Searching for the Wild: the Changing Post-War Conceptions of Environmentalism and Gender

SEARCHING FOR THE WILD: THE CHANGING POST-WAR CONCEPTIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND GENDER

Scott Obernesser

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2010

Committee:

Jolie A. Sheffer, Advisor

Lawrence Coates

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ABSTRACT

Jolie A Sheffer, Advisor

Throughout the course of contemporary environmentalism, activists have found voice within practices of civil disobedience. Similarly, movements to reassess traditional constructions of gender have been entrenched in disobedient practices in hopes of upsetting dominant discourse. Through disobedience, distinct ties have been drawn between shifting gender ideologies and treatment of the environment. This work looks to examine two 1990’s manifestations of disobedience in terms of environmentalism and gender: Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild (1996) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996).

Through inspection of the text’s two main characters, Chris McCandless and Tyler

Durden, we are able to examine links inherent in environmental and gender activism and thereby prompt reassessment of gender and environmental praxis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I. American Crisis ...... 14

Environment + Disobedience = Crisis ...... 14

Masculinity + Disobedience = Crisis ...... 30

CHAPTER II. Masculinity, Gender, and Environment ...... 40

Into The Wild ...... 36

Fight Club…… ...... 47

CHAPTER III. Conclusion ...... 69

REFERENCES/WORKS CITED ...... 82

Introduction

Society, you're a crazy breed. I hope you're not lonely, without me. Society, crazy indeed... I hope you're not lonely, without me. -Eddie Vedder, Into The Wild Soundtrack

Monkeywrenching, a term coined in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang,

is the practice of “sabotage in the name of the environment,” also known as ecotage and

even ecoterrorism. Civil disobedience has always been controversial, whether the

noncompliance is violent or non-violent. The use of civil disobedience by various post-

war social activist movements, most significantly the Environmentalist and Feminist

movements, constructs links between ecology and gender and growing needs throughout

the 20th century to reassess conceptions of environment and gender. Though both the

environmental and gender movements have extensive histories, it is clear that both have

been entrenched within a history of disobedience. In one of the first issues of the

EarthFirst! Journal, Dave Foreman speculated about the use of protest, even violent

protest, in environmentalism: “I am entirely pragmatic about violence/non-violence. We

should use whichever we feel comfortable with and whichever is most appropriate to a

particular situation… There are many paths one can take to defend our Earth Mother”

(Foreman 2). EarthFirst! developed in response to stagnation in the environmental

movement almost simultaneously alongside civilly disobedient groups working towards

gender and sexual equality. Acknowledging disobedience as a part of evolving

discourses in environmentalism and gender is an important step in recognizing the

inherent connections between environment and gender. 2

A century before EarthFirst!, American conservation was firmly connected to disobedience. Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the most prominent example of the historical bond between American ecology and disobedience, proclaiming both the importance of nature and wilderness to the human spirit, while also claiming the need for that spirit to be autonomous and revolutionary. Other figures such as John Muir stand out as central to conservation and developments in American environmentalism; though

Muir’s disobedience was nothing like EarthFirst!’s, he did move against modes of westward expansion that relegated the environment to a position of domination. As modes of environmentalism progressed, so did activist reactions to environmental impact: there are hundreds of men and women who have utilized civil disobedience in hopes of changing environmental discourse, including members of Green Anarchy, Earthfirst!, or the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). As campaigners perceive acts against the environment to have progressively larger impact, reactions against environmental hazards must progress as well. While many contemporary protest groups can be admittedly extreme, they are nonetheless still adhering to a tradition of disobedience.

By examining understudied connections between environmentalism, gender, and methods of disobedience, it is clear that wildness entails the liberation of gender and environmental discourses from dominant constructs that limit and restrict historical perceptions. Contemporary conceptions of the wild go beyond mere landscapes. Rather, wildness now evokes images of environmentalism, which are clearly fixed upon nature and conservation, but also connect to masculinity, feminism, and gender. Surrounded by the trappings of post-war America, the wild became particularly important during the

1990’s due to converging ideological crises in gender and environmentalism. It can 3 debated whether aspirations to respond to growing crises arose out of either inauthenticity spurred by mass-consumption in the 1980’s or a climactic realization of humanity’s incredible (and often negative) impact upon the environment, displayed by destructive phenomena such as global warming and climate change. Realistically, the desire to react against contemporary ecological practices became publicly volatile because of both previously noted comprehensions: in response to an ecologically destructive decade (the

1980’s) that reversed trends to limit human impact on nature, many Americans during the

1990’s realized their impact on the environment to be individually much larger and more destructive than they had previously imagined. Further, newly developing gender discourses revealed major problems in perceptions of gender, particularly perceptions of masculinity. Dominant cultural constructions of gender limit gender discourse in much the same way that environmental discourse is limited: relegating certain othered individuals to reside in restricted, defined circumstances creates a set of distinct problems. Throughout this work I consider disobedient environmentalists to be othered because they are largely ignored by dominant culture and searching for voice, just as persons traditionally thought of as othered are searching for voice. Though this term is usually reserved for works using psychoanalytic, feminist, or race theories, I feel the search for voice is applicable to other groups as well, contemporary environmentalism being one of those groups (further, movements in gender, which this work is addressing, regularly use the term as well). While environmentalists may not have an extensive history, they have been limited by culture for most of their active years. As with masculinity, consigning men to fulfill historical visions of masculinity rather than allowing progression and change creates major conflicts with social movements such as 4 feminism and environmentalism. The 1990’s mark a moment when responses to both environmental and gender crises draw deeper connections between both environmentalism and feminism.

In April, 1992, Christopher McCandless, a Romantic and idealistic young nature enthusiast, sent a short postcard to Wayne Westerberg, a friend and former employer.

The postcard is both a greeting and a declaration, a medium for McCandless to announce his great adventure, a stupid yet courageous attempt to reclaim notions of masculinity while allowing himself to be a part of nature, rather than the oppressor of nature. The last two sentences of this short message are touching and prophetic: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you are a great man. I now walk into the wild” (Krakauer 69). By August that same year, McCandless was dead. McCandless marks the growing crises in both conservation and masculinity by showing the link between men and nature. His life argues that a man needs adventure, and that adventure must come in the wild, because it is within the wild that we see clear connections between conceptions of gender and nature. Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild displays the imbalance between social ecological practices and cultural conceptions of gender. For that reason, Into The Wild will be one of my major texts for the entirety of this work.

Again, the “wild” McCandless writes of is more than just mountainsides and uninterrupted vistas. Modern conceptions of the wild go beyond mere borders; they evoke visions of modern masculinity, gendered relationships to landscapes, disobedience and revolution, and chaos vs. order, primitivism vs. civilization. The wild McCandless is referring to is not limited to the Alaskan landscape, nor is it limited to government 5 definitions of wilderness. Contemporary notions of the wild and wilderness are integrally connected to developing histories, culminating in crises centered upon perceptions of the individual in/against nature and individual in/against culture. In Wilderness & The

American Mind, Roderick Nash notes that the concept of wilderness had no meaning until the first throes of civilization created such. Nash writes “For nomadic hunters and gatherers, who represented our species for most of its existence, ‘wilderness’ had no meaning. Everything was simply natural habitat” (Nash xi). Only when “humans saw themselves as distinct from and, they reasoned, better than the rest of nature” did humanity start to find “distinctions between controlled (domesticated) and uncontrolled animals and plants” (Nash xii). Without civilization, there is no wilderness, and that connection to civilization is what unites the wild with other notions of culture, particularly gender and disobedience. Yet othered parties, the fringes of those civilized societies, eventually find voices, often manifesting through disobedient reactions to dominant culture; Chuck Palahniuk’s creation Tyler Durden for instance represents an opposing, yet strangely analogous, tradition to McCandless. Both are othered because they have been restricted by dominant culture and are forced to find voice outside of that culture. Durden and McCandless emphasize crises in masculinity/gender and environmentalism by showing distinctly different methods of reshaping masculinity and environmental action: Durden resorts to more violent methods, while McCandless is strictly non-violent. Though Durden in many ways desires the reedification of modern civilization and the re-evolution of nature like McCandless, Durden does not follow a

Thoreauvian tradition of disobedience. It is clear throughout Fight Club that he would 6 much rather set Walden Pond on fire, along with the rest of New Hampshire and eventually New England, than resist through silence and seclusion.

Though conceptions of the wild have always been somewhat based in a history of disobedience, wildness has transformed over the course of American social progression.

Nash’s studies show us that as the comforts of civilization increased, feelings towards wilderness changed. Harold Fromm, co-editor of the seminal ecocritical anthology The

Ecocriticism Reader, attributes much of this change in thinking to the fact that civilization provides comforts that eliminate the fear wilderness formerly held. Fromm writes “what, after all, is so dreadfully unpleasant about contemporary Western middle- class life…? Yes, of course, traffic jams on the freeways are a strain and suburban life can be parodied, but on the scale of things, in relation to man’s historical life on earth, the ills of suburbia are not so drastic” (Fromm 32). In other words, without the threat of looming death, exposure to the elements, being eaten by animals, destroyed by the whipping winds of hurricanes, roasted in a roaring forest fire, or any other number of natural disasters, former fear of wilderness is replaced by a certain admiration.

Movements attach to more accessible, less fearful concepts; through this, environmentalism and gender became part of wilderness studies. Nash observes

“Americans were becoming civilized enough to appreciate wilderness. They could begin to understand it as an asset rather than as an adversary” (Nash xiv). Over time, admiration slowly becomes wonder and awe, encouraging the need to protect the weaker, conquered other. Fromm recognizes that this process, the act of assuming control over and responsibility for another, connotes considerable changes in the human/nature relationship, changes that tie nature to human affairs. 7

As wilderness and ecology studies develop, it is inevitable for humanity to find links between the environment and gender. As Lynn White Jr. writes in The Roots of our

Ecological Crisis, “[e]ver since man became a numerous species he has affected his environment notably” (White Jr. 3). Conceptions of the wild exist in nature, just as they exist in the untameability of the human spirit, whether we realize that wildness or not.

Gary Snyder recognizes our own wildness and encourages the progression of such anti- society life. He writes in The Practice of the Wild, “[t]he world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence… the idea of the ‘wild’ in civilized societies – both European and Asian – is often associated with unruliness, disorder and violence” (Snyder 5). This is the most overt distinction between the wild and civilization. While civilization looks to create order through regulations and classifications, the wild forgoes order, fully accepting the chaos of existence outside of civilized decorum. When considering wilderness in this fashion, it is clear the wild is disobedient, disobedience that becomes part of other socially disobedient movements. In its contemporary manifestation, the wild induces visions of modern masculinity, gender, and social revolution alongside landscapes that conflict with developing technological civilization. The conflict between order and chaos in some ways describes what the wild manifests as in contemporary

American life. Suggesting the wild’s integral union with other major cultural theories becomes more useful than defining its parameters.

Snyder notes that “[t]here has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred years” (Snyder 7). Humanity and the wild are and always have been inseparable. Max Oelschlaeger, in The Idea of Wilderness, chronicles the 8 history of the evolving liaison between humanity and wilderness. Though this relationship has changed dramatically over the course of time, it remains clear that humanity and wilderness are forever connected. Oelschlaeger claims that contemporary conceptions of wilderness, though varied, depend primarily upon practice, namely that our relationship to the wild depends on our treatment and perception of wilderness:

Whatever an individual’s idea of wilderness, mere stockpile of resources or

Mother Earth, the mass of humanity so fundamentally alters nature that no

laissez-faire position is rational. Neither is a romantic retreat to some

contemporary Walden Pond, like Alaska or Montana, anything more than a

temporary escape from the looming reality of advanced industrial society. Rather

the conservation questions arises at a more fundamental level: the issue involves

the theorie upon which praxis will rest – the idea of wilderness itself. Whatever

this idea, the conceptual difference will be reflected in practice. (Oelschlaeger

285)

To this, I would also add concepts of gender and disobedience, for contemporary environmentalism and wilderness movements have developed alongside movements to rethink gender, while both are firmly established in disobedient traditions. If environmentalism is historically disobedient, moving against cultural trends to assert dominance over an inert landscape, then perceptions of the wild as unruly and disorderly are supported by praxis. Gender discourse, which too has developed in conjunction with environmentalism, is entrenched in disobedience. Practice then determines contemporary cultural conceptions of environmentalism and gender. 9

The wild is in many ways what we personally perceive it to be; yet, in spite of varying individual perceptions, the wild is clearly outside of civilization, yet connected with humanity. Further, the wild is wild: it is chaotic, uncontrollable. But social movements, particularly environmentalism and gender, embrace the chaos and disobedience present within the wild. Wildness becomes a different order, one that is in reaction to civilized order. Snyder clarifies, writing, “[w]hat we call social organization and order in government is a set of forms that have been appropriated by the calculating mind from the operating principles in nature” (Snyder 19). As Durden sees men as animals, Snyder claims we are all a little wild: “[o]ur bodies are wild,” he writes, referencing a nostalgic, pure-being spirit, an animalistic human where “[t]he depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now” (Snyder 17). The order that the wild presents attracts ideologies that do not or cannot find voice within civilized regulations. For disobedient movements like environmentalism and gender, which must find voice outside of social restrictions1, the wild offers an opportunity for disobedience to dominant discourse. McCandless and

Durden are both characters vying for voice amidst 1990’s crises in environmentalism and gender.

Throughout this work, I will address evolving American conceptions of the wild and wilderness and innate connections with contemporary environmentalism and gender, particularly focusing on the post-war era and the 1990’s. The first chapter will situate crises in masculinity, gender, and environmentalism, while exposing ties to disobedience.

