WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:16.350 --> 00:00:18.920 00:00:28.840 --> 00:00:33.260 And thank you all so much for being here it's an honor to be here tonight and 00:00:33.260 --> 00:00:38.449 tonight I will be talking a little bit about the American sublime and Anacapa 00:00:38.449 --> 00:00:45.170 Island and to get us started a little bit wait one moment I'll be talking about 00:00:45.170 --> 00:00:49.220 what the concept of the American sublime means in American history and aesthetic 00:00:49.220 --> 00:00:53.870 philosophy as well as what it means in the context of Anacapa Island which 00:00:53.870 --> 00:00:56.750 means I'll be talking about perceptions and representations of 00:00:56.750 --> 00:01:01.190 Anacapa islands throughout time and then I'll talk a little bit about why those 00:01:01.190 --> 00:01:05.059 perceptions and representations matter for the way that we care for this island 00:01:05.059 --> 00:01:10.940 and the way that we act is environmental stewards for anacapa island. so to get us 00:01:10.940 --> 00:01:18.950 started I'll do a very short summary of what the sublime means. so in Europe 00:01:18.950 --> 00:01:23.060 the sublime started as a reaction in part to the Enlightenment when people 00:01:23.060 --> 00:01:27.110 were starting to rethink the way in which they understood the natural world 00:01:27.110 --> 00:01:31.910 and their place within it. the preeminent scholar on the European sublime Marjorie 00:01:31.910 --> 00:01:37.220 Hoped Nicholson writes that before the Enlightenment era most the sort of most 00:01:37.220 --> 00:01:41.899 common perception of nature and particularly challenging natural sites- 00:01:41.899 --> 00:01:47.869 places that are dangerous with large cliffs or waterfalls places that we're 00:01:47.869 --> 00:01:52.580 worried about when we're in them- the prevailing perception of these places 00:01:52.580 --> 00:01:57.860 was called mountain gloom so just gloomy areas with nothing worth noting, no 00:01:57.860 --> 00:02:00.649 reason to go there, just really terrible places you don't want to find yourself 00:02:00.649 --> 00:02:04.789 in but as the Enlightenment began helping people rethink their place 00:02:04.789 --> 00:02:07.459 within that world they started appreciating some of the more 00:02:07.459 --> 00:02:11.270 challenging aspects of these landscapes and she calls that transition the 00:02:11.270 --> 00:02:14.930 transition from Mountain gloom to Mountain glory and in mountain glory you 00:02:14.930 --> 00:02:20.599 get the idea of the sublime. the sublime as described by 17th century and a 00:02:20.599 --> 00:02:24.640 little bit into the 18th century European philosophers is generally the 00:02:24.640 --> 00:02:30.050 combination of beauty and terror in nature so one philosopher Edmund Burke 00:02:30.050 --> 00:02:34.870 describes this as terrible beauty and he emphasizes pain and terror and horror. 00:02:34.870 --> 00:02:40.530 most of the other philosophers aren't quite as dramatic as Burke is. 00:02:40.530 --> 00:02:44.690 Hugh Blair for instance focuses on grandeur and mighty power or force, 00:02:44.690 --> 00:02:50.270 Immanuel Kant focuses on how the sublime is an internal thing that a viewer 00:02:50.270 --> 00:02:54.480 experiences as opposed to beauty being sort of more external the sublime is 00:02:54.480 --> 00:02:59.610 something that you as a person are experiencing or for example Shiller 00:02:59.610 --> 00:03:04.680 describes the sublime is actually being the internal triumph over your fear of 00:03:04.680 --> 00:03:10.170 nature. but the general points of the sublime to remember are that it is very 00:03:10.170 --> 00:03:15.120 very different than the perception of beauty or the beautiful. my professor 00:03:15.120 --> 00:03:18.000 who supervised my research once described the difference between the 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:22.860 beautiful and the sublime to me as the beautiful being a beautiful meadow with 00:03:22.860 --> 00:03:28.080 flowers maybe a gentle rolling hill nothing too challenging whereas the 00:03:28.080 --> 00:03:32.790 sublime is a rushing cataract of water cascading down a huge mountain with 00:03:32.790 --> 00:03:38.730 rocks it's beautiful but it's also scary, it's inspiring fear, there's some danger 00:03:38.730 --> 00:03:42.810 involved, and some negative words. often times the sublime will have these 00:03:42.810 --> 00:03:48.510 negative words like horror terrible awful in connotation those connotations 00:03:48.510 --> 00:03:54.870 also come up a lot. and one final thing also with the sublime there's an entire 00:03:54.870 --> 00:03:58.950 area of philosophy that debates about whether or not the sublime can actually 00:03:58.950 --> 00:04:02.400 be applied to an object meaning is something actually sublime or do we just 00:04:02.400 --> 00:04:07.049 think it's sublime. I'm not going to get into that tonight it's not very relevant 00:04:07.049 --> 00:04:11.070 to this talk but the most important thing is that in what I'm talking about 00:04:11.070 --> 00:04:18.060 a natural site is being seen as sublime. Within American history the sublime has 00:04:18.060 --> 00:04:22.680 a slightly more recent history because it started in Western European 00:04:22.680 --> 00:04:26.669 philosophy and it took a while to gain traction here in the US. the earliest 00:04:26.669 --> 00:04:30.840 example of the sublime in the US is natural bridge which is in Virginia and 00:04:30.840 --> 00:04:34.680 was most famously described by Thomas Jefferson and it's the naturally 00:04:34.680 --> 00:04:37.890 occurring geological formation that looks like a bridge over a river it's 00:04:37.890 --> 00:04:42.210 really astonishing and unusual looking but this is an example of something that 00:04:42.210 --> 00:04:45.780 really wasn't accessible to much of the US, mostly that was this was people who 00:04:45.780 --> 00:04:51.120 had access to the philosophical treatise being written by the Western European 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:54.280 philosophers and most of the US didn't have the education or 00:04:54.280 --> 00:04:58.720 the finances to do that so it took a while for the sublime to become more of a 00:04:58.720 --> 00:05:04.570 popular notion and that was closer to the 1820s and 1830s which was also at 00:05:04.570 --> 00:05:08.500 the same time as the rise of landscape painting in the US. so this is an 00:05:08.500 --> 00:05:12.940 example of a painter Thomas Cole who was very heavily involved in the sublime 00:05:12.940 --> 00:05:18.490 movement within the US and these paintings often reflected a lot of these 00:05:18.490 --> 00:05:22.990 same values of other phenomenon phenomena happening at this time so this 00:05:22.990 --> 00:05:28.360 was the time of expansion, of national exceptionalism, building within the US as 00:05:28.360 --> 00:05:31.660 it came into its own as a country and it was trying to build its national 00:05:31.660 --> 00:05:35.560 character and one thing that a lot of writers have noticed- writers of history 00:05:35.560 --> 00:05:40.840 and culture- is that the US often felt like it had something to prove in the 00:05:40.840 --> 00:05:46.710 face of Europe, Europe had all of these cultural monuments like the Vatican or 00:05:46.710 --> 00:05:50.950 all the places in Paris, all the places in London, all these amazing cultural 00:05:50.950 --> 00:05:54.760 sites, and the US felt like it didn't have anything to compare on that level 00:05:54.760 --> 00:06:00.340 and as it started expanding towards the west it started finding it snatched its 00:06:00.340 --> 00:06:07.780 monuments in nature instead of in "culture." but one really important thing 00:06:07.780 --> 00:06:12.400 to mention in the context of nationalism and expansionism is that at this time 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:16.539 