I have spent years of my life all told on extended outdoor adventures—self-supported expeditions usually undertaken as a combination of backpacking and river descent by packraft, in addition to a handful of significant mountaineering trips, and other human-powered activities. My expedition highlights include summitting Lhotse in 2019, crossing the Nussuaq Peninsula in Greenland in 2021 (including visiting the Greenland Ice Sheet in multiple locations), crossing Iceland coast to coast from south to north by foot and packraft in 2024, rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 2022, and traveling many thousands of miles in Alaska in over a decade, notably likely becoming the first and only person to travel the full length of the Susitna River from its glacier headwaters to the ocean, and multiple trips from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, among others.
 
Some might dismiss these endeavors as merely recreation or self-indulgence. While I acknowledge some truth to both, I wish to convey an important underlying motivation that may be less difficult to detect to an outside observer. For me, embarking on such expeditions is a philosophical act. Now to be clear, I believe that any trip taken into a wild place, whether formally protected as such or not, even for a short time with an unambitious objective, can also be a philosophical act. But there is something about the style of outdoor exploration that I have often undertaken that uniquely qualifies it as philosophical.
 
I set out on these trips deliberately seeking greater clarity on each aspect of the traditional triumvirate of philosophy: the true, the good, and the beautiful. And let’s add in a measure of wisdom while we’re at it. Philosophy is after all—by a common translation of the underlying Greek—the love of wisdom.
 
Perhaps the best way to relate this intertwining of philosophy and wilderness exploration is through a brief autobiographical account. I grew up during a time of massive proliferation of information technology. My family had our first PC when I was in high school. I began my undergraduate education studying computer science and eventually engineering. I had lived through a period of great techno-optimism during the dot com boom and the proliferation of the personal computer into nearly every American home. Not only did I see an engineering career as a practical path towards a respectable, well-paying career, but I had a great inherent interest in technology, captivated by the allure of computers in particular.
 
Philosophy however fundamentally changed my trajectory. I naively took an Introduction to Philosophy course and was blown away. I quickly became obsessed, taking every philosophy course on offer. It competed heavily with my engineering major in the number of courses I took on (always too many). And while I sought out a wide diversity of classes, philosophy loomed larger than all other disciplines. I ended up with a minor as my school did not offer a major at the time. And ultimately philosophy conquered my major, as I was accepted into a master’s program at the University of Montana in philosophy that allowed me to finish my undergraduate degree more quickly with a Liberal Studies major.
 
One aspect of philosophy that I encountered was a critical perspective on technology. My eyes were opened to the possibility that technology, for all its promise, might also be threatening and disorienting, so much so, perhaps, as to overwhelm its positive contributions. I’m not ashamed to say that I began to fear technology. My fear at the time was primarily of absorption into a dehumanizing, freedom-stripping, Borg-like, transhuman technology on a one-way evolutionary path towards an end state where humanity is no more than a mere organelle in a cell–the formerly free individual permanently brutalized, inescapably entwined into a dystopia of total surveillance and virtualization. I was struck by Thoreau’s worry that “men have become the tools of their tools.”
 
Rather than mindlessly working towards this dystopian end, even if it meant stable and well-paying work, I thought I would be better off in a critical role. My intent was to try to alter the trajectory of its development and, if possible, to escape it. I thus sought to journey to the wild beyond the reach of technology, assuming such a possibility. I don’t want to give the impression that I was driven primarily by fear. Not at all. In fact, more by love—love of these places and their beauty.
 
My master’s program allowed me to combine my philosophical and wild journeys. It helped that it was in Montana. I took off for a summer to hike most of the Great Divide Trail in the Canadian Rockies, my first major expedition. Near the end of this program, my thesis advisor advised me not to pursue philosophy any further, to go instead into law. I think this was less a rebuke of my talent than a realistic assessment of career options and perhaps also of what might actually affect the world.
 
