And thank you all so much for being here it's an honor to be here tonight and
tonight I will be talking a little bit about the American sublime and Anacapa
Island and to get us started a little bit wait one moment I'll be talking about
what the concept of the American sublime means in American history and aesthetic
philosophy as well as what it means in the context of Anacapa Island which
means I'll be talking about perceptions and representations of
Anacapa islands throughout time and then I'll talk a little bit about why those
perceptions and representations matter for the way that we care for this island
and the way that we act is environmental stewards for anacapa island. so to get us
started I'll do a very short summary of what the sublime means. so in Europe
the sublime started as a reaction in part to the Enlightenment when people
were starting to rethink the way in which they understood the natural world
and their place within it. the preeminent scholar on the European sublime Marjorie
Hoped Nicholson writes that before the Enlightenment era most the sort of most
common perception of nature and particularly challenging natural sites-
places that are dangerous with large cliffs or waterfalls places that we're
worried about when we're in them- the prevailing perception of these places
was called mountain gloom so just gloomy areas with nothing worth noting, no
reason to go there, just really terrible places you don't want to find yourself
in but as the Enlightenment began helping people rethink their place
within that world they started appreciating some of the more
challenging aspects of these landscapes and she calls that transition the
transition from Mountain gloom to Mountain glory and in mountain glory you
get the idea of the sublime. the sublime as described by 17th century and a
little bit into the 18th century European philosophers is generally the
combination of beauty and terror in nature so one philosopher Edmund Burke
describes this as terrible beauty and he emphasizes pain and terror and horror.
most of the other philosophers aren't quite as dramatic as Burke is.
Hugh Blair for instance focuses on grandeur and mighty power or force,
Immanuel Kant focuses on how the sublime is an internal thing that a viewer
experiences as opposed to beauty being sort of more external the sublime is
something that you as a person are experiencing or for example Shiller
describes the sublime is actually being the internal triumph over your fear of
nature. but the general points of the sublime to remember are that it is very
very different than the perception of beauty or the beautiful. my professor
who supervised my research once described the difference between the
beautiful and the sublime to me as the beautiful being a beautiful meadow with
flowers maybe a gentle rolling hill nothing too challenging whereas the
sublime is a rushing cataract of water cascading down a huge mountain with
rocks it's beautiful but it's also scary, it's inspiring fear, there's some danger
involved, and some negative words. often times the sublime will have these
negative words like horror terrible awful in connotation those connotations
also come up a lot. and one final thing also with the sublime there's an entire
area of philosophy that debates about whether or not the sublime can actually
be applied to an object meaning is something actually sublime or do we just
think it's sublime. I'm not going to get into that tonight it's not very relevant
to this talk but the most important thing is that in what I'm talking about
a natural site is being seen as sublime. Within American history the sublime has
a slightly more recent history because it started in Western European
philosophy and it took a while to gain traction here in the US. the earliest
example of the sublime in the US is natural bridge which is in Virginia and
was most famously described by Thomas Jefferson and it's the naturally
occurring geological formation that looks like a bridge over a river it's
really astonishing and unusual looking but this is an example of something that
really wasn't accessible to much of the US, mostly that was this was people who
had access to the philosophical treatise being written by the Western European
philosophers and most of the US didn't have the education or
the finances to do that so it took a while for the sublime to become more of a
popular notion and that was closer to the 1820s and 1830s which was also at
the same time as the rise of landscape painting in the US. so this is an
example of a painter Thomas Cole who was very heavily involved in the sublime
movement within the US and these paintings often reflected a lot of these
same values of other phenomenon phenomena happening at this time so this
was the time of expansion, of national exceptionalism, building within the US as
it came into its own as a country and it was trying to build its national
character and one thing that a lot of writers have noticed- writers of history
and culture- is that the US often felt like it had something to prove in the
face of Europe, Europe had all of these cultural monuments like the Vatican or
all the places in Paris, all the places in London, all these amazing cultural
sites, and the US felt like it didn't have anything to compare on that level
