A Place for Dialogue: Language, Land Use, and Politics in Southern Arizona

Notes

[ notes ] prologue 1. My use of the term “web” is influenced by Donna Haraway’s use of the same metaphor in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. Haraway describes her analytic method as following connections between multiple sources, sites, and actions. She explains that this method traces a web similar to the Internet (6–7) or a game of cat’s cradle (268–71). For example , calling herself a “subtle ethnographer and theorist of the complex, shifting, and nonsystemic geometries of margins and centers in the contemporary world,” Haraway notes that her work requires her to “navigate both the imagined Net and the actual net” to trace linkages between communication and other practices (6, 7). The metaphor indicates a systemsoriented analysis. In my case, this analysis traces a system of rhetorical practices and material impacts that, I argue, cannot be fully understood separately from one another. Like Haraway, I stress the importance of connecting margins—such as social movements—to centers—such as legislatures and mainstream politics. While Haraway is my inspiration, I have since seen the metaphor of a web used by Marilyn Cooper, in language and purpose notably similar to mine (“The Ecology”). 2. See my methodological appendix. 3. Pima County maintains an official web site for the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan at http://www.co.pima.az.us/cmo/sdcp/. 4. Quoted by Tony Davis in “A Pocket-Sized Bird Takes on Sunbelt Subdivisions .” 1. the range of rhetoric 1. Many argue that watershed protection and water consumption are the most significant issues at stake in arid land use. Southern Arizona’s major urban area, Tucson, is built on an aquifer that, for years, has been depleted at a significantly higher rate than it has been recharged. The rapid growth of the largest Arizona city to the south of Tucson, Sierra Vista, has become an international issue: the city’s wells are implicated in the degradation of the San Pedro River that flows north from Mexico to Arizona, supporting a riparian area that is an essential link in the migration of birds from Canada to Mexico and Central America (Kingsolver). Not surprisingly, then, the impact of cattle on watersheds and riparian areas is a particularly sensitive point of debate that tends to draw passionate responses. Cattle are charged with both historic and contemporary contributions to watershed erosion. Riparian areas draw the most attention in land management plans, frequently with the requirement that cattle be fenced out of those areas. Yet, some argue that ranching limits the rapid development of thirsty urban centers. This book will weave aspects of debates over the interaction between cattle grazing and watershed management through its analysis. Early in my research, however, I made a decision to make arguments about grass a primary focus of my analysis of ecological argument, at the expense of hydrology and other possible topics. 2. There has been an almost logarithmic growth over the last few decades in narrative analysis within the human sciences. Amia Lieblich, Rivka TuvalMaschiach , and Tamar Zilber briefly review multidisciplinary interest in narrativeresearchandreproducea figureof itsgrowthinthefirstchapterof their methods book, Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation. In tandem with this growth in narrative studies is a tendency to broaden definitions of narrative even so far as to include texts such as questions and images. Michael Chandler, Christopher Lalonde, and Ulrich Teucher review many of thesebroaddefinitionsin“Culture,Continuity,andtheLimitsof Narrativity,” while themselves arguing that a more limited definition of narrative is more analytically useful. I tend to agree, despite recognizing the vulnerabilities of a dichotomous distinction between narrative and nonnarrative. Differentiating between narrative and nonnarrative genres make it possible to understand narrative as just one possibility among many, and to therefore examine the unique rhetorical impacts of narrative. 3. Somers actually proposes four categories. The remaining two, which are “conceptual/analytic/sociological narrativity” and “metanarrativity,” call on her academic audience to be conscious of the narrativity of their own theoretical work. Somers argues that her claims about narrative structure apply to all four categories (“Narrativity”). 4. Somers provides a slightly different list: “(1) relationality of parts; (2) causal emplotment; (3) selective appropriation; and (4) temporality, sequence, and place” (“Narrativity” 601). 5. Geographer Paul F. Starrs’s “An Inescapable Range” is one example of an academic analysis that reproduces this position. 190 ] Notes 6. For these critiques, see, for example, Kevin DeLuca’s Image Politics, particularly the final section of chapter 1, and Gerard Hauser’s “Civil Society and the Principle of the Public...