Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs

Introduction by David Havlick, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO.

To the extent that it exists, the national reputation of Colorado Springs orients around a handful of characteristics: a conservative political climate, megachurches, military bases, the looming backdrop of Pikes Peak, and perhaps the city’s most recent branding effort as Olympic City, USA. Those of us who live in Colorado Springs, of course, find other layers and more nuance amid the communities and spaces we inhabit, but even moving past the stereotypes of this place, it remains easy to take for granted much of what we find: traces of the mining and railroad booms spurred by the city’s founding figures, the opulence of the Broadmoor resort, scattered remains of early twentieth-century tuberculosis and health destinations, and the scenic backdrop of mountains and forests that have long beckoned travelers to visit or remain.

John Harner’s captivating examination of Colorado Springs, brought forth in Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs, offers the reader a multifaceted explication of how and why this city came to exist as it does today. Harner was rightfully recognized with the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2021 J. B. Jackson Prize for his comprehensive and engaging treatment of Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak region, and portions of the book trace their intellectual lineage directly to Jackson. As the four reviews that follow this introduction highlight, Harner brings to bear on Colorado Springs a systematic, distinctive set of perspectives focusing on key themes that have shaped the city, its people, and the surrounding environment. These are signaled in charmingly blunt chapter titles that take aim at some Colorado Springs traits that the reader might anticipate: “War,” “Liberty,” “God.” Other core themes and chapter titles veer from the expected, turning instead to “Grass,” “Air,” or “Fun.” Through all of these, however, the reader benefits from Harner’s devotion to place (another of his ten chapter titles) and a critical eye that highlights the many benefits of geographic analysis. The book is impressive as an academic work—informed by a decade poring through local archives, enhanced by dozens of examples of Harner’s original cartography, guided through a clear-eyed analysis of the region’s political economy (one greeted by disapproval from the city’s mayor), and documented with more than thirty-five pages of endnotes—but at its root this is also an implicitly personal geographic engagement with place and the author’s continuing efforts to understand the city he calls home. Throughout, Harner demonstrates how geographical analyses, tools, and traditions can contribute to this understanding. Put simply, it is a wonderful example of what geography—and a particular geographer—can do.

As the reviews in this forum affirm, Harner manages to attend to the particular historical and contemporary landscapes of Colorado Springs while also modeling how this idiographic and applied scholarship can provide insights that might be directed to many other kinds of places. You do not need to live in or know Colorado Springs to appreciate this book, although to be sure it helps. Housed within the detailed explications of what happened here in Colorado Springs, Harner manages also to chart a course for conceptual frameworks that can help us think about other places with complex social and environmental histories. Harner proves to be an adept storyteller and polymath, bringing together multiple traditions in geography—including historical geography, landscape studies, urban theory, GIScience, and humanism—to foster a truly rich understanding of Colorado Springs.

For those of us who do live in or know Colorado Springs, Profiting from the Peak forces us to reengage with the familiar in ways that press for deeper reckoning at every turn. The historical and geographic insights that resonate throughout the book do not merely represent interesting details, but rather challenge us to examine the human–environment relationships that are too easily taken for granted. In one of his most extensive chapters, Chapter 2, “Water,” Harner documents the rapid and ongoing development of transbasin waterworks that secure and supply water for Colorado Springs and cities including Denver, Boulder, Aurora, and much of Colorado’s Front Range urban population. Although most of this water infrastructure is effectively invisible, Harner makes clear that in its absence, Colorado Springs and the state more broadly could not have developed as they have. By pressing us to confront the map of water development and consider the political, engineering, financial, legal, environmental, and gravitational work required to deliver water reliably across, over, and through watersheds and mountain ranges, Harner quietly makes plain the fact that we inhabit a landscape that is thoroughly produced.

In documenting the many changes to the landscape in and around Colorado Springs, Harner also opens up hopeful prospects for change. Thousands of cars travel I-25 through Colorado Springs each day without ever noticing the former Pikeview coal mining district. Perched at the north edge of the city, the mines here generated more than 1,000 tons of coal daily in the early twentieth century, fueling much of Colorado’s early industrial boom. Coal trains from Wyoming still roll through this area, but one of the large power plants downtown has already transitioned away from coal and it’s nice to imagine a future when we might look across the foot of Pikes Peak, or Piedetava (to use Harner’s Spanish-Ute neologism), and see an urban infrastructure that has pushed beyond its carbon-intensive foundations. Harner highlights a number of shifts in the cultural and economic geographies of Colorado Springs, including an encouraging rededication to a vibrant downtown post-2008. With greater insight and care, surely residents of the Pikes Peak region could learn not only to profit from the peak, but also to respect and appreciate the many amenities, ecosystem services, and beauty that it offers. Profiting from the Peak makes clear that this task would be worth the effort, and that the contributions of geography and geographers ought to play a valuable role in pursuing this vision.

Commentary by Steven M. Radil, Department of Economics and Geosciences, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO.

Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs is an important contribution to the literature interrogating the history of cities in the American West. Place, landscape, and the past are the book’s central concerns and Harner provides a wonderfully encompassing view of the city from its origin in the 1870s and its growth and change over time. Harner does this holistically by addressing the traditional spectrum of core concerns for geographers (e.g., Aiken 1983), integrating discussions of place, spatial organization, the biophysical environment, and how people interact with it into the overall story of the city’s history.

The book is a result of Harner’s own long-term personal and professional connections to the city and the wider region. For example, Harner has written about cities in the American West in general (Harner and Larkin 2002) and critiqued Colorado Springs’ urban form and the politics that have shaped its growth (Harner and Kinder 2011; Harner 2020). He has also played a central role in the development of historical geographical narratives about the city for the public in partnership with a local history museum in a project called The Story of Us (Harner, Knapp, and Davis-Witherow 2017). Profiting from the Peak therefore draws on Harner’s deep academic and experiential knowledge of Colorado Springs but also transcends his previous scholarship and engagements.

In this sense, Harner’s efforts in Profiting from the Peak reflect the philosopher and place theorist Casey’s (1993) assertions that to live as a human is to live locally and that to know anything is to first know the place that one is in. Like many U.S. cities, Colorado Springs has a well-developed narrative about its past and something of a local history publishing industry that serves to reinforce it (e.g., Sprague 1980). This means that there are many books that recount the city’s key events and the people behind them, yet Harner’s book stands out in that it strives to write a history of the place from a geographer’s point of view rather than from a historian’s perspective. Although numerous geographers have resided in Colorado Springs or worked on issues that are specific to it, there are very few that know the overall place well enough in Casey’s meaning to have taken on such a project. In that sense, perhaps this book could have only been written by Harner.

One of the book’s pleasures is that it is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Each chapter deals with a different thematic topic related to either the city’s physical or human geographic context (or often both), such as the place’s outdoor recreation tourism industry. These chapters are titled plainly: “Water,” “Air,” “Rock,” “Fun,” “War,” and “God” are examples. This organizational choice allows the chapters to overlap and mix with one other productively, an important issue for a geographical audience. For instance, the chapter on war describes in some depth the processes by which major military bases arrived in the city beginning in the 1940s and how the presence of these institutions subsequently shaped the city’s landscape and culture. In doing so, the chapter necessarily draws in stories further explored in other chapters, such as the rise of the Christian right in the city during the 1990s in the God chapter, and how both processes then became entangled with the other (e.g., Marsden 2014). The structure also makes the book novel for those hoping to avoid another traditional retelling of the sequential history of the city.

Beyond the book’s novel thematic structure, another of its strengths is the inclusion of a series of original maps made by Harner, as well as numerous other historical maps and photos. In fact, every chapter save the last two has at least one example of original cartography by the author. The net effect is an engaging and visually informed read. In an era when a great many critical human geographers dismiss mapping as part of a geographer’s toolkit because of concerns about its epistemological underpinnings or role in power relations, Harner’s maps highlight one obvious way to distinguish his book from the bulk of the local history offerings, even to the lay reader. For human geographers in particular, the inclusion of these maps should highlight the value of developing and nurturing the set of skills needed to create them as well as an example of how they can complement a critical approach (O’Sullivan, Bergmann, and Thatcher 2018). These maps and the other visual materials are also clear and easy to read, a credit to the author and the publisher.

There are some notable tensions present in the book that Harner navigates throughout. First, because of the subject matter, Harner straddles speaking to both academic and lay audiences on one hand as well as to geographers and nongeographers on another. He does this adroitly by keeping the focus on the notion of the landscape, enough of a digestible and common-sense idea to accommodate both a lay audience and academics who are otherwise unfamiliar with the underlying body of thought that Harner draws on. Those same audiences, however, might find the discussion about the notion of the landscape and the related discussion of the place concept somewhat underexplained. The choices Harner makes here are understandable, but it is also reasonable to consider how a diverse audience might have benefited from an expanded discussion that linked the construction of landscapes and places to the concerns of history and historians (e.g., Pred 1984; cf. Withers 2009).

Second, Harner is quite clear that capital accumulation is the key social process that has shaped the landscape and place overall, and that this process is abetted by a persistent discursive framing of the city as a place of “liberty” and the political practices that go along with such a framing (low taxation, antiregulation, social conservatism, etc.). Despite this clear stance, the book is not consistently focused on a full-throated critique of this process, nor does it dwell on deeply interrogating the agents, agendas, and systems that have supported it over the years. Harner does include moments of subtle commentary and does address the potential to realize a more progressive sense of place in the concluding chapter titled “Place,” but in an era where everything seems political and politicized, the book was less so throughout than some readers might otherwise expect.

Potential critiques such as these are necessarily mild in nature because of the book’s overall excellence. Harner provides a masterful example of the power of geographic observation for a diverse audience, and his attention to the landscape and a concern for the place in which he both lives and works is an object lesson for us all.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Commentary by Yolonda Youngs, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, California State University San Bernardino, San Bernardino, CA.