and as it started expanding towards the west it started finding it snatched its
monuments in nature instead of in "culture." but one really important thing
to mention in the context of nationalism and expansionism is that at this time
the sublime was not being used to justify environmental preservation or
the halting of progression actually generally encouraged the exploration of
these sublime sites and it encouraged the sort of touristic pilgrimages to these
sites and one of the best examples of that is Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls was
an incredibly important and arguably the most popular the first of the most
popular sublime sites in the US. Niagara Falls really rivaled anything
that Europe had to offer in terms of natural monuments and it was also
Niagara Falls that started the movement towards using the sublime as a
justification for environmental preservation because Niagara Falls fell
aesthetically. Niagara Falls was in a sense in many people's opinions ruined
by touristic and economic development as people started visiting more, more
economic development started occurring more industrial development including
canals and train and Niagara Falls started to look a lot less natural, a lot
less pristine and even some European commentators started making fun of the
US for not being able to take care of its own natural wonders. so the fall of
Niagara Falls as this monumental site of grandeur and the sublime site that
wasn't taken care of very well was very important to the transition of using the
sublime not just to justify going to a site but to justify preserving that
site. so the next site that was essential in making the sublime part of American
environmental thought was Yosemite Valley. Yosemite was established as a
national park in 1864 in the middle of the Civil War. there are a lot of
different explanations of why Yosemite was established at this time,
first it wasn't actually a national park it was a state park established by the
federal government, some scholars suggest that it might have been established as
this park as a way to try to find a new Niagara Falls that the country could
unite around in a time of such lack of union during the Civil War, another
suggestion was the increasing realization that not all sites within
the US had a lot of economic viability and that we should start turning
worthless and I do use the word worthless on purpose it was often used
to describe these sites, turn worthless sites in to places of public
recreation and aesthetic enjoyment but Yosemite ended up going through a
series of mismanagements that also needed to be corrected. and oh before I get to
that I just want to show you a few images of Albert Bierstadt who is one of
the most important landscape painters of the sublime also just because
interestingly if you've ever seen Anacapa Island, his paintings of the
Farallon Islands look an awful lot like Anacapa so I just wanted to share that
with you. so then the sort of pinnacle of sublime and monumental sites within
American history was Yellowstone. this was when the first official national
park was established in 1872 after mismanagement at Niagara Falls
and at Yosemite but one really interesting thing is that
although this was another chance for sort of redemption on a national and
international stage for the US it was also within this category of assigning
worthless lands to be public lands. There was a lot of debate at the time about
whether or not Yellowstone should be put into public sort of preservation and one
of the reasons people didn't want that to happen is that they were worried
they'd be losing out on the opportunity to gain economically from the land and
one of the main reasons it did pass as becoming a national park is that it was
determined that it was an economically worthless area of land. and
before I move on I would just like to also mention that literature in addition
to art was very important to the history of the sublime so if you've heard of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, many of these
authors were also developing these ideas in tandem with painters like Thomas
Moran and Albert Bierstadt and all of these people helped contribute to a
cultural imagination of what America's lands had to offer. but what does all of
this have to do with Anacapa, it seems pretty removed, no scholar has ever
described the Channel Islands National Park or any component of it as sublime, the
most commonly described sites are Niagara Falls, Yosemite, Yellowstone and
Grand Canyon, so why Anacapa? if you've ever been to Anacapa you might really be
wondering that because there's not a lot on that island but and if you know much
about the history of the park you'll also know it wasn't established as a
national monument until 1938 which is way after the heyday of the sublime in the 19th
century so you're probably really wondering why I'm talking about 19th
century aesthetic philosophy. Well I am arguing in the paper that I wrote for
this and in a previous talk that I gave on this subject that the sublime has
actually been deeply embedded within perceptions and representations of
Anacapa Island since the beginning of its descriptions in Anglo-American
literature, news and art. Anacapa also within Channel Islands National Park
represents the most the site with the most potential to be a
