The American environmentalism is very specific because it is based on many phenomena that are directly linked to the American identity. The term itself in the American context carries a certain kind of aura and stimulates emotions partially because it heavily lies on another term that is crucial in the American way of relating to nature and that is wilderness. As William Cronon notes “wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest” (“The Trouble with Wilderness” 96). There is also a pinch of pride and sense of opposition in the word “environmentalism”. Environmentalism in the United States belongs next to all other –isms in the realm of social criticism; its range is therefore much wider than a mere focus on the protection of the environment. In short, environmentalism is as much about society as it is about its environment called nature.
There are several preconditions that make American environmentalism distinct and unique: First, it builds up on the history of rebellion against an authority. May it be the rebellion against the British oppressive rule, the American unjust government permitting slavery, the beat rebellion against conventional American values and the subsequent countercultural rebellion in the 1960s, or a grassroots rebellion against the government that destroys the environment, there always is some authority or institution serving as a unifying force for the counter-attack. Second, it is based on the individual rather than on the collectivity. There are individual thinkers like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey and many others, whose writings had a tremendous impact on the environmental movement as a whole even though their attitude towards the natural world was highly individual and personal. This personal message, however, is a very effective tool that enables readers to identify with this personal experience and direct the reader to a similar way of perceiving the natural world. Third, it is fixed on the notion of the wilderness, a uniquely American nation-building category.
The three above mentioned characterizations of the American environmentalism – the counter-undertone, individualism and the idea of wilderness – are also the most essential American values and therefore, I linked American environmentalism with American identity. Being an environmentalist, a naturalist or nature writer has a lot to do with being a patriot. Thoreau sees the bright future and freedom in America’s vast wilderness. “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe”, he says and urges the nation to “forget the Old World and its institutions” and follow the sun as it migrates westward because “[h]e is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow” (“Walking” 234-35). For Thoreau the Old World had nothing to offer since the wilderness and freedom were in America. John Muir was not such an outspoken patriot like Thoreau; nevertheless, his biggest achievement was in the advocacy of the National Park System and founding the Sierra Club, the very two institutions which create and support the myth of wilderness as a truly American icon. Finally, Edward Abbey, whose allegiance to the United States was questioned and researched by the FBI (Bishop 92), was in fact a patriot of Thoreau’s kind. Critical of his own government and directly engaged in various acts of civil disobedience in the name of wilderness, Abbey gave the link between wilderness and freedom a more acute political meaning.
These nature writers and many more are also an unprecedented part of the American environmental movement as such. Though they are primarily writers and not activists, they give the movement emotional drive and new approach. The individual struggle for nature conservancy set a powerful example for others to follow. And they do. Although the environmental movement thus inevitably becomes a mainstream and wilderness is more a concept than a reality, the whole movement still largely builds on the original premises. This emotional and personal tone of American nature writing is in stark contrast to the factual and scientific tone of the European nature writing. American nature writing is much more accessible to readers, therefore it is more popular and effective. In the United States the personal wilderness experience in the spiritual sense is valued more than knowledge about ecology because, in fact, it initiates the interest in ecological knowledge that comes naturally afterwards.
There are many prominent figures that marked the history of American environmentalism and it is hard to make such a narrow selection. My intention is to capture some of the main landmarks in the development of the environmental movement. As for Henry David Thoreau, he is the must-read for any American environmentalist, the founding father of the environmental perception and the prophet who gave the movement its philosophical background in the “bible” called Walden. He is the clear choice where to start any excursion on the landmarks of the environmental movement. Thoreau has become a symbol and a myth and as such lives his own (after)life. I did not wish to reproduce the myth of Thoreau but I also realized that omitting him in my research on significant turning points in the history of American environmentalism, would be altering and twisting this history. My aim is to study how the myth of Thoreau shaped the whole movement since then. Thoreau might not be the very first writer who contemplated on the natural world, but he was the first one to make literature an effective tool of the environmental imagination. He set an important example to be followed.
John Muir comes naturally after Thoreau in many respects. First of all, Muir based his worldview on Thoreau’s environmental imagination. Often nicknamed “the father of the national parks” (Philippon 106), his greatest achievement is considered the establishment of the National Park System. Muir’s political and social advocacy of wilderness launched the subject into the public attention. He put Thoreau’s theory into practice and social action, which was reflected in the foundation of the Sierra Club. His infamous split with Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester in the United States, gave rise to the first environmental battle of ideas; the preservationist and conservationist points of view represented an irreconcilable clash of ideas about wilderness management. This battle that was most clearly reflected in the controversy over damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley that divided the American public at the beginning of twentieth century. Muir activated the public opinion in what became the first national debate on an environmental topic.
Finally, Edward Abbey, a representative of the modern-day environmentalism of the twentieth century and seemingly a character who does not fit next to the environmental forefathers Thoreau and Muir. However, if one moves beyond the puritan morality of Thoreau and Muir’s time and Abbey’s lifestyle led according to the “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” motto, there are more similarities than differences. Abbey’s sources of inspiration are writers celebrating solitude and nature, the tradition started by Thoreau. The Thoreauvian legacy is apparent in Abbey’s anti-government attitude and various acts of civil disobedience as well as in Abbey’s patriotism. It can be said that Abbey is a manifestation of Thoreau in the realities of the twentieth century.
The question of Muir’s time between the “keep it like it was” preservation and wise use utilitarian conservation has never been successfully settled in the United States and Abbey took up the fight. His polemic on industrial tourism and national parks is an interesting follow-up reflection on John Muir’s vision of national parks almost hundred years before. By the late 1970s as the environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, or the Wilderness Society became mainstream and the pressure of the corporate interests on public lands has grown into “techno-industrial megamachine” of the conservative wing, it was time to act in defense of the wilderness. Always a controversial figure, Abbey became a cult hero as well as a respected member of academia. His novel The Monkey Wrench Gang served as an important turning point in the American environmental movement – it inspired the foundation of Earth First!, a direct-action radical anarchist group of eco-warriors who were frustrated by the compromising conventional political activism of the well-established environmental groups.
This particular choice of authors is meant to uncover the succession in the realm of the environmental imagination and explore the trends and shifts in its development. The reason is to point out the unique stable basis of the American environmentalism such as the individualist response to the natural world in relation to the dominant society, the idea of wilderness and the nature writing with its role model in Henry David Thoreau. The main focus of this thesis is to uncover the sources of inspiration of these individual writers and their conception of wilderness preservation. As for the former, I cannot leave out American Indians as the biggest source of inspiration. All three authors that I selected for further analysis and many other environmentally oriented authors were interested in American Indian cultures and their perception of the natural world. The underlying invisible force in formation of the American environmental imagination is the philosophy of American Indians. Henry David Thoreau talked to animals, plants and rocks; John Muir felt the spirits in nature and they surely did not make these discoveries under the influence of the Euro-American society that based its values on the Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism. John Muir under the influence of the Thoreauvian transcendentalism and American Indian spirituality moved beyond the strictly anthropocentric outlook to more inclusive biocentrism. He clearly anticipated the later ecosystem interpretation of biotic community and deep ecology.
The way these authors are situated in time is also an important factor. Henry David Thoreau is a representative of the nineteenth-century world. Thoreau’s era was the time when the battle against wilderness and American Indians was not yet over but it was basically won with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution that further empowered the Euro-Americans in the already uneven contest. The wilderness was rapidly diminishing in the east but the frontier was still vast and open. Yet Thoreau understood the trends and anticipated the future development of the rapidly changing world. His writings are to a large extent very topical even today.
John Muir represents the transitional period at the turn of the century. Though he experienced the frontier life in Wisconsin during an early stage of his life, he also saw the closing of the frontier that put a limit to the seemingly unrestricted progress and growth. The free land that used to be the icon of the westward movement was suddenly exhausted; there was not much left for conquering and subjugating except for the American Indian reservations that were made too big previously. This new situation called for a new approach toward wilderness. According to the theory of value, the less there is, the more valuable it is, wilderness became worth saving. If not in reality, then at least in special designated areas that were set aside for this particular purpose. It was an ideal time for Muir to step in with his concept of wilderness; the nation was just reflecting on the value of wilderness and what it meant for it. Muir was not the sole initiator of the national park system but he represented a significant voice in favor of wilderness and gave the discussion a less anthropocentric tone. The popularity of wilderness on the national level was also brought about by president Theodore Roosevelt who became known as an outdoor enthusiast and a promoter of the conservation movement.
