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 (it wasn't the math I swear, I made an A in Calculus 1 and finished through Calculus 3 and Differential Equations).
 
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.”
 
Was this fear warranted? At the time, direct neurological-network interfaces were just being developed and information technologies were developing rapidly in ways that showed what I thought were clear signs of such worrisome trajectories. Perhaps it is still too early to tell. Regardless, 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 this development by challenging the underlying thinking guiding it, and, if possible, to escape it. One aspect of this thinking as I saw it is a desire to dominate and control nature, including our own. I thus sought to journey to the wild beyond the reach of technology—at least in this pernicious manifestation—assuming such a possibility (and if not to find out firsthand). To where autonomy and vitality still reigned, where all good things are wild and free, where nature’s grandeur can be felt overwhelmingly, with our own works but scratches—the world as it once was. Wilderness is in this understanding a point of resistance, one starting place to reimagine our place in the world and our relationship with our own creations. A place where we are, but within a greater context of flourishing. 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. | Continued Here: Full Version.

See also Wild Places and Beyond Forever and Photography and Art.

"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.

I streamed my first ever Facebook Live event last night--a Fireside Chat on Earth Day 2020 focused on the topic: "Which is preferable as an activity (which would you give up if you had to): Fire or Television (including streaming)?"
Watch it here

"Homo erectus appeared, roughly 1.8 million years ago. Until recently, the earliest human hearths were dated to about 250,000 B.C.; last year [2012], however, the discovery of charred bone and primitive stone tools in a cave in South Africa tentatively pushed the time back to roughly one million years ago." (source)

"The overpowering rise of machinery pains and frightens me; it is rolling along like a thunderstorm, slowly, slowly; but it has taken its direction, it will come and strike."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as Susanne in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

Last night, I had the opportunity to see this new film starring photographer James Balog, who was previously featured in Chasing Ice. I highly recommend seeing The Human Element if you have the chance. What I really enjoyed about it is how well it evokes and thus makes palpable and sensual the complexities of the human relationship with nature. James and the filmmakers are able to successfully present complex scientific connections and ideas that are often confined to the language and presentation of scientific abstraction--a step too far removed from our animal senses to move us emotionally and thus to move us to action. The Human Element is thus an important contribution in shaping our future.

This need to ground climate change discussion in the terms of immediate sensation has previously been addressed by David Abram. There is a wonderful segment of the film where James sends a camera attached to a weather balloon into the upper atmosphere to sensorially demonstrate just how thin the earth's atmosphere really is. I found it moving and very akin to the kind of evocation that David Abram seems to suggest is needed. A little ironic perhaps since the mediums of film and photography necessarily mediate our senses. Another instance of philosophical interface is in James's consideration of the element of fire. He notes that the internal combustion engine hid fire from our view and thus disclosed our relationship with it. We too easily forget this dynamic process and thus blindly consume the ancient fossil fuels pulled out of the earth to our great collective detriment. This is a fantastic example of what philosopher Albert Borgmann calls the device paradigm.

Philosophy aside, The Human Element is an entertaining and scientifically engaged presentation of how humans have become an increasingly significant force of nature. It manages all this without being politically divisive or preachy. Interestingly, it is completely focused on the U.S., often on conservative regions of the country that may deny the scientific evidence for climate change. Hopefully, the film will create room for positive engagement with these populations. The U.S. focus is also important as Americans are the highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases on earth, and thus need to make the most changes. One downside in leaving out international examples is that some of the regions where the greatest climate change impacts are occurring, like small island states and low-lying countries, such as Bangladesh, are excluded.

In sum, this is a beautiful film. Please see and share it with others.