am Nation A short film by Sara Schaumburg

Maybe the people who feel the greatest urge to venture back in time and live off the land...are the ones most detached from it.

enough to let me tag along. For them life in the wetlands is not a novel vacation. It is living, as it has been for countless generations. They don’t need to escape from it. Regardless of how much fun I had there and the satisfaction I got from experiencing a very foreign lifestyle for a few days, I will never be able to appreciate the Mun River like the Thais who have been its stewards for centuries. Nor will I be able to comprehend exactly how fragile their lives truly are.

For some adventure-seekers, this lack of appreciation has proven fatal. Timothy Treadwell, a native of New York, spent 13 summers making friends with grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness. His luck ran out at 13, and in 2003, his and his girlfriend’s bodies were found partially eaten by one of his beloved bears.

Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old college graduate from the suburbs of Washington D.C., ventured into the wilderness outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. Four months later, his body was discovered by local hunters. The general consensus among Alaskans about endeavors such as these is summed up quite well by the responses to an Outside magazine article written about McCandless’ story.

One passionate Alaskan writes, “Such willful ignorance amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically

demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill—just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility.”

With luck, the repercussions of this lack of humility will not impact the innocent. The real danger of this is when larger endeavors, such as navigating oil tankers, fall victim to poor planning. Or worse, when large development projects like superhighways, mines, or dams are constructed based on hasty decisions concerning land and resources that are home to others.

My romanticizing of the wetlands led me to an experience that ultimately did not live up to my impossibly high expectations. I did not come away from the experience a changed person or with a fresh outlook on life, and the locals with whom I shared my time probably would have been embarrassed to know how much I idealized their lives.

What I did realize is that instead of a culture of romanticizing life in the wilderness, we need to develop a culture of respect for those whose lives personify our romances. Only with this can we avoid the damage that is done when we think we can understand a place, a people, or a way of life to which we have merely escaped.