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| photo Michael Connor |
I had this piece published in Rapid Magazine way back in 2014 but stumbled upon it again and see it as valuable enough to resurface. It highlights Bernard Amy's important point about the value of outdoor and adventure activities:
In his few lines he managed to articulate what many before
him have attempted and failed. 74 year old French mountaineer Bernard Amy was
this winter [2014] made an honorary member of the Italian Academic Alpine Club. His
acceptance speech, while only a couple of paragraphs long, was remarkable.
My Ph.D. research ultimately falls into the motivation field, and one consistent belief in this area of study is that
people cannot be trusted to explain why we do the things we do. Motivation is
complex, and each situation is complex. There is no one reason for anything,
let alone the highly biased reason we provide to validate ourselves.
Unfortunately for all of us outdoor types, George Mallory’s 1923 justification
for attempting the as-yet unclimbed Mount Everest “because it’s there” is much
more shallow than it is profound. Because of this no very famous statement we all deal – paddlers and
climbers alike - with a public perception that we are reckless risk takers. We
are written off as irresponsible and totally lacking in reflection.
Amy included all mountain sports when he spoke of society becoming increasingly
“precautionary”, requiring us to redefine our “social contract”. A social
contract is more or less a level of permission granted upon all of us to do
what we choose – assuming it meets some nebulous standard that society deems
ok. Adventure activities such as paddling and climbing live on the borders of
such acceptance, as non-enthusiasts have a hard time understanding why anyone
would do what we do. Mallory’s comment still echoes into today.
Amy’s significant contribution is in changing the conversation. He proposed that in order to be “accepted as a risky activity, we must explain what the mountains give us and what we learn from them. In other words, we must not try to explain why we go to the mountains, but what we find there”. What Amy is saying is that our own personal reasons can’t justify an activity, but their outcomes may. He goes on to list some of the adventure sports outcomes that could prove “useful” to society:
o
the development of our capacity for enterprise
and initiative
o
developing courage through reasoned risk taking
o
the capacity for autonomy and the feeling of
responsibility
o
the appreciation of the values of solidarity
o
self-confidence, character development,
self-control, and socialization
As the basis of a social contract, what we do for outdoor recreation, education or tourism is not only acceptable, but important to society. Read like this, adventure sports become a vehicle to provide skills and abilities widely recognized as
lacking in today’s society. In fact what we do may align more closely with
societal ideals of ‘precaution’ than non-participants would think: Amy characterized
mountaineering as having “a permanent element of doubt, [and] a continuous
questioning of oneself about the sense of the activity”. This doubt, I would argue,
is a defining feature of all adventure sports. Our ability to deal with
uncertainty is what is needed in today’s society. I take my hat off to Bernard
Amy for wisely laying the foundation of a redefined social contract.
Find Amy's address and comments here