Though environmentalism really began in the 1960’s, conservation has deep roots

1 By social restrictions, I mean those methods employed by dominant culture to limit the voice and activities of certain individuals who lie outside the cultural definitions of ‘normal’ and heteronormativity. 10 snaking through the soil of American history. During the post-war era, reactions to dominant social traditions based on cultural and technological progressivism and

Westward expansion birthed environmentalism. A more viable social movement than conservation because of its public sentiment, environmentalism combined conservation and ecology studies, establishing both a social and scientific foothold in the American consciousness. During the 1980’s, perceptions of wilderness changed, once again firmly establishing the man/nature binary in which humanity saw nature not as another inhabitant of the earth, but rather as a provider to be used however we so pleased.

Contemporary environmentalism is centralized upon these two decades and the work done to either progress or limit the scope of environmentalism.

Post-war conceptions of gender and masculinity developed along a similar timeline: during the 1960’s, feminism linked gender discourse with disobedience and sparked new discussions about empowerment, social freedoms, and equality. However, the 1980’s saw public limitations of feminism and gay rights movement, relegating othered parties to find voice through new avenues.

Due to indecisiveness and a stagnant public agenda, the 1990’s saw developments in the environment and gender that differed from previous generations. Reactions to ecological practice became more visceral, more dire. Whether the reaction was one of divorce, separation from civilization in order to commune with a nostalgic vision of nature, a Walden-esque existence, or one of violence or monkeywrenching, following the footsteps of Edward Abbey, one thing becomes quite clear: the need to react against dominant environmental and gender discourses marks crises in both movements at which the 1990’s is the epicenter. From this spawns the pop-culture representations of figures 11 such as Into The Wild’s Christopher McCandless and Fight Club’s Tyler Durden.

Though McCandless and Durden obviously differ in their fiction/non-fictionality, they both represent a larger cultural trend, namely the desire to escape dominant ecological practices and emasculation in contemporary American culture.

While much focus has been placed on environmental reactions, it is integral to note that McCandless and Durden also expose a simultaneous crisis in masculinity and gender. Spurred by the beginnings of feminism, changes in male perception and satisfaction, and most importantly by a growing lack of importance, both to culture at large and to men personally, men began to reassess their place within society. By the

1990’s, the publication of Robert Bly’s Iron John, which criticized the new American male, the development of masculine studies programs in academia, and the transition to media and appearance driven representations of the self, marked significant and radical changes in modern masculinity. Again, this chapter will contextualize and historicize these crises in order to properly engage the literary texts and address the progress of developing conceptions of the wild and subsequent notions of environmentalism and masculinity.

The second chapter will address reactions to the previously mentioned crises by examining popular-culture examples of extreme reactions that exhibit qualities of wildness. Throughout the course of this work, my primary literary texts will be Jon

Krakauer’s Into The Wild, a non-fiction work following the late Christopher McCandless, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, which follows Palahniuk’s fictional character Tyler

Durden. McCandless and Durden, as important figures in 1990’s popular culture, reveal the severity of growing environmental concerns during the decade. Further, they also 12 reveal the implicit connection between environmentalism, masculinity, and disobedience, a link that has been present in environmentalism since Thoreau, though in vastly different manifestations. Both characters, though disobedient and searching for release from social restrictions, represent immensely different traditions; McCandless for instance longs for serenity and solitude amongst nature, while Durden is working towards more socially violent ends. Regardless of their differences, they are both working towards similar goals, the reinstitution of natural ecological values as the primary human concern.

Recent theorists, such as Neil Evernden, complicate the notion of ‘going back to nature”;

Evernden asks “what is this thing ‘nature’ that we hasten to defend?” (Evernden xi).

Evernden asserts that the vision of nature we often retain is not a truthful representation of what nature really is; rather, the nature we often ‘go back to’ is a nature created in order to fulfill cultural needs. Regardless of Evernden’s clarification, McCandless and

Durden both have a more simplistic vision of the nature they are trying to either return to or reinstate.

What these crises and there subsequent cultural reactions ultimately reveal about contemporary American environmentalism is the need and desire to reassess our praxis.

William Cronon simply states that “[t]he time has come to rethink wilderness” (Cronon

69). But rethinking wilderness, or more importantly our connection to wilderness, has much larger cultural implications beyond just human expansion; rethinking wilderness means rethinking our conceptions of disobedience and rebellion, masculinity, and the human/nature relationship. This thesis seeks to reexamine those parts of culture that are equally affected by our need to reconsider the wild and wilderness. In the process, I wish to not only evoke a new understanding of wild and wilderness via my central texts, Into 13

The Wild and Fight Club, but I also hope to call attention to crises related to contemporary environmental emergencies, crises in masculinity particularly and the inherent connection between the wild and other major cultural conceptions. Only by addressing other cultural alluvions directly influencing environmentalism and changing perceptions of the wild, can we expect to rethink our position amongst the wild and within the human/nature relationship.

I. American Crisis

Environment + Disobedience = Crisis

The history of American environmentalism emerges from historical conservation, preservation practices, and ecological politics. Though the word environmentalism was created during the 1960’s after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring spurred large-scale public awareness of human impact on the environment, conservation politics have been developing throughout the entirety of American history. Starting with the nature writing of major figures such as Henry David Thoreau and progressing via the massive social movement now known as environmentalism, progressive ecology is and always has been rebellious and revolutionary, radical and disobedient. Though rebellion typically conjures images of violence, Bastille-storming and guillotine-swinging, environmental disobedience is not necessarily violent; in fact, ecotage (ecological sabotage) and ecoterrorism did not become nationally recognized until the mid 1970’s, after the publication of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Though disobedience runs throughout American ecology, the contemporary environmental movement, much like masculinity and gender, remains in some fashion the battle between two decades, the radical 1960’s and the conservative 1980’s.

The 1990’s, a decade of transition where 1960’s and 1980’s ideologies converge,

remain a pivotal decade in the evolution of environmental practices, the time during

which conflicting eras realize their difference, seriously questioning modern

environmental practices and gender ideologies. In the throes of post-modernism, amidst

rapidly developing technologies and epiphanies of human impact on the natural world,

the 1990’s mark a time of environmental crisis, generating equally radical reactions in a 15 restless American populace. As the severity of converging crises increased during the

1990’s, responses from othered persons looking to gain voice forced certain individuals, such as Into The Wild’s Chris McCandless, practicing non-violent protest, and Fight

Club’s Tyler Durden, practicing violent dissent, to participate in dominant discourse through disobedience.

Conservation practices in America became mainstream during the mid to late

1800’s when literary figures like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson brought issues of nature to the forefront of the American consciousness. Though transcendentalism was a major American movement, it is important to remember that environmentalism, even in the early days of conservation, was and remains deeply entrenched in civil disobedience. Thoreau, one of America’s earliest conservationists, published “Civil Disobedience” in 1849, a manifesto which became famously evident in

Thoreau’s life through seclusion at Walden Pond (Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience). From the moment he penned “"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have,” and subsequently moved outside of social restrictions living amongst nature, conservation

(and thereby environmentalism) and disobedience were forever connected in the

American consciousness. From Thoreau’s writings, activists developed a distinct radicalism. During the 1960’s for instance, that radicalism developed into non-violent protest. Martin Luther King Jr. modeled much of his methodology on Mahatma Gandhi’s practices, who was significantly influenced by Thoreau. Whether violent or not,

Thoreau’s influence upon environmentalism and American disobedience remains clear: not only did he change the way humanity saw themselves amongst nature, but he also 16 firmly established a radical tradition of disobedience amongst future environmentalists.

Here we also see the first connections to McCandless and Durden, though specifically

McCandless: Thoreau, when upset by dominant government, left that governing body.

He disappeared, just as McCandless did nearly 125 years later. From this Thoreauvian method, McCandless bases his disobedient protest of dominant discourse through separation from said discourse. As Eddie Vedder song “Society,” written about

McCandless for the 2007 film adaptation of Into The Wild, “Society, you’re a crazy breed, I hope you’re not lonely without me” (Vedder). Through this non-violent method,

McCandless gained a voice outside of social restrictions.

The late 1800’s and early 1900’s saw major advances in conservation. Fifteen years after Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” in 1864, the federal government finally recognized conservation by designating Yosemite Valley and surrounding areas as protected land via the Yosemite Grant. In 1872, a large landscape dotted with unique geothermal features in north-western Wyoming called Yellowstone was declared the first

National Park, followed several years later by Yosemite National Park and Sequoia

National Park. At the turn of the century, the appointment of Theodore Roosevelt and his expansion of countrywide conservation practices were national news. The previous advances were made possible by a small number of conservationists who acted against social patterns of dominance; people like John Muir were able to recognize the uniqueness of certain lands and the connection those lands had to humanity.

By acting against dominant discourses such as Westward expansion, early conservationists allied themselves with Thoreauvian disobedience, working to accomplish goals that may not be larger cultural goals. The newly formed Sierra Club, 17 headlined by Muir, became a major environmental power. In 1935, The Wilderness

Society was formed, who declare it their “calling” and “passion” to “protect America’s wilderness, not as a relic of our nation’s past, but as a thriving ecological community that is central to life itself” (About Us, The Wilderness Society). Between 1890 and 1916, the

National Parks expanded to fourteen National Parks and prompted the creation of the

National Park Service, charged with protecting the unique lands congress set aside

(National Park Service History: History of the National Park Service, A Brief History).

Despite perfectly good resources (parks were often stockpiles of natural capital), early conservationists were able to work against environmental dominancy and save unique lands.

Even the notion that the environment is present for more than just human use creates a debate; conservation and environmentalism is historically disobedient because it works against the progression of technology and industry. It is extremely important to note that conservation practices were never (and are still not) ushered into culture uninhibited, but require a degree of disobedience. As Victor B. Scheffer observes in The

Shaping of Environmentalism in America, “[e]arly opposition to environmentalism came from the business world: from manufacturers, corporate leaders, owners of extractive companies, land developers, and a few economists” (Scheffer 10). Different industries – mining, timber, and rail primarily – felt limited by early conservation efforts. Major corporations also worked against the limitations that pre-environmentalism placed upon industry standards. Conservationists, being small in numbers and with little funding, often had difficulty enacting environmental policy. 18

The early clashes between the young conservation movement and the interests of a rapidly developing civilization are exampled quite clearly in the Hetch-

Hetchy/O'Shaughnessy Dam debate. Hetch-Hetchy, sometimes referred to as a second

Yosemite Valley, is the main feature of the northern Yosemite watersheds, what is now the northern half of Yosemite National Park. In the early 1900’s, interested parties proposed to dam Hetch-Hetchy valley, letting the Tuolumne River flood the valley in order to create a reliable water source for the San Francisco Bay Area. John Muir was the most outspoken opponent of this initiative. In 1913, when the federal government finally green-lighted the O’Shaughnessy Dam, Muir was reportedly heartbroken and died less than a year later. The debate required Muir to act against powerful industries, despite their overwhelming power. Trying to save Hetch-Hetchy required conservationists to work against the progress of the American industrial machine.

Currently, efforts to restore the Hetch-Hetchy Valley have garnered national support.

However, California’s continuing drought virtually ensures the postponement of any reclamation. Though efforts to stop the original dam were unsuccessful, the movement still exists.

The 1960’s saw the first developments of true environmental activism and the birth of environmentalism. Much of the movement was made up of young people, young people who shared interests in other forming social movements as well. Much like Tyler

Durden, many environmental activists were young and facing a lengthy future on the

Earth. Threats such as the nuclear bomb helped humanity realize its impact on the natural world; not only could humanity have potentially long-term harmful effects on the environmental world, but they now had the power to possibly destroy it entirely. Though 19 youth culture activism may have started as an anti-war movement, it soon became clear that other traditional debates needed reassessment, such as treatment of the environment and social construction of gender. During 1960’s activism, specifically environmentalism and feminism, activists acknowledged connections between gender ideologies and treatment of the environment.

The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) solidified connections between the environment and gender, linking environmentalism to feminism, while realizing the reality of negative human impact. Silent Spring examined the effects of chemical pesticides on the environment, focusing on the incredibly harmful chemical

DDT and its lasting effects on land, animals (birds specifically), and humans. Carson’s now famous non-fiction work was damning of the chemical industry; her opening pages describe a pretty American town existing in peace and tranquility. “There was once a town in the heart of America,” Carson writes, “where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields” (Carson 1). But the serenity of small-town America existing peacefully with nature does not last for long: “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change” (Carson 2). Non-human nature, crops and animals, began to die, while families started to get sick. “Everywhere was a shadow of death,” laments Carson. Carson realizes and chronicles the impact of humanity on the environment, and the eventuality of that harm sneaking back into the American life.

Silent Spring necessitated a revaluing of traditional American hierarchies, claiming the 20 environment that surrounds us deserves more attention, while also calling for a restructuring of the human/nature relationship.

Silent Spring is an example of environmental disobedience; Carson’s work is scientific, yet it goes against the typical sciences of her age. In the late 1950’s and early

1960’s, science pushed the bounds of technology and thereby civilization. Carson’s work overturned huge advances in science and also helped change perceptions of humanity’s relationship with the earth. Instead of using potentially destructive methods to advance human interests, Carson asked scientists to consider the future of their impact. In Silent

Spring’s introduction, Linda Lear comments that “Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness” (Carson x). Carson brought to light the rapidly changing post-modern attitude towards environmental unrest, a wild attitude that did not see nature as threatening but rather as a symbiotic. Lear writes “[i]n Carson’s view, the postwar culture of science that arrogantly claimed dominion over nature was the philosophic root of the problem. Human beings, she insisted, were not in control of nature but simply one of its parts: the survival of one part depended upon the health of all” (Carson xv). Viewing humanity as a part of, rather than the master of, nature was one of the major steps in cultural restructuring of American attitudes towards the environment. Further, this allows humanity a different access to nature, access that is a major goal of environmentalism. Arguably, this change in thinking is very wild, constructing environmental paradigms that are integrally connected to gender ideology and disobedience. Strengthened and inspired by Carson’s views, environmentalists took up her mantle. 21

It is integral to this study to note that Carson was responding to dominant discourse through two avenues of disobedience: feminism and environmentalism. While the major focus of Carson’s work was the effects of pesticides on the general public, the fact that Carson was a woman speaking out against technological progression from within the science community intensifies the disobedience of her actions. Her inability to accept humanity’s negative impact on the environment influenced the beginnings of both environmentalism and feminism, reshaping shifting gender and environmental ideologies.