“When a place speaks to you, you should listen” (p. xiii). In Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs, John Harner presents an expertly crafted cultural and historical landscape study that results from his attentive listening to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Within ten thematic chapters, Harner guides the reader on an exploration of Colorado Springs through three dimensions of place that make this city unique: “the built landscape, the values of people, and the nature–society relationships” (p. xiv). At its core, Profiting from the Peak is an expertly told and highly readable story about people, place, and environment woven together as a deep meditation on the concept of place identity.

Harner’s thematic approach is a refreshing invitation to explore Colorado Springs from a spatial perspective instead of the standard historical divisions that often constrict chapters. Although historical eras and time periods are central to this book and clearly discussed in each chapter, they are used as markers of landscape change or ideological shifts shaping city planning instead of hard breaks. For example, in Chapter 6 (“Fun”), the themes of tourism, parks, and their development are focused on the evolving recreation economy in Colorado Springs. Harner traces the 1960s skiing and Colorado Ski Country USA marketing campaigns back to city founders and boosters General Palmer and Charles Perkins and their push in the early 1900s to develop public parks in the city. The chapter fluidly shifts between these topics and similar historical arcs as Harner builds his argument about the city’s evolution as a distinct place in the American West. In this vein, Harner’s fidelity to landscape and a thematic approach draws on foundational work in cultural geography from Peirce Lewis, J. B. Jackson, and Donald Meinig found in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Meining 1979b) as well as more recent place-based studies of cities such as Patricia Gober’s (2005) Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert or Larry Ford’s (2004) Metropolitan San Diego: How Geography and Lifestyle Shape a New Urban Environment.

Profiting from the Peak is also a presentation of visual materials with decisive clarity and purpose. More than just images as pretty pictures, Harner actively engages every image and map in this book to move his narrative forward. This work serves as contribution to visual culture studies and a terrific example of the value of a geographical approach that is spatial, visual, and process-oriented. His archival deep dive into the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum results in the presentation and interpretation of maps, documents, reports, photographs, and many other invaluable resources to better understand the evolving cultural and environmental landscape of Colorado Springs. The press should be commended on the crisp, clear colors and printing for these images, especially the generous reproduction of color imagery. Harner also created many original maps using geographic information systems (GIS) data, historic aerial imagery and maps, and his own knowledge about Colorado Springs. This author-cartographer role is rare in book publishing. His maps often present new spatial interpretations or analysis, such as Figure 8.11 (p. 203) comparing the north and south half of Interstate 25 during building removal in 1960 construction efforts or Figure 8.14 (p. 205) of four maps showing population change and housing unit change from 1940 to 2010 in census tracts in the oldest parts of the city. The maps are clear and the design is clean, making for an easier connection between his narrative and his audience. The book also includes an impressively large set of repeat photographs taken by the author. One small critique is that although imagery plays a central role in this book, there is no list of illustrations. That would have been a useful guide to finding images and referencing them as the narrative moves along.

Harner’s book is a tour de force of public geography. Although it could be argued that geographers have been deeply engaged with public audiences and community outreach for a long time, there is a recent, refreshed interest in this vein of work. At the 2019 AAG Annual Conference, Past President Derek Alderman dedicated much of his talk to this theme and examples of geographers pursuing this work through collaborative projects with their local communities. Products from this work can result in museum displays, public talks, and new data sets of volunteer geographic data, to name a few. Examples include Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein’s “Neon Speaks” project with community members, neon light artists, and the Museum of Neon Art.

Harner’s project takes public geography to new digital realms as well. Profiting from the Peak evolved into a related digital geohumanities project at the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum, in collaboration with Tierra Plan, LLC. The result is a digitally animated museum exhibit and Web experience entitled The Story of Us (see https://www.cspmstoryofus.com/). The Web site is admirable for the wealth of visual and text content it provides to public audiences. Large quantities of archival collections are often difficult for the average public user to see or experience without trained effort or special access such as a curated tour of the museum collections. This is not the fault of archivists or librarians or the public institutions that hold these materials. Instead, it is a challenge of displaying large quantities of materials in often limited museum spaces. Digital geohumanities projects offer a solution to this problem and an alternative venue for scholars and librarians to reach public audiences. The Story of Us is a tremendous proof of concept for public and digital geography. Through this digital creation, Harner and his collaborators are joining a cadre of scholars seeking out new realms to connect scholarship beyond the classroom (or archives).

The Story of Us highlights how great print scholarship can translate to clever digital elements for public geographies. The Web site provides a level of playfulness and interactivity that is often missing in scholarly attempts at digital geohumanities. Users can mix and match their content—such as historic maps and images—and skip around the Web site in a choose-your-own adventure that is satisfying and educational. Large tiles with letters from A to Z beckon users to click on themes as diverse as Tesla and Tuberculosis, Buffalo Soldiers, or Olympic City USA. For example, choosing the letter Y resulted in a message about “You” that encouraged users to join the museum in sharing their knowledge and stories about Colorado Springs. To stir inspiration for these personal stories, the next screen revealed a large selection of historic maps and aerial images of Colorado Springs, digitally scanned at high resolution and available for selection as a base map. For example, I could select a 1947 aerial image of Colorado Springs and match it with a contemporary layer of repeat photographs from 1945 showing various locations around the city. This level of interactivity allows for public users to explore the city on their own while enjoying self-directed queries about its past that might be difficult in other formats.