sublime site with its craggy and volcanic nature, its arch rock, its sheer
cliffs that anyone who has been on the island knows you're not supposed to get
very close to otherwise you might fall down them, with its history of shipwrecks
and it just in general its dangerous atmosphere, Anacapa Island has all the
dangerous qualities of sublime but it also has many of the most iconic
features within the park. That's why I'll be talking about Anacapa Island and I
want to tell you that I planned on telling you when Anacapa might have
started being seen as sublime or when it stopped being seen as sublime because I
wasn't sure if it's still being seen as sublime today but what I ended up
finding after I went through newspaper after newspaper and I promise you it
wasn't through lack of reading many newspaper articles throughout time
Anacapa has been seen as both sublime and a worthless barren speck in the sea
since the beginning of these descriptions and the very first
description was of a rather dangerous event because the Winfield Scott wrecked
very famously on Anacapa Island in 1853 and this was the first US description
of this island that I could find in any historical newspaper database and there
are many different descriptions but this one I particularly liked and I don't
expect you to read any of these historical prints they're very difficult
to read especially from afar but this one describes the island as being in a
dense fog, rocky and barren and desolate without inhabitants and generally
describes the very gloomy foreboding island upon which this ship wrecked so this was
the very first entry of Anacapa Island into national history within the US as a
very much a mountain gloom site. But just a year later famous artist James Abbott
McNeill Whistler who would go on to become a very famous artist in the US was a
young artist working for the US Geological Survey and was tasked to etch
this very Island one year later and he got in trouble father famously for right
here it's hard to see but there are seagulls there and as the US
Geological Survey is about rocks and nonliving features of islands he was not
supposed to include any living features and certainly not seagulls. we don't know
why he did this; my hope is that perhaps upon visiting the island Whistler
realized that you can't depict this island without the shrieking gulls that
make it what it is for better or for worse and he was compelled to include
these birds as a sign of the vitality of this island and a little bit of a hint of
the sublime there potentially. Then just a few years later in 1864 anacapa was
described by another newspaper article as one of the most singular lumps of
land in the world with sharp precipitous sides that rise almost perpendicularly
out of the sea this is a very great example of the contested nature of
Anacapa because of that once most singular which particularly for 19th
century language is a very good thing you want to be a most singular but it's
also a lump of land which isn't very positive in any vernacular so it's already
exhibiting this really contested nature and some ambivalence towards the island
both seeing it as incredible but also really unappealing. One of my favorite
readings that I found in historical newspaper is another decade later or so
it's this one which is a first hand explorers account of the island and I
just like to point out that starting right here going all the way to here is
one sentence
which actually is indicative of the sublime because many writers especially
in the Western European tradition who describe their experiences can't stop
talking about it, they keep rambling on and adding more things because it's so
inexplicable and amazing that they just have to add another thing before they
take another breath so this extremely long sentence where he described
exploring anacapa's caverns and going into gloomy areas with waves crashing and
seals barking (probably see lions barking), phosphorescent glow upon the ceiling and
how the other sailors are all afraid and superstitious and won't go in any
further this run-on sentence about this experience that he just can't stop
talking about is indicative that he actually was really experiencing the
sublime in 1877 when he explores Anacapa's caverns, so this is one of my
favorite ones. and then moving past the 19th century into the 20th
century this contested nature of the sublime continues. this is a 1931
articles from the LA Times called the little-known islands that lie off our
coast if you have very keen eyes you can see that there are a lot of markings on
this map most of which are inaccurate most of the history the article goes
through about the islands is wildly inaccurate but one of the most
interesting things is that the author describes the islands as beautiful as
having a Mediterranean climate and being like a Garden of Eden on earth but when
he gets to anacapa he says that it is worthless and anacapa is bleak, of no
value and it is three islands of grotesque shape that's about all he says
about anacapa so in this one you can see that he has a very sort of pastoral
image of what the beautiful is but he's really not looking for the sublime he's
not looking for a more challenging aesthetic he's not looking for the
dangerous scary Island and he really writes off anacapa as just grotesque as just
