Riff-raff at Ya’Udahs, Jakarta, 2008.
I was tasked to write this essay for my ‘Concepts and Theories in Geography’ course. Thought I would share it here.
Who I am as a Geographer
Michel Foucault once stated that everything he wrote was autobiography. Experience makes us who we are. I grew up in a small town in Eastern Washington. The east slopes of the Cascade Mountains with Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams visible to the west and the Columbia River to the east. Hanging on the wall of my room in parent’s home was a map of the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition with a solid red line tracing out from St. Louise up the Missouri River and over the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean and a dashed red line tracing the whole route back. For me this was geography; maps, names, exploration. And there were no lack of names to add to those of Lewis and Clark. There was also Alexander McKenzie, David Nelson, David Douglas, John Day, James Cook, and George Vancouver. The region was rich in the history of ‘The West’: the Whitman Mission, the Nez Perce and Chief Joseph, the Colville and Yakima Nations. You could not travel far without crossing paths with someone who passed this way or some event of an encounter. I grew up wanting to know what that was all about. The vistas were wide and expansive and the thesis was ‘The West is Big’. I was strictly motivated by what was up around the next bend in the river or on the other side of a mountain ridge and how it all pieced together like a giant puzzle. I was intent on making my own map. I was my own ‘Corps of Discovery’.
I arrived at ‘geography’ through botany. In the Pacific Northwest and Alaska I worked as a botanist for the U.S.D.A. Forest Service for six years conducting botanical surveys and writing biological evaluations covering four National Forests and nine Ranger Districts and in Hawaii I worked for the National Park Service at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park for twelve years. My expertise ran toward rare, threatened and endangered plant species. I hunted them. To hunt them you needed to know something about habitat and to understand habitat you had to know something of physical and biological geography. Where were these species located in relation to soil type, aspect and slope, elevation, rainfall, and plant communities? You had to know the physical and biological conditions with which particular plant species were associated to understand their particular distribution in the landscape. Then you had to cover a lot of ground. If you were successful then you mapped, measured, monitored, and (hopefully) protected.
The U.S. Forest Service was always like working for a double edged sword. There were 20,000 acre contiguous clear cuts full of land slides and blown out roads on the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. One particular site the biologists had given the name ‘Hiroshima’. On one day in late August I found myself on a high ridge on the south of Prince of Wales Island looking down into the vast Moira Sound at the largest expanse of temperate rainforest I had ever seen. Wolves were howling from a ridge line to the east. To the west were mountains and river drainages that, according the map, had no names. In the haze of the far distant south were the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Where the U.S. Forest Service was a ‘multiple use’ agency and where biologists and road engineers sat on opposite sides of the room glaring at one another, the National Park Service was an agency with the cohesive mission of ‘preservation’. What were managed most intensely here were the tourists. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is a park of gradients. You can walk from rain forest to desert in fifteen minutes or walk along low coastal cliffs of nesting seabirds in the morning and by the early afternoon walk along subalpine trails through mamane and ohia trees. Village sites, petroglyphs, burials, and artifacts are scattered everywhere through the Park. The native flora is ninety percent endemic. Endangered species are truly critically endangered with some plant species numbering as few as the fingers that can be counted on one hand while others have passed into extinction. Dry, mesic, wet, hot, warm, cold, low, middle, high; endemism, evolution, biological invasions of alien plants and animals; active lava flows, snow, torrential rain, 1000 year old ohia trees; and the ancient faded footprints of Hawaiian warriors. All this on the slopes of two volcanoes: Kilauea, one the most active, and Mauna Loa the largest, volcanoes on planet. You cannot stand in this space for any length of time without understanding that you have become a physical, biological, or human geographer. The landscape simply does not permit it.
The more I persisted in this landscape the more I wanted to interrogate its genealogy. There was James Cook (again). I had seen him once on Vancouver Island, then in Anchorage, and now in Hawaii I was walking in his shadow again at Kealakekua Bay where he ended his days as a geographer in a violent and foolish skirmish of near cosmic proportion. I did not know I would see him again in Batavia (along with Bligh and David Nelson). What was of interest also were the plant species I was working with. The Hawaii flora is called disharmonic. That is it is composed of disparate species arriving over long distances from a number of sources. It is also high endemic and it is understood that the two-thousand or so species in the flora were derived from only around two-hundred successful colonization events. Hawaii’s remoteness, adaptive radiation and evolution are the keys to understanding this. Then there were the Hawaiians themselves. Their genealogy is traced back through long distance Polynesian canoe voyages strewn out over archipelagos of small Pacific Ocean islands covering one of the largest expanses of the planet. All I had to do was to follow this genealogy back over the map; where it led to was Indonesia.