Harner’s book also stands out for his inventive uses of repeat photography in print and digital formats. Whereas physical geographers and other environmental scholars have long used this method to document landscape change, repeat photography is gaining a revitalized appeal with cultural geographers. Original sets of repeat photographs are an incredibly valuable data set. The work of collecting these field data demands weeks and months, if not years, of time, from selecting historic imagery, to finding the original site, capturing photographs that mimic the original photographer’s angle, direction of light, frame, and subject matter. There’s also the heavy lifting of organizing and managing these large data sets of often hundreds or thousands of images so that they can be used in print or digital publications later. Harner nimbly handles this logistical challenge of the work and effectively curates photographs into a visual narrative that complements both the text and museum Web site. This is no small task. Harner’s project builds on and complements books such as William Wyckoff’s (2020) Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace: Rephotographing the Arizona Landscape (2020) and Dan Arreola’s three-book series, recently concluded with the 2021 Postcards from the Baja California Border: Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900–1950s.

In conclusion, Profiting from the Peak is a pleasure to read and an important contribution to the historical geography of the American West and Colorado. It will be a good fit in upper division undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in human geography, urban studies, and environmental history. Scholars from geography, landscape studies, environmental studies, urban studies, and environmental history will enjoy this compelling read.

Commentary by joni m palmer, Southwest Environmental Finance Center, Center for Water and the Environment, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

In this commentary, I am going to pay attention to the power of a book returning someone to her academic roots, while also helping the reviewer see a place anew, and consider how such a book might engage (and inspire) a new generation of students in landscape studies, urban geography, and cultural geography.

As noted in the introduction to this forum, Profiting from the Peak has been awarded the AAG’s J. B. Jackson Prize for advancing geography to lay audiences, which seems more than a fitting note to start this particular commentary. Of equal importance, at least to me, is that this book harkens back to some of the classics (e.g., Hopkins 1954; Cronon 1991), which is important because Harner suggests new, multilayered ways of reading and writing small- and midsize cities; such cities are consequential to our understanding of the world today, although they are often overlooked as regional anchors.

As soon as I opened Harner’s book, Profiting from the Peak, and read the table of contents, my mind went directly to two readers and writers of landscape and the American West: William Wyckoff’s (2014) book How to Read the American West: A Field Guide, which I think of as a guidebook in the J. B. Jackson way of thinking: “prose in an effort to interpret the surrounding world.” Wyckoff’s book, if I were to develop a syllabus for a graduate seminar on reading and writing landscapes, would be mandatory [prefatory] reading to Harner’s book. Wyckoff’s book is divided into eight chapters; it provides a means by which one might begin to pull apart the threads of a thick, rich landscape fabric, thus exposing the elements of—in this case—the American West. Wyckoff’s chapters (“Nature’s Fundament,” “Farms and Ranches,” “Landscapes of Extraction,” “Places of Special Cultural Identity,” “Connections,” “Landscape of Federal Largesse,” “Cities and Suburbs,” and “Playground”) would, I believe, provide a solid grounding for one to read Profiting from the Peak—in which Harner delves into the particularities of a place (a city) in the American West. See Harner’s table of contents, and you will see what I mean. I discuss this further later.

I also think of Meinig. Harner’s book includes ten chapters, which immediately made me think of Meinig’s (1979a) “The Beholding Eye,” in which we (well-schooled geographers that we are) all know—Meinig talks about ten versions of the same scene. Meinig’s ten versions are not the only lenses through which one might read the landscape; reading this essay decades after its publication encourages me to consider the lenses Meinig did not include (and might not even have considered). Harner explores and tests some of Meinig’s lenses, explicitly and implicitly, and even includes a few more. I am curious as to which lenses of Meinig’s most intrigue Harner with regard to Colorado Springs, and which new lenses he might offer after the fact; that is, after writing the book.

Maybe I am reading too far between the lines—or between the columns in this case—but the graphic presentation of the table of contents was initially, and is still (after reading the book), a compelling entrée into the book. I kept coming back to this page while I was reading the book, thinking about whether this was something Harner did to expose connections, suggest misalignments, or allude to breaches or gaps. I drew cross-connections on this page—producing a crazy tangle of thoughts between and among these words (these categories) that framed my way of thinking of and into Colorado Springs. I have numerous images, from my active experience of reading the book, that helped me think about potential relationships between these two columns. With the addition of each chapter, layer, and lens, I considered new connections. I invite you to imagine the table of contents, and to consider the cross-connections you are compelled to explore while you are reading Harner’s book.

• Grass    Fun

• Water    War

• Air   Liberty

• Metal  God

• Rock   Place

J. B. Jackson is clearly an important figure in Harner’s work; in particular, I think of Jackson’s (1980) essays in The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics, in which Jackson talked to the reader about “Learning about Landscapes.” Jackson (1980) said, “my contribution to the education of my students was simply this: I taught them how to be alert and enthusiastic tourists” (3). He went on to question this insight regarding the reputation of being a tourist. I remember reading this chapter in Loeb Library when I was a second-year graduate student in landscape architecture—it was the first time I seriously considered what it meant to be a tourist. I had not traveled much then—my traveling was just beginning: It mostly revolved around my childhood wanderings along the beaches (and small communities) on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and as a graduate student walking long stretches of Mass Avenue from Arlington, through Harvard Square, past MIT, across the Mass Avenue Bridge, 290 Smoots to Boston. This walking was my way of learning about Cambridge and Boston, and I suspect this is how Harner’s (book writing) journey began.

