RADICAL CO-LABORATION ACROSS THE MULTIPLE AMERICAN WESTS: 

IMAGINING PLACE-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE 

 
By 
 

Jared L Talley 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

Philosophy—Doctor of Philosophy 

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to  

2021 

ABSTRACT 

RADICAL CO-LABORATION ACROSS THE MULTIPLE AMERICAN WESTS: 

IMAGINING PLACE-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE 

 
By 
 

Jared L Talley 

The grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of 

environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive 

extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly 

variable climate, continued mis-management, and that these lands are publically owned thereby 

requiring decision making processes that are accountable to the diverse values that the public 

holds. This dissertation focuses on the last of these, namely that collaborative decision making in 

the environmental governance of the American West is beneficial yet itself understudied and 

conflicted. Simply, if the public wishes to collaborate in the governance of Western lands, then 

special attention needs to be paid to the context, opportunities, and obstacles of Western 

collaboration in order to better navigate diverging values, knowledges, and worldviews.  

This argument begins with the premise that the ideal collaborator is often conceived as 

rational and discursive, able to aptly articulate their positions, wrestle with other’s arguments, 

and come to consensus over conflict. “Values” and “knowledge” are nested in a web of “beliefs” 

and “attitudes,” all of which reflect the cognitive dimensions of our worlds. This is not wrong, as 

it seems a requirement of collaboration to navigate the complexities of our worlds through 

discussion of values, beliefs, attitudes, knowledges, etc. However, I argue that the focus on the 

cognitive dimensions of collaboration obscures the materiality of collaborators – their own 

bodies, the places they exist in, and the ways that these structure their worlds. 

 
 

Building from the works of Mark Johnson and John Dewey, I develop a theory of the 

embodied imagination and the role of embodied and sociocultural experience in order to explore 

the ways in which Western landscapes condition our environmental beliefs. These diverging 

beliefs – or, as I term them, environmental imaginaries – are themselves embodied, occurring as 

much in our minds as in our bodily performances and experiences. I argue that the places we 

experience are integral to the beliefs that we hold. The reflexive place-belief process leads to the 

American West being a multiplicity of American and Indigenous Wests where the same 

landscape is experienced and perceived so differently as to provide considerable obstacles to 

collaboration in environmental governance. 

Through discussions of environmental imaginaries, Western places, the experience of 

various fencing in the West, and the experience of scientific measurement and grouping – and its 

concomitant impact on environmental governance – I argue that collaborative scholars and 

practitioners should take seriously the ways that place, experience, and the imagination impact 

the potential of collaborative environmental governance. This dissertation ends with a discussion 

of collaboration itself, arguing that a renewed focus on the embodiment of collaborators is better 

understood as radical co-laboration, or that organizing Western environmental governance 

around collaborative principles that take seriously the emplaced body is a radical divergence 

from the governance philosophies currently employed in the West, namely those that that prefer 

top-down governance that relies on our cognitive expertise in lieu of our embodied experience. I 

end with a discussion of structural changes that are required in order to enact co-laboration that 

recognizes the imaginatively derived, embodied experience of place in hopes that Western 

landscapes can be better governed, conserved, and protected through public, co-laborative 

processes.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Copyright by 
JARED L TALLEY 
2021 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In memory of Charles D. Smart 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

 

I had never imagined I would complete a writing project of this magnitude, and I am 

certain I would not have without the support, guidance, and care of my intellectual and personal 

communities. Thank you to my committee – Dr. Paul B Thompson, Dr. Kyle Powys White, Dr. 

Elena Ruiz, Dr. Laura Van Riper, Dr. Kevin Elliott, and Dr. Michael O’Rourke for the countless 

hours of discussion and, more importantly, for supporting me in exploring my own imaginative 

space while simultaneously keeping me grounded.  

 

I could never adequately express my appreciation and indebtedness to Agee and Vicki 

Smith of the Cottonwood Ranch, Domingo and Ruby Uhart of the Home Ranch, and Robin and 

Steve Boies of the Boies Vineyard Ranch, among all the others I have spent time with. You 

graciously took me in and showed me exactly what collaborative management on Western lands 

could look like and I truly appreciate your generosity of mind and spirit. 

 

And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the undying support of my 

partner, my family, and my friends. Lauren, Scott, Tara, Merrill, Kerri, Kevin, Mom, and Dad: 

Your support has all too often been thankless, but it has never gone unrecognized. You all 

provide the foundation with which I thrive on – thank you for the hours of talking over beers, 

repairing broken vehicles, countless meals, and putting up with my general crankiness.  

 

Lastly, I want to extend my sincere appreciation to Michigan State University’s 

Department of Philosophy for cultivating a space where pluralist philosophy can grow, Michigan 

State University’s Distinguished Fellows program for supporting me throughout this venture, and 

Christy Claymore Vance for her copyediting expertise. It takes a village. 

 

 

 

vi 

PREFACE 

 

In summer of 2018, I was participating in a collaborative effort to better manage 

livestock on a large working ranch in northeastern Nevada. We were listening to a University of 

Nevada extension agent explain how the different plant communities of the area respond to both 

grazing and wildfire – two hot topics for land management in the Western states. Our group 

consisted of local ranchers, state and federal agency officers and managers, non-profit 

organization representatives, disparate community members, and university extension agents. 

The group was dominated by scientists, heralding from their respective organizations, all with 

some sort of expertise on rangeland management. Our group’s goal is to learn from each other’s 

experiences and expertise in order to better manage the land and better manage our own actions 

on the land.  We were collaborating, but I couldn’t help but wonder what we meant when we said 

we were collaborating – is it sufficient that a group of people get together or was more required 

in order to collaborate?  

I am a westerner and descendant of those who settled in Idaho, born and raised in the 

deserts and mountains that sustained the Shoshone and Bannock Peoples since time immemorial, 

land that I now work to understand in order to better govern. I grew up surrounded by rural 

agriculture and rapid urban growth, seeing the outdoors as a place of repose and recreation, and, 

alternately, as a place to work and thrive. As a multi-generation Idahoan steeped in rural culture 

but also impacted by urban growth – and trying to find myself in this liminal space – I have been 

led to work across the ever-present divides we find in the American West, from the urban/rural 

and the wilderness/rancher divide, to the deeply entwined racial and economic divisions that 

have roots in the genesis of the American West as a settler colonial project. In the current 

 

vii 

academic culture, I’m late to my studies. I enjoyed a comfortable career in a local lumberyard 

before the economic recession of the mid-2000s that prompted me to pursue an education – an 

education that has taken me across the nation, yet throughout has led me back to my place and 

thinking through the issues we face in the West. I quickly learned that the divisions that often 

characterize Western conflicts oversimplify the complexity of its peoples – settler, Indigenous, 

emigrant, migrant, and all those in between – and the connections these people feel to this land.  

Throughout the years and my academic training, I’ve been participating in a variety of 

collaborative efforts in the American West and, in some sense, this dissertation was borne out of 

my curiosity to understand what collaboration means in the context of the American West. Of 

course, there are many dimensions that must be considered in order to understand these 

collaborations including the interpersonal preferences of the participants, the organization of the 

collaborative effort, the credentialed expertise of the speakers and the non-credentialed expertise 

of the listeners, the hierarchies existing between federal/state/and local agencies, the history of 

the land and the communities represented in the group, and much more. But, for all the 

complexity, collaboration has always been on the horizon of western governance, whether that 

be the collaborative governance structures of Indigenous Peoples, the neighborly collaboration 

that was required to eke out a living for the settlers in the arid deserts, or that which is required to 

manage vast tracts of federally-owned public land. Although many westerners have forgotten (or 

choose to forget), collaboration is as much a part of western landscapes as the vase sagebrush 

seas and towering granite peaks. 

As I was contemplating all of this on the ranch tour, the speaker said something that 

piqued my interest. In characterizing the different plant communities we were looking at, the 

speaker described the delicate balance of restoring native and non-native plant species as a 

 

viii 

bulwark to the spread of invasive plant species. These invasive species, they explained, were 

prone to wildfire and dominated the landscape to such an extent that were they proliferated, there 

would be no biodiversity and, in corollary, the land was in an extremely unhealthy state. This 

spreading of invasive species into native and non-native plant communities is characterized by 

ecologists as colonization. “Colonization,” I thought to myself, “now that’s an interesting 

description.” This project describes how I understand this description and what it means for 

collaborative land management in the American West. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ix 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... xi 

LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... xii 

INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 

IMAGINATION ............................................................................................................................17 
     Overview ...................................................................................................................................19 
     Metaphor ...................................................................................................................................29 
     Social Imaginaries .....................................................................................................................34 
     Time and Sweetgrass ................................................................................................................38 
     Conclusion ................................................................................................................................44 
 
ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION AND IMAGINARIES ...................................................47 
     Ontological and Epistemological Imaginaries ..........................................................................53 
     Multiple American Wests and Their Environmental Imaginaries ............................................64 
     Conclusion ................................................................................................................................77 

OF WESTERN PLACES AND FENCES .....................................................................................80 
     Nature, Technology, and the Body ...........................................................................................88 
     Fences as Material Boundaries ...............................................................................................107 
     Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................113 

EXPERIENCE SCIENCE ...........................................................................................................115 
     Scientific Experience ..............................................................................................................119 
     Rangeland Practice..................................................................................................................137 
     Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................154 

(RADICAL) CO-LABORATION IN THE AMERICAN WEST ...............................................155 
     Collaboration then, Co-Laboration Now ................................................................................156 
     Co-Laborative Place-Based Governance ................................................................................178 
     Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................189 

OF CHEATGRASS AND BIODIVERSITY...............................................................................190 

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................195 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

x 

LIST OF TABLES 

 

Table 1: Characteristics and Examples of Environmental Imaginaries .........................................78 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

xi 

 

LIST OF FIGURES 

 

Figure 1: Federally Managed Lands of the United States ................................................................2 

Figure 2: Environmental Imaginary Map ......................................................................................52 

Figure 3: I.L. Ellwood Co. Barbed Wire Advertisement .............................................................109 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

xii 

INTRODUCTION 

 
 

The American West had always been seen as a unique region of the country and had 
played a central role in America’s national imagination and self-conception…as the 
region has steadily built a stronger sense of its own identity, it has also at last begun to 
outgrow its political infancy by developing a genuinely western way of dealing with 
western issues.  

– Daniel Kemmis (2013, 110-116), This Sovereign Land  

 

The American West (hereafter referred to as “the West”), as a region, is a dynamic entity 

that has shifted over time with the colonization of the North American continent, often 

delineated as the lands west of the 100th meridian (Stegner, 1992; Wilkinson, 1993).  These lands 

are generally lauded for their grand landscapes and unique natural formations, cemented in the 

national imagination through representations in American cinema and the designation of 

protected lands such as Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. The environments of the West 

are iconic, to be sure, and should be protected. However, what we mean by protected and just 

how much of the West must be protected is highly controversial. These considerations, among 

others, are at the heart of land management or, more broadly, the environmental governance of 

the West.  

Environmental governance in the West is contested and complex, due in no small part to 

its unique regulatory structures, competing cultural attributions, and high levels of uncertainty 

regarding issues critical to its communities. The systematic interaction of these factors leads 

contemporary researchers to identify the West as a unique social-ecological region, citing the 

ecological aridity, the diverse topography, and the sociocultural and political economies of the 

region (Jones et al, 2019). Much of the land of the West is characterized as an arid desert, with 

elevations ranging from the lowest on the North American continent – Death Valley at 282 feet 

 

1 

below sea level – to many of the highest peaks. The arid deserts of the West, often referred to as 

the sagebrush sea, have evolved highly specialized ecosystems that are specific to the region, 

developing resilience to the low-precipitation, widely-varying temperatures, and diverse soil 

types that made concentrated human agri-settlement difficult to those settlers accustomed to the 

rich soils and plentiful waters of the east (Steinberg, 2002). The difficulty of human agri-

settlement disincentivized Euro-American colonial settlement in the region, and although the 

United States government attempted to motivate settlement through a series of homesteading 

acts, the current region is predominantly unoccupied in comparison with the rest of the 

contiguous United States. Due to the lack of development, the vast lands of the West remain 

under federal management rather than the private and state management that characterizes much 

of the country (See Figure 1, United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Land 

Management). Although the region resisted large scale agri-settlement, small settler communities 

did proliferate around the few industries that could thrive in the arid desert – generally, livestock 

ranching, sub-surface mining, and timber industries. 

Figure 1 - Federally managed lands of the 
United States 

Although the region was deemed inhospitable to white European agri-settlement, western 

lands have been home to a diversity of thriving Indigenous communities since time immemorial. 

The violent dispossession and removal of Indigenous Peoples from their land cannot be cleaved 

from the American identity and was critical to the formation of the West as a distinct region. 

 

2 

Indigenous Peoples have a significant presence in the West as seen in the western land that is 

under tribal jurisdiction due to the reservation system as well as their portrayal in western art, 

culture, and cinema. Despite the past and current violence toward Indigenous Peoples, their 

communities thrive throughout the West and must be recognized as sovereign nations with 

legitimate interest in the governance of western lands. These communities exercise sovereignty 

both as nations themselves and as diverse groups within the nations – these nations and groups 

are active in environmental conservation and stewardship practices tied to their cultures and 

economies, and have legitimate interests in collaborating with federal, local, and state 

governments as well as with the other settler communities in the West. Indigenous sovereignty 

precedes U.S. sovereignty historically prompting many Indigenous People to seek their own 

governance practices without U.S. interference, but the last century has seen a proliferation of 

co-management and collaborative conservation and stewardship. 

Aside from the rural settler communities that have developed around livestock, mining, 

and timber industries and the Indigenous communities who have lived on western lands since 

time immemorial are the rapidly growing urban communities of the West. Of import is the 

quickly growing urban populations – a 2017 U.S. Census report lists western states holding 7 of 

the 10 top states in population growth (#1 – Idaho, #2 – Nevada, #3 – Utah, #4 – Washington, #6 

– Arizona, #9 – Colorado, #10 – Oregon; U.S. Census Bureau 2017). This growth is fueled, in 

part, by western lands themselves. According to a 2017 Headwater Economics report, western 

counties with larger shares of federal lands have higher rates of in-migration and population 

growth (Rasker, 2018). These urban centers grow amid the business-friendly political landscape 

of the west due to conservative tax havens and free market ideologies, shifting from traditionally 

extractive and industrial industries to service and technological hubs (Farrell, 2020). The in-

 

3 

migration from retirees and young employees enjoying the amenities and recreation of the urban 

west prompts geographers to delineate the Old West (typified by rurality, decreasing and aging 

populations, and reliance on extractive industries) and the New West (typified by urbanity, 

increasing and young populations, and a shift to service and technological industries) (Bryson & 

Wyckoff, 2010). 

Amid the Indigenous, Old, and New Wests are thriving populations of migrant 

agricultural workers who seasonally travel to work the fields that help maintain rural economies, 

and immigrant communities that have been displaced from their homelands due to conflict and 

poverty. It is not merely those western peoples that can claim American or Indigenous 

citizenship that call the West home – it is both these and all those people that live, work, and 

connect to western lands in diverse ways with or without legal status. As I speak of Western 

peoples, I mean to reflect this diversity and not only those people that have some form of cultural 

currency (imagined to include some sort of citizenship right) in the American West. Although I 

often speak of ranchers and farmers, Indigenous peoples, and urban recreationists, I intend that 

the lessons learned here, if taken seriously, make room for the active and ethical engagement of 

this richer diversity. 

Despite this rapid growth and cultural diversity, western landscapes are still 

predominantly unoccupied relative to the rest of the United States. These undeveloped lands 

have historically been ripe for natural resource extraction and industry which has left scars across 

the West including degraded rangelands from historic over-grazing, mining tailings from 

dredging, and degraded service roads from timber harvesting. Meanwhile, amid more 

environmentally aware communities and prompted in part by the burgeoning recreation industry, 

the preservation and conservation of western landscapes has become prominent in environmental 

 

4 

governance. However, the Old West, the New West, and the Indigenous West differentially 

value western landscapes and this, of course, can make environmental governance difficult. 

Western landscapes are as conflicted as they are awe-inspiring. The centuries since 

Western settlement have seen pernicious extraction – mining, timber, grazing, development, etc. 

– that has left many lands in states of ecological disrepair, threatening local biodiversity and 

curating the conditions for more common, intense, and destructive wildfires. Endangered species 

protections, national land designations (e.g. wilderness, historic sites), and landscape restoration 

projects seek to redress much of this disrepair, yet they often demand the cessation of those 

extractive activities that precipitated the disrepair. This, of course, can be devastating to the 

diverse rural communities whose cultural, political, and social economies rely on these practices. 

Many of the communities that do not rely on these industries are increasingly demanding greater 

protections for western environments, sometimes under the auspices of the intrinsic value of the 

land itself and sometimes for the sake of recreational accessibility. In either case, there is an 

ideological difference between those western peoples whom work on the land and those whom 

recreate on the land, prompting heated litigation and a climate of winners or losers. Amidst all of 

this conflict, there is the fact that these lands were recently stolen from their Indigenous Peoples 

who still live on western lands and the just governance of them must ethically include the 

acknowledgment and atonement of this history of genocide. And, of course, these 

extract/preserve/restore conflicts occur under the auspices of climate change and the strains it 

puts on the desert landscapes. Taken together, the governance of western landscapes is complex 

and, although an understatement, conflicted. 

Amidst conflict, environmental degradation from industry, and motivated by the 

proliferation of environmental legislation, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act 

 

5 

(FLPMA) was enacted in 1976. Ending the homestead era and providing the framework for 

contemporary western land governance, the FLPMA demands that federal lands be managed for 

multiple use, explicitly defined as managing 

in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, 
environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archaeological values; that, 
where appropriate [management] will preserve and protect certain public lands in their 
natural condition; that will provide food and habitat for fish and wildlife and domestic 
animals; and that will provide for outdoor recreation and human occupancy and use. 
(Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, p. 2) 
 
The multiple-use doctrine, as it is often called, can also be seen as a multiple-value 

doctrine. Each use in FLPMA is derived from and promotes a host of values that are often 

conflicting with other uses and it is the job of land managers to balance these. The demand that 

land management must respond to a multitude of (often competing) values is no small task and 

has inevitably given rise to considerable conflict in the environmental governance of the West. 

While this is due to a wide range of social, economic, cultural, and political factors, the federal 

control of lands that westerners live and work on provides impetus to many of the environmental 

conflicts in the West. Put too simply, westerners want more control over western lands in order 

to enact their specific environmental agendas which are often in conflict with federal 

management, itself representative of varying non-western environmental agendas.  

The federal management of western lands is not a small matter. Tension regarding the 

proper balance of federal versus local control is at the heart of environmental governance 

conflicts in the West (Davis, 2018; Skillen, 2009). On one hand, some westerners eschew 

government management in general and seek to privatize all western lands under well-trod free 

market arguments that rely on free markets to capture and organize our individual and shared 

values, whether they be moral, social, or political. On the other hand, some westerners support 

the continuation of federal management in order that vast swaths of public land remain open and 

 

6 

their management is held accountable to the American public. The issue can be overly-simplified 

by asking at which level of government (federal, state, local, etc.) should decision-making 

regarding the proper use of public lands occur.  

Another way to view this is to ask what the term “public” connotes in public lands – is it 

a broad public where western lands are managed for all Americans (although what this means for 

Indigenous peoples and those people without citizenship needs critical examination) or should 

public be understood narrowly as those who live, work, and recreate on or near the lands in 

question? I do not intend to answer this question, excepting that to collaborate in western land 

governance requires, as I argue, embodied emplacement which itself tends to prioritize the local 

over the federal. But, on its own, this is not meant to suggest that there is no role for federal 

government or that privatization is paramount.  

In my experience, the “genuinely western way of dealing with western issues” alluded to 

in the epigraph can be summarized in one-word: collaboration. The description of the conflict 

over land tenure in the West is oversimplified, but it provides context to the latent collaborative 

environmental governance movement in the West. Facing recurring conflict over environmental 

management and considering the multitude of environmental values that must be considered in 

decision-making, environmental managers, land-users, and advocates are increasingly seeking 

opportunities to collaborate across ideological lines in order to better manage western lands. The 

West is home to some of the most lauded and protected landscapes in the country as well as 

some of the most controversial. These landscapes are owned and governed by the federal 

government under FLPMA’s prescription to manage for a wide breadth of land values. Despite a 

history of conflict of the proper management of western lands, the communities that live on these 

lands – representing the diversity of values prescribed by FLPMA – are recognizing that they 

 

7 

must come together to overcome differences and find solutions to seemingly intractable issues. 

They are choosing collaboration over conflict. 

These western collaborations are an exercise in democracy. Whereas democracy in the 

United States has been intimately and historically bound with land tenure, the lack of explicit 

ownership in the West prompts the public to exercise their democratic rights on a basis other 

than ownership. That is, someone’s understanding themselves as having a democratic right in the 

governance of western lands is not because of their having a fee title to a particular property or 

bounded piece of land. In the literature on collaboration, this non-land tenure basis is often 

cashed out as an interest, meaning that those with an interest in western land management have a 

right, in light of their interests, to participate in the governance process (c.f. Colvin et al. 2016; 

Freeman, 1983; Mitchel et al., 1997)1. These “interests” often refer to the way a person values 

the land, whether those values be economic, recreational, cultural, spiritual, or something else 

(e.g. economic interest, recreational interest). I do not argue that interest-based participation, 

however construed, should be abandoned. However, these “interests” are not very helpful in 

practice. 

Interests, on their own, are not those types of things that easily track a person’s actual 

behavior and attitudes – they may be amalgamations of varied complementary or contradictory 

values, changing and shifting amid a society in flux. People’s behavior often contradicts what 

appears to be in their interests and given the complexities of land governance, rallying behind a 

single interest often requires that a person choose one interest to support over other competing 

interests. Interests, then, may be sufficient proxies for including a diverse and potentially 

conflicted value-set in collaboration, but they also remain ambiguous enough to not provide 

                                                           
1 Much of this literature is found under terms of “public participation,” “stakeholder engagement,” and other 
related terms. Although these are terms of art, I do take them all to be collaborative in nature.  

 

8 

normative guidance to collaboration. Because, of course, how do we represent the interests of the 

whole American public in western land governance? Should we weigh the interests of western 

peoples over the interests of non-western (and, plausibly, global) peoples? How do we balance 

the incoming populations of the New West with the smaller populations of the Old and 

Indigenous Wests? How do we form consensus with legitimately contradictory interests? These, 

among others, are questions that need to be answered and other collaboration scholars are 

working diligently toward that end. But, that is not my aim. 

Collaboration is lauded as a normative ideal by well-intentioned people (Reed, 2008). 

However, collaboration is difficult in practice and it is my contention that this is due in no small 

part to a lack of reflection on “collaboration” as a concept, including both the interpersonal 

characteristics of collaboration (e.g. individual values and knowledges, social hierarchies, power 

differentials) and the structural contexts that collaborations must take place in. But, even more 

so, this difficulty stems from a lack of collaborative spirit and understanding in the public itself. 

Given the increasing popularity of collaboration as a practice, specifically in the environmental 

governance of the West, it is time for a concerted effort to understand just what we are asking 

when we prescribe it. In this dissertation, I aim to critically examine the underpinnings of 

western collaboration with the ultimate goal that this work can help to develop and guide future 

collaborative studies and efforts. More importantly, however, I am speaking to western peoples 

in this project with the goal that we (as westerners) recognize and embody the collaborative spirit 

that our western places need.  

This argument begins with the premise that the ideal collaborator is often conceived as 

rational and discursive, able to aptly articulate their positions, wrestle with other’s arguments, 

and come to consensus over conflict (Elam & Bertilsson, 2003). “Values” and “knowledge” are 

 

9 

nested in a web of “beliefs” and “attitudes,” all of which reflect the cognitive dimensions of our 

worlds. This is not wrong, as it seems a requirement of collaboration to navigate the complexities 

of our worlds through discussion of values, beliefs, attitudes, knowledges, etc. However, I argue 

that the focus on the cognitive dimensions of collaboration obscures the materiality of 

collaborators – their own bodies, the places they exist in, and the ways that these structure their 

worlds (c.f., Ankeny & Leonelli’s 2016 discussion of repertoires). This dissertation is a modest 

attempt to provide an exploratory path relating collaborators’ bodies to their cognitive processes, 

specifically recognizing the ways that the experience of western environments can provide both 

opportunities and obstacles to collaboration. Ultimately, I aim to defend the claim that 

recognizing the emplaced body in collaborations allows us to see western collaboration as a 

radical politic, helping to understand just how the West is “outgrow[ing] its political infancy” 

and developing “a stronger sense of its own identity” (Kemmis, 2013). By radical politic, I only 

mean to suggest that organizing western environmental governance around collaborative 

principles that take seriously the emplaced body is a radical divergence from the governance 

philosophies currently employed in the West, namely those that that prefer top-down governance 

that relies on our cognitive expertise in lieu of our embodied experience.   

Overly simplified, to collaborate is to work together, whether that be toward the same 

goal or in coalition for different goals. In order for people to work together (the presumed goal of 

a collaboration), they will have to navigate – sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly – 

tensions that arise over differences in kind, content, and amount of knowledge, divergent and 

sometimes contradictory values, beliefs, and attitudes, and varying expectations for the process 

and perceived success of the work. They will also have to exist together, side-by-side as bodies 

in place. However, our bodies do not accidentally exist in our places – we move and act with 

 

10 

intentionality that is, somehow, structured. I argue that understanding this “somehow” begins 

with understanding the role that our imaginations play in relating our bodily experiences to those 

structures that we move and act within. Briefly, and following from Mark Johnson’s (1987) The 

Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, the imagination 

organizes our embodied and sociocultural experiences into conceptual schemas that undergird all 

our actions, either through embodied or cognitive interactions and reactions. These 

imaginatively-derived conceptual schemas set the constraints and possibilities for our 

knowledges, values, and expectations that we bring to bear in collaborative settings. Simply, I 

am arguing that in characterizing our collaborative efforts there is a rich story to be told 

regarding how our imaginations and embodied experiences construct the worlds we collaborate 

within. Put another way, collaborative efforts need imaginative efforts. 

To this end, I develop an account of the imagination in chapter two that centers the 

embodied person in these imaginatively formed worldviews, detailing the ways that our physical 

and social experiences give rise to how we imagine our worlds and our places within them. The 

human imagination is powerful in its ability to manipulate our worlds in the sense that we can 

reflect on what we imagine and what we imagine does not have to correspond to how things 

currently are. However, the imagination resists the sort of logics that are often requested of 

rational thought, meaning that its ability to present a manipulated reality to us does not seem to 

help figure out how to act in our actual reality. Barring extreme cases, every person has an 

intimate relationship with their own imagination and although the constitution of that 

relationship may itself be puzzling, we should not assume that it is thus inconsequential. This 

raises the salient question of chapter two: How is the imagination consequential? Although I do 

not attempt to substantively answer this question, I develop a brief account of the imagination 

 

11 

that shows how our individual embodied and sociocultural experiences are organized, 

normalized, and communicated in order to develop shared, community-wide, conceptual systems 

that condition our shared understandings of our worlds. In the literature these shared conceptual 

fabrics are sometimes referred to as social imaginaries that serve to guide micro/meso/and macro 

level social worlds. Thus, chapter two argues that our bodily experiences play a role in 

determining our imaginatively derived conceptual systems which, in turn, are normalized and 

shared to form broad social imaginaries. These social imaginaries can diverge between 

communities and understanding this divergence – including its experiential and imaginative 

determinants – can help us to understand both obstacles and opportunities in working together: 

collaborating across diverse communities. To be sure, this approach is not novel. The Toolbox 

Dialogue Initiative, for instance, similarly approaches collaboration by seeking to focus our 

attention to the conceptual systems that structure our knowledge making processes and thereby 

allowing focused reflection on these determinants (Eigenbrode et al., 2007). The imagination’s 

role in the creation of these conceptual systems, however, helps to understand how divergent 

systems come to be and can provide novel entry points into these discourses. 

Chapter three focuses specifically on divergent environmental imaginaries, or those 

social imaginaries that are distinct based on their relative conceptualizations of the environment. 

These environmental imaginaries define and give meaning to our environments, including the 

ways that we know them, the value(s) we attribute to them, our actions regarding them, and our 

experiences of them. Using the experience/imagination/imaginary framework, I delineate four 

predominant environmental imaginaries in western environmental governance, rooting these 

imaginaries in the embodied and encultured experiences of the groups that hold them. I label 

these imaginaries as the machine, the garden, the community, and the family imaginaries, where 

 

12 

both machine and community generally represent rural populations, both machine and garden 

represent urban populations, and family represents Indigenous populations. These imaginaries 

(as well as others not described here) exist in a landscape of power differentials where those in 

positions of power are able to enact their imaginaries in ways that are at odds with others’ 

imaginaries. Namely, those imaginaries that developed from settler colonial imaginaries are 

often dominant in western collaborations, and if we seek a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive 

collaborative landscape, then they must be contended with. More specifically, and perhaps 

damning, is that some imaginaries are constituted in such a way as to foreclose the experiences 

that are needed for robust collaboration. These foreclosing imaginaries are thus an obstacle to the 

collaborative spirit that must take root in the environmental governance of western lands. As 

environmental imaginaries vary across the knowledge/value/action characteristics described 

above and vary according to the relative power that they hold (or, more specifically, that those 

communities possessing those imaginaries hold), divergences in imaginaries prompt 

collaborative participants to fundamentally diverge on critical issues and hinder just and 

equitable collaborations. As these environmental imaginaries are derived from our embodied 

experiences in our respective places, the places in which we experience are critical to 

understanding our imaginaries – in other words, where we are is critical to who we are and, 

conversely, who we are is critical to where we are.  

In chapter four, I contrast the concepts of place and space in order to develop an account 

of a community’s contextual, particular, and meaning-laden sense of place. I argue that what is 

considered the American West can be better understood as a multiplicity of American and 

Indigenous Wests, with varying communities imagining the same western landscapes as 

differentiated places. The meaning attached to these places, the ways of knowing these places, 

 

13 

and the behaviors appropriate to these places are all derived from the respective communities’ 

sense of place, itself critical to the development of a shared imaginary. Attending to the 

multiplicity of place-meanings in the American West is, as I argue, critical to collaborating 

across divergent environmental imaginaries. Not only does this attention help us to better 

understand conflict arising from divergent place-meanings, but it also helps us to understand the 

ways that our governance practices privilege certain place-meanings and structure the 

concomitant development of emplaced environmental imaginaries. 

Threaded throughout chapter four are discussions of the ways in which our technologies 

are both reflective of our imaginaries and serve to construct imaginaries through their interaction 

with our places and imaginations. Specifically, I focus on the role of fencing in western 

landscapes, arguing that different fence-types have varying impacts on our experiences of our 

environments, thereby exemplifying and iteratively adjusting our environmental imaginaries. 

Technology, in general, is not a specific focus of this dissertation. However, I argue that 

recognizing how different communities relate to their technologies is critical to understanding 

their environmental imaginaries and, by corollary, the obstacles and opportunities they provide 

for collaboration. 

As the scientific institution is heavily relied upon for environmental governance, chapter 

five evaluates the experience of science and the concomitant imaginaries that guide its pursuits, 

focusing specifically on those elements that conflict with the imaginaries of other western 

communities. Briefly, the experience of measuring and grouping, both experienced against the 

background of perceived realism, constitute a social imaginary of the scientific institution that 

critically diverges from social imaginaries of many western communities and poses substantial 

obstacles to collaboration. By tracing these elements through the scientific imaginary, I argue 

 

14 

that we can better understand how divergent environmental imaginaries are either aligned with 

and supported by science or antithetical to science. Collaboration, as a normative ideal, occurs 

across many imaginaries, and so it is critical that the conflicts arising from the scientific 

imaginary (per its dominance in environmental governance) are understood in order to better 

inform future collaboration. 

In chapter six I turn towards a worry briefly mentioned early in this dissertation, namely 

that although collaboration is lauded as a normative ideal, it is practically difficult and this is 

perhaps due to a lack of reflection on “collaboration” as a concept. If varying communities have 

varying imaginaries with which they understand their world, as I have argued, then its plausible 

that the meaning of “collaboration” is also varied across different communities. I argue that 

although current governance seeks to support western collaboration, it is only collaboration of a 

certain ilk that is promoted and that this runs contrary to the embodied collaboration – what I 

term co-laboration – that I argue for throughout this dissertation. I describe co-laboration in 

detail in chapter six, but what I mean to suggest is that co-laboration explicitly encourages and 

treats non-discursive experience alongside the discursive, employing our complete and varied 

selves to work and experience together in place. Therefore, and harkening back to the epigraph 

of this dissertation, embodied, place-based co-laboration as argued for here is a radical politic 

that allows the West to develop “a stronger sense of its own identity…outgrow its political 

infancy…[and] develop a genuinely western way of dealing with western issues” (Kemmis, 

2013). The chapter ends with a brief discussion on governance strategies that can help guide 

western co-laborers toward this radical co-laboration. 

This dissertation concludes as it began, with a reflection of my experiences in both the 

practice and the study of collaboration/co-laboration in the West. The metaphor of invasive plant 

 

15 

colonization is an apt metaphor for the broad lessons I’ve learned and those I wish to share. As I 

argue in chapter two, metaphors are powerful in collaboration and need to be better considered. 

It is my hope that this dissertation supports in detail those lessons that this metaphor can teach 

us. Imagining place-based environmental governance in the American West is, as I will argue, an 

exercise in democracy requiring radical co-laboration and the recognition of a multiplicity of 

American and Indigenous Wests.  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

16 

 

IMAGINATION 

 
 

…no two cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space. Space and time, 
like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct 
practical action. – Lewis Mumford (1955, 18), Technics and Civilization 
 

When we are asked to imagine, what are we being asked to do? Presumably, being asked 

“to imagine” is being asked to do something, which leads to the question of whether imagining is 

purely a conscious act and/or an act that happens outside of our conscious approval. Of course, it 

seems that I can consciously imagine – I might imagine a white bear at someone’s request, but I 

might also unconsciously imagine, as in imagining a white bear when someone asks me not to 

imagine a white bear (Wegner, 1987).2 Furthermore, when I fall backward into a chair do I not 

on some level imagine the chair behind me? Or the ground beneath me as I walk? Certainly, 

when asked, I can consciously imagine the chair behind me or the ground beneath me, but it also 

seems that many of my actions require me to unconsciously imagine those surroundings that are 

outside of direct perception. This sort of imagination is described as the virtual body, or the 

“imaginative dimension of embodied existence…the virtual body allows us to extend our 

habitual behavior beyond the actual situation to the limitless realm of the imaginary” (Steeves, 

2001, 276-277, commenting on Merleau Ponty’s initial formulation of the virtual body). 

This, of course, may be a controversial statement. The imagination is as familiar as it is 

puzzling, resisting agreed upon definition and consequence. In the words of Leslie Stevenson 

(2003), “to digest all that has been written on the extremely flexible notion of imagination would 

be a lifetime’s work” that I do not intend to concentrate on here. Just what the imagination is has 

                                                           
2 This phenomenon – the Ironic Process Theory – has been tested and validated in psychology (Boon et al., 2002; 
King & Council, 1998). 

 

17 

not been decided. In all likeliness it is as nebulous as P. F. Strawson suggests in his oft-cited 

introduction to Imagination and Perception (1974): 

the uses, and applications, of the terms ‘image’, ‘imagine’, ‘imagination’, ‘imaginative’, 
and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family 
seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty exactly to identify and list 
the family’s members, let alone establish their relationships of parenthood and 
cousinhood. (83) 
 
The imagination that resists agreement is an imagination that exists (in some form) at the 

level of the individual. To make matters even more complex, the concept of the social imaginary 

– introduced by Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) and later popularized by Charles Taylor (2004) – is 

now employed throughout the sociological literature to explain shared commitments across 

varying communities in a number of varying contexts (c.f. Jasanoff, 2015; Smith & Tidwell, 

2016). It is not readily apparent nor explicitly argued in the literature how the individual 

imagination and the social imaginary are related, if at all, yet one might think that they are 

related, even if only metaphorically or as distant linguistic family members. This ambiguous 

relationship renders the imagination, and its family of related terms, even more complex as it 

may be consequential across different communities and not relegated merely to the individual 

psyche.  

Although employing our imaginations in an analysis of environmental governance may 

be difficult in light of these ambiguities in both the individual and the social imagination, it does 

not mean that it is ineffectual. In this project, I do not intend to provide a definitive argument of 

just what the imagination is that would stand against others, instead I am providing a general 

tapestry of features that emerge from others’ discussion of the imagination. The features are, 

briefly, that the imagination is embodied inasmuch as it is a mental faculty, that it requires 

experience (not merely perception) as fundamental inputs, that it metaphorically extends (i.e. 

 

18 

extends by use of metaphor) patterns gleaned from our experience to other facets of our 

experience, that the social imaginary derives from common and constructed experiences and 

primarily consists of sets of non-discursive conceptual schemata used for concept interpretation, 

and that our conceptual tapestries are rooted in this experiential/imaginative/metaphorical 

extension structure.  

Overview 

The imagination, although nebulous, has not been ignored by philosophers. Edward D. 

Casey (1976) outlines three major paradigms of imagination in philosophy as the subordination 

of imagination to other mental faculties (c.f. Plato), the superordination of imagination to other 

faculties (c.f. Sartre), and the role that imagination plays in mediating between perception and 

reasoning (c.f. Hume, Kant; Casey 1976, 15-19). The three views have in common, according to 

Casey (1976), that the imagination is “denied a genuinely distinctive role of its own…[being] 

relegated to a secondary or tertiary status in which it merely subtends some supposedly superior 

cognitive agency such as intellect or…some presumably more original source such as sensation” 

(19). Casey’s own project seeks to distinguish imagination as a “unique” and “nonderivative” 

faculty that is not contingent on nor resides in a hierarchy of other mental faculties and 

sensations. Importantly, and critical to my own project, is the view that the imagination is, in any 

form, a mental faculty. Whether it is subordinated or superordinated to other faculties, mediating 

other processes, or a unique and nonderivative faculty of its own, it is still a faculty of the mind 

and must be explained in relation to its psychical characteristics. 

Our imaginations certainly do have psychical characteristics. When I imagine an apple, 

for instance, my experience of the imagined apple seems to be in my mind – it is not something I 

can touch, see, smell, or taste (although I can imagine touching, seeing, smelling, and tasting the 

 

19 

apple). Better understanding the ways that our imaginations are able to internally represent a 

variety of experiences, the reality of those internal representations, and the relationship of these 

imaginings to both our physical realities and our other mental faculties is certainly a worthwhile 

project and has long dominated philosophical discourse of the imagination.  

The imagination, as it is generally conceived in philosophical discourse, is perhaps best 

articulated by Eva T. H. Brann in her comprehensive review of imagination, The World of the 

Imagination: Sum and Substance (1993) as “a faculty for internal representations; these 

representations are image-like; therefore they share a certain character with external images; in 

particular, like material images, they represent absent objects as present; they do so by means of 

resemblance” (5). Although much work has been directed at each component of this definition 

(Gregory, 2016; Kind, 2001; Nanay, 2010; Thomas, 1999), I limit this discussion to only a few 

key characteristics of this conception. First, regardless of the ontology of the imagined object 

(e.g. the imagined apple), I assume that the imagined object can be distinguished in my 

imagination from other imagined objects such as an imagined banana. I do not intend to provide 

metaphysical support for this claim, asking only for the reader to grant that an imagined apple is, 

tautologically, an imagined apple (i.e. imagined-object) and not an imagined banana. Second, the 

imagined object shares a certain character with non-imagined objects. An imagined object that is 

red thus shares a certain character (red-ness) with external red objects. I do not mean to suggest 

that red-ness, here, is purely a physical state, only that the red-ness in the imagined object shares 

certain similarities to the red-ness in the non-imagined object. Third, in our imaginations we are 

able to mix and match these characteristics to form novel imagined objects such as mixing the 

characteristics of red-ness and banana-ness to form the imagined object of a red banana.  

