenna (as Joy Adamson), a lioness playing Elsa the Lioness, and Bill Travers (as George Adamson), in Born Free (1966), directed by James Hill.
 


 
      It is difficult to escape the implication in Born Free that the primary responsibility for protecting African wildlife lay with white people and Western society. Filmed after Kenyan independence, it makes some attempts to escape these shackles, including African actors who depicted Adamson's assistants, Nuru and Makedde, in reasonably prominent roles. But ultimately it is a drama played out between African animals and white men and women. For Western, especially British audiences, this was also a more comfortable vision of Africa after the conflicts and violence of Mau Mau and decolonization. 15
      In her more intense moments, Joy Adamson saw herself as an innovator in the progress of civilization and George Adamson believed that they had made a lasting impact on how human beings regard wild animals.14 Although Born Free, as a book and a film, has perhaps not been claimed by modern environmental movements, it is a ubiquitous reference point and did surely influence some strands of popular environmentalism, especially its animal-centric, anglophone forms. I did not like the hit song, which—along with the score—won an Oscar. 16


William Beinart is professor of race relations, University of Oxford, and chair of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. He was formerly director of the African Studies Centre (2002–2006), and is author of Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 2001), The Rise of Conservation in South Africa (Oxford, 2003), Social History and African Environments (Ohio, 2003, edited with JoAnn McGregor), and Environment and Empire (forthcoming, 2007, with Lotte Hughes).



NOTES

1. George Adamson, Bwana Game: the Life Story of George Adamson (London: Collins and Harvill, 1968); and My Pride and Joy: an Autobiography (London: Collins and Harvill, 1986). Adrian House, The Great Safari: the Lives of George and Joy Adamson (London: Harper Collins, 1995).

2. Adamson, Bwana Game, 219.

3. Joy Adamson, Born Free: a Lioness of Two Worlds (London: Collins, 1960).

4. Joy Adamson, Living Free: the Story of Elsa and Her Cubs (London: Collins, 1961); and Forever Free (London: Collins, 1962).

5. Carl Foreman, A Cast of Lions: the Story of the Making of the Film Born Free (London: Fontana Books, 1966).

6. Virginia McKenna, Some of My Friends Have Tails (London: Collins and Harvill, 1970), 36.

7. Ibid., 42.

8. Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), which is highly critical of the exclusion of African people from this reserve.

9. Adamson, Bwana Game, 258.

10. Ibid., 261.

11. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 113–15, discussing animal naming.

12. Foreman, A Cast of Lions, endpage.

13. David Attenborough, Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2002), 152.

14. Adamson, Bwana Game, 219.

dancing along the edges of the human and the natural

MICHAEL BESS

FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL is sometimes classified as a documentary. Nothing could be more misleading. It is a visual poem, composed in the manner of a fugue. It is by moments astonishing, inspiring, fascinating, baffling, and deeply moving. With good reason, it established Errol Morris's reputation as a truly great practitioner of the cinematic art—a reputation that has been further underscored by his equally brilliant (and equally unsettling) 2004 film, The Fog of War. 17
      This masterful film presents portraits of four unusual men, interweaving and juxtaposing their thoughts and deeds. Dave Hoover is a lion tamer; George Mendonca is a topiary gardener (that is, he prunes large bushes to make them into animal shapes); Ray Mendez is a specialist on naked mole rats, the only mammals known to establish a social structure akin to that of bees and ants; and last but not least, Rodney Brooks is a robot designer at MIT. The gulf that separates these four subjects' lives is immediately obvious, as Morris jumps from one to the other and back again; but what gradually emerges as the film goes along are the commonalities they share as well. The film viewer cannot remain passive when confronted with this stately procession of sheer diversity: The mind begins frantically searching for patterns, comparisons, thematic threads. All four of these men are tamers of nature, determined to understand and control creatures in the nonhuman world; all four are passionate about what they do, to the point of eccentricity; all four share a certain ambivalence about the power they hold over their creations and express doubts about where the final control really resides. 18
      At the same time Morris plays the tease: He leaves the connections tenuous, tantalizing, uncertain. Just when the viewer thinks a pattern is becoming clear, a new one emerges to displace and slightly disrupt the former one. And then there's the jungle movie footage: interspersed throughout the interview material and images of these four men doing what they love to do, we are confronted with dramatic scenes lifted from the 1936 Hollywood film, "Darkest Africa"—a kitschy and very obviously "dated" story about brave explorers battling in a jungle city to save a captive woman. The effect is completely perplexing at first, then gradually begins to establish subtle and unexpected connections and juxtapositions with the struggles of the lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole rat man, and robot maker. Meanwhile, a powerful musical score reminiscent of Philip Glass ties it all together, giving the film a haunting emotional tone, somewhere between melancholy, obsession, and awe. 19
      As the film advances, we keep learning more about what makes these four remarkable fellows tick; the overlap effect gradually builds up, making the lives of these totally different individuals appear increasingly kindred. The lion tamer talks nostalgically about the golden age of circus acts, which he believes has now passed irrevocably away; he tells us the tricks of his trade ("never for a second forget that this creature really wants to eat you"). The 70-year-old topiary gardener reflects on the obvious fact that, when he becomes too old to pursue his daily routine of nipping and snipping, his creations will instantly go their own way once again. The mole rat expert describes his awe at the complexity of these creatures, who have built a little jungle city of their own, a glassed-in world with its own intricate rituals and hierarchies and division of labor. The robot maker speaks excitedly about the feeling he gets when he sets loose one of his mechanical creations and "it just does what's in its nature to do." 20


 
Figure 1
    Photo by Nubar Alexandian, © Sony Pictures Classics.

    Rodney Brooks' robot, as portrayed in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997), directed by Errol Morris.
 


 
      In its nature? A robot? What kind of nature is that? This film is guaranteed to disturb anyone who would like to believe that the line between the artificial and the natural is clean and clear-cut. It's all about the places where humans, machines, animals, and plants get deeply embroiled in each other's affairs. What category does George Mendonca's giant giraffe-bush fit into—human artifact, animal, or plant? Is a naked mole rat less or more insect-like than one of Rodney Brooks's scrambling six-legged robots?—mammal, insect, machine? Morris evidently takes great delight in this kind of destabilization of boundaries. 21
      This film is also about humility, the ephemeral nature of human endeavors. It leaves us with a sense of affection for the passionately quixotic efforts of these four men, each devoted to an eccentric pursuit that will clearly, in the end, fade away. Someday, they know, and we know, the lions will cease to obey; the bushes and shrubs will revert to the shape of their inscrutable inner telos; the mole rats will continue with their busy little lives, oblivious to the passing of the man who beheld them with such fascination; the robots will grow in number and populate our lives, becoming "fast, cheap, and out of control" (Rodney Brooks's words) as we adapt to them and they adapt to us. All of these creatures, man-made or not, parade before us in Morris's tone-poem: it leaves us with a feeling of kinship spreading across the categories we customarily use to set ourselves apart. Human, machine, plant, animal: just "doing what's in our nature to do." 22
      This film would make a wonderful addition to any course on environmental history or green politics, because it impels the viewer to question the meanings of "nature" and "the natural," and to reconsider the relation between humans and the myriad varieties of nonhumans that surround us. Thus, the film deftly complicates and problematizes many of the "given" concepts that arise in discussing environmental issues, and it does so in a way that powerfully engages the viewer. Too often, students tend to associate environmental issues (and environmental history) with dreary declensionist tales of woe, mayhem, and impending doom; and with preachy scholarly efforts to mobilize students for the broader cause. This film confounds those expectations: it preaches nothing at all, except the possibility of seeing ourselves, and our surroundings, in all kinds of exciting new ways. 23


