- Recent work in environmental literature includes numerous journal articles and a host of books, including Lawrence Buell's Environmental Imagination, Patrick Murphy's collection Literature of Nature, John Daniel's The Trail Home, John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington's collection Reading Under the Sign of Nature, Bruce Greenfield's Narrating Discovery, and Scott Slavic's Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Of course, popular interest in humanity's collision with wilderness is also waxing: Into Thin Air, Undaunted Courage, The Perfect Storm, In the Heart of the Sea and Endurance are recent bestsellers.
- Buell , Lawrence . 1995 . The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture , 2 Cambridge : Harvard University Press .
- Some scholars are impatient with such claims of connection. For instance, in his book Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, Scott Slovic observes: "The facile sense of harmony, even identity with one's surroundings (a condition often ascribed to rhapsodic nature writing) would fail to produce self-awareness of any depth or vividness. It is only by testing the boundaries of self against an outside medium (such as nature) that many nature writers manage to realize who they are and what's what in the world." Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 4. Slovic's argument is an insightful version of a familiar stance critical of claims to identity with the natural world. Mountaineering narratives are among the clearest expression of the self-discovery by struggle against "an outside medium" he identifies in American nature writing. I believe that the stark clarity of that human/nature contest is the very thing that makes mountaineers' claims to oneness with their environment worthy objects of our speculation. More generally, North American nature writing from Thoreau to Annie Dillard to James Galvin has revealed the possibility of knowing landscape as connection instead of as other. Mountaineering narratives make especially clear that this connection is an ontologjcal actuality obscured by an epistemological heritage.
- Leopold , Aldo . 1949 . A Sand County Almanac: with Outer Essays on Conservation from Round River , ix New York : Oxford University Press .
- Tallmadge , John . 1981 . "Saying "You" to the Land," . Environmental Ethics , 3 : 353
- Love , Glen . 1990 . "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism . Western American Literature , 25 ( 3 ) : 237
- Abram , David . 1996 . The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More than Human World , 69 New York : Vintage .
- Scigaj , Leonard . 2000 . "Reveling in the Referential Flux: Involution and Merleau-Ponty's Flesh of the Visible in Pattiann Rogers," ” . In Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Eco-Criticism , Edited by: Tallmadge , John and Harrington , Henry . Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press .
- Casey , Edward . 1996 . "How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time," ” . In Senses of Place , Edited by: Field , Steven and Basso , Keith . 20 Santa Fe : School of American Research Press .
- 1980 . Wholeness and the Implicate Order , London : Routledge . Wendell Berry writes that such dualism is "the most destructive disease that afflicts us." In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm argues that dualism is inconsistent with twentieth-century physics, and that it perpetuates a fragmenting vision that leads to abuse of the land, See also Carolyn Merchant, John Daniel, Neil Evemden, Lynn White, Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez, to name a few
- See also Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially Chapter 2, "Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment."
- 1998 . "Finding Place: Spontaneity, Locality, and Subjectivity," . Philosophy and Geography , 3 : 21 – 43 . Casey, "How to," 22. Casey's student David Abram makes a similar argument about the actual integration of place and person being obscured. Abram's Spell of the Sensuous suggests that fundamental features of civilization--e.g. written language--alienate us from an awareness of the living, interacting, landscape. Jeff Malpas offers another excellent discussion of place and being in his essay
- Casey , Edward . 1993 . Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World , 262 Bloomington : Indiana University Press .
- Lippard , Lucy . 1997 . The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society , 9 New York : New Press .
- Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, ix and 27.
- Tuan , Yi-Fu . 1977 . Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience , 3 Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . Aldo Leopold's famous "land ethic" is another, earlier, effort to show people their participation in the interconnected regime of the natural world. The most famous expression of the land ethic is "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." The point here is that humans are one ingredient of a biotic community that must be understood as an integrated unit. Place has also been theorized in other ways. It is worth noting that Yi-Fu Tuan brings a more holistic conceptual framework to space and place in his study Space and Place where he says "Place is security, Space is freedom." In contrast, I want my remarks to turn a critical light on the concept of space to illuminate the difference between measuring landscape as an abstraction and, alternatively, recognizing landscape as an extension of self.
