(Un)making a conservation landscape: repeat photography and environmental narrative in Mexico’s Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park

Abstract

This essay uses repeat photography, a method in the natural sci­ences for studying change over time, to re-examine the conservation status of Baja California as a ‘living museum’ of pristine wilderness and relic of California’s ecological past. My focus is the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park, a portion of northern Baja’s forest sym­bolizing conservation’s narrative of Baja as the ‘before’ to California’s ‘after’. While this narrative has protected this ecosystem, I argue that it has also been instrumental in expanding U.S. conservation model into Mexico and casting local, land-based people with centuries of land tenure as enemies of conservation. While repeat photography can corroborate conservation’s story, I propose a critical re-photography that turns the lens back onto ourselves as the makers of landscapes. I leverage repeat photography’s implicit reflexivity to reveal the scientific and cultural priorities that have relegated land-based people to the past and threaten to exclude them from the future.