Further, the movements’ similar goals and parallel paths identified one another as partners in a race to garner larger cultural recognition and reassessment of historical perceptions.

As activism increased, national recognition of changing attitudes concerning the environment became inevitable. Joseph M. Petulla in American Environmental History chronicles major steps in the progression of environmentalism. During the 1960’s,

Petulla clearly shows how important the 1960’s were for environmentalism: in 1962,

President John F. Kennedy hosted a White House conference on conservation; in 1963, congress passed the first draft of the Clean Air Act, establishing “a federal program within the U.S. Public Health Service and authorize[ing] research into techniques for monitoring and controlling air pollution” (History | Clean Air Act | US EPA); in 1964, congress passed the Wilderness Act, which “established a National Wilderness

Preservation System to be composed of federally owned areas designated by the

Congress as ‘wilderness areas.’” (National Park Service - NPSWilderness). Further, in

1965, congress passed the Water Quality Act and Solid Waste Disposal Act, while in

1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) passed as well. Five major pieces 22 of environmental legislation were all passed within the same decade, while major political figures also acknowledged the importance of growing environmental concerns.

These developments mark the most important decade in American environmental progress.

In 1970, two significant events took place that further legitimized the environmental movement. On April 22nd, the first annual Earth Day took place. Gaylord

Nelson, former U.S. senator and major proponent of the developing environmentalist movement, proposed Earth Day “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda” (Earth Day Network). Earth Day was supposed to be a day of national recognition, a time when American’s could step back and not only examine the effects of post-war America on the environment, but promote the possibility of change. Later that year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed “to consolidate in one agency a variety of federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities to ensure environmental protection” (Environmental Progress |

Earth Day | US EPA). The EPA established even firmer federal recognition of the environmental movement. Again, these developments mark the 1960’s as vital to the progress of environmentalism, establishing the environment as an entity that, though separate from humanity, is integrally linked with the human process. Earth Day promoted disobedience, though non-violent disobedience, and national recognition of environmentalism, while creation of the EPA confirms the effectiveness of disobedient methodology: the EPA surely did not develop directly because of Earth Day, but recognition of federal need to police environmental impact came in direct response to years of disobedient activism. 23

Still, not all environmental advances during the 1960’s came through channels of government; even in the beginning years of environmentalism, the limitations of dominant discourse necessitated alternative methods of disobedience, methods not policed by patriarchal culture. In 1971, as environmentalism entered its early teen years,

Greenpeace was formed, marking a renegade organization able to utilize peaceful protest outside of governmental regulation. Perhaps even more importantly was there ability to make significant differences despite a more radical disobedient methodology. Founded originally “to ‘bear witness’ to US underground nuclear testing at Amchitka, a tiny island off the West Coast of Alaska,” Greenpeace is now an internationally renowned organization with over 2.8 million supporters known for protesting off-shore oil drilling, whale hunting, and other environmental tragedies (Greenpeace | Greenpeace USA).

Greenpeace encompasses one branch of environmental radicalism, non-violent yet staunchly disobedient, fully capable of reacting against the progress of society in the interests of the natural world. Further, it is the continuation and progression of 1960’s methods, offering further entry points into the discourse which govern environmental impact.

The 1960’s and early 1970’s established contemporary environmentalism and placed newly developed ecological concerns on the forefront of the American consciousness. During the 1980’s, much of that progress was halted, even reversed in some instances. While certain social causes like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism had gained much lasting support during the 1960’s, other foundational issues, such as ending the war in Vietnam, had been perceived by many as utter disappointments. Additionally, many of the activists who spent years living out of vans 24 and carrying picket signs were no longer so mobile: the pressures of adult life could not coincide with constant rebellion. Despite the hard work of 60’s campaigners, the growling of American consumerism had once again, much like in Muir’s time, overtaken environmental concerns. One must look no further than 1980’s politics to see the drastic turn in America’s federal support of the environmental movement. With the election of

Ronald Reagan in 1980, a series of disputed congressional decisions followed by several appointments, specifically Secretary of the Interior and Chief Administrator of EPA, undoubtedly clashed with 1960’s environmentalism.

It is no secret that the Reagan administration strongly supported big business.

Unfortunately, big business is often environmentalism’s major opposition; the traditional opponents from way back in Muir’s day – mining, timber, rail – are still radically opposed to environmental legislation because that legislation often limits the scope of such industry. In the 1980’s, the oil industry constantly clashed with environmentalists.

Reagan’s support of big business meant hard times for the progress of environmentalism.

The Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth explaines "[t]he Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands – more than any other administration in history, including the current one [George W. Bush’s administration]”

(A look back at Reagan's environmental record). Scheffer notes that within Reagan’s first year in office, “he cut the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Environment

Programme from $10 million to $2 million (the Congress later restored it to $7.85 million)” (Scheffer 178). Further, “he ended President Carter’s Young Adult

Conservation Corps, and in 1984 he vetoed a measure that would have created an 25

American Conservation Corps” (Scheffer 178). An article in Grist, an online environmental journal, also notes the Reagan administration’s major attempts to weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which were both landmark successes for early environmentalists. Scheffer also adds that, though the EPA was operating at a reduced budget throughout most of Reagan’s presidency, the agency’s workload had coincidentally “doubled in the early 1980s and then grew sharply as Congress enacted yet new responsibilities in the mid 1980s” (Scheffer 179). Reversing 1960’s environmental policies had dire consequences; much of the progress made by activists during the 60’s was reduced or eliminated entirely, while federal support for further activism was at an all-time low. Granted, awareness of growing environmental concerns was still present within the American public, but the ability to act on those concerns was seemingly absent.

Much of this was made possible by two key Reagan appointments: in 1981, James

G. Watt became Reagan’s new Secretary of the Interior, while Anne M. Gorsuch was appointed the new Chief Administrator of the EPA. Scheffer notes Watt’s immediately disquieting first impressions: “Watt… startled senators at his 1981 confirmation hearings by leaving the impression that long-term planning for public land conservation is pointless, for the Second Coming will render moot the decisions of mortal beings”

(Scheffer 179). Scheffer goes on to chronicle Watt’s subsequent decisions: proposals for large-scale oil drillings off the coasts of California, opening the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling, and the Powder River Basin scandal, a “shady, if not downright illegal” deal that “leased coal mining rights in Montana and Wyoming to private companies at a loss to the Treasury of $60 to $132 million” (Scheffer 179). Gorsuch was cited by congress 26 for her “contempt for failing to turn over EPA files on 160 toxic waste dumps in three states where EPS was allegedly not enforcing the superfund” (Scheffer 179). The New

York Times notes that, though both Watt and Gorsuch resigned amidst scandal, their successors were also less concerned with environmentalism than expected; Watt’s successors even “tried to follow the course charted by Mr. Watt” yet went about doing so

“in a much less confrontational way” (Reagan and Environment). The consequences of reversing many environmental precedents set in the 1960’s effectively closed dominant discourse, allowing activists minimal effect on real environmental policy. Due to such limitations, othered environmentalists were forced to find new avenues of protest and influence. Those reactions were largely based in disobedience, disobedience that was no longer always non-violent. The reactions of Americans and the clashing of liberal 1960’s politics with conservative 1980’s politics set a tone for the developing crisis that would take place during the 1990’s and propagate McCandless and Durden’s disobedience.

By the time the 1990’s began, the environment and environmentalism was in a state of emergency. Adherents to previous American conservation traditions had no outlet for environmental protest despite the very obvious need to react against 1980’s treatment of the environment. Since traditional methods of dissent were rendered ineffective, other forms of disobedience developed. Unsurprisingly, reactions ranged from violence (Durden, EarthFirst!) to desertion (McCandless). Further, the 1990’s mark a moment when the international community began to realize the scope of human impact on the environment as well. Heavy deforestation of the Amazonian rainforests, the undeniable reality of global warming and climate change, and the escalating pollution of the world’s oceans all revealed the undeniable truth: human impact on the environment 27 progressed to a point where it was no longer ignorable. The radicalism of characters like

McCandless and Durden exemplify the need to readdress treatment of the environment, as well as shifting gender ideologies.

In 1992, Bill Clinton, newly elected president pushing a very pro-environment platform, started to reexamine many Reagan-era political decisions. According to the

EPA’s website, “[t]he number of chemicals listed in EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory nearly doubled, from 328 in 1990 to 644 in 1999” (Earth Day Network). Further, Clinton instituted a new nationwide recycling program that, if nothing else, promoted environmental agendas back into the national spotlight. During the later years of his presidency, Clinton pushed through several pieces of environmentally progressive legislation: in 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act; in 1997, an Executive Order “to protect children from environmental health risks”; in 1998 “the Clean Water Action Plan to continue making America’s waterways safe for fishing and swimming”; and in 1999, announcement of “new emissions standards for cars, sport utility vehicles, minivans and trucks, requiring them to be 77 percent to 95 percent cleaner” (Earth Day Network).

Though Clinton came “under sharp criticism from environmentalists and conservation groups” early in his second term, he still very actively looked to support environmentally progressive legislation (Clinton Environmental Record Justifies Criticism). Further, the environmental crisis was brought to full American attention. Though Clinton’s presidency was integral in recognizing the growing disaster in environmentalism, necessary opportunities to impact environmental discourse were forged by individuals who recognized social limitation of environmentalism’s progress, also recognizing the value of disobedient action in regaining voice. 28

Again, recognition of said crisis was not limited to the federal government.

During the late-1970’s and 1980’s, after years of politicians reversing pro-environment trends, many environmentalists decided to take matters into their own hands. Though more peaceful organizations like Greenpeace still thrived, other more radical methods had started emerging all over the United States. Much of this can be attributed to Edward

Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a seminal environmental text that encourages everything from blowing up bridges and dams to cutting down telephone poles in order to stop human impact on the environment, essentially “shutting down [the] destruction that many monkeywrenchers say is their primary concern” (Scarce 72). Other activists and protest groups developed out of Abbey’s manifesto, including John Hanna, founder of

Earth Liberation Front (ELF) who was arrested for fire-bombing several crop dusters in

California (EARTH LIBERATION FRONT), and Earthfirst!, established in 1979 “in response to a lethargic, compromising, and increasingly corporate environmental community” (Earth First! Worldwide). It is from this tradition that Tyler Durden emerges: violent, willing to do whatever it takes, Durden is disobedient in a mode of violence that offers one opportunity to act against dominant discourse. While environmentalism started to recede from public attention under new national leadership, disobedient activists looking to fight back resorted to alternative methods, transforming what had historically been a disobedient yet non-violent movement into a much more radical front. Limitation of public power and lack of governmental response severely restricted possibilities to act out against policies that did not adhere to past environmentalist traditions, creating the need and opportunity to produce new methods of protest and action. As the crisis in environmentalism escalated, forms of activism 29 escalated; disobedient extremism garnered attention that environmentalist methods did not, giving activists opportunities to influence dominate discourse through new voice.

We see this extremism in popular culture through McCandless and Durden, who not only display the ominous position of dominant discourse but also the capability of disobedient action to disrupt said dominancy.

Since the days of Thoreau, conservation politics have been inherently disobedient.

Despite the general presence of disobedience permeating modern American environmentalism, diverse reactions to the environmental crisis show public desire for changes in treatment of the environment. And while reactions in political and academic discourses are socially acceptable, expected even, other reactions have been more radical.

Whether that disobedience manifests as violent actions against civilization or as separation from society altogether depends primarily upon the individual reaction:

Christopher McCandless followed a Thoreauvian path, disobedient in non-violent ways but radical nonetheless, while Tyler Durden hiked the John Hanna-trail, self-justified in his attempted bombings and violent restructuring of social conventions. Despite the range in reactions, one thing that remains perfectly clear is the need and desire to react against social developments that prompted the 1990’s environmental crisis.

Masculinity + Disobedience = Crisis

As has been noted, similarities between environmentalism and movements in gender, particularly masculinity, create connections between gender and the environment; the disobedience of both movements proves the desire to re-evaluate traditional perceptions, while their similar chronological progression shows dominant discourse’s effects on both movements simultaneously. Just as environmental discourse reached a point of crisis in the 1990’s, gender, and masculinity in particular, arrived at a similar emergency, almost paralleling the previously examined timeline in environmentalism.