Michael Bess is Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006). He is currently working on a study of the moral and social implications of human biological enhancement.

negotiating the thin red line

LISA M. BRADY

IN MANY WAR MOVIES, there are clear winners and losers, often drawn around undisputed lines of good and evil. The focus is typically on a single, heroic individual who attains final victory through some act of daring or sacrifice. In Terrence Malick's 1998 film The Thin Red Line, there are no heroes. There are only individuals struggling to understand what roles they play and to find meaning in their circumstances. Malick's film is based on James Jones's 1962 novel of the same name. It examines the U.S. Army's successful bid in 1942–1943 to wrest control over the small tropical island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese. The battle was a crucial turning point in the Pacific Theater and was the first step toward larger Allied victories in the region. While The Thin Red Line takes license in its presentation of the military history of the battle, it is brilliant in its portrayal of relationships—between soldiers and civilians, between officers and their men, and between humans and nature. 24
      The Thin Red Line is not your typical war movie, a fact made plain in the film's opening scene. Missing are the guns, the tanks, the marching soldiers. There are no valiant, determined men stumbling over bloody corpses (that comes later). No sense of chaos assaults the senses, no battle cries indicate that this, in fact, is a film about a war. Instead, the movie begins with a crocodile silently submerging itself in murky water, its presence quickly obscured by the algae growing on the liquid surface. From there, the camera turns its lens on the jungle. As the camera pans up into the verdant canopy, a voice asks, "What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself—the land with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?" These questions are left unanswered (as indeed they must be), but they form the philosophical foundation for the film. 25
      It is this uncertainty, this questioning, that makes The Thin Red Line so compelling. The film has few absolutes, and even those are presented with a cynical edge. In postulating about the reason they were fighting the war, Sergeant Welsh, played by Sean Penn, says, "Property. The whole fucking thing's about property." The broader issues Malick raises—the justness of war, the existence of choice and individual freedom, ambition, cowardice, life, death, the relationship between humans and nature—are timeless. Moreover, it is simply a stunningly beautiful film. Malick relies on images rather than words to illustrate his point, using voice-overs and dialogue judiciously. One of the best qualities of the film is a result of Malick's fluid direction and meandering story line. Nearly every scene can be viewed independently, without extensive exposition on its specific context, and most of the issues raised transcend the events on Guadalcanal. For all these reasons, the film is among my favorites, personally and professionally. 26
      I was transfixed the first time I watched it, fascinated by the elegant juxtaposition between nature's calm existence and war's frantic striving. My favorite scene, the one I always show my students, depicts the first major engagement between the Americans and the Japanese. In order to capture the enemy position, the Americans have to cross an open field and climb a steep incline that is defended by a few well-fortified Japanese machine gun nests. The battle scene resembles its counterparts in more traditional war movies until Malick zooms in to show us what's happening on the ground—literally. There we see that the human conflict matters little to the hatchling struggling out of its shell and beginning its life in the midst of death, or to the snake winding its way through the soldiers hunkered down in the tall grass. Rather than coming across as hackneyed, the scene provides an excellent example of nature's agency and of the importance of terrain within the context of war. 27
      Other scenes are less successful in avoiding cliché, but are still useful for encouraging students to question their assumptions about nature and culture and for introducing important concepts within environmental history. Perhaps the best example is the second scene of the film, which depicts a village of Pacific Islanders living harmoniously with nature in a tropical paradise. Their lives are untouched by the war, except for the presence of two American soldiers who are absent without leave. The village is peaceful and its residents want for nothing. Later in the film, however, the soldiers return to find the community all but destroyed. I use the scene to introduce to my students the idea of constructions of nature and to discuss the implications of assuming that "traditional" ways of life have no ecological impact. 28
      While the two scenes I've described are perhaps the most "teachable," there are dozens of vivid images scattered throughout the film that have left deep and lasting impressions on my mind. My favorite, and perhaps the most evocative, is the quiet concentration one young soldier demonstrates in the midst of the terrible firefight on the hill; he seems oblivious to the ravages of war around him as he gently strokes a small plant, the leaves of which curl up at his touch. Another is the final scene of the film. The Americans, having taken the island from the Japanese, are shipping out to their next deployment. From the departing boats, Malick pans back to the shore of Guadalcanal, where the jungle looks as it did before the war arrived. 29
      Despite some of its historical and conceptual flaws, Malick's film provides important insights into the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. The Thin Red Line is not just another movie about the glories of war; it is a profound investigation into the meaning of conflict, not just for human societies, but for nature as well. 30


Lisa M. Brady, Boise State University, is the author of "The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War" (Environmental History, July 2005). Her current research continues to examine the relationships between war and nature, both in the American Civil War and in the Korean DMZ.

