In the 18th century, when the Romantics looked up at
the mountains of Europe, instead of seeing what their predecessors
saw – foreboding rocky obstacles to human advance – they saw
sublime peaks. Rather than fear, they felt wonder and desire. In a
swift shift of perception, they re-wrote European attitudes towards
mountains, initiating the modern age of mountaineering. Today,
according to climber Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, another shift in
perception may be on the vertical horizon. In Contact:
Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking, McCarthy
has assembled 23 essays from a wide range of authors, inviting
readers to “listen closely to the words mountains speak through
climbers, and hear where our culture’s attitudes have been and,
also, where those attitudes are going.”
McCarthy, chair
of environmental studies at Utah’s Westminster College, urges
readers to look past the ropes and crampons to see how climbing
narratives resonate in the larger world. An intriguing blend of
adventure reading, environmental studies text and pure literary
pleasure, this fresh perspective should appeal to climbers,
teachers and anyone interested in the environment. To McCarthy,
climbing is about more than achieving a summit, facing danger or
demonstrating physical prowess; it’s about how those summits and
risks can transform the self, opening it to new relationships with
the natural world.
He writes that
“climbing sensitizes the body, opens it to the land’s current, and
thereby animates it to awareness of the natural world.”This
“intense physical attention to the ice or rock pushes people to
experience nature as an extension of themselves and, thereby, to
know it as more than the passive resource our culture of
consumption and extraction tells us it must be.”McCarthy’s book
compels readers – climbers and non-climbers alike – to look up and
consider not only what we miss when we don’t engage with the
natural world, but also the consequences of not reaching, as a
society, for a better hand-hold.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Words that mountains speak.
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