During the 1950’s, suburbanization and Fordism dominated culture and defined the

American family along strict lines of gender. During the 1970’s, when the feminist movement looked to break out of the strict male-female binary established by heteronormative gender norms, masculinity inevitably changed. The 1990’s were a moment where popular culture and elite culture identify changes in masculinity that, whether attributed to the development of feminism or loss of masculine purpose, deserve critical attention. Subsequently, this crisis is recognized by academia, which is integral to the reinterpretation of modern masculinity and its incorporation into the Academy and academic studies. Yet, the consequences of masculine crisis manifest in disobedience that is much more tangible than aforementioned theoretical application. Much like the crisis in environmentalism, the crisis in masculinity generated a variety of reactions that very clearly are connected to movements in ecology and share methods of disobedient rebellion. Again, quite unmistakably, throughout studies of masculinity and the wild, disobedient reactions to dominant discourse reveals links between environmentalism and gender that challenge traditional conceptions of nature and masculinity. 31

Conceptions of western masculinity date back to the Greeks and Romans, though we need not go back that far. During American history, masculinity remained largely unchanged until the post-war era. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999),

Susan Faludi notes that the “Promise of Postwar Manhood” was that of “after victory;” fathers who “were veterans of World War II and Korea” no longer promised their sons opportunities to claim their masculinity on the battlefield (Faludi 5). The realities of modern warfare claimed a different toll on soldiers: machine guns could kill entire platoons with ease, snipers could kill enemies from thousands of yards away, and the threat of nuclear bombs threatened the survival of humanity. Just as early disobedience in environmentalism may have started as anti-war activism, those who eventually saw problems in contemporary conceptions of gender founded much of their activism in early anti-war movements. The effects of war escalated in the post-modern age, drastically changing American activism and disobedience, and thereby environmental and gender discourses.

Faludi writes that the immediate post-war era “had crafted a new image of the

American boy as a youth of promise, cocksure and slightly vulgar in his tail-finned convertible yet fueled with all the energy and moral vigor of the postwar moment”

(Faludi 102). During the 1950’s and the 1960’s, we see the first developments of contemporary masculinity and its links to disobedience. Faludi further writes that, during this time, “[t]he Bad Boy was becoming a masculine image for a younger generation to emulate, if only by purchasing a leather jacket” (Faludi 103). The developments of youth culture helped to progress this change in perception: though men once connected their masculinity with creation, the mastering of a craft, youth in the post-war moment claimed 32 their masculinity through danger and local notoriety. Further, when disobedience became legitimate activism in environmentalism and gender, men looking to regain lost masculinity joined movements that challenged dominant discourse. Christopher

McCandless and Tyler Durden, essentially youthful protesters of society’s impact and restrictions, find themselves not only disobedient to traditional environmental discourses, but masculine/gender discourses as well. It is not coincidental that either characters’ rebellion could be interpreted as either a move to regain lost masculinity or reassess treatment of the environment; their disobedience is assuredly both. Rather, McCandless and Durden undoubtedly look to challenge dominant discourse through the use of wildness, thereby evoking treatment of the environment and gender simultaneously.

Their disobedience is performed in hopes of reassessing shifting ideologies in both the environment and gender.

Perhaps the most major development in changes to contemporary masculinity would be the development and flourishing of feminism. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, second-wave feminism, spurred on by successes from other social movements, started to actively pursue fair treatment for women throughout many spheres of the American life.

The opening of gender discourse, due in some part to youth culture’s challenging of

American normativity, is also in many ways a reaction to early post-war masculinity; women were through living an American version of Victorian life. Suburbanization, which helped develop the modern family while also expanding technological culture beyond the bounds of urbanity and into nature, limited women to the home and suburbs, while men were expected to work in the cities and provide for their families. Women’s reactions against this limiting lifestyle would hugely affect later conceptions of 33 masculinity and in many ways cause crises in masculinity during the late 1980’s and

1990’s. Further, early feminist realization of oppression further connected feminism to environmentalism because women identified the environment as similarly subjugated by patriarchal culture.

Rachel Adams and David Savran acknowledge that second-wave feminism may be a singular movement but one from which different methodologies have developed.

For instance, they note that the “New York Radical Women and The Feminists, called for complete segregation of the sexes,” whereas other groups, like NOW, “urged men and women to work together towards a sex/gender system that was less oppressive for all”

(Adams 3). In many ways, we see splits in methodology that are analogous to different methods used in environmentalism. Just as Greenpeace and EarthFirst! would in many ways acknowledge comparable goals, many feminist groups would claim similar ambitions though they may use very different methods. Feminism worked to dislocate historical patriarchy and reform gender hierarchies, or do away with such conceptions all together. The development of women’s studies programs within the university system also firmly established feminism amongst the intellectual, allowing the developing theories an arena from which to operate, develop, and coincide with other elements of culture2.

The emergence of feminism, women’s rights, and gay liberation movements all had profound effects on masculinity and the environment by promoting disobedience and re-evaluating traditional, patriarchal dominancy. Retro masculinity is built firmly upon

2 San Diego State University formed the first Women’s Studies program in 1970 (was then known as San Diego State College), after a decade of close ties with women’s rights activism. SDSU was closely followed by Cornell University and several journals focused on women’s studies, including Female Studies (SDSU Women's Studies). 34 established hierarchies, patriarchal hierarchies that place men and heteronormativity above women and sexual liberation. Adams and Savran write that “patriarchal masculinities and instituitons derive their power in part through the feminization of gay men and women” (Adams 5). This process draws parallels to treatment of the environment over the course of American history as well; in order to further processes of western expansion and the progression of technological society, the environment had also been feminized, disempowered. With this in mind, it is not merely coincidence that feminism and environmentalism developed on similar timelines; issues of gender, feminism, and masculinity are firmly embedded in an environmental tradition, while environmentalism is similarly indebted to social movements such as feminism. When both converging ideologies shifted during the 1990’s, it was inevitable that passionate and socially restricted individuals like McCandless and Durden would react in extremism to both discourses.

Throughout the late 1970’s, groups of men started to react against what they felt were emasculating developments in culture. However, Adams and Savran explain that it was not until the 1980’s that men’s groups, developed in direct reaction to the advancements of feminism, gained extensive popularity. Many of these men felt they no longer possessed the strength of previous generations, the empowerment that masculinity had been built upon (though those same feelings of empowerment were what placed men above others, notably women and the environment). Though there were admittedly many different groups, many believed reclamation of a more nostalgic masculinity, masculinity based on concepts of spiritual replenishment and reclamation of self-sufficiency through nature, would re-instill men with purpose and direction beyond the cubicle wall (as Tyler 35

Durden would most assuredly agree). Interestingly, several methodologies developed out of such thinking. First, many men, particularly younger men enveloped in youth culture, took to modes of disobedience, allowing for disobedience in a closed masculine discourse. A second tradition emerged, one generated by Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), which once again ties masculinity with concepts of the wild by showing the inseparability of gender and environmental ideology.

Bly’s Iron John is in many ways both an exploration and condemnation of modern masculinity that served as the “bible” of early men’s movements. Bly’s man is raw, a salt-of-the-earth kind of character, who is not concerned with his fashion or others perception of his character. Further, this man is connected to the earth; he is of the earth and lives amongst nature. Bly shows that modernity, civilization which cages the “Wild

Man,” can just as easily cage any man’s wildness. Bly claims that during the 1960’s, men recognized femininity not only in culture, but also within themselves which helped men become “more thoughtful, more gentle” (Bly 3). While Bly outwardly applauds this recognition, it seems he more realistically sees this as a weakening of masculinity.

Ultimately, Bly declares that the contemporary man is “soft,” that although getting in touch with his own femininity has possibly made him a better person, “sympathetic to the whole harmony of the universe,” he nonetheless lacks traditional masculine qualities and

“has little vitality to offer” (Bly 3). Bly’s work is problematic but it does reveal modes of disobedience that in some fashion worked for a return to historical conceptions of masculinity. McCandless and Durden do not necessarily fall into a Bly-model; it seems they complicate the shifts in gender and environmental ideologies too much to create binary systems that place men and women on separate ends of a spectrum based upon 36 cultural expectations. McCandless and Durden do however acknowledge a ‘softness’ in masculinity that they intend to address through disobedient rebellion and reinstitution of wild order, reassessment of the human/nature relationship.

Iron John does clearly reveal one of the various reactions to the growing crisis in masculinity: a retreat to nature, furthering the connection between masculinity, the environment, and the wild. Through examples like McCandless and Durden, it becomes clear that, though traditional masculinity was once at odds with the natural world, it seems the environment is where masculinity can be reclaimed. This can be attributed to comparable processes of social restriction; dominant discourse that determines environmental treatment also determines what masculinity is. Only through the disobedience already in place in environmentalism can characters like McCandless and

Durden find opportunities to reclaim lost notions of masculinity. Adams and Savran write that the second-wave men’s movement “succeeded in gaining quite a few adherents in the early 1990’s” by calling for a “return to nature, spirituality, and male bonding” which “compensates for pervasive feelings of emptiness and alienation” (Adams 5).

Further, the movement “advocated escape from the unwanted burdens of women, family, and social responsibilities” (Adams 5). If civilization and contemporary developments in culture were at fault for the crisis in masculinity, then the most obvious immediate solution to regaining masculinity would be to leave civilization entirely, thereby leaving behind the restrictions of contemporary society. Neil Evernden complicates this by claiming that our historical ideas of nature, alongside our contemporary perceptions of nature, are social constructions that fulfill cultural desires at the expense of the othered subject (in this case nature). To further complicate this, we must also go back briefly to 37

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which acknowledges that technological advancements that allowed for the progression of contemporary culture were discoveries made largely by men, discoveries men were quite proud of. The culture then that men are fighting against is a direct product of their own hubristic inventiveness. Almost simultaneously in conjunction with environmentalism’s disobedient reactions to cultural limitations, reclamation of masculinity is also looking to eliminate culture from the crisis.

By acknowledging that through disobedient environmental discourse men found opportunities to reclaim lost masculinity, it becomes clear that the 1990’s crises in environmentalism and masculinity offer prospects of disobedient reaction. Throughout the decade, other areas of culture acknowledge the growing problem. Faludi notes that an increasingly media-driven culture formed social representations of gender: “the dictates of a consumer and media culture had trapped both men and women in a world in which top billing mattered more than building, in which representation trumped production, in which appearances were what counted” (Faludi 451). During the 1980’s, culture had become increasingly obsessed with self-image and representations of the physical self.

This was “good for no one” Faludi writes but femininity “fit more easily into the new ethic,” while men were left trying to find new avenues through which masculinity had not entirely disappeared. Avenues of disobedience presented in environmental activism in many ways fulfilled that need.

Further, feminism had reached a pinnacle in the academic community when new gender studies by writers such as Judith Butler soared in popularity. Simultaneously, the birth of masculine studies programs marks academic acknowledgement of said crisis.

Throughout the early 1990’s, programs specializing in other cultural theories developed 38 programmatic goals to address the increasing lack of analysis in new emerging criticisms.

Concurrently, the limitations of modern corporate life, along with seemingly meaningless work that produced no tangible product, left men wondering about their purpose. If what they did, how they lived, could be so easily replaced in a fordist, assembly-line mode of life, then what was the purpose of existence? If, as Tyler Durden says, men are not all unique snowflakes, then how do they reclaim personal significance?

The accumulation of problems in gender and environmental ideology marks the

1990’s as a moment of crisis that spawns a series of reactions, responses that support the restructuring of masculinity, culturally-formed gender roles, and treatment of the environment. Christopher McCandless and Tyler Durden at once become popular examples of men trying to reclaim lost masculine purpose; though using two very different methodologies, McCandless and Durden are once again working towards eerily similar goals. Questions do arise from their processes however. Are McCandless and

Durden working to reclaim notions of masculinity under new cultural circumstances or are they in fact trying to reestablish retro, historical conceptions that, rather than adapting to post-modern order, hearken back to pre-feminist, pre-gay rights, pre-civil rights era?

To claim that complicated characters like McCandless and Durden just want ‘the world to go back to normal’ would be seriously detrimental to their actions and disobedience. It seems quite clear that the reclamation of masculinity via McCandless and Durden’s disobedient actions holds repercussions ranging far beyond men, implications that have serious effects on gender and environmental discourse. Since both are looking to reinstitute wildness in civilization, wildness that is inherently based in reconceptualizations of gender and environmental ideologies, then their disobedience 39 undoubtedly becomes about more than just reinstituting familiarity, retroactive gender hierarchies that purport the same patriarchal hierarchy they are disobedient against. The crises in both environmentalism and masculinity mark a serious moment in culture, a moment that brings together disparate traditions and raises major theoretical questions.

Through McCandless and Durden, we are able to see cultural patterns, thereby examining the lasting effects of such crises on perceptions of wildness, environmentalism, masculinity, and disobedience.

II. Masculinity, Gender, and Environment

Into The Wild

If contemporary conceptions of the wild entail shifting ideologies of gender and the environment, then is it necessary to understand exactly how masculinity interacts with the environment, finding voice through disobedient environmental discourse just as environmentalism accesses voice through disobedient gender discourse. Examining characters like Christopher McCandless and Tyler Durden offer us unique insight as to how individuals during the 1990’s worked to reclaim masculinity, and how activists and persons restricted by social limitations prompt reassessment of gender and environmental ideologies through disobedience.

In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi chronicles the evolution of American masculinity. In the eighteenth-century, Faludi notes that “the perceived key to masculinity was ‘publick usefulness’” (Faludi 11). The lone wanderer in the woods was regarded as an outsider who “served no social purpose” (Faludi 11).

Faludi goes on to explain that by the nineteenth-century, that very same wanderer “would begin to gain a certain renown as an emblem of virility, his rapaciousness evidence of his ambitious, rags-to-riches drive… To be a man increasingly meant being ever on the rise”

(Faludi 11). Yet something changed in the American masculine consciousness during the post-war period; by the 1990’s, Faludi claims men and masculinity were in an ideological crisis. Faludi questions:

If men are the masters of their fate, what do they do about the unspoken sense that

they are being mastered, in the marketplace and at home, by forces that seem to

be sweeping away the soil beneath their feet? If men are mythologized as the 41

ones who make things happen then how can they begin to analyze what is

happening to them? (Faludi 13)

During the 1990’s, American are able to finally realize their own impact on the Earth via crises in environmentalism such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Gulf War I, and global warming. The subsequent transitions in historical perceptions of masculinity present certain individuals opportunities to not only change masculine traditions, but also acknowledge shifting gender and environmental ideologies, propagating through disobedience the structured hierarchies that govern gender and environmental discourses.