applied science to the rescue

TOM BROOKING

"IT SHOULD BE fertile," muses an archetypal New Zealand farmer at the start of Pumicelands, a naively optimistic state-funded documentary (legend has it that the voice belonged to New Zealand's doyen of grassland science and one of the most powerful men in the country when the documentary was made—Bruce Levy).1 The farmer goes on to suggest that the infertility of the Pumicelands at the volcanic center of the North Island of New Zealand is a major mystery because it's "fine and friable." Loosely based on Pare Lorentz's The Plow that Broke the Plains, the Pumicelands documentary goes on to tell in a very unproblematic manner how applied science not only solved the mystery, but opened a large area of formerly useless land (cattle and sheep both withered and died until the addition of critical trace elements such as cobalt and molybdenum) for more intensive settlement.2 Perhaps what is most fascinating about this classic New Zealand environmental film is the difference in tone from The Plow. 31
      Pumicelands uses a bright and breezy commentator to explain how the soils of the central North Island defied scientific understanding for many years. The producer almost seems to be playing Tigger to Lorentz's Eyeore because The Plow's script is delivered with gravitas rather than the breathless levity of a Movietone Newsreel. Things become even sillier for the modern viewer when, after four minutes, white-coated scientists are shown working in a laboratory. The rather clichéd tones of Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra accompany the heavily telegraphed announcement: "And then—discovery." Twenty-first-century students find this moment so daffy that they burst out laughing. In fact it took over thirty years of experiment in field and laboratory and much trial and error to crack this problem. According to the documentary, though, this quick fix would bring benefit to both Pakeha (white New Zealanders) and Maori (native New Zealanders long dispossessed of most of their land by the state and white farmers). Seemingly oblivious to the irony involved in this claim, the documentary marches on to show bulldozers, driven down precipitous slopes by carefree latter-day cowboys, mincing scruffy secondary growth into submission. "Man's" inevitable triumph over such obstacles as deficient soils is confirmed. The documentary concludes in an upbeat fashion by showing how a new bicultural community complete with brand new schools and houses is being built on the land rescued by applied science. Corny jokes about birds in cages and the luring of women to such a relatively remote area follow before the documentary relocates into a school room. There Maori and Pakeha children sing Little Liza Jane with no sense of either history or irony. The end comes with a flashback to the farmer muttering "it should be fertile." 32
      Visiting agrarian historians from the United States have expressed surprise that New Zealand farmers, agricultural scientists, and politicians have maintained a rather overconfident belief concerning the ability of applied science and government agencies to fix environmental problems.3Pumicelands presents science as a form of alchemy with magical transformative powers and reveals a kind of blind faith in the capacity of applied science to solve problems quickly and painlessly. Today it is still hard to find expression of the view that every solution found for old problems creates at least three new problems. In this sense there is a complete reversal here between the frequently gloomy, Bergman-like tone of New Zealand dramatic movies, compared with the hollow glamour and shallow optimism of Hollywood. 33
      In contrast, The Plow presents nature as overwhelmingly powerful and incapable of domestication. Yet migrants to both the United States and New Zealand carried notions of the superiority of rural life and both peoples imagined their new land as abundant, fertile and easily transformable into a superior garden. Most of the idealism variously described as "arcadianism" or "ruralism" found its way to New Zealand as well as North America.4 So why are these movies so different? 34
      The obvious reason is that New Zealand has never experienced an environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Dust Bowl, even if revisionist work suggests that the Dust Bowl may have been a natural phenomenon rather than a disaster induced by human folly.5 In contrast to the powerful and lingering mythologies associated with the Dust Bowl, the slips and floods of 1938 seem modest. Indeed most New Zealanders have forgotten all about them even though they did claim the lives of twenty-one road builders near Gisborne and convinced the First Labour Government to establish the Soil and Water Conservation Council in 1941. Nothing anywhere near as bad occurred again until Cyclone Bola in 1988 when most New Zealanders had forgotten the lessons of the big wet of 1938. Many farmers even continued to deny the link between deforestation and flooding down to Bola despite the best efforts of Lance McCaskill (coincidentally trained in the 1930s by America's soil preservation gurus who had learned so much from the Dust Bowl), other soil conservators, and Catchment Boards.6 Soil erosion remained a problem for engineers rather than farmers. 35
      More subtle differences also explain the very different approach. Whereas urban American intellectuals constructed the countryside as problematic by the 1930s, most New Zealanders still idealized rural life into the 1950s. Farmers continued to wield considerable power within the New Zealand parliament and agricultural scientists held more sway with state bureaucracy than industrialists, entrepreneurs, or accountants, so long as agriculture still earned around 80 percent of the country's export income, that is, down to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s. Consequently, the industry remained above and beyond criticism of its environmentally damaging practices. Indeed, no major protest against environmental degradation emerged until the 1960s; even then this was largely directed at industrialization and dam building. 36
      New Zealand's identity as a kind of social laboratory from the 1890s inflated national confidence in its capacity to solve problems. By 1949, government officials and many others believed that state-assisted investigation of any problem would provide quick and easy solutions, usually in the form of some kind of bureaucratic mechanism. Just as the Department of Social Welfare and the expansion of state housing had supposedly removed poverty, so the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the agricultural colleges, and various research institutes would eradicate any negative effects of farming should such unlikely developments occur. 37
      New Zealand's relative newness, even compared with the United States, and its ongoing commitment to the Imperial project, also help to explain the difference. Pakeha New Zealanders had not been in the country long enough by 1954 to realize fully the consequences of the massive environmental transformation they had wrought. New Zealand had been changed as much in a single century of settlement as the United States had in four hundred years and Europe in two millennia. The significance of that change, which happened so fast, had literally not dawned in the consciousness of any but a few exceptional individuals. Furthermore, the guaranteed British market removed the need to think about other ways of making a living and encouraged turning to chemical inputs as the quickest and easiest method of solving soil problems. Despite the best efforts of ecologists and environmental historians, the triumphalist narrative of Pumicelands remains a dominant orthodoxy as New Zealand farmers continue to extract high levels of production by making large inputs to their indifferent soils. Films such as Pumicelands have much to teach us about New Zealand's environmental history. 38


Tom Brooking is professor of history at the University of Otago, where he teaches a course on New Zealand environmental history. He co-edited Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Oxford, 2002) with Eric Pawson and is currently leading a major project on the reconstruction of New Zealand's grasslands with Eric Pawson.



NOTES

1. Tom Brooking, Vaughan Wood, and Robin Hyde, "The Grasslands Revolution Reconsidered," in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 169–82.

2. Ross Galbreath, "A Grassland Utopia? Pastoral Farming and Grassland Research in New Zealand," in DSIR: Making Science Work for New Zealand, 1926–1992 (Wellington: Victoria University Press/Historical Branch, 1998), 58–79.

3. For example, Professor Tom Isern of North Dakota State University.

4. Tom Brooking, "Use It or Lose It: Unravelling the Land Debate in Late Nineteenth- Century New Zealand," New Zealand Journal of History 30 (October 1996): 145–47; and Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Origins of Modern New Zealand Society (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 19–73.

5. Geoff Cunfer, On The Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

6. See Michael Roche, "The State as Conservationist, 1920–60: 'Wise Use' of Forests, Lands, and Water," in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Pawson and Brooking, 192–97.

