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Book Review
| Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. By Jake Kosek. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xx + 380 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $23.95.
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| Understories begins with the author's arrival in Truchas, New Mexico, a village eight thousand feet high in rugged mountains. A neighbor who is Hispano and counts his family's presence there in centuries welcomes him by firing two .30–06 rounds over his head and one at his feet. Kosek aspires to study the interplay of nature, culture, and race in a contested environment. He has come to the right place. |
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The times are taut: tensions over logging, grazing, and even firewood collection on the surrounding National Forest have never been greater, and in Santa Fe Hispano activists have hung lawsuit-happy white environmentalists in effigy. Nor are things well in Truchas and nearby communities, which have the nation's highest per capita rate of death from heroin overdose. |
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In a manner owing much to Michel Foucault, Kosek maps the relations between these and other seemingly unconnected phenomena by "taking seriously metaphors, metonyms, and turns of phrase in conversations, interviews, and public records that linked different forms of nature across time and space" (p. 22). His journey takes him through local forests haunted by conquest and colonialism, to analysis of forest-related symbols ("Smokey Bear is a White Racist Pig"), to arguing that an impulse toward racial exclusion lies at the heart of the wilderness movement, and to the resentments and suspicions inspired by the anomalous presence of wealthy, secretive Los Alamos amid the want of northern New Mexico. Along the way, Kosek touches deep truths, but the touch tends to be light and short. |
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Understories is best understood as a polemic. It recruits its "facts" to theory, not the other way around, thus committing what Kosek decries in other analyses—"a violent act of reduction" (p. 243). In this drama the forest has no objective identity; it is only what people would have it be, and so it functions as a stage on which the (inept) Forest Service, (good guy) Hispanos, and (bad guy) enviros contend with each other. The dramatist has given the land, notwithstanding its dynamism, no lines. Moreover, Mr. Kosek's rules of evidence seem to value proximity as highly as causality, which is seen, like science, as a mere construct. Thus, if advocates for eugenics occupied the same historical moment as the birth of national parks and forests, the latter should be understood as tarred by the former, and any valid forest politics of the future must take this linkage into account. |
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Unfortunately, Kosek never tells us what those politics should be. In an epigram, he quotes Foucault: "I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. ... It would bear the lightning of possible storms" (p. 276). Understories indeed delivers impressive flash, albeit in labored academese. It exults in the freedom of disparate connections, in the demolition of boundaries, in the unearthing of dark feelings and durable resentments. It tells us there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies. |
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Yes, one agrees, but a less polemical guide might have shed more light on territory so deserving of exploration. |
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William deBuys teaches documentary studies at the College of Santa Fe. He is the author of six books, some focusing on northern New Mexico. His latest is The Walk (Trinity University Press, 2007). |
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