Morgan Pritchard- American Camino Chapter 2 Discussion

    We have been reading Chapter 2 of American Camino, which discusses aesthetic tourism. It states that people used to associate nature and the wilderness with terror and avoided it. People's perceptions changed over time when artists began painting landscapes and nature. It started to become an aesthetic. People started to be less afraid of the wild due to the making of "domestic landscapes" which are made by man to be a more aesthetic version of nature. Many examples the book gives of aesthetic landscape paintings are from the 17th and 18th centuries. After reading this section of the book, I started to think about how aesthetic tourism and people's perception of nature have changed since the 18th century. 

    After the Industrial Revolution, a lot of rich people started liking the aesthetics of nature a lot more but more specifically, a people-less nature. I read an article recently about the Los Alamos Ranch School which was founded in 1917. It was a place where elite families would send their sons to the wilderness of New Mexico. Being in nature and doing manual labor was seen as masculine and a necessary program for their boys to complete. This is a form of aesthetic tourism. It is interesting to see how people's perceptions of nature change over time. What once was scary was then seen as a privilege to be able to explore by the wealthy in urban cities.

    Even now people have altered views of nature because of aesthetic tourism. The first example that comes to mind is the story of Chris McCandless. His well-known story was turned into the book and movie, Into the Wild. I watched this movie for a leadership class last semester and the people in my group had a lot of opinions. They expressed how dumb it was for Chris to go off alone into the wilderness and how it is no surprise he died in the wild. This shows that even today people are somewhat scared of nature. The aesthetic nature people enjoy exploring is national parks and trails that have already been explored by humans and are deemed safe in our minds. Once you start exploring uncharted territory, the fear comes back and nature is no longer peaceful.

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