the sublime was not being used to justify environmental preservation or 00:06:16.539 --> 00:06:20.590 the halting of progression actually generally encouraged the exploration of 00:06:20.590 --> 00:06:25.150 these sublime sites and it encouraged the sort of touristic pilgrimages to these 00:06:25.150 --> 00:06:32.500 sites and one of the best examples of that is Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls was 00:06:32.500 --> 00:06:36.550 an incredibly important and arguably the most popular the first of the most 00:06:36.550 --> 00:06:43.390 popular sublime sites in the US. Niagara Falls really rivaled anything 00:06:43.390 --> 00:06:47.470 that Europe had to offer in terms of natural monuments and it was also 00:06:47.470 --> 00:06:51.850 Niagara Falls that started the movement towards using the sublime as a 00:06:51.850 --> 00:06:57.180 justification for environmental preservation because Niagara Falls fell 00:06:57.180 --> 00:07:02.470 aesthetically. Niagara Falls was in a sense in many people's opinions ruined 00:07:02.470 --> 00:07:07.689 by touristic and economic development as people started visiting more, more 00:07:07.689 --> 00:07:11.229 economic development started occurring more industrial development including 00:07:11.229 --> 00:07:16.839 canals and train and Niagara Falls started to look a lot less natural, a lot 00:07:16.839 --> 00:07:20.829 less pristine and even some European commentators started making fun of the 00:07:20.829 --> 00:07:25.239 US for not being able to take care of its own natural wonders. so the fall of 00:07:25.239 --> 00:07:29.860 Niagara Falls as this monumental site of grandeur and the sublime site that 00:07:29.860 --> 00:07:34.659 wasn't taken care of very well was very important to the transition of using the 00:07:34.659 --> 00:07:39.879 sublime not just to justify going to a site but to justify preserving that 00:07:39.879 --> 00:07:47.259 site. so the next site that was essential in making the sublime part of American 00:07:47.259 --> 00:07:52.479 environmental thought was Yosemite Valley. Yosemite was established as a 00:07:52.479 --> 00:07:57.069 national park in 1864 in the middle of the Civil War. there are a lot of 00:07:57.069 --> 00:08:00.519 different explanations of why Yosemite was established at this time, 00:08:00.519 --> 00:08:04.659 first it wasn't actually a national park it was a state park established by the 00:08:04.659 --> 00:08:09.099 federal government, some scholars suggest that it might have been established as 00:08:09.099 --> 00:08:13.479 this park as a way to try to find a new Niagara Falls that the country could 00:08:13.479 --> 00:08:19.179 unite around in a time of such lack of union during the Civil War, another 00:08:19.179 --> 00:08:23.050 suggestion was the increasing realization that not all sites within 00:08:23.050 --> 00:08:27.579 the US had a lot of economic viability and that we should start turning 00:08:27.579 --> 00:08:32.649 worthless and I do use the word worthless on purpose it was often used 00:08:32.649 --> 00:08:36.699 to describe these sites, turn worthless sites in to places of public 00:08:36.699 --> 00:08:42.519 recreation and aesthetic enjoyment but Yosemite ended up going through a 00:08:42.519 --> 00:08:48.370 series of mismanagements that also needed to be corrected. and oh before I get to 00:08:48.370 --> 00:08:51.879 that I just want to show you a few images of Albert Bierstadt who is one of 00:08:51.879 --> 00:08:55.509 the most important landscape painters of the sublime also just because 00:08:55.509 --> 00:08:59.379 interestingly if you've ever seen Anacapa Island, his paintings of the 00:08:59.379 --> 00:09:03.699 Farallon Islands look an awful lot like Anacapa so I just wanted to share that 00:09:03.699 --> 00:09:08.949 with you. so then the sort of pinnacle of sublime and monumental sites within 00:09:08.949 --> 00:09:14.470 American history was Yellowstone. this was when the first official national 00:09:14.470 --> 00:09:19.240 park was established in 1872 after mismanagement at Niagara Falls 00:09:19.240 --> 00:09:23.100 and at Yosemite but one really interesting thing is that 00:09:23.100 --> 00:09:26.520 although this was another chance for sort of redemption on a national and 00:09:26.520 --> 00:09:31.140 international stage for the US it was also within this category of assigning 00:09:31.140 --> 00:09:37.440 worthless lands to be public lands. There was a lot of debate at the time about 00:09:37.440 --> 00:09:42.810 whether or not Yellowstone should be put into public sort of preservation and one 00:09:42.810 --> 00:09:46.290 of the reasons people didn't want that to happen is that they were worried 00:09:46.290 --> 00:09:51.420 they'd be losing out on the opportunity to gain economically from the land and 00:09:51.420 --> 00:09:55.260 one of the main reasons it did pass as becoming a national park is that it was 00:09:55.260 --> 00:10:00.800 determined that it was an economically worthless area of land. and 00:10:00.800 --> 00:10:05.550 before I move on I would just like to also mention that literature in addition 00:10:05.550 --> 00:10:09.560 to art was very important to the history of the sublime so if you've heard of 00:10:09.560 --> 00:10:15.870 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, many of these 00:10:15.870 --> 00:10:19.890 authors were also developing these ideas in tandem with painters like Thomas 00:10:19.890 --> 00:10:24.060 Moran and Albert Bierstadt and all of these people helped contribute to a 00:10:24.060 --> 00:10:30.930 cultural imagination of what America's lands had to offer. but what does all of 00:10:30.930 --> 00:10:36.210 this have to do with Anacapa, it seems pretty removed, no scholar has ever 00:10:36.210 --> 00:10:40.050 described the Channel Islands National Park or any component of it as sublime, the 00:10:40.050 --> 00:10:44.160 most commonly described sites are Niagara Falls, Yosemite, Yellowstone and 00:10:44.160 --> 00:10:50.130 Grand Canyon, so why Anacapa? if you've ever been to Anacapa you might really be 00:10:50.130 --> 00:10:57.510 wondering that because there's not a lot on that island but and if you know much 00:10:57.510 --> 00:10:59.940 about the history of the park you'll also know it wasn't established as a 00:10:59.940 --> 00:11:04.740 national monument until 1938 which is way after the heyday of the sublime in the 19th 00:11:04.740 --> 00:11:07.950 century so you're probably really wondering why I'm talking about 19th 00:11:07.950 --> 00:11:13.890 century aesthetic philosophy. Well I am arguing in the paper that I wrote for 00:11:13.890 --> 00:11:17.460 this and in a previous talk that I gave on this subject that the sublime has 00:11:17.460 --> 00:11:20.940 actually been deeply embedded within perceptions and representations of 00:11:20.940 --> 00:11:25.140 Anacapa Island since the beginning of its descriptions in Anglo-American 00:11:25.140 --> 00:11:31.010 literature, news and art. Anacapa also within Channel Islands National Park 00:11:31.010 --> 00:11:34.769 represents the most the site with the most potential to be a 00:11:34.769 --> 00:11:41.369 sublime site with its craggy and volcanic nature, its arch rock, its sheer 00:11:41.369 --> 00:11:45.360 cliffs that anyone who has been on the island knows you're not supposed to get 00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:49.319 very close to otherwise you might fall down them, with its history of shipwrecks 00:11:49.319 --> 00:11:55.980 and it just in general its dangerous atmosphere, Anacapa Island has all the 00:11:55.980 --> 00:11:59.850 dangerous qualities of sublime but it also has many of the most iconic 00:11:59.850 --> 00:12:06.149 features within the park. That's why I'll be talking about Anacapa Island and I 00:12:06.149 --> 00:12:10.319 want to tell you that I planned on telling you when Anacapa might