 

20 

Thus, I minimally suggest that our imaginations are able to imaginatively represent our 

non-imaginative experiences (e.g. of red-ness or banana-ness) and mix and match these to 

develop novel imagined objects that present themselves to us as an imagined object. I do not 

mean to privilege visual modalities in suggesting that only visual experiences (such as that of 

seeing an apple) form imagined objects; these “imagined objects” are internalized experiences 

that can range from sensory experience (e.g. images, sounds, tastes, etc.) to embodied and/or 

sociocultural experiences (e.g. falling, flying, happiness, fear). It may be the case that an 

imagined object is developed from exactly one imaginative experience or it may be that the 

imagined object is the construction relying on an aggregation of many atomic imaginative 

experiences into an imaginatively organized and (relatively) cohesive whole. 3 For example, a 

person may imagine themselves as a tourist in an amusement park, complete with the imagined 

crowd, the excitement of riding the park rides, eating the park-specific food, and so on. The 

whole of the representation would construct an aggregated imagined object, just as imagining a 

solitary apple would construct a solitary imagined object.  

Although I do not wish to defend his account of the imagination here, David Hume’s 

argument for the development of complex ideas from simple ideas is helpfully analogous to what 

I am proposing. For Hume, novel imagined objects must be constructed from both current 

sensory perceptions and past imagined objects (themselves products of sensory perception), 

providing a constraint on the imagination ultimately limited by a person’s sensory perceptions.4 

                                                           
3 It also may be the case that a solitary imagined object is actually comprised of multiple imagined objects. For 
example, an imagined apple may be the aggregation of imagined-apple-color, imagined-apple-shape, imagined- 
apple-sound, etc. This is consistent with my conception of imagined object – it may just be that what we take to be 
the atomic unit can be further reduced to more fundamental units. 
4 I do not presume to ontologically conflate the use of “imagined objects” and Hume’s “ideas,” although they may 
be importantly (dis)similar or (dis)connected, Hume’s properties of ideas provide plausible analogous constraints 
on imagined objects. 

 

21 

Hume argues that we cannot develop ideas (i.e. elements of imagined objects, as I’ve 

conceptualized here) without first perceiving corresponding sensory impressions such that 

without ever seeing red, we could not develop the idea of red-ness. For Hume, ideas correspond 

to impressions and these impressions are prior and necessary to the formation of ideas: “…that 

the simple impressions always take the precedence of their correspondent ideas” (Hume, 2003; 

my italics). Hume’s account intends to motivate an empiricist attitude by virtue of impressions 

being narrowly understood as sensory perceptions and, indeed, our sensory perceptions do 

matter. However, and although our sensory perceptions do impact our experiences, I suggest that 

experience is something more than mere sensory perception – a point I return to later in this 

chapter. Thus, a landscape might be similarly perceived by two people, but this is not to say that 

it is also similarly experienced (Meinig, 1979).  

Simply, this means that ideas (my analog to imagined objects) require impressions. 

Experiences, broadly construed, represent Hume’s impressions. Imagined objects, as I’ve 

described them, represent Hume’s ideas. This implies that imagined objects (however produced) 

are only comprised of previously imagined things and new experiences, never created ex nihilo. 

The iteration of experience/imagination is thus limiting as our imaginations are limited to our 

experiences. Casey (1976) puts it succinctly as “what we take to be in the imagined object or 

event is only what we already, explicitly or implicitly, know about it. Imaginative experience is 

inherently circular in this regard, with the consequence that in imagining we cannot claim to 

confront anything radically new” (pp.7-8). Hume makes this explicit in An Enquiry Concerning 

Human Understanding, stating: 

Nothing is more free than the imagination of man, and though it cannot exceed the 
original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited 
power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas in all the varieties of 
fiction… (EHU, p. 39) 

 

22 

Thus, I assert, imagination as I’ve described can be understood as a faculty of internal 

representation and organization, providing the capacity to “mix, compound, separate, and divide” 

the elements of imagined objects and thus providing the possibility for novel imagined objects to 

develop. I do not offer a strong ontology of the imagination or the imagined object5, instead only 

briefly developing an understanding of the imagination and its products that can help illuminate 

the role of the imagination in place-based environmental governance.  

It is certainly a worthy project to better understand the internal-representation function of 

the imagination, but I leave that for others. Importantly, however, is that the account I’ve given is 

similar to the philosophical accounts outlined and supported by Casey (1976) and Brann (1993) 

insofar as they are purely activities of the mind. Although my experience of my own imagination 

seems to validate this insofar, at least, that my imagining seems to occur in my mind, there is 

reason to be suspicious of its purely psychical nature since it appears to be somehow constrained 

by our sensory, embodied, and sociocultural experiences. In describing the role of the 

imagination in pragmatic philosophies, Thomas M. Alexander (1990) argues that for the 

pragmatists (focusing specifically on works of Peirce, James, and Dewey), imagination is “a 

dynamic, ‘embodied’ view, beginning with the idea of living organic beings acting and learning 

in a world...[where] the ontological modalities of actuality and potentiality are integrated into the 

very idea of an ‘event’ or ‘situation’” (p. 325). In this view, the integration of the event-

actuality/potentiality falls to the imagination whereby the meaning of the “actual was 

reinterpreted and reconstructed in light of the possible” (p. 325). This suggests that the 

interactions the emplaced body has with their surroundings can be meaningful, in part, by 

                                                           
5 It is sufficient for the purposes of this essay that these imagined objects can be modified as described. I offer this 
account only as compelling evidence of the nature of the constructed imagined objects, not as a robust analysis of 
their constitutions. 

 

23 

accounting for the “[imagination] at work in our pre-conscious bodily organization of 

experience” (p. 346). Simply, this view argues that we are emplaced bodies whom interact with 

our local worlds in a variety of ways and, according to the pragmatists, our experiences of our 

worlds are simultaneously products of our imaginative faculties as well as serving to structure 

those same faculties. These experiences are meaningful in virtue of our imaginatively-structured 

interpretations of the experience, and the experience itself orients our imaginations towards 

future structuring-interpretations.  

The pragmatic imagination begins with the recognition that we act and learn in our 

worlds – we are embodied beings and the “events” and “situations” that we experience are 

structured by and simultaneously products of our imagination. What does it mean, however, to 

have an experience? As we are embodied beings, are we in continuous states of experience or do 

we have discrete experiences that vary in quality and influence? What is the difference, if any, 

between an active experience such that we are consciously experiencing and a passive 

experience such that we are subconsciously experiencing – or is this an artificial distinction? We 

commonly use the term “experience,” but it is not obvious as to exactly what we mean by 

suggesting that these experiences are a primary loci of our lives, especially as they are structured 

by and products of our imagination.  

Experience, in its general form, can be understood as to have some sort of interaction 

with the world as in I experienced the apple or I experienced the warm water. In these cases, 

experience is a generalized sensation such that it can be replaced by a more particular term as in I 

tasted the apple or I felt the warm water. In this sense, experience can be passive or intentional 

as much of what we experience (hear, see, feel, etc.) is non-intentionally experienced. We may 

choose to listen to the wind through the trees, but the intentionality of listening is not required to 

 

24 

experience (in this broad sense) the passive hearing of the wind through the trees. The 

passivity/intentionality of experience is well articulated by John Dewey (1934) in Art as 

Experience as: 

Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing 
conditions is involved in the very process of living. Under conditions of resistance and 
conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this 
interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. 
Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in 
such a way that they are composed into an experience. (p. 36, author’s italics) 
 
More difficult, though, are those internal experiences of memory, imagination, and other 

sorts of mental acts. Following from external experience generally being understood as an 

interaction with the world, we may see these internal experiences as interactions with the world 

by proxy. What I mean by this is that our interactions with the world are taken up into the 

imagination and, a la Hume, mixed, compounded, separated, and divided in our imaginations so 

as to be experienced again. What is being experienced again, however, is not the original 

interaction with the world, but instead the remembered or imagined interaction complete with 

whatever characteristics have changed whether by some fallibility in our memory, some novelty 

in our imagination, or some difference in who we are as the experiencer. Furthermore, although 

many of our internal experiences are intentional as they – by their intentional nature – are those 

that we recognize as an experience, we also experience passive internal experiences. These 

passive internal experiences are difficult to examine as it is prima facie plausible that we must 

intentionally reflect on them and that intentional reflection is, itself, its own experience. The 

sorts of internal experiences that we recognize as having an experience (e.g. grief at the memory 

of a lost loved one) have a force that passive internal experiences do not have. Akin to hearing 

the wind instead of listening to the wind, our passive internal experiences are relegated to the 

background, unrecognized as experience without intentional focus. And, if mind/body dualisms 

 

25 

are artificial, these internal experiences are not without external impetus (nor are external 

without internal impetus). The landscape of human experience thus ranges across the external 

and internal, the passive and the intentional. As Dewey suggests, our experience occurs 

continuously as we interact with our environing conditions and although some experiences are 

more powerful (i.e. having an experience), our inchoate experiences remain experiences.  

Philosophical treatments of experience qua experience are limited, generally being 

relegated to either phenomenological or epistemological accounts that seek to highlight the 

relations between body and world (an admittedly false distinction to many phenomenologists, 

c.f. Husserl, 1962; Landgrebe, 1973). Dewey’s account of experience, however, takes seriously 

that experience is simultaneously a primary feature of being a cognizing human (including our 

educative, aesthetic, and political engagements) while also recognizing that a human experience 

is not fully described by the attitude of the experiencer – the experience itself is the interaction of 

a person with their surroundings (Dewey’s situation) such that the experience is located as much 

as a quality of the person as it is a quality of their environment. Experience, here, can be seen to 

be a part of a person’s environment and not merely a person’s reaction to their environment. 

Experiencing, then, is a continuous phenomenon of the person’s existence where one moment’s 

experience is not isolated from prior experiences nor is it detached from their environment (as it 

is as much a feature of their environment as it is a feature of their humanity). Furthermore, our 

current experiences – influenced by our past experiences and our current environments – set the 

conditions for future experiences since, according to Dewey (1938), “the principle of continuity 

of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone 

before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after” (35; my italics).  

 

26 

The range of experience described here suggests that we are in a constant state of 

experience that vacillates between being externally and internally stimulated, presented to us as 

inchoate or forceful, and is always setting the conditions for future experiences. The continuity 

principle does not, however, immediately suggest a way to discern those experiences that matter 

and those that do not. What matters, perhaps, can be understood by the goals of the project. 

Dewey, for instance, highlights educative experiences that allow a person to have future 

experiences enabling them to intellectually and ethically grow, but this is because human 

education was one of many issues that mattered to Dewey. However, for these purposes, it is 

plausible that our imaginations make no such distinctions in organizing our experiences, save the 

possibility that our having an intentional and forceful experience can prioritize certain 

experiences over others. But even this prioritization must be considered against the possibility 

that the magnitude of inchoate experiences may help to balance the scales, simply seen as a 

consideration between quality and quantity. Future work would do well to describe the 

relationship between prioritizing quality and quantity of experiences, but it is sufficient for these 

purposes to recognize that every experience matters in some way (perhaps to smaller or larger 

degrees) as the basic inputs for our imaginative capacities.   

It is important to note the charges brought forth against Dewey of experiential givenism 

and foundationalism which Dewey – and myself – eschew. Shane J. Ralston (2013) explains the 

worry for pragmatists as “that by appealing to experience as the ultimate arbiter of epistemic 

claims, they are invoking experience as a primordial given, grounding knowledge on experiential 

foundations. Thus, their appeals to experience qua given are incompatible with their professed 

antifoundationalism” (p. 3). The worry here is that experience is being seen as a given, meaning 

that, according to John McDowell (2008), “one would be being given something for knowledge 

 

27 

without needing to have capacities that would be necessary for one to be able to get to know it” 

(p. 1). Non-inferential, non-propositional, and non-conceptual experience – the sort that 

permeates our lives – cannot itself be the foundation for our inferential, propositional, and 

conceptual epistemic claims without itself being somehow influenced by these same claims, or 

else it is just given. And it is not. As Ralston explains, a careful reading of Dewey shows that he 

was not making this foundational claim. Simply, experience “comes to us in full bloom as 

qualities initially felt or had in a ‘situation’ and later selected and determined as ‘objects in 

thought’ (Ralston, 2013, p. 4). Our felt or had experiences organize our reality in ways that allow 

us to recognize the objects of inquiry that are cognized propositionally, inferentially, and 

conceptually. In this project, I follow this perspective of experience – I do not intend to provide 

an experiential foundation for our epistemic claims, noting only that our experiences condition 

our epistemic claims through focusing our attention to certain phenomena (to be conceptualized) 

or conceptualizing certain phenomena in ways that align with our experiences and thereby 

iteratively validating our concepts with our experiences.   

The pragmatic account of imagination briefly described above recognizes the pivotal role 

of experience as the imagination works in our “pre-conscious bodily organization of experience” 

(Alexander 1990, p. 346). In other words, the imagination acts to organize our experiences – 

passive, intentional, external, and internal – to form “the ontological modalities of actuality and 

potentiality” (ibid, p. 325) that guide our future experiences. This role of the imagination in 

guiding our experiences of the world is perhaps best detailed by Mark Johnson in The Body in 

the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987), where he offers a 

compelling empirical account of the imagination as dynamically embroiled in both our embodied 

experiences and our mental constructs – an account that is decidedly pragmatic by focusing on 

 

28 

the amalgamation of our embodied experiences and our reasoning capabilities thereby dispensing 

with the mind/body dualisms promulgated throughout the philosophical literature. Briefly, 

Johnson’s argument is that our imagination constructs “a complex web of nonpropositional 

schematic structures that emerge from our bodily experiences” (p. 5) that are then metaphorically 

extended into other domains of our worlds. This metaphorical extension, as described in the 

following section, inscribes meaning into our worlds and this meaning, in turn, is the essence of 

our reasoning capacities. In the opening lines of the preface to The Body in the Mind, Johnson 

explicitly describes the fundamental and central role of imagination in our lives, warning that 

“[w]ithout imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful. Without imagination, we 

could never make sense of our experience. Without imagination, we could never reason toward 

knowledge of reality” (p. ix).  

As stated, Johnson argues that the meaning we attribute to our worlds is imaginatively 

derived from our embodied and sociocultural experiences and metaphorically extended through 

our conceptual systems. These conceptual systems, themselves, are not founded on an 

experiential given – they are merely conditioned by it. This metaphorical extension is essential to 

this account and, as I will argue in chapter three, is critical to the evaluation of environmental 

governance in light of our imaginations. Therefore, we need a better account of metaphorical 

extension than I have thus far provided.  

Metaphor 

When we say that we are swimming in a sea of knowledge, what do we mean? Surely we do not 

mean that we are literally swimming or that there is a liquid sea of knowledge. It should be 

obvious that whatever we mean, we intend to communicate by way of metaphor. We do not have 

to be literally swimming to communicate that what we are doing is hard work, without solid 

 

29 

grounding, or perhaps without an express goal. Similarly, there also does not need to be a liquid 

sea of knowledge to communicate that it is vast, deep, and beyond any single person’s grasp. The 

metaphor is used to communicate structural similarities between our understanding of the object 

in question – here the depth/breadth of knowledge – and a more familiar object/action that 

highlights the relevant aspects of our assertion. This suggest that the metaphor is describing one 

concept (knowledge) in terms of our experience of another concept (the sea).  

This may seem innocuous, but it is suggestive. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) argue that our 

conceptual architectures consist of structured metaphors grounded in the ways beings-as-we-are 

experience the world. For example, the statement “my knowledge keeps increasing” is founded 

on the structuring metaphor that “more is up,” rooted in the physical fact that as more things get 

added to a pile, the level of the things goes up (p. 463). Our imaginations, in this case, derive the 

pattern that “more is up” from our experience of piles rising as more is added to them and this 

pattern (or, as Johnson (1987) describes it, this schemata) is then extended to our concept of 

learning – specifically, that the more I learn (knowledge), the higher it gets (increasing). 

Similarly, the scientific concept of “high-energy particles” is another extension of the metaphor 

“more is up” – a metaphor condition by our embodied experiences, yet a metaphor all the same 

(p. 465).  

The metaphor of “more is up” is rooted, according to Lakoff and Johnson, in our 

embodied experience. However, our experiences are not always recognizable purely as a 

function of our embodiment. Take, for example, Lakoff and Johnson’s example of the statement 

“I rose above my emotions.” This statement is founded on the culturally rooted structuring 

metaphor that “rational is up,” alluding to the view that human’s rationality places them over the 

natural world (ibid, p. 16-17). Although it may be sufficient that the structuring metaphor is 

 

30 

culturally rooted, it is of course possible that the prolific experience of human bipedalism in 

conjunction with a presumed uniqueness of human rationality provides the foundation for the 

cultural metaphor (humans are up and humans are rational, therefore “up is rational”) (Gregorić, 

2005). Importantly, this suggests that although there may be (and should be, if the above authors 

are correct) embodied experiences guiding our concepts, these concepts are historically 

structured and enacted to produce the sociocultural conditions structuring our current 

experiences. As Meryl Altman (1990) reminds us, “to recognize the pervasiveness of metaphor is 

not, alas, to be magically placed outside its potential for doing political damage” (p. 500). This 

suggests two critical points: First, although “up is rational” certainly conditions many people’s 

conceptual schemas, we should be careful that our projects view it as descriptive and not 

prescriptive and, second, that sociocultural experiences can construct conceptual schemas 

inasmuch as embodied experiences. This point should not be understated – dominant social 

institutions both reflect the experiences (and, by extension, conceptual schemata) of those 

communities that have the power to influence the institution while also conditioning the 

experience of those who interact with the institutions.  

The claim made by Lakoff and Johnson is not that metaphor plays a passing role in 

structuring our conceptual architecture, but that it is an essential component. Illustrating the 

fundamental role of metaphor in structuring our concepts is Michael J. Reddy’s (1984) The 

Conduit Metaphor. Reddy argues that the range of metaphors we use to speak about the English 

language structures a concept of language that impacts our behaviors in the world. Examples of 

this are the metaphors “I gave away all my best ideas,” “insert that thought elsewhere in the 

sentence,” and “the poem is bursting with meaning.” Metaphors such as these imply that “human 

language functions like a conduit enabling the transfer of repertoire members from one 

 

31 

individual to another” (p. 311). On this view of language, words, sentences, paragraphs, and the 

like are viewed as holding meaning in and of themselves with communication consisting of 

perfectly transferring words to willing listeners/receivers. Furthermore, the metaphors we use to 

speak about language – namely those that view it as a conduit of meaning – structure what we 

conceive of as language. As Reddy notes, this view has structured communication theory from 

the outset, implying that communication can occur in a process of perfect encoding and decoding 

of symbols (e.g. Shannon & Weaver 1951; as cited by Reddy). On this concept of language, the 

meaning of a book is self-evident as it is contained within the words on the pages. Competing 

language-concepts, such as Reddy’s Toolmakers Paradigm, take seriously that meaning in 

language must be interpreted by a receiver familiar with the symbols, culture, and context of the 

utterance.  

Not only does this illustrate the metaphorical foundations of something as familiar to us 

as language, but it also – to the point of this dissertation – prompts us to reflect on our own 

discursive and non-discursive commitments. If a participant in a collaboration conceives of their 

linguistic acts as operating through a conduit (i.e., the meaning of their words being contained in 

the words themselves), then it will be difficult to communicate their meaning across varying 

conceptual schemas that have imaginatively derived divergent concepts (based off diverse 

participant’s unique embodied and sociocultural experiences) without explicit recognition of the 

diverging language-concept and the non-discursive experience it is founded upon. In this case, 

one concept – the conduit-language – can arrest or distort the expression of a different concept. If 

the meaning of “language” (on a conduit interpretation) is contained within the word-concept 

“language” then diverging experientially derived concepts of language such as those that instead 

find meaning in the contextual interpretation of the word-concept may face interpretative 

 

32 

difficulty as they are rendered either incommensurable, untranslatable or, minimally, confused. 

What this specific difficulty looks like, however, is not decided and has been considered 

elsewhere (c.f. Holbrook, 2013). 

Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully defend the metaphorical structure 

of our concepts, it is worth recognizing that the role of metaphors has been substantially 

conceptualized and empirically validated since Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work (e.g. Gibbs et 

al., 2004; Glucksberg, 2008; Pecher et al., 2011; Richardson et al., 2003) as well as providing 

empirical evidence of Dewey’s non-given, non-foundational experience (Ralston, 2013). 

Gregory A. Cajete (2004) describes “the metaphoric mind” that we employ to “describe, 

imagine, and create [the world] in which we constantly participate” (p. 50) as the foundation of 

Indigenous science and, ultimately, the foundation of the stories we tell about our worlds and the 

meaning we attach to these stories. In the introduction to the latest edition of The Cambridge 

Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (2008), Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. asserts that “Metaphor is 

not simply an ornamental aspect of language, but a fundamental scheme by which people 

conceptualize the world and their own activities” (Gibbs 2008, p. 3). These studies have 

provided a wealth of evidence to suggest that the concepts we use are themselves metaphorical in 

nature. If we use metaphor to fundamentally construct our conceptual architecture as Lakoff and 

Johnson and others have argued, then we have reason to believe that our concepts – now seen as 

intricate systems of metaphor – are instrumental in constructing a conceptual apparatus that is 

fundamentally constrained by our social and embodied experiences in the world. Put a different 

way, our concepts are dependent on us as beings-as-we-are and on our sociocultural and 

embodied experiences.  

 

 

33 

Social Imaginaries 

Thus far, I’ve argued that our imaginations are critical to our meaning-making practices 

as they guide the concepts that we then use to understand and navigate our worlds. Our 

imaginations, in Hume’s words, “[have] unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, 

and dividing” the imagined-objects we develop from our sensory, embodied, and sociocultural 

experiences; however, they are limited by the very finite-ness of our experiences. They can only 

work with what they are given, and they are given only what we as individuals experience. 

Therefore, our conceptual systems, following from Johnson and Lakoff’s work, are limited by 

our individual and finite experience. However, this raises a problem: Surely we are able to share 

concepts with each other, regardless of them being constructed from the individual’s imagination 

and, by corollary, their individual experience. If we cannot directly experience another person’s 

experience, how are we able to construct similar (or, perhaps, the same) concepts?  

As similarly sociocultural and embodied people have a variety of similar experiences in 

similar places, their imaginative structures become more aligned and these are “what is shared 

when we understand one another and are able to communicate within a community” (Johnson, 

1987, p. 172).6 It is perhaps controversial, but I take these common imaginative schemas to be 

constitutive of what is commonly termed the social imaginary. The social imaginary, as 

described by Claudia Strauss (2006), was first introduced by the French philosopher, Cornelius 

Castoriadis, and later developed by the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. Castoriadis (1997) 

recognized the social imaginary as rooted in the “radical imaginary” of the individual (pp. 127, 

                                                           
6 Similar, here, relies not only on similar material worlds and thus similar embodied experiences, but also on similar 
experiential stances. By this, I mean that we should expect similar experiencers with similar embodiments 
experiencing similar material surroundings to develop similar imaginative structures. This suggests that two 
sufficiently dissimilar experiencers can develop divergent imaginative structures from similar material 
surroundings. 

 

34 

142). The social imaginary, however, is not reducible to the individual – it reflectively structures 

the meanings taken up by the radical imagination (thus reinforcing the social imaginary) and 

social institutions (Castoriadis,1997, p. 128; Dews 2002, p. 518). Whereas Castoriadis saw the 

social imaginary as singular in a culture, Taylor (2004) recognizes a plurality of imaginaries. 

These imaginaries were “cultural models, which are similarly shared, implicit schemas of 

interpretation,” diverging and converging across diverse communities (Strauss, 2006, p. 329; see 

also Jasanoff, 2015; Smith & Tidwell, 2016). Here, I defend Taylor’s plurality of social 

imaginaries as products of similarly-oriented interpretive groups, deriving from a community’s 

aggregated experiences while also structuring future experiences and meaning-making of the 

community. Again, it should be noted that those communities in asymmetrical positions of 

power have the ability to shape other communities’ imaginaries through developing social 

institutions, norms, and material worlds (stemming from their own imaginaries) that can curate 

the experience of marginalized imaginaries. Thus, which experiences are aggregated must be 

evaluated with careful attention paid to the ways in which asymmetrical power relations curate 

experience. 

It should be noted that, as Claudia Strauss argues, just what the social imaginary is has 

not been settled in the literature. I do not attempt to provide clarity to this on-going literature, 

instead using the term merely to represent the aggregate imaginative schemas of communities – 

if a personal imaginary is the interpretative schemata developed from a person’s 

experience/imagination/metaphorical extension process, then the social imaginary (as I use it) is 

the interpretative schemata shared between multiple persons. This can be shared accidentally as 

people from different places/times may develop similar imaginaries, or it can be shared more 

intentionally through the structuring of experience in any given community. My terminology 

 

35 

should not be seen as either supporting or indicting similar literatures – although, as seen in 

Strauss’s work, there may be some important similarities. 

Although there may be many ways for a social imaginary to emerge, I wish to focus on 

two that will help to illuminate the role of the imagination in environmental governance. I label 

these two common experience and constructed experience. Simply, common experiences are 

those in which multiple persons with similar experiential stances (i.e., they are disposed to 

experience similarly) are present for the same phenomenon whereas constructed experiences are 

those where one person’s experience is used to structure another person’s experience. For 

instance, it is plausible that if two siblings raised in the same home find a frog and it is the first 

frog they’ve ever experienced, then their concept of a frog will be importantly similar as their 

experience of the frog is importantly similar. This is an oversimplified illustration of a common 

experience. These experiences will, of course, be made much more complex when two people 

from varying backgrounds see the same frog as they are bringing to bear different past 

experiences to their experience of a frog. However, as these people have more similar 

experiences of frogs, for instance, it is plausible (but not necessary) that they develop similar 

conceptions of frogs. Of course, they may never share a conception (c.f., W. V. Quine’s gavagai 

thought experiment), but through extended and iterative mutual experience we can expect that 

the shared-ness will approach convergence. Extending this example, if a community whose 

individuals have long experienced frogs and these frogs are prevalent in their children’s stories, 

children who never had an experience with a frog will develop a concept of “frog” based on their 

experiences with the descriptions of frogs. This is an oversimplified illustration of a constructed 

experience. The experiences of others before them have structured their experience of frogs, 

thereby influencing their conceptions of frogs.  

 

36 

I do not mean for the previous example to definitively illustrate the common and 

constructed experiences that develop and guide our social imaginaries. They are, however, 

suggestive in that they provide a plausible bridge between the individual imaginary and the 

social imaginary and, in turn, between individual and shared interpretation of concepts. As 

communities experience their local situations in common, they both construct similar conceptual 

systems while also structuring their future experiences through the institutionalization and 

normalization of their conceptual systems. As well, discursive experiences – such as the frog 

stories – are experiences, nonetheless, so as communities develop discursive practices they are 

able to share their imaginaries through them. In either case, social imaginaries emerge as the 

unique and “similarly shared, implicit schemas of interpretation” with which diverse 

communities understand their worlds.  

The frog-example is misleading in that it focuses narrowly on the particular experience of 

a frog and not the broader schemata developed by the experience of frogs-in-their-environments. 

As argued, these schemata are imaginatively configured as metaphors that are extended to other 

facets of life that may not explicitly relate to the specific experiences that led to the development 

of the schemata. The aforementioned metaphors of “more is up” and “rational is up” have 

plausible foundations in human experience, but I suggest that in the case of the social imaginary 

it is not the particular experience which matters as much as the schemata that is derived from the 

experience. By this, I mean that it is not my personal experience of being bipedal and supposedly 

being rational that operates on the social imaginary, but the shared “schema of interpretation” 

that allows me to conceptualize my rationality as being up. The social imaginary, derived from 

common and constructed experiences and proliferated by extension into other aspects of the 

community’s interpretative schemata, is implicit in all of that community’s shared conceptions. 

 

37 

But, following from Castoriadis, it is “not reducible to the individual [i.e. individual radical 

imagination]”. Thus, I contend, the social imaginary does not consist of a group of concepts per 

se (as I’ve used the term here), but as a group of metaphorically extended schemata that structure 

those concepts that we use to understand our worlds. The next section presents two examples of 

the social imaginary structuring our concepts in order to show both how I conceive of the social 

imaginary and how I intend to apply it as an evaluative tool. 

Time and Sweetgrass 

As I’ve described it, the world constrains and conditions our experiences in ways that 

ultimately shape our conceptual architecture. Given that each person who has ever lived has a 

necessarily distinct set of experiences and that, in general, human groups have developed 

together (and thereby, developed shared social imaginaries), we should not be surprised that the 

diversity of human cultures has developed a plethora of conceptual systems, at times converging 

and at times diverging. Take, for instance, Lewis Mumford’s (1955) recognition that a 

fundamental shift in the conception of time occurred at the proliferation of mechanical clocks. 

The clock, according to Mumford, “helped create the belief in an independent world of 

mathematically measurable sequences; the special world of science” and yet “there is relatively 

little foundation for this belief in common human experience” (p.15). As a method of measuring 

discrete sequences, the clock structures human experiences in ways that were not previously 

afforded. Many of our modern routines are ordered by the clock instead of other qualitative 

measures, such as daily weather patterns or annual seasonal changes. The ways in which the 

clock serves to structure our conceptual systems are telling, as Mumford observes, since “the 

categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change…[when] the application of 

 

38 

quantitative methods of thought …had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time” 

(12).  

However, this is not the only way to conceive time. Donald Lee Fixico’s (2013) The 

American Indian Mind in a Linear World details the ways in which Indigenous customs, 

interactions, knowledges, and metaphysics challenge the linearity of euro-colonial thought as 

described in the relation of time to oral storytelling relations: 

Time as a part of the story…becomes less relevant as the story continues to be told. Time 
becomes less important as the characters come to life and relive the experience. The 
storyteller breathes life into the story by describing the characters involved and vividly 
describing the event. The past becomes the present and when common patterns are a part 
of the experience told about, they are lessons for the future. ‘When’ something happened 
is not so important as “why” and “how” something happened. (p. 25) 
 
Many Indigenous traditions do not conceive of time as a linear, past-present-future 

progression, instead being understood as a cyclical force where the “past becomes a part of the 

present, and the past and present is projected into the future…past, present, and future…are a 

part of the American Indian circular understanding of a time continuum” (ibid, p. 27). 

Conceiving of time as cyclical rather than linear is well described in the literature, stemming 

from the experiences of the natural occurring cycles such as birth and death, the annual seasons, 

and celestial rotations (c.f., Little Bear, 2000; Maryboy et al., 2020; Pinxten, 1995; Pritchard, 

2002). As with the linear tracking of time being experienced through mechanical device, 

schedule prioritizing social commitments, and future-oriented ideologies, cyclical time is 

experienced through natural repeating cycles, event prioritizing commitments, and both past and 

future ideologies. The two conceptual systems are distinct and, to the point of this project, will 

certainly make different questions tenable: how we conceive of time, following from how we 

experience time, structures our methodology by influencing the questions we ask and how we 

ask them, to the ways we measure the phenomenon and what counts as justified results.  

 

39 

There are, of course, many metaphorical schemas (e.g., social imaginaries) that condition 

these divergent conceptions of time. Mechanization, for instance, is extended from “nature as 

machine” schemas, themselves derived in part from reductionist explanations of natural 

phenomena. Regardless of the other imaginaries conditioning divergent conceptions of time, the 

example of time highlights distinct experiences that prompted different communities to 

recognize the metaphors of “time is linear” and “time is cyclical” in their respective social 

imaginaries. Although not using the language of “social imaginary,” Mumford recognized that 

the social imaginary of “time is linear” permeates the social fabric of the communities who hold 

it, declaring that “during the first seven centuries of the [timekeeping device’s] existence the 

categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect of life was left 

untouched by this transformation” (p. 12). Mumford traces the development of linear 

timekeeping technologies from the rise of quantitative measurements of nature as a “belief in an 

independent world of mathematically measurable sequences” (p. 15), to the imposition of habit 

and order on Benedictine monasteries. He argues that this habit and order gave rise to the 

“regularity [of] the life of the workman and merchant” (p. 14) seen as broadly necessary for 

capitalistic systems as well as more mundane systems, such as the world of human dress as the 

newly measured “year” led the fashion industry to change their styles every year rather than over 

generational shifts. Here, the ways that the technological clock structures the imagined social 

future (fashion, etc.) is described by Sheila Jasanoff as the sociotechnical imaginary or, the 

“collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment 

of…scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 120). Although I use 

“social” in the social imaginary as signifying that the imaginary is shared socially, it is related to 

the sense that, akin to Jasanoff & Kim, it serves to structure imagined forms of social life 

 

40 

reflected in the design and fulfillment of social projects (i.e., how constructed experience 

promulgates the social imaginary).  

The social imaginary that interprets time as being linear prompted conceptual systems 

that conceive of the universe as measurable discrete units that could help to bring quantitative 

order and regularity to human society. Those who operate under the “time is linear” imaginary 

structure their activities in accordance with it and, as societies evolve, this imaginary becomes 

institutionalized in our social systems in ways that serve to structure new experiences. Our 

personal imaginations develop patterns from these experiences that recognize time as linear, and 

thus (through constructed experience as described above), we develop similar imaginaries of 

time as linear. This suggests that to understand fundamental differences in how diverging 

communities understand their worlds, we need to account for the imaginaries that condition our 

practices, ranging from broad institutions such as capitalism to narrow technologies such as 

watches. 

Perhaps a more concrete example of diverging imaginaries is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 

(2013) Braiding Sweetgrass and her account of a study on the relationship between harvest 

methods and sweetgrass proliferation. Indigenous teachings of sweetgrass harvest prescribe, 

among other things, that “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we 

ignore it, it will go away” (p. 157, as quoted by Kimmerer), prompting Kimmerer’s graduate 

student to design a project that tested two competing ways that Indigenous peoples harvested 

sweetgrass and their impacts on its proliferation. When the graduate student proposed the 

project, one of their scientifically-trained committee members dismissively responded “I don’t 

see anything new here for science…There’s not even a theoretical framework,” to which 

Kimmerer responds that “[o]ur research was most definitely grounded in theory…in the 

 

41 

traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples: If we use a plant respectfully, it will 

flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away” (p.159). The relevance of this exchange to social 

imaginaries may not be obvious. 

For clarity, let’s ask ourselves “What is the object that is central to the research?” The 

most immediate answer is “sweetgrass” since the study is, fundamentally, a study of sweetgrass. 

From the western scientist’s perspective, this is clear – the plant is itself central and articulated 

within its ecosystem in interesting ways; the project is, to some extent, a project of understanding 

the nature of these articulations. On this view, the sweetgrass exists independent of the observer 

and it is up to the clever researcher to discover the mechanisms that provide for its proliferation. 

However, as I’ve argued, we must be careful – we must pay attention to how the concept of the 

plant is structured by our imaginaries. The concept of “sweetgrass” used in a western science 

schema cast the plant as a thing independent from us and, not coincidentally, casts its flourishing 

as independent of us. The committee member’s reaction was meaningful as it specifically 

references the conceptual framework that motivated their judgment about the project. In 

responding “…There’s not even a theoretical framework,” the committee member is, in essence, 

saying that within the conceptual schema of western science, the proposed research is not the sort 

which poses a legitimate question since, as Kimmerer recalls, “Anyone knows that harvesting a 

plant will damage the population” (p.150, as quoted and italicized by Kimmerer).  

Here, the committee member is evidencing their imaginary by suggesting that the concept 

of sweetgrass is independent from the researcher and, through a process of metaphors about the 

kinds of behaviors we should expect from things when we are involved in their existence versus 

those we can expect when we are merely observers to their existence, the sweetgrass is obviously 

going to be damaged with human intervention. The concept of sweetgrass implicit in this 

 

42 

statement renders the research question illegitimate since we know the answer. The researcher 

trained in western science has constructed their conceptual system in an institution that presumes 

the independent nature of these concepts, leading to discovery-metaphors such as “I’ve come 

upon a new theory,” “I’ve uncovered the mechanism behind the phenomenon,” or “I’ve revealed 

the underlying assumptions.” We “explore” new scientific domains and “unearth” surprising 

findings, “locating” them in the conceptual system that structured their own location. The social 

imaginary conditioning this concept of sweetgrass is “nature is an object,” prompting 

development of institutions that treat nature as such while subsequently conditioning some 

people’s experiences to recognize nature as such. This language is iteratively reflecting the 

experientially constructed imaginaries while also conditioning future experiences and actions 

that can adjust or reinforce those imaginaries. 

Conversely, Kimmerer’s concept of sweetgrass is distinct from the one detailed above. 

The sweetgrass “beckons” with its sweet vanilla fragrance, it “wants to be found,” we must “ask 

first” before harvesting it, and “[i]t’s the grass that will teach you” (pp. 156-158). Kimmerer’s 

description of sweetgrass is described with metaphors that understand our world as having 

agency and relationships with human communities. The sweetgrass that foregrounds Kimmerer’s 

graduate student’s thesis is allowed within the conceptual system of “If we use a plant 

respectfully, it will flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.” This is extended from the social 

imaginary of “nature is agent,” where one recognizes the sweetgrass as beckoning, wanting, 

teaching, and able to give consent. The scientist’s and Kimmerer’s concepts are distinct and both 

are legitimate within their own conceptual systems. They both posit a concept of sweetgrass but 

the concept employed is differentiated along the social imaginary it is developed within.  

 

43 

We use concepts to structure our epistemic projects and these concepts are imaginatively 

rooted in our embodied and social experiences. A contemporary plant biologist trained 

exclusively in western science may have social experiences that are best characterized with 

discovery-metaphors, developing a concept that allows certain questions to be asked, certain 

methods that can reliably produce the right type of information to answer the questions, and 

answers to the questions that are conceptually aligned with the defining concept. An Indigenous 

plant biologist trained exclusively in their community’s traditional knowledge may have social 

experiences that are best characterized with agency-metaphors, developing a concept that allows 

certain other methodologies that are conceptually aligned with the original concept. These 

diverging concepts, in the view developed here, are intelligible through diverging social 

imaginaries that are developed from our embodied and sociocultural experiences and shared 

through our common and constructed experiences.   

Conclusion 

It is not my intention to outline an exhaustive account of either the individual or the 

social imagination. I do intend, however, to motivate the view that our imaginations play a 

critical role in developing our conceptual systems from our metaphorically extended experiences. 

Our experiences are finite and negotiated through a complex series of institutionalized 

imaginaries that structure our understanding of our worlds which often diverge from other 

conceptual schemas structured by other social imaginaries. Before turning toward the application 

of this view of the imagination to environmental governance, it is worth highlighting the key 

features of this discussion.  

•  Feature 1: The imagination is an embodied faculty inasmuch as it is a mental faculty. It is 

structured by our performance in the world while it simultaneously structures that 

 

44 

performance. In this discussion, many of my descriptions have used language that suggest 

it is fundamentally a mental faculty that only uses embodied inputs. This is as much due 

to my own deep-seated imaginaries that have developed in modern institutions 

propagating mind/body dualisms as it is an impoverishment of my language to articulate 

the integrated nature of the imagination.  