The ‘Corps of Discovery’ then set off to Bali with two objectives; to see native forests and to cross the Wallace Line. It is easy to become a avid fan of Alfred Russel Wallace, all you have to do is read a bit of his biography and then dive into his most famous book ‘The Malay Archipelago’. Wallace was the oldest of the eleven children in his family, largely self-taught he spent a number of years in the Amazon collecting beetle and bird specimens for Victorian collectors. He nearly perished when his ship caught fire on his return voyage to England. His journals and collections were largely lost. His second adventure took him to the Malay Archipelago, the Dutch East Indies, or Indonesia as it is known today. Largely traveling alone he crisscrossed the islands over an eight year period from 1854 to 1862 and collected over 125,000 specimens. But his greatest contribution is his writings on biogeography and the theory of evolution. He is recognized (often as a second thought) as the co-founder of the theory of evolution along with Darwin. In 1855, Wallace penned ‘On the Law that has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’, also know as the Sarawak Law, an essay of eleven pages. In it he states:
“That all these operations have been more or less continuous, but unequal in their progress, and during the whole series the organic life of the earth has undergone a corresponding alteration. This alteration also has been gradual, but complete; after a certain interval not a single species existing which had lived at the commencement of the period. This complete renewal of the forms of life also appears to have occurred several times:- That from the last of the geological epochs to the present or historical epoch, the change of organic life has been gradual: the first appearance of animals now existing can in many cases be traced, their numbers gradually increasing in the more recent formations, while other species continually die out and disappear, so that the present condition of the organic world is clearly derived by a natural process of gradual extinction and creation of species from that of the latest geological periods.”
And:
“…no group or species has come into existence twice. The following law may be deduced from these facts: – Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.
A country having species, genera, and whole families peculiar to it, will be the necessary result of its having been isolated for a long period, sufficient for many series of species to have been created on the type of pre-existing ones, which, as well as many of the earlier-formed species, have become extinct, and thus made the groups appear isolated.
They must have been first peopled, like other newly-formed islands, by the action of winds and currents, and at a period sufficiently remote to have had the original species die out, and the modified prototypes only remain.”
Here is the key wording:
“Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.”
This concise and elegant essay must have shook Darwin to the core. Wallace or Darwin? Wallace of course.
From my own Bali journal, May 2000, comes this:
“Today was jalan-jalan supreme. I walked all over Candikuning and over to Danau Bratan to Pura Ulun Danau Bratan and then back to Eka Karya through the orchids and medicinal plants past the Ethnobotany Guest House. In the afternoon I finally found what I had come for- a rather amazing intact piece Bali rain forest. Just take the trail located up from the main office and the “kaktus” garden. I was fairly speechless. The forest is stunning. Gesneriaceae, Melastomacecae, Fraxinus, Begoniaceae, Diplazium, Pteris, Dicksonia, Pipturus, Asplenium, Rubus (2 species), and tremendous big trees. There were signs of wood collecting and some felled trees and some fallen trees. No trash! No people. Lots of bird calls but the birds are hard to see. The forest has a high diversity of trees species, ferns, shrubs, and herbaceous stuff. I feel rather not adequate to the task of making sense of it but then again I did recognize a number of plant families. I need some time in the herbarium which would help. I have many, many questions. I got home late, wet and a muddy. When I changed I also had the pleasure to discover leeches. I was a bloody mess. I forgot about the leeches. Just as well I suppose, as the hike would have not been as good if I were looking for leeches all the time. I don’t know how they got onto my legs. And they were way down into my shoes. My socks were quite a bloody mess. BUT – just to find that bit of forest has been worth the entire trip. Tomorrow I will go back and make a full day of it, weather permitting. It is after all a rain forest and a very fine one at that.”
If Wallace could cover nearly the entire Malay Archipelago alone over an eight year period I certainly could endure leeches for an afternoon or two. Then this from crossing the Wallace Line:
“I left Padangbai at 4:30am on the Wimala Dharma for sunrise on Lombok Straights. Soccer games on TV and loud reggae music. Lots of fun as only the Indonesians can. The sky was magnificent and the water blue and smooth.
Verbatim directions posted on ferry: “We, the captain and other do our best all the time in service of carrying passengers safely to their destinations. Therefore please enjoy cruising to your hearts content. In case of emergency, we ask you to follow the crews inducements without confusion. 1. In an emergency keep your head and follow the crews inducements confusion makes the situation worse. On leaving the ship give preference to ladies, children, and olds and tidy up yourself to have your hands free with only valuables as possible. 2. The life jackets are stored in each cabin kindly confirm the stored place and how to wear it by “How to put on the life jacket” and check the leaving route by the map of leaving route.”
The clouds over Lombok Straits were low and billowy. The sun rose over Gunung Rinjani and Gunung Agung; both of these magnificent volcanoes rising sharply from their base and in full view. Rinjani is impressive and heavily forested. The ferry ride was great fun and the Captain came down and sang karaoke while we waited to dock at Lembar. The bay and surrounding mountains are absolutely beautiful. Lombok, from what I have seen of it, is even more beautiful than Bali; very rugged and Rinjani dominates.”
