Introduction

 

Today we are accustomed to the idea that the city’s reach is all-pervasive. Telecommunications and high technology penetrate everywhere, agriculture is industrialized, and widespread tourism together with unceasing migration have undone traditional settlement patterns. The most remote corners - national parks, Antarctica, the Himalayas - exist not in opposition to the urban but rather remain their natural only through special dispensation from the city. Crisscrossed by infrastructural grids - water, power, scientific research, and tourism - deployed to serve the needs of urban life, nature is as thoroughly visited, studied, and reshaped as the urban.

A visit to California’s Owens River Valley serves as a case study for understanding the reach of the city and the reshaping of nature. This forgotten land has made possible the massive growth of Los Angeles, even though it lies hundreds of miles away. In popular history, the Owens River Valley was an idyllic California Eden, a bountiful farming region under the eastern Sierras, until Los Angeles stole the flow of the river to fill its aqueduct. Passions over water still run high in the”ÀÜValley but as this guide demonstrates, water is only one of a series of infrastructures overlaying its terrain. Between the Sierras and the White Mountains water, power, and a myriad forms of tourism intersect with a sublime landscape, at once beautiful and toxic, natural and reshaped by man.

We have no record of the natural state for the Owens River Valley. Its indigenous peoples, the Paiutes, redirected river water into channels to irrigate their crops. After a bloody war, white settlers extended these systems, turning the more typical desert scrub of the Valley into heavily irrigated farmland. Had this state endured, the Owens River Valley likely would have turned into a landscape of industrialized agriculture similar to California’s present day Central Valley. The redirection of Owens River water to Los Angeles, the concurrent purchase of much of the land in the Valley by the city – L. A. is the largest landowner there - and the establishment of national park boundaries to protect the watershed all forced the territory toward an artificially enforced wildness.

Only some seven miles wide, the Valley is bounded by the 14,000 foot high east face of the Sierras on the west - among them Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight states - and by the 14,000 foot high White Mountains on the other. The result is the deepest valley in the United States, indeed, one of the deepest on Earth. In this unique scenery are some of California’s best spots for hiking, fishing, skiing, and mountain climbing. Today tourism brings the people of the city to the Valley.

By the 1930s, the Valley’s landscape was recognized as its salvation from economic ruin. Father John J. Crowley, known locally as “the desert padre,” traveled up and down the Valley, helping the peoples of the depressed communities understand that tourism could replace agriculture as the its main industry. Today tourism brings people to the the Valley. These visitors make life economically feasible but also leave behind demands and expectations that reshape both the local culture and the local environment.

Just as the Owens River Valley’s economic role has changed, so has our perception of its”ÀÜnatural attributes. To the earliest white explorers and settlers, the Owens River Valley, like other unique places in the American continent such as Niagara, Falls, Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon, was sublime. While a beautiful landscape might inspire one think of organic wholeness, unity, and boundedness, the sublime landscape allows individuals to sense their smallness against the boundlessness and infinity of the universe. The sublime reveals to us that nature is not merely beneficial, it is also catastrophic.

The vast forces that have built the mountains bounding the Valley have also created a landscape of incredible violence and toxicity. The largest recorded earthquake in California - 8.3 on the Richter scale - was centered in the Owens Valley town of Lone Pine, but even this seems minor when we visit the lava-strewn plains north of Bishop to see the trauma inflicted upon the earth 760,000 years ago when the Long Valley Caldera erupted. Today, volcanism’s remnants serve simultaneously as innocuous tourist attractions – a domesticated sublime - and as deadly threats to human life. A remnant of the eruption, Mammoth Mountain is one of the continent’s top ski areas, but undreneath lies a volcano that may yet erupt. Already, carbon dioxide emissions from the mountain have claimed one life. Likewise, the rejuvenating hot springs of Mammoth Hot Creek, also caused by vulcanism, have been marred by 14 deaths since 1968 alone. This in addition to the countless accidental deaths among skiers, hikers, rock climbers and fishermen that have taken place in the pursuit of recreation in the wild. Our domestication of the sublime comes at a price.

Until the conquest of the American frontier in the late 1880s, the sublime landscape was key to the young country’s national self-image. For European settlers, the vastness of the continent and the extremity of its features were proof of God’s gift of manifest destiny. But, as historian David Nye explains, with the conquest of the frontier complete, we needed to turn to a technological sublime: the belief that our manifest destiny was confirmed by our construction of immense engineering works that would tame the sublime continent. Works such as the Hoover Dam, the skyscrapers of New York, the Golden Gate bridge, and the Saturn V rocket all stand as evidence of this technological sublime. Not only did these works tame the continent - and in the case of the latter, the unfathomable distance between Earth and moon itself - they themselves were sublime: gigantic and awe-inspiring.

But these are icons of a bygone age. If there is a sublime today, our awe now derives not from a visible icon but from the vastness and uncomprehendability of an unmappable network that appears everywhere simultaneously. If the Los Angeles Aqueduct was built in the days of the technological sublime, it also anticipates this networked sublime. Taking the six hours to follow the Aqueduct from the city to its furthest reaches above Mono Lake forces one into the scale of ultra-large human artifacts that cannot be comprehended spatially but rather are understood only through the measure of the time it takes an automobile to travel from one end to another. Instead of demonstrating our capacity to control the world, such objects demonstrate a technology so vast and ungraspable that it is a form of nature again.

Driving through the Owens Valley, we find evidence of these multiple layers of infrastructure and belief at work. Rather than seeing them purely as distractions from the “natural,” we should recognize that not are they only inescapable, but that our very conception of the “naturalness” of the Owens Valley is dependent on them.