Okay, enough about me … but wait—this is, to a certain degree, about me. As I said earlier, this book brought me back to my roots, as a person who studies the landscape, and as a woman who reads and writes places. Not only did this book encourage me to go back to the books that initiated me into being a landscape reader and writer, but I felt compelled to read the scribblings in the margins (from several naive decades ago) … which got me thinking about my first time in Colorado Springs, circa 1972. All of this swirled around in my head, and I tried to come up with other excellent books about small U.S. cities. I was looking for books that do not lecture. I was looking for books that entice one to explore, as Stilgoe (1989) urged us to do in Outside Lies Magic: “Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic” (2). I would never have thought that a book about Colorado Springs would capture my imagination, but Harner got me thinking about this city, particularly because of his reading and writing it within its regional context—while weaving in the cultural, economic, political, and the social—to create, as Anne Whiston Spirn (1998) speaks of in her book, The Language of Landscape, a language that is native to the place. I would like to bring a couple of her eight points of “landscape is language” into this conversation—only briefly, of course, as points for conversation about Harner’s book.

• Spirn (1998) said that “To read and write a landscape is to learn and teach: to know the world, to express ideas and to influence others” (15). I’d like to ask Harner: What do you think of this notion, with regard to why and how you wrote the book? Spirn believed that reading and writing landscapes is how “humans share experience with future generations, just as ancestors inscribed their values and beliefs in the landscapes they left as a legacy, ‘a treasure deposited by the practice of speech,’ … a rich lode of literature: natural and cultural histories, landscapes of purpose, poetry, power, and prayer” (15). John, knowing your academic and landscape experience inclinations, I would like to discuss how the poetry, power, and prayer of reading and writing landscape is part of your everyday, and your scholarly, practice.

• Another of Spirn’s (1998) points is, “Landscape is loud with dialogues.” She alerted us to the various intersecting storylines and how (these) as dialogues also “tell of a congruence between snowfall and roof pitch, between seasonal sun angles and roof overhang.” She said, “The context of life is a woven fabric of dialogues, enduring and ephemeral” (17). John, I’d like to ask you to talk about the dialogues—loud and soft, enduring and ephemeral—of Colorado Springs. What are some of the dialogues of this place you did not have the opportunity to include or write about in this book? I’m also thinking about your thoughts on how some of these dialogues feed, or become, enduring mythologies.

That brings me to the final person I’d like to invite to the table: Tim Ingold (1993), via his essay, “The Temporality of Landscape.” At the beginning of this essay Ingold states, “Telling a story is not like unfurling a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding the attention of listeners or readers into it. A person who can ‘tell’ is one who is perceptually attuned to picking up information in the environment that other, less skilled in the tasks of perception, might miss, and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths of his own” (153). The question I have for Harner, then is this: Who else would you like to have tell the story of Colorado Springs, and thus take us along his or her own path(s)? What kinds of meanings and dialogues of this place might we discover from this person? What are the paths that intrigue you, that you did not (could not) take us down?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book—it felt like a conversation I might have with Harner over a beer (or two) at a local watering hole in Colorado Springs. John, who else would you like to bring out for a beer and conversation?

Commentary by Kevin McHugh, School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

The Penumbra of the PeakPicture this. Geographer Peirce Lewis walked into a classroom at Penn State carrying an armful of maps, books, and papers. He deposited his load on the desk and walked to the window. Gesturing out the window of the Deike building, Lewis said to the class, “Everything out there, call it landscape, tells us who we are, and were, and are in the process of becoming.” This was the first-time offering of a new course Lewis was calling “The American Landscape.” That day in 1976, Lewis distributed a handout to the dozen or so students gathered, myself included, a fresh mimeo printed in blue ink titled “Axioms for Reading the Landscape.” Lewis told us that he wrote the axioms as a navigational guide for our foray in landscape. A decade later, John Harner attended Penn State, where he, like so many students, was affected by geographer and teacher extraordinaire Peirce Lewis (Marsh and Wood 2021).

Fast forward to 2021. John Harner’s fulsome monograph on Colorado Springs, Profiting from the Peak, is published by the University Press of Colorado. The book opens with a seven-word memoriam: “In memory of Peirce Lewis, landscape geographer.” In my reading, Profiting from the Peak is a signature moment in the history of landscape studies in geography. Like the teaching and writings of Peirce Lewis, Harner’s interpretive reading of Colorado Springs does not abide divisions in geography, such as a schism between physical and human geography or a separation of cultural and political geography. His geographical vision is holistic. Like Lewis, Harner’s work is fully committed to field research, direct connections with landscape, and the built environment. Harner is ever mindful and attendant to the spatial composition of forms in the land. Like Lewis, Harner treats historical geography as absolutely fundamental, not simply as backdrop. Like Lewis, Harner’s genuine curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and encyclopedic knowledge in matters of landscape and place are boundless; I dare say dizzying! Finally, like Lewis, Harner is so adept in landscape study and writing that he makes it look easy, which, most assuredly, it is not. Profiting from the Peak is testimony to Harner’s sustained commitment to place and region, a level of vigilance that few can muster.

