This essay discusses the changing notions of landscape and nature at work in the video installation Mountain Pine Beetle and explores some of the forces that eventuated in the devastated landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West brought on by the infestation of the mountain pine beetle beginning in the early 2000s—an infestation caused, in no small part, by what some scientists have called a perfect storm of circumstances created by global warming. For this project, the landscape becomes a site of inscription of forces that operate both above and below human scales of perception and interaction with the landscape— forces that are at once geological, economic, and geopolitical. ver the past couple of years, we have been working on a suite of video installation projects based on different landscapes. The first in the series is set in the Central Flyway Migration Corridor of the southeast Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico, near Houston, where we live, which in turn sits in the middle of one of the largest and most concentrated oil and petrochemical refining and shipping complexes in the world, which runs from the Port of Houston and the Houston Ship Channel to Galveston Bay and from there to the Gulf of Mexico. The second is set in and around Big Bend National Park in west Texas, on the Mexican border—a UNESCO biosphere reserve that is the size of the state of Rhode Island and the most remote place in the lower forty-eight states, sitting at the "big bend" of the Rio Grande. Big Bend is a dramatic landscape of animal and human migration, not only home to 430 species of birds and more than 50 endan- gered, threatened, and otherwise listed species but also a hot zone for human move- ment across the US-Mexico border—a perennially explosive political issue in the United States, particularly in states such as Texas and Arizona. The third in the series, the one we focus on here, Mountain Pine Beetle, is set in the radically altered mountain forests of Colorado after the mountain pine beetle infestation that began about twenty years ago, reaching devastating proportions in the mid- to late 2000s.

中文翻译：

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风景和题字

本文讨论了视频装置“山松甲虫”在工作中不断变化的景观和自然概念，并探讨了由早期山甲虫的侵袭导致的落基山脉西部被破坏的景观所产生的一些力量2000年代-这种侵害在很大程度上是由一些科学家所说的由全球变暖造成的完美风暴所致。对于此项目，景观成为题为人类在地域上和在景观下相互作用的相互作用力的场所，这些力既是地质，经济又是地缘政治。在过去的几年中，我们一直在根据不同的景观开发一套视频安装项目。该系列中的第一个设置在德克萨斯州东南海岸的中央飞行通道迁移走廊，位于我们居住的休斯顿附近的墨西哥湾，而墨西哥湾又位于最大，最集中的石油和石化炼油之一的中间从休斯敦港口和休斯敦船舶航道到加尔维斯顿湾，再到墨西哥湾，遍布世界各地。第二个区域位于德克萨斯州西部墨西哥边境的大本德国家公园及其周围，这是联合国教科文组织的生物圈保护区，面积相当于罗德岛州的大小，是下四十八个州中最偏远的地方。大里约热内卢的“大弯”。大弯弯是动物和人类迁徙的戏剧性景观，不仅栖息着430种鸟类，而且有50多种濒临灭绝的，受威胁的，以及其他列出的物种，但也是人类穿越美墨边境的热区-在美国，尤其是在得克萨斯州和亚利桑那州等州，这是一个长期爆发的政治问题。该系列中的第三个，我们重点关注的是山松甲虫，它是在大约20年前开始的山松甲虫侵袭之后，在科罗拉多州经过彻底改造的山林中建立的，在2000年代中期至后期达到毁灭性的比例。