The third imaginary stage is the modern environmentalism as a product of the turbulent 1960s and Edward Abbey as a representative of the era whose impact pointed a new direction in the movement. Abbey decided to fight back against the world of free market capitalism under the rule of corporations that marketed the glorious image of the Wild West while devouring the land and destroying its last patches of wilderness in the name of economic growth. Revealing the shocking reality of the dammed rivers, clear cut forests and strip mined mountains, Abbey’s writings went directly against the myth about the Wild West. His writings inspired radical environmental movement in the 1980s. The political lobbying as the only tool against the corporate power left many environmentalist frustrated and powerless. Abbey introduced a different tool in enforcing justice against the colossal political and industrial system: a direct action. It has remained a widely used technique till today.
The choice of authors that I made is therefore not accidental but it is also, by no means, exhaustive. Within the range of this thesis I had to be highly selective as far as the number of authors included is concerned. The sample I present here suggests something about the nature of the American environmentalism but, as I am aware, it is not fully representational. Writers like Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and many others had also a significant impact on American environmentalism just as American Indian writers like Leslie Marmon Silko or Linda Hogan who alter the canon of American nature writing with a different kind of sensitivity. Nevertheless, I believe that Thoreau, Muir and Abbey are the best examples of how interconnected is the nature writing with the environmental movement. All three authors made a practical contribution to the wilderness protection and represent different stages in the American environmental movement.
1.1. Wilderness in American Context
Before going straight into an analysis of the individual writers’ perception of wilderness some theoretical background of the trends in American environmental movement is needed. As I have already suggested the American environmental imagination is for many reasons specific and unique due to cultural as well as natural environment. The conditions for development of the movement were unprecedented. Although it might seem paradoxical, it is in fact logical that environmentalism goes hand in hand with industrialism and progress. Lawrence Buell emphasizes the fact that this situation is not new in the American context: “For more that a century the United States has been at once a nature-loving and resource-consuming nation” (4). The fact that environmental movement in the United States has developed on such a large scale in a country that has become the world’s largest polluter reveals something about the nature of the sociopolitical conditions. I would argue that the environmental imagination in the United States is a part of the cultural heritage. The American identity is built on wilderness after all. However, the practical impact of this imagination (apart from the patriotic pride in the land as it is captured in Woody Gutrie’s song “This Land is Your Land”) is quite low. “Awareness of the potential gravity of environmental degradation far surpasses the degree to which people effectively care about it. For decades it has been reckoned a major issue, but it has modified citizenly behavior only at the edges” (Buell 4). Clearly, Americans did not embrace Thoreau’s concept of voluntary simplicity. Consumerism remained the reality while environmental awareness and Thoreau’s legacy is celebrated on a more theoretical level.
I therefore thought it necessary to explain and define two concepts that are key to understanding the American environmental consciousness: wilderness and nature writing. These concepts are not genuinely American but they have different connotations in the American context. The former of the two, wilderness, is a term that has culturally specific connotations in the United States. Wilderness is one of the vital ingredients of the American character. The nation was built on and out of wilderness; it symbolized the endless opportunity and possibility. Wilderness is a condition for progress. In the past it was appreciated only for what could become of it once it was conquered and subjugated. Nowadays wilderness still stays in the centre of American consciousness but as it diminishes, the attitude has changed significantly: the hatred and fear has been replaced with nostalgia and admiration. Is wilderness a myth or as William Cronon puts it “a state of mind” (“The Trouble” 106) rather than a physical reality? If yes, what are the consequences of such a perception?
Wilderness seems to be a more concrete term than nature and thus easier to define. However, as many book-length studies on the subject suggest, it is not the case. Wilderness is a highly subjective category that is culturally determined. In the American context it is loaded with meanings and emotions. The following passage by Edward Abbey shows how difficult is to capture the meaning and glamour of wilderness:
Wilderness. The word itself is music. […] We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.
Why such allure in the very word? What does it really mean? Can wilderness be defined in the words of government officialdom as simply ‘A minimum of not less than 5000 contiguous acres of roadless area’? […] it is not sufficient; something more is involved.
Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit. (Desert Solitaire 189)
Even in the twentieth century, Abbey clearly refers to wilderness as the oppositional force to the numbing influence of capitalist society, wilderness is for Abbey a symbol of freedom but he also goes beyond this stereotypical connection. On a deeper level, wilderness is something within us as well as something without that is difficult to grasp and understand.
The idea of wilderness has also been changing over time significantly. In the past wilderness was always characterized by words like “hideous”, “desolate” or “loathsome”. It was feared and hated; the only way to deal with wilderness was to conquer it. Nash offers the etymology of the word as one way to its understanding: the root seems to have been “will”, the meaning was thus self-willed, willful or uncontrollable. From “willed” became “wild” (Wilderness and the American Mind 1). Wilderness was an inhospitable place that posed a threat to moral character of people because it reduced them into the wild condition. In short, wilderness was a place where humans did not belong. Interestingly enough, even though wilderness has acquired some esthetic values and has lost its repulsiveness and danger over time, it has remained the place where humans do not belong. As we shall see, even the current official definition strictly excludes people form wilderness.
Wilderness was what the first European settlers experienced in the New World and it shaped the national character in a significant way. The frontier as a meeting point between savagery and civilization is the key to understanding American character. The assumption of cultural primitivism about the spiritual values of wilderness adapted to the realities of industrial capitalism and modified itself into the romantic notion of pure wilderness that is doomed because it cannot compete with civilization. The first one to note this connection was Frederick Jackson Turner whose essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) reinterpreted American history in a new way. Turner’s “frontier hypothesis” built on an assumption that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development” (qtd. in Smith 250). Turner draws a line between freedom, democracy and free land. Free land in the west was a condition of democracy and stimulus for growth. The way this connection between wilderness and freedom was constructed proved very influential and problematic. As the frontier moved west, the wilderness diminished and finally, at the close of the nineteenth century, was completely conquered. Cronon discusses the implications of Turner’s hypothesis: if the United States depended on free land (wilderness), “in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as monuments to the American past – and as an insurance policy to protect its future” (“The Trouble” 91-92). What happened to freedom then? This question has been addressed many times since Turner’s hypothesis was published. The number of authors and thinkers pondering on the question suggest that it has not been solved yet and that the frontier mentality has not been entirely overcome.
A quick look into the American legislature shows how institutionalized has wilderness become. The Wilderness Act (1964) was passed “[t]o establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes” (“The Wilderness Act”). The rationale for wilderness preservation is formulated in the anthropocentric rhetoric of the nineteenth century. Wilderness is worth preserving for its cultural values (“for the permanent good of the whole people”) and not so much for its inherent or ecosystem values (these are probably included in the “other purposes”). The Wilderness Act officially defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain” (“The Wilderness Act”). As broad and vague as this definition is, it explicitly states that wilderness and human presence are mutually exclusive. The Act thus reproduces the dichotomy between wilderness and civilization. Man might be a visitor but “does not remain”. Evidently, wilderness is very well suited for recreational purposes (it makes people good) while making sure they can be kept out (they do not remain because of a complicated set of rules and restrictions on what is considered a wilderness area).
The current discussion on the concept of wilderness focuses on the myth that has been created around this term and its implications on people’s relationship toward wilderness. In his controversial essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness”, William Cronon attempts to deconstruct the myth of wilderness in favor of a more applicable and personally responsible attitude. Cronon sees the problem in the very definition of wilderness as a “pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization” (“The Trouble” 83). According to Cronon, wilderness is a human creation and therefore the wilderness ethics is not relevant to western problematic relationship with the nonhuman world since it favors only dramatic and sublime landscapes that are untouched by human presence. It does not consider the human interaction with the land and completely disregards the native inhabitants of the supposedly pristine environments: “The removal of Indians to create ‘uninhabited wilderness’ – uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place – reminds us just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (“The Trouble” 95). Because the concept of wilderness builds on the doctrine of the eighteenth century supernatural values of the sublime and the primitivism of the frontier myth, Cronon points out the nature–culture dichotomy that the idea of wilderness supports rather than fights against. He searches for a new environmental ethic that that “embraces the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place” (“The Trouble” 107).
Roderick Nash is the first modern historian of wilderness whose classic study Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) is still the most thorough study on the subject. In an article “The Value of Wilderness” Nash introduces eight arguments why is wilderness valuable and worth protecting:
1. Wilderness as a reservoir of normal ecological processes. […] 2. Wilderness as a sustainer of biological diversity. […] 3. Wilderness as formative influence on American national character. […] 4. Wilderness as nourisher of American arts and letters. […] 5. Wilderness as a church. […] 6. Wilderness as a guardian of mental health. […] 7. Wilderness as a sustainer of human diversity. […] 8. Wilderness as an education asset in developing environmental responsibility. (293-298)
Out of these eight categories, two are distinctly American. The relationship between wilderness and American national character has been already discussed but what is interesting on Nash’s list is “Wilderness as a nourisher of [genuinely] American art”. There is a special relationship between wilderness and culture. Wilderness has been a source of inspiration of many artists who finally turned away from European models and produced the basis of what became truly American art. Wilderness has been portrayed, produced and reproduced in great works of art and these images in return sustain the myth of wilderness.