Wallace would have appreciated the spirit I which I traveled and he most certainly would have recognized the familiar terrain. Bali is about the same size as the island of Hawaii and I did discover that the islands share plant families and genus and even some species. What I was not prepared for was an island the size of Hawaii with 5.2 million people on it practicing a one-thousand year old culture. That was the magic of Bali and if I ever doubted that there was magic I did not after my visit there. The culture, if that is thr right word to use, permeated everything from the crassest Kuta street bar full of rowdy and rude Australians to the high mountain temples. This was an absolute immersion. For me this was truly ‘the cultural turn’.
Of course all of this just called for more. My next trip out to Indonesia had the objectives of seeing Kebun Raya Bogor, the great garden of Bogor, established by the Dutch in the 1820’s; Yogyakarta the center of Javanese culture and the nearby temples of Borobudor and Prambanam; Cibotas, which is also yet another botanical garden associated with the Gede-Pangrango National Park; and Krakatau, or at least the steaming remnants of it. This would require traveling through Jakarta, a city I had been warned about to avoid. In Cook’s day Jakarta was known as Batavia and he hated the place immensely. Bringing his ship and crew through the Great Barrier Reef and then through the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia he ended up in Batavia to refit and rest. His crew died there like flies. It was the same for Bligh, although his crew was much smaller given the crowded and open boat the crew that the H.M.S. Bounty was generous enough to provide. On that open boat was David Nelson, the first botanist to visit and collect plants in Hawaii, he did not survive Batavia. The consistent recommendation I received about Jakarta was to get out of it as fast as possible. It seemed the city still held to its late eighteenth-century reputation. But you cannot avoid it as it is the major gateway to Indonesia. I did my best just to ‘pass through’ but the very act of passing through breeds a particular kind of familiarity.
Demographia.com whose job it is to pay attention to urban populations currently ranks Jakarta as the third largest city on the planet; giving the ballpark figure of some 23 million people living in the greater Jakarta urban area the city is ranked between that of Tokyo and New York. Jakarta is notorious for its air and water pollution, lack of sanitation, traffic jams, seasonal flooding, street beggars, and crime. It is a city on first take that looks as if it were torn from the pages of a Phillip K. Dick novel; some kind of future dystopia where the rich were really rich and the poor were really poor and everyone lived behind walls topped with razor wire and broken glass and the government and police were both dangerous and corrupt. I had spent my entire working career hunting rare plants and this city was clearly out of anything within the range of my experience. Taking six hours in an automobile to cover a distance of forty kilometers is not an uncommon event in Jakarta. If anything it gives one a decent length of time to contemplate the city in all of its complexity. Your first reaction might be to try to think up ways to improve the city but the best urban planning department with all the state of the art GIS would barely make a dent in it. Jakarta plans itself. As much as the city government might like to make its presence felt the city runs itself. Once you abandon the notion that ‘something can be done’ here and grasp the idea that the city is a thing-unto-itself’ then Jakarta starts to open itself up. You can’t change it so the effort must be made to understand it. Over the years since my first visit to Jakarta I have been in and out of the city countless times and each of those times has left me in a state of wonder of what it was I was exactly seeing. This was all very antithetical to hiking around on volcanoes looking for endangered plants. But then it seemed to me, as a geographer, that this was also sort of the last piece of the puzzle. I had a decent grasp of physical and biogeography; this was human geography writ large. During the most recent visit I made to the city, in 2008, I spent a month walking the streets of Jakarta with notebook and camera in hand. This was as arduous and intellectually challenging as anything I have done. I would also argue that the motivation I had to piece together some sort of understanding of Jakarta certainly has its roots in that map of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that hung on the wall in my room. This is a bit of autobiography.
In 2006, for the first time in human history, over fifty-percent of the population of the planet resided in urban centers. All things being equal by 2050 seventy-five percent of the population of the planet will be living in urban centers. I venture to propose that this century is the century of the city and our future pivots on the urban. As an urban geographer I can say I am not interesting in planning schemes, the technology of satellite imagery and GIS is interesting to me only through the story it can tell through its data and images. Modernist uptopias are long past gone. As an urban geographer I am most interested at what is happening at the street level. The urban future, for the majority of the people on the planet, could be taken to be a neo-liberal dystopian hell but it most likely will emerge as a network of ‘other space’; an aporetic heterotopia. Cities are not going away even if the post-civil society sits on the horizon.
I have no particular models in mind here to follow but I would offer my background reading as a way to position myself. My views have been particularly influenced by (in no particular order) Karl Marx, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Susan Abeyasekere, Abidin Kusno, Benedict Anderson, Ann Laura Stoler, James C. Scott, Clifford Geertz, Stephan J. Lansing, Ariel Heryanto, Lea Jellinek, Jane Jacobs, Deyan Sudjic, Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alexander Cuthbert, Terrance McGee, Hans Dieter Evers, Peter J. Nas, Mike Davis, Kevin Lynch, and Phil Hubbard, just to name a few of the authors whose books sit on my bookshelves. I am particularly linked to Jakarta through family and friends who live and work and write about the city. I suppose I am a (structural) post-structuralist with an eye for social justice, gender equality, and the street. Like Foucault I would agree with his claim that “I adhere to no dogma.”
I fit into the future of the discipline of geography as an interpreter.
