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.
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