Teal Gardner
February 2023
I want to wander & to see
to ride my bike through fresh days, to look closely
to gather information; objects; presences; artifacts
I want connection & to tend to mysteries - to things I can’t quite know just by seeing
But by being-with
gathering the earth’s intelligence toward me
I want to live
in the creases and folds of a living planet
a planet-being.
Ecogeoglyphic is a neologism I’ve coined
It breaks down into three parts;
Eco - ecology - from oikos, Ancient Greek for house/home. Invoking our home place. Geo - earth - from gê, Ancient Greek for earth. Invoking the material earth.
Glyphic - carve - from glyphē, Greek for carve/hollow/engrave. Invoking the act of writing, of carving into stone.
I share the Ecogeoglyphic with others, and sometimes it helps to refer to it as the EGG.
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Thinking through the Ecogeoglyphic (a window, a frame) - I invite you to peer through the following examples, and maybe put your face to the window sometime, wherever you are.
Start close, say, with your feet: your feet in the grass, grass over dirt, dirt over sand, sand over riverbed. Go ahead and pull a little lens from your pocket, and with that small lens, see the world in its frame gets bigger, factored up in definition by the details. With your eyes close up, shrink, drawing your body closer to what is now much bigger beneath the glance of the magnifying lens. What is there? Granite, lichen, moss, maybe an ant moving across some inches of land. Could you draw it on paper then, trace the line the ant makes crawling over sand, holding a grain of it in their jaws?
About that lens: its lens is made of sand; glass is made of sand. Think of the glass-making factory and industrial process required to produce it, and the transportation of the lens across the land, from the hand that made it to your hand; then pocket. Put the lens away and walk, arms swinging, into the hills. Tall plants hold the dry land in their deep roots. Stand close to the plant and remember its name; Antelope Bitterbrush. In this land, this plant stands taller than most, with yellow flowers of spicy honey in the spring, and bitter, such bitter tasting berries in the fall (they look like tiny drops of blood suspended in wax- but don’t eat them). A few seasons on the land, described end to end by a branch that holds both flower and berry, in their turn.
Move up the trail and visit a favorite spot to look from, heart pumping from the steepness of the hill. Facing West, the sun is just dipping into Oregon’s horizon. Below this hilltop is a spreading grid, a system for organizing streets and people. Asphalt and concrete are driven in trucks that glide over flat roads; and on the edges of the cities more concrete is poured over trenches dug in the soft, river-rock studded soil. Subdivision entrances are emblazoned: Tesoro, Privada, Avimor, Estrada Village, Spurwing Acres, Heartland Ranch, Arrano Farms, Creighton Woods, Lakemoor, Monticello Estates, Valynn Village, and so on.
What we now call “Idaho” is a real place with a fake-native title given to it by early East Coast Industrialists, who were intent on selling the promise to make some big cash from mining gold in the mountains, and the potential to farm in the valleys. In your backpack is a camera, with a deep zoom lens. Through it you can see far across the valley, and close into the rhyolite and sandstone rocks and Sagebrush, into the Netleaf Hackberry tree full of yellow birds. Beyond, zoom in to look at a big, big structure. A white, huge-sized house that stands stiffly, isolated by the newness of its build. The camera is your extension, and while you film the big white house you begin to wonder,
Who lives there and where do they get their money? What is the house made of, and where did it come from, piece by piece, on the bed of a truck? And who worked to make it, with their hands covered in the dust and the sand from the concrete and putty work? How does their back feel at the end of the day, after lifting beams of lumber, and where was that lumber milled? In Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Canada? Does anyone even live there, or is this another one of those luxury investments, a shell for holding capital? Did a family of elk once curl up and sleep in the snow where the garage now stands two hundred years ago, or last winter?
Now you’re filming with a camera and thinking of matter, material, economy, wealth, power structures, laborers, and supply chains. You’re thinking in geographies, of these shapes made by lines on maps that tell a story of boundaries, place-names, and ownership, and theft.
The Ecogeoglyphic holds time inside it like the yolk of an egg; histories roll headlong and spread like the tumbleweed (aka Russian thistle, aka plant that came from Russia during an early wave of immigration, aka an invasive weed, aka a touchstone plant for Western Aesthetics, aka a plant that lives really well in this environment) in their nursery beds alongside the Snake River, where they catch on a rock, and they cluster and stop. Downriver from the tumbleweeds are boulders the size of cars, shuttled here ten thousand years ago in the gush of a great flood that carved the river’s canyon. The boulders are slick to the touch, and covered in ten thousand years of patina. Glyphs were pecked into them by harder rocks held in the hands of migrating Indigenous people as they made their homes and lives across the Snake River Plain. These glyphs were made five thousand years ago, it is said. Gone now, from the plain, is the predominance of ancient ways of human living. The river is now known as a toxic agricultural runoff channel, empty of the Salmon who for millenia nourished their riverine home with their bodies when they returned from the ocean to mate and die.
The histories of the region I live in are violently bloody ones, glinting with the desire of industrialists to expand their reach and enrich themselves through killing and stealing from Indigenous people, and from the land; ending so many lifeways and species dynamics. All of this extraction is facilitated and made easy by the abstraction of the land as an embedded tangle unto itself, transformed into a story that can be gridded-out mathematically, and bought and sold, even from a place as distant as Singapore.