•  Feature 2: The imagination is integrally tied with our experiences which serve to provide 

the fundamental units of the imaginary. It can “mix, compound, separate, and divide” 

these experiences to form novel imaginaries, yet it is still constrained by our experiences. 

•  Feature 3: The imagination metaphorically extends patterns gleaned from our experiences 

to other facets of our experience. Thus, metaphors from one aspect of our experience can 

be influential in recognizing the meaning of other, otherwise unrelated, aspects of our 

experience. 

•  Feature 4: Through common and constructed experiences, social imaginaries are 

developed that structure the sometimes diverging and sometimes converging conceptual 

architecture within which diverse communities interpret their worlds and structure their 

actions. 

•  Feature 5: Social imaginaries primarily consist of sets of metaphors rather than sets of 

particular concepts. For example, a social imaginary may recognize the metaphor that 

“nature is an agent” prompting the individual to understand the concept of sweetgrass as 

having agency, but the imaginary does not itself contain the particular concept of 

sweetgrass. 

 

45 

•  Feature 6: Our conceptual architecture (both that which is held individually and that 

which is shared socially) is rooted in this embodied/imagination/metaphorical extension 

process.  

Lastly, I must recognize that in this discussion I am seeking to conceptualize the 

imagination through my own interpretive structures (i.e., Feature 6). I would be remiss to not 

recognize that if my conceptualization is persuasive, then it is also just one conceptualization of 

the imagination structured by my own imaginaries. I am, literally, imagining the concept of 

imagination and this may seem at the outset a project that promises to fail. Therefore, I offer this 

conception only as a possibility and it will be up to my reader whether or not they are motivated 

by this possibility after I attempt to defend it in the following chapters. We should also 

remember that if we are initially suspect of the embodied nature of the imagination – a critical 

feature of my argument – then we may be operating from a social imaginary that only structures 

the concept as such. This recognition should, minimally, leave open the possibility of competing 

yet intelligible conceptions of the imagination.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46 

 

ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION AND IMAGINARIES 

 
 

If, as environmental philosophers contend, western metaphysics and ethics need revision 
before we can address today’s environmental problems, then environmental crisis 
involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better 
ways of imaging nature and humanity’s relation to. – Lawrence Buell (1995, 2), The 
Environmental Imagination 
 
 
As embodied beings, humans necessarily experience our local environments. I explicitly 

recognize – and do not wish to diminish – that the term “environment” is not relegated only to 

those spaces often described as natural or consisting of non-human life and its requisite 

ecosystems (c.f. Warde et al., 2018).7 However, both environmental philosophy and 

environmental governance disciplines have taken up as a subject this narrow understanding of 

the environment. Following from the previous chapter, though, our conceptions of the 

“environment” are built from both our direct experiences of our natural environments and by 

metaphorically extending imaginatively derived schemas from other non-

(natural)environmental8 experiences. Therefore, to understand how different communities assign 

meaning to their respective natural environments, we must recognize both the direct experiences 

that each community has with their natural environments as well as those experiences of their 

non-natural environments that are metaphorically projected onto the natural environment. In this 

chapter, I argue that the built and natural environments different Western communities have 

developed within has constructed divergent environmental imaginaries that confuse the meaning 

                                                           
7 I recognize that the term “natural” can be misleading. For the purposes of this dissertation, I use it colloquially to 
distinguish between environments that are constructed by humans versus those that are not, e.g. cities versus 
forests, roads versus valleys, buildings versus mountains. I am sympathetic to the view that no such distinction 
exists on this colloquial definition of “natural” rendering either everything as natural or nothing as natural, but that 
is not important for this project.  
8 My use of the parenthetical (natural) denotes the subset of the environment that is conceived as the natural 
environment. 

 

47 

of the thing we are seeking to govern, namely the environment. Put another way, the 

environment that we seek to govern does not emerge from a universal environmental imaginary 

but instead from a multitude of divergent imaginaries that each understand the concept of the 

environment in fundamentally distinct ways.  

Important here is an analytical distinction between the related terms of “environmental 

imagination” and an “environmental imaginary.” The imagination, as I’ve described it, is a 

robust embodied and mental faculty that organizes and extends our experiences in ways that 

allow us to ascribe meaning to our worlds. The environmental imagination, as it is commonly 

used, does not reference this broad faculty but instead references the specific ways that we 

imagine our environments (analogous to colloquial usage of the term “imagination”). By this, I 

mean that to ask what the environmental imagination is, is to look for the imagined object that a 

specified person or community imagines as the environment or, put another way, to ask about the 

output of the imaginative process. It is not to ask about the faculty (i.e., process) for imagining 

the environment nor is it to ask about the metaphorical extensions prompting a specific 

environmental imagination. The environmental imagination, as it is commonly used, is the 

imagined-(environmental)object produced by the imagination, not a type of imagination that is 

specifically environmental.  

For example, D. W. Meinig’s (1979) oft-cited essay, The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of 

the Same Scene, illustrates common ways to imagine the environment including imagining our 

environment as habitat, artifact, wealth, history, et al. But to imagine our environment as wealth, 

for example, is not to say anything about how the imagination constructed the environment as 

wealth nor how this construction of environment-as-wealth enables or hinders our ability to 

imagine it as something-other-than-wealth. In other words, the imagination in the environmental 

 

48 

imagination is not specifically environmental. It is telling that Lawrence Buell’s (1995) The 

Environmental Imagination, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, does not index the 

“imagination” nor does he make clear what he means by environmental imagination aside from 

the quote cited here. The environmental imagination as used by Meinig, Buell, and others (c.f. 

Brady, 1998; Brazeau, 2014; Meyer, 2009) can be otherwise viewed as the imagination (of any 

other ilk) oriented specifically towards the environment. 

The environmental imaginary, however, and as I use it, seeks to provide just what the 

environmental imagination does not. As discussed, imaginaries (in general) are “cultural models, 

which are similarly shared, implicit schemas of interpretation” (Strauss 2006, p. 329) that enable 

communities to share interpretations of their worlds. A specific imaginary, such as an 

environmental imaginary, is the “cultural model…[and] implicit schema of interpretation” that 

predominantly operates to interpret a narrow subject. Thus, an environmental imaginary is the 

imaginary that operates to interpret the environment. The environmental imagination, as depicted 

above, will be conditioned by the environmental imaginary, but will not be sufficient to describe 

it. Nate Gabriel (2014) defines urban environmental imaginaries in related terms as being 

“understood…as conceptual framings and systems of meaning related to urban environments, 

including assumptions about the nature of the city and the nature of nature” (p. 39). The 

imaginary acts as the structure within which the environmental imagination emerges. Given this 

discussion, I do not focus on the environmental imagination – the imagined 

(environmental)objects of diverging communities – instead focusing on the environmental 

imaginaries of those communities. These imaginaries set the conditions for a community to 

imagine their environments and subsequently provide considerable obstacles to environmental 

collaboration. Put another way, I focus not on the products of various environmental imaginaries 

 

49 

but instead on the constituents of those interpretative schemas being labeled as environmental 

imaginaries. 

Imaginaries, in general, are complex. An imaginary of the environment consists of 

metaphors extended from other aspects of our experience and this, in turn, suggests that these 

same metaphors construct other imaginaries operating to interpret other features of our world. 

Put simply, an environmental imaginary overlaps with other imaginaries. Much of the following 

discussion highlights the role that these other imaginaries play in forming our environmental 

imaginaries, such as our epistemological and ontological imaginaries as described below. I do 

not mean to suggest, however, that a focus on other imaginaries that are constitutive of our 

environmental imaginaries presumes that they hold primacy over the environmental imaginary. I 

articulate the environmental imaginary in light of these other imaginaries only for clarity and to 

highlight vital dimensions of our environmental imaginaries. 

Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of 

environmental imaginaries, there are four dominant themes in the literature that help to illustrate 

the prevailing imaginaries in the environmental governance of the American West. For 

simplicity, I label these four environmental imaginaries as the environment-is-machine, 

environment-is-community, environment-is-garden, and environment-is-family imaginaries. As 

discussed, metaphors are powerful in their role of structuring our conceptual structures from our 

experiences and these four metaphors provide a jumping-off point in describing varying 

relationships between humans and their environments. I do not presume that these imaginaries 

are exhaustive of the possible imaginaries nor are they mutually exclusive. In practice, it should 

not be surprising to encounter an imaginary that is not captured here or one that is an 

 

50 

amalgamation of two or more of these. In my experience, however, these represent many of the 

dominant dimensions of the environmental imaginaries in Western environmental governance.  

Critical to this project is the role of settler-colonialism in the production of environmental 

imaginaries, as it has conditioned the experiences of those it has and continues to benefit and 

those who both fell to and continue to survive its violence. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) 

remind us that “within settler colonialism, the most important concern is…land...[which] is 

remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the 

owner to his property” (p. 5). The settler colonial imaginary is thus marked, at a minimum, by 

interpreting the environment (i.e., the land) as a set of commodifiable objects to be bounded, 

collected, traded, and enjoyed by those who have some propertied relation to the land, rather than 

a living force that we must hold ourselves accountable to. The settler-colonial imaginary is 

pervasive throughout many western communities (recall the conflict arising over publicly owned 

lands and the rights that these owners have to use the land in line with their values and interests), 

although it is differentially manifested in the communities. Viewed in relation to the settler-

colonial imaginary, the environment-as-machine imaginary can be seen as the parent imaginary 

(that which came before) whereas the environment-is-community and environment-is-garden 

imaginaries are divergent evolutions of the settler-colonial imaginary.  

Divergent or not and without severe disruption (in whatever form it may take), these 

others are also settler-colonial imaginaries, albeit evolved and adapted to varying circumstance. 

However, the environment-is-family imaginary stands apart from the settler-colonial imaginary; 

in the evolution metaphor, it may be better understood as having a unique provenance wherein its 

genesis does not share a common ancestor. 

 

51 

These four imaginaries emerge from the interaction of two different dimensions of our 

relationships with our environments: Our ontological imaginaries as extended to the environment 

(e.g. whether humans are a part of or apart from our environment) and our epistemological 

imaginaries as extended to the environment (e.g. the ways in which we know of and about our 

environments).9 For example, the -machine and -garden imaginaries are related in their 

ontological extension in that they similarly operate (with vastly different consequences) on the 

presumption that human welfare is separate from environmental welfare. The -community and -

family imaginaries are similarly related (again with different consequences) in that they presume 

that human welfare is inseparable from environmental welfare. In contrast, the -machine and -

community imaginaries are related in their epistemological extension in that they rely on linear 

thinking that seeks the accurate measurement and prediction of environmental phenomenon. The 

-garden and -family imaginaries are related in that they recognize dynamic, non-linear thinking 

that takes seriously forms of knowledge that may be more difficult to measure and communicate 

(See Figure 2). 

                                                           
9 My use of “ontological imaginaries” and “epistemological imaginaries” is not meant to suggest either the 
ontological/epistemological dimensions of our imagination nor that our ontological/epistemological commitments 
are merely imagined in the colloquial sense (i.e. not real). What I do mean by these descriptions is the 
experience/imagination/metaphorical extension that conditions our ontological/epistemological commitments. 
Therefore, a description of the “ontological/epistemological imaginary” is a description of those imaginative 
factors that serve to construct our ontological/epistemological commitments. 
  

 

52 

As described in chapter two, imaginaries reflect our experiences in the world 

(imaginatively derived, organized, and metaphorically extended) and serve to guide our 

experiences of the world. Our ontological and epistemological imaginaries are thus products of 

our experiences and guide future experiences within the constraints of our varying 

ontological/epistemic commitments. What I mean by this, for example, is that an experience of 

the environment that separates human welfare from environmental welfare serves to construct 

and/or reinforce an ontological imaginary of human beings apart from the environment, which is 

then employed to direct us to imagine and act as if our welfare is independent of the 

environment’s own. This is an iterative process and as such, our as-if behaviors (and their 

concomitant experiences) further reinforce the ontological imaginary. As human communities 

have developed and evolved within a multitude of environmental relationships that vary along 

their ontological commitments, we should expect that multiple ontological imaginaries have 

emerged. Although I focus specifically on our ontological and epistemological imaginaries  – 

discussed below – a variety of interrelated factors (e.g. moral, social, and technological 

imaginaries) have developed that serve to construct our diverging concepts of the environment. 

Future work would do well to label and explicate other relevant dimensions of our imaginaries, 

helping to recognize and refine a plethora of environmental imaginaries.  

However, it is my contention that describing the role of the ontological and 

epistemological imaginaries in the development of environmental imaginaries is a crucial 

starting point. Therefore, before outlining the four environmental imaginaries discussed, more 

needs to be said regarding our ontological and epistemological imaginaries. 

 

 

53 

 

Ontological and Epistemological Imaginaries 

To ask “what is knowledge?” in common conversation is, according to this account, to 

ask “what is the concept of knowledge you hold?”10 We should expect these answers to vary 

according to the relevant imaginaries brought to bear to structure our individual concepts of 

knowledge and we should not be surprised that our shared imaginaries (imaginative feature four 

in chapter two) allow many of us to answer in similar fashions. The concept of knowledge that 

we employ is itself structured by our individual and shared imaginaries, themselves consisting of 

metaphorical extensions of our imaginatively patterned experiences. Similarly, the concepts of 

“being” (in the ontological sense) and “what is” are structured by our metaphorically extended 

social imaginaries. A robust account of the social imaginaries that structure our ontological and 

epistemological concepts is well beyond the scope of this chapter. But this is not to say that 

general treatments cannot be informative. The remainder of this section briefly describes how 

our experience of various boundaries in our lives is taken up and extended by our imaginations 

and, through the iterative process described above, create, extend, and reinforce our imaginaries, 

environmental and otherwise.  

The very generalized ontological distinction employed here is that some imaginaries 

prompt us to view humanity as being apart from the environment and conversely, some prompt 

us to view humanity as being a part of the environment. The critical feature here is some people 

imagine a boundary between humans and the environment (often justified by the perceived 

intentionality and rationality of humans that some see as absent in the non-human world) and to 

                                                           
10 Many will find this statement worrisome. I am not arguing that knowledge is entirely socially-constructed nor am 
I arguing that it is entirely independent of our sociality. Just as our worlds constrain our experiences, it is possible 
that some form of independent knowledge constrains our concepts of knowledge. In either case, according to this 
account, we should expect varying conceptions of knowledge as various imaginaries develop from diverse 
experiences. 

 

54 

others this boundary is either enlarged to include the environment or it does not exist at all. 

These boundaries can be readily seen in material manifestations such as a chain-link fence that 

separates human establishment from “wild” natural areas, but also exist psychically. Consider the 

Confucian proverb that “without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish humans from 

beasts” – although the proverb can be materially extended to separate “humans from beasts,” the 

boundary it is espousing illustrates a psychical boundary between humans and animals founded 

on our contrasting capacities to respect others. However imagined or extended and disregarding 

the specific characteristics used to distinguish, many environmental imaginaries rely on 

boundaries between humans and the rest of the (natural) world to conceptualize what the 

environment is and how we should regard ourselves in relation to it. 

Boundaries, however, are not limited to a human/nature distinction. Boundaries, in 

general, are commonplace in modern society ranging from innocent separations, such as painted 

lines in a parking lot, to more insidious separations such as militarized walls to prevent people 

from entering/leaving. Socially constructed boundaries are prolific such as racial and gender 

categorizations that bound certain people to certain social experiences. Boundaries are ubiquitous 

and each of them are different, but our experiences of them are still important insofar as the way 

that boundaries (whether material, psychical, or something else altogether) operate on our bodies 

impacts our imaginaries through the metaphorical extension of our reoccurring experiences. In 

other words, the experience of boundaries can imaginatively operate to see boundaries where 

they were not before.  

It is not enough to say, however, that experience of boundaries in general can beget the 

sort of boundedness that I claim operates in some environmental imaginaries. This boundedness 

is complete in the sense that the boundary is clear enough to know when it has been breached 

 

55 

and is non-porous insofar as porosity is limited by sanction. Boundaries such as these are ever-

present – we respect property boundaries where trespassing incurs fines, moral boundaries where 

trespass incurs personal corruption, social boundaries where trespass incurs banishment, and 

more. These boundaries are closely tied to how we hold ourselves accountable and responsible 

for our behaviors, either positively or negatively, as they can mean that a bounded thing is to be 

avoided and avoidance is antithetical to holding ourselves accountable and responsible to the 

bounded thing. I can erect a fence between my property and my neighbor’s in order to avoid 

being held responsible for my actions impacting their property and I can lock fragile glassware 

away from places where it might be broken to avoid the possibility.  

But, boundaries are not necessarily complete. Just as some boundaries are non-porous in 

the way described, others are porous. The shore at the edge of a lake is an incomplete boundary 

in this way – it can be crossed without punishment (and assuming no other boundaries exist, such 

as a property boundary) with an understanding that we may have to comport ourselves 

differently upon crossing the boundary. We swim in the lake, and walk on the shore. The door of 

a supermarket operates similarly. It is a porous boundary between two spaces and we understand 

that we must comport ourselves differently as we pass it. Whereas our experiences of complete 

boundaries prompt us to avoid that which is bounded and, in some cases, removes and/or reduces 

our responsibility to the bounded, incomplete boundaries prompt us to face the bounded and 

comport ourselves differently upon crossing the boundary. In other words, incomplete 

boundaries prompt us to reflect on our responsibilities and hold ourselves accountable to the 

bounded when crossing.  

Of course there are many situations where boundaries are necessary and there are many 

where boundaries are harmful. I do not presume to provide general principles of boundedness 

 

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nor do I think the characteristics of all boundaries – complete or incomplete – can be captured in 

such a short space. For example, Patricia Seed’s (1995) Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s 

Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 describes the power of boundaries in English law which 

served to delineate owned property as  

the ordinary action of constructing a dwelling place created the right of possession…by 
fixing a boundary, such as a hedge around fields, together with some kind of activity 
demonstrating use, anyone could establish a legal right to apparently unused land...The 
ordinary object – house, fence, or other boundary marker – signified ownership. (p. 19) 
 
The ordinary action of developing a hedgerow was significantly entrenched in the legal, 

social, and ceremonial practices of the English in ways that resist simple descriptions of porosity 

or completeness. The boundary was incomplete to some, complete to others, but rarely materially 

complete (i.e., one could physically cross it). And relevant to land management in the West 

where homesteading only recently ended, these boundaries were made meaningful specifically 

because those constructing them saw the land as “apparently unused” thus ignoring and/or 

erasing the ways the land was used by people who did not confer ownership through 

boundedness. The ways that these homesteading boundaries enacted particular customs for 

particular people cannot be cleaved from the ways that responsibilities to land, other people’s 

customs, and the distribution of power were impacted by the ordinary boundary. Simply, 

boundaries are not neutral – they signify something to someone. 

I do want to highlight, however, that experiences of boundaries (with the concomitant 

meanings attached to them) and the responsibilities they demand (or not) can be taken up in our 

imaginations to form imaginaries that are then extended into other aspects of our lives. The 

imaginative experience of complete and incomplete boundaries, as I’ve described, gives rise to 

diverging schemas of boundary is non-accountable separation and boundary is accountable 

separation, respectively. What I mean by this is that the recurring experience of complete or 

 

57 

incomplete boundaries elsewhere in our lives (i.e. our embodied and sociocultural experiences) 

are extended to the boundary between humans and nature in ways that dictate our responsibility 

and accountability to the environment. Experiences of complete boundaries remove human 

accountability for their actions regarding the environment as a non-porous boundary exists 

between the two. These imaginaries present themselves to us in discourses that defend a sort of 

human dominion over the environment as humans are rendered completely separate from their 

environments and are thus not accountable to their environments. Experiences of incomplete 

boundaries demand human accountability for their actions regarding the environment as a porous 

boundary exists between the two.11 These imaginaries present themselves to us in discourses that 

demand mutual consideration of humans and nature, recognizing that our responsibilities must be 

adjusted when crossing the porous boundary.  

Boundaries of any ilk have many different functions ranging from the materially benign 

(e.g. parking lot spaces) to the psychically vicious (e.g., racial segregation). One function of 

boundaries is to delineate those things that matter and those things that do not matter in our 

decision-making processes, exemplified by the common moral imperative given to humans based 

on their perceived unique rationality (i.e., anthropocentric morality due to human rationality). In 

this case, humans are bounded from the natural world as they are seen to have a unique 

characteristic that the others do not, and it is in light of this characteristic that we must consider a 

different moral calculus for humans. This example illustrates the setting of a boundary condition 

meaning that the boundary is conditional on certain characteristics, in this case, rationality.  

                                                           
11 To some imaginaries, no boundary exists between humans and nature. For this argument, these cases are 
sufficiently similar to the incomplete boundary cases to warrant including them under discussion of incomplete 
boundaries. 

 

58 

Some moralities set the boundary around the individual, the family unit, the community, 

or something else entirely, each supplied with its own condition (perhaps personal freedom, 

blood relations, or shared norms, respectively). These boundaries can be either complete or 

incomplete; for example, liberalism may generally be seen as a porous boundary around the self, 

meaning that the individual matters but we are still responsible for the freedom of other selves. 

Libertarianism, however, is similar in that the boundary is set around the self, but it is a complete 

boundary in which we are not responsible for the freedom of other individuals. This is a quick 

example and I do not mean it to be conclusive, instead intending only that it helps to recognize 

the plurality of boundaries. Environmental imaginaries diverge, in part, due to this plurality. It is 

not within the scope of this project to fully explicate the sociopolitical imaginaries operating 

within environmental imaginaries, but it is sufficient to recognize that these sociopolitical 

boundary conditions are themselves constructed and reinforced through the experience-

imagination-metaphorical extension process described above. The more an individual has 

individual-prioritizing experiences, the more that they may develop individual-prioritizing 

imaginaries. In contrast, the more an individual has community-prioritizing experiences, the 

more that they may develop community-prioritizing imaginaries.  

These crude categories – individual and community – are related to competing 

conceptualizations of another facet of environmental imaginaries: ownership. Concepts of 

ownership are tied to these individual/community/other imaginaries in that varying concepts of 

ownership recognize various boundaries around the self, community, or something else 

altogether. For instance, Lockean ownership (i.e. mixed labor and resource) is coherent with a 

non-porous bounded individual imaginary as what matters for deliberation is the individual self. 

The self performs labor and that labor permits the self to own (read: control) that which it 

 

59 

labored over. Communal ownership, however, is not coherent with a non-porous, bounded 

individual imaginary as individual labor is not sufficient to individually own that which is 

labored over. Communal ownership requires, minimally, a porous boundary which demands that 

our control over that which is communally owned must be weighed against our responsibilities to 

those others in the community. Our imaginaries regarding ownership and the rights entailed by it 

are tied to our imaginaries regarding our responsibilities to ourselves and our communities – if I 

own a thing under a Lockean mode of ownership, my control over that thing reinforces an 

imaginary holding the individual responsible only for themselves. Conversely, if we own a thing 

under a communal mode of ownership, our conditional control over that thing reinforces an 

imaginary holding the individual accountable to their community members. It is important to pay 

attention to the ways in which our experiences of one phenomenon (i.e., ownership) can 

reinforce imaginaries of another facet of our experience (i.e., social responsibility).  

Varying conceptions of ownership recommend different responsibilities between the 

owner and that which is owned. For instance, a non-porous individual boundary that 

characterizes Libertarian ownership makes no demands on the owner regarding their 

responsibilities to that which they own. The imagined non-porous boundary works to remove this 

responsibility while differentiating the owner and that which is owned along some boundary 

condition. This boundary condition, at least in contemporary ownership discussions, follows 

along the well-trod lines of the subject/object dichotomy. Simply, objects (imagined as such) can 

be owned whereas subjects (imagined as such) cannot. The objectification of that which is 

owned – following from the subject/object boundary condition – along with the non-porous 

boundary promotes an imaginary where the individual can do-as-they-will to their property (i.e. 

that which is owned) without trespass as they hold no responsibility to the object nor to their 

 

60 

community. This imaginary is ever-present in environmental discourse, finding evidence in 

extractive commodification practices. A porous boundary, however, demands a responsibility of 

the owner to that which is owned and/or to the others that can claim ownership. These 

imaginaries are reflected in discourses around environmental stewardship, suggesting that the 

steward has a responsibility to that which is being stewarded. Paired with an individual 

imaginary, this responsibility may be limited to the relationship between steward and stewarded, 

but on a collective imaginary this responsibility is extended to the relationship between steward, 

stewarded, and the community who also relies on that which is stewarded.  

In both cases, the boundary condition between the steward and that which is stewarded is 

similar to the subject/object dichotomy as the stewarded is conceptualized as that which can be 

stewarded (object). It should be noted, however, that the subject/object boundary condition is not 

pervasive in all imaginaries. For instance, North American Indigenous Peoples are often 

regarded as the initial stewards of the land before Euro-settlement, but the subject/object 

condition is not present. This suggests either that the term “stewardship” is more complex than 

treated here or that it is a term applied to Indigenous practices without a deeper understanding of 

those practices. I do not take this specific worry up here, noting only that in a nation founded on 

Lockean principles of ownership, it should not be surprising that settler culture has labeled 

Indigenous practices as “stewardship” as the settler-imaginary extended subject/object conditions 

to describe contrasting practices.  

For these purposes, however, it is sufficient to recognize that many imaginaries – 

extractive and stewardship – render that which is owned/stewarded as an object. Conceptualizing 

our environments as objects both allows them to be owned (and in some cases, removes our 

responsibility to them, i.e. non-porous boundaries) and renders them an object of study in 

 

61 

contrast to a subject of study. The material objectification of the environment removes agency, 

free will, desires, beliefs, and knowledge from our epistemic concerns regarding the 

environment, prompting an environmental science founded on post-enlightenment ideals of 

“scientific exploration, universality, atomism, and progress…[and] Cartesian dualism…the 

dichotomization of mind/matter, culture/nature…” (Robinson & Tout, p. 160) that has largely 

dictated the development of Euro-centric and western environmental science. To know the 

environment apart from either its own subjective states or those of the people thriving in that 

environment constructs an imaginary of the environment as a mechanized object, one in which 

parts of the whole interact to cause future states. Causality, as a concept, is philosophically 

contested (c.f. Hume), yet does imply a causal linearity that is pervasive amongst our 

understandings of the environment. This linearity is not specific to the environment as it resides 

in our imaginaries and can be extended to other facets of our lives, as seen in the discussion of 

time in the previous chapter. Important here, though, is that linearity as extended in our 

imaginations is both reinforced by and serves to reinforce an imaginary of the environment as a 

mechanized object bound by linear causation.  

The intersections of lines, and the study of their subsequent angles, were of high 

importance to the Greek mathematicians and philosophers, and have been ever-present in 

western thought, since. A straight line drawn on paper is among the simplest markings, but it is 

telling that it can be used to clearly distinguish between two things such as the dash in 

“culture/nature” or a fence between two properties. A straight line is commonly imagined to be 

the shortest path between two points as in a highway cut through a forest, tunneling under a 

mountain, or bridging a river. Lines often have directionality, as in Cartesian graphs, a line at the 

checkout of a store, or a past-to-future timeline. In contrast, a curved line – especially a circle – 

 

62 

operates differently. For example, a tilde (~) in mathematics suggests approximation. A curved 

line will not be the shortest path, strictly speaking, and a circle does not imply directionality. The 

way we experience linearity – straight lines, curved, or something else altogether – is extended 

through our imaginations to concepts such as time, efficiency, and causality as well as to our 

built worlds such as roads, fences, and architecture – all of which, in turn, shape our future 

experiences.  

Different aspects of our knowledge systems can be understood through this 

straight/curved line distinction or, as it is more commonly referred to, as the difference between 

linear and nonlinear thinking. Although an oversimplification, linear thinking understands a 

phenomenon as “the whole [is] exactly equal to the sum of its parts, and causes are proportional 

to effects” whereas nonlinear thinking recognizes the “high level of interdependency, inter-

connectivity and unpredictability that operate at the chaotic zone where there is no 

proportionality between cause and effect” (Vakili, 2018, p. 280). For linearity, the outputs of our 

systems are proportional to the inputs whereas they are disproportional in non-linearity. 

Conceiving of the environment as a collection of mechanized objects, causally related, and as a 

total sum of its parts begets an epistemology that prioritizes deterministic objective knowledge 

and neglects the chaotic elements of our relationships with the environment such as our (and its 

own) agency, free will, desires, and beliefs. Nonlinear thinking, conversely, recognizes the 

“interdependency, inter-connectivity, and unpredictability” of our environmental relationships, 

seeking to understand our environment with respect to those chaotic elements that linear thinking 

neglects. Again, this is not meant to draw hard distinctions between the imaginaries, but only to 

suggest that the experience of straight, curved, or other sort of linearity in our lives – through our 

 

63 

experience of time, causality, roads, fences, etc. – can be taken up into the imaginary and 

extended to other facets of our lives.  

The characteristics of our ontological and epistemological imaginaries discussed here are 

not meant to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive; however, they are meant to illustrate how our 

imaginations can extend experiences of porous and non-porous borders, individual and 

community boundary conditions, subject/object dichotomies, and different sorts of linearity 

throughout our conceptual systems to make sense of our environments. Our experiences of things 

like boundaries and lines are metaphorically extended throughout our conceptual systems and 

reinforced in the ways we act (both as our actions are experienced by ourselves as well as our 

action dictating the conditions of others’ experience) to further develop our imaginaries. The 

remainder of this chapter extends this discussion to the four environmental imaginaries – 

environment-is-machine, -garden, -community, and -family – that are often present in western 

environmental discourses, describing the ways in which these imaginaries cleave along these 

ontological and epistemological dimensions. 

Multiple American Wests and Their Environmental Imaginaries 

The communities in the West have evolved and developed throughout varying political, 

economic, and social-historical trajectories, and these trajectories give rise to distinct 

divergences in how the communities experience their worlds. As argued, varying experiences 

will vary the development of the imaginary that ascribes meaning to our environments. Neither 

the environments of the American West or the American West itself are, accordingly, unified 

concepts. What I mean by this is that when we ask in what ways should we govern ourselves 

with respect to western environments, we need to be clear as to which concept of the 

environment we are inquiring about. The diverging imaginaries construct a plurality of 

 

64 

environments: The American West is a misnomer. There are multiple American Wests that 

coexist in time and place and it is through the interrogation of the imaginary used to ascribe 

meaning to any one of the American Wests that we can begin to understand western 

environmental conflict.  

If we take seriously the views that our conceptual systems are derived from our social 

and embodied experiences in the world – our imaginaries – and there are sufficiently distinct 

conceptual systems that interpret a set of experiences differently, then we should be prompted to 

take seriously the possibility that differently conceptualized American Wests may derive from a 

common set of material conditions but are nonetheless not reducible to those material conditions.  

The discussion of the ontological and epistemological components of our social 

imaginaries in the previous section began with the recognition that some imaginaries prompt us 

to view humanity as being apart from the environment and, conversely, some prompt us to view 

humanity as being a part of the environment. The view that human and environmental welfare 

are separate serves to characterize, paradoxically, environmental imaginaries that see our 

environments both as machines which are put in service of humans and as gardens which are to 

be protected despite humans. In both cases, the imaginary rests on a non-porous boundary 

between humans and nature where, although the bounded is differently imagined (e.g., machine 

and garden), our responsibilities to the environment are limited to those that are required for our 

own human benefit and welfare. 

Lynn White Jr. (1967) traces the imaginary separations of humans from their 

environments to the proliferation of Judeo-Christian theologies in combination with a “marriage 

 

65 

between science and technology” (p.1203).12 Importantly, White recognizes that this separation 

occurred, in part, from a change in the notion of time: 

Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had had 
a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their 
cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a 
concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation…God had 
created [humans]…Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over 
them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical 
creation has any purpose save to serve man’s purpose. (p. 1205) 
 
This linear and directional time has a beginning, and, in this beginning, God created 

nature “for man’s benefit and rule.” The ontological separation is taken up in the imaginary and 

enacted through the advancement of mechanistic technology – itself harkening from a linear 

imaginary – that further reinforces a divide between humans and their environments. The 

ushering in of Modernist and Enlightenment ideals through “discourse of scientific exploration, 

universality, atomism, and progress” (Robinson & Tout, 2012, p. 160) further entrenched these 

non-porous boundaries through extension to subject/object dichotomies and 

individual/community separations conditioning conceptions of ownership. On this imaginary, the 

quantification that linear time-keeping promoted, as described by Lewis Mumford, and the 

ontological separation in the form of subject/object dichotomies is extended to the environment 

rendering it as a quantifiable object that is ripe for consumption by the individual who owns the 

land, with no moral trespass as the environment is not constituted as something that can be 

morally trespassed upon. Natural processes can be known through linear causality that, when 

extended forward in time, can predict future states. Prediction tames the savage wild as that 

which can be predicted can be controlled and, of course, the environment must be controlled. 

This imaginary, built on boundaries, subject/object dichotomies, and linearity (among much 

                                                           
12 This is but one narrative of this separation – related narratives of capitalism, imperialism, and technological 
advancement can also help understand this separation. 

 

66 

more not discussed here) render the environment as a machine that operates merely as the 

backdrop to human activity. 

The interaction of environmental and modernist discourses is well-trod in the literature 

and need not be belabored here (c.f. Latour, 2012; Wolfe, 1998). Of import, however, is that the 

environment-is-machine imaginary is alive and well in the West and, more importantly, that it is 

an imaginary and not merely a set of values derived from careful ratiocination. As an imaginary, 

we must recognize the ways in which it performed – either materially, technologically, socially, 

or psychically – and the ways that these extensions constrain and guide the embodied and 

sociocultural experiences constituting our imaginaries.  

The -machine imaginary is extended through western communities by their reliance on 

extractive industries such as subsurface mining, energy production, and commercial agriculture, 

and reinforced through the social and political power these industries possess. It is also extended 

through origin stories told about and by the West that celebrate the struggle to survive against a 

wild and dangerous natural world. Hollywood westerns capitalize on (and reinforce) this 

imaginary through popular cinema, such as their portrayal of mountain men (e.g. Jeremiah 

Johnson, 1971; The Revenant, 2015) as individualistic (individual versus community), trapping 

furbearing animals to support distant economies (object versus subject), masters of their own 

domain (dominion), and traversing rough landscapes, relying only on their own wit and skill for 

survival (nature as savage wild). This imaginary is performed through the trope of the Wild West 

where cattle, mining, and lumber barons built towns around saloons, brothels, and churches 

while the lawman and renegade began a long history of conflict that fueled the cinema industry 

(West, 1988). The “Wild West,” as portrayed and imagined by Hollywood, appeals to common 

themes of survival, individualism, domination, and a reliance on extractive industries that 

 

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survive into contemporary times in many western communities – an extension of the imaginaries 

that also interpret the environment as a machine. None of these examples, however, explicitly 

construct the environment as a machine, yet the experience of the individual characteristics of 

the -machine imaginary are present in some form throughout. There will seldom be pure forms of 

these imaginaries, as people in practice will have diverse experiences that develop varying 

imaginaries; nevertheless, we should recognize that the individual characteristics often relate to 

each other and that the more someone experiences them, the more likely they are to develop 

imaginaries that reflect them. 

The -machine environmental imaginary finds its origins in sociohistorical ideals of 

dominion and modernism, constructing an environment that is hostile and must be controlled in 

light of human interests. Imagining the American West as a frontier characterized by unfettered 

extraction, lawlessness, and individual stoicism and, concomitantly, institutionalizing these 

characteristics, allows reproduction of the -machine environmental imaginary. However, the 

American West is not always imagined as such. Aside from imagining Western landscapes as 

material resources to be extracted, some communities imagine these landscapes as environments 

to be protected from human impact and preserved for human repose. Metaphorically, the 

environment is seen as a garden in the sense that it is dedicated natural space valued for its 

aesthetic, spiritual, and transcendental characteristics (Marx, 1919).13  

The environment-is-garden imaginary is at odds with the –machine imaginary in that it 

does not allow for unfettered resource extraction, instead demanding protections for 

environmental spaces in order to keep human activity from deleteriously impacting nature’s 

processes. The two imaginaries may be at odds with the proper use of the environment, but they 

                                                           
13 By “garden,” I do not mean those spaces where people cultivate food, instead meaning those spaces where 
nature is curated for human pleasure such as European landscape gardens. 

 

68 

are related in the non-porous boundary imagined between humans and nature. This border 

demands that to protect the environment humans must remove ourselves from it, setting aside 

wild spaces that will remain untouched by extractive society. Instead of a mechanized object to 

be put into the service of human society, the environment is seen as garden with which to be 

tended and enjoyed, sans human communities. John Muir’s efforts to set aside iconic 

environments as national parks and protected wilderness exemplifies the garden imaginary as 

these legal protections allow humans to derive aesthetic and recreational value from the 

environments, yet disallows their material use of the environment (e.g. farming, forestry, 

mining).  

Although the -garden and -machine imaginaries are similarly related in their non-porous 

boundary between humans and nature, they are dissimilar in their epistemic imaginaries 

regarding the environment. Whereas the -machine imaginary conceives of the environment in 

terms of causality and linear-thinking (the preemptors to prediction and control), the -garden 

imaginary recognizes the dynamism of wild spaces. This dynamism appreciates the “high level 

of interdependency, inter-connectivity and unpredictability” (Vakili 2018, p. 280) of natural 

systems, demanding humble awe and a respect for unknowable nature instead of the prediction 

and control of it. Jack Turner (1996) argues this point in The Abstract Wild as: 

What emerges from the recent work on chaos and complexity is the final dismemberment 
of the metaphor of the world as a machine and the emergence of a new metaphor – a view 
of a world that is characterized by vitality and autonomy…instead of a vast machine, 
much of nature turns out to be a collection of dynamic systems…all that drops out, really, 
is long-term quantitative prediction, and that affects most science primarily in one way: 
control. (p.123) 
 
Turner describes this new view of the world as a view that respects nature’s inherent 

wildness, admonishing the imposition of human control over natural systems. The imagined 

“vitality and autonomy” of nature professed by Turner is reflected in many non-anthropocentric 

 

69 

accounts of the environment such as Arne Naess’ (1988) deep ecology and Tom Birch’s (1993) 

universal moral considerability of nature. If nature is autonomous and in virtue of this should not 

be controlled by humans, then we cannot act (either individually or institutionally) in ways that 

manifest human control. If our material use of nature is an act that manifests human control of 

nature, then we should cease the act. The -garden imaginary demands that we separate these 

actions from natural processes which is coherent in terms of the non-porous ontological 

boundary between humans and nature. Importantly, though, are the actions that do not directly 

manifest human control. Whereas it is easy to recognize the control of strip mining, it is not so 

easy to do so in the act of hiking. Specific prescriptions aside, the actions that are tolerable on a -

garden imaginary are those that do not, in Jack Turner’s words, “impose a human order on 

nonhuman orders” (p. 111). Again, and whatever specific characteristics these actions may have, 

this is coherent with a non-porous boundary between humans and nature.  