have 00:12:10.319 --> 00:12:14.639 started being seen as sublime or when it stopped being seen as sublime because I 00:12:14.639 --> 00:12:18.600 wasn't sure if it's still being seen as sublime today but what I ended up 00:12:18.600 --> 00:12:22.290 finding after I went through newspaper after newspaper and I promise you it 00:12:22.290 --> 00:12:25.279 wasn't through lack of reading many newspaper articles throughout time 00:12:25.279 --> 00:12:32.100 Anacapa has been seen as both sublime and a worthless barren speck in the sea 00:12:32.100 --> 00:12:35.399 since the beginning of these descriptions and the very first 00:12:35.399 --> 00:12:41.220 description was of a rather dangerous event because the Winfield Scott wrecked 00:12:41.220 --> 00:12:50.939 very famously on Anacapa Island in 1853 and this was the first US description 00:12:50.939 --> 00:12:55.529 of this island that I could find in any historical newspaper database and there 00:12:55.529 --> 00:12:58.319 are many different descriptions but this one I particularly liked and I don't 00:12:58.319 --> 00:13:01.619 expect you to read any of these historical prints they're very difficult 00:13:01.619 --> 00:13:06.749 to read especially from afar but this one describes the island as being in a 00:13:06.749 --> 00:13:11.910 dense fog, rocky and barren and desolate without inhabitants and generally 00:13:11.910 --> 00:13:16.499 describes the very gloomy foreboding island upon which this ship wrecked so this was 00:13:16.499 --> 00:13:21.929 the very first entry of Anacapa Island into national history within the US as a 00:13:21.929 --> 00:13:29.759 very much a mountain gloom site. But just a year later famous artist James Abbott 00:13:29.759 --> 00:13:34.439 McNeill Whistler who would go on to become a very famous artist in the US was a 00:13:34.439 --> 00:13:39.179 young artist working for the US Geological Survey and was tasked to etch 00:13:39.179 --> 00:13:46.199 this very Island one year later and he got in trouble father famously for right 00:13:46.199 --> 00:13:51.300 here it's hard to see but there are seagulls there and as the US 00:13:51.300 --> 00:13:57.210 Geological Survey is about rocks and nonliving features of islands he was not 00:13:57.210 --> 00:14:02.310 supposed to include any living features and certainly not seagulls. we don't know 00:14:02.310 --> 00:14:08.340 why he did this; my hope is that perhaps upon visiting the island Whistler 00:14:08.340 --> 00:14:12.660 realized that you can't depict this island without the shrieking gulls that 00:14:12.660 --> 00:14:18.810 make it what it is for better or for worse and he was compelled to include 00:14:18.810 --> 00:14:23.940 these birds as a sign of the vitality of this island and a little bit of a hint of 00:14:23.940 --> 00:14:32.040 the sublime there potentially. Then just a few years later in 1864 anacapa was 00:14:32.040 --> 00:14:36.360 described by another newspaper article as one of the most singular lumps of 00:14:36.360 --> 00:14:41.850 land in the world with sharp precipitous sides that rise almost perpendicularly 00:14:41.850 --> 00:14:47.490 out of the sea this is a very great example of the contested nature of 00:14:47.490 --> 00:14:51.630 Anacapa because of that once most singular which particularly for 19th 00:14:51.630 --> 00:14:56.340 century language is a very good thing you want to be a most singular but it's 00:14:56.340 --> 00:15:02.730 also a lump of land which isn't very positive in any vernacular so it's already 00:15:02.730 --> 00:15:06.510 exhibiting this really contested nature and some ambivalence towards the island 00:15:06.510 --> 00:15:13.020 both seeing it as incredible but also really unappealing. One of my favorite 00:15:13.020 --> 00:15:17.070 readings that I found in historical newspaper is another decade later or so 00:15:17.070 --> 00:15:22.080 it's this one which is a first hand explorers account of the island and I 00:15:22.080 --> 00:15:26.580 just like to point out that starting right here going all the way to here is 00:15:26.580 --> 00:15:29.210 one sentence 00:15:31.529 --> 00:15:37.149 which actually is indicative of the sublime because many writers especially 00:15:37.149 --> 00:15:41.529 in the Western European tradition who describe their experiences can't stop 00:15:41.529 --> 00:15:45.609 talking about it, they keep rambling on and adding more things because it's so 00:15:45.609 --> 00:15:49.209 inexplicable and amazing that they just have to add another thing before they 00:15:49.209 --> 00:15:54.129 take another breath so this extremely long sentence where he described 00:15:54.129 --> 00:16:01.119 exploring anacapa's caverns and going into gloomy areas with waves crashing and 00:16:01.119 --> 00:16:10.209 seals barking (probably see lions barking), phosphorescent glow upon the ceiling and 00:16:10.209 --> 00:16:13.509 how the other sailors are all afraid and superstitious and won't go in any 00:16:13.509 --> 00:16:17.589 further this run-on sentence about this experience that he just can't stop 00:16:17.589 --> 00:16:20.739 talking about is indicative that he actually was really experiencing the 00:16:20.739 --> 00:16:26.889 sublime in 1877 when he explores Anacapa's caverns, so this is one of my 00:16:26.889 --> 00:16:34.660 favorite ones. and then moving past the 19th century into the 20th 00:16:34.660 --> 00:16:39.399 century this contested nature of the sublime continues. this is a 1931 00:16:39.399 --> 00:16:43.239 articles from the LA Times called the little-known islands that lie off our 00:16:43.239 --> 00:16:48.009 coast if you have very keen eyes you can see that there are a lot of markings on 00:16:48.009 --> 00:16:52.059 this map most of which are inaccurate most of the history the article goes 00:16:52.059 --> 00:16:56.470 through about the islands is wildly inaccurate but one of the most 00:16:56.470 --> 00:17:00.069 interesting things is that the author describes the islands as beautiful as 00:17:00.069 --> 00:17:04.480 having a Mediterranean climate and being like a Garden of Eden on earth but when 00:17:04.480 --> 00:17:13.689 he gets to anacapa he says that it is worthless and anacapa is bleak, of no 00:17:13.689 --> 00:17:19.419 value and it is three islands of grotesque shape that's about all he says 00:17:19.419 --> 00:17:23.230 about anacapa so in this one you can see that he has a very sort of pastoral 00:17:23.230 --> 00:17:27.399 image of what the beautiful is but he's really not looking for the sublime he's 00:17:27.399 --> 00:17:30.639 not looking for a more challenging aesthetic he's not looking for the 00:17:30.639 --> 00:17:35.080 dangerous scary Island and he really writes off anacapa as just grotesque as just 00:17:35.080 --> 00:17:41.169 bleak and barren. In the same year another article is published calling 00:17:41.169 --> 00:17:47.770 Anacapa a barren isle and a dry, barren, lonely speck in the sea and 00:17:47.770 --> 00:17:52.970 goes into its history of very dangerous currents and its history of wrecks. this 00:17:52.970 --> 00:17:58.670 one also exhibits sort of mountain gloom image of Anacapa without any sort of 00:17:58.670 --> 00:18:04.580 sense of it being a beautiful island. But in the very same year famous Hollywood 00:18:04.580 --> 00:18:09.830 producer Cecil B DeMille published an article basically arguing for 00:18:09.830 --> 00:18:13.940 appreciating challenging sights in nature and he goes through five 00:18:13.940 --> 00:18:18.860 different places that he calls worthless isolated lonely spots throughout 00:18:18.860 --> 00:18:23.750 Southern California one of which is San Miguel where he starts the article, the 00:18:23.750 --> 00:18:26.990 others of which are then on the mainland and then ending at Anacapa and his 00:18:26.990 --> 00:18:32.930 experience with diving at Anacapa island and he describes Anacapa as one of 00:18:32.930 --> 00:18:37.490 the