I'VE OFTEN LIKED to define "Northwest environmentalists" as the people who moved here in the '80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the '90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring "It All" with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony "regional cuisine" restaurants, and particularly increased wear-'n'-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow--more "natural," more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today's book--Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that "a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is."
Therefore, to ridicule somebody's ideas or visions as "fantasy," "myth," or "escapist" is more than insulting. It's a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got "advanced" enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here's his quite rational argument against the E-droppers' hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
"Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not--apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system--is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine's euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness--the larger pattern...."
As you might surmise, Tuan's a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of "escape" and "escapism" as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
"The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored....
"Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. 'He doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'"
Thankfully, history's had its share of ladies 'n' gents who've dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club's only a movie.
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