ASLE 2015, Moscow, Idaho

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory

Shelley McEuen

Shelley McEuen is a Professor of English at the College of Southern Idaho. She serves as the graduate student delegate to the Rocky Mountain MLA Executive Board. She presented her collaborative course "Science, Literature and the Environment" at the 2014 MLA conference, and most recently presented at the ASLE conference in Moscow, Idaho. McEuen is  PhD student working on a dissertation on narrative theory and ecocriticism.

Jonathan Frey

Audrey Cameron

Hilary Hawley

Laura Godfrey

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Shelley McEuen
The Stories We Tell, The Landscapes We Deserve:
“Reading the Dynamics” of Rock Creek as Neglected Urban Wild Space

When Cheryll Glotfelty, first official professor of literature and environment defines ecocriticism, she states simply, “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xviii). However, much of the literature upon which ecocritics have primarily focuses on an idealized, natural wilderness, often perceived in areas existing out of and separate from humans. William Cronon contends the idea of American wilderness is a cultural construct, wherein the definition creates a paradox  “embod[ying] a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” (80). Through the construction of these distinctions between man and wilderness, frames of reference are established, and as man remains outside of the sublime ideal, his responsibility to preserve much less see and recognize his local, urban wild spaces becomes fractured and less fundamental. However, when the definition of wilderness is broadened to a different standard for what counts as natural, (i.e. the backyard tree becomes as significant as the one in the rainforest), the man/wilderness distinction is blurred, creating an important shift in perspective and personal agency (Cronon). When natural wildness includes marginalized and neglected spaces existing within urban areas, opportunity is created for their examination within a sociological and cultural context. Rock Creek and Rock Creek Canyon, which run through the city of Twin Falls, Idaho, are an example of one such marginalized, urban wild space. Rock Creek town site refers to a specific settlement along the bank of Rock Creek and will be referenced separately. A close examination of Rock Creek and the existing narratives within which it is mentioned, provides an important foundation for contextualizing the neglected, urban wild spaces existing in the West while providing entrance into a broad, overarching narrative still largely framing the Twin Falls region today.
 
Established in 1973, Rock Creek Park extends 12 acres along its own canyon, cutting through the southwestern part of Twin Falls. While running through the park, I am frequently made aware of an especially effusive, foul odor, especially at the park’s eastern entrance, and the presence of graffiti and refuse littering the running and walking pathways is recurrent. Research with the local office of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality reveals high levels of phosphorous, ecoli and suspended solids in the creek, which correlate in concentration with its progression from its source in the South Hills through the eastern side of Twin Falls. Water quality monitoring stations begin on the fourth fork of the creek near a location known as Diamondfield Jacks, with additional monitoring stops at the Rock Creek Store, in Rock Creek Park, and at the creek’s discharge point, where it empties into the Snake River. The condition of the creek is “impaired” by IDEQ standards, the result of runoff from agricultural and industrial activity through which it flows, recreational activity stemming from the South Hills and Rock Creek Park and lastly, open sewers which DEQ estimates number around 30—a holdover from the former use of Rock Creek as sewage disposal. These estimated 30 sewer lines are unmapped due to rapid development in the region (Buhidar). As of summer, 2013, people were seen swimming and fishing Rock Creek waters. When mentioning Rock Creek, the overwhelming response consistently falls into two categories, the first being concern for personal safety due to the character of the people who frequent the area, and the second a sentiment of “It’s better than it was,” the latter referring to the federal clean up effort occurring in the late 1970s. When students in an English/Biology 210 course at the College of Southern Idaho were asked about the canyon and park, one student out of 15 knew of Rock Creek’s existence and had an idea where it was located.
 
