A Focus on the Environment as a Source for the Recuperation of Memory, Neilson Professor Lecture III, Miguel Angel Rosales (transcript)

MEMORY AND LANDSCAPE

I

This is the last of my talks here at Smith College and I’d like to close the series with something slightly different – although still closely related – to the topics I’ve talked about previously. So I’d like to examine with you the impact of colonialism on the land and how it determines our way of experiencing and appreciating it: how we can see the landscapes we live in as open texts that can help us rethink our history and our place in it and in the world as a whole.

In my first two talks I discussed how the distant voices of silenced minorities could still be heard in dance, music and other artistic forms, and how cinema is able to conjure up this lost speech in different spaces and times, suggesting new perspectives that can enhance our ability to capture and understand these other presences.

II

When we look at the places and landscapes we inhabit from the historical standpoint, we can trace the processes of erasure of what has been silenced, and the markers and monuments imposed on the territory to cement the hegemonic discourses, begin to become clear. Attempting to theorise space as political, shaped by history, is also part of my work as a documentary film-maker. When I began to research the Afro-descendant community and the importance of the slave trade in Seville, my findings started to reconfigure my experience of the city I had lived in for more than 30 years. On the cathedral steps I saw the old slave market; a well-known luxury hotel became the old storehouse where slaves were branded with hot irons; Santa María la Blanca Square, through which I often passed, turned into the place where Black Sevillians gathered to play music, dance and celebrate; the Santa Justa railway station was in the former San Gil slum area, where many enslaved people had lived; the church of Nuestra Señora de los Reyes was the first place to bring together a Black nation, united under a form of Catholicism syncretised with African beliefs; and La Plaza de Cuba 'Cuba Square' was one of Early Modern Europe’s first slaving ports. Also, I noticed the names of the city’s streets, squares and avenues, mostly commemorating Catholic saints, Spanish colonial history and the conquest of America, or glorifying historical figures connected to the Franco dictatorship.

In this way I saw the city anew, as a body bearing the marks of its history, the scars of its violence, and revealing the alleyways of resistance, the words that had lost their meaning but were still spoken, the names that had been buried in oblivion. There was much work to do in following the traces of these forgotten presences behind the facade created by the commercialisation of public space and the instrumentalization of memory.

Recently, with Yinka Esi Graves’ latest work The Disappearing Act, we made a series of films in which she brought the body into dialogue with places marked by the slave trade and colonial history. We worked in different sites in Andalusia, Portugal and Ghana. In Seville, one of these was the San Telmo Bridge, which crosses the Guadalquivir River and joins the city centre to Cuba Square. For centuries, this stretch of the river was where enslaved Africans arrived in the city.

III

As some of you will know, I’m not only an anthropologist and film-maker; much of the year I’m also a forest engineer. For more than 25 years I’ve worked in the forests of Andalusia, its rivers, paths, mountains and solitary places. In addition, throughout my life I’ve had a close relationship with nature. When I was very small I used to explore the mountains and forests of Cadiz with my father, and for many years I trekked in high peaks, becoming familiar with the Atlas mountains in Morocco, parts of the Chilean Andes and, of course, the mountain ranges of Spain.

My interest in memory and history and how they affect our perception of the places we live in was something that my curiosity also transferred to my understanding of the forests and my interpretation of the landscape. Perhaps in the hills and woodlands we don’t come across such explicit evidence of erased lives or stories buried under monuments, plaques and statues in honour of the nation’s military prowess and colonial conquests; but of course the land is also marked by the same process. We perceive nature through the landscape we observe – which is nothing if not a cultural construction, a text that we can interpret in terms of its different layers and depths.

In the forestry field I’ve been lucky enough to specialise in pathology, the science of tree health. Basically my task is to assess the state and health of the woods. I say this is lucky because it’s very different from the part of forestry related to engineering and calculation, and in my view has highly creative aspects. I track the condition of 1,700 trees across a broad expanse of land of around 8.000 square miles that I visit every year. This is a landscape of great beauty in winter and spring but with extremely dry, harsh summers. It is a landscape that is completely anthropized; that is, managed by humans for centuries and thus directly affected by every social change.