There is another geographer who I must mention in expressing John Harner’s landscape perspective in Profiting from the Peak. This is Don Mitchell, who also spent time at Penn State as a master’s student. Mitchell (2008) penned a retort to Peirce Lewis’s (1979) axioms titled “New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice.” Harner has masterfully developed a unique voice in landscape geography by melding a cultural-historical-environmental outlook with a critically inflected sounding in the spirit of Mitchell’s axioms: Landscapes are actively produced and contested as concretized spatial forms of power and social justice. Surficial looking is simply not sufficient, for landscapes “naturalize” and conceal injustice that needs to be revealed. To this end, Harner tells the story of Colorado Springs as a variegated history and geography of capital accumulation. His critically informed historical landscape geography is a tour de force, a finely detailed account traversing wide terrain: land division and town settlement; agricultural production; procuring, storing, and distributing water; building railroads; mining metals, ores, and coal; the rise of therapeutic and recreational landscapes; landing of the Air Force Academy and defense economy; the growth machine of suburban sprawl; and the rise and fall from grace of evangelical organizations and megachurches.

In the preface, as noted previously, Harner writes: “When a place speaks to you, you should listen” (p. xiii). Throughout the book, he has an acute ear in sensing intolerance and inequality, past and present. This is evident, for example, in his deft treatment of political culture and labor tensions in the tumultuous mining history of the Colorado Springs region. I was struck, for example, by the organization of the Western Federation of Miners and the rare benevolence of two mine owners of the Cripple Creek gold boom: Winfield Scott Stratton (Independence Mine) and Jimmy Burns (Portland Mine). Harner’s textured stories of figures—large and small—who made and remade Colorado Springs brings landscape and place to life for the reader. His artful storytelling is always framed and informed by larger, shifting cultural values in the making and remaking of the American West.

Profiting from the Peak captures the ethos of liberty, freedom, free markets, and small government that has been the genius loci, or animating spirit, of Colorado Springs. Throughout the book, Harner raises questions about intolerance and inequality that emerged in this rarefied atmosphere. In the final chapter, he argues that, today, this ethos is being increasingly questioned, yet continues to contribute to social and urban environmental problems that require more public engagement, intervention, and investment. Reading Harner’s optimistic yet critically informed interpretation of historical and contemporary conditions in Colorado Springs reinforces my long-standing view that he speaks with a direct, affirmative voice, a voice of conscience—moral yet never moralizing.

I applaud that Harner wrote Profiting from the Peak with Colorado Springs residents in mind: “My hope with this book is to instill curiosity among readers, particularly Colorado Springs residents, so they pay attention to the landscape around them and ask meaningful questions” (p. xv). The preface provides some framing in place, landscape, and nature–society relations—and place is revisited briefly in the concluding chapter—but the book by design is not an academic tome rehearsing and pushing geographical ideas. It demonstrates place, landscape, and environment through a rich case study, written in fluid prose that is surely appealing to a wide readership. This speaks to the fact that Harner’s career as a geographic educator moves beyond academic circles and the university classroom to encompass publics through community engagement. This is illustrated most admirably in the digitally animated museum exhibit and Web experience that he and collaborators created for Colorado Springs, The Story of Us. The scope and depth of this community project is truly remarkable. His presentation about The Story of Us at Arizona State University a few years back stands out in my mind as among the most captivating talks I have witnessed in thirty-seven years in Tempe. Like the marvelous interactive design of The Story of Us, the book is replete with historical and contemporary photographs, maps, images, and graphs that tell the story of Colorado Springs with aesthetic richness. In Profiting from the Peak, word and image are interwoven seamlessly in telling the story of Colorado Springs.

Kindly indulge my turning to a slightly more elevated concluding response to John Harner’s herculean work in landscape and place geography. In reading Profiting from the Peak, I take special note of the single-word chapter titles (e.g., “Grass,” “Water,” “Air,” “Metal”). Of all the marginalia I scribbled in the book, perhaps the most incisive is the single word “elemental” that I wrote in the margins of the contents page listing the ten chapter titles. It strikes me that Harner is thinking and writing geographies with elemental touchstones in mind, for what can be more elemental or fundamental than water, air, rock, and God?! I could not help but think about the resurgence in elemental thinking that we are witnessing in geography and geophilosophy (Engelmann and McCormack 2021). Harner writes in the concluding chapter, “Geography does still matter.” Indeed, I might choose to italicize matter in this punchy sentence.

