In the history of the American West, it was white settlement, smallpox, the railroad and rifle, but also the steady incursion of barbed wire fencing which tamed the no longer virgin, wild, territories reaching from present day Nebraska through West Texas. The nascent barricades curbed the movement of nomadic peoples and migratory animals (buffalo) along with the open-range ranching of Longhorn cattle. Barbed wire’s amorphous form and eminent extendability made it a flexible political tool; in some cases the U.S. Government enclosed lands held by the Cherokee Nation on supposedly temporary terms, their negotiations aided by the seeming unobtrusiveness of thin steel strands and periodic fence posts. Barbed wire’s diligence as a fixed boundary might be confused by its innocuous material qualities and timid definition of inside from outside. Lightweight and tumbleweed-like, the tense wire was nevertheless rigid enough to choreograph such disastrous events as “The Big Die-Up”, when hordes of shelter-seeking herds froze across the Southern Plains during the unseasonably cold winter of 1886-87.

Barbed wire’s bureaucratic function, deployed at a level very low to the ground, may have seemed to be purely in the service of capital, particularly in securing personal property (including the more stable stock-farming of high grade Hereford and Angus cattle).

Yet it ultimately amounted to a much more pervasive manipulation, quickly systematizing a variable albeit cyclical ecological system—the aberrant grazing of buffalo allowed time for prairie grasses to regenerate, for example. In this case, the use of the adjective “wild” to describe the romance of the Wild West connotes a cultural-imperialist perspective, held in place by steel spikes whose legitimacy was eventually supported by the U.S. Supreme Court to the detriment of the cowboy and the Plains Indians.

Kari Rittenbach

The Sri Lankan government will soon establish a wildlife sanctuary in the midst of a heavily mined jungle, which until May of 2009 was the stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The government’s official reasoning for programming the region as an animal reserve emerges from a belief that the proposed use will resolve any local conflicts between humans and elephants. As there are no major reserves in the region and the area is occupied by both elephants and people, this plan has some merit.

However, many critics are suspicious of the government’s motivation for returning the region to jungle, claiming this decision is a mere tactic for the systematic suppression of the country’s Tamil population. The government has set aside the land to protect elephants rather than working to house the local people who have been displaced by the war. The powers that be may be concerned that if the region is repopulated, it would lead to the appearance of memorials to the recently defeated rebels, following other markers that have appeared on similarly significant battlegrounds. There may even be fears that the area may be commandeered by rebels for yet another uprising, if left isolated.

Filling the area with animals and establishing it as a government controlled wilderness makes the jungle difficult to reclaim by any group which is not associated with the island’s ruling party. The proposed sanctuary is intended to attract tourists to this site, encouraging further sanitization of the area. Speculation aside, the move will, at the very least, help to protect the endangered Sri Lankan elephant while spurring an influx of much needed funds into the region.

Erandi de Silva