Fishing Guides in the Anthropocene

Graduation date: 2017How do fishing guides of the Cascade and Coast Range rivers negotiate the conflicting tensions between their client’s desire to experience the wild and the extractive nature based tourism of their role as fishing guides? How do they position their services relative to the environment and an imagined landscape that serves as a metaphorical boundary area for their clients? By situating these professionals as guides to a human impacted and discursively constructed wilderness in the context of the Anthropocene, I show that the guides are entrepreneurs meeting the desires of their clients to visit an imagined landscape and participate in what they see as ecotourism. The extractive nature of the nominal activity that has been defined out of its proper context does not prevent the guides from positioning themselves as providers of wilderness experiences. By a combination of applied focus and ethnographic methods, I show that the tension involved in catching and killing fish is less important than satisfying the need to experience a connectedness with the wild