"Everybody Wants to Pioneer Something Out Here" Landscape, Adventure, and Biopolitics in the American Southwest

This article analyzes a controversy that emerged when the first Eco-Challenge (R). race was held in southern Utah in 1995 and sparked resistance from environmentalists who saw it as overly commercial, likely to inundate the region with tourists, and damage lands and wildlife. In an analysis of the controversy, I argue that the problem was partially rooted in notions of "wilderness" as naturally empty, and as nationally symbolic. Though stake-holders disagreed on "correct" uses of the land, they all imagined the desert as an empty space of freedom and equality, which, mirrored 1990s understandings of markets as free and level-playing fields. Adventure sport thus presented a logical environment for making the citizen bodies demanded by 1990s neoliberal cultures: flexible, free, and constantly self-improving. But "wilderness" is made in symbolic material ways that reflect cultural exigencies as much as physical characteristics of place. Though such constructions efface human and nonhuman histories, I ask whether wilderness adventure can be imagined through more historical complexity.