Written narratives can provide an historical account, which for those interested in nature and history can serve to provide context for current conditions, particularly as they relate to a specific place such as Rock Creek. To become intimately familiar with a place, however, takes time as well as research, and Aldo Leopold recognized this when he brought his family to live in a shack in Sand County, Wisconsin. Known as the pioneer of restoration ecology, Leopold acknowledged the significance of learning the history of a particular place in order to better understand its current condition:
 
“It is astonishing how few of those who have learned by rote rule or ‘nature study’ the statics of the land’s present inhabitants or condition, ever learn to read the dynamics of its past history and probable future. To see merely what a range is or has is to see nothing. To see why it is, how it became, and the direction and velocity of its changes—this is the great drama of the land, to which ‘educated’ people too often turn an unseeing eye and a deaf ear.”
(Game Management 387-88)
 
How then, are we to “read the dynamics” of a place, as Leopold suggests? Studying narrative accounts as a means to understanding the ecological and cultural dynamics of a specific location or area seems a logical place to begin. Connected to the ecological aspects of place, narratives can provide insight toward a cultural and psychological positioning of it as well. In beginning to negotiate the landscape of Rock Creek, narratives provide a crucial entrance to understanding the origins of the community framework for this important water resource and how that framework continues to define the creek and largely, the community itself.
 
Bringing an ecocritical lens to the existing narratives of Twin Falls that include Rock Creek reveals a romanticized history of progress, growth, and industry. One dominant theme, found in H.J. Kingsbury’s Bucking the Tide, is that of transformation: the irrigation of the Snake River Plain which led to agrarian abundance, while neglecting any self-examination toward environmental implications. However, to solely apply ecocriticism to these texts is to miss a richer context. Drawing on elements of narrative theory—specifically correlations between content and technique—reveals a homesteading vision mired in determined resolve for agrarian success combined with audacious risk-taking and experimentation. The result is an altered landscape characterized by impairment and accepted contamination. Rock Creek embodies a hybrid, middle ground landscape, existing on the cusp of rural and urban. It represents a place where nature and wildness exist within the city limits but are often dismissed. The neglected and marginalized state of Rock Creek’s waters and canyon exhibit and reflect much of the agrarian tradition upon which Twin Falls was founded as it reveals current values toward and definition of nature, wildness and personal responsibility for management of such spaces.
 
While narrative theory encompasses a broad scope of approaches, for its use in reading Rock Creek accounts, the recent publication of David Herman’s collection Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates offers a simple and useful unifying definition in the book’s preface. According to Herman, the collection is an attempt to “develop[e] ways of understanding what stories are and how people engage with them” (x). In searching out narratives of Rock Creek and its canyon, the results are embedded within larger homesteading narratives of the Twin Falls area. H.J. Kingsbury’s Bucking the Tide is the earliest complete account of Twin Falls and the surrounding area. Told in first person, Kingbury begins in his native England, journeying to America via ship to Chicago and eventually making his way to Idaho for a printing position on a weekly newspaper in what was then Perrine City (43). Bucking the Tide is a small, expansive volume, spanning the years 1907 through 1945, with Idaho and I.B. Perrine largely treated as a location and person of interest within a broader timeline of adventure. In “Narrative as Rhetoric,” James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz discuss how narrative is frequently portrayed as events occurring in sequence which they challenge by viewing narrative as “itself an event” with “a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience” (3). This shift, purports Phelan and Rabinowitz, allows for exploration of the components of any story constructed for a broader purpose (3). It is this focus on narrative “as multileveled communication” that allows narrative scholars to explore the experience of the narrative itself. This moves readers beyond the narrative’s thematic meaning and allows for a close examination of the narrative’s “affective, ethical, and aesthetic effects—and with their interactions” (3). In considering the Kingsbury narrative, the reader can see the prominence placed on I.B. Perrine’s decision to obtain water rights, and the ardor with which Kingsbury speaks to this irrigated transformation is evident in his language and tone. The title of the chapter on I.B. Perrine is titled “The Dream Came True” and in it, Kingsbury vividly establishes Perrine’s success in bringing a fertile vision to life:
 
“In the 90s, the Blue Lakes Ranch began to look like a fairy land every spring time when the blossoms of more than 20 kinds of fruit trees were in bloom, and in the fall the aroma from all the ripening fruit filled the air. Slowly but surely as the years passed the smell of fruit became stronger than the odor of the sagebrush. Civilization was doing its work. Man had conquered the desert and had made an oasis of that little spot. Why could not man conquer the great American Desert which surrounded that spot?” (49)
 
Kingsbury creates an intriguing juxtaposition with the fruit trees overpowering the smell of sagebrush followed with his line about civilization and man “conquer[ing] the desert.” Kingsbury’s approbation is clear, and Jeffersonian values are evident, in concordance with the utilitarian ethic of liberating a land for use and thus, rendering it more attractive.
 
