Doing the Franklin: Wilderness Tourism and the Construction of Nature

The contemporary idea of wilderness is intertwined with the ideal wilderness experience. In the case of the Franklin River, rafting expeditions were central to the images used by conservationists to save the river from a proposed dam in the 1980s. This paper illustrates how “wilderness” shapes not only how tourism is conducted on the river, but also the understandings and values attributed to the experience. Acknowledgment of the political effectiveness of the idea of wilderness, it is argued, must be tempered by the observation that the contribution of “wilderness experience” to communal environmental understanding is at best ambiguous.