If forced to distill the modern environmental movement to a single credo, one would be hard-pressed to improve on “Think like a mountain.” The phrase, now unavoidable in the promotional materials of conservation groups, originated in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), in a brief chapter about the shortsightedness of wolf hunting. Decades earlier, as a young officer in the Forest Service, Leopold had championed a sportsmen’s campaign to exterminate large predators from the Southwest to stimulate the growth of the deer population.1 But by the time he began writing the book that would help shape the environmental movement—a book that he proposed calling Thinking Like a Mountain—Leopold had come to recognize his folly:
I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
Dead of its own too-much.
The hunters, ranchers, and game managers who failed to understand the consequences of their actions, writes Leopold, have “not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”
The idea that intervention in the natural world might yield devastating unintended consequences for humanity—that “the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating”—was not original to Leopold. It dates back at least a century earlier, to Alexander von Humboldt (“In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation”) and acolytes such as George Perkins Marsh and Charles Darwin. But it was Leopold who elaborated the insight into an ethical structure for guiding humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. What does it mean to think like a mountain? It means that “too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.” It means “peace in our time.” It means, echoing Thoreau, that “in wildness is the salvation of the world.” It means, in short, that we should respect the mountain, because the mountain does not respect us.
Ecologically minded novelists in recent years have increasingly asked a Leopoldian question: How might a novelist think like a mountain? “Nonhumans can, do, and must speak,” writes Amitav Ghosh in the concluding passage of The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). “It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories.”
How might that restoration be achieved, exactly? How can a narrative form dedicated to the examination of individual human experience reflect a view of the world in which human experience is not paramount—at least without resorting to rank anthropomorphism, sententious advocacy writing, gimmickry, or just plain corniness?
These questions may have greater urgency now that we’ve entered our permanent season of environmental dread, but they’re not new. Explorers have attempted to scale this Matterhorn before. Among the most successful of these is the writer who can safely lay claim to the title of the Twentieth Century’s Great Montane Novelist.
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, whose cragged, shell-shocked face embellishes the Swiss 200-franc note, lived in the shadow of mountains, wrote about mountains, was haunted by mountains. He grew up in Lausanne and, apart from a youthful decade or so in Paris, spent the rest of his life in his native canton, Vaud, publishing more than twenty novels. The president of Vaud’s tourism office recently defined the cantonal character as marked by “self-flagellation and restraint,” which is not a bad description of the Swiss author’s sensibility.
In Ramuz’s novels, mountains menace. Derborence (1934), first published in English as When the Mountain Fell (1947), takes as its subject an actual event from 1714, when a mountain collapsed on a village. The first part of the novel depicts the landslide, which killed more than a dozen people and inspired locals to rename the local range Les Diablerets: the Devil’s Mountains. In the second part, set two months later, a man, or something resembling a man, crawls out of the rubble. Si le soleil ne revenait pas (What If the Sun…, 1937) is set in the shadow of a steep mountain that blocks the sun during the coldest six months. When a local oracle predicts one year that the sun will never return, the village descends into madness.
Great Fear on the Mountain, first published in 1926, has another exquisite horror premise. The members of an impoverished Alpine village debate whether to send a second expedition of men and animals into a high mountain valley, at an altitude of 7,500 feet, where a rich pasture lies beneath the base of a monstrous glacier. The rationale for the expedition is clear and urgent: the cattle, the villagers’ only real source of income and sustenance, are going hungry, and the pasture has enough grass to fatten seventy animals all summer. The path is clear, the weather is good, and the survival of the village is at stake. The only reason not to mount a second expedition is the memory of what happened on the first.
What exactly did come to pass during that expedition twenty years earlier is not immediately explained. “No one ever really found out what happened up there,” says the young chairman of the Village Council. (This is in part because almost every member of the earlier expedition died.) In a reversal of our current political dynamic, it is the village’s older generation that is wary of exhausting every available natural resource, while the younger generation calls for rapacious economic exploitation. The young farmers are not intimidated by the elders’ stories, even when the old men warn that a new expedition will put at risk “not just their lives in this world, but their lives in the next.” Ultimately the matter is put to a vote. The pasture boosters win, fifty-eight to thirty-three.
