| Stories and narratives have an important role in the development of human relationships, particularly in the development of our relationships to the natural world. The types of story told about the nonhuman world can greatly influence the ways in which humans interact with that world. All too often, those stories have encouraged the creation of a divide between and within the human and nonhuman worlds, a divide that then permits humans to mistreat and degrade various communities in both the nonhuman and human worlds. This work explores the stories that have been and are told about a particular place, the pinyon-juniper ecosystem of the American Southwest. By exploring three particular narratives related to that place---the scientifically founded story, the culturally based story, and the resource-driven story---and the corresponding actions that have derived from those stories, we might be able to better understand how the stories we tell affect our relationship to the nonhuman world and so work to create new, more responsible stories and actions. This project concludes with a suggestion for just such a new story regarding the human relationship to the natural world, a narrative based on mutuality, interconnectedness, and the searching out of those points where the human and the nonhuman worlds meet and become melted together. |