Contemporary attitudes toward wilderness are divided into many different and opposing points of view. In today’s interconnected world it is hard to imagine wilderness as an untouched place. Even seemingly untouched places are in one way or another impacted by human activity. The primitivist nostalgia for the bygone pristine wilderness is still a strong icon because of its strong but equally romantic link to freedom. To the initial conservationist and preservationist split were added other approaches to wilderness management. Conservation and preservation are in fact two forms of the same anthropocentric tradition. An opposing tradition is represented by ecocentrism, which was successfully picked up by deep ecology.
1.2. Nature Writing: An American Phenomenon
Nature writing is an individual reflection of the surrounding environment put into a verbal experience. It is not just a detailed description of natural phenomena (nature writers are often amateur naturalists but not scientists) but it is also (and mainly) a personal reflection on the natural world and our response to it. Scott Slovic in his study on American nature writing points out that the psychological nature of this genre connects the inner self with the outer natural world (17). Nature writing cannot deal with nature and being detached from culture. Reflections on society are as much a part of nature writing as the natural world itself. Nature writing is implicitly or even explicitly critical. Due to the personal character it often takes form of a diary, journal or a personal record. Lawrence Buell defined an environmentally oriented work (nature writing) in a very broad manner:
1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. […] 2. The human interest is not understood to be only legitimate interest. […] 3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. […] 4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (Buell 7-8)
The fact that nature writing has become quite popular in the contemporary literature and that it has found its way into the American literary canon reveals something about today’s attitude toward the natural world. In the era of the global environmental crisis, this heightened interest is more than understandable. Nevertheless, nature writing as a genre is still marginal. Scott Slovic raises an important question concerning the real impact of this trend: “How does nature writing (and by extension the environmentally conscious teaching of literature) influence people’s attitudes and behavior?” (181). Nature writing connects the personal with the natural and as such it has the potential to heal our broken relationship with the natural environment through the personal intimate discourse. On a larger scale there is a potential for a social change and reevaluation of values through its personal, easy-to-relate tone. However, as Slovic again points out, it is a question whether the text can serve as a connection between the self and the natural world. Does the text separate us from the real experience or does it facilitate a more intense engagement with it? (180) It is a serious question too, nonetheless, I think that pondering on it would be missing the real point. Either way, nature writing brings a new perspective. In the long perspective, it does not matter whether it inspires people to leave the comfort of their homes and all conveniences of daily life in search of the raw experience of the wilderness or not. Edward Abbey warns against such folly, he stresses that such an experience is not for everybody. First, one would have to be willing to give up a car because “you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe” (DS xii). Moreover, there is not much of the wilderness left to accommodate everybody. Just a glance at American institutionalized wilderness areas, national parks, is enough to see that demand surpassed supply and that the situation is far from sustainable. Nature writing is therefore successful when it changes the way we perceive the world, not necessarily when it inspires people to go and experience the wilderness themselves. The sensitivity toward the environment we live in can be built through first-hand as well as through second-hand experience. As Abbey points out, “[a] man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces” (DS 148).
As I have already mentioned, Thoreau was not the first writer who dealt with his natural environment; however, he was the first who did it in a new way. The genre of nature writing can be traced back as far as Henry David Thoreau who is regarded as the founding father of the nature writing tradition. Thoreau’s Journal is therefore considered an “example of nature writing at its purest” and is for “all […] contemporary American nature writers, the prototypical literary investigation of the relationship between nature and the mind” (Slovic 5). By an extensive analysis of works by Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez, Scott Slovic demonstrates how applicable Thoreau’s Journal on works of these contemporary nature writers is. Leaving out the assessment, I only agree with Slovic that contemporary nature writers have not yet overcame the Thorauvian model of nature writing.
Daniel J. Philippon in his study Conserving Words partly answers Slovic’s question of how does nature writing influence people’s attitudes and behavior by showing how American nature writers shaped the environmental movement. However, Philippon deals more with the question of whether there exists such an influence at all rather than how does it work. Slovic’s answer is yes, nature writing can transplant the environmental perception into action and there are concrete examples that it has already happened many times. The most well known examples are John Muir’s ideas channeled into the Sierra Club, an organization he helped to establish; the Wilderness Society co-founded by Aldo Leopold; or the direct influence of Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang on the practical and theoretical basis of Earth First! Philippon speaks about the influence of nature writing on people’s attitudes and behavior but he also acknowledges that the relationship works both ways and speaks about an “ecology of influence” as a complex web of interrelationships that resemble an ecosystem (4).
Contrary to Buell’s skepticism about the difficulties of transplanting the theory into action in the consumerist American society, Philippon presents some concrete examples when such a transition happened, nevertheless, the legacy of Thoreau seems to have more influence on some marginal individuals than on the society as a whole. There is a question whether nature writers should not take a different, new and maybe even radial approach rather than follow the example of their predecessors. If Thoreau’s legacy is ingrained in the American mind but has no practical impact on the attitudes and behavior why not trying a different way and break away from Thoreau?
After having defined the theoretical background, I will focus on the three selected authors themselves. In the next chapter, I will discuss the life of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Edward Abbey and the context of their works.
1.3. Starring: Wilderness Prophets
Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey are icons of nature writing genre (though Abbey rejected the term). Their writings had a significant impact on environmental movement. They gave the movement philosophical background but also contributed to it in a very practical way. I will now look more closely on the lives of the individual authors and put them into a wider context of their era.
1.3.1. Henry David Thoreau: Walden Woods Rebel
Born in 1817 in Concord, Henry David Thoreau was a naturalist, social critic, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist of his time. He was one of the first critics of the fast progress of industrialism and its impact on the natural world. Though he was not famous during his short life , he became a legend and an important source of inspiration for future generations. Most of his works were published posthumously and launched him into the position of a founding father of the environmental thought. Thoreau is now referred to as “the patron saint of American environmental writing” (Buell 115).
Since he was a little boy, he liked to roam in the woods and he read extensively. When he later studied at Harvard, his classmates viewed him as “cold and unimpressionable” and they point out that he “was of an unsocial disposition, and kept himself aloof from his classmates” (Van Doren Stern 8). After his studies he returned to Concord and wanted to become a teacher but, except for a short period when he run his own school with his brother, could not find such a position. Thoreau was unemployed or did odd jobs when Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped in to employ this young scholar. Thoreau came to live with the Emersons; he worked around the house and tutored their children for board and lodging (Van Doren Stern 1-31). Emerson as a leading transcendentalist of the day had a significant influence on Thoreau. For a young intellectual it was a perfect place to be.
After two years with the Emersons, Thoreau went to tutor Emerson’s brother’s children on Staten Island near New York City but he missed Concord and soon went back home and worked mostly in his father’s pencil factory. During this time he was making ready to carry out an experiment of living in solitude and voluntary simplicity in the woods. Thoreau got Emerson’s permission to build a simple cabin on his land on the shore of Walden Pond and moved there to live for exactly two years and two months (Walden 1). Although in 1840s the Walden woods could no longer be referred to as wilderness, Thoreau made his point in living “deliberately” (Walden 88) and set thus an important precedent for future generations.
Thoreau’s rebellious and nonconformist nature already surfaced during his years at Harvard. Later he became known for his modern and liberal teaching methods and his political views. Thoreau lived during the turbulent era that culminated in the Civil War (though he did not live long enough to see the victory of the Union and the institution of slavery abolished). In a small village of Concord in a free state in New England slavery was hardly an issue that concerned people directly and even though they did not approve of it, they mostly preferred not to get involved. On a national level, however, this period was marked by a heated debate over this “peculiar institution” and a bitter struggle to maintain the fragile balance between the slave-holding states and the free states in the Union. Thoreau, like Emerson and other intellectuals, became an ardent Abolitionist and refused to keep silent about the issue of slavery. Thoreau did not just publicly speak about the evils of slavery but also actively helped fugitive slaves and did not pay his poll tax so that he did not support a government that permitted slavery. When confronted about his debt to the government, he refused to pay and rather went to jail. He was released (against his will) the next day because someone had paid his tax during the night (Van Doren Stern 74-88).
