ABSTRACT
One might assume that extreme adventurers would use the stories they tell to make stronger cases for sustainable environmental practices. Unfortunately, so many adventure narratives (often called survival narratives) fail to communicate any noteworthy environmental ethic. Instead we typically get an age-old struggle of conquest, narcissism, and alienation from the land because of unconscious objectifi cation. Adventure narratives, especially when framed as “survival narratives” illustrate how casually people with privilege exaggerate the importance of their own conquests in the overwhelming scheme of people actually living on the margins of survival. The combination of adventure together with the publication of a given narrative precipitates these dilemmas because the focus on self-infl icted struggle for survival is, for the adventurer, so megalomaniacal that writing it down only compounds and reifi es the egocentric ontology. That is, by writing about my adventure experience-my brush with death-I further objectify the alien object (nature) because my text is now an additional physical object, as well as a metaphysical layer of distance between me and said object, instead of a catalyst that binds me to the land. I don’t suggest that a written narrative can never compliment the actual experience or that extreme adventure stories always fail to reveal acts of great courage, bravery, altruism, or even heroism, but too often self-centered motives complicate such possibilities and even if they don’t, the status symbols associated with hero frames, like courage, bravery, and altruism, create distance between the reader and the author-hero.