most impactful places he's ever visited particularly being underwater he 00:18:37.490 --> 00:18:41.210 feels like he's experienced a whole new world and has experienced something 00:18:41.210 --> 00:18:45.380 really spectacular that not many people have the opportunity to feel so in the 00:18:45.380 --> 00:18:50.090 very same year as an article calling anacapa barely a barren aisle and just 00:18:50.090 --> 00:18:55.360 specks in the sea another writer was describing it as the most beautiful 00:18:55.360 --> 00:19:01.250 wonderful spectacular thing he had ever been to. But what's interesting about all 00:19:01.250 --> 00:19:04.910 of these was that they're all focused on aesthetics but within the National Park 00:19:04.910 --> 00:19:08.330 Service the focus in the 1930s really was not on aesthetics but rather 00:19:08.330 --> 00:19:12.410 scientific and ecological value. This is the time of burgeoning understanding of 00:19:12.410 --> 00:19:15.740 the interconnectedness of different parts of nature which eventually led to 00:19:15.740 --> 00:19:21.590 the field of ecology and these quotes are taken from the 1933 report by a 00:19:21.590 --> 00:19:26.150 secretary in the Department of the Interior to President Franklin Delano 00:19:26.150 --> 00:19:29.930 Roosevelt about whether or not the islands should be recommended to be a 00:19:29.930 --> 00:19:33.920 National Monument and he did recommend that they be a national monument but 00:19:33.920 --> 00:19:37.190 said that the scenery of the Channel Islands is not positioned sufficiently 00:19:37.190 --> 00:19:42.020 extraordinary to justify classification as a national park on the basis of scenery 00:19:42.020 --> 00:19:47.300 and pretty much just dismisses everything aesthetically about the 00:19:47.300 --> 00:19:50.420 islands saying that the value of these islands is that they're in the ocean and 00:19:50.420 --> 00:19:53.810 that we need more oceanic representation within the Park Service and that they 00:19:53.810 --> 00:20:00.390 have significant scientific value and in the proclamation in 1938 by Franklin 00:20:00.390 --> 00:20:07.380 Delano Roosevelt these same emphasis continues. The focus is on the natural 00:20:07.380 --> 00:20:12.539 resources of the National Park and on ecology and scientific value and no 00:20:12.539 --> 00:20:16.830 focus on aesthetic value which is particularly interesting when you start 00:20:16.830 --> 00:20:20.580 thinking back towards Yosemite and Yellowstone where aesthetic value 00:20:20.580 --> 00:20:25.019 was of extreme importance in establishing these parks, they were sites 00:20:25.019 --> 00:20:29.730 of monumental grandeur whereas Channel Islands National Monument at the time 00:20:29.730 --> 00:20:34.470 was a site of scientific value but one thing that held consistent across these 00:20:34.470 --> 00:20:40.289 establishments of parks was that idea of the worthless lands. Anacapa island and 00:20:40.289 --> 00:20:43.350 santa barbara island were the two islands included in the National 00:20:43.350 --> 00:20:46.380 Monument when it was established. they also were the least economically 00:20:46.380 --> 00:20:51.090 profitable of all of the Channel Islands so it fit within that foot of emphasis 00:20:51.090 --> 00:20:55.139 on islands that we won't gain from as much economically and I'll just add that 00:20:55.139 --> 00:20:59.429 that also doesn't mean that the worthlessness angle doesn't negate the 00:20:59.429 --> 00:21:03.029 sublime angle one of the sublime philosophers Edmund Burke actually 00:21:03.029 --> 00:21:08.370 argued that the sublime has to be of no use to man that's where its value 00:21:08.370 --> 00:21:12.659 comes from it can't be something that is providing a practical use to us so that 00:21:12.659 --> 00:21:18.330 worthlessness is very important in this history. and then just a couple more 00:21:18.330 --> 00:21:26.669 examples after this establishment of the park, this one's pretty great. it also 00:21:26.669 --> 00:21:32.340 said you don't land on this island you board it so this one about a decade 00:21:32.340 --> 00:21:36.779 after the park was established calling it a bleak rock and Siberia but with 00:21:36.779 --> 00:21:41.909 charm so this is again one of those examples of the contested nature of the 00:21:41.909 --> 00:21:45.690 island the author clearly recognizes the Anacapa is a difficult place to 00:21:45.690 --> 00:21:50.580 encounter but that it also has something of value as he discusses from the quote 00:21:50.580 --> 00:21:55.559 on the right for you that it almost seems overdone there's so much there 00:21:55.559 --> 00:22:00.570 that you're encountering and feeling and hearing and seeing that you understand 00:22:00.570 --> 00:22:07.260 why someone else might not be as interested in it. This one is from 1980 00:22:07.260 --> 00:22:11.180 the year that the park was established as the park we now know it as and this 00:22:11.180 --> 00:22:15.140 article was in the LA Times and focused mostly on how dangerous and scary the 00:22:15.140 --> 00:22:22.640 islands are. It focuses on the rough seas, the swell, those sorts of things and 00:22:22.640 --> 00:22:28.250 particularly for anacapa how barren the island is and it also calls it the most 00:22:28.250 --> 00:22:32.870 inaccessible of all of the islands but four years later in the same newspaper 00:22:32.870 --> 00:22:36.410 another author completely disagrees and describes anacapa as the most 00:22:36.410 --> 00:22:41.120 picturesque island in the entire park so this back-and-forth continues and one of 00:22:41.120 --> 00:22:44.690 my favorite examples of the back and forth is that in 1995 a group of City 00:22:44.690 --> 00:22:50.480 Council members in Ventura was described by the Ventura County Star as going to 00:22:50.480 --> 00:22:54.350 anacapa island on a trip some of those people when they went to inspiration 00:22:54.350 --> 00:22:59.120 point described it as a million-dollar view saying the trip that whole trip was 00:22:59.120 --> 00:23:04.790 worth that view whereas others including the then-mayor said "this will 00:23:04.790 --> 00:23:11.350 never rival Yellowstone or Yosemite but there's enough to keep people coming." 00:23:11.500 --> 00:23:17.180 Which isn't exactly the most glowing recommendation of the island and even 00:23:17.180 --> 00:23:20.690 within this article there are a lot of examples of contested ideas about what 00:23:20.690 --> 00:23:24.200 Anacapa was like even between the author and whoever wrote the captions 00:23:24.200 --> 00:23:27.950 because the author clearly agrees with the more this is an amazing island sort 00:23:27.950 --> 00:23:32.690 of view whereas the captions describe anacapa as actually three specks of land 00:23:32.690 --> 00:23:37.730 in the ocean harkening back to that use of the word speck in the 1930s. And then 00:23:37.730 --> 00:23:41.930 for just one quick example of a contemporary article about anacapa you 00:23:41.930 --> 00:23:45.730 can see that this back-and-forth perception of both the island as 00:23:45.730 --> 00:23:52.550 dangerous and foreboding but also as beautiful continues in a rather gothic 00:23:52.550 --> 00:23:57.740 piece by a former park ranger turned ghost hunter Andrea Lankford that 00:23:57.740 --> 00:24:01.940 focuses on the island and its eeriness, describing the island as having a horror 00:24:01.940 --> 00:24:06.910 movie like atmosphere with shrieking gulls like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds 00:24:06.910 --> 00:24:15.320 and how the island its name comes from the Chumash word for mirage or illusion 00:24:15.320 --> 00:24:19.190 then saying that its a splendid name for an island that likes to keep its skeletons 00:24:19.190 --> 00:24:24.980 in the closet one of them quite literally alluding to a suggested 00:24:24.980 --> 00:24:29.690 death she says happened on the island that I wasn't able to