A Folk History of Twin Falls County 1863-1963, published by the Twin Falls County Territorial Centennial Committee includes short, typed, personal accounts from the ancestors of those settling the Twin Falls area. Some of the accounts have been taken directly from the original ancestral notes. The style of this small publication is folksy—imbued with line drawings and irregular margins—and the credits for each entry are typed beneath the text. Section headings are simple and lack pretension: “Them Good Ole Times” and “Hardship and Happiness” serve as examples. In the section “Twin Falls County,” credited to Anna H. Hayes, Rock Creek is invoked in regard to its resources as part of a broader acknowledgment of the irrigation miracle:
 
The earliest settlers along Rock Creek established water rights and began irrigation of the adjacent lands. They were successful in raising fabulous crops of wheat, other grains and alfalfa, as well as fruit and vegetables, demonstrating the fertility of the soil under irrigation. The climate is mild in winter and hot enough I summer to produce maximum yields from all crops grown under irrigation. Construction of the Milner Dam in Snake River, gave impetus to the development of the Twin Falls area through providing a means for irrigation of the Snake River desert area. It was the first dam to be constructed in the river hence the Twin Falls project enjoys priority rights for the use of water for irrigation and the tract has never experienced a water shortage in the irrigation season. (15)
This publication makes indubitably clear in straightforward fashion the positive aspects of irrigation on the Twin Falls region in creating a viable economy and fruitful climate for a growing community. With flows from creeks such as Goose Creek, Rock Creek and Salmon Falls Creek, in addition to the Snake River, early homesteaders in the region were supplied with valuable water they labored to channel. A crucial and contentious relationship with water resources and water rights was established that remains today.
 
Two modern narrative publications focus on the area of Twin Falls and the Rock Creek townsite. David Richard Jensen’s Rock Creek: First Settlement Between Fort Hall and Fort Boise and Jim Gentry’s In the Middle and on the Edge: The Twin Falls Region of Idaho serve different purposes, but both serve to illuminate more deeply the region’s agricultural roots and negotiated relationship with water. Jensen’s text begins with a geological history of the Bonneville Flood and the implications of that extraordinary event. Jensen’s collected narratives are represented in the form of interviews conducted with living Rock Creek town site ancestors to supplement the original written accounts of the first settlement. Again, information regarding Rock Creek is embedded in a larger narrative of homesteading Rock Creek town site and the surrounding area. Jensen, speaking at his July, 2013, Kimberly book release, indicated his reliance on extensive interviews for the text’s narrative material. In a written narrative account from Donna Scott, supplemented by modern interviews with Ruth Lindgren and George Walton, the images of Rock Creek’s past remain vivid: “Salmon would swim up Rock Creek and the Larsen boys could just step out of the house to the bank of Rock Creek and spear them. One of the largest was 42 pounds. It was not unusual for salmon to find their way up the irrigation ditches and flounder in a field for lack of water” (203). A reader today may find this statement rather difficult to believe, as salmon haven’t been reported in Rock Creek since the early 1900s. Later in the narrative, it is made evident the functional aspect of the creek: “Lars Larsen harvested his wheat by hand tied it into bundles and stored the wheat until spring. When the water was running high in Rock Creek, he would use the power from a water wheel to thresh his wheat. The mill was located on Rock Creek, about 50 feet away from his house” (203-204). Jensen’s compilation exists as a strong example of narrative Phelan and Rabinowitz describe as serving “a multidimensional purpose” in the relationships among author, narrator and audience (5). Jensen writes from personal ancestral insight, himself a direct descendent of the Lars Larsen homesteading family, and his decision to combine written accounts and supplemental material from recent interviews creates a multilayered look at the first settlement. Jensen’s reverent tone and intention to preserve the rich narratives surrounding his place of origin are personal and evident from the preface:
 
“No one came to the Snake River Plain because it was beautiful, even though it is. They came for the free land and the promise of a better life. To the Paleo immigrant, it meant food and habitations. The European emigrants dug out the sagebrush because others had shown that there was magic soul that only required the water and a good family to covet it.” (Preface, Rock Creek)
 
