An Evening with Jake Kosek, author of
"Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico"

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ANNUAL BOOK LECTURE 2009

Tuesday, May 26, 2009  |  4:00 - 6:00 pm

MU II, Memorial Union Building
University of California, Davis

“Understories” demonstrates how the volatile and violent politics of race, class and nation animate contemporary forest struggles in the U.S. Southwest. Author Jake Kosek argues that Chicano activists, Anglo environmentalists, and state officials, as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers have all shaped the material and symbolic "natures" of New Mexico's forests. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, he demonstrates how these fractious natures are integral not only to environmental politics but also the formation of racialized subjects, labored landscapes and modern regimes of rule.

Kosek traces these political formations by examining histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation that have forged Hispanos' passionate attachments to place. He describes how their feelings of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that mapped forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos, while Los Alamos National Laboratory remade the social ecologies and political economies of northern New Mexico. “Understories” thus offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations among nature, justice and difference.

This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the UC Davis Environmental Justice Project, John Muir Institute of the Environment, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Science and Technology Studies, History, Geography Graduate Group, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute.