Cyborgs in the woods

Abstract

This paper makes the suggestion that the field of outdoor recreation needs to move toward recognizing human agency when constructing definitions of wilderness if it wishes to address the ecological crisis. In an attempt to show this, this paper begins with an overview of two trends in outdoor recreation - the emphasis on minimum impact wilderness techniques and the various technological innovations that have occurred in the past few years. The next section explores some consequences associated with these trends (e.g. what definition of human beings is being suggested through an emphasis on minimum impact practises? What kind of sub-textual message of nature, and hence human beings, is technology promoting?). Each of these two trends is shown to relate to each other in ways that are simultaneously conflicting, ironic and complimentary. The next section offers one critical postmodern alternative to the ontologically absolute type of knowledge often generated within the discourse of outdoor recreation. This alternative arises from embracing the creative role human agency has in defining and explaining what nature and humans are, from decentring ontologically absolute knowledge in favour of a discursively conditioned image of the cyborg, which blurs the boundaries between human/animal, human/machine, and material/non-material. The fifth section looks at some possible hopeful results of adopting cyborg imagery in outdoor recreation as a means to address the ecological crisis.