Nature travel: imagination vs. reality

Nature Talk
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Worth the read, yes, but that doesn’t mean I agree with his conclusions. He cited sublime nature experiences by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir (and pointed out that the tourism industry today has hopelessly watered down the meaning of the word sublime). But then he seemed to conclude that those experiences were invalid – “Getting back to the wrong nature,” as his title says.

Well, since when do Wordsworth, Thoreau, or Muir need Cronon to validate their experiences? I have had nature experiences like Muir’s. I have sometimes had nature experiences like Thoreau’s. And yes, on occasion, I have even tasted a bit of what Wordsworth experienced, 'cause I’m intrepid. Well, if you like Muir’s experience, and are put off by the idea of Wordsworth’s, by all means hand your money over to one of those despotic ecotourism outfits where there is absolute control over how many people come, where they can go, how long they can stay, and what they can do.

Well, there are two kinds of support. If we are talking about a nonprofit soliciting donations, then the calculus is the value of the conservation work they are doing. But we are not talking about that. We are talking about an outfit that has gone the route of selling an experience. So then the calculus is whether or not the experience is worth the money. When It’s my money, I’m the one who gets to decide whether the experience was worth what I spent.

My family was not a traveling family; so when my parents split up and my mom moved us kids cross country, we decided to make it the road trip adventure we had never had. One of our stops was Yellowstone. We did the usual tourist thing of seeing Old Faithful. I found it a very forgettable experience. I was in my late teens, but still a minor, so it wasn’t my call. If I had been an adult making my own decision? I would have taken out a backcountry permit and skipped the Geyser Basin entirely.

Now, what @earthknight seems to be advocating is: let Yellowstone stop issuing backcountry permits at all; just have visitors restricted to the Geyser Basin area and the developed campgrounds. Well, I tell you: if I had been reading books about Rocky Mountain wildlife, gone to Yellowstone imagining mountain goats on crags, flocks of bighorn sheep in a wildflower meadow, and maybe a chance at a grizzly sighting – but instead just got to sit on a bench waiting for hot water to squirt – I would go on to tell people: Might as well give Yellowstone a miss. Not worth the drive or the money. How would that support conservation?

Or, remember Jurassic Park? The tightly controlled tram ride to the designated whistle-stops, and the tyrannosaur doesn’t show up to be fed? Would you come away from that experience feeling like it was money well spent? How about if you grew up reading lots of dinosaur books and had hoped to see the dinosaurs behaving and interacting?

Bottom line is, if the kind of nature travel that @earthknight is advocating does become the standard, my original question will still apply: How do you deal with the dissonance between the nature you imagined and the nature you got to see?

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No, not even close. I have no idea where you pulled that idea from.

The fact that there are permits being issued is the very point I’m making, that’s the sort of responsible activity that needs to be supported as that is an attempt to manage undue impact.

Nor was I making any reference to conservation organizations as they’re largely not part of this equation.

It’s specifically about organizations “selling the experience”, however that’s done (permits, guided tours, etc). The vast majority of those organizations do so irresponsibly, catering to the “I want what I want and no-one tell me otherwise” travel crowd and damaging the very thing they rely on for their business.

In contrast, there are a few organizations that say, “In the interested of responsibility and sustainability you can’t do certain things; you can’t feed the orangutan, you can’t go wandering through the bird nesting area, you have a time limit on how long you can spend in the gorilla’s habitat, etc” because they are aware of the damage and impacts done by tourists and are trying to find a responsible way to provide the experience but do so in a way that’s minimally impacting.

That is what I mean.

The unequivocal fact of the matter is that behaving responsibly means that sometimes you can’t do everything you want to, and when it comes to the environment in particular we need to show a lot more responsibility than we currently do.

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OK then.

I guess that depends on whether the nature you imagined has any actual relationship to nature in reality. Obsession with mythological wilderness killed Chris McCandless, who was also intrepid. He went expecting a nature that was both more pristine and less deadly than what he encountered. He thought of Alaska in terms Muir would have approved of and when he got there he was stopped in his tracks by bush roads that had been chewed to snot by 4x4s. He starved to death surrounded by spell-binding beauty in a derelict vehicle that had been left to rot by the side of the road because nobody could be bothered to drag it out of the bush.

