The Designation of Places
(A quick note, we’re back from our time on the road, but we’ll keep publishing some reflections as we wrap up the semester)
When our professors told us they were planning to take us to the Desert Botanical Gardens, I was less than thrilled. My deep-seated distaste for the Botanical Gardens is born out of loyalty to the battles my extended family has been fighting against the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens since 2016. This conflict arose when the Gardens proposed a $30 million expansion that abuts my cousins’ grandmother’s property. My family had issues with the proposal that included clearcutting forest that surrounded their property and paving over acres of delicate vernal pool habitat. There was also concern over potential runoff that would damage an already human-altered watershed. Now, years after the expansion’s completion, this once solitary property is illuminated by comically bright streetlamps and peppered with the echoes of slamming doors and car alarms. A $30 million dollar parking lot sits where my uncles and cousins used to roam the woods. Heavy machinery crouches behind chain-link fences atop the old sledding hill. On the property line between them and the Botanical Gardens, my relatives erected a sign that reads “Ahead lies desolation by hubris and greed.” Having witnessed this utter destruction and with these words in mind, I had no desire to walk around the Desert Gardens and pretend to have a good time. In fact, I was determined to have a bad time. I succeeded.
My takeaways from the Botanical Gardens were undoubtedly affected by my previous knowledge of their environmental impacts elsewhere, but also by the content the institution presented and the ways it did so. There were many exhibits I wasn’t expecting at all – a walkway of Indigenous history, for example, highlighting ancestral connections between people and plants, and structures built by local Indigenous community members. While my expectations didn’t dictate the experience I ultimately had, they certainly influenced my mood and the information I retained. Shortly before our time at the Gardens, we visited the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum. While the “museum” featured much of the same content as the Gardens, it was also home to rehabilitated animals, an aviary, free flight programs, an art gallery, and an aquarium. The Desert Museum offered a much broader experience than people typically expect when they hear “museum.” The concept that places’ designations affect the ways visitors interact with presented content is something we talked about at length as a class. An art gallery warrants different expectations than a zoo, though both are often informational and engaging (though when animals are involved, like at the Desert Museum, the ethics of the place are highly debatable).
In terms of pure designation, though, how does a title affect our expectations of the place or the experiential goals of the institution itself? Why label yourself as a museum while also displaying eels that are not native to desert sand? The professors encouraged us to look at these places we visited from multiple perspectives and to keep these questions in mind as we navigated through these spaces. A museum is most often a space for archives, is it not? Why do they display specifically curated information if they have so much more in the back rooms? Moreover, how do the art exhibits in many of these museums play off the historical Indigenous content and artifacts they display? Reflecting on these questions and remaining conscious of my own expectations and takeaways as we visited many educational institutions perhaps taught me more than the exhibits themselves, though I couldn’t help but think of these questions in a much broader context as we continued our journey.
The questions I couldn’t let go of – about the ways that people relate to places based on their titles – remain applicable on a much larger scale. In terms of public lands, the titles we give, like “national park,” “monument,” or “wilderness area,” not only affect the management styles present on the landscape but the ways that people recreate in those spaces. But do different titles and official designations of public lands impact the level of respect garnered from the general public? This question was posed to our group as we camped on land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management and remained open as we moved through the culturally significant landscapes of Chaco Canyon and Bears Ears. In places like these, Joshua Tree, or Lake Powell, where Indigenous voices, funding, and accessibility play deeply into the management of sacred and anthropological sites, the question of public interaction became obvious and very highly contested. During our time in Bears Ears National Monument, for instance, we visited the Friends of Cedar Mesa’s Bears Ears Education Center. It is the only physical space dedicated to presenting educational content about Bears Ear’s history and future, and information on how to move respectfully and safely through the landscape. With Bears Ear’s conflicted political history and incredibly complex Indigenous origins, it became apparent that a lot of these questions don’t yet have answers. These ideas only sparked intense debate and reflection among our group as we recreated in these spaces.
Does understanding the history of a place affect how people experience it? Does a title mean anything or is it external forces that create internal expectations that truly impact engagement and retention of experiences? In places like Bears Ears, where the people in charge have neither the resources nor funding to provide crucial information to the public, whose responsibility is it to learn about the landscape? These are questions I cannot shake as I begin to reflect on all that we’ve done over the last three months. What I can deduce from these experiences is that everything we consume is affected by previous knowledge and expectations of what is or what should be. I knew I was walking into the Desert Botanical Gardens with a grudge. I knew I expected to have a bad experience, because of what I know about the institution’s impacts elsewhere. It affected my expectations, my engagement, and my takeaways. In a similar way, most expect a certain grandeur or serenity when visiting a national park, or to learn something new when visiting a museum. To what extent do these titles and designations affect interaction, though? How deep do these preconceived notions run, and in what ways do they show themselves administratively? For these larger and more meandering questions, I can only reflect. I do think, though, that being asked these questions while actively experiencing and moving through all of these landscapes prompted a much deeper and more meaningful reflection by everyone in our group, and I can only continue to reflect as I move farther away from these experiences.