Relationship to Land
This is a great example of how recreation is a preliminary step towards extraction. And how recreation first acts as an impenetrable shield to other claims to the land, but is super flimsy when it comes to extraction uses in the ever present resource/energy crises.
This is also a good demonstration of how when we lean really heavily on corporations to save us, to have our back, to voice and stand up for us… they will until there’s a greater price tag to be had by selling out. We the consumers are just a vehicle for wealth to be created.
“More importantly, recreation is often a precursor to traditional, and much more ecologically destructive mineral extraction. It is a politically salient justification for obliterating competing claims to land but becomes a flimsy shield in the face of ever-occurring energy and resource crises.“
Marketing the Wilderness, Joseph Whitson
BWCA.
-Marketing the Wilderness, Joseph Whitson.
I really would like to do more research on Native peoples who inhabited this area that I live in, prior to colonization. I have no idea about any of this.
The people that come to see us often have spent a long time only showing up to show the people around them the “shiny parts” of who they are. The super productive, the ever-kind, the caretaker, the always-on, adventurous, hyper independent type of “shiny parts”. And they say things like “well if I wasn’t anxious, I’d be able to do XYZ a lot
... See moreThis connects to land and what it’s talking about on page 12 of “marketing the wilderness” book. How we prioritize “shiny parts” of the land, but then dump garbage all over the “not shiny parts”. We sell access to the “shiny parts”, protect them, idolize them, but we demolish the “not shiny parts”.
Wilderness recreation facilitates the dualistic understanding of humans as separate from Nature. We explore, we experience, we categorize ‘this’ as wilderness, untouched, worth preserving, worth connecting to and ‘that’ ad wasteland, exploitable and fallen. Then we return home, and we remain just as alienated from the nonhuman world around us as we
... See moreIt’s the truth. All these companies set out these beautiful images, or back the most extreme contexts (mountain shredding, huge hikes, climbs in the most picturesque places, etc.) to sell their products. To sell us access. What ends up happening is that we discard the remaining spaces that don’t fall into that. We protect and preserve these beautiful spaces, and are sold access to them, and then we trash the rest that doesn’t fall into that category.
Like many strategies of settler colonialism, wildernessing is adaptive and is more concerned with the creation of communicable spaces that can be easily marketed rather than maintaining any one specific representation.
Marketing the Wilderness, Jospeh Whitson
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