Christopher McCandless emerges from varied traditions, but holds specific links to Romanticism and transcendentalism, traditions founded upon the writing of figures like Thoreau. McCandless assumes the natural world to be accepting, open, and expects from nature a certain reciprocal understanding of his cultural plight. Upon entering the

Alaskan wilderness, the expectations that Jon Krakauer notes McCandless may have had include support for McCandless’ disobedience of governmental, social standards.

Afterall, if one is not accepted by, or cannot accept, dominant culture, where can one go?

In McCandless’ mind, to nature and the wild, to be associated with other disobedient disciplines that cannot find voice under social limitations. McCandless was looking for that which is not contained, a wilderness that is outside of social and cultural restrictions.

By resituating himself outside of cultural boundaries, McCandless is disobedient to notions of civilized contribution; he has revoked his own status as a contributing citizen.

By doing so, he is able to reassess treatment of the environment and make efforts to reclaim masculinity, altering conceptions of gender. Further, his example in popular 42 culture interrupts dominant environmental and gender conversations and allows for re- examination of traditional hierarchies.

Historical links between American masculinity and environmentalism are dictated by notions of exploration and westward expansion. Until the birth of environmentalism in the 1960’s, masculine men were focused upon environmental domination (though a small few such as John Muir are exceptions). In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx performs an intensive study concerning the tamable American landscape, chronicling patriarchal attempts at natural domination: over history, the garden, the virgin land, becomes “The Garden of Ashes,” notes Marx, confirming the increase of human impact on the environment (Marx 354). Marx writes, “[o]urs is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society,” that is, in all reality, far past notions of the Romantic pastoral (Marx 355). Still, if the garden has been tamed, why do stories such as

McCandless’ still pique popular curiosity? Marx notes that concepts of the pastoral, and those disobedient individuals who challenge dominant discourse through wildness, “still seize the native imagination” (Marx 355). Marx continues, “[e]ven those Americans who acknowledge the facts and understand the fables seem to cling, after their fashion, to the pastoral hope” (Marx 355). Pastoral hope is anticipation of wildness. In order to retain hope of the pastoral, one must work against notions of technological progression. This disobedience also allies individuals with movements like environmentalism and feminism, movements that assume disobedient identities in order to influence dominant discourse. McCandless springs from this convention of disobedience, working to gain voice in order to garner larger cultural acknowledgement of shifting gender and environmental ideologies while retaining optimism for the pastoral. 43

McCandless also declared connections between disobedience, gender (masculinity particularly), and the environment in his own writings. As an adherent to the pastoral tradition, McCandless searched for solace away from society, amongst the world of nature, and encouraged others to do so as well. In a letter to Ron Franz, McCandless explains some of his pastoral thinking and further encourages his old friend to live a similar lifestyle:

...I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really

should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things

which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to

attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take

the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of

security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace

of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a

man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion

for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences,

and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for

each day to have a new and different sun… You are wrong if you think Joy

emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all

around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to

have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in

unconventional living. (Krakauer 56-57)

McCandless is indeed trying to reach people through the written word and the lived life, like many of the American Trancedentalists, but his descriptions of what is wrong with 44 the world, and what one should do thereby to change, become the most interesting part of this letter. He specifically addresses the limitations of men in contemporary civilization and encourages men to be more adventurous. However, one might say that McCandless’ encouragement even ranges to adventures in disobedience of dominant discourse, affecting gender and environmental ideology. While McCandless could have been simplistically promoting road trips, it seems that he was more likely promoting the participation in movements that could garner changes in environmentalism and gender.

Faludi writes that crises arising in masculinity during the 1990’s were born out of a need to reassert man’s autonomy from culture and society, reestablishing man’s dominion over his own life and surroundings (Faludi 13). Since one of the chief goals of the environmental movement is reversing trends that other and subjugate the environment, then it seems natural individuals searching to reinvent masculinity and gender would attach to environmentalism. Yet, strangely enough, for young men like

McCandless, problems often stem from the people that helped start those very same movements that look to recreate gender and treatment of the environment. For post baby- boomer generations, the need for independence and self-sufficiency often stemmed from negative relationships with their fathers. Faludi writes, “[s]o many of the men I met as I began this book were still trying to find their manhood by finding their fathers” (Faludi

530). She continues, “[t]hey still wanted to believe in a patrimony, not of money but of know-how, the sort of secret knowledge that a father mastered and taught his son, the sort of knowledge that a son would know he had learned by the approving glint in his father’s eye” (Faludi 530). Due to lack of direction (i.e. no fathers for guidance), 1990’s men’s search and desire for masculinity was a journey “that often felt like orphans turning 45 endlessly off some open road, pulling into unfamiliar towns, looking for fathers they could not find” (Faludi 530). Young men like McCandless turned to social movements, looking to recreate a society that felt more comfortable for them, rather than culture that preferred older generations. Shifting in gender and environmental ideologies presented an opportunity to enter into direct disobedience to dominant discourses controlled by patriarchal culture.

McCandless is representative of this youth oriented movement acting against their parents; though his relationship with his father was rocky at best (and often much worse),

McCandless did not seek his father’s acceptance or follow in his father’s footsteps. Upon graduation from Emory Univesity in 1990, McCandless disappeared. He immediately cut off contact with his family and between the spring of 1990 and the summer of 1992, the year of McCandless’ death, and never spoke with any member of his family ever again.

Krakauer notes that “[g]iven Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’ extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable” (Krakauer 64). Put off by his parent’s wealth, disgusted by his father’s marital infidelities, and fed up with family rules and expectations, McCandless essentially disowned his own father, finding father figures in the likes of Thoreau, Emerson, and other revolutionary nature enthusiasts who not only shared his own aversion to society, but also found solace in the natural world. Further, he found the direction he needed in movements that promoted disobedience against the society propagated by his father. McCandless was unable to accept direction from his family, so he moved outside of their society and gained voice in his disobedience.

Like many of his predecessors, particularly Thoreau, McCandless exercised reclamation of masculinity through disobedience. Krakauer notes that McCandless once 46 publicly echoed Thoreau, declaring “I heartily accept the motto – ‘That government is best which governs least” (Krakauer 123). However, McCandless would have been more accurate if he had echoed Thoreau’s assertion, “That government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience). Krakauer notes many of McCandless’ disobedient incidents. After college, McCandless set off across the country, eventually ending up around Lake Mead, on the border of Nevada and Arizona. In an effort to render himself completely independent, McCandless looked to rid himself of much of his personal belongings. “Then in a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud,” Krakauer writes, “he arranged all of his paper currency in a pile on the sand – a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties – and put a match to it. One hundred and twenty three dollars in legal tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke”

(Krakauer 29). Later that year, on tax forms for employer and friend Wayne Westerberg,

McCandless filled his name in as “Iris Fucyu,” his address as “None of your damn business,” and his social security number as “I forget” (Krakauer 101). These actions not only attach McCandless to conservationists like Thoreau, but also to historically disobedient movements like environmentalism and feminism. Further, by following his literary heroes, McCandless creates a set of father figures that not only respect but also encourage his separation from society and placement within nature. McCandless’ search was not so much about replacing his father, but more about finding direction.

McCandless undoubtedly found that purpose in his disobedience and his efforts to reassess cultural conceptions of gender and environmental ideologies.

This further explains why McCandless set off into the wild. Krakauer notes that

McCandless absolutely loved the stories of Jack London; he obsessively “read and reread 47

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, ‘To Build a Fire,’ ‘An Odyssey of the North,’ ‘The Wit of the Porportuk’” because he was “[m]esmerized by London’s turgid portrayal of life in

Alaska” (Krakauer 44). In order to claim natural serenity and London’s promise of masculinity, McCandless followed London’s characters. Yet, Krakauer further notes

“that he [McCandless] seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the sub-artic wilderness” (Krakauer 44). It becomes evident by this point in the text that the reclamation of London’s picture of masculinity interferes with

McCandless’ goals; the masculinity portrayed in London’s works is a retro masculinity, not a contemporary masculinity that holds distinct ties with social movements in gender and the environment. Yet, chasing a retro, fictional, literary masculinity is a mistake not only limited to Christopher McCandless. Krakauer writes that “prevailing Alaskan wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death” (Krakauer 72). Krakauer’s list is extensive, from

Gene Rosellini, who lived “for more than a decade” alone, subsisting on whatever he could find or kill with his barehands or medieval implements before he killed himself with a knife through the heart (Krakauer 75), to John Mallon Waterman, a young climber who prided himself on climbing peaks previously insurmountable, who spent just a little too much time alone before being committed to the Anchorage Psychiatric Institute

(Krakauer 79). McCandless’ case is unique because of his activist mentality, his obvious intelligence, and his interest in upsetting the patriarchal dominancy that effectively 48 restricted his individuality. Unlike his predecessors, McCandless’ odyssey was a search for voice, voice he unfortunately could only achieve in death.

Krakauer himself acknowledges that he recognized the appeal of a simpler life, a life away from rules and restrictions of society and culture. Krakauer writes, “[i]n 1977, while brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs, I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devil’s Thumb,” an imposing Alaskan peak

(Krakauer 134). Krakauer was a “willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless” youth, who “disappointed [his] father in the usual ways” (Krakauer 134). Krakauer further notes that that “[l]ike McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please” (Krakauer 134). While he was climbing, Krakauer concedes that “the lapses of conscious, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes” were all “temporarily forgotten” (Krakauer 143). While McCandless has become culturally iconographic of the contemporary wilderness wanderer, the longing for purpose and the draw of nature are, by no means, qualities limited to one individual. McCandless however is representative of a larger movement centered upon the 1990’s in response to shifting gender and environmental ideologies.

We must step back for a moment however and return to McCandless’ uniqueness: his story stands apart, not only because he died, but because he was smart, capable, and adamantly set on certain goals. Krakauer makes it quite clear that what McCandless wanted to do was both admirable and foolish, but he was afforded no other opportunities to gain access to gender and environmental discourse. McCandless’ disobedience followed the only possible path possible for him to have maximum impact upon the 49 society he so wished to change. The words of Charlie, a crazy old man who had provided

McCandless with a place to live for several months, seem awfully prophetic: “Seemed like a kid [McCandless] who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t quite know what it was” (Krakauer 42). Yet, through his death, McCandless became a part of the environmental debate. He influenced environmental discourse.

Without the extremism of his disobedience, the same impact would have been impossible.

The life of security that McCandless writes of in his letter to Ron Franz is undoubtedly a life amongst society, restricted by expectations, laws, money, and countless other things McCandless would have found unforgivable. Yet, caging a man’s spirit and physical being in the suburban, Fordist post-modern world is the fault which

McCandless can not bear. He repeatedly stressed that “[t]he very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure” (Krakauer 57). Limiting that spirit, whether through restrictions or obligations, is thereby emasculating. Masculinity lies in the ability to roam, to wander one’s world and experience it. Further, McCandless asserts that relationships under current social circumstances are unfufilling: “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships” (Krakauer 57). It seems fair to say that McCandless is not admonishing all relationships, but rather just ones that adhere to traditional roles based on historical, patriarchal stipulations. At the end of Into The Wild, readers are meant to believe McCandless would have enjoyed seeing his family again, yet he could only do so once contemporary conceptions of gender had changed significantly enough as to not resemble suburban, Fordist relationships that limit certain individuals to finite roles. 50

McCandless makes it clear that the reclamation of masculinity is not possible in every setting; in cities for instance, where civilization and society control conceptions of gender and environment, othered individuals like McCandless are unable to properly exist. McCandless was very uncomfortable in cities. In a letter to Jan Burres,

McCandless despairingly writes about some time he spent in San Diego: “Have been living on the streets of San Diego for the past week. First day I got here it rained like hell. The missions here suck and I’m getting preached to death” (Krakauer 53).

Similarly, an entry in McCandless’ journal notes that he went into Los Angeles in 1991 to

“get a ID and a job but feels extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately” (Krakauer 37). In city environments, McCandless became restless, ready to move on to new, more exciting surroundings. Society binds autonomy, inhibiting growth as both a human and a man. When McCandless is in the wild, he is responsible solely for his own survival. He can do what he wants, when he wants, where he wants. Civilization implies restrictions that inevitably affect autonomy. It is possible that McCandless’ need for autonomy implies fantastical representations of manhood, but it seems more likely that McCandless realizes that the constraints he feels within civilization are not limited to his own situation. Those same restrictions restrain possibilities in gender and environmental discourse by limiting voices of othered individuals who are forced to then find voice through avenues of disobedience.

McCandless finds the openness he seeks, the ability to roam and develop physically, emotionally, and ideologically, within the natural world.

McCandless’ travels, writings, and life mirror many of the previously mentioned men central to movements of both American Romanticism and masculinity. In many 51 ways, McCandless most closely resembles John Muir, a figure central to American views on both the environment and masculinity. Muir, born in Scotland and raised in the

Midwest, was a true Westerner at heart and had considerable trouble balancing life in society and his love for the natural world. Muir biographer Charles Norman notes that while Muir worked Indianapolis, the pull of the natural world became too much: “I like the inventive work,” Muir said, “and the earnest rush and roar and whirl of the factory but

Nature’s attractions are stronger, and I must soon get away” (Norman 59). Much like

McCandless, Muir was unable to exist under social restraints. Most of Muir’s life after that point was spent walking the country, exploring his spiritual side via communion with the natural world. When he stumbled upon Yosemite Valley, Muir was permanently awestruck; he never stayed away from the Valley for long after that day.

