The Amenity Migrants

Why They come Up to the Mountains?

Key motivators of amenity migration

The original construct from 1996 had three factors:

Higher valuing of the natural environment, cultural differentiation and leisure, learning and spirituality (Price et al., 1997)

Superior natural environment and differentiated culture

From available information it appears
that mountain natural environment is the more
common motivator or, for some places, is the
more articulated of the two by the amenity seekers
and the promoters of their migration (especially
land developers and real estate agents;
public tourism and recreation officials).

It shows that many
in-migrants principally motivated by the consumption
of amenities find or make work after
their arrival in high-amenity places

Müller
(Chapter 17, this volume) cites a Swedish study in
which 80% of the in-migrants were amenities
‘consumption led’, the remainder being ‘primarily
production led’ (moving for specific employment
opportunity).

Understanding the relationship between
amenity migration and tourism has been advanced
here.

Perlik (Chapter 15) finds that the European
Alps’ tourism typically excludes amenity migration.

However, in other places studied, tourism is a
primary source of income for amenity migrants
wanting to obtain it from their new place of residence (Glorioso, Chapter 18; Hall, Chaper 20;
Moore et al., Chapter 9; Müller, Chapter 17;
Otero et al., Chapter 14; Thompson, Chapter 7,
this volume).

Spiritual Dimension

Spirituality is an essential part of human existence.
But it is elusive by its very nature. Thus,
when we inquire into the contribution of spirituality
to amenity migration to mountains, we are
to a degree searching for something hidden
behind the ranges (to paraphrase Rudyard
Kipling’s great mountain poem, The Explorer).

Through the Feng Shue tradition in
China, temples of both Taoists and Buddhists
were set among mountains and waterfalls, as
these landforms were considered to have energy
conducive to spiritual practice (Fisher and
Luyster, 1991).

When I was a young man
living on a Prairie ranch on the edge of the
Canadian Rockies, our foreman once said to me
‘God had a hangover when he made the mountains.’
He avoided the nearby Rockies at all
costs. I have also heard other people express
feelings of oppression and an uncomfortable
sense of being confined in mountain environments.

These modern people echo the feeling of
many western Europeans before the Romantic
period, who experienced the Alps’ chaotic landforms
as offensive to their sense of harmony
(Milne and Milne, 1962).

When Scottish botanist
David Douglas first saw the Canadian Rockies
from the Big Bend of the Columbia River in
1827, he wrote that the scene ‘impresses on the
mind a feeling beyond what I can express. I
would say a feeling of horror’ (in Brown, 2002:
145).

Even more negative views were held into
the 1880s, by Swiss mountain guides who feared
being attacked by satanic powers on the Furgenn
Ridge of the Matterhorn (Blakeney, 1979).

But
for many people in many cultures, mountains
are places of special reverence. They certainly
are for me.

Canada’s first commissioner of National
Parks and the creator of the world’s first park
service, J.B. Harkin, openly expressed a spiritual
response to mountains: ‘Let our mountain parks,
at least, continue to offer challenge to hardihood
and courage. In these silent wildernesses there
are “holy places”’ (Harkin, 1957: 12).

Canadian
geologist and explorer A.P. Coleman wrote
‘There is a cleanness and virginity, an exquisite
loneliness about many Rocky Mountain peaks
and valleys… There is a feeling of having caught
Nature unawares at her work of creation’ (in
Harkin, 1957: 14).