The most current and comprehensive historical account of the Twin Falls region comes from College of Southern Idaho professor Jim Gentry. Gentry’s extensively researched In the Middle and on the Edge is broken into four parts beginning with historical context and moving progressively through development of the community and its response to WWI and WWII. Gentry’s text is unique for its content and span, and his spare style attempts to represent history as accurately and objectively as possible. Rock Creek is first mentioned as a location for grazing cattle, which were brought to the region in 1871. It was along Rock Creek that the cows “found tall grass and winterfat” (69). Interspersed throughout Gentry’s historical account are references to Rock Creek’s waters being used for crop irrigation, with issues of over-appropriation as early as the 1890s (122).
 
Rock Creek’s sole use, however, wasn’t limited to hydrating cattle and crops, and Gentry’s account reveals the first serious indications of Rock Creek’s marginalization. During the 1940-50s, the creek was used as a primary sewage removal system for the growing community, and “All the city sewage was still pumped, without treatment, directly into Rock Creek” (Gentry 312). It was only after the 1960 census that civic leaders made a concerted effort to develop the community infrastructure of Twin Falls. However, citizens were divided about whether a sewage-treatment plant was necessary. The League of Women Voters became involved in an effort to warn Twin Falls residents of the dangers of typhoid and polio germs that were being carried by the sewage. Still, voters rejected the proposed sewer treatment plant in June of 1958. It is challenging to fathom 3, 250,000 gallons of raw, untreated sewage being dumped daily into Rock Creek during this time (Gentry 330). Only after the State Board of Health declared untreated sewage Idaho’s primary health concern did voters narrowly agree, in August of 1960, to establish a sewage-treatment facility in an effort to improve the quality of the Snake River. Campaigns leading up to the vote were aggressive, with one billboard in Burley boldly declaring, “Flush your toilet, Twin Falls needs a drink!” (Gentry 330).
 
Gentry’s narrative, providing the rather straightforward, foundational history of the Twin Falls area, pairs well with Mark Fiege’s Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Fiege speaks to the power of the garden myth made manifest through the irrigation of the west, particularly the area of southern Idaho. When examining the ecological history and current condition of Rock Creek, it is within this “archetypal passage from desert waste to redeemed and regenerated land” that they should be viewed (Fiege 198). Within the “industrial Eden” of the Twin Falls region, homesteaders exerted control over their environment in unprecedented ways and water, the garden’s essential tool, was harnessed. As Fiege contends, dams and canals were simply part of the redemption process that allowed for water control, reconciling man with his new garden (198). Whether watering livestock, irrigating crops or removing human waste, Rock Creek’s historic uses reveal a tool in the form of a working creek. The local definition of Rock Creek as an essential, functioning canal, rather than a natural creek, is widely accepted.
 
Canals are an established and integral part of Twin Falls history. Drive east toward Burley along Addison Avenue during non-winter months, and a landscape of canals can be seen in full operation. However, these canals have been mapped and painstakingly dug, whereas Rock Creek’s waters have always flowed naturally. Rock Creek continues to exist for Twin Falls residents in its marginalized and neglected state as a result of its dismissal as nature and the narratives establishing it as a working tool.
 
Yale historian and environmentalist Jenny Price in her two-part essay “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” contends “To define nature as the wild things apart from cities is one of the great, fantastic American stories. And it’s one of the great fantastic American denials” (207). Echoing much of William Cronon’s earlier sentiment about wild spaces defined as separate, Price says by relegating nature to “A place apart,” the American tendency to deny any wild spaces within the “corrupted modern civilization” is “convenient” and “one of the great fantastic American denials” (207). Denying Rock Creek its own narrative as a wild, natural space existing within Twin Falls, absolves residents of responsibility for the creek’s current condition. It is within this agricultural reconciliation myth, of which Mark Fiege speaks in his text Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, that our ideological separation from the natural wild becomes embedded in our cultural construct. One result of this separation, in rural/urban cusp areas in particular, is evident in marginalized spaces such as Rock Creek, which historically and currently bears the burden of fertilizer, pesticide, and waste transport. The same separation enabling the work of groups such as The Sierra Club to claim authority in the preservation of areas deemed pristine and inviolate keeps distant and unseen the natural wild within which we live. In the case of Rock Creek, the overarching narrative, recorded by Perrine, Kingsbury, Hayes, and others is one of agriculture as foundational bedrock, and the location of Rock Creek within the system’s large canal system is secure. In a very real and observable sense, Rock Creek and its position within the Twin Falls region serve as western motif example of boundaries being blurred. As Fiege states: “In the hybrid landscape, clear distinctions between technology and natural systems dissolved. Nowhere was this more evident than in hydraulic technology, in the dams, reservoirs, canals, and ditches that provided the basis for irrigated agriculture” (205).
 
