The Everest Effect: Nature, Culture, Ideology

By Elizabeth Mazzolini

In The Everest Effect Elizabeth Mazzolini traces a series of ideological shifts in the status of Mount Everest in Western culture over the past century to the present day and links these shifts to technologies used in climbs. By highlighting the intersections of technology and cultural ideologies at this site of environmental extremity, she shows both how nature is shaped—physically and symbolically—by cultural values and how extreme natural phenomena shape culture.
 
Nostalgia, myth, and legend are intrinsic features of the conversations that surround discussions of historic and contemporary climbs of Everest, and those conversations themselves reflect changing relations between nature, technology, and ideology. Each of the book’s chapters links a particular value with a particular technology to show how technology is implicated in Mount Everest’s cultural standing and commodification: authenticity is linked with supplemental oxygen; utility with portable foodstuffs; individuality with communication technology; extremity with visual technology; and ability with money. These technologies, Mazzolini argues, are persuasive—and increasingly so as they work more quickly and with more intimacy on our bodies and in our daily lives.
 
As Mazzolini argues, the ideologies that situate Mount Everest in Western culture today are not debased and descended from a more noble time; rather, the material of the mountain and its surroundings and the technologies deployed to encounter it all work more immediately with the bodies and minds of actual and “armchair” mountaineers than ever before. By moving the analysis of a natural site and phenomenon away from the traditional labor of production and toward the symbolic labor of affective attachment, The Everest Effect shows that the body and nature have helped constitute the capitalization that is usually characterized as taking over Everest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817389123

Book preview

THE EVEREST EFFECT

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

Series Editor

John Louis Lucaites

Editorial Board

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

THE EVEREST EFFECT

Nature, Culture, Ideology

ELIZABETH MAZZOLINI

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Granjon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover design: Erin Bradley Dangar / Dangar Design

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1893-2

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-8912-3

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Extremity and Ambivalence

1. Breathless Subjects: Authenticity and Oxygen

2. Exaggerated Energy: Utility and Food

3. Heightened Stakes: Individuality and Communication

4. Sublime-o-Rama: Extremity and IMAX

5. Redefining Access: Ability and Money

Conclusion: The Power of the Example

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

My biggest debt of gratitude regarding this book is owed to both Jeff Nealon and Rich Doyle, without whose influence and capacities as teachers, mentors, and friends I could not have conceived of this project, let alone written it. Although this debt is split between two people, there is plenty to go around.

The book also benefited from the valuable time and thoughts of many people. At Penn State Megan Brown, Dan Conway, Jeremiah Dyehouse, Valerie Hanson, Janet Holtman, Amitava Kumar, Melissa Littlefield, Janet Lyon, Ryan Netzley, Jenny Rice, Marika Siegel, Jillian Smith, Susan Squier, and Shannon Walter all provided valuable feedback. At Rochester Institute of Technology I had engaged readers in Doris Borelli, Lisa Hermsen, Melissa Nicolas, Laura Shackelford, and Katie Terezakis. At Virginia Tech I found an especially helpful writing group just in the nick of time with Elizabeth Austin and Liesl Allingham. Bernice Hausman’s expert mentoring has been invaluable. My collaborations with Stephanie Foote have been enormously enriching in a number of registers. I am very lucky to know Devon Johnson and to have been able to draw on her work ethic and intelligence to help me complete the manuscript. Social support can be just as intellectually nurturing as writing advice, and I received social support in abundance from many of the above people, as well as from Marco Abel, Danna Agmon, Hester Blum, Tony Ceraso, Brooke Conti, Jodi Dean, Jonathan Eburne, Leisha Jones, Jeff Karnicky, Erika Meitner, John Muckelbauer, Phil Olson, Jeremy Packer, Kelly Pender, Katy Powell, Will Roberts, Emma Rose, Emily Satterwhite, Joe Scallorns, Marla Scarola, Sarah Sharma, Dan Smith, and Matthew Vollmer. I will always be indebted to readers at the University of Alabama Press, whose constructive input on an early version of the manuscript sharpened my thinking and focused my writing. Material support from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech came in very useful, to say the least. Dan Waterman ushered this book and me through the publication process nimbly, and I will always be especially grateful to him.

A version of chapter 1 previously appeared in Theory and Event, and a version of chapter 2 previously appeared in Cultural Critique. I am grateful to the editors of those journals and the readers of my articles for their comments, which allowed me to improve the articles and also the chapters subsequently based on them.

