Mountaineering, from Adventure to Knowledge

A (mis)guided adventure tourism experience: An autoethnographic analysis of mountaineering in Bolivia

Due to the fast growing nature of the adventure tourism industry and the commodification of adventure activities therein, improved understanding of adventure tourism experiences and mountaineer adventure tourists in particular is needed. In an effort to move beyond traditional market segmentation approaches, this study analysed autoethnographical data from an adventure tourism mountaineering ex...

From Faerie Tale to Adventure Game

Elephants avoid costly mountaineering

Understanding the behavioural decisions underlying animal movements is a major challenge. Here we report evidence for the importance of the abiotic terrain feature 'gradient' in guiding the movements of African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana). Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking data overlaid onto digital elevation and surface gradient models show that elephants tend to avoid steep...

From Adamovec to Dubrovnik: an extended adventure, 1971-1992.

Fortunate encounter 1: By 1970, I had been employed for 5 years at what was then named the Communicable Disease Center, now the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Atlanta, Georgia. A telephone call came from the Director of CDC, who asked whether I might be interested in serving as the Project Officer for a Special Foreign Currency Program, “Arboviruses in Yugoslavia;” I wa...

Naturalising purpose: from comparative anatomy to the 'adventure of reason'.

Kant's analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presu...