Abstract
One of the most common themes in environmentalist writings has been that of leaving civilization to submerge oneself in wilderness that is full of threats and potentially deadly. One of the motives for such adventures has been to open oneself to the full force of nature and potentially become transformed by it. Such transformation is defined here as a moral experience, and a hermeneutic analysis of one such experience—Val Plumwood’s encounter with a crocodile—is carried out. While such experiences have been usually associated with wilderness adventures, it is argued that what is really important is to encounter wild entities capable of denying human appropriations of nature, and this can take place anywhere. Indeed, ecological discomforts experienced close to home are proposed as a more radical version of wilderness experience in which we encounter alternative interpretations of human identity and even of moral concepts like for instance ‘justice’.
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Notes
- 1.
This particular example, though this was not the main reason for its choice, will also help us see that there is nothing particularly masculine about the Thoreauvian model. Even if it has been historically associated with men, the example of Plumwood clearly shows that this does not have to be so.
- 2.
A death roll is a strategy that crocodiles use to kill their prey. When a crocodile catches a large prey, it drags the victim into the water, and then uses its own body weight to roll around its own axis until the prey drowns; or, in a more personal fashion: “It is, essentially, an experience of total terror, total helplessness, total certainty, experienced with undivided mind and body, of a terrible death in the swirling depths” (Plumwood 2000, 132).
- 3.
Though it was clear for her form the beginning what the rock ‘said’, its message was certainly given depth and reality by her subsequent experience with the crocodile. Still, the idea of fragility and precariousness did not seem to pose particular interpretative challenges to her, which we can all perhaps understand, given how commonly we hear about the precariousness and fragility of human life.
- 4.
An implication of relatives who suffer the loss, or of the rescue services that will eventually have to save the wilderness adventurer, might complicate such an ideal. Still, the ideal would be that, as Snyder notes, one does not expect rescue, and perhaps it is also expected that family and friends identify with the goals and ideals of a wilderness adventurer.
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Tokarski, M. (2019). Discomforting Encounters with Nature as Moral Experiences. In: Hermeneutics of Human-Animal Relations in the Wake of Rewilding. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18971-6_6
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