Risking Bodies in the Wild

Abstract

At the heart of American adventure sports is the appeal of personal challenge that has roots in 19th-century “wilderness cults.” Preserving wilderness and testing oneself against it were part of a search for moral, physical, and even national purity. But, as critics have begun to argue, racism, expansion, and exclusion underpin the wilderness movement. Although these exclusions have been identified, there has been less attention to these exclusions in contemporary adventure culture and environmental thought, which borrow values from the early wilderness movement and suggest that an environmental ethic arises from risking the body in the wild. By examining adventure culture through disability studies, this article exposes the relationship between environmentalism and ableism. It argues that disability is the category of “otherness” against which both environmentalism and adventure have been shaped and revises environmental thought to include all kinds of bodies.