II 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.
 
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 was also after an alternative to the mundane and expected path of the everyday, the life of quiet desperation. 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, distilled into immediate necessities, revealing what is truly needed and what truly matters; 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. I understood my time recreating in wilderness as a kind of rehearsal for an environmentally benign future that more closely resembled the human past, prior to (and thus perhaps succeeding) industrial and agricultural devastation. In that sense, it was in direct response to the crises of our time.
 
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. Perhaps I sought a kind of purification in wilderness, to burn away these lies. A place to go with no one standing in the light of my sun. 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. It is all too easy for the media-saturated, often isolated internet (or cable news) junkie to lose substantive connection with the real world, encountering instead a filtered and skewed funhouse mirror free of clear bearings. 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 (not to mention mental health and political dysfunction). 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 a bit different than what drove me. They also seemed not to think as much, at least not critically and skeptically, about technology. To be clear, I do recognize the importance of environmental justice, while also appreciating that it does not delimit the entirety of environmental thought and concern. Wilderness, meanwhile, arguably includes an element of justice for both humans and nonhumans. Perhaps there is also a deeper connection between the two than is commonly appreciated in academic treatments. Thoreau again offers useful insights: his love for nature’s wild beauty was never far removed from his opposition to injustice.
 
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? Have I found what I’m looking for? 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 and writing. 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. Probably somewhere in between. I am also sure that I will continue to query these issues.

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 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

It is clear that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain ought to be protected as designated Wilderness. I have done my own journey through the Refuge, including through the contested Coastal Plain. Here is a film worth checking out focused on the importance of the area and here is the website of a fellow adventurer and storyteller.