The -garden imaginary constructs an American West where the wild spaces must be 

protected from human control, whichever form this may take. The introduction of National Parks 

performs this imaginary by material extension, literally bounding wild space and regulating it for 

only those acts assumed to impose minimal control over wild spaces.14 National Parks allow for 

human repose through wildlife and landscape viewing, tours, and hiking, but disallows the 

extraction of natural resources such as forestry or mining.15 This bounded protection is extended 

through other policy mechanisms such as the Wilderness Act and the National Monuments Act, 

and through environmental discourses that seek to protect all wild spaces – regardless of legal 

status – from human control. For example, Western Watersheds Project is a non-profit 

                                                           
14 It should be noted that I do not claim these acts actually do remove the imposition of human control over wild 
spaces. It is sufficient to recognize that they are assumed to be benign with regards to human imposition. 
15 Some extraction is allowed through grandfather clauses, yet this derives from a -machine imaginary in contrast 
to the -garden imaginary. 

 

70 

organization that explicitly seeks to remove cattle-grazing from western lands in order to protect 

the land, performing a -garden imaginary by enacting a non-porous boundary between humans 

and nature. The -garden imaginary is extended through Western communities through amenity 

based development where people choose to migrate to the West in part due to the landscape 

aesthetics and recreation opportunities, a phenomenon described as the emergence of a “New 

West” (Vukomanovic & Orr, 2014; Winkler et al., 2007). As the New West emerges, the -garden 

imaginary is institutionalized in legal protections, thus curating certain experiences of the West 

and reinforcing the interpretation of the environment as a garden. 

The sociohistoric ideals of Eurocentric thought – domination, modernism, romanticism, 

and transcendentalism – structure institutions that provide the sociocultural experiences allowing 

both -machine and -garden imaginaries to develop, promulgate, and persevere. The conceptual 

separation of human civilization from their environments can be seen in contemporary 

environmental conflicts reflected in the discourses of extractive industries and radical 

environmentalists that seek to protect nature by removing human use from it. Involved in these 

conflicts are powerful extractive industries that are themselves supported by Eurocentric 

philosophies, economic power, and political legitimacy within the progress narratives of United 

States policy (Nieto & Durbin, 1995).16 In response to the environmental degradation that results 

from extractive conceptions, radical environmentalists demand that all human use of 

environments be de-coupled from human society for the preservation of pristine nature (see the 

Ecomodernist Manifesto, Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). The non-porous boundary between humans 

and nature demands that we cannot imagine nature with people in it unless it involves 

                                                           
16 Progress narratives, here, refer to the idea that infinite economic growth is a desirable aim for a nation. Infinite 
economic growth, however, requires material inputs that further require environmental resources, thus 
motivating a -machine imaginary.  

 

71 

domination and extraction. If porosity were imagined, however, then this wouldn’t be a simple 

either/or consideration. Communities that operate from either of these imaginaries are in tension 

regarding the proper use of western landscapes (i.e. environments), and this tension is 

complicated by the -community and -family imaginaries held by many communities living on 

western lands that do imagine porosity. 

-Machine and -garden imaginaries both emerge from a non-porous boundary between 

humans and nature. However, unlike -machine and -garden imaginaries, -community and -family 

environment imaginaries do not share a common genesis, demanding each be understood on its 

own terms. The Euro-colonial settlement of the West carried with it a particular form of 

agriculture that had evolved from ideals of Eurocentric thought, namely that private property and 

an ontological separation of humans from the land rendered the environment as an object to be 

owned and cultivated for the production of food and fiber for human use. Agriculture required 

the healthy productivity of a landscape, but also required the use of the environment. -Garden 

imaginaries cannot capture this as agriculture necessitates the use and extraction of 

environmental resources, yet the recognition that healthy environments are essential to 

productivity diverges from purely extractive practices. Thus, a third imaginary – environment-is-

community – emerged from the settler colonial imaginary, similar to that of the -machine and 

garden imaginaries and as an answer to this contradiction.  

Aldo Leopold’s (1970) land ethic famously formalizes this, prescribing an environmental 

relationship such that we “think like a mountain” (p.140) or, in essence, think through our 

practices as if we just were the environment. Leopold’s land ethic “simply enlarges the 

boundaries of the communities to include soils, water, plants, and animals, or collectively: the 

land” (p. 239), recognizing that we should seek a “state of harmony between men and land” that 

 

72 

required humans to responsibly manage their environmental practices (p. 243). Wendell Berry 

(1977) and Paul Thompson (2017) echo this sentiment of responsible environmental 

management within agriculture practices, arguing that commercial agriculture’s productionist 

ethic motivates irresponsible environmental practices and we should instead seek practices that 

better harmonize humans and their environments. Along varying degrees of environmental use 

by humans, these sentiments are reflected throughout the literature (Baviskar, 1999; de Silva, 

1987; DeLind & Link, 2004; Merchant 1981; Norton, 2015).  

Common to all these accounts is the demand that human practices should be held 

responsible to natural processes. Responsibility, as discussed, emerges from a porous boundary 

where we must comport ourselves differently as we cross it. The ontological boundary is 

weakened as we begin to imagine ourselves being responsible and accountable to the other, with 

the recognition that upon crossing we must reflect on our actions in ways that are not required 

without crossing. Whether prompted by the pragmatic recognition that humans do in fact live in 

their environments and, by virtue of this, use their environments or the normative prescription 

that humans should use their environments, this imaginary diverges from the -machine and -

garden imaginaries in that it seeks to responsibly integrate humans with environments.  

Although the -community imaginary diverges in the imagined character of the 

human/nature boundary, it does not interrogate the epistemological imaginaries that allow the 

environment to be managed, scientifically studied, owned, controlled, and ultimately treated as 

an object. Contemporary trends in alternative agriculture such as regenerative agriculture and 

holistic grazing management explicitly recognize the porous boundary between human welfare 

and the environment’s welfare as well as the dynamic system between the two, yet has not been 

divorced from the siren of predictive control. The environment is imagined as a system of 

 

73 

interdependent objects that can be known by its causal processes that, when extended forward in 

time, can predict future states. As in the -machine imaginary, that which can be predicted can be 

controlled and, of course, the environment must be controlled. For the -community imaginary, 

knowing the environment means also knowing the social, cultural, economic, and political 

systems that are entwined with environmental systems as the boundary is extended to these 

human systems. Those sustainability discourses that explicitly consider the human, economic, 

and environmental systems together are examples of the -community imaginary as they imagine 

humanity as part of the environment and not separated from it.  

The -community imaginary constructs the American West as a system of 

interdependencies where agricultural, human communities, economic systems, wildfire, 

threatened and endangered species, invasive species, and a myriad of other nodes operate as a 

complex system. Land managers (either private citizens, federal employees, or non-profit 

representatives), themselves part of the system, must act responsibly with respect to the system 

itself (Thompson & Talley, 2019). The system is experienced as such by those communities 

whose livelihoods are integrally tied to environmental health such as agriculture, ranching, and 

forestry, thus constructing and reinforcing the porous boundary holding their practices 

accountable to the environment. However, to know the system requires predictive science. The 

National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires government agencies to perform 

environmental assessments and impact analyses before making decisions using the “best 

available scientific data” and the Bureau of Land Management requires the utilization of  “high 

quality information, including the best available science” in planning processes (BLM Planning 

2.0 Fact Sheet, 2016). The prioritization of predictive control constructs institutions that, again, 

constrain and guide those experiences that are taken up and reinforced in the imaginary. The       

 

74 

-community imaginary constructs an environment where human actions are held responsible to 

the environment, yet the epistemic imaginaries, deployed to understand those actions themselves, 

interpret the system again as a machine, knowable through causal relations and controllable 

through prediction, yet now incorporating human society into the -machine. 

The -community imaginary’s similarity to the -machine and -garden imaginaries should 

not be surprising given the common genesis from the post-enlightenment, Euro-colonial ideals of 

the settler colonial imaginary. Importantly different, however, are the foundations for the 

environment-as-family imaginary. Although both the -community and -family imaginaries reject 

the non-porous boundary between humans and nature, -family imaginaries developed prior to 

Euro-colonial influence within North American Indigenous communities, understanding the 

relationships between humans and their environments in terms of mutual reciprocity and 

exchange. In this case, the environment consists of both human and non-human nature intricately 

linked through a web of kinship relations where the welfare of any specific individual, species, 

or community cannot be uncoupled from the welfare of those it stands in reciprocal relation to.  

Whereas the -community imaginary weakens the human/nature boundary in order to hold 

humans accountable to their environments (while maintaining the linear epistemic stance of 

prediction and control), the -family imaginary does not recognize a boundary. This imaginary 

developed apart from the western philosophies that condition the other imaginaries, instead 

manifesting through the place-based lived experiences of cultures that pre-date the rise of 

Eurocentric colonialism (Tuck et al., 2014). Without the dualistic and extractive imaginaries 

provided by western philosophies, reciprocal relationships evolved in concert with local 

environments, developing social institutions that align with local environmental conditions.  

 

75 

Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (2001) explicitly recognize this contrast with western 

philosophies as: 

…American Indian tribal customs, habits, and social organization…[consider] as an 
attitude or awareness…a deep system of experiential relations on which the world is 
building or living. The key here is recognizing that experience is the undeveloped and 
untheorized site where the divisions between the subjective and objective, material and 
spiritual, and an entire series of dichotomies disappear…the clan system not only 
indicated a certain tribal human organization, but also actually existed as a symbolic 
representation of the ecology and environment that we human beings were and are a part 
of. (p. 34) 
 
Important here is that western “dichotomies disappear” (emphasis added) – signifying 

that the imagined human/nature boundary is not weakened as the -community imaginary 

construes it, but altogether missing. Without this boundary, humans “were and are a part of” that 

thing being imagined as the environment.  

The -family imaginary does not construct boundaries within the environmental web of 

relations, recognizing that humans and the environment are alike in that they need each other and 

have responsibilities to each other. This is not a responsibility tempered by a subject/object 

dichotomy such as me believing that I am responsible for my house (I, a subject, am responsible 

for the welfare of my house, an object), but instead responsibility is built on extending agency to 

that which we are responsible to. For example, recalling Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) 

description of sweetgrass in chapter 2, sweetgrass “beckons” with its sweet vanilla fragrance, it 

“wants to be found,” we must “ask first” before harvesting it, and “It’s the grass that will teach 

you” (pp. 156-158). Sweetgrass is an agent itself, with responsibilities to humans and, 

reciprocally, human action must be held responsible to it as an agent. As Deloria Jr. and Wildcat 

remind us, “the universe is personal and, therefore, must be approached in a personal manner” 

(p. 23), as our relationships are between mutual agents and not between agents and objects. This 

dynamic relationship cannot be captured in the “simple construction of cause and effect and the 

 

76 

reduction of causal relationships to the constant conjunction of objects” (Deloria Jr. & Wildcat, 

2001, p. 51) pervading linear epistemic imaginaries. Appropriate responsibility on the -family 

imaginary instead appreciates the “high level of interdependency, inter-connectivity and 

unpredictability” (Vakili, 2018, p. 280) of nonlinear epistemologies, demanding humility and 

respect for our environments instead of the prediction and control of linear imaginaries. The        

-family imaginary constructs an environment where human actions are held responsible to their 

environments in the same ways as they are held responsible to other humans, understood through 

dynamic imaginaries developed with respect to the web of relations between experiencing human 

and non-human agents. 

Due to the genesis of the -family imaginary apart from Euro-colonial influence, the -

family imaginary is not broadly shared throughout the American West. Although it is not broadly 

shared in non-Indigenous communities, it does serve to interpret western environments for the 

Indigenous communities of the America West that must be, minimally, considered in the 

governance of western landscapes and, at a maximum, ceded the power to enact their 

sovereignty. The -family imaginary has had little uptake (or, arguably, no uptake) in western 

institutions and therefore does little to condition the experiences of non-Indigenous western 

communities. However, the vibrant Indigenous communities of the American West condition 

experiences according to the -family imaginary through their own practices and reclamation of 

Indigenous knowledges, reinforcing the imaginary in their own communities and helping to 

construct it in those settler communities they do influence. Despite the lack of broad 

institutionalization, the American West constructed by the -family imaginary must be recognized 

as one of the multiplicities of American Wests that must be understood in collaborative processes 

where Indigenous communities are present. However, given the unjust colonial impacts that have 

 

77 

and continue to impact Indigenous Peoples, it is more appropriate to refer to this construction as 

an Indigenous West with respect to these communities’ sovereignty. 

Conclusion 

As discussed, imaginaries are “cultural models, which are similarly shared, implicit 

schemas of interpretation” (Strauss 2006, p. 329), where environmental imaginaries are those 

specific imaginaries used to interpret what is meant by “environment” to different communities. 

Although these will have many dimensions not discussed here, dominant environmental 

imaginaries in the American West rely on diverging interpretations of both our ontological 

experiences of boundaries (whether porous, non-porous, or missing completely) and our 

epistemological experiences of linearity (whether causal or dynamic) [see Figure 3]. The 

metaphors of –machine, -garden, -community, and -family are intentionally chosen to prompt us 

to extend our experience of the metaphorical object (machine, garden, community, family) to our 

experiences of the environment in order to illustrate the relationships constructed from the 

imaginary.  

Examples

Table 1: Characteristics and Examples of Environmental Imaginaries

Whereas scholars have furthered our understanding of social imaginaries generally, and 

sociotechnical imaginaries specifically, there is a surprising lacuna in developing environmental 

imaginaries. Developing this account is important as it provides a method of integrating our 

 

78 

 

Environment As

Machine

Garden

Community

Family

Characteristics
Non-Porous human/nature distinction              
Linear epistemology, i.e., output proportional to input
Environment as object
Non-Porous human/nature distinction
Dynamic epistemology, i.e., output disproportionate to input
Environment as object
Porous human/nature distinction
Linear epistemology, i.e., output proportional to input
Environment as system including objects (nature) and subjects (humans) 3-part Sustainability discourse, holistic management
No human/nature distinction
Dynamic epistemology, i.e., output disproportionate to input
Environment as system of subjects

Human domination of nature
Quantitative prediction and control
Hydroelectric dams, strip mining
Human domination of nature
Romantic and Post-Enlightenment Discourse
National Parks, wilderness
Natural systems include humans
Quantitative prediction and control

Human/natural systems inseparable
Agent-to-agent responsibility and knowledge sharing
Indigenous seasonal governance; place based knowledge

individual and social experiences, imaginative and rational faculties, and material and psychical 

worlds together in describing our varying environmental attitudes.  

This brief introduction to environmental imaginaries in the context of the American West 

argues that our experience of things such as boundaries and linearity, whether materially or 

psychically, are able to impact our imaginaries in ways that extend to the interpretation of our 

environments. Environmental imaginaries (including how they are constructed and how they 

serve to construct) are important to environmental discourse, so we need to pay careful attention 

to the places we occupy and ways that they enable or constrain certain experiences. The multiple 

American Wests and the Indigenous West constitute and are constituted by different places and, 

as such, we need to attend to these differences in order to account for environmental conflict in 

the American West. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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OF WESTERN PLACES AND FENCES 

It’s a place, it’s a feeling, sometimes it’s just a state of mind 

It may not be what you were looking for, but it’s here in what you find 

And it’s all these things, it’s the West 

 
 

 
 

– Dave Stamey 
It’s the West 

We are in places. Some places beckon us, some are to be avoided, and some are banal; 

however, and regardless of our place proclivities, we are emplaced and this emplacement urges 

reflection. The opening lines of Edward S. Casey’s (1993) seminal work on the philosophy of 

place, Getting Back Into Place, asks us to “imagine what it be like if there were no places in the 

world” (p. ix) – a seemingly innocuous consideration that prompted Casey to detail a history of 

place in philosophical thought and the experiential characteristics of place, including the ways in 

which place is structured by and serves to structure our experiences (Casey 1993, 1997). The 

places we occupy stand in conceptual contrast to the spaces we occupy, a distinction espoused by 

Casey and taken up in contemporary thought, especially in the geography disciplines that take as 

a subject the ways in which people operate in place/space (Massey, 1994; Relph, 1976; Sack, 

1997; Tuan, 1990). Although an oversimplification, the distinction between place and space can 

be seen as the former being constituted by meaning where the latter is not (Relph 1976, p. 3). 

Casey’s initial prompt augmented through this distinction can be revised to ask us to imagine 

what it would be like if there was no meaning in the worlds we inhabit. This is a challenging, if 

not impossible, request.  

The multiple American West and Indigenous Wests described above are each constituted 

by various meanings that diverse communities attribute to their landscapes, serving to interpret 

the same landscape as a different place. The “landscape,” as I use it here, is the set of material 

 

80 

conditions that are interpreted to give meaning to our inter-related concepts of environment and 

nature, deriving from our social and embodied experiences in the world and, concomitantly, 

serving to guide those experiences. The landscape, in this sense, is a common set of material 

conditions yet it is not benign with respect to how those material conditions are themselves 

constructed by the various communities acting from their own shared imaginaries.17 Therefore, 

the landscape does not operate merely as the background to human action, but is instead an 

active participant in the development of our imaginaries. This raises a salient puzzle: If our 

landscapes have been constructed to reflect and reinforce certain imaginaries, shouldn’t we 

expect the conditioned experiences to converge on place-meanings? Or, put differently, 

shouldn’t the same material conditions experienced over time render the same social imaginary? 

The simple answer is yes, kind of – we might reasonably expect that over time, similar 

imaginaries will emerge from specifically-constructed landscapes as experienced by similarly 

socially-positioned people. But, it is important to recognize that a common set of material 

conditions cannot be construed as a common set of experiences. And, to the point of this project, 

it is these varied experiences that operate in our imaginations. The place, itself, is critical to 

understanding the experience, but also insufficient. In Space, Place, and Gender (1994), Doreen 

Massey describes the ways in which places encode gender relations through the social relations 

that give the material conditions meaning that, in turn, are differentially experienced by 

differently embodied and socially positioned peoples. In recalling a teenage visit to an art gallery 

with two young men, Massey recalls that many of the paintings (painted by men) were of women 

in various stages of undress, paintings “of women seen through the eyes of men” (p. 186). That 

the paintings were asymmetrically devoted to women’s bareness means something to those 

                                                           
17 Those communities (and their shared imaginaries) that hold social, economic, and/or political power, 
disproportionately impact the material conditions of the landscape.  

 

81 

experiencing it – to the men it might mean that women are objects of aesthetic beauty or objects 

of dominion, but objects, nonetheless. To Massey, as she “looked at them, my two young friends, 

looking at pictures of naked women as seen through the eyes of men” in this place where 

women’s bareness was celebrated, she  

felt objectified…[that] this was a “space” that clearly let me know something, and 
something ignominious, about what High Culture though was my place in Society. The 
effect on me of being in that space/place was quite different from the effect it had on my 
male friends…I lost that argument [about her experience] on the grounds that I was 
“being silly.” (p.186) 
 
To Massey, the experience of this (meaning-laden) place was uncomfortable, 

objectifying, and belittling – an experience that critically diverges from those of her male friends 

in a (imagined as meaningless) space that was constructed as a reflection of patriarchal society’s 

imaginaries of women with a particularly gendered affect. The art gallery as a space serves to 

obscure the social, lived realities and experiences of women while the art gallery as a place 

centers those same gendered realities and experiences. Massey concludes that this “gendering of 

space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed 

and understood in the societies in which we live” (p. 186, my italics). Just as places encode 

gender, they also encode a variety of different social, racial, political, environmental, etc. 

relations. Places, thus, are not neutral and attention must be paid to the ways in which places 

reflect certain imaginaries (often those of the dominant social position).  

Critical to the multiple American Wests and this project are the ways in which western 

environments are often constructed to reflect settler-colonial imaginaries and how they are 

differentially experienced by varying communities in the West. The landscape diversity 

(mountains, deserts, urban, rural, etc.), and the sociocultural diversity of communities in the 

American West operate to create a varied and diverse landscape of places that, I argue, 

 

82 

characterize much of Western environmental conflict. Generally, I call attention to the mismatch 

between a community’s place-meanings (interpreted through their environmental imaginaries) 

and the landscapes they are experiencing. This mismatch is not merely in their mental or 

cognitive attitudes toward their landscapes, but in their embodied and felt experiences of their 

places. And, to make matters more complex, the ways in which some imaginaries conceive of the 

“landscape” as a mere background to human activity (space) instead of an active participant in 

human activity (place) pose considerable obstacles.18 Thus, before describing the ways in which 

various landscapes are interpreted as various places – mismatched or not – it is worth being clear 

regarding what I mean by both space and place. 

Although there has been a resurgence of the importance of place in contemporary 

analyses (e.g. Casey, 1993, 1997; Relph, 1976; Sack, 1997; Yuan, 1990), the concept of place 

has been deliberated on and prioritized throughout history. Vanessa Watts (2013) describes 

Indigenous ontologies as being necessarily emplaced as “place and thought were never separated 

because they never could or can be separated” (p. 21), suggesting that place has always been a 

central theme in Indigenous practices, regardless of contemporary revivals of the notion. From a 

Euro-centric perspective, Casey’s (1997) The Fate of Place traces the discussion of place 

throughout western thought, suggesting that place held conceptual import in the elaboration of 

our inhabited worlds until the early modern period, at which point the concept of space took 

primacy as a metaphysics of our world. Space, however, was inadequate for understanding our 

embodied experiences and through the phenomenological work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, 

                                                           
18 Non-place is specifically theorized as a product of supermodernity where history does not ground current 
experience, global hyper-mobility detaches people from their places, and a rise of individualism prompts us to “no 
longer collectively share places….instead, all of us have our own ‘trajectory’ in space” (Drenthen 2009, p. 301). See 
also Marc Augé (1995) as cited in Drenthen (2009). Although I use “space” and “non-place” interchangeably, I do 
recognize that “non-place” is similar yet analytically distinct from “space.”  

 

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Heidegger, Bachelard, and Derrida – among others – place was reinstated as a central notion 

(Casey, 1997).  

The inadequacy of space in this respect stems from the abstract nature of space; abstract 

space, as conceptualized in the early modern period, was “continuous, isotropic, homogeneous, 

finite, or infinite” (Relph, 1976, p. 26, quoting Jammer 1969, p. 7), whereas place has “a special 

noncausal power found in its containing character, its qualitative differentiation, its heterogeneity 

as a medium, and its anisotropy of direction” (Casey, 1997, p.134). On this view, our worlds are 

instantiations in space, a metaphysically prior construct serving to relate and constrain our 

experienced realities. The objects that we interact with – fundamental to our experiences – are 

spatially organized, independent from each other, and able to be understood apart from our 

experiences of them. Places, on this account, are “merely momentary subdivisions of a universal 

space quantitatively determined in its natural homogeneity” (Casey, 1997, p. 134). Within space, 

our experiences are matters of mental processes, “subsum[ing]…every sensible appearance 

under a representation whose status is unremittingly mental” (ibid, p. 203). The Cartesian mind-

body dualism required that our material realities – the spatially extended body and the 

homogenous space it occupied – were distinguished from our meaning-laden experiential 

realities, seen here as “unremittingly mental.” 

As theorists became critical of modernist dualisms, conceptions of space as 

metaphysically distinct from place were problematized. Lying at the heart of these criticisms was 

the recognition of the role of the theorists in their conceptualizations – empirically, theorists did 

not theorize outside or apart of their own places. Ernst Cassirer (1970), as quoted by Relph 

(1976), asserts that “we must admit that abstract space has no counterpart and no foundation in 

physical or psychological reality”, itself “a free creation of the human imagination and as such is 

 

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a direct reflection of the achievement of symbolic thought” (p. 26). Space, as a creatively 

imagined abstraction, may be useful in certain projects where an object’s extension is central to 

the epistemic goals of the project, yet this does not give it priority – metaphysical or otherwise – 

over place. Places, being “sensed in a chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other 

people, personal experiences, care and concern for home, and in the context of other places” 

(Relph, 1976, p. 29), are not merely derivate of nor are they reducible to space. Place is 

constitutive of space – it is “basic to protostructuring [of the rational world]…it is place that 

introduces spatial order into the world” (Casey, 1976, p. 5).  

Whereas Casey (1997) and others contend that as embodied beings we are necessarily in 

place as “there is no place without body [and]…there is no body without place…our own 

embodiment brings implacement [sic]—as well as continual reimplacement—in its immediate 

wake” (p. 104), other scholars imply that place is something to be achieved rather than an 

entailment of embodiment. For instance, Martin Drenthen (2009) argues that a communities’ 

sense of place and their place-attachment are something to be achieved through reflection and 

modification of the modern-era institutions that render place as non-place. The modern-era has, 

according to Drenthen, resulted in the emergence of non-places which “make up a purely 

functional, sanitized landscape” and this “arrangement of space misses the specifics of a regional 

place that enable people to feel connected to it” (p. 19, emphasis added). It is unclear if Drenthen 

admits that, as Casey argues, we are always emplaced and it is only our degree of recognition of 

place (our sense of place) that varies across the landscape or if there is a strict delineation 

between place and non-place. It is worth recognizing that the ontology of place is not settled – 

what it is, what priority it has, and/or what are the determinants of a specific individual or 

communities’ sense of place. However, if our local environments are both critical to our 

 

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imaginative meaning-making processes and themselves constituted by those processes, then 

place (being that which we experience and that which is constituted by our experience) is ever-

present. Our psychical engagement with place may differ by degrees (such that one person may 

fully recognize their emplacement while another does not), but this is not to say that we are not 

always emplaced. Simply, as embodied beings we are always in place and never in space, 

whether or not we consciously engage with our place.  

Place and space are distinct, the latter an abstract notion of the continuous and infinite 

extension of the objects (and relations between objects) in our world, whereas the former is 

contextual, particular, and meaning-laden, both structuring our experiences and being structured 

by our experiences. Places should not be understood as simply material surroundings 

(landscapes) – they are, as Casey (1993) suggests, “more an event than a thing” (p. 329). This 

difference in abstraction versus particularity is important in the West. This dissertation began 

with the assertion that The American West, in general, faces conflict regarding environmental 

governance. In so asserting, I’ve imagined the American West as an abstract homogenous 

concept or, in other words, as a regional space. The Spacial American West is useful for 

epistemic projects that do not require the specificities of place such as understanding the 

dynamics between snowpack on distant mountains in the winter and riparian health further 

downstream in the late summer. Spacial analyses – whether they be ecological, social, political, 

etc. – have enjoyed success in understanding the broad dynamics of the West and this success 

reinforces the notion that the West is an abstract homogenous region. However, the multiple 

American and Indigenous Wests I’ve described do not constitute a homogenous region.  

This divergence between abstract homogenous spacial analyses and particular 

heterogeneous placial analyses aligns with the divergence of non-porous and porous boundaries 

 

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described in the previous chapter. To conceive of a region as space (the schema conditioning 

spacial analyses) is to view the complexities of human experience as apart from the complexities 

of their landscape whereas conceiving of a region as place is to recognize that human experience 

and the landscapes that they experience are ontologically intertwined. This should not be 

surprising since, as Casey (1997) reminds us, the concept of space emerged from the same 

dualisms of modern metaphysics that are extended to the environmental imaginary in the form of 

the non-porous boundary between humans and nature. This lack of boundary is echoed in 

Vanessa Watts (2013) description of Indigenous ontologies as “place and thought were never 

separated because they never could or can be separated,” explicitly eschewing the dichotomous 

boundary between human experiences and the world in which they experience. The epistemic 

resources that emerge from and are used to describe spacial conceptions of landscapes reinforce 

the landscape-as-space notion by conditioning the experiences of those invested in these. 

Although our spacial understanding of natural and social systems can be generally applied across 

the region, the cleaving of human experience from spacial landscapes is ill-suited to attend to the 

ways that diverse Western individuals and communities construct meaning and behave in their 

local places – a primary focus of environmental governance. Space is useful, but where matters 

of governance are concerned, place is prior.  

As our imaginaries derive from our embodied and sociocultural experiences within our 

respective landscapes, understanding those landscapes in which we experience is critical to 

understanding our imaginaries. Places are experienced differentially depending on what relations 

they encode and who is experiencing them, and understanding how the felt experience (positive, 

negative, or something else) of places is critical to recognizing diverging imaginaries and the 

opportunities/obstacles they provide for environmental governance. In other words, where we are 

 

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is critical to who we are and, conversely, who we are is critical to where we are – simply, our 

places matter. The remainder of this chapter further elaborates on the ways that an individual or 

communities’ place functions to guide their varying imaginaries, focusing on the roles that both 

their natural habitats as well as their built environments play in this process.  

Nature, Technology, and the Body 

Our places, as I’ve described, are particular to a person and/or community and various 

places may derive from the same material conditions. Although places are not things inasmuch 

as they are events, they are in part comprised of things. “Things,” of course, is broad. For these 

purposes, I distinguish only between those things composing the natural habitat being 

experienced and those things that are artifacts within the natural habitat. In practice, this is not a 

clear distinction since a genetically modified plant occurring in place may be a considered as 

both an artifact as well as a natural thing. This is also not meant to exhaust the types of things 

inhabiting place. For instance, the experiencing body is a thing in the experiencing body’s habitat 

and as such, is part of the habitat being experienced. However, it is unclear if one’s own body is 

an artifact or a natural thing. This suggests that we cannot so easily distinguish the constituents 

of a place, yet this crude distinction serves to highlight specific considerations of place.  

Before turning towards the artifacts and natural things in place, it is worth noting the 

heterogeneity of the human body. We are emplaced bodies who interact with our places in a 

variety of ways. I recognize that it is a mistake to homogenize the “human body” since the 

considerable variation in the ability of different bodies will ultimately lead to varying 

experiences of place. The abilities of marginalized bodies will provide a variety of experiences 

that must be considered and can lead to novel understandings of our places, and we must be 

careful not to obscure these experiences in analyses. I recognize that my own embodiment serves 

 

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to guide my interpretations of place and, as such, I limit this project to the environmental 

imaginaries that are in part developed through social institutions and not fully through my 

personal, direct experiences.  

The natural/artificial distinction is meant only to guide our intuitions regarding those 

things that we experience in place. I use the terms to denote a sort of intentionality regarding 

things, such that natural things are those that proliferate despite human intentionality and artifact 

things are those whose proliferation requires human intentionality. For instance, a seed that is 

deposited by wind and sprouts into a sapling would be a natural thing as it proliferates without 

human intervention. A tree purchased from a nursery, planted, and carefully pruned would be an 

artifact as the thing – the pruned tree – is as it is because of human intervention. Machinery, 

architecture, and infrastructure are overt examples of artifacts, whereas naturally occurring 

geology, flora, and fauna are examples of natural things. These two labels – artifact and natural – 

may be better seen as the poles of a continuum where degrees of human intervention dictate the 

naturalness/artificialness of a thing. This distinction is not meant to analytically delineate types-

of-things, but is instead offered as a heuristic to evaluate the ways that our places serve to guide 

our experiences and, ultimately, construct/reinforce/modify our imaginaries. I consider each of 

these types of things – artifacts and natural things – in turn. 

Our embodied experiences are conditioned by the habitats in which we find ourselves. 

We may feel a sense of foreboding when looking up the face of a large bluff, or a sense of 

vertigo when looking over a cliff. We may feel a sense of tranquility sitting beside a stream in 

the sun in summer, whereas that same stream in the leafless winter may give us a sense of dread. 

How we specifically feel in light of our surroundings is not important, only that our surroundings 

can have this impact on us. Of course, this impact can either be conditioned by our own prior 

 

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imaginaries (a past experience with the forebodingness of something larger than me may 

metaphorically extend to the forebodingness of the large bluff rising above me) or aid in the 

development of novel imaginaries. In either case, the places we occupy – complete with both the 

“things” in place and the meanings attached to those things – are integral in shaping our 

experiences and, in turn, creating or reinforcing our imaginaries.  

Edward S. Casey (1993) offers an example of this complex interaction between place and 

body in his evaluation of the phrase “the look of the land” (p. 195). The phrase “the look of the 

land” encapsulates this embodied interaction between human and place as “the look” requires the 

interpretive faculties of the agent while “the land” is proffered as that place which is to be 

interpreted. The look of a land will vary greatly across the multitude of natural variations of 

landscapes, but in general Casey argues that the experience of “the look of the land” leads to 

either an “experience of desolation” (p. 196) or a “peculiar sense of consolation” (p. 193). Which 

we are led to is dependent on our affective experience (itself structured by past experience) of 

four features of the landscape – the relative barrenness (the lack of features essential to life such 

as water, vegetation, wildlife, or shelter), vastness (perceived endlessness and lack of 

delineation), impenetrability (resistance to movement, cultivation, or development), and isolation 

(disconnected from other people and places) of the landscape. These characteristics are meant 

only as conspicuous examples tied specifically to the experiences of desolation/consolation. 

Different experiences such as joy/sorrow, calm/dread, larger than/smaller than, close to/far from, 

etc., may require analyzing different features of a landscape than those offered for 

desolation/consolation and future work would do well to elaborate on these.  

However, the desolation/consolation experience is significant in the experience of 

western landscapes as the experience of arid deserts and recalcitrant granite peaks is in some 

 

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sense explained by these features. Yi-fu Tuan (1990) relates early settler-explorer accounts of the 

American West in familiar terms, such as Lieutenant J. H. Simpson’s reproach “of the almost 

universal barrenness which pervades this country,” J. R. Bartlett’s characterization as “barren 

and uninteresting in the extreme,” and W. H. Emory’s concession that the land was “wholly 

unsusceptible of sustaining an agricultural population [read: impenetrable]” (p. 67). To Euro-

American settlers accustomed to the rich soils, plentiful waters, and rolling topography of the 

East, the arid deserts and impassable granite peaks of the West could certainly appear barren, 

vast, impenetrable, and isolated. It is no wonder that the bulk of early settlers merely passed 

through the arid deserts of the Intermountain West in search of the greener – and more consoling 

– landscapes of Oregon and California. Contemporary settlement in the West illustrates the 

perceived desolation/consolation of the place to those who settled it – the majority of population 

centers occur in wide fertile valleys along waterways, connected by those interstates and 

highways that replaced the trails used by settlers, miners, trappers, and Indigenous peoples since 

time immemorial. These settlements are in the least barren landscapes of the arid, rocky desert. 

The landscape’s vastness is tempered by the delineation between arable fertile valleys and 

otherwise impenetrable landscapes and connected by the most-easily traversable trails/highways 

through a rough landscape.  

The bulk of the western populace lives in these consoling places where water, land, and 

comfort are relatively abundant, but the West is also littered with small communities – both 

settler and Indigenous – thriving in the “desolate” landscape. The natural habitats of these 

communities, complete with the things constituting these habitats such as water, geological 

formations, flora, and fauna, prompt a range of varying experiences that are taken up through the 

imagination and extended through our imaginaries. Simply, different features of a place will be 

 

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differentially interpreted by diverse communities. An Indigenous community that has lived in the 

arid deserts of the west will not likely feel “desolation” in similar landscapes, whereas settler-

colonists that came from more populated, vegetative, and (to them) more comfortable 

environments could feel a “displaced desolation” when settling the West.  

On this view, the physical character of a place can, in part, determine the interpretation of 

a place for a community. As argued above, however, the imaginary developed by the 

imagination from previous experiences will influence place-meaning as well. For example, 

Ángel J. García Zambrano (2012) shows that pre-European contact Mesoamerican communities 

preferred founding cities in places where they could align their buildings with a mountain peak 

that was visible beyond a concave mountain recess to give the impression that the peak was 

emerging from the recess. This is due to both the landscape features (mountain recesses and 

peaks) as well as the pre-conceived meanings of these features, namely that they were the “‘place 

of ancestors’ or ‘place of those who have ancestors’” (p. 217). Our places are therefore 

constituted by both the landscape features as well as our prior place-interpretations – a desolate 

place is that which is not consoling and that which is consoling is a natural habitat interpreted as 

such.  

The relative consolation or desolation imparted by a place is intertwined with the 

environmental imaginary developed in that place. A desolate place is a place to be avoided and 

recurrent avoidance (by the individual and the group, over time) prompts the development of a 

non-porous boundary as discussed in chapter three. The desolate becomes a landscape which we 

hold little responsibility to – it is too barren, vast, impenetrable, and isolated to be of practical 

use – and as such is rendered either disposable (e.g. -machine imaginary) or to be cordoned off 

 

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as wilderness (e.g. -garden imaginary).19 In contrast, a consoling landscape entices inhabitation 

and, as such, a responsibility to the landscape prompting the development of a porous boundary 

(e.g. -community and -family imaginaries).  

Importantly, however, places may vary between desolate and consoling throughout the 

year. While spring in the arid desert may be consoling due to seasonal stream flows and desert 

blooms, late summer can be desolate as water becomes scarce, plants dry out, and wildlife 

retreats to cooler alpine meadows. Western settlement occurred on the socio-political assumption 

that static land tenure rendered the ideal citizen – find a place, put down roots, and weather 

whatever comes at you. The economies of western static settlement – livestock ranching, 

agriculture, forestry, etc. – are seasonally dependent such that the more consoling spring 

landscape is most suitable to economic production and the more desolate seasons are least 

suitable to production. Thus, these communities vacillate between experiences of consolation 

and experiences of desolation, prompting an engagement with and responsibility to their 

landscapes that seasonally varies. The experience of both seasonal consolation and desolation 

prompted by static settlement in the arid desert or recalcitrant mountains renders an imaginary 

that blends the porosity of the human/nature distinction (from the consoling landscape) with the 

otherness required of the objectification and linear epistemology (from the desolate landscape) of 

the -community imaginary.  

However, Indigenous communities did not prosper under the socio-political assumption 

that static land tenure was ideal. Instead, these communities traveled throughout their landscapes 

as changing seasons provided varying subsistence opportunities, expanding and shrinking their 

                                                           
19 Romantic wilderness retains the desolate features, but instead inspires a sense of awe/sublimity in light of the 
desolate: “A desolate landscape may also, paradoxically, give rise to a peculiar sense of consolation…the isolated 
figure in the empty landscape finds in wilderness itself a con-soling partner. The lonely individual and the desolate 
landscape form a silent but powerful pact” (Casey, 1993, p. 193) 

 

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social groups according to the abilities of their environments to provide necessary resources 

(Benton-Benai, 1979; Faulkner, 1977; Meyer, 1990). Seasonal rounds, however, were not a mere 

reaction to the challenges and opportunities provided by seasonal change. As the Kootenai 

Peoples (2015) recognize, “The Kootenai lifestyle, before the reservation era, was migratory but 

far from random. We knew every aspect of our homeland…We knew what to expect as the 

seasons unfolded, year after year…” (p. 49, italics added for emphasis). Seasonal rounds are 

more than random or reactive movements on the landscape – they integrate community norms 

and responsibilities with seasonal change to develop harmonizing relationships that act in 

accordance with (not in reaction to) environmental change. For example, the Kootenai 

historically returned to the same campground every winter (what is now called Apgar near 

Glacier Park in Montana) to “dance and sing in an important renewal ceremony” (p. 51). There 

were three songs sung at the ceremony – one for good health, one for food, and one for material 

possessions – which told people to store resources at other campsites throughout the year. During 

the Leaf Bud Moon, now known as March, winter food stores were depleted and food was scarce 

since snow still covered much of the land, but the people had food that had been stored at 

specific sites during fall hunts to feed them through spring (p.57). Where the natural habitat 

would be seen as seasonally barren and impenetrable by static communities, seasonal rounds 

(complete with the concomitant social institutions) allowed Indigenous communities to move 

across landscapes without the experience of desolation. This dynamic emplacement conditions 

the -family imaginary as the imagined boundaries experienced in avoidance of desolation does 

not occur, instead it demands responsibility to the constituents of place, varying by season. 