It is within this blurring of distinctions that wild urban spaces such as Rock Creek are dismissed. By all indications, Rock Creek is not seen as natural or wild by the residents of Twin Falls. Economic and cultural conditions continue the beloved and long-established myth of the agricultural irrigation miracle, without recognition of consequences beyond more growth and abundance. If residents were to define Rock Creek in terms more congruent with their Hailey counterpart’s Silver Creek, which has managed to draw world-class fly-fishing and Nature Conservancy protection, it would necessitate better stewardship.
 
Perhaps a key to further exploration of this simultaneous blurring between nature and technology and the tendency to position ourselves outside of the wild can be seen in Richard White’s essay “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature.” In this essay, White explores the idea of environmentalism contradicting work and the implications this has on American environmentalism. White invokes Lewis Mumford, an American historian and sociologist, noted for his study of cities. Mumford saw in technology the possibility for “integration of humans and nature” (qtd in White, 182). Mumford’s “Neotechnic” vision of harmonious balance between human technology and nature has ironically become “redefined as a problem” (White 182). According to White, the problem isn’t the technology itself, i.e. the canals and dams, it is that technology places work squarely within nature. The issue, White says, is that much current “environmental writing” creates an imposed dichotomy where the natural, wild ideal lies “beyond the reach of our labor” (182).
 
In taking such a position, continues White, “environmentalists ignore the way some technologies mask the connections between our work and the natural world” (182). The narratives of Rock Creek have established it within a system that obscures the boundaries between technology and nature. By applying the principle of wildness existing outside of ourselves, the agricultural work within which the entire Magic Valley region has come to define itself keeps separate that which we call natural from all that has been tamed and reconciled for our use. Recent economic growth has brought two large businesses, Chobani and Clif Bar, to the Magic Valley. Both corporations tout aspects of agriculture—Chobani’s use of dairy products and Clif Bar’s announced plans to work cooperatively with Twin Falls area farmers—as catalysts in making their decision to locate in the region. The connection of the area’s continued economic growth within a desert landscape to the zealous reconciliation narratives written in the late 1800s and early 1900s is easy to see. The question of where the environmental narrative of Rock Creek exists becomes complicated within the cacophony of economic improvement. In other words, when and how does Rock Creek’s voice emerge?
 
Narratives are crucial cultural artifacts, especially when serving as the lens with which to interpret the past and frame the present. Brian Richardson in an essay from Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, emphasizes that narrative theory has a bias toward the “representational aspects of narrative” corresponding to Aristotle’s focus from Poetics on “mimesis and lifelike representations of human behavior” (23). According to Richardson, literary theory from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century “continued to insist on literature’s duty to ‘hold a mirror up to nature,’ and nearly all twentieth and twenty-first-century narrative theories are likewise grounded in a mimetic conception” (23-24). The narratives of the Twin Falls region fall into the mimetic category, mirroring actual events told in first or second person and represented as nonfictional accounts. However, when viewing these narratives as a mirror of the past, the mirror is arguably slanted toward one particular angle, with heavy representation of the reconciliation myth of man and nature through the use of successful agrarian methods. The early narratives of Rock Creek and Twin Falls have been largely effective with audiences in terms of fulfilling their authorial designs—a communication of triumph. As Phelan and Rabinowitz explain, “rhetorical narrative theory identifies a feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response. … [It does this through] its synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics” (5-6). The narratives of early Twin Falls find threads connecting a larger, current narrative: a story of conquest through unlikely agrarian prosperity amidst a desert. This recurrent motif is seen through the emergence of more economic growth at the expense of infrastructure and resources; at this moment, Chobani and Clif Bar serve as primary examples.
 