the root of your family

KATHLEEN BROSNAN

IN A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, filmmaker Alfonso Arau juxtaposes the budding romance between two young Californians in 1945 with the story of her wine-making family's more mature romance with the land. Victoria Aragon, the pregnant, unwed twenty-something daughter of an upper-class, Mexican-American family, returns home to the Napa Valley from graduate school. On her trip, she meets Paul Sutton, a recently discharged veteran who, disillusioned with his own marriage, has returned to his job as a traveling candy salesman. He pretends to be Victoria's husband temporarily to placate her father. Performing this charade, Paul and Victoria fall in love, but the father remains openly hostile to the young man, who was raised in an orphanage and, in the father's opinion, possesses no sense of family and no sense of place. After obtaining an annulment, Paul tries to explain to the vineyardist how much he loves Victoria. In anger, the father attacks the former soldier and accidentally starts a fire that seemingly ruins the vineyard. Paul climbs a hill and tears from the ground the oldest vine which the family brought to California, via Spain and Mexico, some fifty years earlier. In discovering that its rootstock has escaped the fire's wrath, Paul stakes his place in the family and restores its landed heritage. The father tells Paul, "This is the root of your life, the root of your family. You are bound to this land." 39
      In this sentimental, visually alluring film, Arau blends fact and fantasy in what he calls "magical realism."1 Some scenes, for example, were filmed at Napa wineries, but many landscapes were computer generated. The most memorably rapturous scene occurs when a frost threatens the next-day's harvest. The young couple, scantily clad despite freezing temperatures, joins her family and their workers to don translucent "butterfly wings" and waft among the vines, bringing the heat of the smudge pots down to the grapes. Arau's mixture of reality and illusion proves more fanciful than historical. 40
      The Napa Valley offers a nearly ideal environment for the cultivation of grapes, and frost has been a problem, albeit not a problem for autumn harvests. "Cool conditions, and especially the cool nights, allow the grapes to ripen with an adequate natural acidity which is necessary for producing fine table wines. The only handicap is the spring frosts."2 In March, grapevines experience budbreak, and frost is a danger as this new growth begins. In some years, before grape growers developed better protections, more than half the crop was lost in a single spring night.3 In contrast, the first autumn frost in Napa does not occur until the last days of October, after most of the valley's grapes have been picked. There is no record of a threatening frost on the eve of harvest in 1945 or any other year.4 41
      Before the 1960s, vineyardists lit smudge pots filled with oil to warm the grapes, while smoke drifted through the vines, as the film portrays. There is no evidence, however, that Napans slipped on "butterfly wings" to aid the process. Since the 1960s, Napa vintners have employed either huge wind machines that force warmer air back to the ground or overhead sprinklers whose water freezes as it comes in contact with the vine, emitting latent heat and insulating the grapes.5 When grapegrowers contemplated these new methods, they balanced competing economic and environmental concerns. The dense, acrid air pollution generated by the smudge pots was hardly the luminous cloud suggested by Arau. It spread across Napa County, and occasionally reached the east side of San Francisco Bay. Alternatively, the scarcity of water in California made sprinklers a risky choice for vineyards that lacked private reservoirs.6 In the end, given the rise of tourism, complaints from neighbors, and the efficiencies of the new methods, vintners abandoned smudge pots and their vexatious smoke. 42
      Arau fills the frost scene and others with a plethora of workers. The Aragons live in a California-missionary-style mansion. Both elements suggest a wealth that few Napa winemakers enjoyed in the 1940s. Prohibition had devastated the wine industry, and Repeal had resolved few problems. Equipment was in disrepair, expertise was lost, consumers had moved on, and vineyards contained poor quality grapes.7 Moreover, as the industry struggled to regain its footing in 1945, no Mexican-American family had achieved the viticultural success experienced by or the racial acceptance accorded the Aragons at the harvest festival. 43
      In the movie, the family repeatedly claims its heritage by emphasizing the European rootstock that connects it both to the land in Napa and to its own European ancestors. In doing so, the film ignores an environmental catastrophe faced by Napa and most of the world's viticultural regions in the nineteenth century—phylloxera—but in its error, opens the door for a classroom discussion of the global consequences of species shifting. Native to the Mississippi River Valley, phylloxera is a sap-sucking insect that attacks the roots of grapes vines, although in a parasitic adaptation, it does not kill all American vines. Phylloxera traveled to France in the 1850s and decimated its vineyards. The insect spread across Europe, and later arrived in California when local vintners recruited v. vinifera cuttings from Europe. University of California scientists mistakenly recommended a v. californica rootstock that proved nonresistant. In 1890, Napa County held some 17,000 acres of bearing vines; a decade later, only 2,000 remained, forcing local vintners finally to acknowledge successful French experiments with v. rupestris St. George, another American rootstock, and begin replanting.8 By 1945, few rootstocks that originated in Spain still would be found in the Napa Valley. 44
      Rather than search for accuracy in films, I hope to discover glimmers of historical truths. Arau captures a few truths. His "magic realism" mirrors Napans' own use of romanticism to sell wine and promote viticultural and scenic tourism. Napans have merged visitors and vintages within a veil of European historicity and California-missionary architecture. Vineyards, they tell tourists, are tended by "gentlemen farmers" and combine the lure of a pastoral idyll with cosmopolitanism. Tourists, in turn, shape self-identities by visiting places that offer social affirmation. Nowhere was this truer than in the wine world. "Tourism is fundamentally about the difference of place, while wine is one of those rare commodities which is branded on the basis of its geographical origin."9 Napans successfully pitched to people with the greatest disposable income the sensuous imagery that dominated travel guides and food books in postwar America and suggested an achievable vision of the good life.10 45
      In presenting the Aragons as a family of "gentlemen farmers," the movie also offers another valuable lesson for the classroom because it propagates the agrarianism that has permeated American history. A long-accepted tenet of Western thought, agrarianism suggests that humans' natural and nobler calling is in the cultivation of the land. In working the fields, or in this case, the vineyards, farmers supposedly acquire virtues such as honor, self-reliance, and manliness.11 This film allows us and our students to contemplate how much of agrarianism is myth and how much is reality, and even in the latter case, whether it has been a reality available to all Americans or one that has been denied to some on the basis of race or ethnicity. 46
      Finally, we might ask alternatively whether, in claiming his heritage through the land and despite all his flaws, the father in the film captures a different truth. Does tilling the soil inculcate what historian Dan Flores calls a "spirit of place" grounded in human interaction with local environments?12 What "spirit of place" emerges from the Napa vineyards as human values—such as familial pride and romanticism—"engage in a dialectic with the land"? In an interesting classroom exercise, we might ask students if they similarly can describe the "spirit of place" in which they live and identify the cultural values that have interacted with the local environment to create this spirit. 47
      In the end, A Walk in the Clouds offers the story of a family that defines its "sense of place" through an entwined interaction with its history and its environment, and in doing so, allows us to contemplate global environmental exchanges and to probe persistent rural myths that may have found new life in the tourist world. 48


Kathleen Brosnan is associate professor of history and research director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. She is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change along the Front Range (New Mexico, 2002). Brosnan is completing an environmental history of the Napa Valley wine industry and editing the Encyclopedia of American Environmental History.



NOTES

1. Joe Brown, "Big, Fluffy 'Clouds'," Washington Post, August 11, 1995, sec. Weekend, p. 39.

2. Maynard A. Amerine, "The Napa Valley Grape and Wine Industry," Agricultural History 49 (1975): 289.

3. "Frost Protection for North Coast Vineyards," Leaflet 2743, Division of Agricultural Sciences, University of California, September 1975, 1; Herbert B. Schultz, "Microclimates on Spring Frost Nights in Napa Valley Vineyards," American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 12 (June 1961): 81–87; "Napa River Trial Distribution Program: 1998 Frost Season," California Department of Water Resources, February 1999, 1, 4; and Keith W. Bowers, "Basic Facts about Napa County Grape & Wine Industry," University of California, Cooperative Extension, Napa, CA (1975).

4. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to Present (San Francisco: The Wine Appreciation Guild, 1994), 21, 44, 51, 62, 64, 72, 91, 115, 144,171, 188, 244–45.

5. "Frost Protection for North Coast Vineyards," 3; "Wind Machine Prevents Frost Damage," Wines and Vines 28 (August 1947): 18; and "Sprinkling Does an Anti-Frost Job," Wines and Vines 51 (May 1970): 25.

6. "Napa Trial Distribution Program," 1–5; "Two Sides of the Air Pollution Issue," Wines and Vines 51 (April 1970): 23; and Sullivan, Napa Wine, 144.

7. Sullivan, Napa Wine, chaps. 9–11 passim; and Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: from Prohibition to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33.

8.First Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui & Co., 1881), 89–92; First Annual Report of the Chief Executive Viticultural Officer of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for the Year 1881 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1882), 173–74; Eugene Hilgard, University of California, Report of the Viticultural Work during the Seasons 1883–4 and 1884–5 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1886), 207–10; Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for 1889–90 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1890), 22; Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for 1891–92 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1892), 11–12; Principal Cellars: "Winehaven" on San Francisco Bay (San Francisco: California Wine Association, [1909]); and Directory of Grape Growers, Wine Makers and Distillers of California (Sacramento: State Printers, 1891), 83–99.

9. Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargain: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 15; C. Michael Hall, Gary Johnson, and Richard Mitchell, "Wine Tourism and Regional Development," in Wine Tourism Around the World: Development, Management and Markets, ed. Liz Sharples Hall, Brock Cambourne, and Niki Macionis (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), 196 (quotation); John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 1 ; and C. Michael Hall and Niki Macionis, "Wine Tourism in Australia and New Zealand," in Tourism and Recreation in Rural Areas, ed. Richard Butler, C. Michael Hall, and John Jenkins (Chister, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1998), 199.

10. Equally significant from the perspective of the valley's wine industry participants was the demographic character of Napa's tourists. Vintners tapped a key group: baby boomers with disposable income. A subsequent study prepared for the Napa County Board of Supervisors disclosed that 56 percent of visitors to Napa County earned more than $50,000 in 1988; the median family income at the time was $42,200. Moreover, almost two thirds of the pleasure seekers surveyed had no children, suggesting fewer demands on their wealth. "Planning for Travel and Tourism in Napa County," February 15, 1990, prepared for Napa County Board of Supervisors by Dean Runyan Associates, 65–67. The Napa Valley Conference and Visitors Bureau (NVCVB) unapologetically attempts to identify and cater to the very wealthiest consumers. Annual Report, 2000/2001.

11. Randal Beeman and James Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); and Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).

12. Dan Flores, "Spirit of Place and the Value of Nature in the American West," in A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 37.

the knowledge that is in names

JANE CARRUTHERS

SHOULD THE EQUIVALENT of an Oscar ever be awarded to cattle, there will be no worthier recipients than the colorful Nguni livestock featured in Heaven's Herds, a South African documentary about the close bonds between the Zulu people and their cattle. Given the iconic status of species like lion or elephant, it is perhaps surprising that cows are currently the favorite mammal in South Africa. On almost every street corner informal traders sell wire-bead decorated cattle, shopping centers display similar items in tourist outlets and art galleries, cow-hide handbags and upholstered furniture are seen everywhere, while the "Cow Parade"—life-size models painted in creative designs by well-known South African artists—on tour in retail malls countrywide is much admired and raises money for charity (see http://southafrica.cowparade.com/). 49
      This popular interest in livestock emanates from a doctoral thesis in Zulu linguistics by Marguerite Poland (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1997) that linked the kaleidoscopic coloring and patterning of Nguni cattle with the naming and praising practices of their Zulu owners. In 2003 the thesis became a best-selling book, The Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Nguni Cattle of the Zulu People (Fernwood Press, 2003), illustrated by Leigh Voigt, a renowned wildlife artist. Heaven's Herds has followed in its wake, the film narrated by Pitika Ntuli, Zulu poet, writer, and African Renaissance academic. It begins by following Poland's sensitive naming thread, but the movie then adopts a more human-centered storyline on the role of livestock in modern, but nonetheless traditional, Zulu society. As with other pastoral people, cattle are a Zulu man's most prized possessions, offering wealth and status, access to women, beasts of burden, a supply of hides and dung, food in the form of milk, and playthings for racing and fighting. They are slaughtered on special occasions like weddings and funerals. Most importantly, they serve as intermediaries between the living and the dead, and the ancestors need to be approached through and appeased by the ritual slaughter of an animal (the killings shown in the film are not for the squeamish). 50
      The significance of cattle in the lives and history of precolonial communities such as the herding Khoekhoen and the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers (for example, Tswana, Zulu, and Xhosa) has been covered in a rich historical and archaeological literature. Scholars also have given some attention to settler livestock and imported ideas around environmental science. However, Heaven's Herds opens up a number of relevant new questions for environmental historians, two of which are briefly considered here. The first concerns the ecopolitical factors that account for the rallying of the South African public—both white and black—behind a breed that was for many years dismissed as economically valueless "scrub" cattle, while the second is how to tap into the environmental knowledge communicated through Nguni cattle names. 51
      The enthusiastic reception of the book, film, and cattle trinkets is yet another indication of the national pride that has galvanized South Africa since 1994. Valorizing an indigenous livestock breed like the Nguni promotes African self-respect and points to precolonial stewardship. It also contests a Western agricultural philosophy that informed apartheid's "progressive" veterinary management when Africans were encouraged to farm with imported stock, restrict the number of cattle they owned, and subscribe to strict state veterinary interventions, all of which were fiercely resisted. But current thinking advocates sustainability and ecologically appropriate land use. Nguni can survive drought, poor grazing, and parasite infestations and diseases: extensive pastoralism with a resilient creature like the Nguni would be wise agricultural husbandry. These issues are being debated in a context of declining state subsidies and difficulties with access to international markets. But what about other local cattle strains? One fundamental interdisciplinary question would be: To what extent are Nguni "indigenous"? The archaeological evidence is not conclusive, but suggests that human migrations, warfare, barter, and cross-breeding between Bos indicus (Zebu) and Bos taurus (Taurine) created Sanga cattle, a diverse grouping with a variety of physical characteristics. Sanga cattle appear to have been in southern Africa for an extremely long time, but they did not arise here. 52
      Historians also need to revisit the role of colonial agriculturalists, for they were not entirely uninterested in local breeds. Nguni cattle were studied by animal scientists from the early 1930s, and this work needs to be integrated into the historical discourse. It seems that the oldest and most popular local strain is the Afrikaner, but one might also consider the Basutho, Drakensberger, Sanganer, Western (Kalahari) Nguni, Pedi, and Shangan, the last two currently in very small numbers and perhaps heading for extinction, as previously happened to the Bolowna and "Hottentot." Moreover, Bonsmara (which has been vilified as "exotic") is, in fact, a fascinating landrace, being an internationally as well as a locally successful beef breed, developed in South Africa in the 1950s by crossing the Afrikaner with imported Herefords and Shorthorns. What an interesting analysis the environmental history of southern Africa's local cattle breeds would make, perhaps asking too why wild animals such as eland and buffalo were never domesticated, and linking the subject with game ranching. 53
      In contrast is the cultural heritage around Nguni, so beautifully expressed in names. The different colorings and patterns are careful descriptions of the natural and domestic world and critiquing and interrogating them would indicate some of the nuances in the relationship that Africans have with nature. For example, a beast with a speckled throat is named by the Zulu Inkomo emfukumfuzi because it looks like the golden mole Amblysomus iris as it emerges from the ground with soil around its head, while a tawny animal dotted with lighter and darker spots and marks is called imaqandakahwayiba after the Kei apple, the edible fruit of Doveyalis caffra. Using the prism of cattle names to reflect indigenous environmental knowledge would lead to extremely productive historical research. 54
      Thus although some scholars have highlighted aspects of the connections between southern African people and livestock, a holistic narrative that foregrounds indigenous cattle and the environment remains to be told. Heaven's Herds suggests that the time is ripe to do so. 55


