The Arc of a Life

What I find interesting about that era is that you had people who were living in wilderness.  Most of the world had not been raped and pillaged to the extent that it has been now.  In fact, there were only about a billion and a half people living on the planet when you were born.  Now there's six and half billion, so I think then there was a great deal more living memory in relationship to wilderness.  Then in the 60's you have all these people and this “elevated” consciousness, but you also start to have a lot of people exploring places that heretofore you had to yourself.  What was that like, to have the things you did because you loved to do them become “cool” and even commercial?

It was very traumatic at first because this was my private playground.   There was movement in myself from being more selfish to being more global in my view, and there were a number of times when I would go back and visit places that I saw as a child and they had been completely transformed.  It was really traumatic.  And then I began to realize that this is the way of the world, and when I began to travel internationally I realized this is just the way things go. 

You have to get the people out there to save it.  It was the Sierra Club that made that point.  Elliot Porter, The Place No One Ever Knew, the Glen Canyon.  In the forward he made the point that it's nice to have it untouched and unspoiled and unseen, but you can't save it when it's unseen.  People have to experience it:  they have to be there.  That of course played back into my mentality.  That was what drove my thesis (PhD). I was in science, physiology and pharmacology, so could I write a thesis, a dissertation that was on straight philosophy of population explosion?  No.  So I took a segment of that and wrote about population size and density, it's effects on psychological parameters.  I tried to ferret out the impact of behavior as a function of population.  The back and forth between the two, and a lot of that stuff didn't make sense to me at the time, because you're looking at prime effects, and the statistics weren't really there to look at variance.  That's what I was mostly picking up in the dissertation, changes in variance.  The worse got worse and the better got better.  But did the mean effect change much, not really.  That was hard defense. 

How about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that when you look at something you change it.  You've seen these remarkable places and now you're taking people there.  Then you get Wilderness Travel and all these other organizations expanding the commercialization of wilderness experience, paying people to take them up Everest.  What did you think of those things?

I was way in front of that sort of thing, paying people to take them up Everest, but I could see it was going to have a big impact.  Remember, when I started in science I was in physics, so I was very aware what it really meant, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the social variant of that, well, it's just a metaphor, it's not the same thing. 

But I could see that that was happening even before I vaguely considered being a guide and I asked myself, “How do you get around this?”  You have to educate people.  You want them in order to save it, and you've got to get more people out there but you're going to transform it, so what I thought was, “Do it with the least impact possible.” 

It just appalled me how you go to Utah and see these dingbat off road people, even then driving to hell and gone ravaging a place.  And it's only gotten worse.  But, if you walked across it, sure, you're going to have an impact but it won't be as profound. 

That's how it continues to disturb me to this day when I go to the Everest region, the Khumbu region.  That's what from the very beginning I fed into Wilderness Travel and then Ibex , and all my outfitters, that “You guys are going to make a living on this.  They're coming to see this.  If you want them to see this, they won't see it next year if you treat it this way, so you have to change your approach.  “Look at this guys, there's sixteen toilet holes here when three years ago this used to be a beautiful grass meadow.  Now it's f****d, it's an outdoor toilet with a lot of uncovered holes.  Let me show you how to dig a toilet hole in the sod.  You put a layer of dirt in it then you stomp on it so it doesn't get all over your boots, then dig another layer, then take that piece of sod I showed you the last thing