I went instead to the wildest place I could imagine—Arctic Alaska—to be a park ranger. I believed at the time that philosophy wasn’t something one simply studies or thinks and writes about—a collection of ideas—but something one lives. This was a philosophical move as I saw it: I was seeking out the truth, the real truth, the truthiest truth. Not something written in books or orated, but a world distinct from human artifice, whether mass-produced or derived by art or reason. I don’t suppose I was ever really satisfied with the truths of the philosophers. And I was even less satisfied with the truths of religion, at least not the Judeo-Christian heritage of my upbringing. We had a nasty breakup, and I’ve moved on. Best to leave it at that. The book of Job is still a fun read though.
 
I thought at the time that being in nature—the wilder the better—was the highest one could aspire to in life. And that therefore looking after such places, even if that was only the mundane work of regulating human use through permit systems and sensible regulations, instilling leave-no-trace principles, teaching wilderness survival and navigation, or picking up bits of litter and human shit, was the highest act of environmental decency one could achieve. I took very seriously two of Thoreau’s penetrating insights: “In wildness is the preservation of the world” and “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” I also was greatly inspired by his radical insistence on moral simplicity—his project to rethink our economic lives in relation to a broader environmental and social context. Thoreau demonstrated that a degree of withdrawal could be a moral and political act rather than isolation and resignation. I sought my own moral simplicity even as it slipped into exploration and adventure.
 
I wanted to live on the edge of things, not worrying about what I would eat or drink or wear, not toiling to store up for tomorrow. I wanted to array myself in the world’s spontaneous beauty, thereby partaking in it myself. I put balls to the wall, took fearless step after step over the void, with no idea where I was headed, if anywhere…
 
On wilderness journeys, the world is simplified; the noisy wider world slips away and the place where you are becomes your world; reality is the immediacy before you; distance must be felt and earned, by step and paddle stroke; the weather must be accepted and contended with; after enough time in the wilds, something lifts, and this decompression leaves space for an expansion of our innate powers of observation and reflection. There is something meaningfully special about a journey by your own power from one distant point to another, into and across and through a great expanse, whether a park or a continent. I like the sense of completion—it feels like the creation of an aesthetic object rather than a mere hike.
 
Of course, I knew of the world’s many environmental problems: climate change, mass extinction, pollution in its many insidious forms. These terrified and enraged me, not least because they dulled the sharp edge of the wild places I so cared about. If only people could understand these places, and what they were doing to them—collectively and lazily—they might change their ways, curbing some of these issues, I thought.
 
Somewhere in the midst of my tenure as a park ranger, my semi-religious Muirian fervor tempered and I shifted a bit more towards the outdoors as a place of fun, skill, and exploration, even enriched sociality, though these had always also been present. And my skills increased exponentially, opening entirely new realms, especially mountaineering and whitewater boating.
 
Wisdom also came with time and experience. Lessons learned came from forgetting things (spoons often), close calls (never too close, but enough to make me think), overestimating one thing or underestimating another. You can believe whatever you want at home but venture out very far and you must abide by the world’s demands. Sometimes visitors would come up from somewhere in the lower 48 or from abroad and think they knew. But sometimes when they crawled back into the backcountry office, they admitted they didn’t. “What was that!” This is why a colleague of mine called Denali Park the great humbler.
 
One instance comes to mind. I traversed an especially rugged route across the south side of the Alaska Range. Massive glaciers blanket parts of the landscape there, carving out sheer and foreboding terrain. I detoured around a bear and descended into a glacial valley. It was incredibly steep, the walls hardpack tuff riddled with loose stones, and cut through by broken cliffs. The route had seduced me. It started out moderately, but grew steeper, cliffier, and tuffer—a slick, hardpacked surface that was impossible to dig my feet in. Eventually, I was on all fours crabwalking down, desperately trying to avoid gaining any momentum that could plunge me over the cliffs below. I reached a point where I didn’t think I could go up or down. Not the first time! A massive tongue of ice sat far below me on the valley floor. I managed to scramble over to a pocket of vegetation. I considered putting on my dry suit and tying myself in until I could be rescued. But instead, I collected myself and found a way down—carefully and slowly.
 