The elemental moves against atomistic, siloed thinking that jibes with Harner’s holistic view of geography. He refers to Profiting from the Peak as embracing a “thematic” approach in landscape-place geographies. As a passing thought, might the elemental be a tie that binds and unites in some fashion Harner’s thematic geographies? Might this be the basis for thinking through a schema or framing in invigorating landscape-place geographies? Sharply attuned geographers, like Harner, intuitively know and feel the play of elemental forces and conditions making and remaking worlds, as he aptly demonstrates for Colorado Springs. The elemental here speaks to fundamental conditions that make possible all possible geographies. In my reading, Harner’s beautifully rendered story traces and narrates actual historical geographies of Colorado Springs crystallizing in excessive elemental conditions of possibility. Pikes Peak is an elemental force that has long stirred the imagination. I end with a provocation: What possible geographies of Colorado Springs, geographies yet to come, might be imagined lying in the penumbra of the Peak?

Response by John Harner, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO.

In his review for this forum, Steven M. Radil cited Casey’s (1993) assertion that to live as a human is to live locally and that to know anything is to first to know the place that one is in. In the preface of my book, I stated, “When a place speaks to you, you should listen” (p. xiii). These were the guiding principles that drew me to write Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs. After a career of research mainly in Mexico, I shifted my attention home and focused on seeking meaning in my local place. Although to many a seemingly nondescript, midsized city, Colorado Springs has a distinct identity, and the story of how this place came to be has not been told. The city also has certainly punched above its weight in terms of regional and national influence on conservative politics, western water law, and other topics, which merits some sort of analysis as to why. For more than a decade now I have engaged in a dialogue with this city.

I am enormously thankful to the four reviewers and to David Havlick for his introduction and organization of this forum and for the Author Meets Critics session at the 2022 AAG Annual Conference. After investing a good part of my career in this project, praise from these respected contributors is most welcome, as were the kind words and recognition awarded from the J. B. Jackson Award committee chaired by Dr. William Wyckoff. In my response, though, I will focus on the critiques and questions posed in these commentaries.

Radil points out two potential weaknesses in my analysis of the historical geography of Colorado Springs that, remarkably, both relate to the key themes of the book: the concept of place, and the argument that this city was shaped by the processes of capital accumulation. For the latter, Radil writes that I have not consistently focused on a robust critique of the process of capital accumulation, nor do I deeply interrogate the agents, agendas, and systems that have supported it over the years. I agree with his assessment, which caused me to pause and reflect on why that might be true. One explanation comes from my research method, where I intentionally followed an inductive process. Whereas I had a good idea about the main historical events that shaped the city (although I had not identified all of the chapters in advance), I did not have a clear preconceived thesis about the central driver of its place identity. I wanted to let the story unfold and reveal itself as I conducted research. I did not see in advance the critical importance of how 150 years of determined drive for capital accumulation shaped the city until an entire draft was written, and only then with thanks to my friend and colleague Eric Perramond, who pushed me to focus on this thesis to explain the events in the thematic chapters.

So, then, induction has both strengths—letting a story emerge without trying to cram it into a preconceived ­framework—and weaknesses, namely trying to retrofit a political economy framework into a draft of chapters not always written with that in mind. Once this perspective became clear, a second problem arose that reflects my own lack of skill. I simply find it difficult to express a critique of a laissez-faire development environment in a manner the lay public can relate to and understand without sounding polemical. I have written on hegemony and the ideological construction of place identity elsewhere, but sought to avoid such language in this book (Harner 2001). As pointed out in these commentaries, there is a tension of balancing an academic project with language amenable to the general population. One final explanation I can offer is that I simply didn’t want to lose readers with too much theoretical critique, yet also didn’t wish to come off as a cheerleader of a history and policies that I see as problematic. I’m not sure if I achieved the proper balance, but I certainly tried.

This tension of writing for the general public yet maintaining research rigor also informs Radil’s second comment that the concept of place—of central importance to the entire book—is somewhat underexplained. I again concur with his assessment. Place was clearly in the forefront of my thoughts throughout the project. But writing specifically about place, believe it or not, was an afterthought. It didn’t hit me that I needed some academic background, or context, on how we can think about place until I started writing the last chapter, which addresses the topic head on. Two reasons for this come to mind, the first being that again I didn’t want the book to become too academic, laden with too much jargon. I can discuss place as a process (Massey 2005), as a product of labor and a system of social reproduction reinforced by its landscape (Mitchell 2000), with place ties developing over time (Jackson 1994), but could I really discuss place as “particular types of enduring locales stabilized socially and spatially through the clustered settlement of primary activity sites and the establishment of propinquitous territorial community”? (Soja 1989, 151). Although I elected for brevity in the final chapter on place, I certainly could have incorporated more on the concept of place throughout other chapters. I’m sure I could have also better woven in more discussion of landscapes as actively produced and contested, and as such concretized spatial forms of power and social justice, hence a major player in the construction of place identity. I will note, however, that I needed to cut 35,000 words from my original manuscript draft, which required a hatchet rather than a scalpel during edits. Nonetheless, I now regret not citing something from Edward Relph’s (1976) Place and Placelessness. After initially reading that classic decades ago, I went and reread it after my book was completed and only too late saw helpful passages. An additional note on interpretation and writing about place: I tried to let this concept emerge from the stories on the pages without hitting the reader over the head. As Kevin McHugh stated, my attempt was to demonstrate place, not push geographical ideas on the reader. Place is the interaction and relationships between many dimensions of society, culture, landscape, and environment. I feel it is better for the reader to make those connections without a rigid preconceived theoretical structure. Trying to explicitly state what makes “place” usually falls flat in my experiences. It’s like writing about how to conduct research—you can provide instruction, but better to just do it, to follow some loose guidelines but let the process of discovery unfold for yourself. Place is like that—better to read the nuanced histories, look at the spatial organization, recognize change in the built environment, see the relationships among features in the cultural landscape, and let these coalesce and develop your own sense of place rather than have someone cram it into a form that might not fit for you.

