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

Bryan B. Rasmussen

Landscape Research, 2025, vol. 50, issue 3, 505-525

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 a 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.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2024.2428327

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