Even after retiring as a seasonal backcountry ranger to enter my PhD program, I still sought out the world’s wild places, continuously expanding my range of accomplishments: summitting an 8000-meter peak in Nepal, completing several significant river trips in Alaska, exploring the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, finding new desert realms hitherto unexplored (by me).
 
In all these endeavors, I was still after truth, I think. Truth (and goodness) had, I thought, something to do with beauty. I’ve always been something of an aesthete—attracted from a young age to art and to literature—each of which has stayed with me in some capacity and each of which I have made some forays into. Nature, however, I found to be a level of beauty beyond anything human produced, the ultimate source of all beauty perhaps—in immersive magnificence, in bounteous variety, and significantly in origin—signifying—and in fact embodying—a realm apart from the human dominated. This latter point mattered quite a lot to me, rooted partly in disillusionment with the merely human realm of politics, half-truths, and outright deception. The manufactured, the marketed. My quest was thus both a negative quest, that is deliberately avoiding something negative (lies, ugliness, unfreedom), and a positive one, that is deliberately seeking something positive (truth, beauty, freedom).
 
As is widely acknowledged, we live in an era of increasing confusion and distortion—information chaos. Extremist political movements on the right and left (though overwhelmingly on the right at this exact moment) are willing to say or do just about anything to increase their own power. This is actually nothing new and is in fact the original impetus for philosophy. In Plato’s Republic, written over 2000 years ago in a bronze age society that might seem to have no connection to our own, the orator and teacher Thrasymachus insists, in a discussion with Socrates, that justice is nothing more than the interests of the stronger: might, in other words, makes right. If you allow me to extrapolate just a bit from his position, truth may be regarded as whatever the powerful say it is and nothing more. In an era of rising oligarchs and tyrants around the world, this ought to sound familiar.
 
What is new about our era is the presence of technology in many forms, specifically information technology in the context of truth. The internet—especially social media platforms like Facebook, X, and Tik Tok—is heavily implicated in the rise of misinformation, and in turn radicalized social movements, built upon conspiracy theories and lies. Information technology has, in other words, become a singularly powerful instrument of domination by the powerful, manifested most starkly in Q-Anon, Putin’s domestic and international propaganda campaigns, China’s mass surveillance (and propaganda) programs, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the surveillance programs of the NSA and invasive data collection by private companies like Google.
 
The processes at work here are not simply the manipulation of information, but its ubiquity. Information delivered by digital and media platforms has become all-consuming to the point of trumping our basic sense of community and reliance on our own judgement of the world as derived from everyday interactions with place and with others. From the perspective of the media-saturated, often isolated internet junkie, the real world often appears more threatening than it really is. Philosopher Albert Borgmann calls this the disorientation of cyberspace. Wilderness stands out in his analysis, along with focal things and events like dining with others, running, and collective celebrations, as counterbalances to this disorientation—reorientation in other words, a way of holding onto reality.
 
My Environmental Studies graduate program (and the many side courses I took across disciplines including Anthropology, Geography, and Indigenous Studies) inexorably eroded into the canyoned depths of my convictions in at least one crucial way: showing me that wilderness (properly understood) is a good, but not the ultimate environmental issue, nor the ultimate resolution to the many issues of our time. It does have its role to play in all of them: mitigating climate change, preserving biodiversity, and curbing pollution. One thing I noticed was that for most of the other students in my program, environmental justice—adverse and disproportionate environmental impacts on people—was far and away their overriding concern—what motivated them, got them into the ring for the fight, but very different than what drove me. They also seemed not to think as much, at least not critically and skeptically, about technology.
 
On the other side of this PhD and with quite a few notches on my belt, I now wonder what have I devoted my life to? What was the point of my absurd and relentless quest for the wilder side of things? In my doubtful moments, it seems to me, it has cost me just about everything. I now have two graduate degrees (both devoted to aspects of wildness and technology), a substantial outdoor resume, a slowly increasing, ever-improving ledger of nature photography. But I’m not sure I have the life I imagined, nor imagine, for myself. But the story isn’t finished.
 
