As a Writer, Photographer, and Naturalist, Stephen Trimble explains the battle over open land in the American West in his book, Bargaining for Eden. (UC Press, June 2008). You can check out his website here, as well as his blog below.
By Stephen Trimble
As Bargaining for Eden approaches publication, I’ve been looking back on my ten-year immersion in these stories with both nostalgia and astonishment at just how much territory I’ve covered.
My journey began in 1997, when I drove up the winding road on Mount Ogden for the first time (just over the rocky ridgeline from Ogden, Utah), on assignment to photograph funky Snowbasin ski area before it became a mega-resort. The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics would transform the place. As a writer, I saw an intriguing story.
In seeking answers to a simple question—“what will it take to bring an Olympic downhill racer to the finish line in 2002?”—I found myself reporting a chronicle, scene by scene, character by character—that captured the history of the Public-Lands West, from overused commons to reclaimed national forest to beloved local ski area, and finally, the transformation to corporate showplace and a resulting loss of community.
Earl Holding, owner of Snowbasin, wanted to craft his own version of the mountain. His fierceness and ambition were implacable. And the United States Congress gave him what he wanted—by passing a bill to privatize public lands in the national forest at the base of Snowbasin. To make that happen, Earl used the Olympics as an excuse. And nearly every institution in our society fell in line.
Every town in America has someone like Earl whose desires often trump community interest. He isn’t as bad as many other tycoons, but he gets his way. Earl Holding is a fabulously successful entrepreneur whose power grows—straightforwardly—from his $5 billion and his connections. Earl Holding owns the Little America hotels, Sinclair Oil, Sun Valley and Snowbasin ski resorts, and 500,000 acres of land in the West—making him the 63rd richest American.
If I expected to understand Earl’s dream for the mountain and penetrate to the roots of his values, I had to understand my own. I looked to my childhood and my family just as I poked around in Earl’s past, to comprehend why we had such contrasting visions of caring for landscapes.
And, then, in the middle of tracking these stories in the northern Utah mountains, my wife and I fell in love with a mesa just outside Capitol Reef National Park, near the village of Torrey in southern Utah. To make our own dream of ownership financially feasible, we split the land, selling an existing house and a few acres. And so I became a land developer, too. On a tiny scale, I became Earl—and had to face Earl’s values within myself.
The tension I felt when confronting this irony became the dramatic core of the book. It wasn’t just a theoretical acknowledgment of the old line, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It was much more startlingly personal: I had become the enemy, and my story became much more complex and nuanced as I turned from observer to actor and struggled to come to terms with my new identity as a second-home owner in The New West, a newly-minted citizen of rural Utah.
Note: the caption to the picture to the right is:
The Henry Mountains framed by the author’s contractor as he positions a window in the bedroom of Trimble's house, Torrey, Utah, 2002.
Jeremy Saltteaches in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and is the author of Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896. In his latest book, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (UC Press, June 2008), Salt examines the history and human cost of Western intervention in Arab lands. In his blog below, Salt talks about Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama's recent remarks before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
By Jeremy Salt
Barack Obama’s speech to the annual conference of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, was predictable but still shocking, for a man who appeared on the political stage with a message of change. Arab-Americans, Arabs, Muslims everywhere, and indeed anyone looking for signs of fresh thinking, will be dismayed and disillusioned. Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi all engaged in the bidding war for the Jewish vote at the annual AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference in Washington but because Obama has raised expectations so high it was his speech that was the most dispiriting and disturbing. Scant regard was shown for international law by this former president of the Harvard Law Review. Not even the US government regards Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The western half of the city was seized in 1948. In the eastern half of the city Israel has no rights but only the responsibilities of an occupying power, which it has serially violated through the permanent changes it has introduced over the past four decades. For Israel’s erstwhile negotiating partners in Ramallah – the ‘moderates’ – East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state is a sine qua non of any peace agreement. Yet the message for them from Barack Obama was that ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided’. Hamas now has further reason to say ‘what did we tell you?’. This was a speech that could have been written in the Israeli Foreign Ministry. There were references to rockets‘ raining down on Sderot’ and ‘raining down on Israel’, but naturally none to the missiles and the artillery and tank shells that have rained down on occupied Palestinian land over the past four decades. There was mention of the ‘constant threats’ Israel has faced, but naturally not of the constant threat Israel has posed to Arab states in the past six decades. The word extremism was used in the context of the Palestinians, but naturally not in the context of an Israeli state whose actions in the occupied territories, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights have been condemned time after time over the past six decades by the UN General Assembly and international human rights organizations – not that Obama even mentioned the word ‘occupation’.
