We have all had defining moments.  An event–small, medium or large–that seems to change the course of everything.  For me, it was the rather random choice of topic (more on which after the jump) for a research project with a friend in graduate school, leading to my doctoral dissertation and then onward to nearly two decades in entrepreneurial conservation.  Not my expected career path in my teens, my twenties or even my early thirties. When I saw this opening line in a “culture” piece on The New Yorker‘s website, I was hooked:

In 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New England pastor who’d recently given up the ministry, delivered his first public lecture in America. The talk was held in Boston, and its nebulous-sounding subject (“The Uses of Natural History,” a title that conceals its greatness well) helped lay the groundwork for the nineteenth-century philosophy of transcendentalism. It also changed Emerson’s life.

With no illusions or delusions about the significance of Emerson’s random epiphany, versus my own, I can still relate. Emerson’s ideas and their impact had consequence during his lifetime for the place that became my research focus a century later.  As it happens, Emerson visited that place just before his 60th birthday, and was deeply amused (it inspired his writing for another two decades) and amazed.  That place, which I was interested in for historical reasons related to collective action (thus the occasional posts on this site with that topic as centerpiece), had consequence for late twentieth-century notions of how to develop tourism under a new model.

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