I’m not fully sure how I understand the relationship of the true, good, beautiful, and wild at the moment. I am sure that wilderness expeditions have downshifted in priority for me in favor of political issues, pragmatic environmental concerns, career development, creative pursuits, and other life goals. My relationship with and understanding of technology also continues to develop. I still maintain a healthy degree of concern and skepticism, but also an epistemic humility about what technology is and means for us as humans. Will AI live up to its hype as economic driver and progenitor of utopia—will it be our redemption? Or will it be our undoing? I don’t know. I am also sure that I will continue to query these issues.

I lived through a school shooting. I thought it was an isolated event, a horrible rift in the fabric of normalcy. I was wrong—it was barely the beginning. And it was in fact near the beginning: a month to the day after Columbine. The first of the copycats. Before the copycats of the copycats of the copycats of the…
 
It was nothing compared to so many of the gun massacres that have followed, whether in schools or in, for instance, a grocery store that I had visited many times a few miles down the road from me in Boulder, Colorado where 10 people were murdered on an early spring weekday afternoon. In the shooting at my school, no one died and only one person was significantly injured. But it was still shocking and upending. And his intentions were far worse.
 
I knew the shooter. Years before he was actually a really funny guy, awkward and weird as teenagers often are, but funny. I liked him.
 
But things started to change. And I knew it, better than anyone else. Only I didn’t know what to do—it didn’t even occur to me that I should do anything at all. How could I have known?
 
In this article featuring Beverly Kingston, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, she states that there are nearly always ample signs, and thus opportunities for intervention, to prevent such events:
 
“They're stockpiling weapons. They're talking to other people about what they're going to do. They have more interest in following the Columbine shooters or others who have been radicalized. You can also see changes in their behavior: depression, isolation, intense or escalating anger and changes in their appearance. Shooters in these studies had five or more of these signs. One study found 81% of attackers told someone about their plan, and 93% exhibited strange behavior or other red flags.”
 
I saw nearly all these signs. He would leave the cafeteria during lunch and sit by himself at the furthest possible hallway—just sit there and stare. His girlfriend (yes, surprisingly he had one) would futilely plead with him to snap out of it. His demeanor was utterly changed—he was dark, brooding, humorless. I don’t however ever remember him mentioning Columbine, but he did mention it to others.
 
He invited me to his house one day, the first and only time I ever visited it. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I was impressed by its size compared with my own. No one was home. He showed me his parent’s guns. He shot one into a nearby hill.
 
At some point, I must have been in the bathroom. I just remember walking into a living room with no lights on, only faint sunlight streaming in from some distant window. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room with a gun against his head. He asked me if he should do it. Of course, I told him no, begged him to stop playing around. He pulled the gun away. I think he said he was just kidding. It was terrifying. But at the same time, I thought it was all a joke. Despite such obvious signs, I still had no idea what was to come.
 
I never went back to his house, and I don’t think we ever spoke again.
 
Then one morning some time later, just after leaving my bus and approaching the school doors, a flood of kids suddenly came bursting out. I heard pops in the distance. He had entered the school cafeteria with a revolver and a shotgun and fired at the floor. Ricocheting bullets injured six people. He fled the building and put the shotgun in his mouth. The school principal stopped him. And the rest is history as they say.
 
In retrospect, over 20 years later, he was trying to recruit me, to enlist me in his death plot. Or maybe it was a plea for help. Or both. In retrospect, I could have stopped it, as minor as it was. If I had known what to do. I was a stupid kid, trying to do the right thing, but not properly equipped to do so.
 
My intention here is not to say that increased gun control measures are not part of the solution. They probably are. But this is a deep seeded, multi-faceted issue that likely has no simple solution. What I can share is my own experience, which strongly affirms the analysis by Beverly Kingston.
 
Every potential mass murderer knows someone.

