Epilogue

This chapter emphasizes how intersections of scientific, aesthetic, economic, and material interests in early mountain climbing across nations and continents furthers the understanding of the development of sensual, place-based attachments. It proposes a new environmental culture that would renegotiate concepts of autonomy and freedom. It also reflects on the experiences of early mountaineers that become amplified in the Anthropocene, in which people become victims rather than masters of nature in the face of climate change's destructive floods, devastating fires, and droughts. The chapter investigates place attachment as a means of fostering environmental awareness that relates to the theories of Merleau–Ponty, who posed that the sense of orientation develops in relationship to the surroundings. It also explains how perception always involves movement in the world, as it is embedded in the bodily motor capacities of the senses.

Icecapades

This chapter focuses on James David Forbes and Louis Agassiz, two glaciologists that fueled a passion for ice and snow that prominently figured in the public imagination. It looks into Agassiz's “Études sur les glaciers” and its accompanying atlas of thirty-two plates that stirred sublime awe and scientific curiosity. It also talks about how Forbes, in contrast to Agassiz, fashioned his “Travels Through the Alps of Savoy” in a format and style after Horace-Bénédict de Saussure's publication as a reference for both scientists and mountaineers. The chapter emphasizes how Forbes and Louis Agassiz's works divulge their infatuation with glaciers as a highly dynamic, volatile, and agentic environment. It also discloses Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz who assumed Agassiz's legacy after his death in December 1873 by publishing “Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence.”