Muir remains a pivotal figure in the history of environmentalism but he was also the picture of masculinity; even Theodore Roosevelt, who is often regarded one of the most masculine figures in American history, depended on Muir for guidance and protection on a journey into the California Sierras in 1903 (Norman 171). Yet Muir’s masculinity did not depend on domination of landscapes or the continual improvement of his social position. Rather, Muir was obsessed with the prospect of protecting the lands he so dearly loved: Yosemite Valley, Mariposa Grove, Hetch Hetchy. When Hetch

Hetchy was called to be dammed in 1913, it broke Muir. “His last days were saddened by the condemnation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley for a dam to supply San Francisco with water,” writes Norman. He further quotes a contemporary noting Muir’s last days: “It was sorrowful to see him sitting in his cobwebbed study, with the full force of his defeat upon him, after the struggle of a lifetime in the service of Hetch-Hetchy” (Norman 182). 52

I am not insinuating that Muir was anything less than the most foundational conservationist in American history, but it is important to note that recent studies in ecofeminism, ecological literary criticism from a feminist perspective, complicate some historical views on conservation.

Ecofeminists claim that “important connections exists between women, people of color, and the underclass on one hand and the treatment of non-human nature on the other” (Warren 3). The ways in which women have historically been othered and oppressed are mirrored in the environment; further, “trees, water, animals, toxics, and nature language are feminist issues because understanding them helps one understand the status and plight of women cross culturally” (Warren 4). As I have claimed, this works in reverse as well: understanding feminism helps us understand environmentalism as well.

The trap ecofeminists warn against is that of assuming dominancy over the environment, whether through development and use or through protection. While this may seem strange, ecofeminists point towards the relegation of the environment to a feminine position in power hierarchies that limits not only the possibilities of othered feminisms but also the environment. Those connections present between feminism and environmentalism offer both movements a certain power: progression of one discourse encourages progress in the other. McCandless tries hard to not to assume a protectorate relationship with nature, where he feels the environment depends solely upon his abilities to limit human impact. But he is able to acknowledge connections between shifting gender ideologies that connect feminism with changes in environmentalism. 53

From this connection to activist mentalities, we see McCandless’ versions of protest. When he was not alone, he tried to raise environmental awareness and convince his friends and acquaintances to read the same material he was enthralled with.

In spite of his activism, McCandless was occasionally defined by the patriarchal restrictions he worked to upset: Park Service employee Steve Carwile says of

McCandless, “[i]t’s just intuition… but I get the feeling that he was the kind of guy who might want to ‘set the wilderness free’” (Krakauer 197). McCandless further considered shooting an animal, a moose, to be “[o]ne of the greatest tragedies of [his] life,” despite his looming death from starvation (Krakauer 167). Despite his love and knowledge of the pastoral, some might claim McCandless never understood the ‘nature’ he so dearly searched for. For his Alaskan odyssey, as he himself often calls it, McCandless was set on the prospect of living off of the land for several months. He researched edible plants and how to kill and preserve animals, preparing himself to be at one with the nature around him. It seems he always felt that the wild world would provide for him, that the world he left behind him in Atlanta and Virginia was the cruel, harsh world, while the world of nature would protect him. During his summer-long adventure, McCandless also looked to reclaim lost notions of masculinity by asserting an autonomous existence.

Clearly he hoped life outside of society and culture, outside of that which he can not control, would help him to recover a sense of lost purpose. And, despite his death, that freedom did help him assume purpose.

Krakauer speculates that McCandless died because he consumed poisonous seeds that inhibited his ability to digest food properly, resulting in starvation. While I can see that starvation was the direct cause of death, it seems to me that McCandless’ life can be 54 viewed in two ways: as a tragedy or as an act of disobedience. If viewed as a tragedy, we can lament his early death and the loss of many fruitful, purposeful years. But, viewed as an act of disobedience, McCandless’ life quickly moves beyond the walls of Bus 142, and explodes historical conceptions of gender and environmental ideology. Through his disobedience, we can view McCandless’ unique life as a testament to 1990’s reactions against crises in dominant gender and environmental discourses, and further distinguish his death as extremism working to upset those same discourses.

Fight Club

As McCandless’ example shows, a minority of individuals recognized, accepted, and acted upon shifting gender and environmental ideologies during the 1990’s. Tyler

Durden, the brain-child of author Chuck Palahniuk, shows very different reactions.

Though Christopher McCandless and Tyler Durden are very different characters who use separate methodologies, it seems clear that both desire and recognize a growing cultural need to reassess traditional gender and environmental discourse. Durden’s methods differ from McCandless’ primarily through the use of violence; while McCandless throughout his life remains non-violent in his protests, Durden relies on violence as a primary avenue of disobedience. Durden sees violence as a solution to feelings of emasculation within the modern American man and to centuries of improper treatment of the environment. Though Durden’s conceptions of masculinity are sometimes troubling, founded upon pre-war masculine principles, the value in Durden’s disobedience comes in his acknowledgement of disconcerting gender and environmental treatment. The links drawn between both movements, through Durden’s proposed reclamation of both masculinity and a more natural existence, show Durden’s activism; whether or not individuals accept his extreme methods, Durden is able to identify avenues of disobedience that allow othered persons voice, thereby interrupting the dominant discourses of environmentalism and gender.

Fight Club is a story born and bred out of 1990’s masculine struggles. The text’s central narrator no longer has control over his place within society and, further, is incapable of carving out a place for himself. Cultural emasculation has rendered him 56 castrated3. He cannot control his job, he cannot sleep, and he cannot pursue Marla

Singer. Out of this crisis emerges the narrator’s alternate persona, Tyler Durden, who is both capable and motivated. Durden arises out of the narrator’s personal plight: loss of identity, sedentary physicality, and pressured consumerism has induced cultural emasculation. Late in the novel, the narrator remarks that he “love[s] everything about

Tyler Durden… Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world” (Palahniuk 174). Durden becomes the narrator’s manifestation of disobedience, a character who is willing to live outside of society in order to upset traditional cultural dominancy. Further, Durden is a character of action: where the narrator is unable to gain voice, Durden is able. Matt Jordan writes that

Fight Club “is in part the narrative of a personal crisis arising from an apprehension of the modern world as corrosive of personal identity and in particular masculinity” (Jordan

372). Yet, it is integral to realize that very same modern world is corrosive to other related discourses as well, particularly environmentalism. Durden, the manifestation of the narrator’s masculine desire, can and will do whatever is necessary in prompting dominant culture to recognize shifts in gender ideology and treatment of the environment.

The narrator explains his “triangle thing”: “I want Tyler,” he says, “Tyler wants Marla.

Marla wants me” (Palahniuk 14). Further, the narrator notes the relationships are not about “love as in caring” (Palahniuk 14). Rather, they are about “property as in ownership” (Palahniuk 14). From the very beginning, reclaiming masculinity becomes

an effort to claim ownership over dominant culture, culture that restricts how men like

Durden can and cannot act. Only through Durden’s extreme radicalism can the world

3 The concept of castration as it relates to psychoanalytic theory will be addressed later in this section. While the narrator himself is castrated of power, the threat of castration is both Tyler Durden’s biggest fear and most common mechanism of torture. 57 change enough for the narrator to reclaim personal identity and purpose, upsetting dominant gender and environmental discourses that restrict alternative identities.

Durden’s methods are admittedly extreme: blowing up skyscrapers and completely destroying society could be interpreted as insanity (in fact, doctors in the last chapter do consider Durden insane). Whereas Chris McCandless searches for the wild and recovery of masculinity primarily in isolation, following classical paths marked by figures like Thoreau, Durden feels the problems of masculine America are problems that need to be solved as a group. This is not to say that McCandless’ methods are any more or less effective than Durden’s; both do eventually gain voices and power previously unavailable. But Durden feels he and his companions can “hit bottom” and assume new power through destructive disobedience (Palahniuk 69). “’It’s only after you’ve lost everything,’ Tyler says, ‘that you’re free to do anything’” (Palahniuk 70). Rather than searching for answers, as McCandless does, Durden proposes that the search is unnecessary, or even that the search be destroyed entirely. Instead of adopting the narrator’s passivity, Durden acts. Further, instead of following in the footsteps of literary forbears, Durden attributes the failings of post-war America to histories that have upheld traditional gender and environmental discourse. In order to change those discourses,

Durden feels he must destroy them and the history that upholds them. Only by letting go of social or cultural expectations for what men should be like or how humanity should treat the environment can we finally reassess gender and environmental ideologies, changing the ways in which we view gender and treat nature.

In this way, Durden differs from previous environmental and gender traditions, particularly McCandless’ traditions, resembling a chaparral more than romantic heath. 58

Within the natural world, there are certain ecosystems that must undergo what destruction in order to grow stronger. Lodgepole pine forests have serotonous cones that open under extreme heat, making forest fires absolute necessary for future growth. Chaparrals, hillside meadows famous in southern California, also must have fires in order to germinate and grow. Though society largely sees these fires as destructive, aesthetically- negative even, the temporary destruction of those landscapes is necessary for the ecosystems’ long term health and strength. Durden approaches masculinity, gender, and the environment from a similar angle: society must be broken down in order to build a culture that cannot recognize shifting gender and environmental ideologies.

As has been noted, Durden’s disobedience manifests primarily through violence: whether via fight club, sex, or Project Mayhem, his disobedience is a reaction to his own unfulfilling life and the inability of society to recognize cultural shifts towards new conceptions of gender and the environment. In reaction to his own sad life and suicidal existence, Durden’s first action in the process of self-destruction is to found fight clubs, small pockets of men who gather weekly to exact extreme violence upon one another’s physical bodies in an attempt to release their trapped office spirits. The narrator describes the purpose of fight club when he explains how he felt the first time he punched

Durden:

Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that

didn’t work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank

that says I’m hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my

computer and fiddled around with my DOS execute commands. And Marla

Singer, who stole the support groups from me. (Palahniuk 53) 59

Some might propose that fight club allows men to act like real men; rather, the purpose of fight club is to allow those participants voice. Through their fights, they are able to incubate a spirit of disobedience that sets off a chain of personal ideological restructurings. The extreme violence of fight club allows the men an opportunity to throw aside social regulations, the monotony of modern careers and move beyond the cubicle. “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club,” says the narrator.

And though this may outwardly seem like a regression to retroactive conceptions of masculinity, the realization that disobedience provides new life connects those fighters to movements like environmentalism that work outside of dominant discourse because they are not allowed life inside of that discourse. By promoting violence, Durden progresses destruction, through which he eventually hopes to rewrite what masculinity, gender, and the environment are and how they manifest in contemporary culture.

McCandless’ complicated relationship with his father helps us understand how his search for restructured gender and environmental discourses is not about pursuing retroactive conceptions. Similarly, Durden has also suffered problems with father.

Neither the narrator nor Durden have extensive relationships with their fathers4. When the narrator asks Durden who he was fighting after their first parking lot brawl, Durden says he was fighting his father (Palahniuk 53). The narrator describes his father as a

“franchise,” with all the connotations of modern fast-food capitalism. “Me, I knew my dad for for about six years,” he says,” but I don’t remember anything. My dad, he starts a family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise” (Palahniuk 50). The autonomy of the narrator’s father is release

4 Though the narrator and Durden do in fact inhabit the same body, they are different people in many respects. In the case of their fathers, or father, they have different stories concerning his disappearance. So, though they are undoubtedly inhabit the same being, there are some discrepancies between them. 60 from the contemporary family and hearkens back to traditional, retroactive conceptions of masculinity: the man holds no responsibility for his actions and acts completely upon his own personal volition. The narrator is obviously troubled by this manifestation of masculinity. Periodically through life, the narrator calls his father for life-advice. He promptly gets answers pushing him to follow a regulated, socially acceptable existence: go to college, get a job, get married (Palahniuk 51). The answers the narrator receives from his father are just mass-produced answers though, answers that do not acknowledge contemporary conceptions of gender and the environment. If the narrator’s father does not follow that same advice, being corralled by the expectations of dominant culture, then why should the narrator? Further, if he is also opposed to his father’s masculinity, then what options are still available to him? The emergence of Durden allows for existence outside of dominant discourse, where the narrator and Durden can then reassess conceptions of masculinity, gender, and the environment. Finally, the narrator questions,

“I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need” (Palahniuk 51). More specifically, he does not need another relationship that is yoked to current social conventions. In order to change perceptions of gender and treatment of the environment, he must work against traditional conventions that progress the history he is acting against.

Durden encourages all men, all the “middle children of history” to react directly against emasculation by reclaiming control over their own selves (Palahniuk 166).

Durden does so through the practice of disobedience. The narrator notes that “The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says. Like Tyler says, even a soufflé looks pumped” 61

(Palahniuk 50). Even principles such as physicality are conceptualized by dominant culture to create stipulations for the body. Rather than following the cultural model of what a man should be, Durden accepts a model of self-destruction. Through destruction of his body, Durden is acting in disobedience to a larger cultural model that claims men need look like a “soufflé.” Through that destruction, Durden assumes voice, while his activism connects him with othered, challenging methodologies. Disobedience allows him the ability and motivation to follow his own rules in direct response to what society expects from him and, ultimately, progress new models of gender ideology and treatment of the environment.