bleak and barren. In the same year another article is published calling
Anacapa a barren isle and a dry, barren, lonely speck in the sea and
goes into its history of very dangerous currents and its history of wrecks. this
one also exhibits sort of mountain gloom image of Anacapa without any sort of
sense of it being a beautiful island. But in the very same year famous Hollywood
producer Cecil B DeMille published an article basically arguing for
appreciating challenging sights in nature and he goes through five
different places that he calls worthless isolated lonely spots throughout
Southern California one of which is San Miguel where he starts the article, the
others of which are then on the mainland and then ending at Anacapa and his
experience with diving at Anacapa island and he describes Anacapa as one of
the most impactful places he's ever visited particularly being underwater he
feels like he's experienced a whole new world and has experienced something
really spectacular that not many people have the opportunity to feel so in the
very same year as an article calling anacapa barely a barren aisle and just
specks in the sea another writer was describing it as the most beautiful
wonderful spectacular thing he had ever been to. But what's interesting about all
of these was that they're all focused on aesthetics but within the National Park
Service the focus in the 1930s really was not on aesthetics but rather
scientific and ecological value. This is the time of burgeoning understanding of
the interconnectedness of different parts of nature which eventually led to
the field of ecology and these quotes are taken from the 1933 report by a
secretary in the Department of the Interior to President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt about whether or not the islands should be recommended to be a
National Monument and he did recommend that they be a national monument but
said that the scenery of the Channel Islands is not positioned sufficiently
extraordinary to justify classification as a national park on the basis of scenery
and pretty much just dismisses everything aesthetically about the
islands saying that the value of these islands is that they're in the ocean and
that we need more oceanic representation within the Park Service and that they
have significant scientific value and in the proclamation in 1938 by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt these same emphasis continues. The focus is on the natural
resources of the National Park and on ecology and scientific value and no
focus on aesthetic value which is particularly interesting when you start
thinking back towards Yosemite and Yellowstone where aesthetic value
was of extreme importance in establishing these parks, they were sites
of monumental grandeur whereas Channel Islands National Monument at the time
was a site of scientific value but one thing that held consistent across these
establishments of parks was that idea of the worthless lands. Anacapa island and
santa barbara island were the two islands included in the National
Monument when it was established. they also were the least economically
profitable of all of the Channel Islands so it fit within that foot of emphasis
on islands that we won't gain from as much economically and I'll just add that
that also doesn't mean that the worthlessness angle doesn't negate the
sublime angle one of the sublime philosophers Edmund Burke actually
argued that the sublime has to be of no use to man that's where its value
comes from it can't be something that is providing a practical use to us so that
worthlessness is very important in this history. and then just a couple more
examples after this establishment of the park, this one's pretty great. it also
said you don't land on this island you board it so this one about a decade
after the park was established calling it a bleak rock and Siberia but with
charm so this is again one of those examples of the contested nature of the
island the author clearly recognizes the Anacapa is a difficult place to
encounter but that it also has something of value as he discusses from the quote
on the right for you that it almost seems overdone there's so much there
that you're encountering and feeling and hearing and seeing that you understand
why someone else might not be as interested in it. This one is from 1980
the year that the park was established as the park we now know it as and this
article was in the LA Times and focused mostly on how dangerous and scary the
islands are. It focuses on the rough seas, the swell, those sorts of things and
particularly for anacapa how barren the island is and it also calls it the most
inaccessible of all of the islands but four years later in the same newspaper
another author completely disagrees and describes anacapa as the most
picturesque island in the entire park so this back-and-forth continues and one of
my favorite examples of the back and forth is that in 1995 a group of City
Council members in Ventura was described by the Ventura County Star as going to
anacapa island on a trip some of those people when they went to inspiration
point described it as a million-dollar view saying the trip that whole trip was
worth that view whereas others including the then-mayor said "this will
never rival Yellowstone or Yosemite but there's enough to keep people coming."
