“LAND AS A COMMUNITY TO WHICH WE BELONG:” NATURE, INTEGRALISM, AND FINDING COMMON GROUND IN THE EASTERN SIERRA

Abstract

What makes it possible for people from vastly different political, racial, and economic orientations to find common ground on environmental issues? This ethnographic case study of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, a rural California community, examines how ranchers, environmentalists, climbers, and Indigenous peoples relate to nature and collaborate on the local socio-ecological challenges they collectively face. The basis for this collaboration is in a shared integralism, a perspective which understands humans as integral to land, with both a need to impact it and a simultaneous need to care for it. Integralism arises out of these communities’ relationship of mutual care with their environment, care which itself is a product of dual dependence on nature as a source of both everyday livelihoods but also identity and meaning. The sum of this relationship to the land is an understanding of nature as social – a part of the community itself. I conclude by discussing the practical implications of this orientation to nature.