Jane Carruthers is a pioneer of South African environmental history. She is best known for her book The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Natal, 1995) and for her many journal articles and book chapters dealing with issues around protected areas in southern Africa. She is professor of history at the University of South Africa.

oil and acadian culture

CRAIG E. COLTEN

SINCE HURRICANES Katrina and Rita, considerable attention has been directed toward the plight of the Louisiana's wetlands. The on-going loss of these fragile coastal marshes has made communities in the state's southern littoral more vulnerable to storm surges. One of the most often mentioned reasons for the perilous condition of the wetland is the redirection of Mississippi River sediments into the deep Gulf of Mexico and the consequent "starvation" of the delta. An infrequently mentioned but equally, and perhaps more, significant factor in land loss has been the role of oil extraction in the coastal zone. Subsidence attributed to petroleum removal along with erosion and ecological alterations caused by the numerous channels that penetrate the vast wetlands have had devastating consequences. 56
      Robert Flaherty's 1948 Louisiana Story looks at the early entry of big oil into the Louisiana wetlands. It is the opposite end of the story that we have heard since the storms of 2005. His film presents an admiration for the splendor of the Louisiana cypress swamp and grassy marshes, the hardy independence of the reclusive Cajuns, the positive economic impact of oil revenues, and the benign environmental impacts of this transformative activity. As his wife notes in a supplementary interview on the current DVD version of the film, Flaherty thought that humans did not have a problem living in difficult environments, but managing the introduction of technology into these environments presented a real challenge. This is a central theme in this work and an important theme in environmental history since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964). 57
      Set in the late 1940s, the film opens with a young Cajun boy poling his pirogue through the lush swamp that provides sustenance to his family, but also poses an ever-present danger. Deep understanding of this simultaneously generous and hostile environment enables his family to survive. The youngster is captivated by the noisy arrival of a barge-mounted oil rig towed into the marsh near his home. When the crew fails to strike oil, the Cajun boy sneaks on board and employs folk magic to prime the dry hole. On their next effort to probe the earth for crude, the crew succeeds and the young innocent of the swamps takes credit for bringing in the well. Once the subterranean source is tapped, the crew leaves behind an unobtrusive valve known as a "Christmas Tree" that directs the oil into pipelines and its ultimate destination. With oil flowing from beneath their land, the Cajun family reaps a windfall and treats itself to basic foodstuffs, a new coffee pot, and a rifle. 58
      Commissioned by Standard Oil Company, this film offers an appreciative view of the fecundity of the wetland, and at the same time portrays the oil giant as a beneficent player in the unfolding drama. Flaherty was impressed with the Acadian folk, and he portrays them as experts of the world they inhabited and able to use that acquired knowledge to wrest a living from the land. He showed similar sympathy to the oil companies who paid royalties to the land owners and thereby enabled them to escape an impoverished economic situation. Flaherty suggests that exploration and extraction of oil barely disturbed the resource-rich region and the deeply rooted local culture—their machine in the garden was only mildly disruptive. Much of what we have learned about wetland ecology in recent years suggests otherwise. 59
      Half a century later, I like to show this film on long bus rides back to campus after a field trip to Cajun country. Students today know the oil companies as a once-reliable source of employment for their parents and as a prominent economic presence in the state. Yet, there are few jobs on shore today and off-shore drilling requires far fewer hands than their near-shore counterparts from thirty years ago. Those seeking to retain office jobs have followed the corporations to Texas, fracturing deeply rooted family enclaves. These students too know that oil extraction has carved up the coast and disrupted the livelihoods of relatives who once fished, trapped, or hunted the state's wetlands. Nonetheless, Flaherty's images of the trapper's cabin are as foreign to Louisiana students as those in any place around the country. The sparse dwelling resembles what these students have seen in museums, but few have lived in such stark conditions. Given the circumstances of the former swamp dwellers, it is easy to see the seductive power of technology and economic promise through the eyes of Flaherty's characters. 60
      Despite its slow pace and a bombastic classical score that leaves many students thinking their professor has abysmal taste in film, I remain convinced Louisiana Story can speak to my students in a powerful way. It depicts an isolation and economic status that few of today's students have experienced. Big oil helped many of their parents slip the bonds of poverty, yet now that lifeline to prosperity has become frayed. In overall decline, the oil industry has generated an ambivalence toward the once reliable employer while strengthening ethnic identity. I hope the film allows students to see the role oil played in the erosion of both the coast and of traditional culture. While there are still thousands of acres of swamp and marsh, few of my students' parents rely on their wits to make a living in the wetlands anymore. And while it is still easy to find a Cajun band to dance to on Friday nights, the traditional dance hall is disappearing from the landscape. Louisiana tied its economic dreams to oil and encouraged exploration. In doing so, it unwittingly sacrificed its coast and one of its greatest resources—the Acadian culture. Flaherty saw the wetland and the Acadians who lived there as resilient in the face of the intruding industry. While oil is a nonrenewable resource and is quickly disappearing, perhaps the state's wetlands and its Cajun culture can be sustained. 61


Craig E. Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Although not a Cajun, he is a native of the state and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Louisiana State, 2005).