Up till now there is no proof that Syria or Iran are developing nuclear weapons but Obama spoke as if they were, naturally without mentioning the menacing shadow Israel’s actual possession of nuclear weapons has cast across the Middle East for nearly four decades. On this issue Obama spoke as stridently as George W. Bush, Ehud Olmert and John McCain. ‘I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’. He repeated the ‘everything’ so that no one missed the point that he is ready to go to war if necessary. ‘I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel’. Obama’s Faustian pact with expediency comes at a price he will be paying for years if he becomes president. By locking themselves into position behind an Israel that is determined to maintain its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East whatever the cost (within days of his speech Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said an attack on Iran was ‘unavoidable’), he and John McCain have made another war in the Middle East more rather than less likely. This is hardly the kind of change Obama seemed to promise at the beginning of his campaign.
Jennifer Heath is the author of eight books, an activist, curator and editor of The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (UC Press, May 2008). In her book and the blog below, Jennifer explores the meaning and mystery of veils worn by women and men across the globe. You can also check out the book's website here.
Please Note: Embedded at the end of the blog is a silent, loop video called AmbiVEILantby Tania Kamal-Eldin
By Jennifer Heath
In Turkey and France, it is outlawed. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is mandated.
The veil is deeply polarizing, a locus for the struggle between Islam and the West and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam.
Yet veiling – of women, of men, and of sacred places and objects – has existed in countless cultures and religions for centuries. Perhaps it began when humans watched eclipses and observed the periodic shedding of animals’ outer bodily layer (feathers, skin, fur or horn, even pupas). Veils and veiling are found in the oldest myths, in folklore and fairytale and in the arts. The veil itself is mystery, even as it is the shroud that guards the mystery. As much as the veil is fabric or a garment, it is also a concept. Veils are the ethers beyond consciousness, the hidden hundredth name of god, the final passage into death, even the biblical apocalypse – the lifting of god’s veil to signal the “end times.”
I grew up in heavily Roman Catholic and later in Muslim countries, where veiling was common. In those days – as Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi observed in an earlier decade – a rural Italian or Greek woman looked not much different from, say, a rural Egyptian woman. How and why have we politicized customs so ancient their origins and meanings cannot necessarily be traced and certainly can’t be “blamed” on any group or event? When I say “we,” I do indeed mean all of us, East and West. We all collude in turning women’s bodies into battlegrounds – nowadays signified by the veil.
For The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, I assembled twenty writers and scholars – Kecia Ali, Michelle Auerbach, Sarah C. Bell, Barbara Goldman Carrel, Eve Grubin, Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, Jana M. Hawley, Jasbir Jain, Mohja Kahf, Desiree Koslin, Laurene Lafontain, Shireen Malik, Maliha Masood, Marjane Satrapi, Aisha Shaheed, Rita Stephan, Pamela K. Taylor, Ashraf Zahedi, Dinah Zeiger and Sherifa Zuhur – to engage received wisdom about the veil, to explore its multiple histories and layered sacred, sensual, and socio-political truths in memory- and research-based chapters that speak to the veil throughout human imagination. These marvelous contributors, who represent a wide range of societies, religions, ages, location, races, and accomplishments, examine the veil in its myriad guises; they elucidate, criticize, and/or praise the practice.
The overriding concern expressed in these chapters is the exploitation of the veil for political agendas. Across time, veiling and unveiling have been forced upon women. Demonization seems especially virulent today with respect to the Muslim veil, perceived by the West as a challenge to modernity and secular enlightenment and even as a terrorist threat, while among some Muslims, it has become a symbol of solidarity and resistance.