"In the wilderness, you have left cyberspace behind in one sense, but not in another. You’re still surrounded by it physically, and it continues to offer itself as a possibility of information and communication. Isn’t it Luddite to refuse the offer altogether? Doesn’t a refusal betray a timid failure to come to terms with technology? And aren’t you drawing an arbitrary line through technology? After all, everything you wear and carry is high tech, the fabrics of your clothing and shoes, the poles of your tent, the cooking utensils, the binoculars, the watch, and the map. There are not only questions of consistency but also questions of ethics. You can get lost or injured in the wilderness. If lost, is it responsible to make the Search and Rescue people pay in toil and time for your precious refusal to carry a GPS device not to mention the anxiety you are causing your beloved when you’re not showing up at the appointed time? Similarly, when someone in your party is injured and immobilized, is it right to jeopardize the person’s health or even life while you’re getting help? Shouldn’t you have some electronic device that would have summoned help quickly and effectively?

Information technology might also make your hike more deeply informed and moving. Say you carry a device with a camera; you point it at a particular peak, and an app informs you that this is Chief Mountain where, as James Welch tells us at the beginning of Fools Crow, ‘Eagle Head and Iron Breast had dreamed their visions in the long-ago.’ Is such a device much different from a knowledgeable companion and in fact more reliable and better informed than a human could be (though of course incapable of a conversation)?

If such a snapshot makes your trip more valuable, why not ‘one day’ not far in the future wear a pair of spectacles from Google’s Project Glass? It won’t be very different or more obtrusive than the sunglasses you’re wearing now. It responds to voice commands and on request projects fourteen icons on your visual field. If you worry about an impending snowstorm that may blind you on your ascent to Stuart Peak, you can call up the weather forecast. If your worry was unfounded and you made the peak, but took a wrong turn on your descent, you call up a map, and it shows you before your very eyes and in vivid detail where to go to reach your campsite. If you suddenly remember a crucial appointment you should have scheduled, you summon your calendar and record a reminder. If on your way down you come upon a lovely flower, unknown to you, you hold it in your gaze and are told: It’s the Mountain Bog Gentian, and here are its interesting facts.

As you approach your camp, there is a high-country sunset of ravishing beauty, just the thing to impress and provoke envy in your colleagues. You take a picture and send it to them. But why not send them a continuous video of your entire hike, fine-grained and in three dimensions, complete with audio? In fact on their giant plasma screen with perfect stereo sound, they can share your entire experience, a better experience in fact since they won’t have to suffer your chills and exhaustion and can fast-forward through all the tedious part of hiking and camping. Come to think of it, why not just stay home and rent the perfect wilderness hike video? If exhaustion has to be part of the experience, you can watch it while doing stairs on your stair climber machine.

I have traced a trajectory from the reasonable via the plausible to the laughable. It shows us how seemingly inescapable, continuous, and seductive the culture of technology is. You enter the wilderness with reasonable moral concerns, follow the logic of technology, and end up in the gym, watching a screen. It seems that any line you may draw across the trajectory is arbitrary, including the legal line between wilderness and non-wilderness." 1

“Technology as a way of taking up with reality has put the power of technological information in the service of radical disburdenment. At the limit, virtual reality takes up with the contingency of the world by avoiding it altogether. The computer, when it harbors virtual reality, is no longer a machine that helps us cope with the world by making a beneficial difference in reality; it makes all the difference and liberates us from actual reality.” 2

1 Albert Borgmann in The Force of Wilderness Within the Ubiquity of Cyberspace (AI & Society, 2017)
2 Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. p. 183.

"The most serious form of environmental pollution is always mind pollution. Environmental reform most fundamentally depends on changing the way we think. Scientists may have answers to environmental problems, but the answers are not solutions unless they change behavior. Enough technology! It's time to listen to the humanists again." --Roderick Nash (2001)

From: Noel, T. J., & Fielder, J. (2001). Colorado, 1870-2000, revisited: the history behind the images. Big Earth Publishing.

From my dissertation:
Keeping, tending, or managing the wild is a paradox. Nature loses something of its wildness once brought under the wing of human concern. Although human impacts on nature are often thought to also curb nature’s wildness, not all impacts are the same. Some, like climate change, biodiversity loss, invasive species, and certain forms of pollution are globally pervasive and have been, up until now, inadvertent. For climate change in particular, the present challenge is to shift from inadvertent impact to deliberate design of the global climate. This is no small feat, requiring complex, international negotiations that involve every sector of the economy with millions of human lives and the existence of nations at stake.