Which isn't exactly the most glowing recommendation of the island and even
within this article there are a lot of examples of contested ideas about what
Anacapa was like even between the author and whoever wrote the captions
because the author clearly agrees with the more this is an amazing island sort
of view whereas the captions describe anacapa as actually three specks of land
in the ocean harkening back to that use of the word speck in the 1930s. And then
for just one quick example of a contemporary article about anacapa you
can see that this back-and-forth perception of both the island as
dangerous and foreboding but also as beautiful continues in a rather gothic
piece by a former park ranger turned ghost hunter Andrea Lankford that
focuses on the island and its eeriness, describing the island as having a horror
movie like atmosphere with shrieking gulls like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
and how the island its name comes from the Chumash word for mirage or illusion
then saying that its a splendid name for an island that likes to keep its skeletons
in the closet one of them quite literally alluding to a suggested
death she says happened on the island that I wasn't able to find any
historical evidence for but this article is a really great example of one
recently that continues this perception of the island as dangerous and
foreboding but also really intriguing. I
would like to also mention a few other contemporary sources I conducted three
interviews for this research and the first was with was with photographer Tim
Hauf whose work is used regularly by the park in its promotional materials and
others in other places and I talked to Tim a little bit about his experience of
Anacapa. he said that with anacapa island you really know you're on an island you
always have the ocean all around you, you never feel like you're on the mainland
in a way that you can in a lot of the larger islands in the chain sometimes on
Santa Cruz or somewhere like that you can get blocked by the hills and not be able
to see the ocean anymore or you can see ranch houses but on Anacapa Island you
always see the ocean you always hear the gulls shrieking and you always hear the
sea lions barking and that really gives you this sense that you're in a very
unique and different place than the mainland. but he also emphasized
Anacapa's accessibility as an island and how easy it is to get around and how
flat the island is once you get on top,
not the best image for that, which lessens its power and force a little bit.
If the island is easily accessible and easily walked around it's not quite as
dangerous so Tim expressed this sort of sense of the island being sublime and
unique and very different but also being accessible and when I asked him what his
favorite spot on the island was he told me obviously it has to be Inspiration
Point and he said that that goes without saying he can go to inspiration point
and sit there from sunrise until sunset and have photo opportunities that change
constantly. He goes on to describe the various different conditions that you
can see at Inspiration Point and how incredible that can be to sit in one
spot for hours and get so many different views and have so many different
experiences without even moving so I would say that Tim's perceptions of the island and
his descriptions of it generally fit with an idea of the sublime but also
show that contested nature that it's not all clearly one category or the other.
Another artist that I spoke with is Ken McAlpine a local author who wrote a book
in 2009 a pre-smartphone era as you can tell from the cover about living on the
islands for extended periods of time during a one-year period in his life. The
project that he developed which was to stay on each island for a week and then
come back to the mainland and write about it, he said it came from a place of
feeling like modern life was sort of spinning out of control in his own
personal life and he wanted to get down to what really mattered and that
what better place to do that than the islands and for anacapa sort of getting
down to what really matters in a very Thoreauvian sense, getting to that
sense of isolation and solitude was a lot more difficult than some of the
other islands because it's so small. there's really not a lot of backcountry
hiking that you can get into and escape through on Anacapa Island so it was
somewhere where he really had to work on solitude as almost a mental exercise and
one of the ways that he talked about this was that he was already nervous
about camping on the island for a week when he first arrived which is pretty
understandable again if you have been to Anacapa and you know that you can loop
the island in a couple hours or less it's understandable to be a little
nervous about staying there for a week. he felt this really ominous feeling in
his stomach and as he approached the island on the boat and it didn't go away
when he got on the island, and it didn't go away as he was walking around but on I
believe the second night that he was there he went out to Inspiration Point
at sunset and he suddenly understood what he was feeling nervous and ominous
about and that's that he was afraid of being alone and suddenly he wasn't
anymore and he felt that he had an understanding of his place in the world
while being an inspiration point looking at this view. I would say what he calls a
moment of epiphany is a moment of sublime that he experienced the sublime
at that moment in realizing and having this incredible complicated emotional
reaction to the landscape. and then one other thing that Ken
told me about his experience at anacapa is that it made him think a lot
about humanity's place within nature and he mentioned that it felt like anacapa
would have continued on without him not that we don't have an impact on places
but that the island made him pay attention to what matters and so while
he was talking about this he talked a lot about how that relates to his sense
of stewardship which I'll be getting to in just a little bit. (answering question) I'm not
sure i don't think he did. and then the third interview I did was with a