Interestingly enough, a man with such a strong sense of justice as Thoreau, who fought for Abolitionists’ cause by hiding fugitive slaves, lecturing and supporting John Brown and refusing to financially support an unjust government, did not do the same for the cause of American Indians despite he despite his lifelong interest in them. Thoreau was fascinated by American Indian cultures that inhabited the continent long before the newcomers of his own kind and studied them in books as well as in personal experience. The more he became dissatisfied with Euro-American civilization, the more he turned to American Indians and drew inspiration from them.
After his Walden sojourn he devoted himself to the writing and lecturing. He made few trips to Maine, Canada and to the Midwest to study American Indians. His concern in natural history gave rise to ecology and environmental history. His detailed studies of changing local ecosystem were only much later appreciated for their depth. These studies were also possible because of his outdoor work as a surveyor.
The Walden experiment that he described in his journal and later published, and his civil disobedience when he refused to pay taxes, which he explained in an essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), had little acceptance during his lifetime but made him immortal after his death. Generations of nature writers and social reformers read his works and took inspiration in it. Thoreau died in 1862 of tuberculosis when he was only 44 before he could organize and publish his Indian Books, a very ambitious project that was presumably his plan. Thoreau’s last words “moose…Indian” (Van Doren Stern 163) inspired many interpretations of Thoreau’s message.
1.3.2. John Muir: Wilderness Champion
Just as Thoreau is given credit for setting the philosophical background for environmental movement, Muir is celebrated for putting it into action. In the imaginary pantheon of founding fathers and saints, Muir “has come to stand as one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity, both political and recreational” (Holmes 3). For generations after, he served as a mythical figure, a “personal guide into nature”, slightly odd and solitary roamer and America’s “Green Man” (Holmes 3) whose legacy had far-reaching consequences on the nature conservancy and tourism.
Muir’s career (at least as it is presented by himself and repeated by his biographers) started as a typical American dream story of a self-made man, except that he went “from rags to riches” in the spiritual sense of the word rather the material one. Muir deliberately offered his at times somewhat unbelievable life story in his writings and gave it almost mythical connotations through the romantic and religious sublimity of the natural world. Through stories of his life, Muir invites the reader to uncover his personal experience with the natural world. Also his metaphor presenting nature as our true home has encouraged many of his followers to identify with nature and take responsibility for it.
John Muir was born in Scotland in 1838 in a middle-class family as one of eight children. When he was eleven years old, his family immigrated to America and settled in Wisconsin. He had a difficult relationship with his father whose cruel discipline strong religious beliefs tormented the whole family. Young Muir worked hard to clear and plow the land on a frontier farm. The strict discipline of Daniel Muir required work from sun to sun and when the soil was exhausted, he moved the farm to a new place in the Wisconsin frontier. Young Muir was also assigned a task of digging a well. He spent months chiseling away the stone in the well and nearly died in a deadly chokedamp that settled at the bottom when the well was about eighty feet deep. He was lucky to survive but his father gave him only two days to recover and sent him down to the well to finish the job (The Story of My Boyhood and Youth 97-116).
Hard work on a frontier farm did not give young Muir an opportunity for further schooling. He loved books, though he had to conceal them because his father disapproved of all non-religious literature. Whenever he had spare time, he read and was grateful for every five minutes he managed to steal before he was discovered and scolded. The strong-willed boy started to get up in the middle of night to read and work on his own inventions such as clocks, thermometers, hygrometers, a barometer, early-or-late-rising machine, etc. At the age of twenty-two he left his father’s farm with no money to live on and no experience with people and places beyond the closest surrounding of his home. At a State Fair in Madison, he attracted much attention with his inventions and was called a genius. Muir’s dream to study at the University of Wisconsin came true despite the fact that he had not attended any school since he left Scotland at the age of eleven. He worked hard during days and studied at nights to be able to pay for his studies. He spent four years at university and then left without getting a degree (The Story 117-42). At this stage of his life, he was still undecided if he would follow the career of an inventor or naturalist. The final decision came when he hurt his eye and temporarily lost vision in both eyes while he worked on a factory’s belt system in Indianapolis. After couple weeks of uncertainty he regained his vision but he reconsidered his career as an industrial engineer and went on to pursue his studies of nature and botany by exploring wilderness.
In 1867 Muir set on a long journey on foot from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and possibly further to South America. He did not get to finish the journey because he got ill with malaria and he decided to go California instead. In California Muir took a job that changed his life, he became a shepherd in the high Sierras. From that time he stayed, worked and explored Yosemite. Contrary to the geologists of the day, he claimed that glaciers were responsible for shaping the landscape in Yosemite. Muir was eventually proven right and became a public figure publishing articles and studies based on his explorations. He also becomes a campaigner for wilderness preservation a guide into the wilderness for many important people. In 1871 he met Ralph Waldo Emerson who came to Yosemite on vacation. Muir was greatly disappointed that the aging transcendentalist declined his repeated offer for a camping trip. His second chance was more successful when in 1903 he agreed to guide President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip through the Sierra high country. Muir made a great impression on the president who left with a strong resolution to force some protection measures in the federal government.
To meet the increased demand of wilderness recreation that he so ardently propagated, Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, a local club for mountain lovers and wilderness enthusiasts, and was unanimously elected its first president; Muir remained in this position for twenty-two years until his death in 1914. Founded in 1892, the Sierra Club became the oldest and the largest American grassroots organization campaigning for the wilderness protection. The goals of the Sierra Club initially reflected also the scientific, educational, developmental, and recreational aims. The club’s mission was: “To explore, enjoy and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them; [and] to enlist the support and co-operation of the people and the government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” (qtd. in Philippon 141).
Already well established through the Sierra Club, Muir met and befriended forester Gifford Pinchot. The two men committed themselves into creating forest reserves and push the federal government to set them aside. However, their ideas about nature conservancy differed significantly and they soon split up in a bitter dispute, which culminated in the battle over the Hetch Hetchy dam project at the end of Muir’s life. In American context, Muir and Pinchot represent two archetypes in two approaches to the wilderness management: the preservationist and conservationist cause. The conflict between the wise use movement that developed from Pinchot’s conservation as the usage of natural resources in the most efficient way and Muir’s less anthropocentric preservation that meant preserving wilderness areas intact is still topical in the current debate about nature conservancy in the United States.
Although he is mostly connected with campaigning for wilderness preservation in Yosemite and the subsequent establishment of the Yosemite National Park, he extensively traveled and explored other wilderness areas. He made several trips to Alaska to study glaciers, he explored the American Northwest and traveled to Europe and even further to explore Siberia, India, Egypt, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Hawaii, the Amazon River and rainforest, and Africa. At the same time he managed a family life with his wife and two daughters on a ranch in Martinez, California. Muir died of pneumonia, grief-stricken over the lost Hetch Hetchy Valley, in California Hospital in Los Angeles in 1914.
1.3.3. Edward Abbey: Desert Anarchist
Edward Abbey was born in 1927 on an Appalachian farm near Home, Pennsylvania in a family of a logger, trapper, and farmer, Paul Revere Abbey and a schoolteacher, Mildred Abbey. Edward was strongly influenced by his father, who was described by Edward’s younger brother, as “anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-prevailing opinion, anti-booze, anti-war, and anti-everyone who didn’t agree with him” (Bishop 56). Edward Abbey in his later years resembles his father – an anti-establishment figure with a strong sense of justice and taste in classical music. Paul Revere Abbey was well read and often recited Whitman by heart. One of his favorite passages from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass stayed with his son, Edward, all his life:
This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and the crazy. Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or any number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and the young and with mothers of families… Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your soul. (qtd. in Bishop 63)
Edward Abbey’s literary career was of a similar nature. In an essay “A Writer’s
Credo” he explains his ambition in writing: “I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. […] To oppose, resist, and sabotage the contemporary drift toward a global technocratic police state, whatever its ideological coloration. I write to oppose injustice, to defy power, and to speak for the voiceless” (177-78). Abbey was no less American patriot than was Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau; however, (and therefore) he was a sharp critic of his own culture. His motto was Whitman’s “resist much, obey little” (“A Writer’s Credo” 174). In a similar passage as Whitman’s, Abbey sums up the moral responsibilities of a writer to his own society: “the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives” (“A Writer’s Credo” 161). Even though it is easy to point out wrongs elsewhere, for Abbey it is a “moral duty of the free writer […] to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture” (“A Writer’s Credo” 161).