Our natural landscapes (recalling the nature/artifact distinction expressed above) impress 

upon us in various ways. The desolation/consolation impression discussed here is but one of 

 

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these ways. In Topophilia (1990), Yi-fu Tuan describes an array of place/landscape 

characteristics that operate in a similar fashion, including colors, spatial organization, 

symbolism, and scale. Our experience of place (taken up by the imagination and extended 

through our conceptual architecture) will be molded by boundless features that often go 

overlooked – our experience of smooth rocks, for example, is distinctly different than our 

experience of rough rocks. The same for depth of grass, leaf cover of trees, steepness of terrain, 

rigidity of soil, the sounds of near/far water and wind, the smells of various decomposing 

vegetation, and much more. As Relph (1976) notes, places are “sensed in a chiaroscuro of 

setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal experiences, care and concern for home, 

and in the context of other places” (p. 29). We may amend this to include sensory, affective, and 

imagined experience. Recognizing the desolation/consolation and the static/dynamic dimensions 

of our experience in natural landscapes provides a jumping off point to consider the multiplicity 

of American and Indigenous Wests, but it is woefully incomplete. The deficiencies of this 

analysis aside, we can conclude with some certainty that those natural things that occur without 

human intentionality and make up much of our natural spaces (in the sense of green nature, not 

metaphysical nature) are integral to understanding our places. Future work would do well to 

elaborate on the most efficacious of these characteristics. 

However, our places are not merely constituted of natural things. As I walk a trail 

through the mountains I need to, minimally, recognize the experience of the trail itself. I may 

also recognize the water bottle I carry, the shoes I wear, and the jet-trail across the atmosphere. 

Just as the natural landscape molds my experience, the artifacts within the landscape do the 

same.   

 

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Just as the features of our natural landscapes – in combination with our prior imaginaries 

– can help to structure our places, the artifacts within our places serve an interpretive role. Here I 

focus on artifacts understood as the products of our respective technologies. Technology, here, is 

a broad concept that I use to describe both the tools and techniques that humanity uses to modify 

their worlds. I do not offer an analysis of technology, per se, nor do I offer a specific definition 

of what I take to be an artifact (or technological object). For my purposes, it is sufficient to 

recognize that those features of our places that are built, constructed, or fabricated are recognized 

as technological artifacts. As the possibilities are near infinite, I limit my discussion to one 

aspect of technology-in-place – the imaginaries that varying technologies are structured by and 

serve to structure. 

Although the specific details of the relationship are yet to be agreed upon, it is widely 

recognized that technology, in general, has a role (both implicit and explicit) in shaping “the 

ways we view ourselves and our communities, and consequently the direction that our 

individual, community, and corporate activities will take” (Hickman, 2001, p. 3; see also Ellul, 

1964; Feenburg, 1991; Haraway, 2006; Ihde, 1990; Marcuse, 1968; Winner, 2010). It is not my 

aim to defend or refute this, only to show how technology operates on our places in ways that 

offer insights into different communities’ varying interpretations of their place.   

The ways that imaginaries serve to structure our places is well-evidenced through Kent 

Nerburn’s (2010) Neither Wolf Nor Dog (chapter six – “Junk Cars and Buffalo Carcasses”) 

where he discusses the supposed junk he sees on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation with an 

Indigenous elder, Dan. Nerburn was “mystified” by the lack of “order or indication of effort to 

keep things clean” regarding the objects on the reservation, prompting him to ask Dan about the 

“junk cars and all the trash.” Dan’s eventual response is telling: 

 

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Watch our little children. They might get a bike and ride it, then just leave it somewhere, 
like that. You say they are irresponsible. They are just being like their ancestors who 
believed that you owned something only so long as you needed it. Then you passed it to 
someone else…All of this – all these cars and stuff – makes me proud…It means we 
haven’t lost our traditional ways…In our way, everything had its use then it went back 
into the earth. We had wooden bowls and cups, or things made of clay. We rode horses or 
walked. We made things out of things of the earth. Then when we no longer need it, we 
let it go back in the earth…We are living the same way, but we are living with different 
things. (pp.78-80)  
 
Although this passage is, on the surface, explained by mere cultural differences, it is 

suggestive of deeper forces that help to understand how the same place can be differentially 

understood. Nerburn, raised with the material-consumerist experiences of the settler state, 

interpreted the place as disorderly and dirty, strewn with junk and decaying items. Not only did 

Nerburn interpret the place as such, but his interpretations were being structured by this 

experience – he thought it “reflected a lack of self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness about 

life,” a preferable option to his “earlier explanation – that people who lived like this were simply 

lazy and shiftless” (p. 75). The meaning of the objects, themselves, were meanings of the place – 

the place imbued with pre-conceptions of the people who inhabited it. Dan, on the other hand, 

was proud of the artifacts. His place-meaning reflected a different imaginary that structured his 

interpretation as hopeful (see also Medak-Saltzman, 2017). The meaning of the artifacts, to Dan, 

were reflective of his people and their traditions in ways that ran contrary to Nerburn’s 

interpretations. The technological artifacts are not artifacts in space – they are artifacts in place, 

part and parcel of the meanings of the place. The objects, taken in context, are interpreted 

differently by both parties.  

The ways that technology relates to place can be more subtle than the overt interpretative 

differences between communities. For example, the hearth in a house is a common example of 

emplacement – Casey (1993) explains that the hearth was built in the center of Greek homes, 

 

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structured by the socioculturally experienced image-schematic of the Greek goddess of the 

hearth, Hestia. Hestia was said to be the first Greek deity to build a house and symbolized family 

life and household economy (p. 133). For the Greeks, the place-meaning of the hearth-centered 

home was structured by the sociocultural experience of the deity and, reflexively, the hearth 

structured the place-meanings of home and family. Perhaps not coincidentally is Albert 

Borgmann’s (1987) example of the structuring effects of technology: “a stove [is] used to furnish 

more than mere heat. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a 

family and gave the house a center” (pp. 41-42). Certainly, the emplaced hearth in both examples 

was intentionally used as technology, but as Borgmann recognizes it is not for mere warmth or 

cooking. The home-place, itself, structures interaction in the home in ways that are likely to be 

hidden without focused reflection. Similarly, the height of ceilings, the length of hallways, and 

the emplacement of doors and windows structures our place-meanings and interactions (Casey 

1993).  

These examples highlight two interrelated dimensions of artifacts-in-place – the 

materiality and the permanence of the artifact. Materiality, here, refers to the provenance of the 

artifact including both the material that the artifact is constructed of and the relative 

opacity/transparency of the process by which the artifact was created. Working horses20, wooden 

tools, leather garments, and flax twine, for example, have an ephemeral materiality in that their 

existence (as an artifact) is relatively temporary in virtue of the material they are constructed of. 

Cars, plastic tools, polyester garments, and steel cable, on the other hand, have an enduring 

materiality in that they will exist as they are for much longer than their ephemeral counterparts. 

                                                           
20 Horses may seem an odd addition to this list as they are not obviously an artifact. It is true that some horses – 
such as wild horses – are natural in the sense that their proliferation does not require human intervention, but 
working horses proliferate as a result of human intervention. They are selected, trained, and cared for by humans 
for specific purposes, just as the nursery tree is selected, pruned, and cared for to fill a specific need. 

 

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As illustrated by Dan’s response to Nerburn, the experience of ephemeral artifacts prompted a 

different engagement with objects writ large – leaving an artifact where it is at when it is no 

longer useful would not add to the “clutter” of a landscape as it would go “back into the Earth.” 

As artifacts are direct products of human intervention, ephemerality reminds us that the human 

world is not removed from the natural world – our things come from the earth and go back to the 

Earth. Ephemerality reinforces the porous or non-existing boundary between humans and their 

environments present in -community and -family imaginaries, whereas enduring artifacts 

reinforce a notion that human enterprise proliferates in spite of the natural world, reinforcing the 

human/nature boundary essential to -machine and -garden imaginaries.  

Similar to the material provenance of an artifact is the relative opacity or transparency of 

the process by which the artifact was created. By process opacity/transparency, I mean to 

highlight that the process required to create an object can be either easily grasped by the 

experiencer or may be technically nuanced and not understood except by a minority of people. 

For instance, a hammer that consists of a rock tied to a wooden handle with sinew strap is 

process-transparent as many people would readily grasp how such an artifact was created. In 

contrast, a framer’s hammer consisting of molded plastic and titanium, magnetic nail setters, and 

recoil dampening design is process-opaque as most people would not readily grasp how the 

hammer is created. This is due, in part, to the materiality – where the wood, leather, and rocks 

come from is obvious whereas the provenance of titanium and plastic is not so obvious. 

Materiality aside, the design of the framer’s hammer is the product of technical acumen and 

process that is not available to many. The process of creating the wood/rock hammer can be 

understood by many whereas the process of creating the complex framer’s hammer can be 

understood by only a few. Important, here, is the sense that upon experiencing an artifact we can 

 

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imagine – consciously or not – ourselves creating it (given the right materials and time) instead 

of being baffled by its creation. Transparent artifacts are more readily integrated into our life 

experiences as we apprehend the interconnections between material, process, and expertise in 

ways that are hidden by opaque artifacts. Opaque artifacts require a suspension of disbelief in 

that we understand that some process created the artifact, but we are unable to apprehend the 

process. We are not able to integrate the artifact into our life experiences as we do not know 

which experiences are relevant to the artifact – we do not know the provenance of the materials, 

the design, or the manufacturing process. This relative (non)integration is again important to the 

development of our imaginaries. Somewhat paradoxically, opacity reinforces a take-it-for-

granted simplicity that prevents us from recognizing how we are integrated in our environments 

and grappling with the complex interdependencies of dynamic thinking. Transparency, in 

contrast, makes visible the complexities of our integration into our environments as we are able 

to fully place our artifacts within the intricacies of our worlds, reinforcing the dynamic thinking 

and porous boundedness of our lives within our environments. The process-opacity of an artifact 

helps us understand our place within the environment, either as apart from it or a part of it.  

The materiality of our emplaced artifacts is also related to the permanence of those 

artifacts or, more specifically, the artifact’s ability to withstand stressors and/or adapt to 

changing circumstances. Artifacts range between fragility and durability, referring to the relative 

ability of an artifact to endure throughout repeated use and/or degradative processes. Although 

integrally related to the ephemerality or endurance of an artifact, fragility/durability diverges in 

that the materiality of the artifact will impact its fragility, but it is not wholly responsible. For 

example, some glass artifacts are fragile with respect to their repeated use, yet durable with 

respect to degradative processes. Some wood tools, on the other hand, gain durability by 

 

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repeated use due to our hand’s natural oils protecting the wood whereas these same tools are 

susceptible to degradative processes without use. Importantly, however, is the sense of 

responsibility we have to our artifacts depending on their general fragility/durability. Fragile 

artifacts require care, whether that be through repeated use, maintenance, or protection. Durable 

artifacts do not require the same care as they retain their integrity sans human use, maintenance, 

or protection.21 Thus, fragile artifacts prompt experience of responsibility and care, key notions 

in the -community and -family imaginaries, whereas durable artifacts do not. The experience of 

responsibility, especially to objects that for many are assumed to be inanimate, is important as it 

can be extended to care for other non-artifact things.  

Perhaps more important than the fragility or durability of an artifact is the adaptability of 

that artifact. This adaptability refers to both/either the ability of the artifact to be used as it is in a 

different circumstance and/or the modification of the artifact itself to be re-tooled for a new need. 

Artifacts range from being versatile to being rigid, referring to the overall adaptability of the 

artifact for changing circumstances. For example, a pocketknife is highly versatile as it can be 

used in many different situations – it was not created for a singular purpose. In contrast, a cement 

curb is rigid as it is functionally limited to a small range of tasks, namely to prevent certain size 

vehicles from entering certain areas with ease. Its rigidity is due, in part, to its materiality – the 

cement is too heavy to be easily moved elsewhere and too hard to be easily re-tooled. However, 

a curb made of wood can be moved, chopped, burned, and re-shaped much easier than concrete, 

rendering it more versatile than its concrete counterpart. Adaptability, whether versatile or rigid, 

                                                           
21 It should be noted that all these characteristics of artifacts are temporally relative. Given enough time, the 
majority of artifacts will “go back to the earth” through degradative processes and many durable materials can be 
worn through repeated use. Thus these characteristics are relative to our own sense of time. This should not be 
surprising as our experiences are necessarily limited to our lifetimes and thus our lifetimes act as a relative 
benchmark which we relate durability (and other temporal characteristics) to.  

 

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is not an inherent property of the artifact, as to know whether something is adaptable requires 

answering adaptable to what and by whom. Some communities will find artifacts adaptable that 

others will not, varying both by their own experiences with the materiality and process-opacity 

of the artifact. Machinists may see vehicles as versatile as they perceive the machine as process-

transparent and can re-tool it as needed whereas others see them as rigid as they cannot adapt it 

to changing circumstances.  

Adaptability is largely relative, yet this relativity is tempered by the social imaginary 

guiding our artifact-interpretations. In relating Indigenous views of technology to Nerburn, Dan 

recognizes that  

If a car is new and shiny…then you say it isn’t trash. If it is old and can’t go, then it is 
trash…[but] Maybe we’re still using it. That was the Indian way. Use every part of the 
buffalo. Make ropes from its hair. Make drumsticks from its tail. Some of these people 
are making one car out of a lot of them. I’m making a dog house out of mine. (ibid, p. 
77).  
 
Here, Dan suggests that his communities’ imaginary recognizes artifacts as versatile – an 

imaginary that stems from the experience of using “every part of the buffalo”. In contrast, the 

dominant imaginary constructs artifacts as developed for a singular purpose, limiting the 

communities possessing these imaginaries to interpret their artifacts as rigid  (i.e. an inability to 

recognize the versatility of the object) as well as construct more rigid artifacts (i.e. the 

materiality and process-opacity of artifacts prompt a rigid interpretation). The experience of 

artifacts as versatile – whether it be due to the artifact’s construction or the interpretation of all 

artifacts as versatile/rigid – reinforces the imaginary that guides future experiences of artifact 

adaptability. Similar to the ephemerality, materiality, and process-opacity of artifacts, 

experiences of adaptability reinforce the either staticity or dynamism within diverging 

imaginaries. Versatile artifacts can be re-tooled to meet varying conditions, similar to the ways in 

 

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which Indigenous seasonal rounds can be seen as re-tooling social institutions to meet varying 

conditions. Rigid artifacts reinforce the experience of static emplacement; the artifact just is what 

it is, similar to the static imaginary prompting settlement as finding a place and weathering 

whatever comes (with a notable lack of re-tooling sociocultural, economic, and political 

institutions).  

Our built environments are comprised of artifacts that, taken together, help develop a 

community’s sense of place. Although it is not likely useful to evaluate any particular artifact, 

the aggregation of artifacts and natural features allow comprehensive place-meanings to emerge. 

The interpretative dimensions of artifacts described above are useful in describing the emergence 

and reinforcement of varying imaginaries as our built environments are places and our places 

guide the experiences that are metaphorically extended in our imaginaries. On this account, our 

artifacts range across various materialities and permanencies with each possessing different 

degrees of ephemerality and endurance, transparency and opacity, fragility and durability, and 

versatility and rigidity. In general, artifacts with high degrees of ephemerality, transparency, 

fragility, and versatility are more easily integrated into our natural habitats and life experiences 

in ways that reinforce a porous (or lack of) human/nature boundary and a dynamic, non-linear 

epistemology. In contrast, artifacts with high degrees of endurance, opacity, durability, and 

rigidity are not so easily integrated into our natural habitats and life experiences, reinforcing a 

non-porous human/nature boundary and a linear epistemology. As admitted in chapter three, in 

practice our place-interpretations cannot be so neatly cleaved and we should not be surprised to 

discover imaginaries that are not described by these dimensions and/or imaginaries that are an 

amalgamation of multiple imaginaries. However, these dimensions help to describe (in broad 

 

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strokes) the varying built environments in the American West and their role in the development 

and reinforcement of various environmental imaginaries. 

In general, built environments in the United States range from the urban to the rural. This 

distinction is significant in the American West as the desolate landscape (so perceived by Euro-

American settlement) prompted development around the relatively few consoling places in the 

arid desert – the flat, arable, water-rich valleys – leaving the majority of land undeveloped and 

sparsely populated. Urban centers are densely populated (relative to the West as a whole) and 

quickly give way to rural landscapes. In turn, the rural landscapes quickly give way to 

undeveloped public lands, which make up the majority of western landscapes. This gradient from 

urban to suburban to rural and then to far-rural is further discussed in the following section, but it 

is informative in light of the artifacts that each place holds.  

Given the nature/artifact distinction espoused above, urban centers can be seen as 

predominantly artifact – they are near-fully constructed, curated, pruned, and landscaped 

according to the intentions of their communities and institutions. The far-rural (development 

furthest from the urban centers) are also artifact, yet to a much lesser degree. In the West, rural 

populations often live surrounded by public lands and public lands (managed by the federal 

government) cannot be developed without a lengthy National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 

process. Not only is the degree to which the environment is developed suggestive, but – and to 

the point of this discussion – the artifacts that are constitutive of the built environment are 

telling.  

Urban centers are constructed of durable, process-opaque materials that are intentionally 

designed to endure both degradative processes as well as natural disasters, e.g., engineered 

buildings to withstand earthquakes. As explained above, these characteristics of the built 

 

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environment give us places that are experienced as apart from the natural environment. The 

artifacts surrounding us are not easily integrated into our worlds – they do not admit of their 

manufacturing and design processes and are not adaptable to varying conditions. They are made 

to withstand against nature, reinforcing an imaginary of being bounded from nature.  

Rural places are also constructed and intentionally designed, yet significantly depart from 

the durability of urban centers. Much of the built environment is ephemeral – dirt roads, wood-

rail fences, and dirt banked ditches all put in service of agriculture which is, itself, an ephemeral 

artifact (recalling the intentionality of artifacts). Much of the built environment in rural areas is 

not specifically designed to endure, requiring constant upkeep to maintain fragile artifacts that 

reinforce experiences of responsibility and care for these constituents of place. The often 

celebrated simplicity of rural environments is a reflection of the process-transparency of the 

artifacts and their relationships to each other – we can imagine their creation, integrating our 

skills and knowledges into the paradoxically complex construction.22 We do not need to suspend 

disbelief regarding the provenance of the built elements of these rural landscapes, instead 

recognizing our place qua human being as the progenitor of the artifact and, by virtue of this, 

recognizing the dynamics of ourselves in place. The interconnectedness of ephemerality, 

fragility, and process-transparency prompts experiences that reinforce the dynamic, non-linear 

thinking and porous boundaries that characterize imaginaries of humans as a part of nature. 

I must emphasize that as described, these characteristics form an ideal that is hardly – if 

ever – realized in our reality. Urban centers do in fact have ephemeral and fragile characteristics 

and rural places have enduring and durable characteristics. Our built places are complex 

                                                           
22 The construction may not be complex, per se, but recognizing the process of construction is prima facie 
recognizing more complexity than suspending disbelief regarding the construction and taking the process-opaque 
artifact on face-value. 

 

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heterogeneities that cannot be neatly cleaved and, as such, our experiences of varying places are 

of a multiplicity of characteristics of that place. Imaginaries are not simple constructs that can 

easily be traced – to recognize the imaginary is to recognize the complex multitude of 

experiences that, over time, coalesce into persistent metaphorically-extendable schemas. In 

general, however, the more that we experience certain characteristics the more we may expect 

diverging patterns to emerge. Also, the more attention we pay to our (and other’s) experiences of 

certain place characteristics, the more we may recognize previously unrecognizable schemas. 

Urban dwellings with gridded streets, manicured landscapes, and ordered lots are structured from 

and reinforce imaginaries of non-porous boundedness and linearity. The errant bike, broken 

down cars, and ephemeral built landscapes of rural places are structured from and reinforce 

imaginaries of porous (un)boundedness and dynamism.  

The natural and artifactual things of our worlds are emplaced, providing meaning and 

interpretative experiences to the emplaced individual. The ways that our places structure 

meaning can evidence the ways in which different communities dwell in place, as well as the 

imaginaries they bring to bear when interpreting place-meaning of other places, such as Nerburn 

and Dan’s divergent interpretations of artifacts on the reservation. Regarding the natural and 

artifactual things of our places in the abstract is useful in developing concepts that center our 

experiences in the world instead of centering the world itself in our epistemic projects, but this 

may not be wholly convincing without concrete illustration. Much of the power of diverging 

imaginaries lies in their relative boundedness (porous, non-porous, non-existent) and this 

boundedness pervades our place-interpretations as described through the permeability, 

materiality, and permanence of our places and the things they are constituted of. Boundedness, 

however, is not merely a conceptual construct – it is materially constructed and socially enacted 

 

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in our landscapes through fences, walls, and other obstructions. As fences et al. are both material 

and social instantiations of our imagined boundaries as well as emplaced artifacts prompting 

interpretation, they are salient examples of how our imaginaries both structure and are structured 

by our places. Thus, fences23 provide concrete illustration of the abstract dimensions of our 

places described above. 

Fences as Material Boundaries 

Fences in the American West are as varied as they are ubiquitous throughout the 

landscape. Although the nearly 640 million acres of federally managed public lands is relatively 

protected from development, much of it (especially those parts that are relatively accessible – 

recall the impact of permeability on our place-meanings) is crisscrossed with various fencing. 

Rural agriculture is enclosed by fencing and suburban homes are separated by fencing. Urban 

spaces are permeated with boundaries such as the cement barriers dividing traffic and chain link 

enclosing vacant lots. Those traveling between the urban center and far-rural places in the West 

may recognize that a sort of fencing-pattern emerges – the fence-boundaries that occur along the 

urban/suburban/rural/far-rural landscape are distinct to each landscape yet vary wildly between 

landscapes in their purpose, materiality, and permanence.  

Fences are technological artifacts. These sorts of technologies are often characterized as 

extensions of our own capacities, augmenting our bodies in order to enact desires that are beyond 

the purview of our natural endowments. Fences, in this sense, are extensions of our defensive 

and resistant bodies allowing ourselves to “fend off” the other or “fence in” that which we wish 

to hold close. However, the instrumentality of the fence as an extension of the body does not 

readily admit to the experience of the fence beyond that use which it is intended. Vine Deloria 

                                                           
23 For ease, I use fences to refer generally to material boundaries, although I recognize that not all material 
boundaries may be considered to be a “fence.” 

 

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(2001) reminds us that artifacts have “their own power and wisdom” (p. 62) – it is not sufficient 

to merely ask how the artifact works or what use it is, but to also ask “What does it mean?” (p. 

63). Answers to this question may be diverse, but, at least in part, I take it to point towards the 

relationship between the artifact and those experiencing the artifact – a relationship that is not 

easily reducible to instrumentality or materialism. The power of the artifact, or in this case, the 

fence, is somewhat revealed in how the fence is experienced. How the fence is experienced is a 

reflection of the dimensions of the fence that promote varied interpretations such as the 

materiality and permanence of the fence, themselves a reflection of the desires (guided and 

constrained by varying imaginaries) of those who constructed it.24 Fences are constructed 

artifacts that reflect the imaginaries of those who constructed them, and, in turn, present 

themselves to be interpreted and experienced by others, thereby constructing and reinforcing 

imaginaries impacted by those of the constructor’s.  

Take for instance the barbed wire fencing that is used across the West to manage large 

livestock herds. To Euro-American settlers operating within an imaginary of colonial progress, 

modernism, and Christian dominion, barbed wire was an obvious technical solution to demarcate 

land – public or private – and control the movements of livestock as, during settlement, it was 

“increasingly inexpensive and…used to control motion and space, on a massive scale, exploiting 

its capacity for mass production and its power of violence over flesh” (Netz, 2004). Barbed wire 

is a material enactment of those imaginaries that interpret nature as a wild force to be tamed and 

controlled through industrial ingenuity. To progress as a settler-nation required the demarcation 

of property and the control of wildness both within and without that property – control that 

                                                           
24 Materiality, as used here, is meant to point to the material dimension of our experiences and not that our 
experiences are essentially described by materiality. Materiality is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient 
component of our experience.  

 

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recognized livestock as objects to be manipulated through the violent tearing of flesh. In an early 

advertisement for barbed wire from I. L. Ellwood & Co. (Figure 3), barbed wire is described as 

providing “safety to passengers and property…last[ing] twice as long as any other kind of 

fence…sparks do not set it on fire, floods do not sweep it away” and being exalted as “the 

Pioneer barb fencing”(Glidden steel barb wire manufactured by I. L. Ellwood & Co.).  

The desires of a settler-colonial nation were being enacted through barbed fencing, 

desires that reflected imaginaries of private property (and the objects – presumably livestock – 

that were considered property) and standing against nature through fire and flood. Barbed wire is 

enduring in that it does not require continuous upkeep and its rigid in that it resists being adapted 

to changing circumstances. The enduring and rigid qualities, combined with the violence 

inherent in the barbs, further reinforce the same imaginary that allowed for the proliferation of 

the fencing – an imaginary that recognizes the non-porous boundary between humans and nature 

and the suspension of dibelief regarding the provenance of our technologies that obscures the 

 

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complexities of mass industrial production and distribution that, in turn, encourages the linear 

epistemologies conditioning mechanistic and reductionist perspectives.  

In contrast, consider worm fences that are constructed from split rails and zig-zag across 

the landscape. While these are also used to further property demarcation and control movement 

on the landscape, they do so under much less violent conditions. They are ephemeral as they are 

made of wood that will require upkeep or, in the language used above, they require a 

responsibility to the technology that enduring and durable technologies do not require. Worm 

fences do not require vertical posts anchored in the ground and can be moved to respond to 

changing circumstances such as stream banks moving through the evolution of water channels. 

They do not limit wildlife crossing and due to their zig-zag design, allow for natural ecosystems 

to proliferate in their corners. Although their purpose is to prevent livestock movement, they do 

so in a way that does not impart the violence of tearing flesh, instead gently suggesting 

movement instead of forcibly preventing it. They are imperfect and do require more care than 

industrial counterparts, but the requirement for care also reinforces our sense of responsibility 

and consideration to our worlds in light of the natural processes that will impact the fence.  

Aside from barbed wire and worm fences, privacy fences are commonly used to fully 

demarcate property in suburban communities. Privacy fences are primarily constructed from 

wood planks that have little spacing with the intent to fully prevent the other from crossing, 

whether it be moving across the fence or merely seeing through the fence.25 These enact 

complete non-porous boundaries where my actions are removed from my neighbor’s and vice 

versa. Their ephemerality is tempered with stain and paint with the express intent to slow natural 

degradative processes. Unlike split rails which retain the curves and erratic lines inherent in the 

                                                           
25 It is worth noting the proliferation of vinyl privacy fencing which holds the same characteristics of wood plank 
fencing while also removing the natural materiality of the fence. 

 

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tree being split, privacy fence planks are milled to consistent rectangular shapes that erase the 

character of the tree that they are created from. This erasure reflects the imposition of order on 

natural processes – the same imposition reflected in constructing straight roads through 

landscapes instead of allowing our technology to operate in concert with natural forms. Privacy 

fences reinforce both the boundedness of the other and views of individual ownership that limit 

our responsibilities to the other. The ephemerality of wood planks does elicit a sort of integration 

with the natural world yet is tempered by control and manipulation in order to suit our 

sociocultural desires (e.g., privacy).  

Among barbed wire, worm, and privacy fences are an array of fence-types that vary along 

the materiality and permanence characteristics described above, among others not described here 

(e.g. the ability to permeate the fence, the intended outcomes of the fence, the relationship 

between the fence/those bounded by the fence/those aiming to bound, the sociohistorical role of 

the fence). Following Vine Deloria, we must ask what these fence-types mean – what is their 

power and wisdom as emplaced artifacts and what can we learn by reflecting on our own 

experience of fences. The role of mundane or invisible technologies (e.g. fences, hiking boots, 

water bottles), generally, is complex and multifaceted, yet as intermediaries between our pure 

bodies and our experiences of our environments they warrant reflection (c.f. Borgmann, 1987; 

Michaels, 2000). It is beyond the scope of this project to describe the multiple variations of 

fencing and the ways that experiences of them can reinforce those dimensions of our imaginaries 

that are metaphorically extended to our interpretations of the environment. As Davis and 

Williams (2008) recognize, the “contentious interpretations” of fencing constructs “physical, 

philosophical, and psychological barriers of all types…Fences skirt our properties—and our 

minds” (pp. 243-244), and it is just this skirting of our minds that I seek to describe. Future work 

 

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would do well to better elaborate on the ways that our embodied and sociocultural experiences of 

materially manifested boundaries are interpreted to develop and reinforce those boundaries that 

operate in our environmental imaginaries.  

Perhaps more important to this project, however, is the way that attending to fence-types 

can inform collaborative environmental governance in the American West. There are three broad 

considerations coming from fencing. First, given that ontological boundaries of varying qualities 

are critical to diverging environmental imaginaries, recognizing these divergences (and, 

subsequently, facilitating in light of them) is necessary for productive collaboration. Attending to 

people’s preferred fence types can illuminate those dimensions of their imaginaries that can be 

difficult to ascertain through ratio-discursive reflection.  

Second, the consideration of fencing (or boundaries in general) in collaborative decision-

making must be paid attention, especially as current fence discussion rarely (if ever) moves 

beyond the level of cost-effectiveness and convenience. Fencing and boundaries are ever-present 

in environmental governance in the West and are thus overlooked opportunities to engage with 

the embodied experiences (and metaphorically extended imaginaries) of western communities. 

Briefly, I contend that when collaborations decide to bound something – perhaps a natural spring 

in a cattle pasture or a riparian exclosure to prevent grazing – they can more intentionally reflect 

on the implications of the chosen boundary. Choosing boundaries that promote responsibility and 

care through their inherent ephemerality and fragility gives collaborations opportunities to 

physically toil together in ways that reinforce desire to collaborate in other venues and on other 

projects (see chapter 6 for more on this).  

Lastly, reflecting on body/fence/nature relationships is humbling and this humility is, 

itself, a sociopolitical divergence from the (relative) certainty of mechanistic analyses. As 

 

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Michael (2000) recognizes, these technologies operate on such “mundane a level…that there can 

be no overarching principles by which to derive ‘what to do’ as an environmentally concerned 

actor. However, this is the point. It is an analytic that ‘advises’ modesty and caution…” (p.122). 

The act of fence-reflection – or any other mundane/invisible technology – in collaborative 

forums performs the caution and modesty that collaborative places require.  

 

Conclusion 

Returning to a claim made at the beginning of this chapter, as embodied beings we are 

necessarily emplaced as, following from Casey (1997), there is no place without body 

[and]…there is no body without place…our own embodiment brings implacement—as well as 

continual reimplacement—in its immediate wake” (p. 104). This diverges from many “sense of 

place” analyses in that many seek to inscribe place where none was before (c.f. Drenthen, 2009). 

Analyses of either sort, I contend, are not incompatible or otherwise irreconcilable. We are 

always and necessarily emplaced, but the power of our places (comprised, in part, of the artifact 

and natural things in place) may develop and reinforce imaginaries that themselves do not 

recognize the power of place as in, for instance, -machine imaginaries relying on materialist and 

reductionist explanation. We might call these “self-depreciating” places as the place itself may 

appear as a non-place since its power compels non-place explanations and narratives. Thus, to 

inscribe place where none was before can be seen as a reconfiguration of place as to compel its 

own recognition as a place.  

Place, whether self-depreciating or recognized as such, is critical to understanding how 

our varying embodiments experience our world and, concomitantly, how our imaginations 

metaphorically extend those experiences to other facets of our lives. The desolation that many 

 

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Euro-American settlers experienced in the American West can be seen, here, as a characteristic 

of a self-depreciating place. However, as communities recognize their emplacement through 

concerted reflection of the power of those places, their imaginaries may develop a reticence 

towards those experiences that ignore, distort, or arrest the power of place. The landscape of the 

American West – including its natural, sociocultural, and technological components – requires an 

emplaced politic that recognizes the power and wisdom of place. Embodied co-laboration, I 

suggest, is such a politic, but it must be reconciled with the predominant ratio-cognitive 

collaboration and the impacts of the settler-colonial imaginary in its various forms that permeate 

current efforts. In particular, the role of science in environmental and collaborative governance 

must be attended to with respect to the emplaced communities in the multiple American and 

Indigenous Wests.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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EXPERIENCING SCIENCE 

 
 

“Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth 
of further experience.” – John Dewey (1938, 25), Experience and Education 
 
 
Contemporary environmental governance is complex as it must consider a wide range of 

institutions (e.g., economic, political, social) across varying spatial and temporal scales (e.g., 

local to global, present to future) while respecting diverse values and worldviews (e.g., 

environmental imaginaries) enacted at different social levels (e.g., individual, community, 

nation), all within the context of the uncertainty regarding our knowledge of the complex 

ecosystems we inhabit (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006). If we take environmental governance to be 

governing the behaviors that impact our environments (at whatever level and scale one chooses), 

then we may be tempted to say that environmental governance encompasses most of human 

activity. Although this may be trivially true, it is suggestive as it lays open the sorts of 

knowledge that is applicable and relevant in matters of environmental governance. Scholars have 

met this variety in kind with research and study spanning across the arts and sciences that reflects 

on and interrogates the impacts of humanity on our environments. In short, the study of 

environmental governance is parsed and organized across many scales, levels, dimensions, and 

disciplines within and without the academy. 

However, the practice of environmental governance has not followed suit. Although there 

are those that seek epistemic diversity in matters of the environment, by and large the 

governance institutions that are deemed responsible for and wield the most power in maintaining 

our environments widely rely on scientific knowledge to guide the rules, regulations, policy, and 

law that condition human behavior in our natural environments. To be sure, non-scientific 

inquiries do influence scientific management through ancillary considerations, such as 

 

115 

environmental justice concerns, political culture, and the role of values in science. These 

considerations, among others, do impact environmental governance, yet the predominance of and 

reliance on scientific institutions cannot be understated. This may merely be a problem of 

priority – it is not that these ancillary considerations are not important, only that they must be 

compatible, comprehensible, and/or articulated through the norms of science. For instance, the 

concept of place described in the previous chapter resists the generalizable, quantified, and 

objective qualities that are prized of scientific knowledge. On the surface, we might assume that 

this relative incomprehensibility may render the concept opaque to science – and, by extension, 

opaque to environmental governance – yet ancillary studies have developed the concept 

sufficiently to be taken seriously by governance institutions. However, place as “sensed in a 

chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal experiences, care and 

concern for home, and in the context of other places” (Relph, 1976, p. 29) resists scientific 

translation. If contemporary environmental governance wants to take place seriously, it must 

reform the concept of place in ways that cohere with scientific norms. Writing on “sense of 

place” being used in geoscience pedagogy, Steven Semken (2005) illustrates this translating of 

the concept of place into a more functional vocabulary:  

Place is distinguished from space by being socially constructed and local, rather than 
quantitatively described and universal…Land managers and planners have recently been 
encouraged to factor sense of place into their decision-making processes, adopting a more 
ecologically holistic, rather than economically-driven, approach to resource use…Such 
an approach requires a clear definition or even a quantification of sense of place, and this 
has led to development of psychometric models and methods… (p. 149)  
 
Within a few sentences, Semken clearly regards sense of place as resisting quantitative 

and universal description, but then proceeds to “require” clear (read: universal) definition and 

quantification if it is to be useful to land managers. Again, this may be seen as a matter of 

priority – although sense of place as an obscure and complicated concept is important, it must be 

 

116 

made legible to science in order to be useful for environmental governance. If, on the other hand, 

contemporary governance valued these ancillary considerations in their own right, then it would 

not require translation since translating an essentially non-quantifiable and non-universal concept 

into quantifiable and universal terms will clearly change the concept at the risk of 

impoverishment. In this case, it is likely that the governance institutions themselves would 

require retooling in order to develop methods that are responsive to these sorts of ancillary 

considerations as described in chapter six. 

None of this is meant to suggest that science is not a reliable form of knowledge, valuable 

for our governance projects, or should be disregarded in any way. It is meant only to illustrate 

the predominance of scientific knowledge in environmental governance and the impulse to 

translate non-scientific considerations into scientifically coherent concepts before they can 

become useful. But, as with place, some aspects of human experience resist universal, quantified, 

objective description. Take human experience itself, as described in chapter two. Our 

experiences are continuous, being conditioned by both our external environments and our 

internal attitudes as well as those experiences that came before. Some of them are forceful in 

ways that we recognize them as having an experience, yet many of them are inchoate such as our 

experience of the artifacts in our environments. Experience is, presumably, a complex 

combination of objective external conditions and subjective internal attitudes, discrete in some 

ways (such as my spatio-temporally located experience of a certain desk) yet ultimately 

continuous. They are often unrecognized as our inchoate experiences far outnumber our 

intentional experiences, and characterized by an infinite and unknowable amount of past 

experiences. How are we to maintain scientific objectivity, reliable measurement, and 

 

117 

universality when our subject is inherently amorphous and impacted by, while concomitantly 

impacting, the scientist’s own experience?  

I do not aim to substantively answer this question as, plausibly, any answer will make the 

same prioritization errors described above, namely that by translating phenomena that resists 

scientific comprehensibility (i.e. objective, universal, and/or quantifiable) we risk impoverishing 

the phenomena itself. Our experiences, imaginations, and place-meanings are crucial to how we 

conceive of, live in, and appreciate our environments, yet it is difficult to see how these can be 

made functional to contemporary governance as scientific concepts. It is tempting to shoehorn 

these facets of our lives into governance discussions by demanding that they be treated without 

scientific translation in our environmental decision-making, yet this does not grapple with the 

underlying tensions regarding the difficulty in employing concepts that are perhaps 

fundamentally incommensurable with current institutions. I contend that it is not just that the 

norms of science (and scientific governance) disallow the treatment of 

experience/imagination/place in governance, but that the experience of science “arrests or 

distorts” (quoted in the epigraph of this chapter) future experiences, developing an imaginary 

that is unequipped to treat these amorphous dimensions of our lives.  

In order to understand how science can promote these arresting and distorting 

experiences, it is first necessary to understand what I mean by “science” as it is uncharitable to 

homogenize such a diverse activity. Scientific activity ranges across subject material, 

methodology, and accepted practices in ways that make it difficult to generalize the experience 

of science (in general). Despite this diversity, there are recognized activities and norms of 

science that taken together promote the experiences that function to limit the uptake of 

incommensurable orientations. This chapter describes this process through discussion of 

 

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scientific experience in general and the particular experiences of measuring, grouping, and 

realism, ending with a discussion of scientific management in the American West and our 

opportunities to move toward a more holistic and diverse environmental governance.  

Scientific Experience 

Given that our experiences are continuous, meaning that we are constantly in a state of 

experience whether it be forceful or inchoate, any of our activities will necessarily be 

experienced. The character of that experience, however, is dependent on the activity including 

both the environing conditions it takes place in, and our attitudinal dispositions toward the 

activity. The infinitely various characteristics of our activities are, as described in chapter two, 

taken up and organized in our imaginations to be metaphorically extended to other aspects of our 

lives; thus, attending to the ways in which scientific activity – proliferate in environmental 

governance – sets the conditions for our experiences is helpful to understand how the norms and 

tenets of science are extended onto other, perhaps less-scientific, aspects of our lives. It is well 

beyond the scope of this project to fully describe the scientific experience as, prima facie, it will 

vary across time (as norms develop and evolve), discipline (as the disunity of science highlights 

ontological tensions between the disciplines themselves, a la Dupré [1983],), and individuals (as 

each individual scientist’s experiences will differ based on their own past experiences).  