Two items were mentioned by Yolonda Youngs and others in these reviews that helped me to develop the city’s sense of place—my original cartography, and The Story of Us museum exhibit (see www.cspmstoryofus.com). The former has always been obvious and necessary to me. Effective cartography tightly expresses complex relationships and processes in a precise manner. Integrating thematic cartography into the narrative sums up and complements what is written over many paragraphs. The Story of Us exhibit I mention in my preface because that project did evolve while I was building a historical GIS database for this book in the archives of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, and I wanted readers to be aware of this other wonderful resource for exploring the place identity of this city. Having said that, I can take little credit for the exhibit today. Although I was involved with the project’s development by providing (too much) digital content and ideas for spatial displays and interaction, the real credit for the project lies with Leah Davis Witherow, Curator of History at the museum and brains behind the format and content, and Kevin Knapp, Owner of TierraPlan LLC, the spatial analytics firm that built the database and programmed the interface. I remain thrilled with the product they have created, proud of my small contribution to it, and pleased that my book and this digital exhibit complement each other to tell the story of Colorado Springs.

I take great pleasure that joni m palmer was transported back to her early academic career while reading this book. To create such introspection about both herself and her own thinking of place shows, to me, the transformative power of literature to expand consciousness and foster new ways of knowing. That my writing could have such an effect is for me the greatest of all praise, an impact more profound than I could have imagined. After all, palmer states that the giant of landscape studies, J. B. Jackson, simply wanted his students to be alert and enthusiastic tourists. My main goal for students has simply been to get them to pay attention to the world around them and ask questions about how the landscape came to be and what it can tell us. For palmer is right, that reading and writing landscapes is to share experiences with future generations—although, sadly, I can’t claim that poetry, power, and prayer are a part of my daily repertoire. If my book serves to inspire a new generation of students to engage deeply with place, I will be forever humbled. But what are some of the dialogues I could not include? Certainly, scale comes into play here. For instance, I simply could not delve into architectural detail of specific buildings, nor the small stories such as when a certain road underpass was built below a railroad line to avoid collisions, the many local legal disputes that informed Colorado water laws, nor the odd incongruities that developed as neighborhood street patterns coalesced into the larger urban network. These were too much minutiae. There were large stories I wish I could have included, though, most prominent being the early art community that developed in the city around the Broadmoor Art Academy. Colorado Springs was a precursor to the Taos and Santa Fe arts scene; why the city didn’t further develop as an arts colony is a story untold. The leaders of this movement, then, would be who I would like to invite to tell their story. Such people could add to Meinig’s (1979b) concept of landscape as aesthetic, a lens I am poorly qualified to employ.

I greatly appreciate Kevin McHugh connecting the one-word titles of my chapters to theories of the elemental. He delves into the philosophy of elements as a way to distill meaning behind each chapter. This, too, was my thinking, that perhaps I could use a one-word descriptor for an entire historical era to get at the essence, or the fundamental conditions, that make it all possible. McHugh asks whether the elemental is a tie that binds and unites the thematic geographies, and whether this could be the basis for thinking through a schema or framing in invigorating landscape-place geographies. This is a provocative idea, worthy of the ongoing and future debate in geography (Engelmann and McCormack 2021; McHugh 2022).

To McHugh’s final question, what possible geographies of Colorado Springs, those yet to come, might be imagined lying in the penumbra of the Peak? Although my book is a historical geography, I get asked questions about the future of this city every time I present. I point out in the concluding chapter three important features that define the city’s identity, one being the persistence of Pikes Peak in shaping the urban imagination, the second being (as Radil worded it) “discursive framing of the city as a place of ‘liberty’ and the political practices that go along with such a framing.” The final theme is the importance of the urban core as a shaper of identity—the historical buildings, the streetscapes, the public spaces, and the functions the downtown undertakes to create community. There is currently a burst of housing and other developments taking place in the central business district, all good signs. But what possible geographies could we imagine? Dare we imagine this city being a model for sustainable living, with a robust core that counters the pervasive urban sprawl, a healthy relationship and interactive opportunities with the dramatic natural environment at our feet (or over our heads, as we look up to Pikes Peak)? Why can’t we be leaders, instead of perpetual laggards and followers of urban innovation? We have certainly been national leaders when it comes to conservative policies and right-wing Christian political movements. To truly tap into the potential to be a leading city in the American West, with an engaged community of citizens, in the information age, participating in a robust recreation economy, maybe it is time for something else.