find any 00:24:29.690 --> 00:24:35.210 historical evidence for but this article is a really great example of one 00:24:35.210 --> 00:24:38.030 recently that continues this perception of the island as dangerous and 00:24:38.030 --> 00:24:42.280 foreboding but also really intriguing. I 00:24:42.669 --> 00:24:47.390 would like to also mention a few other contemporary sources I conducted three 00:24:47.390 --> 00:24:51.049 interviews for this research and the first was with was with photographer Tim 00:24:51.049 --> 00:24:56.059 Hauf whose work is used regularly by the park in its promotional materials and 00:24:56.059 --> 00:25:00.770 others in other places and I talked to Tim a little bit about his experience of 00:25:00.770 --> 00:25:08.600 Anacapa. he said that with anacapa island you really know you're on an island you 00:25:08.600 --> 00:25:12.410 always have the ocean all around you, you never feel like you're on the mainland 00:25:12.410 --> 00:25:15.890 in a way that you can in a lot of the larger islands in the chain sometimes on 00:25:15.890 --> 00:25:19.340 Santa Cruz or somewhere like that you can get blocked by the hills and not be able 00:25:19.340 --> 00:25:23.570 to see the ocean anymore or you can see ranch houses but on Anacapa Island you 00:25:23.570 --> 00:25:26.480 always see the ocean you always hear the gulls shrieking and you always hear the 00:25:26.480 --> 00:25:31.640 sea lions barking and that really gives you this sense that you're in a very 00:25:31.640 --> 00:25:38.720 unique and different place than the mainland. but he also emphasized 00:25:38.720 --> 00:25:44.360 Anacapa's accessibility as an island and how easy it is to get around and how 00:25:44.360 --> 00:25:49.299 flat the island is once you get on top, 00:25:49.570 --> 00:25:55.040 not the best image for that, which lessens its power and force a little bit. 00:25:55.040 --> 00:25:58.220 If the island is easily accessible and easily walked around it's not quite as 00:25:58.220 --> 00:26:02.990 dangerous so Tim expressed this sort of sense of the island being sublime and 00:26:02.990 --> 00:26:07.309 unique and very different but also being accessible and when I asked him what his 00:26:07.309 --> 00:26:12.500 favorite spot on the island was he told me obviously it has to be Inspiration 00:26:12.500 --> 00:26:16.190 Point and he said that that goes without saying he can go to inspiration point 00:26:16.190 --> 00:26:20.750 and sit there from sunrise until sunset and have photo opportunities that change 00:26:20.750 --> 00:26:25.280 constantly. He goes on to describe the various different conditions that you 00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:29.179 can see at Inspiration Point and how incredible that can be to sit in one 00:26:29.179 --> 00:26:33.380 spot for hours and get so many different views and have so many different 00:26:33.380 --> 00:26:38.780 experiences without even moving so I would say that Tim's perceptions of the island and 00:26:38.780 --> 00:26:42.950 his descriptions of it generally fit with an idea of the sublime but also 00:26:42.950 --> 00:26:49.720 show that contested nature that it's not all clearly one category or the other. 00:26:49.720 --> 00:26:54.530 Another artist that I spoke with is Ken McAlpine a local author who wrote a book 00:26:54.530 --> 00:27:02.180 in 2009 a pre-smartphone era as you can tell from the cover about living on the 00:27:02.180 --> 00:27:07.310 islands for extended periods of time during a one-year period in his life. The 00:27:07.310 --> 00:27:11.450 project that he developed which was to stay on each island for a week and then 00:27:11.450 --> 00:27:16.040 come back to the mainland and write about it, he said it came from a place of 00:27:16.040 --> 00:27:19.550 feeling like modern life was sort of spinning out of control in his own 00:27:19.550 --> 00:27:22.610 personal life and he wanted to get down to what really mattered and that 00:27:22.610 --> 00:27:27.650 what better place to do that than the islands and for anacapa sort of getting 00:27:27.650 --> 00:27:33.950 down to what really matters in a very Thoreauvian sense, getting to that 00:27:33.950 --> 00:27:37.790 sense of isolation and solitude was a lot more difficult than some of the 00:27:37.790 --> 00:27:41.750 other islands because it's so small. there's really not a lot of backcountry 00:27:41.750 --> 00:27:45.950 hiking that you can get into and escape through on Anacapa Island so it was 00:27:45.950 --> 00:27:51.950 somewhere where he really had to work on solitude as almost a mental exercise and 00:27:51.950 --> 00:27:55.850 one of the ways that he talked about this was that he was already nervous 00:27:55.850 --> 00:27:59.990 about camping on the island for a week when he first arrived which is pretty 00:27:59.990 --> 00:28:03.260 understandable again if you have been to Anacapa and you know that you can loop 00:28:03.260 --> 00:28:07.820 the island in a couple hours or less it's understandable to be a little 00:28:07.820 --> 00:28:11.690 nervous about staying there for a week. he felt this really ominous feeling in 00:28:11.690 --> 00:28:15.650 his stomach and as he approached the island on the boat and it didn't go away 00:28:15.650 --> 00:28:19.910 when he got on the island, and it didn't go away as he was walking around but on I 00:28:19.910 --> 00:28:23.120 believe the second night that he was there he went out to Inspiration Point 00:28:23.120 --> 00:28:28.730 at sunset and he suddenly understood what he was feeling nervous and ominous 00:28:28.730 --> 00:28:32.720 about and that's that he was afraid of being alone and suddenly he wasn't 00:28:32.720 --> 00:28:37.040 anymore and he felt that he had an understanding of his place in the world 00:28:37.040 --> 00:28:42.500 while being an inspiration point looking at this view. I would say what he calls a 00:28:42.500 --> 00:28:46.100 moment of epiphany is a moment of sublime that he experienced the sublime 00:28:46.100 --> 00:28:50.690 at that moment in realizing and having this incredible complicated emotional 00:28:50.690 --> 00:28:55.759 reaction to the landscape. and then one other thing that Ken 00:28:55.759 --> 00:28:58.940 told me about his experience at anacapa is that it made him think a lot 00:28:58.940 --> 00:29:04.610 about humanity's place within nature and he mentioned that it felt like anacapa 00:29:04.610 --> 00:29:08.990 would have continued on without him not that we don't have an impact on places 00:29:08.990 --> 00:29:14.749 but that the island made him pay attention to what matters and so while 00:29:14.749 --> 00:29:18.379 he was talking about this he talked a lot about how that relates to his sense 00:29:18.379 --> 00:29:25.519 of stewardship which I'll be getting to in just a little bit. (answering question) I'm not 00:29:25.519 --> 00:29:35.600 sure i don't think he did. and then the third interview I did was with a 00:29:35.600 --> 00:29:40.220 local Chumash elder Julie Tumamay Spenceley because i was going through 00:29:40.220 --> 00:29:43.330 this research i realized that most of the newspaper articles i've shown you 00:29:43.330 --> 00:29:50.779 come from primarily white american men and I was realizing that I need more of 00:29:50.779 --> 00:29:55.009 a diverse perspective within this description and the descriptions of 00:29:55.009 --> 00:30:00.289 Anacapa Island did not start with people who identify as US Americans that have 00:30:00.289 --> 00:30:04.009 been going on for a lot longer than the US was established so I talked to Julie 00:30:04.009 --> 00:30:08.840 a little bit about Chumash perceptions of Anacapa Island and whether or not 00:30:08.840 --> 00:30:13.129 they can align at all with this idea of the sublime and her response is that 00:30:13.129 --> 00:30:17.059 the sublime aligns very well with the sacred and as she was talking about this, 00:30:17.059 --> 