Margaret Fuller’s “Summer on the Lakes” as it Relates to Ecosystem Experiences

  A blog on an outside reading

    Margaret Fuller’s chronologization of her personal experience with the outdoors offers an interesting insight to eco-tourism. Although Fuller takes time to enjoy a sunset like other early nature writers, she also traveled further than her back-yard ecosystem. Fuller  journeyed to the Great Falls, a more tourist-based and built-up spectacle. At the time it was a different and interesting to write about such an outdoors experience.

 

     I find her view of the development at Niagara Falls interesting; “People complain of the buildings at Niagara, and fear to see it further deformed. I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension…” (page 7). She goes on to She chronicles a mix of reactions including  lack-luster emotions while lounging around the hotel and at the falls. Fuller’s reaction to early eco-tourism is fascinating. I find that some of my favorite outdoors experiences are not to built-up and “deformed” locations such as Niagara, rather the simpler forms of nature such is found in her sunset experience. A sunset never ceases to awe me.

 

    I wonder if Fuller would still hold her quote today if she had known of the expansion of National Parks and further eco-tourist adventures. As smaller countries and Appalachian communities have a post-coal turn to eco-tourism I wonder how she would view this. I am hesitant to enjoy Fuller’s writing and sentiments, because large ecotourism locations have lost their ecology. People go for few and maybe learn a couple facts, they rarely emersed themselves in a new ecosystem let alone the ecosystem they live in. I believe that most people would learn more journeying through the soil in their backyard, than in a journey around Yellowstone.