- Evernden , Neil . 1996 . "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy," ” . In The Ecocriticism Reader , Edited by: Glotfelty , Cheryll and Fromm , Harold . 93 Athens : University of Georgia Press .
- Evernden . "Beyond Ecology," ” . 94
- Evernden . "Beyond Ecology," ” . 103
- Evernden . "Beyond Ecology," ” . 101
- LaForce , Gina . 1979 . "The Alpine Club of Canada, 1906 to 1929: Modernization, Canadian Nationalism and Anglo-Saxon Mountaineering," . Canadian Alpine Journal , 59 : 39 – 45 . Gina LaForce and Raymond Huel both identify the presence of Canadian nationalism in the founding of the ACC. They confine their discussions of the ACC to a treatment of the club as an expression of nationalist sentiment and the club's role in the development of such sentiments
- Huel , Raymond . 1990 . "The Creation of the Alpine Club of Canada: An Early Manifestation of Canadian Nationalism . Prairie Forum , 15 ( 1 ) Spring : 25 – 43 .
- Kinney , George . 1910 . "Mount Robson," . Canadian Alpine Journal , 2 : 40
- Johnson , Margaret and Marsh , John . 1986 . "The Alpine Club of Canada, Conservation and Parks, 1906 to 1930," . Canadian Alpine Journal , 66 : 18 William Foster, quoted in
- Odell , Neil . 1950 . "Why Climb Mountains?" . Canadian Alpine Journal , 30 : 51 – 53 .
- See the American Alpine Journal, Climbing, Rock and Ice, anything by Marc Twight, Reinhold Messner's successful books like Sah Nanga Parbat with chapter headings like "Black Loneliness" and quotes like "The higher I climb, the deeper I see into myself."
- McDowell , Michael . "The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight," ” . In Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocritidsm Reader 371 – 91 .
- Casey, "How to," 18.
- Casey . Getting Back , 244
- McKeith , Bugs . 1975 . "Winter Ice Climbing," . Canadian Alpine Journal , : 40
- Chouinard , Yvon . 1966 . "Muir Wall--El Capitan," . American Alpine Journal , 40 : 50
- Robinson , Doug . 1996 . A Night on the Ground, A Day in the Open , 49 La Crescenta, CA : Mountain N'Air Books . A related point is that Robinson is named by many as one parent of the "clean climbing" movement that, in the early 70s, emphasized protection techniques that were not destructive to the environment. He and Chouinard thereby revolutionized climbing practice in accordance with an environmental ethic
- Casey . Getting Back , 262
- Casey , Edward . 1997 . The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History , 239 Berkeley : Univ. California Press .
- Casey . Getting Back , 259
- Scott , Doug . 1971 . "On the Profundity Trail," . Mountain , 15 May : 15
- Daniel , John . 1994 . The Trail Home: Nature, Imagination and the American West , 39 New York : Pantheon Books . Oregon writer John Daniel contrasts climbers' sense of place with the dominant habit of viewing landscape as picturesque setting: "Climbers … may not be at one with nature, but they are immersed in it, interact with it, and in that sense they are part of their surroundings. They experience a sense of place in nature, or at least that experience is potentially available to them. Those who come to sightsee, on the other hand, are not part of the place they look at. They are observers, subjects seeking an object.". Daniel maintains a healthy skepticism toward blanket claims to oneness for all climbers in all settings, but recognizes the possibility of such an intermingling and locates that possibility in "a sense of place" based on a physical interaction that goes beyond sightseeing's objecnfication. The climbers are participants who "experience a sense of place" in the moment of kinesthetically perceived unity
- Roberts , David . 1986 . "Patey Agonistes: A Look at Climbing Autobiographies," ” . In Moments of Doubt , 177 Seattle : The Mountaineers .
- Josephson , Joe . 1993 . "An Alberta Summer," . Canadian Alpine Journal , 76 : 46 – 47 .
- Love , Glen . 1990 . "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism . Western American Literature , 25 ( 3 ) November : 208
- Evemden . "Beyond Ecology," ” . 103 Everenden's sense of individuality bears an obvious resemblance to post-structuralist semiotics, but he draws his examples of the intermingled-self from the sciences. Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy teaches Environmental literature at Westminster College, Salt Lake City. He is presently working on a collection of mountaineering narratives
Philosophy & Geography
Volume 5, 2002 - Issue 2