I am grateful to my family for their curiosity and support regarding this project. My ongoing conversation with Debbie Hawhee deserves mention here because it sustains me with insight and hilarity regarding all things personal and professional. And my greatest and most joyfully shouldered burden of debt is to Chad Lavin, who makes possible everything I do. This book is dedicated to him, and to Walter, who I hope never, ever, ever climbs Mount Everest.

Introduction

Extremity and Ambivalence

Mount Everest’s summit was reached for the first time in recorded history in 1953, by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Fifty years later, in June 2003, the fake news television program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart covered commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of this historic event in a story titled Scene of the Climb. Introducing the story, host Jon Stewart comically intones, Mount Everest—remote, imposing, unapproachable—it’s the [dramatic pause] Mount Everest of mountains. Stewart reports that the celebrations included ceremonial prayers for the nearly two hundred people who have died on the mountain, after which he sarcastically exclaims, so, Happy Everest Day! Edmund Hillary himself attended commemorative ceremonies in Nepal, and The Daily Show report presents footage of Hillary at these ceremonies remarking that the great moments on Everest are the moments when you are meeting challenges. Hillary’s comment, we quickly realize, is meant as a rebuke to contemporary climbers, who apparently do not meet challenges. Along with the none-too-subtle implication, Hillary also overtly castigates contemporary climbers, as when he notes that he does not regard sitting around base camp knocking back cans of beer as mountaineering. Like many people, Hillary by that point had come to feel that selfish intentions and soft lifestyles debased contemporary expeditions to Everest. Because of his status as elder statesman of the sport and eyewitness authority on the changes in Everest mountaineering over the previous five decades, Hillary’s opinions about Everest matter to anyone who harbors a shred of interest in the mountain: mountaineers and sideliners alike.

As the piece continues, Stewart lends credence to Hillary’s judgment by reporting that the mountain is covered in beer cans and other forms of litter. While The Daily Show’s take on Everest is considerably more irreverent and sarcastic than Hillary’s, it expresses similar sentiments. These sentiments are in keeping with widespread beliefs about the decline of the mountain’s environment and cultural status since the early twentieth century. Stewart’s judgment, although presented comically, echoes Hillary’s, suggesting that people climbing in earlier decades did it right, and people climbing now are doing it wrong. After reporting that there are huge amounts of litter on the mountain, the tone of The Daily Show’s piece changes from comic and opprobrious to provocative and disgusted. Stewart cites an AP report that there are one million liters of human urine and thousands of pounds of human waste on the mountain. Stewart also reports that the pay rate for Sherpas carrying human waste from the mountain is four-tenths of a cent per pound, adding (again, sarcastically), at least you get to carry shit down a mountain. He ends by observing broadly that humanity has turned a pristine mountain into a disgusting frat house.

Although a primary characteristic of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is its iconoclastic comic commentary on news stories meant to challenge accepted wisdom, Scene of the Climb is very much in keeping with the status quo. This two-minute piece about Everest draws on many overlapping narratives that currently situate the mountain in Western culture. The most overarching and persistent of these narratives is Mount Everest’s fall from grace, whether it be the grace of nature’s purity or the grace of man’s honorable conquering (or both). Other related narratives that Stewart’s story draws on are about the mistreatment of Sherpas and the indolence of contemporary climbers. The garbage and the human waste that Stewart mentions are frequently cited to illustrate the moral failings of today’s Everest mountaineers, who are merely paying clients of mountaineering firms—inexperienced climbers who have paid a fee to be guided up the mountain. These people are typically contrasted with hale, hearty, and duty-bound experienced mountaineers like Hillary, who was charged with the task of reaching the top for the sake of his expedition members, those who came before him and failed, and for humanity in general.

Over the decades, Everest’s profile certainly has been subject to some dramatic changes. Under the intense conditions of extreme atmosphere and topography as well as media scrutiny and global climate change, Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, has become an overdetermined icon of the sort that makes it difficult to distinguish between what is natural and what is cultural about its identity and status. At first glance, several culturally produced conceptions of nature seem to be at work on the natural-cultural entity known as Mount Everest. For example, Everest occupies a place in the cultural imagination as a site of purity and permanence that must be protected from human-produced degradation. At the same time, the mountain is thoroughly subject to Western fantasies about extremity and conquering nature, and about making money from access to nature. And yet Mount Everest, with its often-unpredictable weather and shifting ice and rock landscapes, is seen as having a mind of its own, capable of exacting karmic revenge. Given the multitude of vested interests in the mountain, many of them in conflict with one another and/or operating under the auspices of defending different ideas of Everest’s purity or exploitability, Mount Everest is undoubtedly, even perhaps above all else, contested terrain.¹

