I enjoyed reading Thoreau because I enjoy spending solitary time in the outdoors, and many of his passages describing a certain river, sound, or moment in nature resonated with me. I think that the themes in Walden and in Thoreau's journal entries are popular today, with the success of books and films like Into The Wild and A Walk in the Woods. I do wonder, however, if Thoreau would approve of modern outdoors-people, who for the most part are reliant on expensive, high-tech gear.
The messages of popular companies like Patagonia, L.L. Bean, The North Face, etc. have always seemed slightly mixed to me. The combination of consumerism and immersion in nature seems paradoxical by Thoreau's standards, because the culture of materialism is partly what Thoreau was seeking to escape by going into the woods to the first place. Marketing campaigns for some of these gear companies sometimes reflect this paradox: Patagonia has a "Worn Wear" campaign, promoting the reuse of Patagonia clothing items for as long as possible. By promoting the environmentally friendly message of not buying new things each year, they are hoping to get more people to... buy new things.
Arc'teryx is a smaller Canadian company that makes a lot of high tech gear, mostly climbing apparel. Their ad campaigns are often centered around beautiful videos with high production values that very rarely say anything about the clothing items themselves, but about a compelling reason to spend more time in the outdoors. This one, called "Silence", has almost nothing to do with Arc'teryx as a company, but it promotes a lifestyle that inherently requires one to purchase things (Arc'teryx hopes that those things come from their brand). Like Thoreau, Arc'teryx is portraying nature as an escape from the clutter of day to day urban life.
I similarly was perplexed by hypocrisy of the Worn Wear campaign. When I arrived at their promotional event at Essex last week, there was a heaping pile of around 20 coats on the ground - each worth several hundreds of dollars, and yet now deemed free because each had some minuscule hole that for the most part, wouldn't have affected the warmth of the coat. I still can't comprehend how a 2 centimeter rip made 400 dollars meaningless.
ReplyDeleteYes, the campaign seems to reveal that they are at least partially aware of the deep contradiction in their, and our, love of the "outdoor lifestyle," one which is at once a rejection of some consumer values, and an indulgence of them. I felt this quite keenly canoeing this weekend. I felt real consumer lust for the fancy carbon canoes and gear I saw flying by us, and felt frustration at how poorly my camelbak bladder worked. If only I had more and better gear, I thought, this exploration of the ADKS by boat would be funner and better! And we'd go faster. Yikes. It shows how completely we are enmeshed in our culture, I suppose.
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