Hannah Orloff Discussion on Chapter 2 Aesthetic Tourism

    In Chapter 2 of American Camino there is a discussion on the difference between aesthetic tourism and a spiritual journey, and in that debate Dr. Redick includes a quote on pages 67-68 by Norman Wirzba which states "When we desire our relationship to nature to be mediated be the expectation that only placed deemed pretty or spectacular are worthy of our attention, then we do witness as idolatry that condemns much of the world to neglect or even disparagement. While we often fail to realize is that our worship of nature's beauty, especially our designations of certain kinds of landscapes or creatures as beautiful, is also fundamentally a reduction of the world to the expectations that we bring to it. In this reduction great stretches of the world and a multitude of its creatures are abandoned by us as unworthy and thus unlovable." When I first read this passage, it fundamentally changed my perspective on nature's beauty and relevance. The fact that human beings see ourselves as separate from nature puts natural landscapes and the creatures within it subjects to our labeling system, which can be harmful as our labeling system is very strict and lacks depth or several meanings. When people give a label or definition to something, that thing is forever now seen and understood by its literal meaning. For example, when Yellowstone received its label as a "National Park", the geysers within the park that are extremely dangerous and deadly now receive hundreds of visitors who walk off the trail and right onto them because they are "spectacular". As park visitors encounter grizzly bears, they approach the large apex predators with cameras and arms extended because these creatures are labeled "cute" online. Our labeling system exists so that we are able to understand and interpret the world around us, but it is easy to misjudge and erase full meaning from things when we reduce them to a label. 

    In the conversation of idolizing nature's beauty, we remove the layers of independence, history, and life those natural landscapes experience. Landscapes are by our terms non-living, but they are constantly changing like organisms, just over millions of years versus decades. The Grand Canyon, one of America's most visited national parks, is now defined as one of the seven natural wonders of the world. But before that, it was sacred land to the native populations of the region, and before that home to other terrestrial mammals and fauna. It was born from rushing water that eroded the rock for centuries before disappearing and turning the land arid. The red rock that coats the walls is surely beautiful, but many visitors to the park and other before have succumb to the steepness of the sides and the severity of the fall, from the roughness of the river that runs through the center. The land is as ancient and cruel as it is spectacular, but those layers are buried under the label of "beautiful landscape". Let's twist it this way, I've heard people describe the Grand Canyon as a "bunch of rocks". For those who have seen it, they find this description offensive because the Grand Canyon to them holds so much more meaning than a "bunch of rocks". A "bunch of rocks" is what you see on the side of the highway, not at that canyon. But it is a label just the same as saying it is beautiful. Now what makes the rocks in the grand canyon more worth our protection than the rocks next to the highway? The size, or the color, or the location, history? It seems like a positive thing to label certain landscapes as "beautiful", but it leads to neglecting the ones that don't fit that description and may be important in other ways such as housing insects or reptiles. Do their lives mean less than the mule deer and elk that cover the Grand Canyon? Landscapes and nature have such fixed definitions in our language that we begin to overlook the other lands and creatures that may also need our protection and acceptance. So judging things as "beautiful" can become just as dangerous as saying they are "ugly" because it establishes what people should consider as "beautiful" and it removes the individuality and complexity of that particular place or thing.  

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