The Great Outdoors: What Tourism Reveals about Nature and Culture in a Consumer Century

Imagine the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Do snow-capped peaks, pine-forested slopes, a pristine lake spring to mind? While all of these elements certainly exist within Colorado’s high country, this composite is a carefully arranged scene, and one that comes as much from human designers as from the rocks, trees, and waters of the mountain ranges themselves. Take the Colorado state quarter. When initially released, many believed it depicted “an idealized mountain, rather than any actual one” (Philpott, p. 60). The artist later revealed that he based this engraving on a personal photograph of Longs Peak. Yet, even after learning that the quarter depicted one of Colorado’s most climbed, treacherous, and memorable of its 14,000-foot peaks, Governor Bill Owens was intriguingly unconcerned. “I don’t know which mountain the artist looked at. It’s indicative of all the mountains of Colorado”; specific or “emblematic,” it didn’t matter to him. More important was the “25-cent advertisement for one-of-a-kind, endless beauty that we know and love here in Colorado.”¹ In promoting natural scenic values, Owens hinted, specific landscapes were less valuable than symbolic ones, with long-standing power to generate associations with spectacular nature in Colorado.

Analysis of evocative images like this one sits at the intersection of environmental history and cultural history. The authors here build on a growing body of literature that uses tourism to examine the tricky historical relationships between nature and culture; they cite influential scholars on the subject including Hal Rothman, Marguerite S. Shaffer, David Wrobel, Paul Sutter, Annie Gilbert Coleman, and David Louter, among others. Studies of tourism hold the potential to focus upon what strictly environmental or cultural approaches sometimes elide: that the apparent division between material natures and human cultures is less certain than it seems. Instead, tourism capitalizes on the entanglement between the physical and the cultural; and it exposes the trouble with presuming Nature—mountains, rocks, trees, fish, squirrels, climate—to be a stable conceptual barometer against which to measure cultural beliefs or applied meanings. As geographer James Proctor argued: “Biophysical and human nature are incomprehensible outside of culturally based knowledge schemes, so the vision of nature as culture cannot be readily dismissed as merely a vision of ideas of nature versus nature itself.”² These books undermine the seeming linearity of a narrative that might otherwise chart the drift from untouched environments towards extractive uses, culminating in the rise of cultural appreciation. Taking tourists seriously means seeing how physical environments, resource use, and the meanings we make of them go hand-in-hand.

The Colorado quarter is a case in point. We might easily dismiss such repetitive, generalized place icons as cultural perversions of physical places. But as these authors demonstrate for Colorado’s high elevations and the Midwest’s northern forests, these “scenic clichés,” as William Philpott terms them, framed people’s understanding of the landscape. Whether in marketing material or highway engineers’ reports, magazine features or landscape management plans, these descriptive habits drove social shifts in how people saw the land, its constituent parts, the relationship between places and humans. Private developers and public officials in Colorado and the Upper Midwest went to great lengths to get the physical world to match the imagined one. These analyses prompt new questions about the relationship of nature and tourism—and of both of those to twentieth-century phenomena like...