the last first contact

GREGORY T. CUSHMAN

IN 1336, A GROUP of indigenous farmers and herders watched as an Iberian expedition disembarked on their native land, the Canary Islands. We know almost nothing about how this first contact played out, but its outcome is all too familiar. The Guanches eventually killed the leader of this early European foray into the Atlantic after he established a settler colony on the island that now bears his name. European guns, germs, horses, and steel proved incapable of eliminating anticolonial resistance on the Canaries for another 160 years, however, until a wet winter, a subsistence crisis, and a horrific epidemic joined forces with the Spaniards' war of attrition. For the Guanches, losing meant systematic enslavement on the Atlantic World's first sugar plantations and eventual cultural extinction.1 62
      The last first contact turned out differently. In the early 1930s, a group of Australian gold prospectors in search of El Dorado took great care to record their first meetings with New Guinea highlanders, the last major human population to make the "dangerous ... passage from isolation to membership in the worldwide community."2 In the early 1980s, two Australian filmmakers, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, tracked down dozens of surviving participants, obtained access to the massive archive of photographs, films, diaries, and letters kept by expedition leader "Mick" Leahy, and used them to produce First Contact in 1983. At first, this riveting, classroom-friendly documentary seems to confirm many of our expectations regarding how a collision between the Stone Age and the Aviation Age should play out. However, careful attention to cultural and environmental signifiers in this film—particularly those provided by native informants—reveals how much we have forgotten or ignored about the biological and cultural meaning of first contact events. This testimony provides a stark alternative to the stories Europeans and their descendants like to tell about how they came to dominate the world. 63
      The first Europeans to explore the New Guinea highlands were driven by God, glory, greed for gold, and an acute sense of superiority based on eleven centuries of European overseas imperialism. This film only hints at the exploitation that mining has wreaked on the landscapes and peoples of New Guinea—and the devastation that would have ensued if geological history had located large deposits of precious metals in the Wahgi Valley. Mick Leahy gloried in his power to "elici[t] undisguised awe and terror ... followed by stunned silence and tears" when demonstrating the ability of his rifle to blow out the brains of a pig or when flying brave native children to the coast in a duraluminum airplane. To some he encountered, even the tin can lids he discarded seemed to be impregnated with power. He and his brothers consciously manipulated these perceptions to advance their "friendly invasion" of this "primeval" realm.3 Many highlanders viewed these outsiders not as gods, it turns out, but as dangerous personifications of wildness. "Did [they] come from the ground? from the sky? from the water?" Others concluded that "they must be our ancestors from the place of the dead" searching riverine sediments for their discarded bones. 64
      But it did not take long for highlanders to realize that these wealthy, powerful beings were human at their core. They achieved this realization in a variety of ways, befitting the spectacular cultural diversity of this region. "When we saw the laplaps [loincloths] and trousers on their bodies, we thought they must not have bodily wastes in them because they were wrapped up so neatly," Kirupano Eza'e recalled. He "carefully hid to watch the white man excrete" in order to get a look at their unchangeable inner substance. "Their skin is different," he concluded with a laugh, "but their shit smells just like ours." Michael Leahy had to post a bodyguard "when nature called ... to restrain natives eager to rush forward and package our bodily waste."4 Like so many colonizers of this era, he was obsessed with hygiene; eastern highlanders, on the other hand, were disgusted by the sweet "spirit smell" given off by his soap-washed body.5 Inevitably, his careful attempts to keep foreign disease out of the highlands failed. Liklik, a highland woman who married one of his native assistants, died from malaria after she journeyed to the coast to meet her husband's relatives. Her own people astutely diagnosed the proximate cause of her illness—she traveled too far from home.6 In other parts of the highlands, epidemics such as dysentery (sikman) sometimes preceded the appearance of outsiders by many years and, in the case of the Tsembenga, decimated their native dogs.7 But in the main, foreign disease is conspicuous by its relative absence from this film and the colonial history of highland New Guinea.8 Virgin soil epidemics and depopulation were not inexorable consequences of first contact. 65
      Michael Leahy initially assumed that these "primitive people" were driven by greed for "the white man's plainly superior possessions ...; murder is of incidental importance compared with the acquisition of those goods."9 He was therefore astonished by the preference Mt. Hagen tribes showed for large mother-of-pearl shells (kina) over steel. When Ndika Nikints first glimpsed these shells, he immediately sent someone to locate his tribe's big-man, Ndika Powa: "Tell him the people-eating spirits wanted to eat the pig and gave this shell in return. ... This strange man that came, he's not a spirit, he's the shellman! Hurry quickly, there's a lot more shells!"—more than he could imagine, as a cheap by-product of pearling activity in the rich marine waters off northeastern Australia.10 In return for shells traded on native terms, the Leahy expedition obtained willing labor, more meat than they could eat, and sex. As one aged woman in the film recalls, "My people gave me to the strangers to get their wealth. We were terrified! We thought they'd eat us. In fact, they were kind to us. We had sex together. Then we knew they were men ... not spirits—just men." In return, Ndika Powa suggested a bride price that would have made his tribe a major power in ritual exchange for generations: he hoped to obtain a few cuttings of the trees that bear kina shells. 66
      This naïve request actually suggests that New Guinea highlanders were not as isolated nor as technologically ignorant as the Australians believed. Europeans expected they would encounter one vast, virgin wilderness in the New Guinea interior. Indeed, the Leahys crossed large unpopulated tracts rich with wildlife, but interspersed with densely settled, grassy valleys that "looked like a huge parkland." Paleoecological evidence shows that the upper Wahgi valley has never been primeval forest; from seven thousand years ago until after first contact, its utterly humanized landscape was dominated by gardens and fire-adapted kumai grass (Imperata cylindrica). Highland farmers were the first, worldwide, to domesticate taro (Colocasia esculenta), bananas (Musa spp.), and the Guanches' bane, sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), and by at least 2500 years ago, they were engaged in intensive, raised-field agriculture. Ever since, enterprising highlanders like Ndika Powa have been quite open to new cultivars and agricultural practices that would improve the productivity and sustainability of their agroecosystems. Circa 1200 BP, Wahgi farmers began planting Casuarina trees en masse to provide timber and firewood, and to replenish the soil. (Meanwhile, the ubiquitous military strategy of ring-barking an enemy tribe's trees helped ensure that the Wahgi retained its open landscape.) Sometime after the great Long Island eruption (ca. 1645), Wahgi farmers rapidly embraced an American domesticate, the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), as their dominant staple and pig fodder and learned to intercrop them with nitrogen-fixing legumes. More recently—but well before first contact—they supplemented these with maize (Zea mays), manioc (Manihot dulcis), squash (Cucurbita spp.), tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), and a host of other foreign economic plants, all the while living in intensely localized, stateless societies.11 67
      As a document of ecocultural change, First Contact is even more valuable thanks to two sequels, Joe Leahy's Garden (1988) and Black Harvest (1992). These films show a wooded, postcolonial highland landscape transformed by the suppression of fire and warfare and the growth of plantation agriculture—lands in which sweet potato now grows as an unwanted weed. Mick Leahy's mixed-race son, Joe, was one of the lucky few who became fantastically wealthy by postcolonial standards after the great Brazilian frost of July 1975 caused world coffee prices to skyrocket.12 The first film centers on the struggle of Tumul, a clan leader of the Ganiga tribe, to obtain suitable recompense for helping Joe make it big. The film ends with Joe Leahy, the proud owner of a Mercedes, making peace by exchanging Tumul's pig for a smoke-spewing Daikhatsu pick-up on the verge of breakdown. (Ironically, Tumul sports a fishing hat emblazoned with the slogan "Get Rich, Stay Rich" during this ritual exchange.) The second film picks up the story five years later when a new cooperative venture is on the verge of its first harvest. Green coffee beans glisten with anticipation in a dew of orange, hand-mixed pesticide. Then, tragically, the world price of coffee collapses and the Ganiga (subsistence farmers still) refuse to pick coffee for the token wage offered by Joe. Popina Mai, the clan leader who risked his reputation and tribal lands on the success of this partnership, receives a cruel lesson in globalization from Joe: "When world prices drop, we're affected too. Nobody cares about our little enterprise. You think we're important. In world terms we're fleas." Symbolically, their partnership disintegrates when Joe refuses to let Popina use his modern toilet, while an old-style tribal war ravages their plantation and the local bank initiates foreclosure. 68
      In Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, 1997), Jared Diamond begins with a question posed by Yali, a leader of the Papuan movement for independence. "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" In the spirit of Mick Leahy, Diamond did not stop to think about what Yali meant by his question, nor wait to hear Yali's answer.13 These films do not refute the interpretations of Alfred Crosby, Tim Flannery, and Jared Diamond regarding the environmental roots of global inequalities, but they at least give the citizens of Yali's republic—on both sides of first contact—a hard-earned chance to respond. 69