But today’s ideological battles are merely subterfuge, distraction hindering feminist progress and blinding us to the increasing feminization of poverty. Conflicts over covering actually veil the realities we must face -- and fix -- of women’s disadvantages, which feed a destructive spiral of impoverishment, population growth, and environmental degradation worldwide.
Meanwhile, veiling is a woman’s – or a man’s – right to choose.
Theresa Urbainczyk is Senior Lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin and author of Spartacus, among other books. In her latest release, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (UC Press, May 2008), Theresa talks about slave resistance and the meaning of freedom in Ancient Rome and Greece. Furthermore, Theresa talks about the inspiration for her book in the blog below.
By Theresa Urbainczyk
I read somewhere that Stalin put forward the thesis that the revolt of Spartacus had brought down the Roman Empire. Whoever was commenting on this, remarked that 500 years was rather a long time-span for the effect to result from the cause.
I was reminded of this when reading in a recent book (Spartacus: Film and History edited by Martin M. Winkler, Blackwell 2007) that in 1960 the Universal film studios wanted an academic to write an article advertising Kubrick’s forthcoming movie, Spartacus, and in the specifications instructed, ‘If you feel that Spartacus’ revolt contributed to the downfall of the great Roman Empire, please emphasise this’.
The response this generally evokes is similar to that some of us have to rather comical mistakes in students’ exam scripts but I was struck by two people making the same comment, especially since it was unlikely that the film executive was familiar with Stalin’s arguments.
Part of me hesitates to admit that another movie Gladiator was one of the reasons I started to study slave revolts. In fact I probably was too much of a snob to go and see Ridley Scott’s film at all if I hadn’t been living in New York and feeling lonely. Any invitation was (almost) better than none when you know hardly anyone in a new city so I went with a couple of classicists. The young American woman beside me murmured at the end ‘Oh that was wonderful.’ The older English man on the other side snarled ‘Spartacus was much better’. I hadn’t ever seen that film and when I did I assumed most of it was pure invention. Which was how I came to look at the ancient sources on slave revolts.
To me they were intrinsically interesting and worth writing about and I was mystified as to why my colleagues weren’t as fascinated as I was. And they most certainly weren’t. After I gave what probably was an overenthusiastic talk on the unexpected (to me at any rate) amount of information there was on slave revolts in antiquity in our ancient texts, one professor chipped in ‘Yes but so what? What effect did the large slave wars have on the course of events of Roman Republic? None at all as far as I can see.’
Thinking about just how much effect the wars did have on this particular period of history, helped explain to me how in both the USA and the USSR the same seemingly ridiculous theory could have arisen. A common confusion for students is the way historians use the term Roman Empire. At the time of the Roman Republic, the Romans had an empire but it wasn’t the Roman Empire, in that they did not have emperors. If we substitute the term ‘Republic’ for ‘Empire’, the theory is not so far-fetched. In fact, expressed in these terms, it’s a commonplace in our historians from antiquity. It’s only in more recent times that the threat of slave revolts has been played down.
As Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Doug Macdougall writes about his findings while still in school about the earth's evolution and human prehistory in his blog below. Furthermore, you can check out Doug's latest book, Nature's Clock: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (UC Press, July 2008). In addition to Nature's Clock, Doug is the author of Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages (UC Press, 2004).
By Doug Macdougall
Time is a sometimes elusive concept, but it’s crucial for understanding history, and that goes for everything from very recent history to the history of the universe. Geologists are especially attuned to concepts of time, because the rocks they study – especially the layers of sedimentary rocks – contain a record of the earth’s history, ordered in time.
But until the discovery of radioactivity, there was no way to measure the earth’s history quantitatively. Geologists studying layers of sedimentary rocks knew that the top layer was younger than the bottom layer, but they had no idea whether the difference in ages was a year, a few thousand years, or millions of years. All that changed when they realized that the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the rocks act like built-in clocks.
