our story
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Like many good stories, the story of The Confluence Lab starts with a road trip. In September of 2018, Jenn Ladino and Erin James travelled from Moscow, Idaho, to the Taft-Nicholson Center for the Environmental Humanities to share research and institutional strategies with a regional network of environmental humanities scholars. The Center, a branch campus of the University of Utah located in the Centennial Valley in Southern Montana, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is a place of tensions. The campus is situated atop an abandoned ghost town that the university benefactors had exhumed and restored some years earlier. (We stayed in the cabin called “Jail,” with metal bars on the windows, which had been fully buried underground just a few years before.) It’s a wild enough location that grizzly protocol meant always walking in pairs, but where the closest neighbors, 8 miles down the road, are the powerful political activists the Koch brothers. Before we left, our geography colleague, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, had enigmatically warned us to “look out for the polar bear.” Now, this valley is home to elk, moose, and pronghorn, among other land-dwellers, and over 260 species of birds, including peregrine falcons, sand hill cranes, and trumpeter swans. But try as we might, we couldn’t spot any polar bears. That is, until we came across a pristine taxidermied full-sized adult polar bear in the living room of the house of the Center’s benefactor during a reception. We sipped cocktails as the bear loomed over us, chatting with the benefactor about wilderness and the changing nature of the American West while this preserved hypercarnivore stood frozen by our side.
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During the nine-hour car ride back to Moscow, our conversation kept coming back to the bear. For the benefactor, having the bear in her house made total sense—it was a symbol of what is disappearing from the pristine wilderness that she hopes the Center is protecting, a symbol of the emotions that she feels for this place. For Jenn and Erin, the bear helped us unpack the narratives of wilderness and “untouched” nature that still have sociopolitical impacts in the West and elsewhere in our increasingly divided country. Beyond our excitement at having solved Teresa’s treasure hunt, the polar bear was a powerful reminder of how a symbol can travel and stand in for emotions and stories that are often buried or unacknowledged. The whole experience got us thinking about the surprising yet productive ideas and occasions that get scholars collaborating outside of their comfortable disciplinary silos and outside of our institutions. We left the valley fired up to make things happen on our campus. In the car, we took turns driving and typing, drafting a mission statement (and an embarrassingly bad acronym) and an application for office space for what would soon become The Confluence Lab. We met with Teresa the week we got home, and the three of us excitedly hashed out ideas for public-facing, interdisciplinary work that would study, respond to, and potentially help to mitigate the divisive environmental and cultural issues of our home state of Idaho. The idea for The Confluence Lab was born.