Nor is it a small change in our relationship with the planet. Humanity has inadvertently become a global, geological force. Now we must become deliberate designers of the climate. As our technological power increases, so do our impacts, as does the necessity and possibility of design. As we liberate the planet from environmental degradation and pollutants, however, a new risk emerges—that the global climate and other aspects of our world become technological artifacts.

As I mentioned in Chapter 2, science, while integral to shaping a sustainable, livable future, is also implicated in technocratic management—as is modern ethics. Without something akin to the impulse in John Muir or the cultural traditions of the Tlingit—if we slip into conceiving and treating the earth as merely an engineering problem or purveyor of services—we risk living on a sanitized earth—a dystopia of total technical design.

#technocracy #technocratic

In an undisclosed location somewhere near the triple border of Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, is something truly extraordinary: protrusions—things sticking up out of the land into the sky. You even have to tilt your head up a little bit to take a gander. That’s really something after a gabillion miles of flat stuff. In an even more undisclosed location near that is a gorgeous, windswept blue pond—ringed on one side by a row of ancient automobiles circa 1950s perhaps—embankments placed nose to tail in an unceasing prairie traffic jam. Rusting, rotting, shattered glass—a stubborn line of Detroit’s finest in spackled dull red holding the landscape together between glistening marine hues and emerald green spring grasses stretching as least as far as the Medicine Bow. Sometimes you have to go east to go west, and there’s always the chance that heading west from here is really only a circling back around again.

It turns out—contrary to common misunderstandings—that medieval Europeans kept themselves quite clean. Not only that, but they utilized industrial waste heat, a practice that—in the digital age—we seem to only just now be rediscovering.
“Ordinary people in medieval cities bathed regularly in public bathhouses. These were often built close to bakeries, to share heat produced by the ovens.” Source.
This basic waste heat reuse model has been (unknowingly) replicated at Iceland's Blue Lagoon, for instance.
Read more about utilizing heat waste here.
This is just one of many archaic innovations that may help us to live more sustainably. Another inspiring one is bâdgir or wind-catchers from Ancient Persia (along with “an underground refrigeration structure called yakhchāl, an underground irrigation system called qanats”). Learn more about this here.

I rarely watch television, and if I do, I make a superhuman effort to avoid advertisements. I happened though to catch a few of the recent Stanley Cup games in a Denver restaurant in which I controlled neither the channel nor the volume, and one commercial for a Toyota 4Runner stood out to me. It featured said machine (shiny and new of course) blasting up roads in a natural setting, with a deep male voice narrating something or other, and generic guitar riffs in the background.
 
It culminated with the 4Runner at a scenic view with the massive words “Keep it Wild” plastered across the screen overtop the vehicle and scenery. After some internet searching, I discovered that Toyota has been running this campaign for around 10 years, if not more.
 
I have no specific beef with Toyota (well, besides their financing of Big Lie supporting politicians and mixed environmental record). I actually own a Toyota—a 2000 Tacoma to be exact—a real truck if there ever was one. It’s less than ideal in terms of gas mileage and for city driving (I try to drive it as little as possible, choosing to bike, bus, and carpool instead), but it delivers for camping and getting into the mountains. I suppose that is the point of the ad campaign.
 
Nevertheless, Toyota’s slogan sits somewhere between irresponsible and insulting. If the wild is anything, it is beyond the limits of motorized access. To be clear, the wild is in a sense everywhere—the weeds in your driveway, the moon looming above a city skyline, the hummingbird flitting by your window—each are wild things that all of us experience every day.
 
But the real stuff—intact landscapes where a variety of creatures, large and small (including predators), can live their lives more or less as they have for eons with minimal human interference and influence—and, once entered by humans on their own two legs or with paddle in hand or on horseback, know that this is a realm apart from their usual world—a place that commands respect in part because it is dangerous and is not theirs to command—a place that overwhelms sense and sensibility with an order apart.
 
More practically speaking, wilderness means in part a specific form of land designation that legally bars road development and mechanized and motorized intrusion. The 1964 Wilderness Act was motivated largely by the threats that these created to the last remaining undeveloped federal lands—usually in the most rugged mountains or most remote deserts.
 