Gregory T. Cushman, assistant professor of international environmental history at the University of Kansas, is researching indigenous understanding of Peru's marine environment and coastal adaptation to the Incan and Spanish conquests.



NOTES

1. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

2. Ibid., 99. Circa 1930, the upper and middle Wahgi River valley, the main focus of these explorations, had an estimated population of 125,000 and the highlands of Papua New Guinea, as a whole, a population as high as one million.

3. Michael J. Leahy, Exploration into Highland New Guinea, 1930–1935, ed. Douglas E. Jones (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 45, 80, 145. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotes come from the film.

4. Ibid., 82.

5. See Warwick Anderson, "Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 640–69. In Mesoamerica, the Spanish conquistadors' relative lack of personal hygiene convinced the Aztecs they were dealing with a barbarian race.

6. Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 46, 167.

7. Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 8–9.

8. See Warwick Anderson, "The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange," Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 713–44; and John Dedemo Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993).

9. Leahy, Exploration, 45.

10. Quoted in Marilyn Strathern, "The Decomposition of an Event," Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 248.

11. T. P. Denham, et al., "Origins of Agriculture in Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea," Science 11 July 2003: 189–93; Jack Golson, "The Ipomoean Revolution Revisited: Society and the Sweet Potato in the Upper Wahgi Valley," in Inequality in New Guinean Highland Societies, ed. Andrew Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 109–136; Abraham L. Gitlow, Economics of the Mount Hagen Tribes, New Guinea, Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, 12 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1947), 18–21, 61–65; Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors, 3, 44–46.

12. See Maxine Margolis, "Green Gold and Ice: The Impact of Frosts on the Coffee Growing Region of Northern Paraná, Brazil," Mass Emergencies 4 (1979): 135–44; these frosts also contributed markedly to the displacement of small coffee farmers from Paraná to the Amazonian frontier.

13. See Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz, Yali's Question: Sugar, Culture and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

new deal jeremiads

FINIS DUNAWAY

IMAGINE, JUST FOR a moment, that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government sponsored someone, say, a noted film critic, to make a documentary film about the catastrophe. Imagine, too, that this director, drawing on the insights of leading ecologists and other scientists, chose to blame the disaster not on the capricious behavior of nature but rather on human actions. With their lack of foresight and careless disregard for the region's ecology, the American people, the filmmaker argued, altered the landscape and ultimately created the conditions that led to so much destruction and human misery in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Finally, as this film circulated around the United States, imagine that it was shown in thousands of movie theaters and seen by several million people, generating considerable controversy in some places but also garnering tremendous praise from a wide range of critics and audiences. 70


 
Figure 1
    Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

    Dorothea Lange, photograph of poster for The Plow That Broke the Plains, outside the Belasco Theater in Washington, DC, June 1936.
 


 
      This series of events, which probably seems un-imaginable in today's political culture, reminds us yet again of what made the New Deal such an extraordinary mo-ment in American history: During the 1930s, a time marked not only by economic depression but also by a number of ecological disas-ters, the federal government hired Pare Lorentz, a prom-inent movie critic, to make films about the Dust Bowl and Mississippi River flooding. These documentaries—The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937)—combined ecological aes-thetics and religious rhetoric to condemn American land use practices. Like the documentary photographs sponsored by the Farm Security Administration and the post office murals commissioned by other New Deal agencies, these films grappled with the relationship between the American people and their land. But while photographers tended to portray the people as blameless victims of calamity and mural artists emphasized the glorious past of the pioneer, Lorentz presented the nation's environmental history as a tale of decline. Refusing to see dust storms and floods as natural disasters, he instead depicted these events as human-created tragedies. Blending words and images, The Plow and The River adapted the Puritan jeremiad tradition to explain the decade's ecological catastrophes. For environmental historians, these films provide not only a portal into the visual politics of conservation but also the opportunity to challenge traditional interpretations of the New Deal. 71


 
Figure 2
    Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

    Baby with plow, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains.
 


 
      As he worked on The Plow That Broke the Plains, Lorentz became embroiled in a cultural debate over the origins and meanings of the Dust Bowl. This debate hinged on one key question: who was responsible for the disaster? Newsreels, along with many journalists and Great Plains politicians, blamed the weather: The long drought of the 1930s, they suggested, turned large parts of the Plains into desiccated fields and swirling piles of dust. Yet Lorentz rejected this explanation and instead emphasized human culpability. His ecological history relied upon a major tenet of 1930s science—the concept of a climax community. According to the ecologist Frederic Clements, the grasslands represented a natural equilibrium, a community of plants adapted to its regional conditions. Armed with their steel plows, pioneers and farmers destroyed this delicate balance on the Great Plains. Their reckless actions, their inability to adapt to the environment, eventually led to the Dust Bowl. Lorentz visualized Clements's concept by instructing his film crew to use a wide-angle lens to portray the vastness of the grasslands that once dominated the Plains. This panoramic perspective established the film's ecological aesthetic. Through this visual strategy, Lorentz depicted the land as an interdepende