Studying anthropology some years after engineering provoked a paradigm shift in many areas of my life and affected the way I saw the woodlands, the trees and the landscape. The holistic perspective I took from anthropology led me to think that the trees I appraised every year might reveal to me, in their old scars, in the colours of their leaves and in their different shapes and markings, not only their physiological condition but also perhaps their history.

For many years now – since I began to learn to “speak to” and communicate with the trees, to interpret them and to try to understand something of their silent language – the history behind each of the landscapes I found myself in has been constantly in the back of my mind. In my regional government team we mostly work from a biological perspective, forgetting that, in a landscape like the Mediterranean, with centuries of human intervention, we can’t leave aside our awareness of history and how it has affected the land.

Clearly, the trees we monitor are affected by numerous factors, both biological – such as insects, fungi or wounds caused by animals – and physiological, stemming from pollution and the long droughts in the Andalusian hills. But I was becoming aware that perhaps we weren’t taking into account that these areas were moulded by a history which is that of the creation of the landscape itself, constructed, like everything human, through the intersection of social, political, cultural and psychological forces.

Thus I started to wonder what the trees were telling us and what was expressed by the mysterious signs on their trunks, in their never-closed scars, in this type of Braille that we read when we pass our hand across the stump of a cut tree, and in the shapes the branches take when they grow into the space around them. The memory of the trees.

IV

When Columbus returned to the Court of Castille from his first voyage to what was later known as the West Indies, he informed Queen Isabella that the trees in the newly conquered lands had shallow roots and were easy to fell. The Queen replied bluntly: “Where the trees do not root, little truth and less constancy should be expected from men.” Queen Isabella was unknowingly several centuries in advance of Buffon and Montesquieu, who believed that people were a reflection of their environment.

In the 15^th century, the sciences of ecology and forestry did not yet exist, of course, which meant that the Catholic Queen could hardly know that in old woods and forests, the trees’ resistance to wind and storm, their firm anchorage in the earth, had less to do with the depth of their roots than with the dense network they formed, clinging to each other, and the flexibility of the living wood that turned violent gusts of wind into harmonious movement.

The drive to colonise America and the new world order that accompanied this also changed the natural order. While Columbus’ three caravels crossed the planet horizontally in the opposite direction to its rotation, the world, imperceptibly, had started turning on a different axis, leaving it permanently upside down. “Man’s” relationship with nature shifted decisively as “he” appointed himself owner and lord of the Earth, sole universal hero in a vertical power relation with the other beings on the planet.

To understand how the rural landscape across much of Spain was shaped, we need to go back deep into history, to the point of no return that was the conquest of the last Muslim kingdoms of Europe and the colonisation of America by the Kingdom of Castille. (I say “much of Spain” because here I’ll discuss a different landscape from other more northerly regions such as Galicia, the Basque Country, Cantabria or Catalonia, where historical and ecological factors are different. The landscape we’re considering here is situated in the central and southern parts of Spain.)

The economy of the Castille was mainly based on transhumant sheep breeding for wool. This single product was so important that the Crown firmly backed the big livestock owners, who had formed an association named El Honrado Consejo de La Mesta (the Honourable Cattle Breeders’ Council). This Council wielded great economic and political power and enjoyed considerable privileges granted by the Crown. Its pressure on smaller farmers and livestock owners is illustrated by a saying of the times: “Two saints and a man of honour are the fate that crushes the people under its weight” (“dos santas y un honrado tienen al pueblo agobiado”), which refers to the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Council of the Mesta. Some of the Council’s privileges are still valid even today, giving rise to surrealist spectacles like flocks of sheep crossing the Gran Vía, Madrid’s main traffic thoroughfare.

This style of wool production required vast expanses of forest to be cleared. Thus Castille shaped a type of landscape known as the dehesa, where sheep and pastures were interspersed with isolated trees that brought in some economic returns and provided an alternative source of food for the animals in the dry Iberian summer. The word dehesa originally comes from defensa (defence), as it signified a piece of land that was partitioned off and defended from the incursion of the forest, sectioned off from the biological processes of nature, and wholly managed by humans. In contrast to the intact, holistic ecology of the forest, the dehesa was a productive model of manageable nature and individual trees.