Abbey’s credo was not to preach to his audience but to speak for them. As a university teacher of creative writing, Abbey articulated what he intended to pass to a young generation in simple maxims: “WRITE RIGHT. WRITE GOOD. WRITE WRONG. WRITE ON!” (Cahalan 132). A writer in his view thus must be political which means “involvement, responsibility, commitment: the writer’s duty to speak the truth – especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental” (“A Writer’s Credo” 163). In the post-war consumer society dominated by corporate interests, truth is hard to get. It cannot be expected from politicians, bureaucrats, governments, media and scientists who “sold their souls to industry, commerce, government, war, long ago” since “truth for one thing is the enemy of Power, as Power is the enemy of truth” (“A Writer’s Credo” 165).
When he was seventeen, Abbey took his first trip to the west and it changed his life forever. He fell in love with the southwest and took the first opportunity to move there. In 1947 he went west to the University of New Mexico where he graduated in philosophy (Bishop 79). Abbey went west with all the stereotypical assumptions and under the influence of western movies. Once he settled down, however, he had become angrily aware of how the land was exploited by the government. The same practices of strip mining, clear cutting, overgrazing and massive development called civilization progress that once destroyed Abbey’s original home, the Appalachia, were under way in the southwest. Abbey set out to undermine the nineteenth-century myth of the American West as a pristine wilderness with cowboys and American Indians by uncovering the twentieth-century physical reality of the New West being exploited by developers and corporate interests.
During the 1950s and 1960, Abbey took seasonal jobs with the National Park Service as a park ranger and fire lookout. The time spend observing the practices of the National Park Service, contemplating of the natural world in solitude and writing these reflections significantly marked his career once he published a set of such essays titled Desert Solitaire (1968). The strong environmental theme and the non-anthropocentric ethics of biocentrism together with rising environmental consciousness and tense anti-establishment atmosphere in the United States launched Abbey into the career of a nature writer, although his scope was much wider and he resisted this label. His resemblance to Thoreau did not escape attention and once he was called “the Thoreau of the American West” , this comparison was picked up and often used.
Abbey’s best-known novel is The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a satire that inspired the foundation of the radical environmental group Earth First! Abbey develops the theme of eco-tage (environmentally motivated sabotage) that he calls “monkeywrenching”. The term was so quickly picked and widely used that it became to refer to any illegal activity in the name of wilderness preservation.
Abbey was first and foremost a very controversial and contradictory figure. He called himself an anarchist but his seasonal employer was a governmental institution, the National Park Service ; he advocated birth control as an important tool to halt overpopulation and yet, he fathered five children; he preferred wilderness and solitude but he lived in a city. He took pleasure in provoking sentiment and his genre was satire. In Preliminary Remarks to his collection of essays One Life at a Time, Please, he openly declares: “If there’s anyone still present whom I’ve failed to insult, I apologize” (5). Abbey died in 1989 of an alcohol-related illness and, according to his instructions, was illegally buried in his sleeping bag in his beloved desert.
After dealing with the individual authors I will turn to their sources of inspiration, or better, to their attitude toward American Indians as they seemed to be a great source of inspiration. On a broader level I want to explore the role of American Indian cultures in shaping of the environmental movement.
2. The Indian: Source of Inspiration and Guilt
All three authors represent a milestone in the American environmental movement and there is a lot of evidence that as they follow each other, they also drew from each other’s works. However, Thoreau was not solely the first, original founder of the environmental philosophy and thought in the American history as it is often claimed. The credit should be given to the indigenous peoples of the American continent whose ecological knowledge and life in harmony with their environment inspired Thoreau as well as his successors. Richard F. Fleck points out that while “[n]o one can deny the importance of Thoreau’s education at Harvard, yet the Penobscots of Maine were surely of equal significance in the development of Thoreau the philosopher” (45).
American Indians are often omitted from history for the arrival of the European immigrants tends to be presented as the beginning of the American history. Yet, the American Indians had the major influence on shaping of the American environmental movement since Thoreau, Muir, Abbey and many others studied these varied cultures and drew inspiration from them. From their initial restrained attitudes one can sense the ambivalent approach of the dominant society toward American Indians. On the one hand, there is the withheld guilt and shame of what had been done to these people and how ruthlessly suppressed their culture was. However, at the same time, American Indians have been culturally appropriated and many times used as symbols of a lifestyle in harmony with the natural environment.
2.1. Thoreau: Friend of Indians
Henry David Thoreau devoted a significant time of his career to studies of American Indian cultures; however, this fact has not been given much attention among scholars. His mostly unpublished voluminous hand-written Indian notebooks that consist of 2,800 pages in eleven volumes (Fleck 8; Sayre x) are valuable sources of information of his intellectual development and sources of inspiration. As Lawrence Buell points out, “[Thoreau] became the first major Anglo-American creative writer to begin to think systematically of native culture as providing models of environmental perception rather than as a mysteriously compelling vestige” (211). Thoreau works on an assumption that American Indians, who have come to America thousands of years before the Europeans, are a great source of wisdom and knowledge about living on this continent that they can pass to the white newcomers. Unfortunately, not many of these “civilized” Europeans were willing to learn from “savages”; instead, they quickly subjugated these people and effectively worked towards destruction of their cultures. Thoreau’s lifelong interest in American Indian cultures was partly a result of his anti-social and, especially, his anti-government attitudes, and partly a reaction to the rapid destruction of America’s ancient forests and natural resources that fell victims to the progress of civilization.
Thoreau especially admired the close coexistence of American Indians with their natural environment. This harmonious way of life, deep respect for the environment and self-reliance became Thoreau’s maxims throughout his life (as was accurately manifested in the Walden experiment). In his study on Thoreau’s and Muir’s interest in American Indian cultures, Richard F. Fleck declares: “The American Indian’s life-style, then, was for Thoreau a confirmation, a paradigm of his own philosophy of living simply and harmoniously in a natural environment” (4). However, it was not just a confirmation of his own philosophy, it was much more than a mere support of his thoughts. It was the source and a major influence on his worldview. For Thoreau, American Indians were the ancient part of the New World, a stable basis to build on and the core of American identity. To his journal he confides that American Indians “seem like a race who have exhausted the secrets of nature, tanned with age, while this young and still fair Saxon slip, on whom the sun has not long shone, is but commencing its career” (qtd. in Fleck 5). Thoreau thus suggests that the Western Euro-American civilization should be more humble and respect, if not learn from the older and well-established native societies. Counter to this suggestion, Thoreau saw the devastating effects of the Euro-American ruthless and greedy subjugation of the land and people living on it. He was painfully aware that American Indian cultures were not going to survive the impact with the Euro-American civilization. In a journal entry, Thoreau captures the fundamental difference between the white and red man:
The constitution of the Indian mind appears to be the very opposite to that of the white man. He is acquainted with a different side of nature. He measures his life by winters, not summers. His year is not measured by the sun, but consists of a certain number of moons, and his moons are measured not by days, but by nights. He has taken hold of the dark side of nature; the white man, the bright side. (qtd. in Fleck 4)
These opposing worldviews make the two cultures incompatible and the ancient way of life had to give way to the new more aggressive one. On a more positive note, Thoreau was also lucky enough to see and experience the reality in some American Indian cultures that still retained their languages, myths and cultural patterns.
As Thoreau became more and more immersed into the study of American Indians, he was slowly moving beyond the nineteenth century stereotypes about the American Indians. Euro-American society considered American Indians as “savages”, the uncivilized people. Robert F. Sayre explains that this notion of an Indian as a savage was entirely a construct of the dominant society used to disdain as well as to elevate these people: “Savagism was the anti- and pro-Indian racism of the nineteenth century. It was ethnocentric and wrong in so many particulars that the word is better used now to name the white man’s ideology, mythology, and theory” (x). The studies Thoreau drew upon as his sources of information were written by Euro-American writers and were inevitably prejudiced according to the dominant ideology and scientific theory of savagism. Sayre defines savagism quite accurately: “The mayor stereotypes in savagism were that Indians were (1) solitary hunters, rather than farmers; (2) tradition-bound and not susceptible to improvement; (3) childlike innocents who were corrupted by civilization; (4) superstitious pagans who would not accept the highest offerings of civilization like Christianity; and, therefore, (5) doomed to extinction” (Sayre 6). All these assumptions were false and they expose the narrow-minded cultural ethnocentrism of the Western Euro-American society in the nineteenth century. The solitary Indian savage, or the romantically pathetic noble savage, became “a national emblem” (Sayre 16). These icons were largely invented and constructed by the dominant society and therefore give a more accurate description of this society rather than of American Indian societies.
