I WAS visiting a mountain nature center recently and was browsing through its small bookstore when I picked up a book about mountain lovers. It had profiles of different people. In the book was an article about the well-known mountaineer and photographer Brad Washburn.

Fully aware of the infiltration of ideology into the intellectual sport of nature loving, I warily began to read a bit, while standing there for a few minutes, about Mr. Washburn’s life and his views of the mountains.

It was not long before I encountered the inevitable poison.

Mr. Washburn, who died in 2007, had a lifelong passion for mountains. This romantic fixation co-existed with an alarming hatred of people. I don’t have his exact words, but his diatribe against “over-population” left no room for doubt about his beliefs. The mountains were being ruined, Washburn said. They weren’t being destroyed because of careless hiking practices. They were being ruined because too many people existed. Where once only a few hiked, now there were thousands. He mentioned one difficult summit in Alaska that now saw some 1,100 hikers a year. Ghastly.

There was no cure for this problem of too many nature lovers, the nature lover insisted, but that people stop producing people — and quick! There were far, far too many people in the world.

I put the book back on the shelf.

After leaving the store, I went on a short mountain walk with my husband on a trail that is probably visited every year by thousands of people. It was a beautiful summer day and the trail was empty except for a few stragglers.

We hiked up to a ledge overlooking a dramatic waterfall, its cold and clear, rushing waters sounding like air moving through the woods. I am not a photographer, but I took a mental snapshot of the scene and stored it in my internal files. I listened to the music.

I thought how lucky I am.

Some of the most ardent lovers of the woods and fields, the skies and stars are some of the most ardent haters of people. Odd, isn’t it? After all, what value would these mountains be if we couldn’t turn to someone and say, “Look, isn’t that beautiful?” Didn’t Mr. Washburn sell his photographs to people? Didn’t he say, “Look at that?”

What value would these mountains be if they didn’t mean something other than what they are — a something no rock or tree can grasp?

Better that I had never seen these cascading waters, these sublime summits and these deep woods, I thought then, than that they would make me regret the existence of a human soul. I’m not very “with it” as nature lovers go. I actually believe it would be great if there were lots more people in the world — and the right conditions, the right thinking to receive them. The woods await more nature lovers. That’s what I believe. The mountains are lonely. The fish are waiting to be caught. The stars want to be outnumbered.

As I said, Mr. Washburn died years ago. He no longer exists in this world.

But the mountains do.

They didn’t need his protection after all.

— Comments —

S.K. Orr writes:

This reminds me of the unsettling documentary Grizzly Man, which profiled the seriously misguided Timothy Treadwell, a young man who loved grizzlies and detested human beings. He and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by one of his beloved ursines in 2003. The bears he so nobly and selflessly wanted to protect from the vile humans are still roaming the earth, still flourishing. The sanctimonious and misanthropic Treadwell and his girlfriend are not.

Laura writes:

The more humans are hated, the more animals are loved.

That reminds me of a neighbor who is afraid of dogs and who likes to walk in a nature center nearby. Dogs are supposed to be on leashes, but usually they are not. She just politely says to people when a dog comes bounding toward her, “I’m afraid of dogs. Could you please put your dog on the leash?”

She has been so harshly berated by dog owners that she has given up walking in the nature center and now walks in the streets.

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