The World’s Highest Junkyard

As the Jon Stewart bit indicates, contestations over Everest become especially poignant when focused on the issue of garbage accumulation on the mountain—a problem on Mount Everest commonly attributed to commercialization, especially in recent decades, as the highest mountain on earth has become an increasingly popular destination. However, whether or not garbage is a problem on Mount Everest depends on who you ask and when. Only in recent years have people come to strongly associate Mount Everest with garbage, and those associations are usually about litter—garbage that individual careless people have cast off. Although it was in a 1963 issue of National Geographic that the phrase the world’s highest junkyard first appeared (as the caption to a photo of litter), it wasn’t until the 1990s, with the accelerated growth of the high-altitude guiding industry, that the concept took hold of the cultural imagination and the phrase and its variations (like the world’s highest garbage dump, and other plays on words related to mountains and trash) enjoyed widespread use.² Cynicism about what a growing climbing industry would do to the presumed purity of the world’s highest mountain led many commentators to assume that the place was strewn with the litter of entitled and irresponsible paying clients of commercial guide firms.

The truth of such assumptions is difficult to ascertain. The mountain sees quite a lot of litter during climbing season, but because many guide firms’ businesses depend on bringing clients a pleasant Mount Everest experience, and because there are other government and industry incentives to keep the mountain clean, there are good reasons to believe that eyewitness accounts capture only individual fleeting moments and do not represent the mountain’s overall constant state.³ There have also been so-called green expeditions whose goal has been to clean up the mountain (although some have fallen short of that goal or betrayed their stated principles). In any case, because of well-established cynicism about capitalism’s ravaging nature and in light of individual eyewitness accounts, the idea that Mount Everest is strewn with garbage appeals to common sense, even though there is reason to believe the picture is a bit more complicated than this.

This very cynicism and common sense are primary objects of inquiry in this book. Judgment-laden commonplaces regarding Everest are beholden to unexamined assumptions about the status of nature and about human behavior with respect to nature, and so deserve further scrutiny. Everest’s garbage problem has been produced not only by careless tourists but also by ideas about culture that are at least as deeply embedded and commonsensical as ideas about nature are. At first glance, it seems obvious that a lot of traffic would lead to environmental degradation. Upon further inspection though, it seems equally obvious that the internal incentives (such as for guide firm owners to be able to remain profitable by continuing to bring clients an appealing experience on a clean-looking mountain) and external incentives (such as deposits to the government returnable once a certain weight of garbage has been brought down) would add up to a much cleaner Everest than one might think. Furthermore, looked at from a different perspective altogether, Mount Everest’s and the Himalayas’ contemporary problems might be seen as linked less to tourists and climbers, even in large numbers, than to a wider-scale (that is, global) industry, which is undermining Everest’s glacial environment rather than merely sullying its landscape.⁴ With the state of Everest’s environment focused mostly on litter, embedded ideas about culture seem to be structured by entitlement, individuality, guilt, and consumerism—on the sides of both the litterbugs and their critics. These ideas all construct Everest in the same way that ideas about its purity, degradation, extremity, and exploitability construct it, as any good cultural constructivist would point out once the logic is extended. After all, if nature has been culturally constructed, surely culture has been, too.

There are varying levels of certainty regarding facts, assessments, and policies surrounding the garbage problem on Mount Everest, and that (un)certainty and the way it has been capitalized upon reveals more about collective, affective, and financial investments in the mountain than it does about external reality. It also indicates one of the ways even inert-seeming material has an ornery way of remaining beyond the grasp of human cognition. Such is the case with many facts about Mount Everest, which would seem to be easy to establish, but are subject to interested reportage generated by people under suboptimal observing conditions. Lack of oxygen can tax brain function, and fluctuating tent cities with strangers moving around wearing heavy equipment do not help with precise renderings.