Cronon’s main point is that we are embedded in nature, not separate from it. It’s an important fact that is missing from the Sierra Club view of the world. It has serious implications for how we go about trying to salvage some vestige of the magnificence that could have been the human birthright if we’d managed our affairs a little differently for the last few hundred years.

Yes. There are lots of others who will pay the money and be glad to know that it is keeping some folks employed doing something other than chopping down the trees and strip-mining the mountains. The fight to preserve biodiversity is about lots of things but the absolute right of any one individual to alleviate their boredom or alienation or whatever by going anywhere they please to do whatever they please is not one of them. There are no simple answers and all of the plausible answers that are available involve people making sacrifices, big and small. Yeah, it’s a drag.

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From your words about absolute control.

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And you the somehow turned that into the opposite of what I actually said.

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No I did not. Your exact words, “absolute control over how many people come, where they can go, how long they can stay, and what they can do” implied that nobody is going off unsupervised into the backcountry. You might remember my exact words, “I have been put off from visiting many, many places precisely because of those requirements.” Did you think I was saying I was put off by the need to stop in at the park office and get a backcountry permit? No.

What I was saying is that I read about some national park in South America somewhere, which seems like it could be a really awesome place. But then I read that all visitors are required to hire a guide – presumably, because that is what creates jobs and thus justifies nature being allowed to exist.

Clearly not elite enough for the tastes of the conservation community. “We only welcome those with enough money to hire a guide.” And that’s at a minimum. In other parts of the world, you also have to stay at the lodge and have your meals cooked, and be driven around. I’m not exactly a high income person; the idea of being required to put my heard-earned money into frills that I don’t need or want does the opposite of attract me. Just as @pmeisenheimer said,

And the way in which access is denied to those who can’t pay the price is through requiring hired guides and so on – the things that enable the “absolute control over how many people come, where they can go, how long they can stay, and what they can do.” Give me a park where I can walk in with my backpack, pick up any necessary permits, and head off.

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Funny you mention Chris McCandless. Yes, he was intrepid. That is forgotten by some who only see him as a cautionary tale against being anything but pusillanimously conventional. But was the wilderness he imagined actually mythological, or just dead? Those 4x4 trails were not there since time immemorial after all. That is actually exactly what I have been trying to discuss here – getting there to find that someone else got there ahead of you and chewed it all to snot. That does not mean it never really existed.

There are many mountainous parts of the West where Native people did not live at higher elevations. Hunting parties went there during the summer, but there were no permanent settlements. The archaeological record shows this. Hence, there was indeed wilderness, even when pre-Columbian civilizations flourished: the Wilderness Act states, " “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This indeed describes areas where Native people traditionally hunted but did not maintain permanent habitations.

Cronon didn’t mention Bill McKibben by name, but it is clear that was who he called arrogant. He seems to have missed the point McKibben was trying to make. He may be one of the people McKibben had in mind: never having seen what McKibben meant by nature, they do not know the difference.

This thread is starting to feel like the Ray Bradbury story, All Summer in a Day. I’m the kid from Earth trying to explain the sun to the kids from Venus.

The places I’ve been and the things that I’ve seen… I feel like I have to hold back; that if I told everything that wants to burst out of me, it would come across as braggy. I know that many people on these forums may never have the opportunities I have had. I know what it is to have that sort of thing rubbed in my face, completely inadvertently, by people talking about what feels only natural to them. It hurts, and I don’t want to do that to you guys.

But I’m beginning to rethink that. The comment on the nature places for children thread, and the turn this thread has taken, tell me that the situation is more dire than I thought.

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And what you turned that into was:

Which is not at all what I said. The issuing of permits is part of that necessary level of control. You literally turned what I said into the the opposite thing.

Regarding the guide requirements, which are common around the world, and especially in South America and Africa, a big part of that is not providing jobs for locals, although that is a part of it, it’s for safety. These are areas that are not easy to navigate, often very remote, maybe have dangerous wildlife, and when people do try to go off and go in without guides they often wind up in serious trouble. The guides are usually inexpensive as well, and they are not required everywhere, just in the places where it makes sense.

I went into a remote and difficult part of Bolivia on a month-long trip in the Alto Madidi region… boat up river, hike over the hills, into the next watershed, made rafts from balas, down river, back to land, then overland until we could hitch rides from logging trucks. Three of us, four additional people with us as navigating the river took two people skilled in that on each raft, plus all of us carrying the gear necessary for a month in the Amazon with no resupply options, no easy way back out. Once in the only way was forward.

A few months previously a group of Israelis went in without guides. They never turned up and a massively costly search and rescue mission was mounted.

That’s why some of these areas require guides.

Is having guides annoying? Sometimes, depends on where you are any why there is a guide requirement. In places like that, in Serengeti, Ngorongoro, etc they make sense, even if it can be a bit bothersome. In areas where they truly aren’t needed it is just annoying and in those areas they aren’t actually doing much to keep things environmentally sustainable.

Regarding McCandless, having been in many of the same places he went to, but long before, and having spent time in interior Alaska, including on places very near to where he died, he was not intrepid, he was an idiot. An unprepared, irresponsible dreamer who died due to his own lack of due diligence. Nothing wrong with being a dreamer, but if you intend to go into any remote or potentially difficult area you need to do your background work first.

I spent several months doing glacier research in SE Alaska back in the early 90s. Even with helicopter support and radio contact to “civilization” do you think they just set us loose on the ice? Hell no. We spent several weeks in training and evaluation before heading up, during which they watched all of us closely to determine who they wanted where. A small subset of us were evaluated as being capable and responsible enough to be on the first team in to set things up, be team leaders for projects on the ice, and on the final close-down team. Because we did your background work, paid attention to the evolving situation, and didn’t go running off half-cocked.

As for Bill McKibben, I know him a bit from my time in grad school in Vermont and have a few friends who worked with him closely. He is passionate, vocal, and active, but not arrogant.

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Let’s rephrase that. How about “Give me a park in which I can do as I please without returning any benefit to local communities whose ability to make use of the park land has been curtailed so I can wander around as I wish, thereby guaranteeing loss of local support for the park and the inevitable degradation of the park’s environmental values that go with that.”

It was mythological and he expended a lot of words describing his motivations that make that unambiguously clear.

I see. May I suggest that most Indigenous peoples would be unimpressed by a colonial piece of legislation defining the meaning of their use and occupancy of their territories? North America was brimming with human cultures whose mode of existence was light on the land precisely because they had no permanent habitations. They moved to hunt, to gather, for ceremony and culture, to give fields a rest and no doubt for reasons that are lost to time. The idea that lack of permanent habitation equates to lack of occupancy and use is a colonist’s perspective that has been used to justify stripping vast tracts of land from its original occupants and transferring it to settlers without compensation. National parks are as much a product of that theft as are cities.

Cronon’s article was written in 1995, at which time McKibben was a thirty-something freelance journalist with a couple of books to his credit. His mention in this article is brief and very specific. Cronon spends considerably more time treating Earth Firster David Foreman. The only use of the word arrogance is this:The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember—as wilderness also tends to do—that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible behavior. Respectfully, I think you have misunderstood the article.

Yeah. Here’s the thing - you don’t know me. You don’t know @earthknight. You have no idea what any of us has seen or done. Like you (and like Cronon), I understand the sensibility that draws some (not all) people to wild places. Perhaps you have had experiences of the natural world that outstrip anything I’ve managed to fit in over 67 years of travelling the world and working in the field but frankly I doubt it. I would love to live in a world where I could strap on a pack and go wherever my whims take me but I live in a world where opportunities to do that responsibly are extremely rare. These days I don’t even like to get on a plane without being sure of what I’m doing because Bill McKibben and others have done such a great job of explaining the environmental consequences of putting individual convenience ahead of the greater good. If you really want to discuss this stuff, PM me.