When I was an undergraduate studying geology – it seems like an embarrassingly long time ago – dating rocks was in a fairly rudimentary state compared with today. We touched on the topic briefly in our courses, but it was only when I was studying for a master’s degree that I really learned the details of dating and isotope geology. From that point on I was hooked. What could be more exciting than working out the exact timing of events in the earth’s distant past? Much of my research since then has concerned geological time.
Radioactivity was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, and another French scientist, Henri Becquerel, near the end of the nineteenth century. For their discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize, but they didn’t really understand the phenomenon they had identified. And they didn’t realize its potential for measuring the ages of natural materials. It was another scientist, the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, who, a few years later, discovered that radioactive isotopes decay at a constant rate and used this knowledge to date several rock samples from the earth’s crust. His results – he determined the rock ages to be around 500 million years – were a shock to many scientists who thought the earth was much younger.
In Nature’s Clocks I’ve tried to bring some of the excitement of geological age measurements to life by delving into the discoveries of scientist like Rutherford and the Curies, and also by outlining some of the amazing techniques scientists have developed more recently to make accurate time measurements of the distant past. It is a fascinating field, and it’s at the heart of our understanding of planet earth and everything that it has experienced over its long history, from plate tectonics to climate change and the evolution of life.
In the latest installment of NPR's Talk of the Nation, author Gayle Greene offers insight into the condition, while elaborating on her book, Insomniac (UC Press, March 2008), in this audio interview. Additionally, you can read more about Gayle and the disorder, including tips and shared experiences on her website, Sleep Starved.
Kasra Naji, author of Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran's Radical Leader (UC Press, February 2008), was recently interviewed by Fresh Air at WHYY/NPR. In the interview, Naji talks about the controversial leader and his rise to power. You can find his interview on the NPR website.
Had Jack London lived until 1968 he would have been 96 years old - not a biological impossibility. After all, his close friend, Upton Sinclair, lived until ‘68 and the ripe old age of 94. It’s tempting to imagine London ’68, the year that changed America and the world, and that London would have loved because upheaval inspired him, and engaged his deepest sympathies.
London was always young – he died in 1916 at the age of 40, and even at 40 there was something boyish about him, as his friends noted. He would have fit in with the youthful students who stormed college campuses in ’68, and he would have been attracted to the youth-orientated culture of the 1960s. In 1905, along with Upton Sinclair, London founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, an organization of radical students, and the forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society, the Sixties group that opposed the war in Vietnam. An extremist almost all his life, London wrote about war and revolution, and it’s likely that he would have written about the war in Vietnam and the cultural revolution that created hippies, Yippies, feminists and Black Panthers. He smoked hashish, rejected the sexual mores of his time, went back to the land and was drawn to Asian spirituality.
1968 was a pivotal year for me. It was the year I was arrested as a protestor, went to jail for the first time, and began to write for underground newspapers. I was not then a big fan of Jack London’s work but I knew about it and him. I admired his 1908 novel The Iron Heel, which describes the coming of a brutal dictatorship to the United States. At times in 1968 it seemed like the United States was headed in that direction, especially when the police attacked demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. London’s prescience couldn’t have been more in evidence.
What London didn’t share with the radicals of 1968 was a sense of outrage about racial injustice. In fact, at times he would be downright racist himself. He identified himself as a white man, praised the white race and looked down at people of color. That’s the part of him I like the least, and it’s the part of him that his biographers andcritics have for the most part declined to explore, much less condemn. When I began to write The Radical Jack London I knew I would have to tackle the issue of race and racism. I think I have done it in a level-headed way and I’m proud of my approach. It’s not the first time I have written about that subject. I did it in my first book, The Mythology of Imperialism, which I wrote in 1968, and in many ways The Radical Jack London is a continuation of my own scholarship as a young man aiming to describe the links between culture and politics, which the academic world of that era was eager to deny. Without a big stretch of the imagination, I can see Jack London with us in ’68, marching, chanting defying the powers-that-be.
As a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, Neve Gordon, writes about the history of Israel's occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as the on-going rift between Israel and Palestine dating back to the 1967 war. You can read more about his book and Middle Eastern politics at his website, Israel's Occupation. The University of California Press will be publishing his forthcoming title, Israel's Occupation in Fall 2008.
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