Despite the Transylvanian trappings, Ramuz is not a Gothic writer: there are no darkened skies or crooked staircases or decaying castles. He locates the uncanny in natural beauty: the more pristine the setting, the more ominous. On a scouting trip to the pasture, the men climb along the bank of a silent white river that moves between meadows “like a browsing animal.” They enter a gorge so loud that “it would’ve been no use shouting at the top of their voices”—a description that naturally raises the question, What would make them shout? As the day ends, the gathering darkness advances toward them, as if summoned by a demon:
You were caught in it, it weighed on your shoulders, it was on your head, on your thighs, around your hands, all along your arms, hindering your movements, entering into your mouth; it was chewed, it was spat out, it was chewed again, spat out again, like the earth of the forest. They struggled like this for a moment, like they’d been buried alive.
Still the men press on until they reach the pasture. And what a pasture: vast, with grass like felt, springy underfoot. At the far end stands an old chalet, built directly into the rock face and used by the first expedition—“a good fine chalet.” Beyond that lies the glacier, “painted in lovely colors.” There is something a bit odd about the glacier: its colors seem to approach, or lurch, like a hypnotic snare. The men try not to look at it.
“This place is higher than the good life and it’s higher than men,” writes Ramuz, an observation that would seem like praise in any other context. In Ramuz, however, “higher than men” is a threat. One can only speculate about the allegorical associations of Ramuz’s fiction to Swiss readers in 1926, but in 2025 it’s easy to read the present into this distant Alpine past. The horror of the picturesque virginal pasture is the horror of a summer’s day in November, of a snowless Christmas, of unseasonably warm surf on the coast of Maine.
It is always a pretty day up on the mountain, “bright and lovely,” with “unbroken fine weather,” the sun “exceptionally strong.” The wind seems never to blow. Snowmelt streams down the cliff faces. Yet this little slice of heaven soon drives the members of the expedition insane.
There are seven people in the expedition, including a thirteen-year-old assistant. The oldest, Barthélemy, is a survivor of the previous expedition—perhaps the only one. He believes he is immune to the mountain’s diabolical insinuations because he wears a devotional card from Saint Maurice around his neck. On the first morning, upon waking in the chalet, he asks the others if they’d heard footsteps at night. “Because the other time,” he says, “it began like that…”
It begins like that again: footsteps on the roof. The child is the first to escape, as soon as the sun rises. He reappears in the village shivering, but no amount of hot tea can save him. When Romain, a burly eighteen-year-old, hikes back down the mountain to return a mule, a stone falls on the animal’s head and it tumbles into the gorge, never to be seen again. The livestock in the pasture come down with some kind of plague and go mad, charging and bucking, forcing the men to slaughter them one by one. When the fiancée of one of the men tries to visit, she falls off the trail into the river and drowns. Romain shoots off his hand in a hunting accident; the wound festers. The men turn on one another, the animals turn on the men, and finally the glacier turns on them all. Its work in the pasture completed, the glacier descends upon the village below. In the end Ramuz’s mountain novels all converge on the same fate: mountain devours village.
It is difficult to think like a mountain because mountains…don’t think. Aldo Leopold’s prompt is allegorical, suggestive, ethical—all fine and good, until you have to write a coherent narrative. The novel, as a form, is innately hostile to collective experience, generalization, moralizing, or sloganeering. It flows, instead, in the opposite direction: toward particularity, moral tension, idiosyncrasy. How, then, can the form accommodate a nonhuman protagonist?
One of Ramuz’s strategies is to ensure that there are no human protagonists. Great Fear on the Mountain is a defiantly ensemble production: the reader’s attention is divided almost evenly among the seven members of the expedition and several of the villagers left behind. Ramuz rarely lingers on any subplot for long. This narrative promiscuity has a formal component: he moves fluidly between characters and narratives without clearly marking the transitions. One especially deceptive passage begins with a conversation between the Chairman and Clou, a villager who hopes to join the expedition, before morphing into something else altogether:
“Well,” the Chairman said, “it’s up to my relative, you understand; I’ll let him know…”
“For my part,” Clou said, “it’d suit me pretty well…”
Night was about to fall, it was a Saturday evening. The two of them were there alone together. The two of them had once again gone up the path that leads behind the village, while Clou was talking with the Chairman.
Sneaky business, this. “The two of them” does not refer to the only two characters who have appeared in the scene up to this point, as that final clause makes clear. The “two of them” are instead two new characters who have yet to be introduced: a woman, Victorine, and her boyfriend, Joseph, another member of the expedition, who goes unnamed for yet another three pages.