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In Singapore, industrialists are terraforming: forming land. Sand is dredged from watery mangrove forests, bargeload by bargeload, and boated up to the shore, where it is poured out, grain by grain, into a new mass, now called “Singapore.” People collect snails and clams that crawl over the mangrove trees, and those people live on these foods, or they have for a long, long time. Now, dredgers pull the sand away, the mangroves die, and the food that was free but for the labor it took to collect is going away. That dredged land became sand for Singapore’s rich to bask on, and wander over in thrall of the
engineering feat that made an indoor rainforest and shopping mall on the expanded landmass: Singapore’s stolen sand. Remember the sand-grain-thought, begun with the ant back in Idaho? This brings us to the sand dredge terraforming 13,618 km from where that thought began. There is a connection here, beyond a grain of sand, actually, two;
1. Extractivist practices are violence to the land. They dig, dredge, draw, drain, and dry up the living in the place, and “replace” it with “reclaimed” land, a sorry excuse for a living system. But how? What thought must be in order to make a living world into a thing that is not alive, but an idea? The grid is that thought, an overlay that maps in clean, right-angled squares the whole of the United States. Every inch of land that is not declared Wilderness has been surveyed and added to the grid, by “quarter section” or, 160 sq km of totally abstracted land. Rock piles, trees, plains, meadows, springs, sand dunes, lava flows, river channels, aquifers, bogs, mountains and all other features of the teeming, ancient earth are nullified under this logic; the objective is to standardize the land. This is terraforming, too, a transformation done by acting as if the world can be pulled apart from itself, bought and sold in parcels shorn from ecological context through description.
2. Nestled in the ecogeoglyphic thought that paused at the sand-dredging in Singapore is another that points back to Boise, Idaho. Here, a semiconductor company called Micron is headquartered, and has its factory facilities in Singapore. The company is growing. In September of 2022, the company broke ground on a new 15 billion dollar manufacturing facility to the South East of Boise. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrota, gripping a shovel in press pics alongside Idaho Governor Brad Little and Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, declared that “the desert around us will be completely transformed … by the largest private investment ever made in Idaho.”
Early on in Idaho’s history as a newly declared state, the wealthy industrialists of the Eastern USA promised Idaho would be turned from desert into an edenic oasis through irrigation, presenting images of the vibrant green cropland that would follow government funded irrigation projects. The aquifer was tapped with wells, dams and reservoirs were built, canals were dug, and pipes were laid. Settlers were beckoned to manifest their destinies in Idaho. All of this movement of capitalist exploitation required, for the US government, and government-backed capitalist projects, the forcible removal of native people from their stewarded, ancestral, and rightful lands, all based on a dubious treaty signed in 1868.
The Boise Valley people continue to carry forward their relations with these lands as their home-places, returning yearly in the Gathering of the Boise Valley People at Ige dai Teviwa, or “Chief Eagle Eye Reserve.” This reclamation and re-inscription of the powerful story of Native resistance and continual striving for the rights of the Shoshone and Bannock people is an outgrowth of the resistance to colonization, and fight for homekeep that was begun when ancestors of today’s Shoshone and Bannock people were confronted by the military enforced laws that would effectively steal their lands, making way for Idaho to be formed as a state.
The thinking of this world-being-built (Idaho) was the thought of Industrial Colonialism. Now, 250 years later, water-intensive semiconductor manufacturing technology redeploys the same rhetoric and its hunger for more.
The EGG wonders,
When this rock …
When, this rock?
When this machine…
When, this machine?
When water was here…
When was water here? Up to here?
(reaching high above the head, makes a horizontal line with the hand)
When, Netleaf Hackberry
When, Elk, Antelope
When, Sagebrush
When, Antelope Bitterbrush
When, Great Horned Owl
When, Raven
When, Salmon
When, Coyote
When, Wolf
When, Crow
When, People
European settlers (my biological ancestors) came here looking to get rich quick or die trying. I am tangled in the net of histories and scales of time, implicated, standing on this rock outcropping and looking hard over a valley.
I can see the roofs of houses all built in the last 5 years shimmering in the violent heat of the late summer,
& it hasn’t rained since May.
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These days my wandering takes me less to the burbling stream or Sagebrush-dotted hillscape: I walk through territories that are in the act of being “transformed” by development, or scour over Google Maps images of subdivisions sprawling out and feedlot cows casting their thousands of shadows over the dirt, visible to the satellites that orbit from space. I wander through open swaths of exposed soil and caterpillar tracks hulking over the soft dust; ripped apart trees and scattered rocks; denuded earth and piles of rubble that was once a riverbed. I walk in places like these, or scope them from above, not because they bring me peace, but because they are unmediated: these sites of development are not an abstraction. The dirt exposed by a steel claw is the active node of the violence, this is the violence of an extractivist society, so close that you can touch it with your hand, so familiar you can sleep in it at night.
In the beginning, I explored these themes accompanied only by my hand lenses, my senses, cameras, notebooks and audio recorders, the internet and earth imaging software. Getting back to my roots as a pedagogue and accomplice; performer, facilitator and clownish artist, the work now calls friends and neighbors into participation, building together a record of love of these volatile and changing lands.
We walk together, curiously, critically, painfully and tenderly within this frame.