Wood, K: Past the Summit

Mountaineering narratives are ripe for ecocritical study. Climbing books describe feats of daring, often endingin heroic success or miserable tragedy. But few have asked what implications mountaineering literature may have on our cultural mindset and environmental ethics. This thesis explores that question, and examines how metaphors in mountaineering narratives can reveal underlying environmental ethics. While predominant metaphors visualize the mountains and environment as objectives, enemies, and arenas for humancompetition, more recent mountaineering texts offer a wider range of metaphors, including metaphors of goddess and spirit. These metaphors encourage a sustainable environmentalethics by implying an interconnected relationship between earth andhumanity, which may in turn have positive consequences for human society. By understanding the inherent assumptions in language,we can choose to resist metaphors that allow us to harm the worldand instead choose metaphors that will help us keep the entirebiotic community beautiful and stable.