00:30:20.690 this is what she told me that she gets back to the seasons that there might 00:30:20.690 --> 00:30:25.070 have been a time in the spring for instance when the island woke up, that 00:30:25.070 --> 00:30:28.610 all of a sudden it becomes sublime because it's alive even though it's 00:30:28.610 --> 00:30:33.289 already been alive this whole time but the life and the subtleties of it make you 00:30:33.289 --> 00:30:37.369 realize how spectacular the island is and for her she would describe that as 00:30:37.369 --> 00:30:42.080 sacred and that that aligns very well with the concept of the sublime so this 00:30:42.080 --> 00:30:45.769 perception has been going on for much longer than just these American 00:30:45.769 --> 00:30:51.409 journalists describing it. And one thing she also added is that this perception 00:30:51.409 --> 00:30:56.929 of Anacapa also was very important to environmental conditions and respecting 00:30:56.929 --> 00:31:01.580 environmental conditions that looking at anacapa throughout time there's been a 00:31:01.580 --> 00:31:05.929 lot of respect and fear of the island for recognizing that it can be very 00:31:05.929 --> 00:31:08.840 dangerous to navigate around and that weather 00:31:08.840 --> 00:31:12.560 conditions around anacapa can tell you a lot about weather conditions throughout 00:31:12.560 --> 00:31:16.790 the entire area so as she talked about this idea of sort of the fear and 00:31:16.790 --> 00:31:20.030 respect of the island that for me also very much connected to the sublime 00:31:20.030 --> 00:31:24.380 because for most of the philosopher's writing about it the fear of something 00:31:24.380 --> 00:31:32.060 also engenders this sort of respect for that which you fear. very quickly I'd 00:31:32.060 --> 00:31:35.840 like to go into some of the park's own materials and whether or not they align 00:31:35.840 --> 00:31:41.380 with the sublime so the first example of that would be the park film and this one 00:31:41.380 --> 00:31:47.570 opens with images of Anacapa Island with a foghorn blaring, seeing the lighthouse 00:31:47.570 --> 00:31:52.550 at night and eventually the music swells and lands on this image of arch 00:31:52.550 --> 00:31:57.320 rock so both of the primary images within the very beginning parts of the 00:31:57.320 --> 00:32:02.770 film focus on Anacapa Island as the sort of icons of the National Park and 00:32:02.770 --> 00:32:08.660 throughout the film we see anacapa during cuts to or sorry during voice 00:32:08.660 --> 00:32:13.010 overs by Kevin Costner talking about places of wretch of refuge and 00:32:13.010 --> 00:32:19.100 inspiration of restoring the spirit Anacapa repeatedly is used to symbolize 00:32:19.100 --> 00:32:23.720 those ideas and those concepts. One of the strongest areas that I see that 00:32:23.720 --> 00:32:30.230 happening is that in the ending part of the film the narrative talks about 00:32:30.230 --> 00:32:34.730 vistas to be discovered: a shot to Anacapa, jagged beauty: a shot of 00:32:34.730 --> 00:32:39.740 inspiration point, calm restoring the spirit, the cliffs of Anacapa and there's 00:32:39.740 --> 00:32:46.100 finally an appeal to stewardship which again focuses on Anacapa with this shot 00:32:46.100 --> 00:32:50.660 of the fog rolling over the cliffs and it ends with a quote calling the Channel 00:32:50.660 --> 00:32:54.530 Islands an island world a wilderness shimmering on the horizon and their 00:32:54.530 --> 00:32:58.700 image for this is panning out from anacapa to view the entire island chain so 00:32:58.700 --> 00:33:03.770 throughout this movie the sublimity of the island is primarily depicted through 00:33:03.770 --> 00:33:07.430 anacapa the beginning of the film, throughout the film, and at the end so 00:33:07.430 --> 00:33:11.900 not only is anacapa depicted as sublime but Anacapa's sublimity stands in for the 00:33:11.900 --> 00:33:16.790 sublimity of the entire National Park. other materials in the park also used 00:33:16.790 --> 00:33:19.879 the same imagery from the brochure to the website, I'm sure 00:33:19.879 --> 00:33:22.969 if you look at any of the brochures you might have right now you'll see 00:33:22.969 --> 00:33:27.440 inspiration point over and over as the symbol of the entire park and its 00:33:27.440 --> 00:33:35.839 sublimity. so again you might be wondering why does all this matter. why 00:33:35.839 --> 00:33:41.179 does it matter if anacapa is seen as sublime or if it's seen as barren? and I 00:33:41.179 --> 00:33:46.219 would tell you that perception and representation matter so much for 00:33:46.219 --> 00:33:50.929 stewardship they matter for how we care about places and for how we protect 00:33:50.929 --> 00:33:56.539 places. and before I tell you more about that I would like to acknowledge really 00:33:56.539 --> 00:34:03.199 quickly that there are issues with the sublime historically. the sublime has had 00:34:03.199 --> 00:34:07.339 many many cultural and environmental problems throughout time. it has been 00:34:07.339 --> 00:34:12.169 used to justify the erasure and removal of Native American peoples from their 00:34:12.169 --> 00:34:16.549 land by promoting the idea that these lands are uninhabited wildernesses of 00:34:16.549 --> 00:34:21.289 pristine beauty just waiting to be settled. it has focused on sites of 00:34:21.289 --> 00:34:25.879 monumental grandeur instead of prioritizing sites with ecological value 00:34:25.879 --> 00:34:32.240 or other values it has also not been democratic and has often been a concept 00:34:32.240 --> 00:34:36.139 that has only afforded recreational and aesthetic opportunities to the most elite 00:34:36.139 --> 00:34:41.210 within American society. it also has been a highly gendered concept that 00:34:41.210 --> 00:34:45.559 prioritizes men over women throughout time if you think of a lot of these people 00:34:45.559 --> 00:34:50.059 whose quotes are often used within the context of the sublime: Thoreau, Muir, 00:34:50.059 --> 00:34:54.200 Emerson, they're often very male voices and a lot of times the female voices 00:34:54.200 --> 00:35:00.619 have been very silenced throughout time. and then finally the sublime one of the 00:35:00.619 --> 00:35:04.099 main critiques of the sublime within environmental studies is that it's often 00:35:04.099 --> 00:35:09.259 been used to legitimize domination over nature and the reason I chose this image 00:35:09.259 --> 00:35:13.759 right here is it kind of talks about all of that because there's a blonde very 00:35:13.759 --> 00:35:19.009 well-dressed man standing physically over nature so I just want to 00:35:19.009 --> 00:35:23.960 acknowledge that those problems exist and they shouldn't be ignored. but I would 00:35:23.960 --> 00:35:27.470 also argue that the sublime is not a concept that should be put on the shelf 00:35:27.470 --> 00:35:32.779 and ignored because there are very valuable parts of it. primarily because 00:35:32.779 --> 00:35:35.990 it expands the mind and it feeds the soul in 00:35:35.990 --> 00:35:43.160 the way that Ken McAlpine described on Anacapa and it's also a very very 00:35:43.160 --> 00:35:48.080 malleable concept. the very fact that no one seems to agree on what the sublime 00:35:48.080 --> 00:35:52.280 is or on what the definition of the sublime can be means that we can define 00:35:52.280 --> 00:35:58.730 it as we want to. so we can take the good parts and move on from the bad parts. one 00:35:58.730 --> 00:36:02.240 of the really valuable parts of the sublime is that it focuses on the 00:36:02.240 --> 00:36:08.510 intrinsic value of a site intrinsic means inherent and non-utilitarian so 00:36:08.510 --> 00:36:14.000 not on what sites have to offer us but what they have just inherently within 00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:21.380 them that's valuable. The sublime values, the experiential value of a place, 00:36:21.380 --> 