Although scientists have a unique experience of science given their proximity to the 

process, they are not alone in experiencing science. The prominence of science in issues of 

governance, technology, and society at large guarantees that a large number of non-scientists will 

experience – even minimally – science. If we are continuously experiencing and, at times, we 

encounter science, then in some trivial way we all experience science. The power of these 

experiences will likely depend on the quality and quantity of the experience along with prior 

 

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dispositions toward science, such that people who rarely have meaningful encounters with 

science will not develop imaginative and metaphorical extensions that draw from their minimal 

experience of science. In contrast, those complacent within the scientific institution – either as 

researchers, community outreach specialists, or the various administrators upholding and 

safeguarding scientific values – will likely develop imaginative and metaphorical extensions that 

draw heavily on their scientific experiences.  

The infinite diversity of individuals between these two positions makes it difficult, 

perhaps impossible, to determine with any sort of reliability the character or quantity of 

experiences that render certain metaphorical extensions. But this suggests only that we cannot 

determine the exact imaginative potential of the individual, leaving space open to evaluate the 

experiential potential of the situation. By this, I mean we may not know how an individual will 

experience a scientific situation as their experience will rely on an immeasurable set of prior 

experiences, but by understanding the situation sans the specific experiencer we can recognize a 

broad set of experiential possibilities that describe the potential experiences of the individual.  

Taken together, the task of describing the scientific experience appears, minimally, 

daunting. Here, I do not take up the task of describing a full taxonomy of scientific experience, 

instead evidencing the experiential potential of scientific experiences by briefly evaluating only a 

few paradigm examples of scientific activity. Following from Hasok Chang (2011), one helpful 

way to distinguish between different types of scientific activities is to distinguish between 

operational activities and mental activities, although Chang himself rejects this “atomistic 

analysis,” recognizing that these two dimensions of scientific activity are a mere projection of a 

much more complex activity and, as such “[w]e cannot literally construct the [complex activity] 

 

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from the projections, but studying the projections does provide important insights about the 

[complex activity]” (p. 210).  

The complex activity of science – and the experience it provides – can thus be 

illuminated through studying these operational and mental projections. However, these activities 

are not unrestrained. They occur within the institution of science and are thus normatively 

constrained. Again, Chang recognizes this as “activities are rule-bound systems of actions, they 

are inherently normative in the sense that the actions within [a scientific] activity are continually 

evaluated in terms of their conformity to the rules” (p. 209). These normative rules structure the 

actions and activities of the scientist and are thus critical to understanding the experience of 

science as the individual’s experience is importantly constrained by the expectations and 

demands placed upon them by the normative institution. This suggests that an analysis of 

scientific experience (thin as it may be) must recognize the operational aspects, the mental 

aspects, and the normative aspects of scientific activity. 

The paradigm examples I evaluate here are the operational activity of measuring, the 

mental activity of grouping, and the normative criterion of realism. What I mean by these will 

become apparent in the following discussion, but briefly I take measuring to be the activity of 

describing the size, shape, amount, quality, etc. of a phenomenon by appealing to uniform 

standards of comparison; I take grouping to be the mental faculty of organizing phenomena by 

appealing to shared characteristics of the constituents; and I take realism to be the attitude that 

our scientific knowledge is that of a mind-independent reality. I recognize that each of these 

(measuring, grouping, and realism) are complex ideas that have been analytically treated in the 

literature (c.f., Kendig, 2015; Savage & Ehrlich, 1992) and while describing these complexities 

may be useful, it is plausible that the everyday occurrence of science most commonly 

 

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experienced is not reflected on with the sort of nuance that these accounts provide. Put a 

different way, most people carry out these activities in these normative institutions with a sort of 

ignorance to the analytical intricacies of the activities and norms. Therefore, these general 

definitions serve as a jumping off point to broadly evaluate the ways that science is experienced 

while a more nuanced account would require recognition of both the particular circumstances 

and the individual experiencer of a situation to fully explicate the specific experience.  

Measurement in our lives is ubiquitous. Assume, for example, that you wish to make a 

beef stew and find a recipe that looks appealing. Thanks to Fannie Farmer, a 19th century chef 

whose book Boston Cooking-School Cook Book introduced standardized measurement into 

recipes instead of the imprecise pinch-of-salt, handful-of-sugar, and plum-size-of-butter of the 

times, adherence to the measurements and methods of your recipe will assure that your beef stew 

is comparable to the beef stew of the recipe writer. The standardized measurement of ingredients 

in our recipes may seem trivial, yet it is an apt example of measurement in general. Measurement 

allows the chef to guarantee their results, share their recipes, and reliably compare their culinary 

dishes by evaluating the quantities of the constituent parts of the dishes. Prior to standard 

measurement, preparing quality beef stew required a personal familiarity with stews in general, 

the specific components of stews, the methods of stew production, and the preferences of those 

eating the stew (among other considerations). To borrow from common parlance, prior to 

standard measurement preparing beef stew was not a science. It is not accidental that Fannie 

Farmer introduced these standard measurements at a time when the Morrill Land-Grant Acts 

(1862, 1890) were promoting the study and teaching of trade skills, including domestic and home 

economics (Richards, 2000). The creation of academic programs around home economics 

introduced activities such as cooking to scientific investigation and methodology, including the 

 

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standardized measurement of our recipes, and more broadly measurement to many (if not all) 

aspects of our lives.  

Standardized measurement allows the chef and the scientist to guarantee reproducibility, 

develop common practices in order to share methods and results with each other, and learn more 

about their own projects by studying the constituent parts of their projects. But, in doing so, it 

also obscures the immeasurable aspects of their projects that, upon recognition, may require a 

different comportment to confront. But, I am not arguing for a philosophy of measurement per 

se, but that the experience of measuring operates in our imaginations and metaphorical 

extensions in ways that need to be recognized. To be sure, this is a nuanced distinction. Whereas 

a philosophy of measurement asks “what is the nature of measurement?” an evaluation of the 

experience of measurement asks “how are we impacted by measuring?” The nature of 

measurement certainly matters much in the same way as the nature of our environing conditions 

matter to condition our experiences, such that what we are measuring and the reliability of that 

measurement condition how we go about measuring (i.e. experience measuring). 

If, for instance, we take our measurements to be approximations of objective qualities of 

the measured (mind-independent) phenomenon or, simply, measurement realism, then we may 

opt for measurement apparatus and processes that aim to reduce the distance between our 

measured values and the objective qualities being measured (Michell, 2004; Trout, 1998). The 

focus here would be on creating instruments that track objective qualities and relations – 

whatever these instruments may be, we can be assured that they prompt experiences that are 

conditioned by the particular instruments. Put differently, we will have experiences of the 

instrument and experiences of measuring – although they are related and the experience of one 

will be influenced by the other, the experience of measuring is common across many instruments 

 

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whereas the experience of the instrument is particular to that instrument. This discussion focuses 

specifically on the experience of measurement while recognizing (and putting to the side) that 

the instrument being experienced may play a role in the experience of the measurement. 

The nature of measurement one explicitly or implicitly subscribes to – whether it be 

representational, operational, conventional, realist, or something else altogether (c.f. Savage & 

Ehrlich, 1992) – will track and be conditioned by the commitments of the particular philosophy 

of measurement subscribed to, developing instruments and practices that track the relevant 

phenomenon. Common to theories of measurement, however, is the act of measuring – despite 

our varying beliefs in what we are measuring and how reliable that measurement is (according to 

the nature of measurement), our measurement activities prompt an experience of measurement.  

To measure requires something to measure (the phenomena), a measurer (the 

experiencer), and some mediating process that tracks the relevant qualities in some standard way 

(the measuring). That measuring requires something to measure is straightforward, but it is also 

telling – to delineate the thing to be measured is to decide what sort of phenomena count as the 

“thing” as opposed to the “not-things.” It should be noted that this is inherently a boundary-

setting process (as described in chapter three), but I do not wish to belabor that point here. 

Importantly, though, is the discreteness of the boundary-setting. Whether or not the attended 

phenomena is ontologically discrete is an important metaphysical matter (recall that discreteness 

prompted Democritus’ atomism), but it is not so important to the experience of discreteness. To 

measure a phenomenon is to imply that the phenomenon can be distinguished from other 

phenomenon in some way – it is this distinguishability that renders the experience of 

discreteness. We may have rational (i.e. cognitively justified) reasons to believe that the 

phenomenon in question is continuous, yet by applying measurement we experience the 

 

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phenomenon as discrete (or, at least, that the constituent components of the phenomenon are 

discrete). Again, I do not make any claims to the ontology of that which is measured, only that 

our predilection for measuring asks us to experience the phenomenon as if it is discrete in order 

to isolate the qualities and/or values that are important for our project. The targets of our 

measurement become discrete-able in order for us to measure, begetting an experience of 

discreteness in the process of measurement.  

The discreteness of measurement is integrally tied to the quantification of measurement 

in that discrete units – whatever they may be – can be counted and mathematically manipulated 

in ways that the phenomenon sans measurement may resist. The numerical analysis of non-

numerical phenomena is ever-present in contemporary science, allowing for complex 

mathematical analyses that help us to understand the phenomenon in question. The epistemic 

power drawn from measurement via the scientific institution cannot be understated – our ability 

to measure and mathematically represent our world is critical to the scientific progress enabling 

our understanding of our world. Aside from the epistemic power quantification affords, the 

quantification of measurement also allows us to impart standards to compare and contrast 

seemingly diverse phenomena. For example, our understanding of the relationship between 

matter and energy, famously expressed as E=MC2, relies on the standardization of the 

quantification system it is written in. We can relate energy and matter and, in so relating, 

understand more about our world through the standardization of the system we use to represent 

both phenomena. The numbers and operators of our equations mean the same thing across 

different formulations, regardless of the phenomena they were derived from. In a recipe, 1 cup is 

just 1 cup – it may be 1 cup of flour or of sugar, but the measurement, quantification, and 

standardization of 1 cup is familiar across recipes requiring either flour or sugar.  

 

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I do not argue that these characteristics of science are wrong, misguided, or otherwise 

unreasonable. However, our experience of these characteristics, especially given the quantity of 

these experiences in the scientific institution combined with the epistemic power given to them, 

can be taken up in the imagination and extended to other aspects of our world that may resist 

measurement, quantification, or standardization. The complex interplay between the experiences 

of measurement, including discreteness, quantification, standardization, and the epistemic, 

political, and social power afforded the scientific institution is critical to the development of an 

imaginary where the important aspects of our world (however decided) are those that can be 

measured, quantified, and standardized. These imaginaries can manifest in many different ways 

from the preference and prioritization of some phenomena over others, the reduction of 

immeasurable phenomena to measurable (i.e. discrete) units, and the (often implicit) disregarding 

of phenomena that resists measurement. In the recipe metaphor, these manifestations can be seen 

as preferring recipes that have measurements to those that do not, imparting measurement to 

recipes that do not yet have them, and/or neglecting any recipe without measurement as whatever 

it may be, it is not a recipe.   

This is not surprising as our imaginaries, in general, comport us to certain aspects of the 

world that may obscure others or may require translation at the risk of impoverishment. What 

needs to be recognized, however, is the way that the imaginary itself either allows or disallows 

the recognition of other imaginaries – a point that will be taken up later in the chapter. 

Experiencing measurement, complete with the discreteness, quantification, and the 

standardization it requires – as well as the epistemic, political, and social power it enjoys – 

prompts imaginaries that see the world as if it were measurable. A world that is structured as if it 

is measurable (i.e. phenomena are understood in measurable terms from culture and science to 

 

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recipes and economic markets) will certainly be more comfortable for these imaginaries and thus 

prompt the material and systemic reproduction of the imaginary. However, measurement is but 

one scientific activity that is experienced and extended into some imaginaries and future work 

would do well to evaluate other operational activities and their experiential potentials. 

When we are measuring, we are manipulating the materiality of our world in ways that 

further our epistemic projects. The activities of science require a wide array of material 

manipulation, but it also requires specific mental activities such as asserting, denying, deducing, 

ordering, and believing (Chang, 2011). As suggested above, although it is worth evaluating each 

of these (and others), it is not my purpose to provide a nuanced account of the mental activities 

and experiences of science. However, the activity of grouping, or the mental faculty of 

organizing phenomena by appealing to shared characteristics of individual phenomenon, is 

illuminating with regards to the overall experience of science. To group is to recognize a certain 

characteristic (or multiple characteristics) and delineate all phenomenon sharing that 

characteristic from others that do not share it.  

I take it to be trivially true that we all, in some fashion, group. The fruit farmer may 

group by picking bad apples (due to some “bad” characteristics) from good apples to preserve 

the crop and the financial analyst may group investments by their predicted return rates. That we 

all group is important, however I contend that the experience of grouping as a scientific 

researcher is importantly different than the more general activity of grouping. This is due to the 

goals of the grouping – the goal of removing bad apples is to protect the apple crop, the goal of 

organizing investments is to direct future investments, and the goal of scientific grouping is to 

uncover and describe the truths of our world. As with measurement, the epistemic, political, and 

social power afforded the scientific institution privileges the institution with the ability to 

 

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safeguard these truths, including the ways that they are discovered and what sorts of things are 

truth-apt. Grouping is an essential activity to the truth-aptness of the phenomena of scientific 

study as the characteristic of truth-aptness primarily delineates those phenomena that are 

acceptable for scientific inquiry with further groupings occurring along different disciplinary 

lines and for different epistemic projects. These further groupings occur at different levels, such 

as disciplinary grouping that delineates the sorts of phenomena that are deemed appropriate for 

particular disciplinary study or subject grouping that delineates the particular phenomena 

relevant to a particular research program.  

Importantly similar to grouping, is the activity of dividing where the former places two 

things together due to similarity and the latter separates two things due to dissimilarity. In the 

Phaedrus, Plato describes the two activities of grouping and dividing as fundamental epistemic 

activities where:  

the first is in which we bring a dispersed plurality under a single form…[and the second] 
whereby we are enabled to divide into forms, following the objective articulation; we are 
not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher... (Plato & Hackforth, 1952, p. 133) 
 
Plato’s description is noteworthy as grouping and dividing could presumably track the 

“objective articulation” of the world where our categories reflect a mind-independent world; our 

groupings are not mere convention, but reflective of the metaphysically prior world of forms. 

The tracking of either naturally occurring or socially constructed groups is well trod in the 

literature on natural kinds (c.f., Dupré, 1996; Kendig, 2015; Mill, 1884). A natural kind is taken 

to be a grouping that occurs naturally and independent of human involvement such that 

“elephants” are a natural kind due to their grouping sans humans but “large mammals” are not as 

they’re grouping requires the relativity of human’s own size as “large” means large-as-

compared-to-humans (or some other criteria). Natural kind realism is the view that our scientific 

 

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groupings track mind-independent natural articulations such that the label “elephants” is 

describing a unique set of objects that exist prior to human intervention. It is worth noting that 

the metaphysical notion of natural kind realism does not, by itself, imply the epistemic notion 

that our groupings do, in fact, track these articulations as it is possible – and historically 

prevalent – that our groupings have just got it wrong and what we initially thought was a natural 

kind turned out to not to be (Psillos, 2005).  

But not all are committed to natural kind realism. Conventionalist accounts argue that 

what we may treat as mind-independent groupings are, nevertheless, socially constructed such 

that whatever we may be grouping is dependent on the humans doing the grouping (Kukla, 

2000). On this view, our epistemic aims can be furthered by novel groupings but it is a mistake 

to assume that these groupings thus track a mind-independent and naturally articulated world. 

Grouping plants as weeds and flowers, for instance, does not track a mind-independent 

difference in the plants, but instead the human preference for one over the other (Bird, 2018). For 

conventionalists, it is human interests that characterize our groupings and not a naturally 

articulated world. These descriptions of realism and conventionalism are brief and not meant to 

exhaust the range of positions regarding natural kinds (e.g., the promiscuous realism of John 

Dupré, 1995).  

What we are grouping and dividing has been heavily argued in the philosophy literature 

on natural kinds, ranging from accounts that center our groupings on a realist account of the 

world to groupings that center on a conventionalist account of the world whereas our groupings 

are dependent on our social, epistemic, and moral projects and thus do not track natural 

articulations. Although philosophers have analyzed the notion of natural kinds, it is not likely 

that the practicing scientist reflects on the metaphysical foundation of their own grouping 

 

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activities. In this unreflective experience of science, the epistemic goal of describing the 

objective articulations of a mind-independent reality are ever-present.  

It is not my aim to argue whether or not we are tracking the objective and natural 

articulations of a mind-independent reality as we group, only to recognize that the scientific 

activity of grouping is experienced as if we are tracking such. Although constructionist and 

conventionalist commitments are commonplace in the humanities and critical social sciences, the 

natural sciences – biology, ecology, geology, etc. – are committed to acting (and thus 

experiencing) as if there is an objectively articulated mind-independent world. If there is such a 

world, then it is only our fallibility as humans that prevent us from correctly, reliably, and truly 

describing this world. The scientific institution (with the epistemic, political, and social power it 

enjoys) seeks to redress this fallibility and has, in doing so, developed practices that prompt the 

experiencer to experience their projects as-if they are tracking such a world – an iterative process 

that is taken up into by the imagination and manifested in future (intergenerational) scientific 

projects that are iteratively experienced. This means, in summation, that regardless of the reality 

of objective articulations, scientific activities are experienced as-if the groupings are reflective of 

reality.  

What does this experience amount to? As mentioned, we all experience grouping in some 

fashion. However, experiencing grouping as being reflective of reality combined with the 

epistemic, political, and social power of the scientific institution renders a scientific experience 

of grouping as something more than the functional grouping we all partake in. Scientific 

grouping is doing something more. Although experience of this grouping may be varied, in 

general grouping requires the imposition of boundary-conditions to delineate that which is within 

the group and that which is without, which itself requires the objects of grouping to be of such a 

 

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nature that their relevant qualities can be ascertained. These boundaries are not porous as the 

perceived reality of the grouping is predicated on its constituents possessing particular 

characteristics that distinguish them from other objects – apples, as a group, are clearly 

distinguished from non-apples and the boundary between the two cannot be crossed while 

maintaining fidelity to the original group. An apple is an apple, and if it is not, then it is not. The 

experience of non-porous boundaries, as described in chapter three, reminds us that the 

experience of these sorts of boundaries is extended through our imagination to view non-porous 

boundaries in other aspects of our lives. It is telling that the scientific institution is prominent in 

environmental governance when many (settler colonial) governance institutions treat nature as 

being non-porously bounded from human activity. 

The activity of scientific grouping is directed toward either a better understanding of the 

relationship between multiple groups or a better understanding of the group itself. By dividing 

phenomena into groups and then studying the relationships between those groups, we impart an 

organization on the world wherein reality is constructed of constituent parts that stand in relation 

to each other yet remain distinct from each other. Although the river and the bank are related, 

they are not the same thing, nor are the fish and the river or the riverbed and the river. We can 

understand rivers, fish, banks, and beds as related, but they are importantly different things that 

can be grouped apart from each other. The as-if-reality character of these groupings – regardless 

of whether they are reality – develops an imaginary that views reality organized as such. And 

since, in the realist tradition, reality just is as it is (meaning that there can only be one reality) the 

organization of this reality as practiced, experienced, and imagined by the institution that our 

society has come to rely on to define reality can just be the only reality. 

 

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Following from the organization of reality as grouped and related objects is the 

disciplinary specialization that has developed in the scientific institution. As multiple groupings 

have developed through time, themselves related by qualities of the groups rather than qualities 

of the constituents of the groups, science has specialized by studying various groups. For 

example, the river in the previous example may be studied by hydrology, the riverbank by 

riparian ecology, the river bed by geology, the fish by aquatic biology, and so on. Of course, 

there are many ways to understand disciplinary specialization – historical process, political 

reaction, economic opportunity, technological possibility, etc. – but scientific grouping, i.e. 

imposing boundary conditions on apt objects in order to better understand the relations between 

groups or the intricacies of a group, is essential to specialization.  

Thus, the experience of scientific grouping can be understood as the experience of 

imposing non-porous boundary conditions that presumably track reality, recognizing as real 

those objects that are of a nature that the relevant qualities are ascertainable, describing reality as 

various groups related to each other, and the experience of disciplinary specialization. Such an 

experience will invariably manifest in many ways beyond the scope of this project, but the 

experiential potential of grouping can be broadly described along familiar lines. First, 

imaginaries developed around reductionist and atomist accounts of the world follow, in part, 

from the experience of grouping as individual groups of distinct phenomena can be divided along 

more particular, differentiated qualities as more is learned about the group in question. Common 

taxonomy trees operate in this way, such that sufficient knowledge of the group “deer” prompts 

division into the sub-groups of “moose”, “elk”, and “mule deer” based on differential deer-

physiologies, allowing ever-more nuanced – and reductionist – accounts of the world to emerge. 

Epistemic progress seen as refined grouping (i.e. the increasing subdivision of a phenomenon) 

 

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and as experienced in scientific research with the goal of ascertaining the truth of the world, is 

taken up in the imagination and extended to the world at large, now imagined as the schema 

truth-ascertainable is group-dividable. It is not that truth is not ascertainable on the reductionist 

model, but only that this metaphorical extension limits what counts as truth-ascertainable – 

namely those phenomena that are not groupable and/or group-dividable – which can have, in 

terms of the epilogue to this chapter, the effect of arresting or distorting future epistemic 

experiences by failing to recognize the truth of experiences that resist grouping, dividing, sorting, 

measuring, etc.  

Second, for a phenomenon to have groupability its nature must be such that the relevant 

characteristics can be clearly delineated. Fuzzy phenomena, or those that are difficult to pin-

down, define, and/or measure, are disregarded, distorted, or de-prioritized in much of scientific 

research. Salient examples are the topics of this project – imagination, experience, place, etc. – 

which, if taken seriously, are exceedingly difficult to group.26 Again, limiting the relevant 

criteria to that which can be grouped has the arresting/distorting effect warned against in the 

epilogue. It is not that clearly delineated characteristics are not relevant, only that the experience 

of them as only relevant or primarily relevant impoverishes our future experiential possibilities. 

Lastly, the variety of groupings, sub-groupings, and combined groupings that help to 

define disciplinary specialization also make it exceedingly difficult – if not impossible – to offer 

a unified picture of reality. As John Dupré (1983) reminds us, “the ideal hare that the 

physiologist might construct out of ideal cells is just not the same as the ideal hare that is hunted 

by the ecologist’s ideal lynx” (p. 335). Perhaps we do not need or desire unification, but the 

                                                           
26 I recognize that this project, itself, relies on grouping. I am explicit about my constructionist commitments and 
attitudes, such that my groupings are mere heuristics to guide our intuitions and not to be seen as reflective of 
some mind-independent reality. If this project is taken seriously, any sort of mind-independent reality is always 
arbitrated by the imagination and our affective, (sub)conscious, embodied, and mind-dependent experiences. 

 

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groupings inherent in science and highlighted in this quote construct an epistemic system where 

it is unlikely that unification could ever be achieved. In practice, theoretical unification is not 

likely necessary. But a non-unified epistemic system can still pose practical challenges such as 

further disciplinary entrenchment when interdisciplinarity is needed to address wicked problems.  

The experience of grouping, in general, supports an imaginary of reality as consisting of 

groupable objects, that when grouped can be studied to better understand the objects themselves 

and/or the relations between the groups. When a grouping is studied (and thus experienced) 

extensively, an imaginary of the world emerges where the ontological properties of that group 

(e.g. physiological properties of individual wildlife versus population dynamics of that wildlife 

group) take precedence over other concerns. In the extreme, this can manifest as imaginaries 

seeing all of reality only from the perspective of a singular disciplinary commitment, such as 

reducing all population dynamics to the aggregate expressions of individual animal behavior. 

This sort of disciplinary capture hampers the ability to recognize relationships between different 

ontological groupings as “what counts as a good research question, what counts as an acceptable 

answer to a research question, and what is an acceptable path from question to answer” (Brister, 

2016, p. 84) is both defined by the discipline in question and can significantly diverge from other 

disciplines. Evelyn Brister (2016) argues that disciplinary capture occurs when the commitments 

of one discipline – in part defined by the objects of study and accepted methods of studying 

those objects – “takes precedence over [the commitments of] other disciplines’” (p. 84). 

Combined with the power differentials between disciplines, this can present reality as being best 

understood by only certain disciplinary explanations. If we imagine the world as groupable 

objects, then disciplines will emerge with this imaginary as the foundation. As these disciplines 

emerge, they specialize into sub-disciplines and diversify across their subjects, with those most 

 

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closely aligned with the dominant imaginary gaining epistemic, political, and social power 

through disproportionate research grants, institutional support, and social interest. The iterative 

process promotes the most powerful disciplines which reinforce the imaginary while also 

narrowing our experiential possibilities. Again, this narrowing arrests and/or distorts the growth 

of future experiences and can, practically, hinder the just resolution of complex and wicked 

social problems. 

The limited scientific activities of measuring and grouping described here share in 

common a realist orientation where scientific activities are presumably describing a mind-

independent world. On its own, this is not worrisome and has truly increased human capacity in 

ways that should not be understated. But, the objectivity, discrete-ability, quantification, 

standardization, reductionist and atomistic characterizations of this reality are not without 

consequence. The experience of these activities and the imaginaries constructed from these 

experiences form a worldview where only certain practices can provide truth as they are most 

closely tracking “objective” reality thus limiting the epistemic communities that do not have 

imaginaries where these practices are relevant. This gives the scientific institution considerable 

power to describe what is epistemically right and wrong and, in doing so, safeguarding their 

imaginary from those it perceives as threats. The world it constructs is a world following from a 

particular imaginary replete with its own meanings, recognized by Elena Ruiz-Aho (2011) as 

“preliminary distinctions aimed at disambiguating the technical meaning of foundational 

terminology...[rely on] a particular conception of meaning [that] is already at play that filters out 

alternative possibilities for critically engaging some of the broader nuances of the field…” (p. 

314). Divergent imaginaries are thus rendered incoherent and/or incommensurable and, as they 

 

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are not seen as reflecting mind-independent reality, they are disregarded or unrecognizably (and 

often unjustly) contorted to align with the dominant imaginary (Latulippe, 2015).  

Philosophers have long argued about reality. I do not presume to know or describe what a 

mind-independent reality is, only suggesting that our very real experiences can develop 

imaginaries that constrain our future experiential-possibilities and limit the expression of non-

dominant imaginaries. Our experiences are of some thing, but they are organized and manifested 

in ways that construct that thing very differently. Experiences that treat that thing as prior and 

independent of our experience of that thing can, as I argue, arrest and distort our ability to 

experience that thing as some thing other than an objective/mind-independent thing. The 

experiences of scientific activities such as measuring and grouping, as well as the experience of 

science – writ large – as taking mind-independent reality as its focus, have just this arresting and 

distorting experiential potential.  

This discussion is likely to annoy many readers. Our intuitions are often groomed by this 

dominant imaginary, and so it is hard to imagine otherwise. What we imagine the world as when 

we measure it or divide it up in a laboratory forms a concept of the world as completely and 

wholly measurable and groupable. But this is only one way to imagine the world. I leave it up to 

future work and better scholars to evaluate the possibilities and constraints of varying 

imaginaries, recognizing here only that there are different imaginaries and that they are 

differentially accepted and treated in our epistemic, ethical, social, and governance practices. I 

suggest only that those imaginaries that distort, disregard, or reject other imaginaries should be 

treated with caution as rejecting an imaginary is akin to rejecting the experiences and worldviews 

of the community that holds that imaginary and, further, disallowing the rejector from imagining, 

experiencing, and learning from the world as some thing other than they imagine it.  

 

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The remainder of this chapter describes livestock permitting on the federally held lands 

of the American West, illustrating how the experiences of measuring and grouping are 

institutionalized within rangeland management and citing ways in which the imaginary built 

from these experiences limits other experiential possibilities from emerging.  

Rangeland Practice 

As described above, scientific activities are carried out on presuppositions that may 

diverge from other communities’ imaginaries, consequently constraining environmental 

governance to those epistemic foundations that conceptualize the world in a way that can 

marginalize some communities (replete with their divergent imaginaries) from participation in 

governance. A salient example of how the scientific institution impacts western environmental 

governance can be seen in the role of environmental monitoring and livestock grazing in the 

West. As mentioned in the introduction to this project, livestock ranching is common in the 

West, but it is managed differently than in other parts of the country. Federal agencies permit 

livestock ranchers to use federal lands for grazing, whereas much of the rest of the country 

grazes on private lands that do not require government-sanctioned permitting. These western 

permits are subject to federal regulation, including the Federal Land Policy Management Act 

(1976), the National Forest Management Act (1976), the National Environmental Protection Act 

(1970), and a variety of United States Fish and Wildlife Service regulations, state and local 

resource plans, and regional management plans. Given the proportion of federal lands in the 

American West (the majority of which are eligible for grazing), grazing permits – and the 

subsequent impacts of grazing (positive, neutral, or negative) – are an integral consideration in 

western environmental governance.   

 

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Grazing permits were first issued in the passing of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 as a 

way to manage for conflicts arising from usage of the commons by competing ranchers. In 

contemporary permitting, these permits designate a day of the year when livestock can be “put 

on” to the range (allowed to graze on federal lands) and a day that they must be “taken off.” The 

number of livestock permitted per grazing allotment is decided by the amount of graze-able feed 

that the allotment has, itself a product of scientific calculation. Governance, and the science it is 

often founded on, understands the environment as being sufficiently stable from growing season 

to growing season in order to demand specific dates, as well as that the amount of vegetative 

growth was a sufficient determinant of herd size. The stability imagined of the environment 

prompts a governance strategy that reinforces the place-stability discussed in chapter four – itself 

constructing a non-porous boundary between humans and nature as human activity is not aligned 

with the ebbs and flows of natural activity.  

The decades since issuance of these permits have shown that the livestock management 

they prescribed often results in extreme environmental degradation, especially given the relative 

fragility of arid desert ecosystems. This, in turn, has resulted in the proliferation of anti-livestock 

ideals arguing that the arid environments of the West are not suited to livestock production and 

thus livestock should be removed (Wuerther & Matteson, 2002). While the demand to remove 

livestock due to the legacy impacts of overgrazing may be ecologically justifiable, it has also led 

to substantial conflict in western environmental governance. Western environments are 

predominantly held in common as federal public lands, so it is not obvious which public to favor 

when the values are contradictory – the conflict is often simplified to livestock are either allowed 

to graze, or they are not. The conflict rises above livestock when viewed as competing 

imaginaries; the -garden imaginaries that predominantly arise from the recreation experiences of 

 

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the urban community stand at odds with the -community and -extractive imaginaries that emerge 

from the agricultural experiences of the rural communities.27 Thus, the conflicted imaginaries pit 

rural communities versus urban communities, long-term residents versus newcomers, recreation 

versus ranching, and environmentalists versus ranchers (among others), pitting varying 

communities – with their respective imaginaries – against each other in a multitude of conflicts 

beyond livestock.  

Governance has responded to this conflict in various ways, but, with regard to livestock, 

permitting has largely stayed the same. Although the state of rangeland science has greatly 

improved, the process remains: Scientists group and measure the ecosystem to ascertain its 

carrying-capacity for livestock, permits are issued on these recommendations, and ranchers 

operate within these permitted constraints. On the surface, this appears to be a viable approach if 

one wishes to continue livestock permitting and desires to do so within the ecological constraints 

of the desert since, surely, we do need to know what the land is capable of. We need the best 

available science to help us understand the ecological impacts, opportunities provided, and 

constraints imposed by ranching activities on the land.  

But, perhaps, we need more than the best available science or, put differently, science 

may be necessary but it is not sufficient. The criteria of “best available science” is not my own 

hyperbole – it is institutionalized in governance through the requirements set forth by the 

National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), requiring that environmental decision-

making on federal lands use the “best available scientific data” to perform environmental 

assessments and impact analyses. Aside from the legal requirements set forth by NEPA, the 

hiring requirements laid out by the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for federal 

                                                           
27 Both livestock production and the rural/urban settlement of the West are settler-colonial projects that must be 
reimagined beyond this description in the -family imaginary. 

 

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environmental management agencies – e.g. BLM, USFS, USFWS – narrowly require natural 

science credentials for land management positions, thus reinforcing the necessity and sufficiency 

of science in governance. For instance, the OPM requirements for a Rangeland Management 

Series job (classification 0454) require either a degree in “range management; or a related 

discipline that included at least 42 semester hours in a combination of the plant, animal, and soil 

sciences, and natural resources management” or a combination of education and experience with 

“at least 42 semester hours of course work in the combination of plant, animal, and soil sciences 

and natural resources management…plus appropriate experience or additional education.” 

(Rangeland Management Series, 0454 2020). These requirements are common throughout 

federal hiring for environmental jobs with the related consequence of narrowly defining our 

epistemic stance (i.e. the sufficiency of science) while demanding and reinforcing experiences of 

environmental governance as those that follow from scientific imaginaries. Taken together with 

the epistemic, political, and social power of the scientific institution, the research funding 

priorities of our contemporary society, our techno-scientific fetishes, and the perceived certainty 

(read: measurable, groupable, knowable, predictable, and controllable – thus regulatable) of 

scientific findings, we should not be surprised that federal environmental management is at a 

minimum invested in scientific management and at a maximum indistinguishable from scientific 

management.28 

Scientific management seeks to understand the causal connections of our ecosystems in 

order to predict future states and through current regulation (e.g. permitting), guide the 

ecosystem to whichever state is predicted and desired (read: control). The regulatory tool of 

                                                           
28 Teddy Roosevelt’s support of Gifford Pinchot’s scientific forest management, institutionalized in the creation of 
the United States Forest Service, is important to the priority given to scientific management in the governance of 
western lands.  

 

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permitting is only the vehicle through which scientific management is enacted. Given the 

structure of permits (on/off dates, Animal Unit Months [AUMs], etc.), science’s role is limited to 

figuring out the size of herd that a specific location can endure relative to its current ecological 

state and/or its desired state. For instance, a heavily degraded location may not be able to endure 

any livestock, while a stable ecosystem may be able to endure an economically viable (for the 

rancher) herd. The location is critical to these analyses as western landscapes range across low 

and high elevations, with varying water availabilities, plant and animal communities, soil types, 

wildfire and invasive species risk, and a host of other factors. Thus, science is employed to 

describe these varying ecosystems and, in doing so, able to provide guidance in deciding the 

livestock carrying capacity of particular systems as we can now predict the impact of livestock 

on that system. But, as with the discussion of sweetgrass in chapter two, there is still 

considerable divergence on whether any human-caused (i.e., livestock) use of the environment is 

most ecologically beneficial. I do not attempt to provide clarity to this divergence, recognizing 

only that science itself seems insufficient to decide whether livestock should be permitted at all. 

That decision must account for the variety of cultural, social, economic, political, and to the 

point of this project, experiential and imaginative, realities of livestock in the West. It is likely 

that Western landscapes could be restored both with and without livestock, the former being 

enacted through concerted restoration and preservation practices with the acceptance of nature 

being able to heal itself sans humans and the latter being enacted through concerted conservation 

grazing practices and a re-tooling of the political and economic systems that constrain current 

grazing strategies. Science may be able to help us achieve whichever end we choose, but it is 

insufficient to both make that decision and decide on the appropriate social configuration that 

 

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can help achieve that condition. Again, science may be necessary in environmental governance, 

but it is not sufficient for environmental governance. 

To whatever degree federal environmental management is invested in the scientific 

institution, we must recognize that environmental governance – as described in the introduction 

to this chapter – is complex and must consider a wide range of institutions across varying spatial 

and temporal scales while respecting diverse values and worldviews enacted at different social 

levels, all within the context of the uncertainty regarding our knowledge of the complex 

ecosystems we inhabit (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006). Clearly, science plays a role in understanding 

this complexity and conditioning our behaviors in light of it – but it is not sufficient to capture 

the multi-dimensionality of governance. The scientific imaginary described in the previous 

section intersects with environmental management practice in setting the conditions for what can 

reliably be known and thus governed. This is due, in no small part, to the experience of studying 

a mind-independent reality that is materially constituted by fully measurable and groupable 

objects, thereby giving the scientific institution considerable power to describe what is 

epistemically right and wrong. 

Thus, when grazing permits are issued on the basis of the scientific ascertainment of 

carrying capacity, I am driven to ask “how are those imaginaries/experiences/knowledges that 

are incoherent to the scientific imaginary being excluded from this process?” Reflecting on the 

complexity of environmental governance writ large, answers to this question will vary across the 

scale and scope of the various dimensions of governance. However, one particular instance of 

this exclusion occurs in the monitoring requirements of livestock grazing on public lands. 

Monitoring, in general, can be understood as the periodic observation of a phenomenon. 

Watching a pot boil is monitoring the pot, just as annual measurements of deer populations is 

 

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monitoring the deer. In the context of grazing, western lands are monitored in order to better 

understand the impacts of our behaviors so as to modify future behaviors. Given the general 

definition of monitoring given here, it should not be surprising that monitoring in the West 

occurs across and within many jurisdictions, institutions, and communities with a similar 

diversity of accepted monitoring methods and analyses. The dedicated bird watcher may monitor 

local birds using binoculars and specimen counts, whereas the hydrologist may monitor aquifer 

volume using sophisticated equipment and computer models. What is monitored and how it is 

monitored is highly dependent on the person doing the monitoring and their objectives of 

monitoring, an obvious point yet one critical to monitoring in the West. 

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for managing 48 million acres in 

the state of Nevada alone (67% of the state; BLM.gov) which is a large administrative task for a 

perennially underfunded agency – not including BLM managed land in the other western states. 

Due to the need for monitoring and the lack of resources to accomplish monitoring at this scale, 

the BLM can enter into a Cooperative Monitoring Agreement (CMA) with a civilian party (often 

ranchers and other land users that have permits to specific land areas) to allow the civilian party 

to carry out the monitoring. The CMA details the purposes and objectives, anticipated use of 

data, methods and protocols, and data analysis requirements of a specific monitoring project with 

the intention that any data provided by a civilian party can be legally used to justify land 

management actions. This practice is commendable and should be recognized for its inclusion of 

the public in federal monitoring, yet it is not without conflict.  

As described, federal land management is invested in the scientific imaginary for a 

variety of reasons, including the need for legally justifiable data that meets the NEPA 

requirement of best available science. The need for more monitoring of sufficient scientific 

 

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quality in Nevada led to the publication of the Nevada Rangeland Monitoring Handbook in 1984 

and updated by the University of Nevada – Reno for its 3rd edition in 2018. The handbook serves 

as a public communication of current rangeland science and details a variety of scientifically 

validated monitoring protocols that are generally accepted by the BLM. For the civilian party 

wishing to enter into a CMA with the BLM, the handbook is a beacon of best practices that, if 

followed, protects the civilian from regulatory impasse. For all the good that the handbook 

provides, it must be noted that it provides only a narrow vision of monitoring – one that extends 

from the scientific imaginary and the entities/relations it deems groupable, measurable, and thus 

monitorable.29 What this means, in practice, is that if a civilian party does not have the relative 

expertise in a prescribed monitoring method, if the phenomena to be monitored is not deemed 

monitorable, if the monitoring method is not tracking scientifically recognized groups, or if the 

objectives of monitoring have (scientifically) obscure determinants, then the regulatory body – in 

this case, the BLM – does not enter into the CMA. This is good insofar as it can be a bulwark to 

maligned interests, but it also constrains the possibility for other benevolent communities with 

their own imaginaries from participating in the regulatory monitoring of the land (or if an 

imaginary conceives of the land as including people, then also the land’s economies, 

communities, cultures, etc.) that they deem important. The monitoring that matters takes for 

granted the sorts of things that can be grouped and measured or, put another way, demands an 

experience of the land as that of scientifically groupable, measurable, and monitorable things. 