local Chumash elder Julie Tumamay Spenceley because i was going through
this research i realized that most of the newspaper articles i've shown you
come from primarily white american men and I was realizing that I need more of
a diverse perspective within this description and the descriptions of
Anacapa Island did not start with people who identify as US Americans that have
been going on for a lot longer than the US was established so I talked to Julie
a little bit about Chumash perceptions of Anacapa Island and whether or not
they can align at all with this idea of the sublime and her response is that
the sublime aligns very well with the sacred and as she was talking about this,
this is what she told me that she gets back to the seasons that there might
have been a time in the spring for instance when the island woke up, that
all of a sudden it becomes sublime because it's alive even though it's
already been alive this whole time but the life and the subtleties of it make you
realize how spectacular the island is and for her she would describe that as
sacred and that that aligns very well with the concept of the sublime so this
perception has been going on for much longer than just these American
journalists describing it. And one thing she also added is that this perception
of Anacapa also was very important to environmental conditions and respecting
environmental conditions that looking at anacapa throughout time there's been a
lot of respect and fear of the island for recognizing that it can be very
dangerous to navigate around and that weather
conditions around anacapa can tell you a lot about weather conditions throughout
the entire area so as she talked about this idea of sort of the fear and
respect of the island that for me also very much connected to the sublime
because for most of the philosopher's writing about it the fear of something
also engenders this sort of respect for that which you fear. very quickly I'd
like to go into some of the park's own materials and whether or not they align
with the sublime so the first example of that would be the park film and this one
opens with images of Anacapa Island with a foghorn blaring, seeing the lighthouse
at night and eventually the music swells and lands on this image of arch
rock so both of the primary images within the very beginning parts of the
film focus on Anacapa Island as the sort of icons of the National Park and
throughout the film we see anacapa during cuts to or sorry during voice
overs by Kevin Costner talking about places of wretch of refuge and
inspiration of restoring the spirit Anacapa repeatedly is used to symbolize
those ideas and those concepts. One of the strongest areas that I see that
happening is that in the ending part of the film the narrative talks about
vistas to be discovered: a shot to Anacapa, jagged beauty: a shot of
inspiration point, calm restoring the spirit, the cliffs of Anacapa and there's
finally an appeal to stewardship which again focuses on Anacapa with this shot
of the fog rolling over the cliffs and it ends with a quote calling the Channel
Islands an island world a wilderness shimmering on the horizon and their
image for this is panning out from anacapa to view the entire island chain so
throughout this movie the sublimity of the island is primarily depicted through
anacapa the beginning of the film, throughout the film, and at the end so
not only is anacapa depicted as sublime but Anacapa's sublimity stands in for the
sublimity of the entire National Park. other materials in the park also used
the same imagery from the brochure to the website, I'm sure
if you look at any of the brochures you might have right now you'll see
inspiration point over and over as the symbol of the entire park and its
sublimity. so again you might be wondering why does all this matter. why
does it matter if anacapa is seen as sublime or if it's seen as barren? and I
would tell you that perception and representation matter so much for
stewardship they matter for how we care about places and for how we protect
places. and before I tell you more about that I would like to acknowledge really
quickly that there are issues with the sublime historically. the sublime has had
many many cultural and environmental problems throughout time. it has been
used to justify the erasure and removal of Native American peoples from their
land by promoting the idea that these lands are uninhabited wildernesses of
pristine beauty just waiting to be settled. it has focused on sites of
monumental grandeur instead of prioritizing sites with ecological value
or other values it has also not been democratic and has often been a concept
that has only afforded recreational and aesthetic opportunities to the most elite
within American society. it also has been a highly gendered concept that
prioritizes men over women throughout time if you think of a lot of these people
whose quotes are often used within the context of the sublime: Thoreau, Muir,
Emerson, they're often very male voices and a lot of times the female voices
have been very silenced throughout time. and then finally the sublime one of the
main critiques of the sublime within environmental studies is that it's often
been used to legitimize domination over nature and the reason I chose this image
right here is it kind of talks about all of that because there's a blonde very
well-dressed man standing physically over nature so I just want to
acknowledge that those problems exist and they shouldn't be ignored. but I would
also argue that the sublime is not a concept that should be put on the shelf
and ignored because there are very valuable parts of it. primarily because
it expands the mind and it feeds the soul in
the way that Ken McAlpine described on Anacapa and it's also a very very
malleable concept. the very fact that no one seems to agree on what the sublime
is or on what the definition of the sublime can be means that we can define
it as we want to. so we can take the good parts and move on from the bad parts. one
of the really valuable parts of the sublime is that it focuses on the
intrinsic value of a site intrinsic means inherent and non-utilitarian so
