Roosevelt Bio 2/25

I thought the last new parts of River of Doubt were so honest they were almost macabre. Even for a cowboy like Teddy he obviously needed to do more research and to choose a more modest attempt besides exploring first hand the "Rio de Duvida." I know it's not in his nature but I almost feel like nature itself is punishing him for all his past adventures into the wild, Roosevelt's humble pie was served through injury, sickness, and unpredictable natural obstacles. To make Roosevelt's condition worse the camp is rife with theft from Julio and his son also isn't fairing too well. As well as constant authority clashing between him and Rondon. Perhaps the River of Doubt is a cautionary tale for both the careless and the proud. Despite the fact that Cherrie colored Roosevelt as a really down to earth guy (When the ex-pres. did his laundry and jumping into the rapids to save supplies and men) I felt that Mother Nature and the indigenous tribes were feeding Roosevelt humble pie through the threat (and likeliness) of death.

4/23

The idea of the "frontier" is discussed in Tsing's "Frontiers of Capitalism," describing the term as a "a zone of not yet - not yet mapped, not yet regulated." There are a few ways of spinning a frontier. One way is glorifying the frontier, going 'where no man has gone before,' and lusting after the allure of voyage and hijacking the frontier's resources (think 'gold rush' of 49). The other way is respecting the natural state of the frontier, and realizing that human influence can disturb its natural condition, at times even desecrate it.

After reading Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," the explorers' mentality towards the 'frontier' seems to lean towards the former. In this reading, we see orchid hunters kill their competition, raid the land's crop and burn the remains, all for the sake of voyage and pride. The chapter conveys the orchid hunters as fervently passionate people, withstanding barely tolerable conditions and the threat of death, for the opportunity to please their funders and reinforce their reputation. There is an aspect of these hunters that seems peaceful with the turf they explore (i.e. falling in love in foreign cultures, turning away from civilization to explore the wild world, working for hardly any profit). Yet there is also an aspect of this practice that seems vain, greedy, and inhumane, forging a price tag on little dollops of nature.

When I first read this, I was startled by how severe and cut throat this industry was. For a prize that is so beautiful and fragile, the inner workings of the hunt were so savage and violent. I began to question how funded exploration could validate such desecration to land, nature, and its native inhabitants. However, Tsing poses the question: How are landscapes made empty and wild so that anyone can come to use and claim them? The question of ownership comes in to play, and whether it is even possible to delegate whether it is right or wrong for the orchid hunters to take the plants from their natural habitat. Can we rationalize the violence in taking from new frontiers? How acceptably heavy can the human hand be in nature?

-CM

Reading “The Orchid Thief” stirred a few interesting thoughts in my head. First, it presented the late 19th and early 20th century collectors in a new light, one that allowed us to see them more as individuals with personal motivations. Orchid hunters provide an excellent example of these great adventurers as they were motivated by nothing more than the hunt and its prize. These are not explorers seeking to add their names to the annals of history, seeking exotic cultures and locales for which to pad their stories back home. No, the orchid hunters did not think of the culture, or location itself, as the exotic end in itself; these were places that actually made more sense to the hunter than his home in Europe. These men sought the most dangerous prize in the most fabulous places for the joy of the hunt, and the beauty that they were rewarded with. To read that many of them died, or chose to live on afterward, in the places that they explored was reminiscent of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, in that it was specified that Akeley himself was buried on the slope of a volcano pictured in the diorama behind his gorillas. To think of him as a man who so valued the location in which he shot these gorillas that he chose to be buried there puts him very much within the realm of the orchid hunter; he collected this specimens out of a desire for their beauty, and a lack of a better way to preserve it. In both cases, this desire for natural beauty leads very nearly to its destruction, but as with any obsession, one can become carried away. It would be easy to accuse men in both positions of disrespecting nature, but given the rapidly changing state of the modern world at the time, they were far closer to men seeking any sort of beauty that still made sense, and holding on to it as hard as they could.

Of the three readings, I especially liked "A Mortal Occupation" by Susan Orlean. I never knew where orchids really came from until now. Always in flower shops, orchids are on display in the windows; a classically beautiful plant. Now knowing their somewhat tragic history gives me a new perspective on exotic flowers in general. It's one thing for the orchid hunters to be killed by natural disasters or local wars or savages, but to be killed by other orchid hunters? I thought it was absurd how the orchid hunters acted towards each other, leaving fake maps or abandoning their hunt just to hunt each other, and burning the areas where they found their precious orchids so no one else could collect the same specimen. Nature can only provide so much. The fact that these people thought they could take whatever flower or plant they desired with no consequences to the land from which the plants once grew is terrible. And people still haven't figured it out.
In the reading "Frontiers of Capitalism" by Anna Tsing, some interesting and relative questions were posed, such as, how does nature at the frontier become a set of resources? and how do ordinary people get involved in destroying their environments, even in their own home places? In a way, these are unanswerable questions. If we knew why people destroyed this earth, then we could come up with some way to stop, and at least preserve what is still left.
In "The River of Doubt" by Candice Millard, I gained even more respect for Theodore Roosevelt. The fact that he, a former president, embarked on a journey like that under such extreme conditions which were far from comfortable, just to be part of a discovery, is very admirable. And despite less than ideal acomodations, he still was so charming and personable with every person he met.

River of Doubt

The sense of adventure in these texts was pretty epic - I can't imagine having to go through such trials as in River of Doubt, it just goes to show how much travel has changed within such a short period of time. That whole hordes of both animals and people died from trekking across Brazil is quite a strange thought, and a fascinating one at the same time. Obviously the deaths were very tragic, but there is something romantic about the kind of adventure they could go through. I thought it was so interesting how Millard has woven in anecdotes about the personalities of Roosevelt and the other explorers, that she picked up from letters home etc.

As Marco said, Rondon seemed to be quite an honorable guy - specially when contrasted with the priest, and his whole story was definitely inspiring. Being a victim of racism himself, he really strove to form peaceful relationships with the natives, instead of just coming in and taking over by force. He did want to bring "civilization" and new ideas and behaviors from the Western world to them - and I'm still deciding whether or not that's an okay thing.

In this weeks readings, especially “A Mortal Occupation” by Susan Orlean and “The River of Doubt” by Candice Millard, I was struck by the size and scale of the adventures that people go on in order to make new discoveries on Earth. In “A Mortal Occupation” there are stories of people giving their lives in order to find and categorize a particular kind of flower. The fact that people were willing to give their lives for a flower illustrates the strong human desire to discover every part of our world and categorize it. Orlean writes, “As modern living became chaotic and bewildering, the Victorians looked for order in the universe, an outline that could organize their knowledge of every living thing and maybe at the same time rationalize the meaning of existence” (p. 68). The orchid hunters demonstrate not only the human tendency to collect and categorize, but also the quest to find our meaning in the world.

When reading “The River of Doubt” I was impressed by the way that Colonel Rondon treated the natives in the jungles of Brazil. He does not treat the natives as unintelligent, wild savages, but he treated them as fellow human beings. By not attempting to overtake the natives and their culture he was able to establish a predominately friendly relationship with them, which ultimately paid off as some of them became helpful to the expedition. By not establishing the natives as the “other” and by using a policy of nonviolence, he avoided many additional problems that he may have faced on his adventure. Rondon respected the natives and their culture, unlike what occurred for natives of north America.