Lincoln Hayes
Dr. Bory
Hum 103
26, November 2023
Pledged
Jose Gonzalez is a conservationist, activist and community leader who started an organization called Latino outdoors. He came to Davidson to speak about the organization, its mission, and his personal view on how society views the outdoors. As I waited in the 900 room in union for the presentation to begin the Davidson outdoors group leaders were listing Gonzalez’s accomplishments before introducing him. When he started presenting, I immediately determined he was a kind, approachable person. He told the audience his origin story, that of a 9 year old Mexican immigrant who moved from Mexico to the Us. He said always felt strongly about his binational, bicultural identity as a Mexican American. He was immersed in nature at a young age in Mexico and felt a stark contrast to that when he moved to the US. After telling us a bit about himself he began explaining some of his ideas and ways of thinking about the status quo of the outdoors and how society thinks of the environment.
Gonzalez heavily subverted my expectations of what I thought he was going to talk about. I expected him to speak a lot about how we all need to be climate activists and how climate change must be stopped. I think he understood that his audience is aware of these things, so his messages were geared more toward how we think about the environment. Much of his discussion was about race and how minority groups may not feel comfortable or even safe in the outdoors. He made the audience question why we might form stereotypes like “oh this race just doesn’t go outdoors”. Something he made apparent to me was that outdoorsiness is gatekept by class. Poorer people, often racial minorities, may not want to go to an expensive store like REI to invest into a hobby that they might not even enjoy. This is why society thinks of white people as outdoorsy, as they are part of the racial majority and have more disposable wealth to explore hobbies like the outdoors.
Gonzalez spoke about how the way society perceives the environment can lead to misunderstanding and negligence of how to treat it. One really interesting topic he discussed that I did not know about was how Smokey the Bear is basically propaganda, placing the responsibility of stopping fires on people and organizations. This drastically reduced the number of smaller more controlled natural burns in Forrests. The lack of smaller fires is what head to massive uncontrollable fires in the past years causing destruction in the American west. Gonzalez spoke about how native Americans would be arrested for attempting to do their cultural burns of forests, even though they were aware of how fires were natural and healthy for the forests. This misunderstanding of the environment is just one example of how our perception of the environment can be skewed in a way that leads to negative impacts on the environment.
Gonzalez’s goals go further than his career goals of increasing diversity in environmental activism and outdoor inclusivity. The goal of speaking to college kids is to challenging the way we think and to show us how our perception of the environment is influenced by forces like colonialism and patriarchy. He had a large slide discussing how our ways of thinking are heavily influenced by colonialism, white ways of thinking and they patriarchy. When he was discussing how these forces are imposed over us I found it strikingly similar to Haraways argument from the cyborg manifesto about how concepts that are deemed necessary are deemed essential by these forces. Gonzalez was making a similar argument about how these forces influence how we perceive the environment as a zero sum game that must be profited off of capitalism. Gonzalez argues that the forces that influence how we think about race are what lead to certain communities like black and Latino communities not feeling comfortable going outdoors because “it is just not what that group does”. Gonzalez calls this the white way of thinking, and he spoke a lot about changing this white way of thinking about the environment to be more inclusive. Gonzalez was arguably successful in his goals because he presented the audience with information and perspectives that we likely were unaware of before the presentation, which allowed us to think about why we think the way we do. It is difficult to change the way people think, but I think Gonzalez did a very good job at presenting the audience with useful information for them to interpret. He certain changed my perspective, as things that I had perceived as normal or natural were revealed to be controlled by higher powers, influencing the way I thought. I was unaware that forest fires are so bad nowadays, among other reasons, due to lack of controlled burns. I am also left with a new way of thinking about the outdoors, as something that should be much more accessable to everyone, and people should make an effort to make minority groups more comfortable being outdoors.