In order to create a dehesa, the forest has to be cleared, the low bush has to be burnt, and only a few chosen trees are left, so that there is space for the sheep pastures. The land must also be fenced off to prevent the sheep escaping and to section it into manageable plots. Today, in the language of Andalusian country people, a “dirty” hill is a dehesa where the natural bush has been left to grow, and pruning or felling the trees to give light to the pastures is called “cleansing.” It should also be said that some of these techniques are indeed effective against the threat of forest fires in the Andalusian summer; but the language in which they are couched tells us much about people’s perception of the anthropized landscape, as distinct from the forest. In this vocabulary an old idea emerges. The opposition between the land not transformed by “men” (i.e. “nature”) and the tamed area of the dehesa is  constructed culturally in terms of hygiene. Expanses of terrain that can be comprehensively viewed at a single glance, possessed by the human gaze, are conceived of as “clean,” whereas the unproductive, unmanaged bush, home for the wild beasts, is seen as “dirty.”

Today the dehesa is the typical landscape of almost a quarter of the Iberian Peninsula, a large percentage of which has lost great swathes of forest. The problem is that this ecosystem created by human beings over the centuries shows very little capacity to adapt to climate change. There are various reasons for this: the poverty of the soils, degraded by centuries of agricultural exploitation; the pressure of the livestock industry, which drives landowners to keep more animals than the land can cater to; the lack of tree regeneration; and the aging human population. In my view, another problem may be the trees’ isolation and the weakness that results from their inability to use the ecological advantages of interaction with others of their kind.

Recently, studies showing how trees in an ecosystem share deep connections have become very important in the ecological and forestry sciences. The trees exchange fluids and nutrients and even create ties of solidarity with other trees in a worse situation, more exposed to harmful agents such as wind, excessive sun and drought. Another fascinating aspect of these studies is that they reveal the role played by other woodland organisms such as bacteria and fungi, which not only help tree roots to keep vital chemical nutrients such as nitrogen but also make up a kind of neuronal network connected by electronic impulses, forming a sort of underground mind of the whole forest.

What I learned from these studies spurred my interest in the idea of the forest as a living being, as opposed to trees as isolated individuals. I began to suspect that many of the illnesses affecting trees, the injuries and scars they bear, have to do with this isolation, with having broken the magical balance of intertwined roots, the rhythm of their synchronised swaying in the wind, the fabulous neurological network of mycelia and bacteria.

With a certain distance and poetic license, we might perhaps imagine that, just as the lifestyles imposed by capitalism drive us to break our community ties and solidarity and live in increasing isolation, something similar was happening to the trees I observed in the dehesas. And it followed that this would also apply to recently repopulated woods and forests, planted in areas that had been cleared of the original trees years ago and where the lack of quality and diversity of soils – exhausted by agriculture – had not enabled a truly interconnected forest to grow.

How, then, was the landscape of the dehesa formed? What were the wellsprings of its history?

The holm oak (Quercus ilex) is the typical tree of the dehesa, and is probably the most representative of the Castilian countryside, along with similar types of oak. As we can imagine from Queen Isabella’s comment, the deep roots of the holm oak cling firmly to the earth. It is a tree that is well adapted to the irregularity of the Mediterranean rains and to long, sometimes gruelling periods of drought. This is why it seeks not only a firm hold on the earth, but also to extend its roots as far it can: by covering as much land surface as possible it can squeeze the most nourishment from the little moisture that stays in the ground in summer. This is exploited by humans by taking the tree from its natural forest and isolating it, then pruning it to yield a wide crown that covers a sizable portion of ground. Apart from this it also provides firewood and acorns for animal food. This is what in engineering we call forestry behaviour, as opposed to species behaviour, which is what the tree would show in its natural state in the forest.

Historians have noted that for centuries, two opposite approaches to land management had coexisted in the Iberian Peninsula: on the one hand that of the Christian Monarchs, who cleared the forests to create wide expanses of pastures; and on the other that of the Muslims and Andalusians, based on agriculture and small-scale livestock breeding. The property form of the first was the latifundium, the great landed estate owned by a single noble landlord, with livestock breeding and cereal monoculture across broad expanses of terrain. The Al-andalus model, in contrast, involved small and medium-sized family properties and a more egalitarian division of the land. While its wider variety of crop species and smaller-scale production gave rise to a patchwork landscape, the open terrains created by the latifundia in Christian Castile have survived to our own day, especially in the centre and south of the country.