I for one am bounteously grateful for the foresight of those over 50 years ago to leave some places protected as such—a respite from the noise, emissions, and consumptive ease of the everyday. Presently, around 2% of all the land in the “lower 48” is protected as wilderness. The rest is within striking distance of a road and otherwise converted for human uses.
 
But even with a variety of protections in place against motorized incursion, it is often regarded by land management professionals as an ongoing threat to Wilderness and other public lands, though not among the largest threats to Wilderness.
 
The late environmentalist and author Edward Abbey famously railed against “Industrial Tourism” in the National Parks in his best-known work, Desert Solitaire, arguing among other things that the experience is diminished by being confined to an automobile:
 
“A man [or you know whoever] on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles...Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.”
 
More important than the quality of the experience of nature is the pressing need to increase the size and interconnectedness of protected landscapes to stymie and reverse biodiversity loss. This will certainly entail decreasing road access in some areas. While slowing climate change (including its profound impacts on wild nature) requires decreasing fossil fuel consumption, which will necessitate—among many other things—slowing the production and dissemination of personal vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine.
 
It is therefore more than a little Orwellian that an automobile company in an SUV ad should help itself to language to which it is totally unentitled.
 
Toyota’s slogan undoubtedly sells 4Runners, but it certainly doesn’t “Keep it Wild.”

#wild #wilderness #TOYOTA #keepitwild

The Taj Mahal is a contradiction. It is easily one of the most superb human creations to ever grace our planet—gorgeous, immaculate, perfect—everything they say and more. It is an exquisitely proportioned aesthetic wonder—a national treasure, a world treasure, a living treasure.
 
It is also a hulking monument to the dead—the tomb of an emperor’s favorite wife.
 
And in a country that has long struggled with poverty, the Taj Mahal was built at great expense; and it is at great expense that it continues to be maintained for the benefit of the millions of tourists who visit it year-round.
 
The most striking contradiction may however be that this new seventh wonder—the subject of the world’s adoration and fawning—sits next to one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The Yamuna River is so polluted in fact that it is considered dead—an open sewer of industrial and human filth. The main sources of pollution are untreated sewage, pesticide runoff, plastic litter, and waste from leather and jewelry manufacturing facilities. It has long been considered by experts in India to be unsavable (in contrast to more recent hopeful assessments).
 
The contrast between the immaculateness of the Taj and the abysmal condition of the nearby river could not be more striking. And nested within this contradiction is another: the Yamuna is considered by Hindus to be one of the holiest rivers.
 
So, to recap, we have a monument to the dead, adored by the living, on a dead river, revered by the living.
 
It might seem that there is a moral here about human priorities gone awry: a charismatic human construction prioritized over an element of nature. Perhaps this is true, but there may be a deeper story in all of this.
 
For the Taj Mahal is also succumbing to decay—some due to the inevitably of time—much however due to local pollutants, including airborne industrial contaminants. The most obvious symptom is surface discoloration, but crumbling of the façade, and possible structural concerns with the foundation are others. Maintaining the Taj is a painstaking and time-consuming process, incorporating, among other techniques, the use of mud baths.
 
The longstanding prominent theory of acid rain from sulfur dioxide emissions as the main culprit of exterior degradation has however recently been supplanted in favor of hydrogen sulfide emitted from the highly toxic Yamuna River. It is also now thought that the Taj is gravely threatened by the decay of its foundations due to the dropping water levels of the Yamuna.
 
The state of the Taj Mahal is therefore deeply entwined with that of the river and the surrounding air. The primary moral lesson then may be the deep intertwinement of the natural and the cultural—each dependent in many ways on the other. Our lives and those things we treasure most cannot persist without looking after the most fundamental aspects of our existence.
 
The truth is that great effort has gone into working to preserve and restore both the Taj Mahal and the Yamuna River. A final lesson is thus that actualizing our ideals and working through complex problems is at times frustrating and heartbreaking and not always successful.
 