not on what sites have to offer us but what they have just inherently within
them that's valuable. The sublime values, the experiential value of a place,
it values that place just for existing just for being as incredible as it is
not for anything else that it offers us and an environmental ethic based on
intrinsic value particularly in the concept in the context of Anacapa Island
is much stronger than one focused on utilitarian value as people have tried
or as people have found out throughout time as they've tried to make anacapa
island an economically valuable enterprise it's not going to happen on
that island, there's no fresh water. there's a rumor that when there were
sheep for ranching on the island the sheep had to lick dew off of each other's
coats to have enough water it's not going to be an island that's going to be
economically valuable in the same way that many of the other islands
potentially could be or the other sites could be so for anacapa that sense of
caring about the island and protecting it has to come from somewhere else and I
think these intrinsic and aesthetic values have a lot to offer us for that
idea. and one person who I look to for this is famous conservationist Aldo
Leopold who developed the idea of the land ethic and he writes that any system
of conservation based solely on economic value and self-interest is hopelessly
lopsided as I've suggested and he instead emphasizes the
interconnectedness of ecology and aesthetics to create what he did call
the land ethic what we would now call an environmental ethics and he knows that
this is not an easy fix, the changing perception
changing representations think changing the way that we think is a very
difficult thing but it's also a very necessary thing as we move forward into
the future. and one of his most famous quotes about this that I'd like to share
with you is that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the stability,
integrity and beauty of the biotic community and I would like to suggest
that maintaining sublime perceptions of Anacapa can do just that. so although the
sublime has all these issues it also suggests a lot about the intrinsic value
of Anacapa that there's something that draws people to this island other than
its utilitarian values, that there's something aesthetic and environmental
and ecological about this island that is truly remarkable and several philosophers
suggests that the sublime really can help us see these things that it helps
jolt us out of our typical thinking, that it helps us challenge our preconceived
notions about what a place is like or what we think of a place. so I would like
to suggest that seeing and representing anacapa as sublime avoids the common
assertion the Anacapa is a barren wasteland. most of us, myself included, are
probably guilty of thinking from time to time that it's a completely worthless
island, there's no reason to go there, it's covered in bird poop, the coreopsis
looks dead for most of the year. it's a difficult island to deal with but the
sublime incorporates anacapa's bleakness and its darkness and its
gloominess and its desolateness into its wonder. seeing anacapa as sublime
places intrinsic value on this island perhaps the comment that Anacapa will
never be Yellowstone or Yosemite is accurate: it's not as picturesque as
those places, but perhaps the very fact that it's picturesque is what makes it
all the more valuable. it's harsh and dangerous and difficult and it's an
island with its own story. by combining an understanding of Anacapa's ecological import
importance and perhaps less than less than obvious aesthetic
importance. Channel Islands National Park and other actors like the writers and
journalists and other artists I've talked about tonight they begin to
appreciate anacapa island on its own terms, to develop a more holistic
environmental ethic and to inspire the public to care about this lonely speck
in the sea. thank you. so I would just like to quickly do a round of
acknowledgements to the many many people who made this project possible including
my research supervisor, Yvonne Menard, chief of interpretation here at Channel
Islands National Park, Lauren Boross here at national channel islands my interview
and research consultants, other people at Carleton College, Channel Islands staff
and volunteers, and my family. and for questions I'm just going to put up my
favorite photo from all of my archival research, this is from anacapa island
in the 1950s and that's a Coast Guard member with his dog at Inspiration Point.
let's give Anna another round of applause for her amazing speech. I think that
you've helped all of us care a little bit more about that speck in the sea so
thank you and and just to remind you I'd like to ask that you wait until I come
to you with the mic before asking your questions so that everyone is able to
hear so with that if anybody has any questions.
this is more of a comment than a question but anacapa is a terribly
important historical island in terms of ecology it was West anacapa where we
discovered DDT's problems it's in our the ice plant and that whole removal
process and the challenge of trying to restore the island and there's so much
life out there that's unseen little butterflies and moths and birds that are
hardly noticed anyway. I completely agree with that, that's actually something that Ken
McAlpine talked about a lot in his interview with me was that being on such
a small island and not being able to go on these long hikes those were the sorts
of things he focused on more were the little things that otherwise he wouldn't
have noticed and I would say that the sublime doesn't have to be experienced
just at these large monumental sites and that it can be experienced on that level
and that also one thing I would add is that I don't think the sublime should be
used on its own to develop an environmental ethic, I think valuing
things like the scientific history of the island its ecological importance for
bird nesting and other scientific processes is also essential to
developing a more robust environmental ethic. thank you for your comment.