And, of course, this experience is taken up in the imagination and extended so as to construct a 

conception of the land as just consisting of those things that are groupable, measurable, and 

monitorable.  

                                                           
29 Of course these are reflections of the objectives set forth by the civilian parties and the regulatory agencies, 
themselves extensions of certain imaginaries – colonial, scientific, extractive, etc. 

 

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Monitoring, in general, is an integral part of responsible grazing. To decide how many 

livestock a certain location can support, the rancher must minimally know the state of that 

location such as whether water is available or whether grasses and shrubs are mature and healthy 

enough to withstand grazing. The realities of ranching on large tracts of land, however, make it 

so that scientific information of this sort is generally unavailable across the diversity of the 

landscapes, especially as annual conditions such as drought or wildfire can alter conditions 

drastically. Given the lack of information, the irresponsible rancher may choose to put their 

livestock onto the range regardless of condition yet within the legal constraints of the permit as it 

only demands on/off dates and number of livestock. Ignoring the conditions of the range in this 

way can and often does result in degraded rangeland as the livestock gather around the scarce 

water in the desert, trampling riparian areas and over-grazing small tracts of land. The scarce 

water resources in the arid desert are integral to the functioning of the ecosystem and so the 

damage to these areas (pollution from cattle waste, destabilization of stream banks, reduced 

riparian health, etc.) have a disproportional impact on the overall arid ecosystem.  

Ranchers are thus faced with a dilemma. On one hand, the lack of scientific information 

combined with the current permit structure prompts a keep-doing-what-I’ve-done grazing 

strategy – a strategy that does not often promote ecological health, but does promote anti-

livestock imaginaries. On the other hand, those that wish to responsibly graze are limited in two 

important ways. First, the structure of current permits are not in harmony with seasonal realities, 

especially given the impacts of climate change on the ecosystem. In the arid desert, run-off from 

mountain snow in the spring fuels desert blooms. These spring desert blooms kick-start the 

growing cycles of desert plants which provide forage for livestock and wildlife, but also must be 

protected to ensure plants grow to maturity so that the annual cycle – and the health of the 

 

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ecosystem – remains viable. The static put-on dates do not recognize this reality as in any given 

year, it may be better for the ecosystem to put livestock on earlier or much later, depending on 

that year’s run-off and spring growth. Furthermore, the number of livestock the ecosystem can 

sustainably support will vary depending on spring growth and water availability. Second, the 

ranchers who recognize that the “way-it’s-always-been-done” does not promote ecosystem 

health and wish to explore novel grazing strategies (e.g. different on/off dates, varying herd 

sizes, rest-rotation grazing) must scientifically justify their decisions. But to justify these 

decisions, they need the site-specific monitoring data that is not available. They can enter into a 

CMA, but to allow the rancher-collected monitoring data to validate novel management, it must 

meet scientific standards (thus prompting the publication of the Nevada Rangeland Monitoring 

Handbook). Collecting this data requires both expertise that is scarce and often mistrusted in 

these communities, and time. Instituting a scientific monitoring program on a large acreage ranch 

requires ranch time and labor that isn’t often available. This time-requirement can be met by 

allowing ranchers to monitor in situ, meaning that instead of collecting data beforehand, they are 

using their own experience of the ecosystem as they move livestock around to decide their 

grazing strategies. Simply, the ranchers are on the land daily and can observe/monitor their 

surroundings and make decisions regarding how to manage their livestock in the moment. 

However, as their experiences may not meet the standards of scientific rigor, land management 

agencies – in line with scientific management – are reticent to allow ranchers this latitude. 

This complex example can be simplified sans detail. On one approach, monitoring 

requires the valid collection of scientific data beforehand in order to justify grazing activity, but 

this data is either unavailable or is unreasonably expected to be attained by the rancher (due to 

expertise and time requirements). This is the core of scientific management – observe the 

 

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ecosystem, collect and analyze the data, and then act to attain a pre-determined desired state. On 

this approach, science is necessary and sufficient. Obstacles to management do not stem from the 

scientific approach per se, but from the availability of data and expertise. Thus, we may find a 

range of solutions from the economic (increasing resources to hire labor to collect data), the 

technological (finding better methods for collecting data, e.g., remote sensing), or the 

sociopolitical (train more rancher-scientists to be able to collect their own data).  

But, there is another approach. Working in tandem – or, to the point of this project, 

collaborating – ranchers, land managers, and other parties can decide what they want the land to 

look like prior to the grazing season, and then the rancher observes the land throughout the 

season and makes adjustment to their strategy to attain the desired state. The desired state, or, the 

product of collaboration, can be described in a variety of ways, including aesthetic appeals, 

scientific indicators, or something else altogether. During the season, the rancher tracks their 

grazing strategy and before the next season, they again come together to see what worked, what 

didn’t, and what the desired state should be in light of any changes. This approach might be 

called “pragmatic management” in that there is substantial focus on the experimentation of 

grazing strategies allowing novel methods to emerge in order to satisfy the group’s desired state. 

The inclusion of land managers and other community members in the collaborative process both 

mitigates for the moral hazard of ranchers enacting their own desired states on public lands 

(which may conflict with that of others) and holds the grazing strategy accountable to its results 

and the rancher to the group. In this approach, science may have a role but it is not necessary or 

sufficient. It is not necessary as the on-the-land experiences of the collaborative group and the 

rancher are enough to guide grazing strategies and it is not sufficient because science alone 

cannot tell us what the group wishes the desired state to be.  

 

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In scientific management, place attachments, land experiences, non-human agency, and 

aesthetics – among many other phenomena that resist mind-independent measurement – are 

either disregarded as being unimportant or they are translated into a scientifically legible 

ontology such that they can be grouped and measured with some scientific reliability. As these 

facets of our environmental relationships are undervalued or deemed irrelevant to environmental 

governance, our practices develop in ways that reinforce their irrelevance and thus construct an 

imaginary where it is difficult (at a minimum) to recognize their importance. Thus, not only do 

the imaginaries, reinforced by the seemingly innocuous scientific monitoring, have the arresting 

and distorting character we may wish to avoid, but they also have the very real consequence of 

disallowing the participation of those communities (through CMAs or other regulatory means) 

that have divergent imaginaries. Aside from the obvious concerns for justice, this arresting and 

distorting character limits the possibilities for environmental governance as what is deemed 

possible is deemed possible by virtue of what is monitorable. The suggestion for pragmatic 

management shows that the scientific monitorability of the landscape may not be necessary for 

collaborative environmental governance, suggesting minimally that it is possible to govern sans 

scientific management. It is beyond the scope of this project to fully imagine what could be 

possible in environmental governance without the arresting imaginaries, yet it should be noted 

that many cultures do have robust, community-supporting, and ecologically healthy 

environmental governance programs that are literally unimaginable to many of those in the West.  

But it is not unimaginable to everyone in the West. The current livestock permitting that 

prescribes on/off dates and the number of livestock allowed is being challenged by a growing 

contingent of ranchers on the recognition that its lack of flexibility doesn’t allow for the sort of 

pragmatic management described above – a necessary concern with increasingly common and 

 

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more intensive wildfires, loss of biodiversity due to annual grass monoculture expansion, and 

changing water regimes due to climate change (Thompson & Talley, 2019). In order to modify 

their ranching practices on federally managed land to align with adaptive and flexible 

management, they must navigate the regulatory systems to be issued a new grazing permit 

developed on a different grazing management philosophy. Pragmatic livestock management in 

the arid deserts requires near-continuous observation that currently cannot be supplied by site-

specific scientific analyses so that changes can be made both in the very short term (e.g. moving 

cattle away from areas that are not responding well to grazing) and in the long term (e.g. multi-

year plans to limit encroachment of annual grasses and restore lost habitat). In addition, these 

ranchers seek to integrate consideration of their communities economic health, cultural 

traditions, and social well-being into their objectives for grazing permits on the explicit 

recognition that their well-beings (economic, cultural, social, etc.) are intimately tied to their 

environmental practices and these practices are regulated by the federal agencies. Pragmatic 

management, and the permits that may allow it, can provide space for these considerations in the 

annual collaborative work and the pluralizing of considerations beyond that which is 

scientifically measurable and monitorable. 

Current permits do not require much – if any – monitoring on the permittees part as the 

permits only establish what the permittee can or cannot do. The new permits being sought, 

however, require a tremendous amount of monitoring on both the agency and the permittee’s 

part. The monitoring that needs to be done, however, is dependent on the agreed upon objectives 

of the permit (whatever those may be) and the legal justifiability of the monitoring methods, 

protocols, and processes. Following from the above discussion, these monitoring considerations 

are constrained by the best available science clause of the NEPA process (which must be 

 

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completed for permit changes) and the imaginaries of the regulatory agencies themselves. 

Objectives must be articulated in ways that their determinants are groupable, measurable, and 

monitorable and monitoring protocols must reliably track the relevant phenomena and also be 

either carried out by experts or be designed so as non-expert data collection can be externally 

validated. In either case, the cultural, social, and general well-being concerns are ancillary 

considerations (if considered at all) due to their inherent immeasurability and perceived 

irrelevance to livestock permitting.30  

Additionally, the scale at which we monitor (chosen with regard to the proclivities of the 

regulatory agencies and the specific expertise of the scientists designing protocols) impacts the 

effectiveness of the permitted grazing management. Site-specific monitoring is constrained in 

which ecosystem factors are monitored as there are a wide range of factors that may or may not 

be present in specific sites. For example, a site within the riparian zone of a stream versus a site 

at high elevation will have different biotic communities, soil types, and atmospheric conditions. 

These site assessments seek to describe appropriate livestock usage rates given site-specific 

factors, and thus stocking rates vary considerably between sites. Permits developed on site-

specific methods require additional labor to collect monitoring data and this serves as a critical 

bureaucratic barrier given the requirements of federal NEPA processes. Furthermore, the 

additional resources necessary for site-specific monitoring are generally unavailable to the 

underfunded federal agencies responsible, and so there is a burgeoning movement to allow 

ranchers to collect data themselves – of course this is weighed against the validity of their data as 

there is a perceived moral hazard in the process. Although not discussed in detail here, this 

requires reflection on the moral hazards presented as well as the epistemic trust and validity of 

                                                           
30 It should be noted that their perceived irrelevance is also a product of a certain sort of imaginary – it is plausible 
that the human/nature and subjective/objective distinctions described in chapter three apply here. 

 

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citizen collected data – issues that are ethically and socially significant and derive directly from 

the scientific choice of analyzing at site-specific levels. 

In contrast to site-specific analyses, some rangeland ecologists use landscape-level data 

to develop range assessments. A notable example is Tamzen K. Stringham et al.’s (2016) 

description of disturbance response groups that has received considerable attention in rangeland 

assessment. Disturbance response groups (DRGs) are landscape categorizations that group 

ecosystems into similarly characterized groups based on their response to ecological disturbances 

including wildland fire, insect herbivory, grazing by domestic livestock and wild horses, off-road 

vehicle use, and climatic events such as drought. On this view, two specific sites may have 

different ecosystems yet be classified under the same DRG as they respond similarly to 

disturbances. DRGs can be developed by aggregating key factors of a landscape, such as 

precipitation zone, soil type and temperature, moisture regimes, and vegetation dynamics using 

computer modeling and GIS software. This allows for large-scale monitoring that is relatively 

inexpensive compared to the labor requirements of site-specific assessments and, thus, is 

preferred given the budget constraints and requirements that federal agencies are subject to. This 

is reflected in the BLM’s explicitly stated goal of improving “the BLM’s ability to address 

landscape-scale resource issues and use landscape-level management approaches to more 

efficiently and effectively manage the public lands” (BLM Planning 2.0 Fact Sheet, p. 1). 

Landscape-level monitoring can be seen as a technological solution to the problem of incomplete 

data that is needed for annual livestock management, but it is also a solution that is supported by 

and, importantly, reinforces those experiences that prioritize scientific management, thereby 

making it more difficult to imagine management, otherwise. 

 

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Landscape-scale monitoring does not provide data on the particular state of ecological 

sites that is required for the short term and small-scale information that is required by ranchers 

for robust livestock management. The activity of scientific monitoring, in general, poses 

considerable challenges to both the inclusion of the community into governance (with their 

sometimes aligned and sometimes misaligned imaginaries) as well as the modification of 

scientifically managed livestock permits to pragmatically managed flexible permits. The 

experience of ranching as regulated by these permits will be vastly different – at a minimum, the 

former does not force the rancher to engage with the dynamics of their environments in the ways 

that the latter does, thus prompting experiences of non-porous human/nature boundaries that 

condition the extractive practices of the -machine imaginary. Nor do they require collaborative 

efforts, the experience of which can help develop imaginaries that hold us accountable to other, 

be that the environment or other communities. However, experience of pragmatic management 

as described above does prompt experiences of holding ourselves accountable through both the 

collaborative efforts and the porous boundary between the rancher and the environment as they 

seek to manage their livestock within in the natural variation and capabilities of the landscape.  

The constraint imposed on the determinants of agreed-upon objectives needing to be 

groupable, measurable, and monitorable, combined with the exclusion of non-expert community 

members and their imaginaries, the complexities of environmental governance at various scales, 

and the legal justifiability of data all aggregate to show how monitoring – and being monitorable 

– impacts environmental governance in the West. And, of course, this is merely describing 

settler-colonial rancher’s experience – I do not presume to describe those experiences of 

oppressed communities that likely find the regulatory process even more misaligned with their 

imaginaries.  

 

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Monitoring is but one activity prevalent in environmental governance, and a relatively 

banal one at that. But as monitoring standards play a part in setting the conditions for what 

matters and, by extension, setting the conditions for how our regulatory practices can themselves 

condition our experiences of the environment, it serves to highlight how the scientific activities 

of measuring and grouping can broadly influence imaginaries. Any activity, however, that rests 

on assumptions of a measurable, groupable, mind-independent reality are at risk of this 

arresting/distorting effect. It is not that these activities are epistemically wrong, only that a 

reliance on this sort of reality to make governance decisions precludes consideration of other 

sorts of phenomena that play a role in our environmental attitudes, behaviors, and decisions.  

Constraining experiences of environmental governance to modes that do not recognize 

these other fuzzy dimensions is – through the imagination/experience/metaphorical extension 

process described above – constructing an imaginary of the environment in the familiar terms of 

rationality, object/subject dichotomies, reductionism, materiality, universality, linear causality, 

and value-free methodologies that characterize some environmental imaginaries. It is important 

to note, however, that this is not a necessary consequence of these constrained experiences. 

Monitoring, for example, is not done in isolation, and thus past experiences and concurrent 

experiences will inevitably interact to either reinforce or dampen the development of these 

imaginaries. For example, a community whose imaginary treats place, experience, imagination, 

etc. seriously will likely be able to group, measure, and monitor without these arresting 

consequences as the act is focused on but one dimension of their environment – namely, the 

groupable, measurable, and monitorable dimension. The other dimensions of their environments 

may be recognized, observed, and respected apart from the scientific activity, thus balancing the 

development of a pluralized imaginary. It is those communities whose imaginary disregard place, 

 

153 

experience, imagination, etc. that scientific regulation stands to reinforce their imaginary. And 

due to the sociohistorical realities of the West, these communities are also the ones with political 

and social power – their imaginary is the dominant imaginary that conditions environmental 

regulation, both constraining other’s experiences (and experiential potential) and reinforcing 

their own imaginaries.  

Conclusion 

Many scholars have convincingly argued that science is replete with value-decisions and 

does not supply objectivity, at least not in the sense of strong realism and human-independent 

referential truth (e.g. Bloor, 1991; Chang, 2015; Deloria, 1997; Dupré, 1995; Ihde, 1999; Latour, 

2005). This chapter reinforces this notion, yet does not take it as its focal point. For the 

experience of scientific activity to impact our imaginaries as described, it does not matter if 

science does or does not supply this sort of objectivity – it only matters that practicing scientists 

and the institutions that support them imagine that it does. How we experience science is just as 

impactful to our imaginaries as how we experience other phenomena in our life. Science is 

unique in its norms, methods, and practices and therefore we should expect that the experience of 

it is unique. Future work would do well to better describe this uniqueness and develop a more 

nuanced account of how different disciplinary practices and institutional settings modify this 

experience and the concomitant imaginaries it produces. I do not argue that science is not 

necessary in our world – it is and we would do well to continue the work on making our science 

more inclusive, better communicated, and more aligned with democratic prescriptions. But, if the 

experience of science can arrest and distort future experiences, we would also do well to honestly 

grapple with these consequences and better understand just which experiential possibilities we 

wish to preserve.  

 

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(RADICAL) CO-LABORATION IN THE AMERICAN WEST 

 
 

…For ideas belong to human beings who have bodies, and there is no separation between 
the structures and processes of the part of the body that entertains the ideas and the part 
that performs acts. Brain and muscles work together… – John Dewey (1927), The Public 
and its Problems  
 
 
The American West is uniquely situated to re-tool our environmental governance 

practices in ways that engage with the multiple Wests, diverse communities and cultures, and 

diverse landscapes. The West holds a powerful place in American – and global – imaginations 

with appeals to rugged individualism, frontier lifestyles, and cowboy legends and this power 

could be responsibly put to service to renegotiate our practices in light of the environmental 

degradation and justice concerns that are fore-fronted in contemporary governance. The 

environments of the West also hold a powerful place in America’s environmental imaginations, 

from the rugged granite peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the serene alpine lakes nestled within 

them, to the geysers of Yellowstone and the desert canyons snaking through miles of sagebrush 

and pinyon pine. These environments also face unique governance situations – it is common for 

a particular Western landscape to face pressure from sub-surface mining, livestock grazing, 

timber-cutting, recreation, water quantity and quality issues, and hunting all at the same time and 

all within the specter of droughts, lengthening (and worsening) wildland fires, loss of 

biodiversity, unchecked development, and population growth. And, among all this, the American 

West is predominantly public land where governance is rooted in ideals of public ownership 

rather than private ownership. The American West is, in sum, a powerful place (importantly not 

a space). Taken together, we have an opportunity in the West to do things differently and in ways 

that make sense for the landscapes of the West – both the physical landscapes and the imaginary. 

We have an opportunity, as noted by Daniel Kemmis in the epigraph to this project, to outgrow 

 

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our political infancy and develop a genuinely western way of dealing with western issues. But 

what does this amount to? 

This final chapter does not offer a complete vision of this “western way of dealing with 

western issues” and, by virtue of what it does offer, could never. Whatever the answer is, if it 

follows from these recommendations then it will surely be the product of diverse communities 

coming together to creatively develop place-based solutions to place-based problems. Simply 

put, it will be a product of western collaboration. Here, though, is the hitch. In the process of this 

re-visioning, the West must also reflect on what we mean by collaboration. It is the task of this 

final chapter to offer a revised vision of collaboration and to broadly outline ways in which 

Western institutions can adjust to actively promote this new vision in order that, in some small 

way, the West may begin to develop our own way of dealing with Western issues. 

Collaboration Then, Co-laboration Now 

Collaboration, generally, is often seen as a normative ideal especially in those cases 

where complex problems require complex solutions, diverse communities can impact and are 

impacted by decision-making, and public support is sought for governance outcomes (McKinney 

& Kemmis, 2011; Talley et al., 2016). Although, in principle, collaboration is lauded, in practice 

it is fraught with ethical and justice concerns (Leeuw et al., 2012), effectiveness concerns 

(Koontz & Thomas, 2006), and conceptual slipperiness (Douglas & Talley, forthcoming). As 

Sherry Arnstein (1969) notes in her seminal paper A Ladder of Citizen Participation, “The idea 

of citizen participation [here, collaboration] is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in 

principle because it is good for you” (p. 216). In principle, many agree that collaboration is good, 

but it can be difficult in contemporary practice. Collaboration is studied and practiced under, 

against, and otherwise in relation to other familiar terms of public engagement, stakeholder 

 

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engagement, democratic participation, participatory theory, and a host of other disciplinary 

specific terms that each have their own considerations, determinants, and prescriptions. I do not 

mean to suggest that collaboration is somehow an umbrella term that resides, conceptually, 

above these others, only that in its broadest form it seems to be present in these other projects. 

But, just what do I mean by collaboration? Answering this in the context of this project requires 

the recognition of the different ways in which collaboration is imagined in different 

communities. Although I do not specifically evaluate which communities hold which 

conceptualizations, it is useful to trace the concept historically to see how it has shifted, 

providing insight as to how it is differentially employed in contemporary practice.  

The Latin roots of collaboration – com laborare, or to work with – point towards its most 

basic usage, suggesting that working together (in any context, and as seen through the range of 

similar terms) is sufficient to collaborate (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2020). A search for 

collaboration and the related terms of collaborateur, collaborator, collaborate, and co-laborer in 

The Oxford English Dictionary (2020) highlight significant variations to the original theme of to 

work with (selections listed chronologically): 

955     J. THOMAS No Banners iii. 28: The collaborateurs, who hated England and all 

she stood for. 

1801    H. C. ROBINSON Diary (1869) I. v. 107: A body of poor students called 

collaborateurs…who assist the more wealthy but less advanced. 

1940    Economist 26 Oct. 511/2: Pétain may be outvoted on the question of mitigating 

the peace terms by some sort of shameful collaboration. 

1941    Ann. Reg. 1940 162: In foreign affairs the watchword of the Vichy Government 

was ‘collaboration’ with the German conquerors. 

 

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1943    Times 5 June 5/2: Not all have a record as black as Laval's...There were some 

who collaborated with a sick heart. 

1922    Contemp. Rev. 122 582: They should also profit from the expulsion of Signor 

Turati and the ‘Collaborationists’ from the Socialist party. 

1923    Contemp. Rev. 123 151: The Socialist Party...had again split up into a 

collaborationist and an anti-collaborationist group. 

1942    W. SIMPSON One of our Pilots is Safe vi. 192: Those of them...who were a 

hundred per cent collaborationists, who had thrown in their lot with the hated 

enemy. 

1958    E. HYAMS Taking it Easy 69: Dutchmen...denounced each other as 

collaborationists unworthy to be employed by the Allies. 

1959    Observer 8 Mar. ½: Certain Africans who had collaborated with the Government. 

1968    Listener 5 Sept. 291/1: The Russians were genuinely astonished...that they 

couldn't find collaborationist politicians prepared to overthrow Tito. 

A dedicated etymologist is required to fully understand the evolution of the linguistic 

concept, yet these examples highlight some significant changes through history. Most striking is 

the shift from the original and relatively neutral to work with to the negatively and slanderous 

usage in the entries, especially those in the early 20th century entries where collaborators worked 

together yet against the perceived greater good. Phrases such as “hated England and all she stood 

for”, “…some sort of shameful collaboration,” “collaborated with a sick heart,” 

“collaborationists… thrown in their lot with the hated enemy,” and “denounced as other as 

collaborationists unworthy to be employed by the Allies” suggest that to collaborate, in the early 

20th century, was to work against the greater good and signified the collaborator as an enemy 

 

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(c.f. Von Soest, 2015). Also striking, although underrepresented, is the 1801 entry where 

collaborateurs were poor students who helped wealthier students. This poignantly suggests an 

inherent power differential between those collaborating and those who seek collaborators, and 

one that regardless of historical usage is present in many contemporary collaborations – a point I 

will return to shortly. 

The general arc, as I read it, for the use of the term collaboration, is that it began neutrally 

as a description of working together, came to be negatively connoted as collaborators were those 

working against the greater good, and – somehow – is now positively connoted as working 

together for the greater good. Varying contemporary collaborative efforts seem to take meaning 

from each of these. These varying interpretations will impact our collaborations, and so I must be 

clear about these meanings and what I mean by co-laboration. 

Those who seek neutral collaboration in the sense that they only intend to work together, 

i.e. solve complex problems, are likely imagining collaboration as not inherently laden with 

power-differentials. To the non-critical practitioner, this is a familiar position – there is a 

problem whose solution will be better or more quickly identified with the assistance of others 

and so efforts are extended to gather and direct a group to identify and carry out a solution. This 

is the type of collaboration that happens in much of our mundane lives such as working together 

to prepare meals and working together to complete work assignments.31 Imagining collaboration 

as such in our mundane lives provides the experience of collaboration (working together) as 

neutral, thus being taken up in our imaginations and extended to other, perhaps more explicit, 

collaborative efforts. In my own experience, many collaborations assume this sort of neutrality 

                                                           
31 Although often not recognized in this sort of collaboration, I argue (without further defense) that power 
differentials will nearly always be present – it only matters, in this case, that the collaborators do not imagine 
collaboration as having such power differentials and, therefore, not acting in accordance with them. 

 

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or, if they do recognize power differentials, are practically and conceptually ill-equipped to 

confront the inequalities.  

Those who imagine collaboration as a means to build public support for predetermined 

outcomes, to expose a community to expertise or public opinion, or as social validity for their 

own projects are likely to imagine collaboration in a similar sense as that of the early 20th 

century. It may be the conveners of the collaboration or the participants themselves who see the 

others as somehow cooperating with the enemy and to be kept at distance. Those one wishes to 

collaborate with are constructed as an “other” that must be taught, convinced, or led. They are 

not often labeled as the enemy (although, importantly, I’ve experienced collaborators in the West 

invite opposing perspectives under the auspices of “keep your friends close and your enemies 

closer”), but the collaborators – either the conveners, the participants, or both – are treated with 

suspicion (consciously or otherwise), as inferior or naïve, or with neglect. Divergent values and 

perspectives are seldom genuinely considered and have little impact on the process or outcomes. 

Where divergent values and perspectives are considered, they are seen as resources to be 

extracted from – these collaborators are seen as having valuable knowledge that is needed by the 

project, yet the engagement with this knowledge will be one-directional (such that the 

interpretation of the knowledge and the collaborative effort as a whole is controlled by the 

dominant imaginary, c.f. Latulippe, 2015). Collaborations imagined as such have difficulty in 

navigating divergent perspectives as one may wish to include the other, but their contrariness – 

imagined as such – must be subjugated instead of encouraged and acted upon. Power 

differentials, of course, are prevalent here – it is the dominant imaginary of the collaboration 

(whichever that may be) that overwhelms, misrepresents, or ignores the other. Although this 

characterization may seem overly combative and, as such, not obvious in contemporary 

 

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collaborations, I contend that how these collaborations are imagined can be (at least) 

metaphorically understood through terms of hostility, dominance, and treating with the enemy. 

These general characteristics are ever-present in many of our contemporary experiences, 

reinforced through the polarization of our country along religious, political, environmental, etc. 

beliefs. As we experience this polarization in other aspects of our lives, we risk extending these 

imaginaries into our collaborative practices.  

Those who seek positive collaboration recognize that considering the diversity of lived 

experience, knowledge, social position, and perspectives are ethically prescribed and will yield 

more equitable results. As well, and importantly, due to the consideration of diversity, they are 

likely to imagine collaboration as necessarily laden with power differentials. They will seek 

equitable and diverse representation, prioritizing relationship and trust-building over compliance 

and conformity while inviting dissent and respectful interaction. These collaborations explicitly 

recognize that the methods, objectives, and assessment of the collaboration will likely change to 

reflect group needs, thereby shifting the focus to the collaborative process itself rather than the 

outcome of the process. Again, this general characterization may seem too altruistic to be present 

in contemporary collaborations. I do not suggest, in any of these characterizations, that the 

practice of collaboration will follow these descriptions ideally, but only suggest that the 

individual people organizing, facilitating, and/or participating in the collaboration will enter it 

with an imaginatively derived concept of collaboration that will condition their experiences of 

the collaboration (perhaps challenging their initial conception or perhaps reinforcing it).  

Of course, in practice, we are not likely to encounter pure interpretations of collaboration 

aligning with any of these as the character of the collaboration will necessarily be influenced by 

the imaginaries of the members, the landscape of power, the context of the collaboration, and a 

 

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host of other considerations not treated here. In practice, we should not be surprised to see 

collaborations with elements of each description intermingled with other imagined types of 

collaboration that I have not, myself, imagined. As well, I do not mean to suggest that any of 

these interpretations is necessarily better than the others, especially with regard to power 

differentials. It may be that dominant imaginaries need to work to recognize a more positive 

collaboration while not expecting marginalized imaginaries to do the same – at least until the 

landscape of power has sufficiently shifted to mitigate for inequities. But, minimally, 

recognizing that these different interpretations exist and accounting for them in the development 

of collaborations may help in understanding the successes, failures, and complexities of 

collaborative efforts.  

Despite the variation in the interpretations of collaboration, there is a common thread that 

runs through many collaborative efforts, especially those that occur through academic and 

governance institutions: the successes, difficulties, triumphs, and failures of collaboration stem 

from ratio-cognitive discursive practices (Davies, 2014; Harvey, 2009). By ratio-cognitive 

discursive practices, I mean those practices that seek consensus through rational argument, 

debate, and/or deliberation. For these purposes, Jürgen Habermas’ (1981) description of 

rationality in The Theory of Communication: Reason and the Rationalization of Society is apt as: 

When we use the expression “rational” we suppose that there is a close relation between 
rationality and knowledge. Our knowledge has a propositional structure; beliefs can be 
represented in the form of statements. …The close relation between knowledge and 
rationality suggests that the rationality of an expression depends on the reliability of the 
knowledge embodied in it. (p. 8) 
 
Important in this description is the suggestion that to be rational, an expression must be 

reliable in relation to the knowledge it contains. Habermas further describes this as people acting 

rationally if they “use predicates such as ‘spicy,’ ‘attractive,’…and so forth, in such a way that 

 

162 

other members of their life-worlds can recognize in these descriptions their own reactions to 

similar situations” (pp. 16-17), thereby rendering the use of descriptive language that does not 

resonate with other’s life-worlds as irrational. It is telling that Habermas uses the example of a 

“clinically noteworthy…reaction to open spaces” described in presumably irrational terms of 

“their ‘crippling,’ ‘leaden,’ ‘sucking’ emptiness [which] will scarcely meet with understanding in 

the everyday contexts of most cultures” (p. 17, author’s italics). The interlocutor describing open 

spaces in such terms is, according to Habermas, “not behaving rationally” (p. 17) as their 

descriptions are not shared by the others.  

Ratio-cognitive discourse is thus the reliance on people being able to articulate their 

knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs (understood as cognitive states) in terms that are coherent with 

their interlocutor’s life-worlds and own knowledge. With the recognition that collaborative 

efforts do need to pay attention to the ways in which participants deliberate, demanding rational 

discourse neglects the ways that varying embodiments, affects, emotions, and social positions 

condition the experiences of diverse participants and the meaning of their words. It short, instead 

of demanding that rationality be intelligible within other’s life-worlds, collaborative efforts need 

to recognize this interpretative challenge and make space for the irrational (as Habermas may 

describe it). On this account, power, dominance, and subjugation will set the conditions for 

rationality such that the misinterpreted are rendered irrational. The rendering of irrationality 

cannot make space for diverging imaginaries in ways that Western governance require, thus we 

must look beyond rational discourse in collaboration. 

Rational discourse will, assumedly, allow social learning, perspective sharing, 

relationship development, and trust building in order that a group of people – each with their 

own cognitive values and knowledge – can work together for better decision-making. The 

 

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reliance on the ratio-cognitive discursive dimensions of our human interactions should not be 

surprising as these institutions are built on modernist principles of mind/body dualisms. Our 

experiences of these systems build imaginaries that prioritize the psychical dimensions of our 

lives and it is these dimensions that we seek to engage each other within. But, as argued 

throughout this project, our embodied and sociocultural experiences are vital to and inseparable 

from our ratio-cognitive lives. Sarah Davies (2014) elaborates on this point, arguing that the 

practice and study of collaborative efforts does not:  

pay attention to the non-discursive – to the role of…the emotional, material or 
creative…[collaborative efforts] are sites, full of objects and bodies, and they deal with 
experiences and knowledges which are similarly embodied and ordered through material 
practices…they take place in particular kinds of sites and spaces…produce different 
emotions…and deal with very different form of embodied knowledge. (pp. 94-95, 
author’s italics) 

 
We do interact discursively and our ratio-cognitive selves are critical to this interaction. 

However, we are not merely ratio-cognitive-discursive beings, and this needs to be attended to in 

our collaborative efforts. 

The skeptical reader might point out that our non-discursive practices might provide 

opportunity and constraint to our discursive practices, but we can nevertheless reliably engage 

each other discursively and through rational cognitive reflection, thereby mitigating for 

differences in our non-discursive experiences since, certainly, discursive experience is still an 

experience (with all the imaginary developing potential experience affords) and, even more so, 

an embodied experience (the act of speaking, listening, and experiencing the place discourse 

occurs in). This essay is, itself, an example of this sort – through my words and propositional 

thoughts, I seek to modify my readers’ imaginary in order to allow imaginative potential that was 

previously not afforded. And to some readers, this may be sufficient as their own imaginaries are 

of a sort that can be extended to the non-discursive aspects of their experience. But to suggest 

 

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that discursive experience is, in general, sufficient to capture non-discursive experience is to 

double down on the mind-body prioritization being argued against. If the imagined dualism does 

not track the reality of our experiences, then prioritization in either direction is misguided. We 

therefore need to recognize the impact that both our minds and our bodies have on our practices 

without retreating to dualisms. We need to talk about what we feel at the same time as feeling 

what we talk about. Richard Shusterman (1994), commenting on John Dewey’s conception of 

experience, summarizes this philosophical point nicely as:  

Wanting to celebrate the importance of this nondiscursive experience, Dewey did so in 
the way philosophers have habitually emphasized factors they thought primary and 
essential – by erecting it as a theoretical foundation. This was a bad confusion of what 
was (or should have been) his true aim – to establish and improve the quality of 
immediate experience as a practical end and useful tool. Dewey wanted philosophers to 
see that nondiscursive experience could be used to improve knowledge as well as the felt 
quality of living. Even if philosophers were trained to dwell instead on discursive reason, 
their task of giving an account of human reality required recognition of the role of 
nondiscursive reason. Moreover, given pragmatism’s aim of not merely explaining reality 
but improving it, the value of nondiscursive experience seemed still more important as a 
project to be realized, and its crucial but much neglected locus was the body. (p.136) 
 
What I take Shusterman to be saying is that although Dewey (and in this project, myself) 

might be emphasizing non-discursive realities in ways that seem prior or otherwise foundational 

to discursive realities, our goal is more pragmatic. It is to balance discussion of the discursive 

with recognition of the non-discursive in order to more fully appreciate the scope of our 

experiences and improve our future practices.  

Taken together, collaboration is imagined in different ways, such as the neutral working 

together, the negative working contrarily, or the positive working reciprocally yet most often on 

the assumption that working together takes place within careful ratio-cognitive and discursive 

reflection. To engage with the non-discursive realities of our collaborations is a radical departure 

from contemporary western environmental governance and one that the American West should 

 

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take seriously. The West’s engagement with non-discursive co-laboration is not merely 

recommended because of the perceived benefit of this sort of modality, but also because 

discursive collaboration is misaligned with the experience of multiple Wests. Put a different way, 

the experience of the multiple Wests begets a form of co-laboration that is not often present due 

to dominant governance strategies. 

The communities of the West are intimately tied to their shared environments, whether 

that be agriculture, mining, and timber communities operating on public lands, urban 

recreationists enjoying the solace of iconic landscapes, or Indigenous communities enacting 

sovereignty through their traditional connections to their homelands (among the many other 

communities in the West). Western landscapes not only provide resources that support various 

communities, but also the unique experiential currency that conditions divergent environmental 

imaginaries to emerge. The harsh desolate desert stands in contrast to green blanketed alpine 

meadows, the impassable granite peaks rise above heavily traversed river bottoms, and 

technological urban hubs stand amidst eroding rural agriculture. The unique experiential 

possibilities of the West are highlighted in the jacket of John D. Dorst’s (1999) Looking West as:  

The American West…perhaps more than any other [region] in the United States….comes to 
us in visual terms. The grand landscapes, open vistas, and magisterial views have made the 
act of looking a defining feature of how we experience the West as an actual place. 
 

Although Dorst is certainly correct to highlight the visual terms of the West, his 

statement could be revised to say that the American West…comes to us in experiential terms. It 

is the experience of the landscapes of the West – the visual, auditory, affective, embodied, and 

sociocultural experiences – that define how we experience a multitude of Wests as actual places. 

For many communities in the West, to thrive was to engage with the land in ways that required 

engaging the breadth of experiences – each conditioned by the diversity of the land itself. 

 

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Although Western peoples are often characterized as ruggedly individualistic, there is also an 

inherent recognition of the value of community, from Indigenous ontologies that center 

community to the practical considerations of having others to help construct a new barn.  

In psychical terms, it is fair to characterize the West as individualistic. But in embodied 

terms, it is not. The value of working together is at the heart of the West, although it is often 

overshadowed by and enacted (or not) through unjust institutions. For all of the conflict 

regarding federally managed public lands, this principle of working together permeates the 

multiple use doctrines that westerners live within, demanding shared responsibility of commonly 

held landscapes. Western experience, at this juncture in history, is manifold and at the heart of a 

diverse set of imaginaries all striving to flourish in their respective Wests. The West, as it is 

currently structured, is young in the sense that it has yet to develop its own institutions that track 

the unique opportunities, socio-historical realities, and experiential possibilities of a region that is 

so unlike others. Its promise is yet to be realized and, in part, this is due to the misalignment of 

institutions, structures, and systems developed elsewhere to the experiential realities of the West. 

Discursive collaboration is just one of these misaligned projects.  

The colloquial proverb that “what you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you 

say,” attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggests the misalignment of discursive collaboration. 

Originally, Emerson (1875) wrote: 

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and 
unity…Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I 
cannot hear you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so 
much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it. (p. 96, author’s italics).  
 

Although similar, Emerson’s original passage suggests that the body, social position, and past 

experiences of the speaker have meaning, and not merely the words that they speak. That “what 

we are stands over” our words is a critical point. Our words do not exist nor, if this is correct, 

 

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cannot exist in neutral space as our bodies are not neutrally emplaced. Just as our bodies are not 

neutral, the places we occupy are not neutral as described in chapter four, nor are our past 

experiences. In collaborative efforts that aim for rational discourse, the words that are said are 

not enough to convey this complexity and they are not heard apart from the listener’s own 

embodied and experiential complexity.  

At this juncture, it is worth being clear about what I mean by discursive versus non-

discursive collaboration. As argued throughout this project, the dichotomy is, in practice, 

constructed. Collaboration, writ large, cannot be characterized in either/or terms, instead falling 

on a continuum where the poles are thus characterized. Therefore, it is worth considering points 

along this gradient that describe collaborative variants. The three variants I wish to consider are 

discursive collaboration, non-discursive by proxy collaboration, and non-discursive 

collaboration.  

What I mean by discursive collaboration is those efforts that render rational discourse 

sufficient for collaboration. By definition, these efforts will promote dialogue among 

participants, and through dialogue, decision can be reached, conflicts can be resolved, and 

lessons can be learned. These collaborations will find it comfortable to meet in conference 

rooms, virtually (by phone, digital video, etc.), or gather relevant information through surveys 

and other one-directional communication strategies. Where non-discursive elements are germane 

to the collaboration, they must be able to be articulated in a way that align with the other 

participant’s interpretative schemas. As Habermas reminds us, people act rationally if their use 

of “predicates such as ‘spicy’…” is done such that others “can recognize in these descriptions 

their own reactions so similar situations.” (pp. 16-17). Thus, the non-discursive (here, articulated 

as descriptive predicates) is relevant to the effort insofar as it is commensurable with the other’s 

 

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interpretive schemas – seen here as their imaginaries. This is clearly not sufficient if divergent 

imaginaries are present.  