This is illustrated by a story that was common in the towns and villages of Andalusia when I was a child. The Duchess of Alba, heiress of the house of Alba, one of the grandest dynasties of the European nobility, was travelling through Andalusia by car. Passing through an area whose beauty captivated her, she cried out to her chauffeur: “What beautiful lands! Do you think they’re for sale?” The driver replied, “Your Grace, these lands are already yours.”

The main crops grown in Islamic Spain were cereals, vines and olives. Engineering and mathematics applied to irrigation made this one of the most advanced societies of its age, thus discrediting – we should mention here – the common view of the European Middle Ages as a historically homogeneous period across the whole continent. It was a strongly innovative model, exploiting new crops such as rice, citrus fruits, sugar cane, palm trees, cotton, aubergines and saffron, and at the same time developing arboriculture. Also important were the increase in aromatic and medicinal plants, the spread of orchards and vegetable gardens, and the rise of silk production, which became a pioneering feature of the Al-andalus economy. The Castilian model, however, gave rise to a completely different landscape, which relied heavily on merino sheep and their wool as the main creator of wealth. For this reason, in the Castilian Spanish we speak today, the majority of words referring to farming techniques, plant species, irrigation and agriculture in general are of Arabic origin, clear evidence that arboriculture and agriculture belonged particularly to the Islamic world of Al-Ándalus. Alberca, acequia, acelga, aceite, zanja, Noria...

During the nearly seven centuries of Arabic Iberia, the natural, uncultivated lands were seen as belonging to Allah. These areas were called the mawa’t, meaning that they were beyond the borders of the alquerías, the land under cultivation. The mawa’t could be farmed by anyone who wanted to irrigate and revitalise the earth, as long as the plot appropriated was on a human scale, adapted to the needs of the farmer’s family. It was said that the mawa’t began where the human voice from the last alquería could not be heard, and an unwritten law dictated that a man could never possess more land than he could walk in one day. The idea of Nature as a vital resource but also as a source of spiritual nourishment that human beings had to live with and respect was central to how  land was experienced and marked the relationship between the people and the land.

The advance of Christianity remoulded the landscape of the Iberian Peninsula and changed forever not only the social and political structures of property and exploitation of the land, but also people’s symbolic and spiritual relationships with it. This relationship was extended across the vast stretches of territory conquered by the Kingdom of Castille and later the Spanish Crown. For Catholicism, “man” (Christian, Castilian and aristocratic) was made in the image of God, who had placed him in the world to reign over all other creatures.

After the Christian conquests, the Castilian productive model was imposed on the Islamic communal lands, which were given to the great warlords or people close to the throne; and it was at that time that the term dehesa took on its full etymological sense of a defence: i.e., lands that were defended and partitioned off from the commons. The Honourable Council of La Mesta imported large herds of livestock into these areas and there was intense competition for pasture, with the local populations losing access to common pastures for their smaller flocks (recalling the saying I quoted above about the two saints and the man of honour).

Pigs were also introduced. The Koranic prohibition of pork made this a sharp point of difference between the two cultures. . In the Alpujarras of Granada (the last territories conquered from the Nasrid kingdom) after the Christian conquest, the Ventas (old roadside inns) used to offer a free piece of pork bacon. If the customer did not eat it, he would be suspected of being a Muslim.

Spanish people’s attachment to pig meat – especially the ham of the cerdo ibérico– largely stems from Christian imposition of the animal on the conquered Islamic territories as a weapon in this conflict of cultures. Pig breeding is today the most important economic activity of the dehesa and changes in demand directly affect the health of the soils and the hills. Thus for example, pig farming has grown out of all proportion in recent years as international markets have opened up, and this growth has often been devastating to the Andalusian forests, as breeders do not respect the land’s capacity to support so many animals, and as a result the soil becomes acidified. Today  much of the damage I come across in my work has to do with this overload of pigs: scars on tree trunks, hardened soils with little porosity, torn-up roots, acidification caused by pig urine, etc.

