Flourishing in Precarity
Ghosts of Encounters
Patterns of Contamination
The Intimacy of Strangers
How to Love a Mesquite: Towards multispecies collaboration for the rehabilitation of the Upper Chihuahuan Desert
Honey mesquite, Prosopis glandulosa, a native tree species to the Southwest, is an indicator of political-ecological imbalance. Mesquite shows up in novel ecosystems of dense, thorny patches within places that have experienced or are experiencing overgrazing, drought, increased CO2, extraction, and development, and the plants proliferate in response to eradication efforts. Mesquite once lived in reciprocity with mega-fauna and Indigenous peoples throughout the Chihuahuan desert. Colonization of the region brought narratives that objectified nature, particularly plants, as a resource and shifted the role of mesquite from a staple food crop and companion species to an invasive native contributing to “desertification”.
This work, as part of my Masters in Landscape Architecture thesis, examines how landscape designers, alongside transdisciplinary collaborators, may facilitate multi-species collaboration between diverse players: human and non-human, including fungi, plants, animals, bacteria, and infrastructure to rehabilitate landscapes experiencing irreversible change or degradation. Using counter-mapping, a collage-based visual analysis method, this study makes visible the assemblages of relationality that mesquite interacts with in order to better understand complex entanglements within the Pecos Watershed region of the Upper Chihuahuan Desert. The project suggests that envisioning interwoven assemblages will help form a new path forward to relating to plants, which will result in greater capacities for adaptation to irreversible ecosystem change.
Follow this link to see risograph prints of this research and here to see design .