The most important sources for Thoreau’s theoretical studies of American Indians were Henry Roe Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States in six volumes 1851-1857, which was one of the most impressive governmental studies under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Another important source was the multivolume Jesuit Relations (1632-1673); these firsthand Jesuit accounts gave Thoreau an insight into the myths, legends and tribal customs of the pre-Columbian America. Thoreau took his notes also from various travel books on America as well as from studies on other indigenous cultures such as James Cook’s Journal on Polynesian cultures or David Livingstone’s Travels in South Africa (Fleck 9-10). Thoreau was clearly not interested only in American Indian cultures but he extensively studied indigenous cultures around the world.
Thoreau’s short life and poor health did not allow him to make more empirical field studies than his several visits to Maine where he became acquainted with the Penobscot Indians and his trip to Minnesota where he met the Sioux Indians at the very end of his life (Fleck 4). Most of his information on American Indian cultures came mediated through writings of others. Thoreau studies these sources on American Indian, Inuit, and other indigenous cultures thoroughly and compared them with his own observations. Having read the theory and facing the reality, Thoreau had to overcome the initial culture shock. However, once he got to know Aitteon, his first wilderness guide, and later Joe Polis, two Penobscots who guided him and taught him about American Indian ingenuity, he moved from his halfhearted attitude toward an intense interest in the Penobscot Indians. “Such a pattern of racial acceptance is quite normal as we grow to appreciate another race through individuals first” (Fleck 37).
Thoreau embraced his studies of the Penobscot Indians so thoroughly that he was not satisfied with a mere look from the outside as an onlooker. When Thoreau studied Penobscot mythology, he could not fail to notice how closely it was tied to the natural world. He made a similar observation about the Penobscot language and made an attempt to learn it in order to get a different perspective on their interaction with the environment. Just as John Muir later, Thoreau learned an American Indian language though on an elementary level, as their extensive notes on vocabulary suggest. This fact shows the depth of the two men’s interest in American Indian cultures. It was something rather exceptional that a member of the dominant society’s middle-class of the nineteenth century would put so much effort into learning the unintelligible languages of the American Indians.
Thoreau did not live long enough to publish any of his notes on the subject of American Indians and the purpose of these lifelong studies has been a subject of many academic debates. Some Thoreau’s biographers say he might have intended to publish them as his masterpiece; some critics claim that he used his notes for his own reference while writing other books. Richard F. Fleck points out that Thoreau used only about ten percent elsewhere in his writings, whereas ninety percent remained unused and concludes that “the Indian books would have filtered into more of pure Thoreau either in more books relating to the Indian as The Maine Woods or indeed by further reflection on an alternate life-style in the midst of a roaring Industrial Revolution” (12).
Thoreau recognized the American Indian superiority in living on the land and inhabiting the American continent for thousands of years in such a manner that the European settlers came to believe that they arrived into a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. Thoreau, who studied American Indians and other aboriginal cultures in literature and compared it with his own findings and interpretations, was able to transcend the bias of savagism and move toward a more complex understanding of American Indian cultures. Richard F. Fleck believes that the true purpose of the Indian books was to “write a book or a series of essays on North American Indians which would correct the myopic view of nineteenth-century Euro-American historians by giving them for the first time a North American’s appreciation of his own continent which was and is rich in mythology” (19). The mythological aspect was what interested Thoreau significantly. Mythology as a way of bonding with the natural environment and making sense of the world around us was for Thoreau, as well as it was later for Claude Levi-Strauss, a universally applicable category for all indigenous cultures around the world (Fleck 20).
2.2. John Muir: Brother of All Men
Unlike Thoreau, John Muir’s interest in American Indians was based more on personal experience with American Indian tribes on his travels than on literature about them. Nevertheless, just like Thoreau, Muir could not entirely escape the bias of his time. Although he admired their harmonious relationship with their environment, his attitude toward American Indians was ambiguous and he had to overcome his initial ethnocentric views. Muir was not an anthropologist; he was first and foremost a naturalist, however, just as he challenged the stereotypes about wilderness, he challenged the stereotypes about American Indian to give both more glorious images.
While reading Muir’s writings, one is confronted with various notes and comments on American Indian cultures. Considering how well is John Muir known and studied in the United States, it is surprising how little attention among scholars was given to the subject of American Indians in his writings. This fact may well reflect the current position of the federal government on this sensitive question concerning the past, the present and the future of American Indian tribes.
Muir’s first experience with American Indians was when he was still a child in Wisconsin. He did not remember American Indians as the noble savages, the institutionalized image, but as impoverished people who were reduced to beggars and thieves on what used to be their land. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth Muir recollects when one of their piglets was shot by a hungry roaming Winnebago Indian and later Muir’s favorite horse was also stolen and cruelly treated (46, 53-54). They also occasionally visited Muir’s family begging for a piece of bread, some matches or to sharpen their knives. In that case, the boys had to watch them closely so that they did not steal anything (84). Even though Muir’s memories from his childhood were not very positive, he was aware that the condition of American Indians was brought about by the Euro-American civilization that colonized the New World and brought progress to these “primitive” people. One recollection from Muir’s memoir in particular documents his sympathy for the people who were subjugated. His father and their neighbor, Mr. Mair, were discussing the “Indian question” and the ownership of the land. Both men reasoned within the stereotypical notions of American Indians in the nineteenth century when, paradoxically, terms like “children of Nature”, “noble savage” and “rude savage” were synonyms:
Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the unfortunate Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural products of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small corn-fields on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their lands and pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it forever in unproductive wilderness, while Scotch and Irish and English farmers could put it to so much better use. […]
Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were practicing was in many ways rude and full of the mistakes of ignorance, yet, as rude as it was […] how should we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms, such as they were, making use of the same argument, that God could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did? (The Story 105-6)
Mr. Mair’s argument was the romantic notion of primitivism that portrayed American Indians as noble people with a sentimental bond with their land who were doomed to extinction because they could not adapt to the new realities of civilization. However said it was they had to go and make space to the more progressive race. Muir’s father held the Christian view of American Indians as unproductive, rude and primitive pagans. Only the conversion to the Christianity can civilize these beast-like creatures and make human beings out of them. Young Muir felt that Mr. Mair won the argument and became painfully aware of the issue for the rest of his life.
Muir’s next encounter with American Indians was when he arrived to California and took a job as a shepherd. One of his companions into the high Sierra region with a flock of sheep over two thousand was a Digger Indian. Muir’s first observation about the Digger Indian was full of distrust from the unknown and different: “The Indian kept in the background, saying never a word, as if he belonged to another species” (My First Summer in the Sierra 157). However, as the time went, Muir became more open and the Digger Indian possibly influenced Muir in his view of other American Indians.
Muir’s first observations and comments on American Indians were ambivalent. He was quick to notice their ability to move lightly and unnoticed (which startled him several times), which he took as a sign of their adaptation to the environment passed down the generations to become an instinct: “The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to retreat. And this experience transmitted through many generations seems at length to have become what is vaguely called instinct” (My First Summer 183). Muir also often comments on American Indian diet and wilderness survival skills; he mentions a great number of plants and small animals that American Indians eat while others remain hungry. When the shepherds ran out of bread, they became miserable and had digestive problems. Muir realized the paradox of starving in the middle of the natural abundance and set American Indian ways as an example to follow: “Like the Indians, we ought to know how to get the starch out of fern and saxifrage stalks, lily bulbs, pine bark, etc. Our education has been sadly neglected for many generations” (My First Summer 198).
Nonetheless, Muir was repulsed by their dirty appearances. When he described a woman dressed in “calico rags, far from clean”, he refuses to accept her as a part of her environment, the wilderness that was so sacred for him: “In every way she seemed sadly unlike Nature’s neat well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of the wilderness (My First Summer 186). Muir bases his judgments on a cultural bias portraying American Indians as primitive, unclean savages and contrasts it with the romantic notion of the pristine wilderness. Everything wild is pure for Muir and therefore he excludes the American Indian from their environment on account of their cleanliness.
Richard F. Fleck points out that although Muir’s comments on collective American Indian cultures were highly ambivalent, his reaction to his sheepherding companion was mostly positive. Like Thoreau in Maine with the Penobscot Indians, Muir had to overcome his prejudice toward American Indians as a group through his encounter with an individual. Muir soon came to realize and appreciate the Digger Indian superiority in his own environment. The simplicity in the American Indian way of life attracted Muir and he also tried to cut down on his needs in wilderness
Michael P. Cohen in his study on Muir points out that Muir tried to learn something about living in the wilderness from animals that had adapted to the conditions but he did not try to copy the Indian ways even though he admired them. Cohen concludes that “Muir didn’t really look seriously at the possibilities of life suggested by Native American ways” mainly for two reasons: one, he was under the influence of the dominant scientific theory of the nineteenth century that indigenous peoples are inferior to the Euro-American civilization; two, Muir’s personal experience with the American Indians at the end of the nineteenth century “was limited to the observing a decaying or degraded cultures” (Cohen 185). Cohen, however, bases his argument on evidence found in My First Summer in the Sierra and other writings of Muir based on early experience with American Indians. Later on, especially after his travels in Alaska, Muir (just like Thoreau) acquired a deeper understanding and appreciation of the varied American Indian cultures.