Ramuz’s slipperiness extends to his manipulation of authorial voice. Once we’re settled into the roving close third person it yields, unpredictably, to an implicating second: “But Barthélemy was no longer listening, he’d turned his back on you.” Me? Elsewhere the collective first plural butts in: “There was no longer any sun. There was no longer anything but this huge shadow that was upon us.” Tenses shift, often within a single sentence (“Barthélemy was alone, he looks around”); “there” becomes “here”; and the reader’s vantage point shifts abruptly in a prose version of a jump cut, as when a group of men hiking up a mountain trail is suddenly reframed from thousands of feet below, as tiny black points against the snow. We never feel confident that we really know who these characters are; we don’t even know who we are. That this shiftiness doesn’t seem baffling—at least, not often—but beguiling is a measure of Ramuz’s control (as well as that of the translator, Bill Johnston).
These devices are all trained toward a single end: the leveling of the hierarchical relationship between the human and nonhuman world. People become ants: deindividualized, disposable, fragile, driven by primal impulses. Mountains become gods.
Ramuz’s narrative quirks may seem unconventional within the world of the modern novel, but within the much smaller neighborhood of ecologically minded fiction, such innovations are common—even, it would seem, inevitable. In George R. Stewart’s Storm (1941), told largely from the perspective of a hurricane advancing across the Californian coast, the hurricane is endowed with a proper name, Maria, and a personality.2 The faceless (and frequently imbecilic) human characters tend to go by their professional titles: Junior Meteorologist, Chief Service Officer, Load-Dispatcher. Maria lives; her victims merely react. In Dino Buzzati’s Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio (The Secret of the Old Forest, 1935), a sacred forest bristles with shape-shifting genies who thwart a foolhardy general’s plans to clear it for timber. The doomed inhabitants of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) have recurring dreams in which they travel back in time to anarchic, ancient ecosystems in which human beings have no place. Their identities unravel into “the drowned seas submerged beneath the lowest layers of your unconscious”—an echo of hallucinations that in Ramuz obliterate his characters’ sense of time, place, and even consciousness.3
Ramuz cannot resist the temptations of anthropomorphism, though in Great Fear on the Mountain the impulse is restrained. At one point Joseph fears that if he turns his back on the glacier, it will “jump on him from behind.” Elsewhere the glacier laughs menacingly and coughs. But these examples are infrequent and tend to reflect the superstitions of individual characters. Ramuz doesn’t fully entertain mountain consciousness until the novel’s final lines: “And never again, since that time, has the sound of cow bells been heard up there; for the mountain has its own ideas, for the mountain has its will.”
The mountain has its will. So do people. When pushed to confrontation, at least in Ramuz, the mountain wins. Leopold was more guarded on this point: “The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it.” It is dangerous to disregard the inherent rights of the natural world. But it is also dangerous to pretend that humanity can reduce its impact to negligibility—to nonexistence. The great challenge is to bring both forces into survivable balance. Can humanity exist, in any semipermanent condition, without bringing all of creation down upon itself? As in Leopold’s day, this remains an open question—the most important one.
The terror of Ramuz’s fiction has little to do with the fate of his individual characters—many of whom suffer merciless and usually abrupt deaths. The terror derives instead from the austere, godlike view of all human enterprise. In Ramuz, there is no eye on the sparrow. What seems at first to be a tale of nature’s revenge reveals itself to be something far bleaker: a portrait of nature’s indifference. “The sky was arranging itself, without paying any attention to us,” he writes. “We’re too small for it to pay any attention to us, for it to even imagine that we’re there.” Elsewhere Ramuz gazes upon Joseph as he crosses the pasture:
But who could have made him out? Did he even count? He was no longer even a dot amid the great areas of rock, through which he was threading his way; unseen, unheard, unseen by anyone, unheard by anyone; no longer even existing at moments.
Did he even count? becomes a refrain. “Humans are down below,” writes Ramuz, “but are they even seen? do they even count?” Do we even count?
No, we don’t—not to the sky, not to the mountain. But we count to ourselves. And this is the great challenge of ecological literature. If we really were to write like a mountain, human experience would become irrelevant, as would human drama, comedy, delight. And who would want to read that novel—the novel written by a mountain? Only another mountain.
The challenge, then, is to write about how this knowledge works on us—the knowledge of the interconnectedness of all life, our self-destructive tendencies, our cosmic insignificance. Does it make us nihilistic? Does it engender a deeper reckoning with the crises of our time? Does it make us—like Joseph—hike up a mountain into the great unknown? The answers depend on the reader, but fiction can help us to ask the right questions. At least until the mountain collapses on our heads.
English (US) · 