Mount Everest’s cultural construction indicates a fundamental ambivalence in Everest’s Westernized existence, because the huge mountain would seem to be the very antithesis of culturally constructed. At five-and-one-half miles above sea level, rising through several layers of atmosphere, Mount Everest’s geological proportions are immense, to say the least. Additionally, with shifting ice fall landscapes and weather that allows for human presence only two months out of the year (and the weather can be unpredictable even during that scarce safe time anyway), Mount Everest’s conditions are nonnegotiable, and have been surmounted only after great pains, many casualties, and a lot of luck. And yet, despite Everest’s seeming inexorability, the mountain’s status and value in culture over the past century or so has shifted according to human events. In spite of all the ways it exceeds human time, scale, and effort, it has nevertheless come to seem that humans can largely manage Everest according to human interests, including the interest in a narrative about how or why things go wrong or right. Over the years these interests have looked a lot like colonialism and capitalism, to be sure. I would add that it is important to note that moral authority, such as the moral authority that comes with idealizing nature in order to judge other people’s actions toward it, is an interest, too. In other words, the cynics who think Everest has declined at the hands of capitalism might not be wrong, but their cynicism is part of the story, too.

Historicizing Everest’s Downfall

Everest has remained steadily in the Western imagination since having been measured and named in 1852, and its cultural profile has been inscribed in turns by ideologies of nationalism, individualism, and consumerism. Historical and contemporary accounts of Himalayan mountaineering inevitably narrate a descent from honor, with such titles as Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Extremes to the Age of Greed (2008) and High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed (2009).⁵ These titles refer to the modernist era’s dreams of conquering the world and the current era’s supposedly degenerate culture. The 2000 edition of a definitive compendium of Everest history, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, includes chapter titles that periodize Everest according to the values we now ascribe to various eras, such as Only Rotters Would Use Oxygen, about the legendary George Leigh Mallory and his compatriots protecting British pride in the 1920s by climbing without the use of by-now-standard supplemental oxygen, and The Last Innocent Adventure, about the first time anyone reached Everest’s summit in the idealistic postwar 1950s, before commercialism took over.

At first glance, the received historicization of Mount Everest makes sense, because eras on Mount Everest are relatively easy to identify, their timelines punctuated by wars and record-breaking feats, their stories having been told in volumes such as Unsworth’s. The early twentieth century witnessed Mount Everest’s nationalistic era. British soldiers who had fought in the Great War undertook expeditions to the mountain in the 1920s, and there was an intimate connection between the manhood of these climbers and the glory of the country for which they climbed.⁶ The legendary Mallory’s oft-cited quote about his reasons for climbing Mount Everest, because it is there, along with his mysterious disappearance after having been witnessed going strong for the top in 1924, has lent this era an aura of romantic bravery and guileless wherewithal. There were further efforts in the 1930s, but none achieved the level of romantic tragedy that the expeditions of the 1920s had. Edmund Hillary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s historic achievement in 1953 signaled the beginning of an individualistic era, as climbers started to become celebrities in their own right, rather than climbers for the cause of national interest. The first ascent to the summit made without oxygen was in 1978, by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, and Messner repeated this feat alone in 1980—another significant first. The consumer era is widely recognized as beginning in 1985 when Dick Bass became the first person to pay to be guided to the top of the mountain. Over the ensuing decades, more and more people paid more and more guides and firms to take them to Mount Everest’s summit, resulting in the industry there today.

This received periodization contributes to the naturalized culture of Everest and the commonly held assumptions and opinions about garbage there (among other things) that current culture surrounding Everest is debased and descended from a more noble time as a result of the selfishness and greed of humans. Although the issue of garbage on Mount Everest is often recruited in the case against capitalist culture for ruining nonhuman nature, it can also help demonstrate some of the limits of that very mode of thinking. For example, before capitalism really ramped up on the mountain, the seemingly noble modernists certainly were bent on conquering nature and seem to have viewed Everest, as well as the people indigenous to the Everest region, for their use and exploitation. Even if doing so did not seem to set in motion the same broad effects as, say, mining in virgin land while decimating native populations (also activities of British men in the modern era) did, the approach was identical. It is not clear that a hale and hearty Briton in 1922 who felt it was his birthright and national duty to reach the top of the world could be judged to be any more of a conscientious climber (or working within any better of a system) than a climber in 2013 discarding a Powerbar wrapper on the ground, because it is there. Adopting this perspective helps us see that individual human actors, even in aggregate, may not be exclusively liable, independent of natural and other material conditions, for the contemporary physical and cultural state of Mount Everest in the way that cynical accounts and progressive (or regressive) histories describe. Furthermore, as I alluded above, if climbers are products of their eras, so too must be their critics.

Nature and/or/versus Culture

Contemporary judgments about Everest are the product of changing material relations just as surely as Everest’s profile itself is. Additionally, judgments of actions on Everest seem just as promising as an object of environmental humanist inquiry as the things that it is so tempting to judge, because the judgment itself evinces relations between humans and nature. Because widespread fascination with Everest has remained more or