00:36:26.060 it values that place just for existing just for being as incredible as it is 00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:30.830 not for anything else that it offers us and an environmental ethic based on 00:36:30.830 --> 00:36:34.610 intrinsic value particularly in the concept in the context of Anacapa Island 00:36:34.610 --> 00:36:39.740 is much stronger than one focused on utilitarian value as people have tried 00:36:39.740 --> 00:36:43.400 or as people have found out throughout time as they've tried to make anacapa 00:36:43.400 --> 00:36:47.690 island an economically valuable enterprise it's not going to happen on 00:36:47.690 --> 00:36:52.670 that island, there's no fresh water. there's a rumor that when there were 00:36:52.670 --> 00:36:55.880 sheep for ranching on the island the sheep had to lick dew off of each other's 00:36:55.880 --> 00:36:59.630 coats to have enough water it's not going to be an island that's going to be 00:36:59.630 --> 00:37:04.040 economically valuable in the same way that many of the other islands 00:37:04.040 --> 00:37:08.120 potentially could be or the other sites could be so for anacapa that sense of 00:37:08.120 --> 00:37:12.050 caring about the island and protecting it has to come from somewhere else and I 00:37:12.050 --> 00:37:17.180 think these intrinsic and aesthetic values have a lot to offer us for that 00:37:17.180 --> 00:37:22.280 idea. and one person who I look to for this is famous conservationist Aldo 00:37:22.280 --> 00:37:28.670 Leopold who developed the idea of the land ethic and he writes that any system 00:37:28.670 --> 00:37:33.260 of conservation based solely on economic value and self-interest is hopelessly 00:37:33.260 --> 00:37:36.980 lopsided as I've suggested and he instead emphasizes the 00:37:36.980 --> 00:37:41.330 interconnectedness of ecology and aesthetics to create what he did call 00:37:41.330 --> 00:37:45.500 the land ethic what we would now call an environmental ethics and he knows that 00:37:45.500 --> 00:37:48.450 this is not an easy fix, the changing perception 00:37:48.450 --> 00:37:52.260 changing representations think changing the way that we think is a very 00:37:52.260 --> 00:37:56.280 difficult thing but it's also a very necessary thing as we move forward into 00:37:56.280 --> 00:38:01.289 the future. and one of his most famous quotes about this that I'd like to share 00:38:01.289 --> 00:38:06.210 with you is that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the stability, 00:38:06.210 --> 00:38:10.289 integrity and beauty of the biotic community and I would like to suggest 00:38:10.289 --> 00:38:16.770 that maintaining sublime perceptions of Anacapa can do just that. so although the 00:38:16.770 --> 00:38:21.569 sublime has all these issues it also suggests a lot about the intrinsic value 00:38:21.569 --> 00:38:25.619 of Anacapa that there's something that draws people to this island other than 00:38:25.619 --> 00:38:29.609 its utilitarian values, that there's something aesthetic and environmental 00:38:29.609 --> 00:38:34.740 and ecological about this island that is truly remarkable and several philosophers 00:38:34.740 --> 00:38:38.490 suggests that the sublime really can help us see these things that it helps 00:38:38.490 --> 00:38:42.150 jolt us out of our typical thinking, that it helps us challenge our preconceived 00:38:42.150 --> 00:38:48.539 notions about what a place is like or what we think of a place. so I would like 00:38:48.539 --> 00:38:52.440 to suggest that seeing and representing anacapa as sublime avoids the common 00:38:52.440 --> 00:38:57.359 assertion the Anacapa is a barren wasteland. most of us, myself included, are 00:38:57.359 --> 00:39:01.020 probably guilty of thinking from time to time that it's a completely worthless 00:39:01.020 --> 00:39:05.700 island, there's no reason to go there, it's covered in bird poop, the coreopsis 00:39:05.700 --> 00:39:11.279 looks dead for most of the year. it's a difficult island to deal with but the 00:39:11.279 --> 00:39:16.140 sublime incorporates anacapa's bleakness and its darkness and its 00:39:16.140 --> 00:39:21.539 gloominess and its desolateness into its wonder. seeing anacapa as sublime 00:39:21.539 --> 00:39:26.819 places intrinsic value on this island perhaps the comment that Anacapa will 00:39:26.819 --> 00:39:31.410 never be Yellowstone or Yosemite is accurate: it's not as picturesque as 00:39:31.410 --> 00:39:36.270 those places, but perhaps the very fact that it's picturesque is what makes it 00:39:36.270 --> 00:39:42.329 all the more valuable. it's harsh and dangerous and difficult and it's an 00:39:42.329 --> 00:39:47.309 island with its own story. by combining an understanding of Anacapa's ecological import 00:39:47.309 --> 00:39:52.980 importance and perhaps less than less than obvious aesthetic 00:39:52.980 --> 00:39:57.569 importance. Channel Islands National Park and other actors like the writers and 00:39:57.569 --> 00:40:01.890 journalists and other artists I've talked about tonight they begin to 00:40:01.890 --> 00:40:06.480 appreciate anacapa island on its own terms, to develop a more holistic 00:40:06.480 --> 00:40:11.430 environmental ethic and to inspire the public to care about this lonely speck 00:40:11.430 --> 00:40:25.980 in the sea. thank you. so I would just like to quickly do a round of 00:40:25.980 --> 00:40:30.330 acknowledgements to the many many people who made this project possible including 00:40:30.330 --> 00:40:34.530 my research supervisor, Yvonne Menard, chief of interpretation here at Channel 00:40:34.530 --> 00:40:39.120 Islands National Park, Lauren Boross here at national channel islands my interview 00:40:39.120 --> 00:40:44.790 and research consultants, other people at Carleton College, Channel Islands staff 00:40:44.790 --> 00:40:49.950 and volunteers, and my family. and for questions I'm just going to put up my 00:40:49.950 --> 00:40:54.120 favorite photo from all of my archival research, this is from anacapa island 00:40:54.120 --> 00:40:59.750 in the 1950s and that's a Coast Guard member with his dog at Inspiration Point. 00:41:00.230 --> 00:41:07.410 let's give Anna another round of applause for her amazing speech. I think that 00:41:07.410 --> 00:41:11.190 you've helped all of us care a little bit more about that speck in the sea so 00:41:11.190 --> 00:41:15.750 thank you and and just to remind you I'd like to ask that you wait until I come 00:41:15.750 --> 00:41:18.960 to you with the mic before asking your questions so that everyone is able to 00:41:18.960 --> 00:41:23.570 hear so with that if anybody has any questions. 00:41:36.170 --> 00:41:42.250 this is more of a comment than a question but anacapa is a terribly 00:41:42.250 --> 00:41:50.420 important historical island in terms of ecology it was West anacapa where we 00:41:50.420 --> 00:42:01.490 discovered DDT's problems it's in our the ice plant and that whole removal 00:42:01.490 --> 00:42:07.609 process and the challenge of trying to restore the island and there's so much 00:42:07.609 --> 00:42:14.960 life out there that's unseen little butterflies and moths and birds that are 00:42:14.960 --> 00:42:20.270 hardly noticed anyway. I completely agree with that, that's actually something that Ken 00:42:20.270 --> 00:42:23.780 McAlpine talked about a lot in his interview with me was that being on such 00:42:23.780 --> 00:42:27.410 a small island and not being able to go on these long hikes those were the sorts 00:42:27.410 --> 00:42:30.650 of things he focused on more were the little things that otherwise he wouldn't 00:42:30.650 --> 00:42:35.720 have noticed and I would say that the sublime doesn't have to be experienced 00:42:35.720 --> 00:42:39.740 just at these large monumental sites and that it can be experienced on that level 00:42:39.740 --> 00:42:43.400 and that also one thing I would add is that I don't think the sublime should be 00:42:43.400 --> 00:42:47.150 used on its own to develop an environmental ethic, I think valuing 00:42:47.150 --> 00:42:50.510 things like the scientific history of the island its ecological importance for 00:42:50.510 --> 00:42:53.990 bird nesting and other scientific processes is also essential to 00:42:53.990 --> 00:42:59.799 developing a more robust environmental ethic. thank you for your comment. 