It could be said that Muir’s attitude toward American Indians was thus formed by both sides of the argument between Daniel Muir and Mr. Mair that he overheard when he was a child. Muir also distinguished two types of American Indians: the wild Indians and the tame civilized ones who had lost their instincts. He felt sympathy for American Indians and cherished their life in accordance with the land and yet, he was discouraged by their uncleanliness. (“The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness” (My First Summer 285).) He was also greatly disappointed when he met an English-speaking American Indian shepherd who acted like a member of the dominant society:
Like most white men, he could not conceive how anything other than gold could be the object of such rambles as mine, and asked repeatedly whether I had discovered any mines. I tried to make him talk about trees and the wild animals, but unfortunately he proved to be a tame Indian from the Tule Reservation, had been to school, claimed to be civilized, and spoke contemptuously of “wild Indians”, and so of course his inherited instincts were blurred or lost. (Our National Parks 317)
As Muir moved away from the conventional view of American Indians toward a deeper understanding of their way of life, he also became aware and critical of the consequences of the dominant society’s civilizing attempts.
Muir was fascinated by American Indians minimal impact on the land. While searching for the reason, however, Muir fell into the trap of primitivism when he concluded that the light impact on the earth of American Indian way of live was due to low level of evolution. They were simply too primitive to be able to cause harm. “The Indians with stone axes could do [the trees] no more harm than could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. […] But when the steel axe of the white man rang out on the startled air their doom was sealed. Every tree heard the bodeful sound and pillars of smoke gave the sign to the sky” (Parks 335). A more developed Euro-American civilization stepped in with better tools to do the work in a more efficient manner. Although this assumption is correct, Muir does not bother to reflect also on the underlying philosophical and spiritual background of the two distinct cultures.
Muir was aware of the otherness of American Indian cultures that prevented him to appreciate them at first. During his first summer in the Sierra when he contemplated on the Digger Indians, Muir remarked: “Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better” (My First Summer 185). His repeated visits of Alaska provided him with an opportunity to get to know the Thlinkit Indians better. The posthumously published Travels in Alaska (1915) shows Muir’s fascination with the Thlinkit Indians’ ecological knowledge, art, folktales and mythology inspired by nature. Muir recorded the spiritual beliefs, social traditions such as upbringing children, described potlatches and studied local language of the coastal tribe. Although far from civilization, Muir was fully aware of its devastating impact in the form of alcohol, which disrupted the traditional patterns of the coastal tribes as he quickly noticed.
Muir also befriended the Inuit and Chukchi people on his travels in the arctic regions of Alaska and Siberia. By this time he became a good anthropologist and he made many valuable notes and observations mapping the state of these cultures in the 1880s. Muir was astonished with how little these people need to make do in the hostile environment. The arctic region where life depended on the peculiar and fragile balance with the environment, revealed the shocking and devastating effects of alcoholism. More than hundred years ago, Muir described the situation that is strikingly similar to today’s realities in these communities (except today it is even worse). Muir felt that civilization brought its worst inventions to the arctic like alcohol and repeating rifles and called it the worst crime ever committed since it ruined the ability to survive in the hostile conditions passed down countless generations (Fleck 67). Although these communities had been self-sufficient for centuries, Muir concluded that once their patterns of live had been disturbed, they needed other help than cheap alcohol and repeating rifles.
Although Muir could not possibly know about Thoreau’s life-long project manifested in the unpublished Indian Books, he followed the same path. His notes on the studies of the Alaskan and the arctic communities are a confirmation of and complementary to Thoreau’s theoretical studies. Muir did what Thoreau could not do during his short life : he traveled. The two men would have agreed on more subjects than just that of American Indians but this subject is probably why they would have agreed on many others. Their personal philosophies were shaped under the direct influence of American Indian spirituality and respect for the environment. Muir along with his predecessor Henry David Thoreau pointed out what is in today’s context called “voluntary simplicity” and “living lightly on the earth”, the terms that are very topical today. Thoreau and Muir were key figures in transplanting some of the American Indian ecological knowledge into the mainstream environmental consciousness. They both took inspiration in the varied cultures of American Indians; “[f]or Thoreau, the Indian was a key to understanding North America, and for Muir, the Indian was a key to living in harmony with our new continent” (Fleck 23).
2.3. Edward Abbey: Racist or Sympathizer?
Even Edward Abbey, who was notorious for his deliberate political incorrectness toward minorities, immigrants and women and who was often accused of racism, took a great interest in American Indian cultures. In Desert Images, a folio book of David Muench’s photographs and Abbey’s texts, Abbey offers thoughtful meditations on the ancient American Indian petroglyphs and pictographs that can be seen on canyon walls everywhere in the Southwest: “The art served as a record. As practical magic. And as communication between wanderers. Water around the next bend, a certain zigzag sign might mean. We killed eleven bighorn here, only two hundred years ago, says a second. We were here, say the hunters. We were here, say the artists” (qtd. in Cahalan 188). Similar reflections on the vanished cultures of the canyons in the Arches are also included in Desert Solitaire. Abbey here traces the long-gone Anasazi culture. Even though they disappeared seven hundred years ago,
here as elsewhere in the canyonlands they left a record of their passage. Near springs and under overhanging cliffs, good camping spots, you may find chipping grounds scattered with hundreds of fragments of flint or chert where the Anasazi hunters worked their arrowpoints. You may find shards of pottery. At other places you will see their writing on the canyon walls – the petroglyphs and pictographs. (DS 144)
Abbey discusses the petroglyphs and pictographs in great detail and concludes that “the pre-Columbian Indians of the Southwest […] clearly enjoyed plenty of leisure time” which “speaks well of the food gathering economy and also of its culture, which encourage the Indians to employ their freedom in the creation and sharing of a durable art” (DS 116). The amount of free time in these ancient societies compared to our modern technocratic age is surprisingly higher: “Unburdened by the necessity of devoting most of their lives to the production, distribution, sale and servicing of labor-saving machinery, lacking proper recreational facilities, these primitive savages were free to do that which comes as naturally to men as making love – making graven images” (DS 116-17).
Abbey’s deep interest in American Indians is also reflected in a scholarly study of Navajo sand paintings published in Architecture Digest. James M. Cahalan in his study on Abbey claims that “[Abbey’s] interest was more than merely academic or aesthetic, and his attitudes toward Native Americans were reflected not only in his books but also in his actions, complicating the picture of this complex, sometimes contradictory writer.” He often spoke sympathetically on behalf of native people and his September 7, 1980, antinuclear appearance in Santa Fe was at a Navajo miners’ benefit. Cahalan also reports a time when Abbey traveled to the Navajo benefit event shortly after he ran in Labor Day race at New Oraibi, Arizona, in the middle of the Hopi reservation. Later he wrote about this experience in an article for Running magazine where he did not focus on the run but on the Hopi prophesies and history. He also became interested in the Navajo-Hopi land dispute in Arizona and published a review on this topic (Cahalan 189).
Unlike Thoreau and Muir, Abbey’s image of American Indians was far from the mythical people living in the wild places with strong ties to the land. American Indian tribes of the Southwest of the second half of the twentieth century that Abbey met were not nearly as inspirational as the tribes that inspired Thoreau and Muir. There might be some of the American idealism but there is no romanticism of Thoreau or Muir in Abbey’s works; he shows the naked facts and thus decomposes the myth of the Wild West. Such as he shows the strip mines, clear cuts, overgrazed land, massive road developments and dammed rivers instead of the “pristine wilderness” of the West, he depicts American Indian people as their true current situation really is: impoverished, isolated in overpopulated reservations, drunken, demoralized; at any case not the proud and noble people they once were.
