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Under the intense conditions of extreme atmosphere and topography as well as media scrutiny, Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, has become an overdetermined icon of the sort that makes it difficult to distinguish between what is “natural” and “cultural” about its identity and status. Of course, Mount Everest is not unique for mixing the natural with the cultural; it is only unique in the particular ways in which nature and culture blend there. Indeed, especially since William Cronon’s edited collection of nature-culture studies Uncommon Ground was published in 1996, humanistic environmental scholars have found it difficult to imagine how nature might be separate from our culturally laden ideas about it. In the introduction to Uncommon Ground, Cronon notes that ideas of nature are always ultimately products of the culture that inscribes them. He identifies some of the embedded concepts of nature that have come to structure various forms of environmentalism—namely, nature as naive reality, moral imperative, Eden, virtual reality, commodity, return of the repressed, and contested terrain. Far from being mutually exclusive, many of these notions would seem to be intimately related and even mutually supportive (Cronon 1996, 23–56). All of these conceptions of nature can be seen at work on the naturalcultural entity known as Mount Everest. To wit: Everest occupies a place in the cultural imagination as a site of purity and permanence that must be protected from human-produced degradation (naive reality, moral imperative , and Eden). At the same time, the mountain is thoroughly permeated by Western fantasies about extremity and conquering nature as well as making money from access to nature (virtual reality and commodity ). And yet Mount Everest, with its often-unpredictable weather along with its shifting ice and rock landscapes, is seen as having a mind of its own, capable of exacting karmic revenge (return of the repressed). Given the multitude of vested interests in the mountain—many of them in conflict with one another, and/or operating under the auspices of defending 6 The Garbage Question on Top of the World Elizabeth Mazzolini 148 Elizabeth Mazzolini different ideas of Everest’s purity or exploitability—Mount Everest is undoubtedly , even perhaps above all else, contested terrain. Contestations over Everest become especially poignant when focused on the issue of garbage accumulation—a problem on Mount Everest commonly attributed to capitalism, especially in recent decades, as the highest mountain on earth has become an increasingly popular tourist destination . Without minimizing the seriousness of the problem, this chapter explores the extent to which garbage exists as much in the imagination and minds of people as it does on the ground. Just to be clear, garbage’s powerful hold on people’s imagination does not make it a “fake” problem , just as garbage’s mere presence on Mount Everest is not the full expression of the “real” nature of the problem (and neither does it suggest an obvious solution). An analytic look at examples of nature-culture configurations , such as those in Uncommon Ground, reveals that our ideas of nature (and judgments about what should happen to it) actually are founded as much in our values and ideals, including those unconsciously held, as they are in any independent external reality. How those ideals and reality are related depends on the specificities of the situation. In that vein, this chapter will take a close look at the particular natureculture configuration known as Mount Everest in order to demonstrate that judgments about the causes and extent of the garbage problem on Mount Everest as well as potential solutions to it owe less to (malleable and open to interpretation) material facts than to (embedded and difficult to dislodge) cultural ideas about what nature is, what it is for, and how it should be treated. These cultural notions create conflicts over how to define garbage, and whether it is something to be blamed on individuals , groups, institutions, or ideological systems—or whether it is even something to be blamed on anyone or anything at all. There are varying levels of certainty regarding facts, assessments, and policies surrounding the garbage problem on Mount Everest, and that certainty (and uncertainty ) reveals more about financial, affective, and collective archetypal investments in the mountain than it does about external reality. These investments tend to focus on entitled individual consumerism, and eschew systemic or nonsubjective approaches to Everest’s environment. This is not to make the now well-rehearsed point about the cultural construction of facts but rather to show...

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