Doubtless, the culture and landscape of the dehesa have served to manage resources in the Iberian Mediterranean for centuries. But we should not forget that this landscape was shaped historically within a specific ideological, economic and symbolic context. Currently, the poor capacity of the dehesas to adapt to climate change, coupled with society’s more recent environmental demands, should perhaps prompt us to consider going back to more fragmented and diverse landscapes. But this, clearly, would necessarily involve a shift in the forms of property and the entire structure of production and consumption.

V

It’s both interesting and essential to reflect on the untrammelled exploitation of resources that lies behind the whole history of the modern period. This type of exploitation is based not only on economic imperatives but is also held in place by the symbolic and ideological systems of the modern nations’ imperial projects. 

The new drive to create colonial empires that emerged after the conquest of Granada in the 15^th century laid down a new productive model requiring an enormous extraction of natural resources. This process would reshape the land, especially around the ports. The enclosures and the ensuing accumulation of landed property in the hands of a tiny elite were, as in contemporary England with the first stirrings of agricultural capitalism, the base on which a new economic and political order was built. The conquest of America also resulted in large tracts of land being devoted to large-scale export crops such as oils, wines and cereals, and to exploiting the forests for shipbuilding, as the empire advanced and vessels grew in size and scope. Combined with this industry, the slave trade, with its huge supply of labour, played an essential role in the development of the imperial economy. Until the 16^th century the forests had been a little-used resource and were seen as alien to civilisation. They were the backdrop to the exploits of hunters, the source of myths and legends, the home of sorcerers and scryers and the refuge for deserters and outlaws. The tree, meanwhile, is a being that inhabits the three realms of the earth: the subterranean sphere, the world of human beings, and the sky towards which it tends its branches.

From the 16^th century onwards, however, the view of the forests changed, and they came to be valued as a national asset. Empire-building demanded a huge amount of raw materials. Wood for fuel, but especially for shipbuilding, became one of the key resources in colonial conquest, the struggle for ascendancy among the European powers and the expansion and defence of trade routes. The size of ships grew at the same pace as the accumulation of wealth and in inverse proportion to the forests that were cut down to build them. 

By the 17^th century the construction of a 74-cannon ship required 3,700 mature trees, each of which had taken from 75 to 120 years to grow. Building a 100-cannon vessel meant clearing around 82 acres of oaks, slightly more than 100 American football pitches – and this before taking into account the wood the ship consumed as fuel. In 1752 alone, more than 200,000 square metres (53 Millions gallons) of wood was used for naval construction in Spain. Apart from the cutting down of wide expanses of forest, shipbuilding caused the disappearance of the ecosystem of a whole range of species from the Iberian Peninsula, and at least a drastic reduction in their spread and number.

Yet the direst part of this long story of ecological destruction undoubtedly took place in Cuba, then a Spanish colony, where the shipyards consumed huge tracts of tropical rainforest. Havana was the empire’s largest shipbuilding hub. Then, from the 18^th century onwards, a new threat came to the Cuban forests: sugar.

Until then, Cuban forests had escaped complete destruction, as the shipbuilding industry needed to leave at least some space for the forest ecosystem to regenerate itself and provide more trees. For this reason, from the 18^th century on, to counter the depletion of raw materials, the Crown enacted a series of laws protecting the forests, thus to a certain extent slowing down deforestation.

A time came, however, when settlers and landlords rapidly spread the cultivation of sugar cane. The sugar-producing colonies that had fed the English and French cross-Atlantic trade had already begun to decline; but it was particularly the revolution in Haiti, the world’s largest sugar producer, that made the trade grind to a halt and put an end to French domination of the market. When Spanish shipbuilding needs also declined, due to the decadence of the empire itself, the exploitation of sugar cane exploded in Cuba and definitively wiped out the island’s remaining rainforest.

There are myriad such examples across the world of the ecological devastation wrought by imperialism and the shift in the relationship between humans and the land and its resources. In the territory surrounding us here, the old Nonotuck and Mohawk nations were driven out and their forests cut down to give way to paths, roads and railways. There’s probably not a single corner of this country that doesn’t bear witness to the impact of colonisation. We can say the same of Europe, although the longer time-scale may make this less evident. Today we demand that the developing countries preserve their forests and woodlands, the last remaining in the world, but perhaps the West should cast a more critical eye over its own history and recognise the unbridled exploitation of nature and its resources not only in the colonies, but also in its own heartlands.