the academy, to beyond it

learn first to listen_
with what is incomplete

some scholarly & creative
non-fiction, peer-reviewed,
& university press chapters
works linked or available upon request

i.   recantations
ii.  books
iii. book chapters
iv. peer-reviewed journal writings
v.  book reviews and interviews

i. recantations

Abstract:

U.S. settler-conservationists tend to consider ourselves more virtuous than compatriots who take Land as a warehouse. As detailed by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, however, white supremacy “is the thread from which the American social fabric is woven,” including conservation institutions.

As author of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey (2016), I suggest a methodology for further surfacing race/ism (any oppressions) spun into the influential schemes of Aldo Leopold’s best-selling A Sand County Almanac (1949), recently reissued in 2020. I decompose my own past scholarship focused on his “land health” concept, to which his “land ethic” pointed—a vision that, from its starting point, still ruthlessly relegates, appropriates from, and assimilates Indigenous Peoples.

This methodology is informed by Robert Pogue Harrison’s examination of living relations with the dead. It applies Kyle Powys Whyte’s framework of reckoning through three issues “that complicate any attempt to compare versions of Leopoldian and Indigenous ethics” on the way to any possibilities of difference-respecting coalitions needing, in common, habitable geographies.

I renew proposals of Leopold that, paradoxically, can support refusals of his obliterative constructions. Within Whyte’s three arenas, I continue to unearth, detail and disavow my bio-cultural ancestral legacies violently silencing Brown, Black, and Indigenous Peoples, undermining Indigenous self-determination and relationships.

Beginning to end, the flow itself of my writing wants to enact a corrective turn from conservationists’—also patriarchal—bad habit of over-listening to a few figures, then, controlling discourse at others’ expense. Three concluding grassroots episodes, in which I participated, mean to hold space for Alaska Native-led rejoinders to, and, already-ever distanced from settler-colonialist presumption as attached to their own starting points and desired futures

A Few Land/Relations Sources by Black, Indigenous and People of Color & Making Caring Connections with Intergenerational Justice, Gender Justice and Disability Justice

ii. books

Land health—-the historical development of which centers Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey–indeed was a radical vision within his and my own culture’s extractive worldview. Yet, as I argue in detail throughout an in-progress, collaborative work, neither my bio-cultural ancestor Aldo Leopold nor I have been nearly “radical” enough when it comes to seeing and resisting baked-in settler-colonialisms and white supremacy in our conservation legacies that erase others including: via relegation (including genocide) of Indigenous Peoples from customary Lands, appropriations of Indigenous cultures and of Black labor (i.e., slavery), and forced assimilation (including child internment in English only boarding schools).  And, while Leopold’s vision incorporated coalition-forming within a fragmented settler-colonial society, the habit of not attending to differences in underlying assumptions between a dominating culture and those still oppressed by its institutions continues to destabilize grounds for real and lasting white, settler conservation alliances with Black, Indigenous, and people of color toward any shared goals.

For more details, please see above, section i. recantations.

iii. book chapters

iv. peer-reviewed journal writings

v. book reviews and interviews

By Sam Mowe, 
“The Unfolding Story of the Universe: A Conversation with Mary Evelyn Tucker and Julianne Lutz Warren,”
Dialogue, The Garrison Institute, July 20, 2016
Web link on garrisoninstitute.org 

Panel with Brooke Hecht (moderator), Carol Gould, Robin Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore,
“Questions for a Resilient Future,”
Center for Humans and Nature at the American Museum of History,
New York, October 8, 2013.
Video Link

“Crafting a Narrative of Care.”
Review of Souder, William.
On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson.
New York: Crown Books, 2012.
American Scientist 101(2): 146, March-April, 2013.

Review of Lewis, Daniel.
Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Journal of Environmental History, 2013.

“The Dogged Arrow and Expanding the Circle of Life”
in JD Hamblin (ed.)
“Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth,”
H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 2(3), 2012
PDF

Review of Swimme, B. and ME Tucker.
Journey of the Universe.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences: 2 (1): 106-109, 2011.

Review of Corcoran, P.B. and A. J. Wohlpart (eds).
A Voice for Earth.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
ISLE 17 (2): 442-443, 2010.