Phelan and Rabinowitz contend, “audiences [of narrative] develop interests and responses of three broad kinds, each related to a particular component of the narrative: mimetic, thematic, and synthetic,” and “responses to the mimetic component include our evolving judgments and emotions, our desires, hopes, expectations, satisfactions, and disappointments”(7). Focusing on the mimetic component renders the early narratives of Twin Falls and surrounding region fundamentally successful. However, the question remains: where does one find Rock Creek’s mimesis? How can other neglected and marginalized spaces of urban wildness begin to take precedence within this established narrative?
 
The answer will not be found in narratives alone, nor will it be found in ecocriticism. If wild spaces such as Rock Creek are to gain attention from their local audience in a move toward action, perhaps the narrative components will begin to shift when science and narrative combine. Simon C. Estok in “Narrativing Science: The Ecocritical Imagination and Ecophobia” believes ecocriticism would do well to realize it needs science with “its findings, its authority, its reach and its material grounding” (142). Estok makes a strong case for combining ecocriticism and narrative in order to “make tangible the seriousness of the problems we have created”(150).
“Importantly, [ecocriticism] … needs to theorize the blurring of boundaries between science and narrative: theorizing about this blurring and showing in detail how both biophilic and ecophobic matters determine our perceptions of and interactions with nature; how personal, local interests intersect with global environmental issues, and how seeing connections between global threats and individual lives can potentially lead to broad changes in our behaviors.” (142)
 
When an agency such as the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality can claim scientific grounding and communicate a rhetorical narrative to share fundamental, pressing data about an impaired, marginalized water source such as Rock Creek, an opportunity is created for new and complex questions to arise related to community responsibility and agency. Today, we live within the landscape we deserve as an audience entranced by an outdated narrative that stubbornly challenges and continues to silence broader ecological concerns. Expanding the definition of nature and wildness to include the areas within which we live and work is no easy task, and these complicated ideas require attention and energy. In an age which Estok describes as that of “continuous partial attention,” it will take consciousness from a concerned public to shift the lens beyond immediate economic growth and concerns toward a more comprehensive and sustainable vision for community living. This shift involves learning and a willingness to read the dynamics of a place such as Rock Creek. It is a challenge that will continue throughout the West.

Works Cited

Buhidar, Balthasar. Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. Interview. 22 June 2012.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble With Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1996. 69-90. Print.

Estok, Simon C. “Narrativizing Science: The Ecocritical Imagination and Ecophobia.”
Configurations. 18.1-2 (2010):141-159. Print.

Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Print.

Gentry, Jim. In the Middle and on the Edge: The Twin Falls Region of Idaho. Twin Falls: College of Southern Idaho, 2003. Print.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1966. Print.

Hayes, Anna H. “Twin Falls County.” A Folk History of Twin Falls County: 1863-1963. Twin Falls: Standard Printing Co., 1962. Print.

Herman, David, James Phelanpeter, J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson and Robyn Warhol. “Preface.” Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State U. Press, 2012. ix-xi. Print.

Jensen, David R. Rock Creek: First Settlement Between Fort Hall and Fort Boise. Littleton: Pro.jekt e LLC, 2013. Print.

Kingsbury, H.J. Bucking the Tide. New York: Ganis and Harris, 1949. Print.

Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz. “Narrative as Rhetoric.” Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State U. Press, 2012. 3-8. Print.

Price, Jenny. “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (2006): 200-245. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. Game Management. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. Print.

Richardson, Brian. “Antimimetic, Unnatural, and Postmodern Narrative Theory.” Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates.

White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1996. 171-185. Print.
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Woodhead, Sean. Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. Interview. 24 September 2013.
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Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory, Continued.

Laura Godfrey
“…where the shingle mill was…”:  Pleasure and Misery in Hemingway’s Remembered Geographies

Jonathan Frey
Landscape with Strip Mall

Audrey Cameron
​We Must Begin With These Stones

Hilary Hawley
What Lies Beneath: The Making and Remaking of an Urban Waterway

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