00:43:05.970 --> 00:43:13.460 In in looking at those landscape artists in the Hudson school and 00:43:13.460 --> 00:43:19.590 how they glossed over kind of the problems and painted beautiful 00:43:19.590 --> 00:43:23.840 landscapes I think I think they were trying to move beyond the aesthetic and 00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:30.090 connect on a very visceral level to make people kind of touch a higher version of 00:43:30.090 --> 00:43:35.849 themselves in making that connection. you see that with this island too in terms of 00:43:35.849 --> 00:43:40.380 that that visceral connection that people can have? absolutely I would agree 00:43:40.380 --> 00:43:45.060 with that I think the sublime interestingly is often almost more about 00:43:45.060 --> 00:43:49.859 that than the beautiful is, of that it gets almost into psychology sometimes 00:43:49.859 --> 00:43:55.980 about being so much within your own reaction to it and many of the articles 00:43:55.980 --> 00:44:00.180 that I read about Anacapa island, people sort of describe this very intense 00:44:00.180 --> 00:44:04.590 internal process and reaction to the island so I'd say that that's definitely 00:44:04.590 --> 00:44:14.540 something that's been going on for this islands as well. getting your workout. 00:44:14.540 --> 00:44:21.540 I think this is a wonderful show of what it's important to us but you 00:44:21.540 --> 00:44:26.880 know in terms of our national parks but kind of like just what I want to express 00:44:26.880 --> 00:44:34.369 I think this is missing not just in your presentation but even in some others 00:44:34.369 --> 00:44:39.000 it's like Teddy Roosevelt was the hunter but he knew the sublime and he's the 00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:44.369 reason for he sought and he said okay he's one of the big movers for our 00:44:44.369 --> 00:44:51.359 national parks because of that. the same with anacapa it related to the fishermen 00:44:51.359 --> 00:44:56.550 who went out there and a lot of them were immigrants like the Chumash you 00:44:56.550 --> 00:45:00.480 spoke of that they this was a place they visited they didn't live there but they 00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:06.089 they had reasons to go there for economic value, well fishermens mostly 00:45:06.089 --> 00:45:10.349 of immigrant background they felt this was the sublime existence this area during 00:45:10.349 --> 00:45:16.830 the time it was made a national park was the mainstay of the biggest fisheries in 00:45:16.830 --> 00:45:20.170 the world and a lot of those fishermen and they 00:45:20.170 --> 00:45:25.840 look at this they have a definition of sublime and the beauty that is not heard 00:45:25.840 --> 00:45:30.190 it's not spoken by anyone you said spoken by the elites but as luckily we 00:45:30.190 --> 00:45:33.820 had a hunter named Teddy Roosevelt that could explain what hunters saw in the 00:45:33.820 --> 00:45:39.130 sublime but we don't have any these immigrant fishermen explaining that in any 00:45:39.130 --> 00:45:43.570 of these stories even in the west of the West that we have our you know that's my 00:45:43.570 --> 00:45:48.310 opinion, anyway. well I would say that that is one of my main issues with the 00:45:48.310 --> 00:45:51.550 historical record and why when I went back to do more research on this I 00:45:51.550 --> 00:45:55.180 started seeking more alternative viewpoints and more literature on sort 00:45:55.180 --> 00:45:58.090 of the ethical connotations of the sublime is that the first time I did it 00:45:58.090 --> 00:46:01.900 I was realizing how limited the perspective was within what was actually 00:46:01.900 --> 00:46:05.710 being recorded and documented in newspapers in the 19th century and the 00:46:05.710 --> 00:46:11.470 20th century certainly it's been limited to whose voice was being listened to and 00:46:11.470 --> 00:46:18.370 that's definitely something that needs to be worked on. I looked up the 00:46:18.370 --> 00:46:22.500 definition of sublime before we came over here and it talks about the spirit 00:46:22.500 --> 00:46:29.140 spirituality of it and I believe that anacapa has that because it's so small 00:46:29.140 --> 00:46:33.970 and you're up on a plateau you're part of the sky so you feel like you're 00:46:33.970 --> 00:46:40.990 really connected to something to the entire world because you can see you 00:46:40.990 --> 00:46:48.550 know forever and the sun rises and the way the clouds come in and the fog wraps 00:46:48.550 --> 00:46:53.440 around the island sometimes I mean it's really amazing. absolutely that's a good 00:46:53.440 --> 00:46:58.560 way to put it. it makes it it's like a spiritual. yeah absolutely. 00:47:04.250 --> 00:47:10.010 hello um I was wondering I became curious on this the difference between 00:47:10.010 --> 00:47:14.130 visiting a place and viewing is interesting to me because like when you 00:47:14.130 --> 00:47:18.120 talk about inspiration point people aren't really being inspired by their 00:47:18.120 --> 00:47:21.510 feet being on the ground they're inspired by looking out like what do you think about 00:47:21.510 --> 00:47:27.240 like the sublime in like being versus viewing? that is one of the most 00:47:27.240 --> 00:47:31.350 interesting areas to me and where a lot of the literature within cultural 00:47:31.350 --> 00:47:36.510 studies exist so I think that the view is probably the most important part of 00:47:36.510 --> 00:47:42.360 the sublime I think that the vista effect and how far you can view and how 00:47:42.360 --> 00:47:46.560 large the sort of caverns that you see or the mountains or the waterfalls or 00:47:46.560 --> 00:47:49.920 whatever the features of the site you're seeing are are probably the most 00:47:49.920 --> 00:47:53.970 important aspect other sensory details are also important but that view is 00:47:53.970 --> 00:47:59.100 incredibly important but one area within the scholarly literature that has a lot 00:47:59.100 --> 00:48:07.350 of contestation is sort of two levels about expectations and photography so 00:48:07.350 --> 00:48:10.470 there's a lot of literature about what happens to a sublime site when you've 00:48:10.470 --> 00:48:15.480 seen tons of pictures of it already. when you go to Yosemite to see Yosemite 00:48:15.480 --> 00:48:18.780 Valley but you've seen a million photos of it anyways and you get out your cell 00:48:18.780 --> 00:48:23.100 phone to take the same picture is it the same effect as if you had planted your 00:48:23.100 --> 00:48:29.910 feet there without having seen it the first time. and then another issue within 00:48:29.910 --> 00:48:34.950 the literature would be then also your expectation of having a sublime 00:48:34.950 --> 00:48:37.620 experience when you go to a place so it's connected to that sort of 00:48:37.620 --> 00:48:42.180 photography and replication but can you have that sublime experience when you're 00:48:42.180 --> 00:48:47.820 expecting to have it or does it have to be unexpected? I think those are all 00:48:47.820 --> 00:48:51.720 really interesting questions and questions that particularly with digital 00:48:51.720 --> 00:48:55.620 media will become increasingly important with visitation to parks but it's a really 00:48:55.620 --> 00:48:58.550 interesting issue to consider. 00:49:02.560 --> 00:49:10.120 further questions if everyone can join me one more time in thanking Anna for coming tonight.