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@jasonhernandez74 my personal answer to the question you posted earlier of how to deal w the dissonance between the nature you imagined and the nature you got to see, is to avoid iconic locations. I do believe that how we perceive iconic areas, such as national parks, is largely dependent on how society and/or media have constructed them to be perceived. The more constructed a location is, or the more iconic it is, likely the greater dissonance between what was imagined and what was experienced. That’s why, even tho i have grown up in CA, i’ve been to Yosemite Valley just once. I am way too independent to want to deal w the rules of such a place, of permits, of the jostling crowds, of signs admonishing me not to do what i would normally be inclined to do or be inclined to go, or have to make a reservation months in advance. And i fully understand why those rules are needed in such high traffic areas, but it’s just not for me. So, where i live i have what i call The Big Empty, an area that is off the iconic path, which has not been advertised, not been constructed in any fashion, so i can experience it as i find it, w/o any preconceived notion or expectation of what i’ll find. For me, i would much rather be there and be free to go where i want and do largely what i want in a largely unknown, under-appreciated landscape, than subject myself to the rules and crowds of a NP, so not going to the iconic NPs is a trade-off that works for me.
I do think my values in this thread would generally align w the views of @pmeisenheimer and @earthknight though with one go back on something in a post by @pmeisenheimer. In that Cronon editorial, the passages that do resonate most w me are the passages about being embedded in nature, such as: “The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die [or are harvested]”; and, “…if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.” I couldn’t help to find it incongruous when @pmeisenheimer mentioned that Cronon’s main point is that we are embedded in nature, but then states that, “There are lots of others who will pay the money and be glad to know that it is keeping some folks employed doing something other than chopping down the trees and strip-mining the mountains”. The reason that caught my eye isn’t because i disagree w the gist of what he was saying, but because our societies and economies require that someone chop down trees and strip-mine mountains, that such work is part of being embedded in nature, and that work shouldn’t (in my view) be disparraged [and really, anyone who uses a smart phone should appreciate mining and miners]. Cronon was the editor of a 1996 book of which his essay was the first chapter. Another essay in the book was by Richard White, entitled, “Are You and Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living: Work and Nature”, the first part of the title reflecting bumper stickers seen for sale in an area affected by the spotted owl-logging controversy. In it he argues that if we do not come to terms with our work (because our work, our labor, is part of what embeds all of us in nature due to the resources consumed in that work), “we will turn public lands into a public play-ground; we will equate wild lands with rugged play; we will imagine nature as an escape, a place where we are born again. It will be a where we leave work behind.” And, “Having demonized those who’s very lives recognize the tangled complexity of a planet in which we kill, destroy and alter as a condition of living and working, we can claim an innocence that in the end is merely irresponsibility.” So, take Hetch-Hetchy that was brought up earlier, a dam that created a reservoir and hydropower system that provides something like 80% of the water needs for 2.6 million people and produces about 1.7 billion kilowatt hrs per year. If the dam was removed, in a state w the water and power issues that CA has, where and how would that water and power be replaced? And for what, for one more additional public playground where people can become, “contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral”? Given climate trends and population growth, as well as ongoing land subsidence in CA as a result of groundwater extraction necessary to grow crops, a state in which the once salmon-bearing San Joaquin River now is dry for a substantial part of its length due to water diversions, at what point will CA need more dams, not fewer? I’m certainly not an advocate of such, but neither would i think it atavistic to propose additional dams if needed to anticipate needs - as San Francisco did over 100 yrs ago. Let’s not demonize the production of power or water or minerals or timber, or for any other resource we as a species require, let’s strive to provide those resources as sustainably and responsibly as possible and maybe in so doing we will be closer to discovering, “…what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like”. White’s essay - https://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/White.pdf

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Those are not mutually exclusive terms, and I think there are good data that show that. On the other hand I don’t think McCandless was an idiot, except in the narrow sense of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. He was a true believer in a heroic myth that put him out of synch with the world around him. Many (probably the great majority) of people who make those kinds of mistakes catch a break and, if they’re paying attention, learn a lesson. I’ve done some really foolish things I’ve only survived by dumb luck and only realized it after the fact. Anyway, by the time McCandless crossed the river he had used up all his breaks. He was a sad, angry, alienated guy looking for something to believe in and he picked something he didn’t come close to understanding without recognizing his own ignorance. He was not afraid of risk and I can respect that. He didn’t do the work to understand what the risks actually were, and that’s about as common an error as you’ll find.

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No argument from me. However, there are reasons for protecting large areas of natural habitat, some ecological, some aesthetic and some economic. In the world we live in in 2021, protecting large areas usually entails sacrifices on somebody’s behalf and in many cases it disenfranchises large numbers of people (like miners and tree-cutters) with few options. Models that don’t try to address that concretely usually fail, at least in non-authoritarian nations. Ensuring that local, usually poor communities see benefit is recognition that the environmental values in the park are inextricably bound up in the welfare of the local people, one way or another.

