Reading Journal: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory

The reason this book is interesting to me is that it gets at the argument that wilderness areas are worth saving when they are sublime. When people are in those high places, the argument goes, they are able to make contact with something profound and this contact is healing in the broadest sense - it improves lives, improves souls, improves us as humans. See Heidi.

But then there is the obvious counterargument that goes: wait a second, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yosemite may be sublime for you, but maybe an open-pit mine is sublime for me. It would be useful to know if we can move beyond or dismiss either argument. And next, it would be nice to know with some more specificity what we are really talking about with this feeling of the mountain high.