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This article develops some contemporary themes in writing about humans and nature through a focus on the cultures, practices, and representations of rock climbing. Although as people our cultural-conceptual legacy weighs heavily on us, and the human-nature and culture-nature dichotomies are not entirely escapable, it is possible to think differently about our interrelations with nature, as others such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have shown. Reflection on rock climbing offers some routes into thinking differently. It illuminates nondichotomous moments in the exchanges between human and nonhuman natural bodies as they encounter and reciprocally encroach on each other. But human and nonhuman natures do not act alone: Other nonhuman entities (e.g., technologies, texts, and artifacts) are part of the networks that open and close possibilities for humans and for nonhuman nature. These other nonhumans afford chances for the reinvention of our selves and the spaces within which we act.It is now standard for commentaries on nature to begin with the observation that there is no singular entity that is Nature but rather that there are multiple natures and that nature is a contested concept framed by historical and cultural contingency. What does this mean for us, as people, though? For, in part, we become possible through our interrelations with nonhuman nature. This article explores this and other questions through a focus on the cultures, practices, and representations of traditional or adventure rock climbing.1 It draws on academic texts, climbing magazines and guidebooks, space and culture vol. 10 no.

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In many Australian communities, outdoor municipal pools are much loved yet constantly threatened with closure. Threats of closure inspire impassioned responses and it is clear that these seasonal pools offer much more than physical infrastructure. At first glance, the concept of ‘emotional geography’ seems to capture this ‘more’, and this essay, based on research at one such pool, demonstrates how pools afford sociality, embodied experiences and practices of emplacement that emotionally connect people to each other, to nature and to an imagined historical community. However, participants’ narratives also revealed affective intensities, and multisensory evocations of place and self synchronically encountered, that the concept of ‘emotional geography’ cannot capture. To understand the cultural meaning and personal significance of seasonal pools in Australia, we have to feel our way through the placial folding of affective intensities and emotional lives.