In in looking at those landscape artists in the Hudson school and
how they glossed over kind of the problems and painted beautiful
landscapes I think I think they were trying to move beyond the aesthetic and
connect on a very visceral level to make people kind of touch a higher version of
themselves in making that connection. you see that with this island too in terms of
that that visceral connection that people can have? absolutely I would agree
with that I think the sublime interestingly is often almost more about
that than the beautiful is, of that it gets almost into psychology sometimes
about being so much within your own reaction to it and many of the articles
that I read about Anacapa island, people sort of describe this very intense
internal process and reaction to the island so I'd say that that's definitely
something that's been going on for this islands as well. getting your workout.
I think this is a wonderful show of what it's important to us but you
know in terms of our national parks but kind of like just what I want to express
I think this is missing not just in your presentation but even in some others
it's like Teddy Roosevelt was the hunter but he knew the sublime and he's the
reason for he sought and he said okay he's one of the big movers for our
national parks because of that. the same with anacapa it related to the fishermen
who went out there and a lot of them were immigrants like the Chumash you
spoke of that they this was a place they visited they didn't live there but they
they had reasons to go there for economic value, well fishermens mostly
of immigrant background they felt this was the sublime existence this area during
the time it was made a national park was the mainstay of the biggest fisheries in
the world and a lot of those fishermen and they
look at this they have a definition of sublime and the beauty that is not heard
it's not spoken by anyone you said spoken by the elites but as luckily we
had a hunter named Teddy Roosevelt that could explain what hunters saw in the
sublime but we don't have any these immigrant fishermen explaining that in any
of these stories even in the west of the West that we have our you know that's my
opinion, anyway. well I would say that that is one of my main issues with the
historical record and why when I went back to do more research on this I
started seeking more alternative viewpoints and more literature on sort
of the ethical connotations of the sublime is that the first time I did it
I was realizing how limited the perspective was within what was actually
being recorded and documented in newspapers in the 19th century and the
20th century certainly it's been limited to whose voice was being listened to and
that's definitely something that needs to be worked on. I looked up the
definition of sublime before we came over here and it talks about the spirit
spirituality of it and I believe that anacapa has that because it's so small
and you're up on a plateau you're part of the sky so you feel like you're
really connected to something to the entire world because you can see you
know forever and the sun rises and the way the clouds come in and the fog wraps
around the island sometimes I mean it's really amazing. absolutely that's a good
way to put it. it makes it it's like a spiritual. yeah absolutely.
hello um I was wondering I became curious on this the difference between
visiting a place and viewing is interesting to me because like when you
talk about inspiration point people aren't really being inspired by their
feet being on the ground they're inspired by looking out like what do you think about
like the sublime in like being versus viewing? that is one of the most
interesting areas to me and where a lot of the literature within cultural
studies exist so I think that the view is probably the most important part of
the sublime I think that the vista effect and how far you can view and how
large the sort of caverns that you see or the mountains or the waterfalls or
whatever the features of the site you're seeing are are probably the most
important aspect other sensory details are also important but that view is
incredibly important but one area within the scholarly literature that has a lot
of contestation is sort of two levels about expectations and photography so
there's a lot of literature about what happens to a sublime site when you've
seen tons of pictures of it already. when you go to Yosemite to see Yosemite
Valley but you've seen a million photos of it anyways and you get out your cell
phone to take the same picture is it the same effect as if you had planted your
feet there without having seen it the first time. and then another issue within
the literature would be then also your expectation of having a sublime
experience when you go to a place so it's connected to that sort of
photography and replication but can you have that sublime experience when you're
expecting to have it or does it have to be unexpected? I think those are all
really interesting questions and questions that particularly with digital
media will become increasingly important with visitation to parks but it's a really
interesting issue to consider.
further questions if everyone can join me one more time in thanking Anna for coming tonight.