That’s one part of a larger question that includes things like “at what point will CA acknowledge that mining ground water and devastating the ecology of the Gulf of California have costs that need to be internalized in economic and urban planning?” We each leave footprints but it is not unreasonable to ask people to watch where we walk.

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Agreed. It seems to me that, at least here in the US, a facade of ‘green’ has been created, however intentionally or not, where although we can feel ecologically responsible by doing things like recycling, or how my full-sized truck at work advertises its ‘eco-boost’ engine (apparently i am happily boosting the eco-something whenever i burn fossil fuel in it), unseen behind that facade things are rapidly degrading.

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Taking your given would not have led me down your train of thought here. I would have said, “Given climate trends and population growth, as well as ongoing land subsidence in CA as a result of groundwater extraction necessary to grow crops, a state in which the once salmon-bearing San Joaquin River now is dry for a substantial part of its length due to water diversions, at what point will CA need to rethink its water usage?” As pointed out in this essay, Almonds and Sustainability, California is essentially exporting 15% of its water – 100 billion gallons a year – in the form of irrigated alfalfa hay. As the author asks, “How much sense does it make, in a state that can face devastating water crises, to — in effect — ship away one-third of the water to meet the needs of every household in the city of San Francisco, so China can eat more beef?” I think questions about when more dams will be needed are the wrong questions.

Beef was the first to go, some years before I transitioned to vegetarian. I saw too many tropical pastures that I knew had once been tropical forests.

That makes sense. Of course, in the example I gave, it wasn’t an iconic location, so much as a location that a travel guide described in not-quite-accurate terms. The phrase, “outpost in the jungle,” I thought, had a specific meaning, and it wasn’t the way I would have described what I saw when I got there.

I have a bit of that in me, too. That is a big part of the motivation behind this thread.

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@jasonhernandez74 i agree, you articulated the proper question to ask about water usage and production. In CA, when a roadway becomes too crowded w cars the solution has always been to widen the road or build a new road, never to search for ways to reduce the number of cars. So, yes, point well taken about water usage and needs in the state.
Environmental crises seem often to result from failures to anticipate the foreseen, and right now it seems there’s a lot more being foreseen than anticipated by governments. But as consumers our choices might help influence change, and although I am not a vegetarian i have cut out beef for similar reasons.

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I rarely have the opportunity to travel to other countries, also for various reasons I do not travel too often in Poland, but I live in a region with a very rich nature, which is a mine of observation, sometimes extremely interestings. I believe that we often fail to appreciate what surrounds us and we look for impressions that will later disappoint …

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That was what I was referring to in the reply that @earthknight took personally. I suspect that there are more users in this forum like you – seldom able to travel much – than like eathknight and I – world travelers who have seen so much. So I hold back, not telling all the stories I want to tell, lest I appear boastful.

I suppose so. I remember the one and only time I intentionally left a good book unfinished: Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen. Near the beginning, he described the Aru Islands as the 19th century naturalist Alfred Wallace saw them. In the final chapter, Quammen began to describe his own trip to Aru in the 1990s. I cut off reading, leaving the last chapter unread. I didn’t want to know what the islands had become in the 90s; I wanted to imagine them the way Wallace saw them.

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Again, no, there hasn’t been anything you’ve said that I’ve taken personally. Disagreeing with your premise is not the same as taking things personally.

As for the travel portion, I’ve had the combination of good fortune, put in the hard work, and made the sacrifices to get a career that offers me the opportunity to live and work in a variety of places.

Regardless, the principles of responsible nature/environmental interaction apply no matter if you’re going to the county park, to some remote “exotic” location, or anywhere else. The location/travel aspect is irrelevant to the larger discussion of what constitutes responsibility and expectations vs reality.

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My mistake. It was pmeisenheimer who took it personally:

I made a general statement about not wanting to seem boastful in a forum where it is likely that many members have few opportunities to travel, and he replied as if I meant him specifically.

I am not sure we are even discussing the same thing any more. I can see why you got onto the topic of responsibility; but the question of expectations vs. reality can apply whether one is being responsible or not.

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Perhaps I need to add a subquestion: have you had nature experiences that were as good as you imagined they would be? Please note, the way this question is worded implies that you anticipated the experience, and imagined what it would be like before it happened.