Paul Burow (Yale) “Forest Values: A Moral Ecology of the Woodland for the Settler Anthropocene” (Yale Environmental Humanities)

Event Description: Please join us for a special lunch event featuring Paul Burow’s research on November 28th at HQ 276. Paul is a PhD Candidate at the Yale School of the Environment and Department of Anthropology at Yale University, and will make a presentation entitled  “Forest Values: A Moral Ecology of the Woodland for the Settler Anthropocene”. His presentation will be followed by a discussion of his work and lunch for attendees. If you are able to attend, please send us an email at environmentalhumanities@yale.edu or lav.kanoi@yale.edu so that we can account for lunch. RSVP-ing is not required but is strongly recommended. 

 

Presentation Abstract: This presentation explores the moral ecology of forest landscapes amidst land use and climate change in the Great Basin region of the interior US west. It proceeds through an ethnographic analysis of how different communities – federal land managers, Nüümü (Paiute) people, and ranchers – negotiate conflicting modes of valuation in forests and rangelands amidst raging wildfires, threatened species conservation, and new regimes of environmental governance. These political and ontological frictions are at the heart of how value emerges as contingent site of human-nonhuman relations in the forest. Value is a fundamental category of social theory and I offer insight into the ways people enact value in the practice of land management and stewardship, with an emphasis on Indigenous theories of value that challenge prevailing paradigms of environmental governance and environmental knowledge amidst settler colonialism in the rural United States. This work is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in California and Nevada between 2017 and 2022, including extensive collaborations with Native Nations and the US Forest Service, and is a chapter in my dissertation, The Ecology of Belonging: Cultural Dynamics of Environmental Change in the North American West, that will be completed next year.