To be sure, many collaborative efforts do recognize the importance of the non-discursive 

and do not assume that similar interpretations are a given. In such a case, the collaboration might 

be described as non-discursive by proxy. It is not assumed that meaning is self-evident in the 

words and thus attention is paid to the non-discursive dimensions of interpretation. Although 

these efforts are discursively reflexive – meaning that they reflect on the interpretative elements 

of their discourse – they still seek to discursively describe, explain, and manage the non-

discursive. Instead of one-directional communication, these efforts will value two-directional and 

relational communication yet will also find conference room meetings comfortable or, in general, 

displaced collaboration. By displaced collaboration I only mean to suggest collaborations that 

occur removed from the places relevant to the collaboration: the conference room is unlikely to 

be the place being discussed. Non-discursive by proxy is laudable and perhaps necessary given 

the realities of our social lives; in any case, it is still prioritizing the discursive.  

Collaborative efforts that treat dialogue as sufficient to navigate the complexities of 

diverse embodiments reinforce an imaginary – through the experience-imaginative-extension 

process described in chapter two – that the discursive is more important to our collaborative 

efforts than the non-discursive. But, as Hasok Chang (2011) reminds us, I am not (nor are any of 

us) a “ghostly being that either believes or doesn’t believe certain descriptive statements, fixing 

[my own] beliefs following some rules of rational thinking” (p. 210). The discursive is 

important, to be sure, but prioritizing the discursive treats our experiences, attitudes, beliefs, 

knowledges, etc. as detached from our embodied realities in that they must be translated and 

communicated linguistically and following some “rules of rational thinking.” 

 

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But our embodied and social realities also exist pre-discursively. For example, Audre 

Lorde (1984) describes true knowledge as the erotic, considering the phrase “It feels right to me” 

as acknowledging “the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the 

first and more powerful guiding light toward any understanding…The erotic is the nurturer or 

nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge” (p. 56). Lorde’s recognition that the phrase “It feels 

right to me” denotes a deeper knowledge suggests that, for Lorde, this knowledge is viscerally 

personal and exists prior to discursive practice. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) describes La 

facultad as the “capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the 

deep structure below the surface. It is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without 

conscious reasoning” (p. 60). Again, our experiences, attitudes, beliefs, knowledges, etc. are 

cultivated before conscious discursive reasoning, necessarily embodied within the experiencer. 

Additionally, Dian Million (2013) describes a felt theory of Indigenous knowledge, recognizing 

that the “lived experience, rich with emotional knowledges…underline[s] the importance of felt 

experience as community knowledge, knowledge that interactively informs our positions…” (p. 

57). Again, Million’s account suggests that some things are known pre-discursively and that the 

specific lived experience is critical to their being knowable.  

I understand these thinkers as telling us a rich story about the ways our bodies hold onto 

pre-discursive knowledge – knowledge that cannot be merely translated and transferred 

discursively. If we take them seriously and we wish to collaborate within the diversity of lived 

experience, then we need to also take seriously that rational discourse may not be sufficient to 

capture the intricacies of our lives. Non-discursive collaboration does not occur sans discourse, 

instead relegating discourse to a necessary but not sufficient role. These collaborative efforts will 

recognize the primacy of embodied and sociocultural experience. These collaborations center 

 

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experience by reflecting on the determinants of certain experiences (e.g., the historic and current 

experience of land dispossession needs to be recognized in collaborations with Indigenous 

Peoples), reflecting on the experience of the collaboration itself (e.g., reflecting on individual’s 

experience of the discourse, activities, etc.), and curating future experience (e.g., reflecting on 

the experiential potential of possible decisions). Above all, these collaborations should take 

seriously the lesson of the proverb “what you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say:” 

participant’s actions must be taken into account and not merely their discursive commitments. 

In principle, non-discursive collaboration should not be difficult nor especially novel. 

The obstacle to promiscuous co-laboration in the West is in the imaginaries that are brought to 

bear in some collaborative efforts that prioritize and deem sufficient discursive practices. Those 

imaginaries – whatever they may be – that arrest, distort, deprioritize, or otherwise neglect the 

pre-discursive reality of our lives will be hard-pressed to appreciate the variance, diversity, and 

plurality of non-discursive collaboration. And if the non-discursive is critical to understanding 

the places of the multiple American and Indigenous Wests, then those arresting/distorting 

imaginaries pose a considerable obstacle to place-based governance. The experience of 

discursive collaborations only reinforces the imaginary that they cannot exist elsewise – to 

collaborate is just to discursively collaborate. The West needs to remember that to co-laborate – 

or to com laborare – is merely to work together and to recognize that as embodied, ratio-

cognitive beings, we bring our minds, bodies, and souls to this work. If who we are is 

conditioned by where we are (and vice versa) then we must confront the minds, bodies, and souls 

conditioned by the multiple Wests and strive to labor together. Collaboration, as it is currently 

imagined, must make way for co-laboration – laboring together with our complete and varied 

selves.  

 

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Although there a multitude of imaginaries that do not treat the non-discursive as, at least, 

on equal footing with the discursive, there is something to be said regarding co-laboration and 

the environmental imaginaries discussed in chapter three. In general, and following from the 

scientific imaginary (which, as I argue in chapter five, will find it difficult to prioritize the non-

discursive), any imaginary that is founded on a linear epistemic imaginary will be ill-suited to 

grapple with the complexities of the non-discursive. The non-discursive resist reductionist, 

objective, and causal accounts of the world, which are constitutive of the sort of linear thinking 

that pervades -machine and -community imaginaries. For these imaginaries, co-laboration may 

need to begin with a sort of Introduction to Experience or Imagination (or, perhaps, something 

else altogether) in order to make non-discursive elements legible to linear thinkers. It is 

important that these elements are introduced discursively and, where available, in empirical 

terms as these are the modes that will be most charitably interpreted to linear epistemologies. 

After sufficient introduction, the co-laboration can move on to treating the non-discursive qua 

non-discursive.  

As described, our places are essential to our experiences. This essentialism may be 

interpreted by some imaginaries as a collapse of the human/nature non-porous boundary where 

our experience is seen as a phenomena of the place itself inasmuch as a phenomena of our lives. 

For those imaginaries – here, described as -community and -family imaginaries – founded on a 

porous or non-existent human/nature boundary, the non-discursive may be easier to entertain 

given the recognition that we are integrally intertwined with our environments in ways that resist 

conceptual separation. The -machine and -garden imaginaries, and the non-porous human/nature 

boundary imagined by them, will find it difficult to imagine how our environments themselves 

constitute our conceptual schemas and thus co-laboration with these communities may begin 

 

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with a sort of Introduction to Place in order to elaborate the ways in which our lives and our 

environments are inherently woven.  

Following from this, the -machine imaginary will find it most difficult to entertain the 

non-discursive, while the -family imaginary will find the non-discursive exceedingly 

comfortable. Generally, collaboration founded on rational discourse tracks settler-colonial 

imaginaries and thus, at a broad socio-political scale, settler-colonialism in all forms must be 

confronted in order to usher in a co-laborative politic. The recognition that our imaginaries – and 

the experiences that give rise to them – are critical to our co-laborative potential allows 

facilitators, supporters, and sponsors of collaboration to evaluate the co-laborative potential of 

their efforts through the predilection of some imaginaries to arrest or distort the non-discursive 

elements of our lives. 

Co-laboration is not uniquely Western nor should it be – we are all complete selves and 

so we should all seek to co-labor (and deserve the recognition that co-laboring requires). The 

West, however, is uniquely situated (public lands, diverse imaginaries, cultural power, etc.) to 

enact co-laboration in order to develop institutions that take seriously the non-discursive 

elements of our lives. What co-laboration looks like in practice will vary immensely. It will, 

however, seek to understand the diversity of place-meanings of the American West and the 

constitutive elements of those. It will celebrate the range of ways people connect to their places 

and respect the range of expertise that communities bring to bear. It will demand that we are 

humble in our prescriptions, recognizing that they are themselves products of our own 

experiences and imaginaries. And it will celebrate the diversity of experience, helping to 

construct an imaginary where Western Peoples reflect on their own experiences and the ways in 

which their imaginaries arrest or distort other’s experience. Lastly, recalling the discussion of 

 

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bodies/fences/nature relationships in chapter four, reflecting on our experiences, places, and 

imaginations is humbling and this humility is, itself, a sociopolitical divergence from the 

(relative) certainty of mechanistic analyses. As Michael (2000) recognizes, these considerations 

operate on such “mundane a level…that there can be no overarching principles by which to 

derive ‘what to do’ as an environmentally concerned actor. However, this is the point. It is an 

analytic that ‘advises’ modesty and caution…” (p. 122). The act of reflection on the non- or pre-

discursive in co-laborative forums performs the caution and modesty that we require. This 

project is, itself, discursive and too short to fully recognize the character of co-laboration as non-

discursive co-laboration will happen in ways that may resist discursive interpretation. But there 

are general strategies we could employ to encourage the non-discursive and, in doing so, we 

begin to characterize co-laboration as something other than collaboration.  

First, we need to contend with our own intuitions about experience. Our experience, as 

described in this project, is continuous and a complex interaction between our embodiment, 

mental attitudes, sociocultural norms, material conditions, etc. Experiences range both from the 

passive to the intentional and from the internal to the external. Some are inchoate, and some are 

forceful. Dedicated work to understand the determinants of a range of experiences is required to 

understand both how some imaginaries are constructed (e.g. how co-laborers are conceptualizing 

the co-laboration) and how to structure our lives in such a way as to produce desirable 

experiences. Of particular import, however, is that we should seek to prioritize those experiences 

that promote imaginaries that value pre-discursive experience or minimally, do not arrest or 

distort it. Whether this be experience of boundaries, natural spaces, artifacts, science, co-

laboration, or something else altogether is beside this point – whatever we demand of experience, 

it should at least be recognized as having the force to limit or distort future experiences. If we 

 

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have diverse imaginaries constructed from diverse experiences, we need to minimally grapple 

with those experiences (as extended in certain imaginaries) that prevent us from recognizing 

experience per se or the diversity of worldviews. This is what I take John Dewey (1938) to be 

suggesting in saying that “Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or 

distorting the growth of further experience” (p. 25). We should strive for experiences that do not 

arrest or distort future experiences and, if we must have certain sorts of experience to even 

recognize the fundamental value of experience, then we should strive for these sorts of 

experience.  

The recognition of experience in co-laboration allows us to focus our efforts on the types 

of experience being had in co-laboring. Instead of developing a co-laboration around desired 

objectives, the co-laboration may instead be developed around the sorts of experiences it arouses 

such that the experience of the co-laboration is not inchoate, but instead becomes forceful or, as 

Dewey describes, an experience itself. Discursive practices can help to guide these experiences, 

but will need to take seriously the limits of discourse. The objective of the co-laboration matters 

and can still serve as a destination, but the imaginative value is now seen as arising from the way 

we get to the destination; the sort of experience our co-laborers have during the travel. Co-

laborations focused in this way are intended to be taken up in the imagination and extended to 

our conceptual systems, allowing the non-discursive (and all the fuzziness that comes with it) to 

be contended with alongside the discursive.  

Our bodies matter to our experience and are thus a locus of co-laboration. They are 

reflections of our past experiences such as the scars we bear and the callouses that evidence our 

recurrent activities. They are also our vehicle of experience and each vehicle can traverse 

different sorts of experiential possibilities. Co-laborations need to take this seriously, creatively 

 

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imagining how the physical act of working together can be pluralized to include the diversity of 

bodies that exist. There will need to be focused effort on physical interaction between the co-

laborers and their material worlds, such that they experience their place in their own way yet 

share multiple and varied experiences of common places. Through iterative material and co-

laborative interaction, co-laborations help to develop place-attachments that can be shared 

between diverse communities. However, co-laborers will bring their past experiences and place-

attachments to their co-laboration, and so attention need be paid to the ways that some places 

pre-empt some experiences. Nevertheless, place is not static and can be reshaped through place 

interaction – the common experience of a place with explicit focus on experiencing that place 

together can help to accomplish this. 

Our bodies also affectively, emotionally, and physically recoil from some experiences. 

Co-laborations need to take this seriously as recoiling is itself an experience and one that can 

arrest or distort future experiences for the one experiencing recoil as well as those experiencing 

the other’s recoil. For example, blatant disregard for someone’s lived experience may provoke 

the disregarded to recoil from the co-laboration and the recoil, itself, will impact the experience 

for the other co-laborers. Recognizing the non-discursive allows the discursive to track and help 

mitigate for recoil – co-laborations need to be clear about prioritizing embodied actions/reactions 

and develop in ways where reactions are treated without being minimized. Careful reflection of 

the co-laboration, done in concert with the co-laborers, can itself be an experience that both 

prompts us to learn and care about the non-discursive through recognition of its reactive impact 

as well as develop further experiences to mediate reactions. Some mediation efforts will prompt 

experiences that allow co-laborers to diversify their experiential possibilities and some will 

 

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prompt experiences that arrest experiential possibilities – careful co-laborative reflection can 

help to achieve the former over the latter. 

And, above all, co-laborations should seek opportunities to physically engage rather than 

merely mentally engage. Some practices in the West already take this seriously – many 

environmental collaborations (importantly not quite co-laborations) take place in the natural 

world through site tours and conservation projects. Of course, there will be many times where 

discursive engagement is necessary, but there are also many missed opportunities to engage 

bodies. Long periods of discursive engagement can be broken up with physical engagement such 

as planting a tree, walking a trail, or lying in the grass. Engaging the body allows non-discursive 

experience to be integrated into the co-laborative, bringing with it the embodied, aural, visual, 

affective, etc. experiences of the place.  

Focusing on the non-discursive in co-laborative efforts may seem pointless, frivolous, or 

otherwise inappropriate. And to the dominant imaginary in environmental institutions, they very 

well may be. Taking seriously the impact and role of experience as well as the experiential 

possibility of Western landscapes, however, should prompt us to creatively re-imagine just what 

we are doing when we are working together. Our co-laboration is an experience itself and just 

what sort of experience do we wish to be taken up in the imagination and extended? These brief 

considerations implore us to re-imagine the experiential potential of the co-laboration, but we 

also must consider the experiential and imaginative potential of the results of the co-laboration. 

We must also consider how the ultimate products will be experienced into the future, opting for 

those that improve future experiences rather than those that arrest or distort them. For example, 

environmental decision-making in the West often must consider fence-types to construct on the 

landscape – a discussion regarding the potential of varying fence-types to promote or dissuade 

 

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certain imaginaries would help to ensure the principles of co-laboration are extended into the 

future experiences of those interacting with the fence. Our choices to measure, group, construct, 

regulate, recognize, etc. condition our future experiences – taking the non-discursive seriously 

demands that we take this conditioning seriously.  

As recognized, I cannot provide a full characterization of co-laboration in practice. What 

is needed is to firstly recognize the value of the non-discursive and then experiment with ways to 

integrate it into our collaborative practices to develop them into co-laborations. We can start by 

talking about the imagination and our imaginaries, what place is and what our places mean, and 

reflecting on experience writ large and our particular experiences. By recognizing the impact of 

the non-discursive on our worldviews, we can begin to work together to integrate multiple 

imaginaries in ways that at this current time may seem unimaginable. This brief discussion has 

only suggested a few ways to do this at the level of the co-laboration itself. However, the 

environmental institutions in the American West have a role to play in prompting non-discursive 

co-laboration at the systemic level and it is at this level that the principles of co-laboration must 

be recognized. 

Co-laborative Place-Based Environmental Governance 

Environmental governance, generally and as described previously, is complex. It is 

especially so in the American West where considerations of economic, political, and social 

institutions that operate across varying spatial and temporal scales are foregrounded by concerns 

of appropriate government intervention (federal, state, local, or none) on millions of acres of 

stolen land that is explicitly managed for multiple (often incompatible) uses and, at times, no use 

at all. Tracing this complexity is a career-long project itself, and thus I cannot do it justice in this 

small space. What must be recognized, however, is that whichever form it takes and to 

 

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whichever ends it proceeds, environmental governance in the West acts on, with, and through 

emplaced human bodies.  

Perhaps most important to the discussion of environmental governance in the American 

West is the role of the various federal agencies in sponsoring, regulating, policing, and otherwise 

governing Western landscapes. If one wishes to engage in environmental governance in the 

West, one must engage the federal regulatory system. This federal system is itself contested, with 

the various federal departments – predominantly the Department of Agriculture (DOA) and the 

Department of the Interior (DOI) – and each with their own various agencies – predominantly 

the National Park Service (NPS), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bureau of Land Management 

(BLM), United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the United States Forest Service 

(USFS) – operating with different missions and objectives, regulatory means and restrictions, 

and with varying levels of community and financial support. There is perhaps no more succinct 

description of this contestation than Michel Foucault’s (2008) description of the relationship 

between various governmental rationalities:  

In the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental 
rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each 
other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality 
of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic 
agents, and more generally according to the rationality of the governed themselves. (p. 
313) 
 
Here, Foucault is describing four sorts of rationalities – discipline, sovereignty, 

neoliberalism, and truth – that operate varyingly in the broad scope of what he terms 

governmentality. Robert Fletcher (2010, p. 178) describes these four as: 

-  Discipline: Governance through encouraging internalization of norms and values 

 

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-  Sovereignty32: Governance through top-down creation and enforcement of regulations 

-  Neoliberalism: Governance through manipulation of external incentive structures 

-  Truth: Governance in accordance with particular conceptions of the nature and order of 

the universe 

These four, in varying degrees, can be found through the complexities of Western land 

governance. For instance, licenses for hunting wild game (a form of governance) are issued 

through various agencies, often requiring training that introduces students to hunters’ or 

sportsmans’ ethics – a clear attempt at discipline governance. The scientific management of 

natural resources is a common description of environmental governance in the West and telling – 

the phrase itself, “scientific management of natural resources” encapsulates sovereignty 

governance (management as top-down enforcement), neoliberalism governance (natural 

resources as incentivizing products), and truth governance (scientific). The meteoric rise of the 

Ecosystem Services framework, the prevalence of conservation easements and restoration 

credits, and the commodification of natural landscapes for ecotourism can all be described with 

varying degrees of these governmentalities. These governmentalities are effective because of the 

conditions they exist within (e.g. neoliberal environmental governance may be more effective in 

neoliberal economies) while also setting conditions for future governance possibilities such that 

if someone always experiences environmental governance as neoliberal governance, then their 

imaginaries codify the environment as mere resources used to incentivize behavior. This is not to 

say that any of these governmentalities is bad or ill-fitted to environmental governance – in fact, 

they will be best-fitted for environmental governance if they align with the imaginaries of those 

in the governance system. But this is suggestive – if there are multiple American and Indigenous 

                                                           
32 It is important to recognize that this concept of sovereignty is not the same as that of Indigenous sovereignty 
which allows sovereign nations to pursue whichever governmentality they wish. 

 

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Wests and they have varying governmentality alignment, then there is no one-size-fits-all. We 

must imagine a governance practice that allows the just and equitable reflection of multiple 

governmentalities through the engagement of multiple imaginaries and, importantly, the 

experiencing bodies that hold those imaginaries.  

That these Foucauldian governmentalities are prevalent in modern institutions is widely 

recognized, and Robert Fletcher has done well to show how they interact within environmental 

governance in a variety of contexts (c.f. Fletcher, 2010, 2017). But, as Fletcher recognizes, they 

appear to be insufficient to capture concerns of environmental and social justice – concerns that 

are increasingly being leveled against contemporary governmentalities. Following from the work 

of political ecology, Fletcher suggests a post-conservation “liberation environmentality” where 

the “dominant ‘development discourse’ in which a cadre of (white, western) ‘experts’ plan 

interventions on behalf of the world’s poor,” give way to “a ‘post-development’ era emphasizing 

genuinely participatory and collaborative processes for enhancing people’s well-being within 

culturally-appropriate frames” (2010, p. 178). The recognition and development of a divergent 

governmentality can, as Fletcher hopes, improve both communication among governance 

practitioners and help to facilitate more just environmental collaborations (p. 180). Forgiving the 

call to collaboration (which, as argued, is often imagined as discursive collaboration), Fletcher’s 

contribution lies both in the critique levelled at contemporary governance but also, and more 

important to this project, the space it carves out to imagine what this new governmentality must 

look like. 

If we are to take seriously the call for a new governmentality and that the West is prime 

for this sort of non-discursive co-laborative governmentality, then critical work must be done to 

highlight the ways in which the federal regulatory system must adjust to accommodate a re-

 

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imagined and genuinely western way of dealing with western issues. The scope of this work is 

well beyond this project and will require multi-disciplinary expertise, practitioner perseverance, 

and community support. However, without providing the conditions for a co-laborative place-

based governance to emerge, it is unlikely that a new governmentality can enter the foray of 

existing governmentalities. 

To do this, our environmental governance institutions must first re-imagine the thing that 

they are governing. The self-interested rational agent operating in an objective and predictable 

material world of spaces must be replaced by an experiencing, imaginative agent operating in 

and through their places. The mind/body, subject/object, and real/imagined dichotomies of 

contemporary governmentalities have – for reasons expressed throughout this project – the 

capacity (if not the necessity) to arrest and distort our future experiences in ways that do not 

allow us to recognize the plurality and diversity of our experiences, places, and imaginaries. Co-

laborative place-based governance, however, requires more than the mere re-imagining of the 

subject of governance. It requires systematic, institutional re-tooling to transform current 

regulatory frameworks into ones that recognize place and experience. 

What this means, in principle, is that current institutions treat the environment (the 

subject of governance) as the material and predictable background to human activity. Human 

activity is treated as impacting the environment, but not part of it. If, on the other hand, human 

experience cannot be understood apart from the human agent’s subjectivity in combination with 

the material condition, then the environment (necessarily understood through human 

subjectivity) contains both the material conditions and human experience – expressed through 

human agent’s imaginatively derived environmental conceptions. To govern either the human 

apart from their environment or treat the environment as distinct from human experience is to not 

 

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recognize the full constitution of the environment. Environmental governance, therefore, needs 

to take seriously the interdependence of environmental material conditions and human 

experience of those conditions as elaborated through our place, experience, and imaginations 

(among other fuzzy and non-fuzzy discursive and non-discursive phenomena). 

Place, as described in this project, is the locus of this shifted environmental conception. 

Our places integrate the material conditions of the environment with the experience of them and 

the imaginative extensions they provide. Shifting the subject of environmental governance from 

either the human apart from their environment or the environment apart from the human 

experience to the places that we experience has the consequence of modifying our governance 

strategies – whatever they may be – to track other relevant features of human experienced 

environments. Recognizing the environment as place is, in Daniel Wildcat’s (2001) words, to 

“actively acknowledge and engage the power that permeates the many persons of the earth in 

places recognized as sacred not by human proclamation or declaration, but by experience in 

those places” (p. 13, italics added). It is not by human proclamation or declaration that our 

environments matter – that they are deemed sacred – it is in the experience of those places. 

Governance that treats place seriously, especially places as events rather than meaning laden 

objects, must at the same time treat our experience of that place seriously.  

People are always emplaced, but without the recognition of their emplacement – without 

recognizing their own experiences of their emplacement and how they are constituted by place – 

they operate as if they are continuously displaced. In context, Wildcat’s words are describing the 

metaphysical background that conditions Indigenous Knowledge, knowledge that western 

science and society are increasingly looking to in order to better govern ourselves in relation to 

our environments. But this sort of knowledge is knowledge of place and the sort that takes 

 

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experience of place seriously. If we wish to more justly engage with this sort of knowledge, learn 

from it and incorporate its principle understandings into our governance, then we must first start 

by recognizing the power of place, re-conceptualizing the subject of our governance, 

understanding that places are entwined with human experience, and that this sort of emplacement 

allows a distinct form of knowledge to emerge. Importantly, we should make place for the 

people with this expertise to thrive and proliferate – instead of translating Indigenous Knowledge 

into Western paradigms, we must learn to act in accordance with Indigenous Knowledge. As 

Indigenous Peoples hold Indigenous Knowledge, we must thus make room for their knowledges 

and the experiences that come with it. This is not done discursively as in saying we want to make 

room, but instead done by acting to make room. We should be reminded that what we do speaks 

louder than what we say. 

In practice, this acknowledgment will take many forms. Aside from the reorientation that 

must occur to integrate experience and place into our governance, we will need to reimagine the 

geospatial scope of western environmental governance. For example, Bureau of Land 

Management (BLM) governance applies to all BLM lands (although, admittedly, they are often 

interpreted locally to meet local conditions – but the constraints to this interpretation are concrete 

and substantial). We will have to figure out how to pluralize this governance in order to allow 

unique forms to emerge based on the varying constituents of local places (people, experience, 

material conditions, etc.). This idea is not new, but it has been forgotten or overlooked in western 

governance. John Wesley Powell, a geologist who explored the American West in the 19th 

century, admitted in his 1879 DOI commissioned Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the 

United States that the West would not be amenable to eastern property divisions, instead 

proposing that western state lines should be based on watersheds. Powell recognized that the 

 

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western landscapes varied along their respective water drainages and water, itself, was all 

important in western environments. Daniel Kemmis (2013) extends this notion, describing 

current political and regulatory strategies such as interstate compacts between states and 

sovereign Indigenous tribes that would effectively place environmental governance at the scale 

of the western drainage with unique governance systems emerging from the varied basins in the 

West. To respect place, federal governance must grapple with the diversity of western landscapes 

and seek to re-tool governance in order to allow diverse governance structures to emerge from 

the multitude of places. I do not offer possible solutions to this issue of de-scaling western 

governance, only highlighting the necessity of it if we are to take the non-universal place 

seriously in our efforts.  

Following from the de-scaling of western space into a landscape of diverse places, 

current governance will need to grapple with the sorts of epistemic justification that it currently 

requires. Simply, the priority placed on the scientific institution must be reckoned with. As 

argued previously, western science may be necessary but is not sufficient to recognize the 

epistemic plurality required for place-based environmental governance. However, it is 

institutionalized in legal procedures such as the “best available science” clause in the National 

Environmental Policy Act (which applies to all decision-making on federal lands, thus decision-

making on western lands), in environmental practice, and in federal hiring and administration. 

Promoting diverse place-based governance will require the allowance of other community 

validated epistemic practices. Again, what this looks like is beyond the scope of this project, but 

we can minimally see this as a pluralizing of disciplinary knowledge in governance justification 

– perhaps a congressional modification of “best available science” to “best available knowledge” 

and the legal shifts that would follow this modification. Interdisciplinary teams comprised of the 

 

185 

natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities would be necessary for justification – 

not merely the natural sciences. The epistemic components of ceremony, story and narrative, art, 

and experience itself must be grappled with and allowed to influence place-based governance. It 

matters not if these considerations can be translated, interpreted, described, measured, or studied 

by western science; place-based governance must recognize epistemic plurality allowing 

justification to emerge from a diversity of epistemic experiences. 

There is low-hanging fruit here: place-based governance will require the modification of 

federal agency hiring practices and funding priorities. Currently, students with environmental 

studies (importantly not environmental science) degrees do not meet minimum federal hiring 

requirements for resource management or conservation officer positions (among many others), 

even though environmental studies introduces students to the social and humanistic dimensions 

of the environment that is needed for place-based management. This is due to their lack of credit 

hours in the natural sciences as their credit hours are instead spread over the natural and social 

sciences, arts, and humanities. The multi-cultural empathy and understanding that emerges from 

these other disciplines will be necessary for place-based governance and should be actively 

integrated into environmental management positions. Funding priorities will need to be shifted, 

allowing resources to pursue varying forms of governance – from stream and wildlife studies to 

co-laborations and cultural remediation. With these shifts, plural expertise will be required to 

both direct and evaluate the shifting as well as facilitate the on-the-ground efforts. Proposed 

policy and regulatory changes will need plural expert evaluation to prevent the 

arresting/distorting effects that hinder place-based governance. 

Current governance is founded on the ability of experts to predict and control 

environmental phenomena (itself a product of the sufficiency of science). Prediction and control 

 

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require a future-objective – we want to control in order to attain a certain sort of condition. Aside 

from the lack of acknowledgment that values play in deciding this condition, this sort of 

governance strategy makes it difficult to quickly adapt to changing conditions, whether they be 

social, cultural, or environmental. Without changing our future-objective, we instead change our 

current strategy when conditions change, regardless of the cost, difficulty, or impossibility of 

changing our strategy. A new governance paradigm would do well to re-conceptualize this 

stance, instead letting the objective emerge from current conditions as reflected in the 

burgeoning shift in livestock permits from static to adaptive. This requires constant engagement 

with our places, critical reflection of our practices, creative experimentation, and genuine 

humility. If we want to preserve our place experiences, although recognizing that they will shift 

with changing conditions, we must resist the urge to focus our energy into making a future-place 

that we wish to inhabit, instead focusing on the place we are in. Both emerging governance 

paradigms such as adaptive management and traditional paradigms such as Indigenous seasonal 

rounds diverge from this future-oriented approach, instead recommending governance practices 

that institutionalize adaptability and practicing in flux. Minimally, place-based governance must 

allow some forms of adaptive/flux/seasonal governance to emerge without placing undue 

institutional restraint on them. 

If we wish to take place-based governance seriously, the institutions that emerge will be 

required to engage with diversity and plurality in ways that they are currently unable to. Much of 

the work to reimagine these institutions will be required of the people that serve the institution 

itself. As these institutions condition the experiences of their employees and the public that lives 

within the constraints of the institution, this work will not come easy. But these people are not 

born into the institution – they are trained. And they are trained in academic institutions. 

 

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Therefore, academic institutions have a responsibility to both study and instruct with a focus on 

diversity, plurality, and the embodied human experience. Much of the academic institution takes 

this seriously, although they face the same imaginative difficulties that those in governance 

institutions face. The emergence of interdisciplinary scholarship is promising as it requires 

significant reflection on the ways our institutions and deeply held convictions pose considerable 

challenges to integrating diverse imaginaries. But if we wish to imagine a new place-based 

governance paradigm, we need to also recognize that much of our academic study is itself not 

place-based. The search for universal truth shifts our focus from our and our communities’ 

individual experiences and obscures the emplacement of our research projects. Much work needs 

to be done to collapse the artifice that render us displaced mental beings and recognize our 

emplaced, embodied, experiential realities. As academics, we condition the experiences of our 

students through our own activities as well as the force with which we hold onto mind/body, 

object/subject, fact/value, true/false, wild/civilized, culture/nature, etc. dualisms. The fuzziness 

of our experience, imaginations, and places (among others) must be allowed to impact our own 

imaginaries in order for us, as a society, to be able to reimagine governance (writ large) as 

something other than it is. 

Our experiences are conditioned by our worlds. Reimagining our environmental 

governance strategies will require those governance institutions to relinquish some of their power 

to the communities that exist in place. We should not fear this. Through co-laboration and the 

celebration of human experience, we can engage with the diversity of communities and 

landscapes in the West. The multiple Wests share in the experiential possibilities afforded by 

public, commonly held lands. By taking our emplacement on these lands seriously, the West 

 

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stands to, as Daniel Kemmis asserts in the epigraph to this project, outgrow our political infancy 

and develop a genuinely western way of dealing with western issues. 

Conclusion 

Collaboration, generally, is increasingly recommended as the tonic for our social ills. 

Humans, as a social species, have always flourished by working together and so to demand 

collaboration is, in some sense, to demand remembering our human-ness. But the ways in which 

humans have been conceptualized as primarily ratio-cognitive discursive beings makes the 

problem of collaboration a very real problem indeed. And this is unlikely to change. However, 

by recognizing the experiential possibilities of our places and our commitments, we can begin to 

reform our imaginaries in ways that make co-laboration possible. In the American West, this 

begins with the recognition of the power of place or, as Joe L. Kincheloe and his colleagues 

(2006) suggest: 

…place is the construct that brings the particularistic into focus; a sense of place sharpens 
our understanding of the individual and the psychological and social forces that direct 
her. An appreciation of the interaction of place and feeling particularizes and exposes 
embedded social forces. (p. 145) 
 
The multitude of western (environmental) places and our diverse experiences of them are, 

in this sense, exposing our embedded social forces. Given the tremendous conflict and 

complexity of environmental governance in the American West, studying our places – and the 

fuzziness of them – stands to help us better understand both our environments and ourselves. 

Studying our places exposes the social forces that hold the West together or, very possibly, tear it 

apart. Taking seriously place-based governance in the West radically reorients us to recognize 

our own and other’s experience of the West. It is a genuinely western way of dealing with 

western issues. 

 

 

189 

OF CHEATGRASS AND BIODIVERSITY 

I’m back in the Nevada desert in the summer of 2018, listening to a University of Nevada 

extension agent explain the spread of invasive annual grass species into native and non-native 

plant communities using the metaphor of colonization. The desert heat is harsh, but somehow 

comforting. I’m surrounded by local ranchers, state and federal agency officers and managers, 

and non-profit organization representatives. Everyone has a hat on, but the size and direction of 

the brim reflects just what community that person represents. Laced hiking shoes tread on the dry 

desert alongside pull-on leather boots. The extension agent is in discussion with a handful of 

differently-specialized scientists. This is like many of the collaborations I’ve participated in and 

learned from – at times it may be more aptly described as scientific dissemination. At a 

minimum, scientific description is the interpretative background that sets the conditions for our 

conversations.  

The use of the colonization metaphor strikes me. In this collaboration, we are all 

colonizers. What does it mean that this is how we understand what the invasive cheat grass is 

doing to the native desert? And why is the cheat grass “invasive” and “colonizing,” but the non-

native plants are not? The answer lies in how these plants live together or, put differently, how 

they provide a place for the proliferation of other species of plants. Cheat grass is invasive 

because when it enters these arid ecosystems, it dominates to an extent that all other plants – 

native and non-native alike – cannot thrive (Knapp, 1996). Non-native plants, on the other hand, 

thrive in symbiosis with their native counterparts. And sometimes when an ecosystem is severely 

degraded, non-native plants can be seeded in order to hold at bay the invasive species while 

allowing the native communities to grow in the places between. The desert soil has a rich bed of 

 

190 

native plant seeds that, given the right conditions, will thrive and keep the invasive species at 

bay. 

We can learn from these plants. What makes the cheat grass dangerous is that it disallows 

the proliferation of other plants – other plants that have their own modes of living, requiring 

different nutrients, soil types, and water regimes while providing different degrees of shade, 

nourishment for the desert wildlife, and germinating seasons. Altogether, the increased 

biodiversity promotes a more resilient system that can recover after wildfires and drought. It 

allows a wider variety of wildlife – some endangered and some not – to thrive in the desert, each 

taking from the system what they need and giving back what the system needs. The biodiversity 

thrives just because none of the species disallows the others from thriving.  

But collaboration between diverse groups (akin to thriving biodiversity) is not often like 

this system. It is constrained by an imaginary that sets the conditions for future experiences and, 

critically, limits the expression of other imaginaries. This metaphor is apt – it is an invasive 

imaginary, colonizing the collaborative space and limiting the proliferation of diverse 

experiences. The West is fighting cheat grass in nearly every threatened ecosystem because we 

know just what is put at risk when the resilience of biodiversity is sacrificed for 100 million 

acres of invasive annual grasses.  

This dissertation was borne out of my own curiosity to understand collaborative efforts in 

the American West. Just as diverse species co-laborate to enact resilient ecosystems, the West 

needs to co-laborate to enact diverse and resilient eco-social systems. When I began, I did not 

expect to find answers in my own imagination, experiences, and places. But I did. Our 

imaginations are spectacular and all-important to how we conceive of our worlds. The second 

chapter of this project attempts to collapse the mind-body dualisms that have rendered the 

 

191 

imagination as either subordinate or superordinate to other mental faculties, instead instilling it 

as both occurring in our bodies and our minds. The imagination, in this role, provides the 

organizing logic that sorts our experiences and metaphorically extends them to our concepts. The 

input to this imaginative process is our continuous, inchoate, forceful, embodied, sociocultural, 

non-discursive, and discursive experience. The output of this process is a rich conceptual 

tapestry that allows us to make sense of our worlds or, as I have used it, our imaginaries.  

As our diverse experiences are necessarily particular to ourselves, we develop a multitude 

of imaginaries that converge and diverge in important ways. The third chapter began painting a 

picture of divergent environmental imaginaries in the American West, or, put differently, those 

sets of experiences that promote varying interpretations of western environments. The 

environment as machine, garden, community, and family imaginaries construct western 

environments so differently as to promote substantial conflict in western environmental 

governance – conflict that is often thought to reside in our discursive epistemic practices and not 

in our embodied and sociocultural experience of our places. Describing these imaginaries is a 

first attempt at taking seriously how our experiences of our places work to develop divergent 

imaginaries and how these divergent imaginaries themselves construct the multiple American 

and Indigenous Wests. 

At the core of our imaginative capacities is our experience of our material worlds or, as 

argued in chapter four, our places. Our places are imbued with meaningful significance and 

whether we choose to recognize it, we are always emplaced. How we live in, recreate on, and 

ultimately experience the granite peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the hot and dry sun of the arid 

desert, or the lushness of river-bottom meadows is important to how we imagine the environment 

at large. How we experience the things in our environments – the naturally occurring objects and 

 

192 

the artifacts that require human intentionality – is important to how we imagine our own relation 

to the environment. The various fences used in the American West serve to illustrate both how 

our imaginaries – whatever they may be – are enacted through our material construction and also 

how our experiences of that materiality are taken up into our imaginations. Just as we can learn 

from the plant communities under our feet, we can learn from the fences we walk alongside. 

The multitude of experiences and imaginative potential of the American West is far more 

than can be treated fairly in such a short space. However, the role of the scientific imaginary 

cannot be understated in the environmental governance of the American West. Chapter five 

begins describing the experience of science from the perspective of scientists acting and reacting 

to their environments. The experiences of measuring and grouping as they occur on the imagined 

background of realism were explored to help understand how they are taken up in the imaginary 

and extended to limit the expression of non-discursive phenomena. It is not that science is not 

necessary only that it is not sufficient – we risk cheat grass invasion if we do not take seriously 

that to diversify our eco-social systems, we need to provide an imaginative place to do so. We 

need experiences that, themselves, promote greater experiential and imaginative potential instead 

of limiting, arresting, or distorting it. 

Our environmental experiences are conditioned, constrained, and encouraged in a large 

part by our environmental governance strategies. Collaboration in environmental governance is 

increasingly prescribed and for good reason – it promises more equitable, inclusive, and effectual 

governance. However, as I argue in chapter six, if it viewed as fundamentally discursive 

collaboration, then it disallows the roles of imagination, experience, and place to be taken up in 

collaborative governance. I argue for a shift to co-laboration which explicitly encourages and 

treats the non-discursive alongside the discursive where we see co-laboration as employing our 

 

193 

bodies and minds to work and experience together in place. The chapter and this dissertation 

ends with a brief description of systemic change in our governance and academic institutions that 

need to be considered in order to allow the imaginative and experiential potential of the 

American West and its communities to flourish. 

As mentioned, this project has been a personal reflection on the obstacles and 

opportunities for collaboration in the American West. For many inter-related reasons (e.g. 

climate change, extractive development, rampant consumption, imperialism, social and political 

unrest), we are at a juncture where we must reimagine what our social practices, material 

realities, and environmental governance strategies look like. We must grapple with the 

complicated, challenging, astounding, and marvelous complexity of our world, ourselves, and 

our experiences of both.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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