EXTREME LANDSCAPE: THE LURE OF MOUNTAIN SPACES
edited by Bernadette McDonald
National Geographic Adventure Press, 249 pp.
Extreme Landscape: The Lure of Mountain Spaces is a great idea for a book. Call up the "big names" like Reinhold Messner, Wade Davis, Edwin Bernbaum and Chris Rainier, and ask them to write essays exploring their relationships with extreme landscapes. Combine insights from 19 specialists in the fields of science, ethnobotany, mountaineering, philosophy, photography and even architecture to shed some light on the subject of what draws us to the mountains, why mountains are so important to the health of the planet, and what it’s going to take to save these sacred places.
Created to commemorate the United Nation’s designation of 2002 as International Year of Mountains, Extreme Landscape covers a vast geography – from the icefields of Greenland to the fiords of Patagonia, from the remote regions of Tibet to the over-populated valley of modern-day Banff.
McDonald’s foreword and Terry Tempest Williams’s introduction will fuel any adventurous reader’s appetite, but you’ll have to pick and choose if you want a meal that fully satisfies. The book’s vision is strong, but the writing is uneven.
Among the more poetic voices is Gretel Ehrlich, whose Arctic – or "attic" – adventures celebrate extremes of cold, dark and light. "The ice and the sky were a watery skin that was part heaven and part Earth," Ehrlich writes, "we were two gulls flying between." His polished prose outshines many other essays that contain occasional glimmers of revelation, but struggle to maintain a coherent narrative thread.
The anthology’s weakest work, surprisingly, comes from one of mountaineering’s strongest men. Messner’s "European Mountain Decalogue" is cryptic, incoherent and fails to even explain what the "decalogue of values" for mountain areas is.
Architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart’s "A New Geography of Hope" is a must-read. Describing extreme landscape as a climate-controlled, glass and steel high-rise with windows that don’t open, they seek revelations "on the weedy edge of a K-mart parking lot." Using proven methods of ecologically intelligent design, McDonough and Braungart aim to transform urban landscapes around the world into a garden metropolis, one building at a time.
"No animal is so stupid and greedy as to foul its own nest – except the human animal," writes Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard in his essay, "Lessons from the Edge."
Chouinard’s story demonstrates how values learned from a life in nature can lead to enormous success in business. With his organization, One Percent for the Planet, he asks businesses to donate one per cent of their net sales to efforts that protect and restore our natural environment.
Themes explored in Extreme Landscape: The Lure of Mountain Spaces provide the context for discussion at the Banff Mountain Summit, part of the 2002 Banff Mountain Festivals. Many of the authors will be present throughout the week to exchange ideas with the international mountain community. |