Notably, Durden’s ultimate threat is castration; when he muscles those who stand in his way, he intimidates them with the threat of castration. Castration, not death, becomes the most hazardous menace because castration means living emasculated amongst society with absolutely no ability to reclaim that lost power. When the Seattle

Police Commissioner decided to strike back at the destruction of fight club, Durden told his colleagues to bring him “the steaming testicles of his esteemed honor” (Palahniuk

164). Without his “balls,” the police commissioner has no chance of advancing in politics, no chance of advancing in culture (Palahniuk 164). Through these particularly violent methods, Durden asserts his dominancy over discourses of power that have previously restricted his voice; through castration, Durden gains authority. Slavoj Zizek asserts that characters like Fight Club’s narrator have most likely already undergone the process of castration. Zizek claims “[c]astration is the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title that confers on me a certain status and authority” (Zizek 34).

Durden is the narrator’s symbolic title, the method through which he gains status and 62 power. Cultural castration of his power has necessitated Durden’s presence; in order to gain voice and authority, he must move beyond his immediate self and into the realm of the symbolic. Sigmund Freud further explains that the threat of castration “excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion” (Freud 938). If castration then, as Zizek implies,

“is what gives power to me [Durden],” then the threat of castration gives further understanding to the extremity of Durden’s reactions (Zizek 34). Further, if we similarly understand movements like environmentalism and gender as castrated, upon which they must find different methods of protest in order to regain power and authority, we can understand how and why they become connected in their efforts to disrupt dominancy.

The importance of disobedience to cultural performance is shown through

Durden’s sexual practice. The way Durden approaches sex is just as radical as his extremist use of violence: he is hyper-sexual, non-committal, and incredibly aggressive.

Yet, Durden still rebels against dominant constructions: Faludi notes that during the

1990’s, men transformed into sexual objects and, though this may be true for many mid-

90’s men, it is those types of classifications Durden is fighting against. Faludi quotes

Sam Shahid, former creative director of Calvin Klein’s in-house advertising agency, who is excited that men have been relegated to sex objects: “Men have become bigger sex objects than women! They are the sex gods now! They have replaced women!” (Faludi

506). Faludi writes that sex became a new way of asserting lost masculinity; if men

“couldn’t prove their manhood in traditional ways – pursuing an honored craft, making a decent living, supporting a family – then… maybe they could derive a sense of masculine confidence from the exertion of sexual appeal” (Faludi 518). During the 1990’s, men replaced the pursuit of traditional masculinity with sexuality and sexual conquests. To do 63 so, men had to embody style and culture, but as Faludi notes, no one would question a man’s masculinity if “he kept that dick front and center” (Faludi 519).

Durden once again fights against cultural classifications that limit his masculinity, and thereby the developments of gender and environmentalism, to certain cultural models. Rather than assuming cultural styles, Durden performs self-destruction and destructive sexual practices. The first night he meets Marla Singer, they have sex “about ten times,” call each other “human buttwipe,” and eventually Marla says she wants “to have Tyler’s abortion” (Palahniuk 59). Durden sees the body as a text upon which his disobedient rebellion can be written. Whether that disobedience takes place on his own body or someone else’s, such as Marla, does not matter much to Durden. By calling each other sewer-sex-names and using abortion as a form of protest, their sexual practices essentially question what ‘typical’ sexual practices entail. By doing so, they encourage readers to consider alternative relationships, relationships outside of hetronormativity and traditional gender constraints.

Further, Durden never spends time with Marla beyond the bedroom. For him,

Marla is nothing but an object, another method through with Durden can rewrite dominant discourse. Again, early in the novel, the narrator dictates Durden and Marla’s relationship: “This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership”

(Palahniuk 14). Sex with Marla is another method of disobedience through which

Durden reclaims voice. Conquering Marla, owning her, implies ownership of his own life, and thereby separation from dominant discourse that restricts his life. The way

Durden dictates what the relationship will look, act, and feel like assumes a level of power unavailable to him while constrained by governing culture. 64

Durden applies the same model of disobedience to environmentalism. As the manifestation of the narrator’s unfulfilled masculine desires, Durden spends almost the entirety of his existence searching for ways in which to change contemporary conceptions of gender or force dominant culture to recognize a shifting in gender ideology. On a similarly radical scale, Durden tries to change contemporary conceptions of nature. It seems strange to think of Tyler Durden as an environmentalist; after all, amidst Durden’s destruction, the narrator declares he would like to “burn the Amazon rain forests,” “pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone,” and “open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells” (Palahniuk 123). While this does not necessarily fall into a 1960’s model of environmentalism, we have already seen that as cultural restrictions of activist movements like environmentalism increased, the extremity of reactions to said limitations became increasingly more radical. Durden places the same hopes of self-destruction upon the environment: if men cannot reclaim a sense of purpose without first hitting bottom, then how can the environmentalism promote changes to the human/nature relationship without the environment also hitting bottom?

Simply, Durden believes the environment cannot. While this may seem counter-intuitive to efforts to protect the environment, Durden is rather trying to forever change discourse that encourages dominance over nature. Durden’s methods may be destructive, but he sincerely believes that once he is done, the ways in which we perceive gender and interact with the environment will be changed.

Durden’s vision of the world is in fact a wild world, a culture that fully accepts shifts in gender and environmental ideology considering both to be integrally linked. To bring about this new order, Durden creates Project Mayhem, a group of renegade men 65 bent on the complete and utter destruction of society. He never shares his complete vision with his colleagues, but in a rare glimpse of his proposed future, we see that

Durden is working towards a very specific dream:

‘[P]icture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a

forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the

ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space

Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge

totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat

to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats

and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night…

Imagine,’ Tyler said, ‘stalking elk past department store windows and stinking

racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather

clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick

kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up

through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny

figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool

lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot

for a thousand miles’ (Palahniuk 125)

The elimination of civilization, including all infrastructure and history, is Durden’s ultimate goal. While there are problems with his vision, primarily the ring of Jim

Bridger-esque life that in some ways purports images of the environment as the supporter for human endeavors, Durden does acknowledge changes in the human/nature relationship which entail a rewriting of dominant environmental discourse. 66

The narrator does however note that what he and Durden wanted most of all was

“to blast the world free of history,” a history of domination and artifice, where humanity takes what they want, when they want at the expense of whatever is in the way; to accomplish such a goal, Durden and his followers would have to create a new mountain man, one that could exist alongside new environmental norms (Palahniuk 124). Durden believes that the destruction of history, the destruction of society, will allow for a new world, a wild world, where conceptions of gender and the environment, and those who adhere to shiftings in said ideologies, would not be limited by dominant discourse, but rather included. After all, what does history hold for the narrator and Durden? “For thousands of years,” the narrator proclaims:

human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now

history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my

soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the

bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge

dumped a generation before I was born (Palahniuk 124)

Is it possible for the earth to recover? Durden acknowledges that under current circumstances, the possibility is slim. No matter how many soup cans the narrator flattens, the fact is that more cans are still made. Motor oil is still pumping through the rubber veins of countless machines. The threat of nuclear war still looms in the future, however distant that future may be. Despite movements such as greening, humanity can hardly make up for centuries of mistreatment and misuse. But by reassessing environmental discourse through “the complete and right-away destruction of 67 civilization,” we may be able to create a more progressive human/nature relationship

(Palahniuk 125).

Durden believes that the destruction of culture and nature simultaneously allows for re-evaluation of historical gender ideology and treatment of the environment.

Through his disobedience, Durden acknowledges that cultural acceptance of wildness, the amalgamation of environmental and gender discourse, through the channels of civilization is essentially impossible. Durden, just like McCandless, realizes that he can only gain voice by fully stepping outside of that culture, and through extremism, he can affect dominant discourse. However, by reinventing both masculinity and the environment as seen through cultural lenses, Durden feels he is able to reestablish a long lost order, the order of the wild, which is fundamentally unordered and uncontrolled.

It must be noted that Durden’s vision is not entirely fulfilled. Despite employing chaotic methodology, feats both rebellious and riotous, Durden’s attempts to reinstate a cultural dark age are unsuccessful. Project Mayhem does not erase history and civilization: the building Durden had planned on blowing up, the Parker-Morris building,

“one hundred and ninety-one floors” that will “slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target,” does not explode or fall (Palahniuk 14). “The world’s tallest building” stays standing, society remains unchanged, and history is preserved (Palahniuk

12). The narrator is then transported to a mental hospital that he refers to as “heaven”

(Palahniuk 206). Further, that failure deems Durden’s alternate personality no longer a necessity. Durden’s existence is balanced by his usefulness; when he cannot achieve his goals, he is no longer needed. He consequently disappears, dies as the narrator puts it. 68

It seems to me though that Project Mayhem actually spurs a more realistic success. With society still intact, Durden has opened up new channels of communication between othered persons and dominant hierarchies. Further, the extremism of Durden’s actions necessitates consideration from dominant bodies; no longer can shifts in gender and environmental ideology be ignored. The consequences for dominant culture are too great; the only realistic solution is re-evaluation of traditional gender and environmental discourses. The narrator acknowledges that he cannot go back into the world, rejoin society, because Durden’s influence still lingers. He notes that “every once in awhile, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches and he says: ‘We miss you Mr. Durden’” (Palahniuk 208). Many men are still carrying out some of Durden’s plans: “Everything’s going according to plan,” they whisper. “We’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world” (Palahniuk 208). Yet, the disappearance of Durden seems to imply a realization: the narrator, on some level, recognizes the futility of destroying society. However, it seems he also is aware that challenging dominant discourse can afford othered persons voice, and afford movements like environmentalism and feminism/masculinism opportunities to address and reassess the ways in which culture conceives of gender and the environment.

III. Conclusion

There’s a big a big hard sun beating on the big people in the big hard world -Eddie Vedder, Into The Wild Soundtrack

What is uncontrollable? What can not be cultivated, harnessed, or exploited?

Humanity has developed methods of survival over the course of thousands of years based upon precepts of adaptation and utilization. Yet, as we have seen, there are elements of our own spirit that will not be inhibited. Despite civilized efforts to repress our basest characteristics, we can not destroy our wild self. As Gary Snyder states, the wild is alive within all of us, in the “depths of mind, the unconscious… our inner wilderness areas”

(Snyder 17). The wild, in post-war contexts, is integrally linked with developments in environmentalism and conceptions of masculinity. As noted in previous chapters, the growth of new movements such as environmentalism and feminism, along with the emergence of youth culture and moves towards suburbanization, mark the 1960’s and

1980’s as moments of extreme change in American perceptions of both the environment and masculinity. More importantly, the 1990’s texts Into The Wild and Fight Club represent a larger cultural reaction to shifting post-war gender ideologies and approaches towards conservation and environmentalism. These two texts are brought together by not only the link present between environment and masculinity but by the extreme reactions of both texts’ main characters to dominant cultural discourse. While their personal protests may have been failures to the foundational cultural belief in survival,

McCandless and Durden forgo their own well-being in order to accomplish something beyond their own selves; the disobedience inherent in the actions of both Chris 70

McCandless and Tyler Durden illustrate the need to reassess our praxis, our conceptions of both gender and environmentalism because both discourses are inseparable.

Since the birth of the environmental and feminist movements, ecological and gender discourses have been entangled with rebellion and revolution. Environmentalism is intrinsically disobedient, as is feminism, for both movements work against dominant cultural discourses. It is inevitable that McCandless and Durden’s reactions would be disobedient, rebellious, for they were reacting against social limitations on environmental and gender ideologies. Though we must establish that McCandless and Durden had distinctly different reactions, it is also important to note the extremity of both reactions.

While they are limited to each singular circumstance, both responses are undoubtedly reactions against dominant discourses that control both characters’ interactions with environmental and gender ideologies. Further, both are reactions against disempowerment, social and cultural. Though both reactions do fail in some regard

(McCandless dies and Durden is sent to an institution), it is necessary that we realize the success in their actions as well: by upsetting dominant discourse, even in a way that is inaccessible to a larger movement, McCandless and Durden reveal the need to address contemporary issues of gender and environmentalism, while prompting future activists to find avenues of protest that are accessible. McCandless enters the Alaskan wilderness because he does not have the opportunity to affect dominant culture with his voice; he cannot allow himself to adhere to those restrictions. Durden acts similarly; though his actions are those of violence, he is trying to eliminate civilized notions of control and inhibition. Again, though both reactions exhibit different methodologies, the acts are still inherently acts of disobedience, rebellion, and revolution. If the post-war era has taught 71 us anything, it is that dominant discourses will be challenged. Ultimately, through their disobedience, McCandless and Durden reveal changes in environmental and gender discourses and the need to address such changes in dominant culture.

McCandless

Just two years after Snyder published The Practice of the Wild claiming wildness resides within the human spirit, Chris McCandless supported Snyder’s claims by leaving behind civilization. McCandless tells his friend Ron Franz that Joy has been placed all around, that “[t]he very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure”

(Krakauer 57). To really pursue that adventure “[w]e just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living,” life outside of conventional discourse and social restrictions (Krakauer 57). In this letter, McCandless acknowledges two key things: first, that masculinity is in fact connected to the natural world; and, secondly, that to pursue said adventure is only possible outside of ‘normal’ cultural circumstances, meaning one must leave civilization. Later in the same letter,

McCandless tells Ron he must leave his life behind, “put a little camper on the back of

[his] pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the

American West,” and he “must do it economy style” (Krakauer 58). Ron Franz, before meeting McCandless, was a very typical elderly American: a widower living alone in

Salton City, CA. He had a series of hobbies, rarely left his hometown, and, according to

McCandless, did not appreciate the world around him, nor realize his own potential. As

McCandless would have assuredly agreed, Franz was in a rut, a rut brought on by

American conceptions of the contemporary life. By disobeying, rebelling against those 72 conceptions, McCandless tells Franz that he can awaken something within himself, something that has long been dormant: his own wildness.