I still hope against all odds that the Taj will continue to sit in magnificence, but on a renewed and restored Yamuna like the one that Shah Jahan and the people of 17th century India once knew.

 I hope in other words that we the living can supplant death with life.

I was recently "spotlighted" by the University of Colorado's Center for Humanities and Arts. Find it here.

In the winter of 2017-2018, I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a month in India (in better days) with the primary purpose of attending an international conference on World Heritage Sites and nature conservation. On the way back, my flight from Delhi to Denver routed through Heathrow in London. As it happens, this route traverses extraordinarily far north over Greenland, Baffin Island and Hudson Bay in Canada. My trip to balmy India thus turned remarkably into a scenic flight over the Arctic in the dead of winter.
 
By an accident of timing, the entire flight was in daylight as we raced ahead of the sun, while the weather was remarkably clear. Northern Ireland and Scotland peeked out of the fog, eastern Greenland was sealed in a layer of cloud, but before long I caught glimpses of Greenland’s ice sheet and massive maritime glaciers and black cliffs. The sea ice of Hudson Bay seemed to stretch on forever. At times, the ice appeared in great solid peninsulas, and at other times it had an odd texture like a frog’s skin or paint chips tightly scattered across the sea. I could only imagine how large each of those chips really was.
 
This wasn’t mere daylight, but the perpetual light of a winter sunset—the white expanse reflected a soft orange glow. For thousands of miles. I stared out the window in awe of this immense frozen landscape.
 
As it happened, one of the inflight movie options was a Red Bull documentary entitled Into Twin Galaxies about a small group of explorers who kite-skied across Greenland’s ice cap to access a remote whitewater river. I took turns watching it and gawking out the window.
 
I knew I had to go.
 
Not just for adventure, but because I was convinced of Greenland’s central importance in the world’s future. And that it was an exceptionally beautiful place that I just had to see for myself.
 
This three-and-a-half-year-old vision is finally coming to fruition this summer. I am due to arrive in Greenland in two weeks with the purpose of working on two amazing projects. The first is a NEST (Nature, Environment, Science, and Technology) Studio for the Arts project with the primary purpose of bridging art and science through writing and photography (https://www.facebook.com/nestcuboulder/). Based on my time in Greenland and a previous trip to Nepal, I will put together an exhibit with the assistance of two PhD students specializing in glacial science (and possibly a helpful friend or two) that will hopefully go on display this winter in Boulder.
 
The second project is a Pulitzer Center environmental journalism grant focused on the relationship between the U.S. and Greenland in the context of climate change, with an additional focus on the science taking place on Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheets. I have a nice website for this and just wrote my first post: https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/legacy-us-relations-greenland-era-climate-change. Please check it out.
 
I hope also to do a little adventuring on glaciers, rivers, or seas.
 
I plan to post intermittent updates and photos on Facebook, Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/Chrisdunnonplanetearth/), and here on my blog.

General Oliver O. Howard to Chief Joseph (Hinmatoowyalahtq'it) and Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) in Montana (1877)

"The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases" --Chief Joseph (Hinmatoowyalahtq'it) in Washington D.C. in 1879

"State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"neither science nor philosophy is needed to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and indeed wise and virtuous."; "judgment...can be confused and deflected from the right direction by a lot of inappropriate and irrelevant considerations."
--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

"Socrates could never get tenure in a philosophy department today. That Socrates could never get tenure today is an indictment of the system--a reductio ad absurdum--not an indictment of Socrates"

"my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is...the wisdom of men is little or nothing" --Socrates (-470 -- -399)

 "Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher."
—Michael Foucault (1926-1984)

"The most thought-provoking thing about this thought-provoking time is that we’re still not thinking."
—Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

"Thinking is a lonely business."
—Heidegger to Hannah Arendt in Hannah Arendt (2012)

This New York Times opinion piece, When Philosophy Lost its Way, is a fantastic take on the often-dismal state of contemporary philosophy.

"There was a brief window when philosophy could have replaced religion as the glue of society; but the moment passed. People stopped listening as philosophers focused on debates among themselves."

"Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it's no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy's all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very 'scientific.'"