Amerikan Yaban Hayatındaki Eko-Göçebeler: Christopher McCandless ve Everett Ruess’in Oto/Bioyografilerinin Bir Analizi

Abstract

Everett Ruess and Christopher McCandless were two young wanderers setting on adventures in the American wilderness. Despite living in different decades, they showed a similar disdain for society and left behind their traditional and socially accepted lifestyles and journeyed into the wilderness with a drive fueled by their love for nature. Gradually cutting their ties to the civilized world, they turned into deterritorialized nomads, as defined by the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari, wandering freely in the American wilderness. These journeys and their departure from society can be seen as both an anti-authoritarian attitude and a process of self-discovery in nature. Ruess and McCandless did not see nature as a place to be domesticated and dominated, but as a place to exist and become ecologically conscious nomads or, in short, eco-nomads. This article examines McCandless and Ruess as eco-nomads. The auto/biographical works written about these two explorers offer exemplary life stories to protect the environment in today’s world of environmental challenges.