Everyone has a story. This is something that I believe and is something that has guided my college experience. I chose to study cartography at UW-Madison because it allowed me to craft stories through design and use of maps, which I have quickly learned tell stories through what information we do and do not include. I chose to work in social media journalism in my undergrad to tell stories about students studying geography. I chose to take Environmental Ethics with WRFI to uncover the story of the nation’s most beautiful landscape and how it should be ethically stewarded. What I have found through this course is much more than just a story. I have found a complicated web of history unfolding across politically imposed boundaries – boundaries which nature does not abide by.
As a cartographer, I am inclined to choose a scale or a boundary to work within, both spatially and temporally. Can I even begin to assess the Crown of the Continent in this way, though? Alicia and Taos Yellowowl of the Blackfeet Nation shared with my class how their tribe’s story goes beyond the bounds of the present day reservation, and through oral history, further back in time than recognized in mainstream scientific thought. In Glacier National Park and through course texts, we learned of the creation of the parks, the untold history of their establishment, and the ways in which climate change is visible through ecosystem changes. The park also showcased billions of years of stories through fossils of ancient life forms. These observations cannot be made by looking at a map; these accounts and observations tell us nature’s stories are spread physically and spiritually across the landscape. We need to look beyond the present day boundaries and beyond the institutions that rule them to understand the land.
While simple sounding, I have found this a challenge. While Montana has a shared story, boundaries managed by different governance such as tribal land, the Forest Service, the national parks, and wilderness creates divides in the stories we tell. Boundaries block communication, represent different management strategies, and even indicate differing metaphysical understandings as to what the landscape is. While I stood at the boundary between the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Lewis and Clack National Forest, it was in the middle of a prairie cleared by a wildfire unconfined to only one designated area. As this region faces climate change, the story of adaption and preservation must unfold through collaboration and work across boundaries.
Anne Carlson, another guest speaker on this trip, showcased the ways this work can be done. Through the Wilderness Society, she facilitates collaboration amongst the different management stakeholders in the region to conserve nature. This inspires me, as I leave this course with the understanding that to adequately address our challenges we must dissolve our artificial walls and come to the table ready to hear each others stories about nature. This is the only way we can decide what nature ought to look like, and the only way we continue to tell not just our story as humans, but the story of nature.