McCandless was always rebellious, but his own personal revolution did not begin until after his college graduation. In the floodplains of Arizona, McCandless underwent a metamorphosis. Instead of limiting his rebellions to civilized methods (i.e. sponsored organizations upholding established sets of rules, such as his Young Republicans club),

McCandless expanded his notions of disobedience. He drove his car off road, abandoned it in the middle of nowhere along with most of his belongings, set fire to $123 dollars, and marched away, leaving his old life behind him. By abandoning the car, McCandless opened up entire worlds of opportunity; cars keep drivers on certain strips of road, limiting where they can and cannot travel. And by burning the money, he declared his own autonomy. On that day, McCandless acknowledged his own separateness from social expectations and restrictions. Only then was he a part of the wild. Yet, more importantly, McCandless recognizes that his transformation allows recognition of shifting environmental and gender ideologies: because those movements are disobedient and lie outside of patriarchal constructions, he too must move outside of those constructions.

At this point, McCandless faces a dire situation. He is, from that point thereafter, unable to exist as a common citizen. He is now outside of not only governmental control, but cultural and social control as well. He can abide by rules if he must, but they do not control him. While living in Bullhead City, McCandless decided to get a job at

McDonald’s where he worked at a mild pace and wore socks only when absolutely necessary. The assistant manager George Dreezen remembers that “as soon as his

[McCandless] shift was over, bang! – the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off. I 73 mean the very first thing. Kind of like a statement, to let us know we didn’t own him”

(Krakauer 40). Once again, the disobedience of social norms (and what could be more revealing of American norms than McDonald’s?) is what allows McCandless his autonomy, and thereby his masculinity and access to the natural world. McCandless is able to reassess his impact, to reexamine conceptions of both the environment and gender, to regain control over his own praxis in ways that others cannot. The consequence of such is his inability to exist within the civilized world.

Shortly after, we realize the full extremity of McCandless’ reaction to the crises in environmentalism and masculinity. About a year after Bullhead City, he set off down the

Stampede Trail in Alaska. By living alone in the wilderness for the summer, McCandless was attempting to stage his biggest rebellion against civilization. Living in complete solitude, away from society, is revolutionary isolation implies forgoing the necessities of society, but it also establishes both a rekindled masculinity and renewed relationship with nature. Again, through disobedience, McCandless’ is able to access those discourses which were previously unavailable. His death several months later marks the severity of such reactions. Some may say that McCandless’ death was a matter of circumstance, that he was ill-prepared or misunderstood the dangers of nature. Rather, it seems that

McCandless’ death was a product of his inability to exist underneath dominant ideologies unable to recognize and address cultural shiftings in environmental and gender discourses. The failure of previously defiant methodologies and the limitations placed upon both gender and environmental progress deem responses of equal radicalism. The extreme reactions of McCandless and Durden mark the severity of the growing need to rework environmental and gender discourses. If one must die, or be put in mortally 74 perilous circumstances in order to gain voice, perhaps praxis does in fact need reassessment. McCandless proves this is the case.

From this, we encounter the issues central to the 1990’s. Disobedience is and always shall be weaved into the histories of environmentalism and feminism. Changing gender discourses depends entirely upon one’s ability to act out against Western heteronormativity, just as developing ecological discourse is dependent upon the public’s capacity to affect environmental ideology. With the convergence of environmental and gender crises in the 1990’s, those able to react did so with consequential force.

McCandless, for instance, is unable to limit his rebellion to the avenues of controlled dominancy. The extremeness of his response is dictated by the extremeness of normative discourses that police ideological boundaries. Should the young and morally ambitious feel they gain voice only through actions as extreme as McCandless’? Certainly not.

Therefore, crises spawned from growing restlessness with traditional heteronormativity and short-sighted ecological practices can no longer be further ignored. McCandless’ reaction illustrates the need to reassess the way we interact with and manage environmental and gender discourses.

Durden

Though McCandless’ reaction is extreme enough to warrant re-evaluation of environmental practice and gender ideology, Tyler Durden presents us with a multiplicity of calamitous circumstances. Like McCandless, Fight Club’s narrator has limited voice; traditional, heteronormative avenues of communication and protest restrict one’s ability to act out against dominant discourse; his need for voice spawns Durden. When someone like Durden is limited in such ways, his reaction is unacceptable by social standards, yet 75 is a reaction of equal force against the restrictions placed upon his individuality by social expectations.

Before Durden emerges, the narrator is like any other contemporary worker: he goes to work, sits in his cubicle, goes home to his apartment. He travels a lot, a practice for which he has developed a specific process. But the narrator is inflicted by a sickness civilization cannot cure. As an insomniac, the narrator has trouble sleeping and depends upon society to cure his ills. After all, the attraction of civilization lies within the safety that one gains from joining society; if civilization cannot provide the necessary accoutrements to guarantee safety, then the attractions no longer out-weigh the limitations placed upon the individual. The narrator explains: “I just wanted to sleep,” he says, “I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200-milligram-sized. I wanted red- and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconals” (Palahniuk 19). Like any of his co-workers would have assuredly done, the narrator depends on society’s advanced technology to cure his ills. Yet, society does not support him by fixing his sickness. His doctor tells him that “insomnia is just the symptom of something larger” and he ought to

“[f]ind out what’s actually wrong” (Palahniuk 19). The doctor is correct: the insomnia the narrator is suffering is only a symptom of society restricting his wild self. When the narrator realizes that his real sickness is caused by the society he asked to cure him,

Durden (the narrator’s wildness) emerges.

Durden, through his disobedience and rebellion, challenges dominant discourse to recognize shifting ideologies in environmentalism and gender constructions. The first step in Durden’s process is to establish fight clubs. Oddly enough, his fight clubs are full of rules. Before each and every meeting, Durden stands in the middle of their basement 76 coliseum and addresses the men who plan to physically abuse one another: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club… The second rule of fight club… is you don’t talk about fight club” (Palahniuk 50). There are seven rules, such as “two men per fight,” “one fight at a time,” and “if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight”

(Palahniuk 50). While this may seem contradictory to the spirit of disobedience, since

Durden demands unadulterated loyalty and submission from his followers, the important thing to recognize is that Durden is creating his own set of rules outside of larger cultural restrictions. They may be regulations to some extent, but they are his regulations and the ability to create that sort of freedom offers Durden an opportunity to gain agency he previously did not have. And though the masculinity that Durden is trying to recapture may be a retroactive masculinity, rather than a progressive model, he is able to counter movements that limit shifting gender ideologies to traditional models. The value in the advent of fight club is that Durden and his fellow fighters are able to react against dominant discourse.

Project Mayhem, as the logical culmination of Durden’s rebellious action, is the next step in his process and enlarges his scope beyond just reclamation of autonomy from social restrictions. Along with reclamation of masculinity, Durden feels Project Mayhem can erase history. “We wanted to blast the world free of history,” Durden says, because history expects young generations to “foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge” without also expecting changes in historical treatment of environment (Palahniuk 124). In order to open up the possibility of voiceless subjects, such as the narrator, assuming voice, then Durden’s actions needed to erase the history of discourse that limited that voice. It is history, Durden realizes, that propagates dominant 77 discourse. Durden further realizes that the way humanity, particularly patriarchal, heteronormative culture, has historically treated the environment is a perfect example of why we must recognize shifts in environmental and gender ideologies. By identifying and encouraging those shifts, it is possible to disrupt history and rewrite dominant discourse. As Durden notes, “the goal of Project Mayhem… [was] the complete and right-away destruction of civilization,” and thereby, the destruction of precepts that limit the narrator’s ability to speak out against those dominant forces (Palahniuk 125). In this,

Durden also acknowledges the innate connection between the environment and gender as movements mediated by culture yet working to act outside of governing culture.

Project Mayhem also portrays the incredible differences between his reaction and

McCandless’: not only is McCandless non-violent and separatist, but Durden’s methods go beyond personal protest and create far-reaching effects amongst the public. One of

Durden’s first “homework assignments” is for members of Project Mayhem to pick a fight with random people on the street. “A man on the street will do anything not to fight,” Durden says (Palahniuk 149). Bringing the fight to random men on the street not only helps “remind these guys what kind of power they still have” but it also takes

Durden’s movement beyond the personal, making it public and political (Palahniuk 149).

Yet, even while Durden increases his movement and expands his focus to environmental concerns, it may still seem as if his acknowledgement of shifting gender ideologies is only encapsulated in reclamation of retroactive masculinity. However, the disobedience that Durden performs, particularly in his sexual practices, moves his actions beyond mere reclamation of retro masculinity; while Marla is involved, the disobedience they practice becomes about acting out against traditional gender roles and 78 heteronormative reproduction. His sex life with Marla Singer goes against all conceptions of civilized sexual practice: it is violent, both physically and emotionally, and it is often fleeting, offering no commitment or promises beyond the confines of the bedroom. Perhaps the most disturbing moment between the two comes when Marla tells

Tyler she wants to get pregnant because she wants “to have Tyler’s abortion” (Palahniuk

59). This goes against the history of sex as an act of reproduction and further gives agency to new conceptions of gender. Marla plans in advance to act upon the precepts of pro-choice, rather than in response to a pregnancy. Pre-meditating such an act destroys dominant gender ideologies that claim sex for reproductive purposes in strict heteronormative circumstances. Further, the fact the Durden feels “Marla is some twisted bitch” but gets off on that, “likes that a lot” in fact, shows not only the disobedience in their actions, but the progressivism in their ability to influence cultural perceptions of gender norms. In much the same way, perceptions of the environment must be equally changed: as culture can no longer view gender as a masculine/feminine binary based upon traditional, 1950’s conceptions of the American family, we can no longer view the environment as a human binary, the conquerable land that was previously mistreated and now needs protection and saving. As we must recognize contemporary gender roles as fluid, shaped by culture, we must also recognize that our perceptions of environment are shaped by mediating forces, and contemporary conceptions of nature deserve the same fluidity that shifting gender ideologies deserve.

Conceptions of the wild have changed as ideologies of gender and the environment altered. Throughout the post-war era, the explosion of different activist movements brought shifts in many discourses. Two of the most obvious affected have 79 been environmental and gender discourses. Advances over the 1960’s progressed both environmentalism and feminism. Other social developments such as the advent of youth culture and suburbanization helped spur the shifting in gender ideology and treatment of the environment. During the 1960’s, conceptions of wildness changed when environmentalism and feminism forever connected ecology and gender in the public sphere. Through the disobedience of those two movements, governmental and public perception of the wild became a vision of not only wilderness areas or remote lands, but also of gender and environmental concerns.

When conceptions of the wild once again changed during the 1980’s, many of those progressive discourses from the 1960’s were somehow inhibited, whether through public policy or reactions to 1960’s activism. Those that previously had attained voice through their activism were no longer afforded the same opportunities. Despite the reality of changes in environmental and gender discourses, during the 1980’s more traditional patriarchal narratives worked to retain retroactive models that were detrimental to newly expanding gender perceptions and environmental concerns. Rather than working with and building upon progress made during the 1960’s, the policy and art during the 1980’s further complicated developments in both discourses leading to eventual crises in both environmentalism and gender.

The 1990’s mark the culmination of crises in environmentalism and gender. Into

The Wild and Fight Club display the 1990’s reaction to both crises. The inability of civilized culture to recognize changes in gender and treatment of the environment places certain individuals outside of civilization. The only reasonable resolution to the process of othering is to gain access to that part of themselves that civilized society attempts to 80 keep dormant: their wild self. In accessing wildness, those placed outside of traditional culture are then able to challenge the dominant discourses of gender and environmentalism. Their protests may be regarded as emblematic of failure; their inability to come to terms with social constraints or protest in less radical, extreme proves the need to find less perilous, yet more effective, forms of social activism. Whether rebellion manifests through methods of silent revolution and self-imposed isolation, like

Christopher McCandless, or through violence and destruction, like Tyler Durden, what remains clearest from both methodologies is the desire and need to act against that restrictive discourse. While they may have failed at providing accessible forms of cultural protest, they succeed in disrupting dominant discourse and presenting that need to a larger public. After all, McCandless’ story caught the attention of Jon Krakauer, who made sure his story caught public attention. Now McCandless’ story is a bestselling book and a full-length feature movie that was nominated for an Oscar; through this exposure, his protests actually affected the discourses he was so un-enamored with. So, while McCandless’ form of protest may be inaccessible to the general public, his example has an effect upon dominant discourse by causing Americans to realize their impact and determine courses of activism that are accessible. McCandless and Durden’s desire to challenge the way society views traditional gender discourse and treatment of the environment reflects a larger cultural need to reassess environmental practice and gender constraints, a need that may not have been apparent to most Americans before the extremeness of their actions. In other words, McCandless’ and Durden’s disobedience reflects a cultural need to reassess our praxis. 81

Ecocritical theory asks theorists and readers to not only consider human impact on nature but other spheres of theory that conflict with dominant culture as well. After all, to reiterate Lynn White Jr., humanity has always affected the environment, and will continue to. But separating humanity from the environment as separate entities is not necessarily a way of somehow controlling our impact. Rather, by acknowledging that environmental practices interact with and affect strictly human discourses, like gender, we can then create methods the combine movements and propagate larger goals in unison, instead of in competition. Wilderness may historically be conceived of as a landscape, a forested mountain devoid of human impact. But wildness is also masculine discourse, feminist activism, and environmental proliferation. In realizing the wild, we realize the interconnectedness of American cultural discourses and progressives desires to reassess those discourses in order to re-evaluate praxis. American’s must reassess those discourses, rather than settling for more traditional conceptions based on histories that limit, and will continue to limit, the voices of othered individuals like Chris McCandless and Tyler Durden. By re-evaluating praxis, Americans have the opportunity to create more appropriate contemporary conceptions of gender and treatment of the environment.

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