Although he fully credits the situation to the dominant society and its corrupting influence, he does not sound overemotional and pathetic. Instead, he is ironic as he discusses the Navajo Indians in Desert Solitaire. In his social commentary, Abbey is particularly critical of the uncontrolled population growth. In the case of the Navajo, the population boom has far-reaching consequences as the reservation space and resources are limited. Many Navajos are gradually forced off the reservation in order to survive. They usually end up in “rural slums along the major highways and in the urban slums of the white man’s towns which surround the reservation” (DS 118). Forced into these conditions, they are “doing the best they can as laborers, gas station attendants, motel maids and dependants of the public welfare system. They are the Negroes of the Southwest – red black men” (DS 118). Abbey describes the social reality of the inevitable chain of dependency:
Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting the usual and well-known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism. (DS 118)
In a typical manner, Abbey pokes into evangelical church offering a spiritual treatment that is completely irrelevant to these people. The inability of the dominant society to reverse this trend is expressed in an ironical comment about “one big wretched family sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries” (DS 119). Forcefully assimilated into, and yet excluded from the dominant society, the Navajos and other American Indian tribes suffer from the loss of identity. “Caught in a no-man’s land between two worlds the Navajo takes what advantage he can of the white man’s system – the radio, the pickup truck, the welfare – while clinging to the liberty dignity of his old way of life” (DS 122).
Abbey’s meditation about the Navajos is not only negative but, on a positive side, he also offers some remedy. His solutions are not “simply the usual banal, unimaginative if well-intentioned proposals made everywhere, over and over again, in reply to the demand for a solution to the national and international miseries of mankind” such as “industrialization; tourism; massive federal aid; better education for the Navajo children; relocation; birth control; child subsidies; guaranteed annual income; four-lane highways; moral rearmament” (DS 121). Abbey claims that all the mentioned proposals “fail to take into account what is unique and valuable in the Navajo’s traditional way of life and ignore altogether the possibility that the Navajo may have as much to teach the white man as the white man has to teach the Navajo” (DS 121). Although the American Indian cultures have been devastated by the impact with the Euro-American society, they can still be a source of inspiration as Abbey believes. In Abbey’s days, there is not much to admire on the way of life of the native peoples as it was during the days of Thoreau and Muir, yet the mutual enrichment of the two cultures is still possible.
Industrialism and industrial tourism are not the likely solutions for the American Indians not only because of the skin color, language barrier, or lack of proper education, but mainly because their “acquisitive instinct is poorly developed” (DS 122). Abbey offers an explanation why the American Indians are not successful in the capitalist world of the today’s America:
Coming from a tradition which honors sharing and mutual aid above private interest, the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without. […] Among these people a liberal hospitality is taken for granted and selfishness regarded with horror. Shackled by such primitive attitudes, is it any wonder that the Navajos have not yet been able to get in step with the rest of us? […] They must learn courtesy and hospitality are not simply the customs of any decent society but are rather a special kind of commodity which can be peddled for money. (DS 122-23)
Abbey is being ironic as usual but he captured the qualitative difference between the two cultures that create the stumbling block in their smooth coexistence. The causes of the Navajo poverty are thus, according to Abbey, on the one hand, too many children, and on the other, too little money. The solution that Abbey offers might be effective, though politically incorrect:
To solve the first part of the problem we may soon have to make the birth control compulsory; to solve the second part we will have to borrow from the Navajo tradition and begin a more equitable sharing of national income. Politically unpalatable? No doubt. Social justice in this country means social surgery – carving some of the fat off the wide bottom of the American middle class. (DS 124)
Abbey’s takes pleasure in directly addressing taboo issues and advocating unpopular solutions. He rather stirs emotions and even gets some negative responses that no reaction at all.
Another topic that was widespread but unnoticed or tolerated was the issue of environmental justice. American Indian communities and other minorities were especially vulnerable to this kind of discrimination. Abbey was aware of the problem and included it in his list of corporate assaults on the western landscape and people. He explicitly mentions the problem of environmental justice in The Monkey Wrench Gang where only a few miles from “the neat green government town of Page” stood “the eight-hundred-foot smokestacks of the coal-burning Navajo Power Plant, named in honor of the Indians whose lungs the plant was treating with sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid, fly ash and other forms of particulate matter” (34-35). The lighthearted funny tone is in fact a pointed critique of the dominant Euro-American society’s hypocrisy that transfers all negative aspects on minorities and enjoys the benefits.
At the same time, Abbey was often dismissed as a racist who disdained American Indians. In a typical matter, Abbey wrote some provocative comments concerning overpopulation in American Indian reservations or was not afraid to declare that one night in Arches National Park he crawled into his sleeping bag “drunk as a Navajo” (DS 249). SueEllen Campbell also points out the fact that Abbey does not mention the Ute tribe still living in close proximity to Arches National Park when he wrote Desert Solitaire.
This chapter devoted to the finding of deeper roots of the environmental imagination of the selected authors explores their interactions with American Indian tribes and uncovers their reverence to these vanishing cultures. After having explored and defined these interactions and their impact on the personal views of these authors, I shall turn to an analysis of their view of wilderness.
3. Wilderness, Home, Freedom, Patriotism
Wilderness is a powerful source of inspiration for Thoreau, Muir and Abbey. It is the core of their work, however, they do not only write odes on the beauty of wild nature, more importantly, they try do grasp the deeper meaning of wilderness and its value. Why do we need wilderness? Where do we stand in relation to wilderness? And consequently, why and how shall we protect it? Writing about wilderness in these terms is inevitably also writing about society. Wilderness thus serves as a medium through which these writers, having gained some physical and mental distance, can reflect on the state of society and its relationship to the nonhuman world. Although writings of Thoreau, Muir and Abbey promote the universal and inclusive view, their initial detachment and retreat to wilderness to produce these thoughts show how bifurcated the human world became from the nonhuman one. Civilization is a self-centered system that does not embrace the nonhuman world simply because the nonhuman world is on a higher level and more inclusive than civilization itself.
For Thoreau, Muir and Abbey there is a direct link between wilderness and freedom. Unlike everything tame, the wild is the free. Abbey goes as far as to endow wilderness with political meaning as a source of freedom in case of a totalitarian regime. Wilderness is a necessity also for physical and mental integration; it is the key to understand the world we live in. Further, wilderness is our original home as the three authors claim in an attempt to awaken a long-forgotten intimate relationship with nature. Though the metaphor of home is most developed by Muir, Thoreau and Abbey also touch on the subject very often. Last but not least, wilderness has spiritual and religious qualities; a theme that was made popular by Muir and Thoreau, however, Abbey has also his nonconformist view on religious spirituality contained in wilderness.
3.1. Henry David Thoreau: Wilderness Means Preservation
Thoreau’s intellectual background was rooted in Transcendentalism, an influential philosophy in New England of his time. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading transcendentalist of the day, was Thoreau’s mentor and friend. Transcendentalists believed in a different kind of sensitivity, they preferred intuition to reason as a way to discover a higher spiritual truth. The core belief of Transcendentalism was the reflection of the higher spiritual truth in natural objects. In Emerson’s view nature mirrored the universal truths emanating from God. If people use imagination and intuition that is a part of human nature, they can transcend the material condition and penetrate to higher realm of spiritual truths. As Roderick Nash points out, Transcendentalism gave wilderness a new connotation: nature came to be seen as a source of religion and the best place where the God’s glory can be experienced. This conception of wilderness was in sharp opposition to the previous notion presenting wilderness as a dark and hostile place whose confusion puts one’s morality into danger (Wilderness 85-6).
Emerson had a great influence on Thoreau but Thoreau was too much of a free spirit to stay like the older philosopher’s apprentice. His retreat to Walden Pond was in a way a declaration of independence on Emerson. At the age of twenty-eight, he went to Walden Pond to live his own life and write his own thoughts (though on Emerson’s property). Thoreau not only proved that he had something to say on his own but, more importantly, he transcended Emersonian transcendentalism. Max Oelschlaeger emphasizes the fundamental difference in Emerson’s theoretical, conventionally anthropocentric and Judeo-Christian outlook, which praised nature only in terms of God’s existence in it, and Thoreau’s practical deep interest in natural organic processes and the essence of life.
Thoreau’s wilderness philosophy was maturing over time but in Walden he made important observations and realizations both practical and philosophical; his thoughts on wilderness culminated in a later essay “Walking”. Thoreau went to the woods not (just) to escape from Emerson’s or his father’s house but to conduct an experiment. He raised many existential questions about life and wanted to find the answers by putting it into extreme. He clearly states his intentions to find the essence of life:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and stuck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever’. (Walden 88)
Thoreau is not a follower of academic wisdom; he does not take anything for granted unless he can prove it himself. He wants to face “the essential facts of life” and learn from it but he also seriously questions religion by saying that people “somewhat hastily” believed and followed the teachings of religion.
Once in the woods in solitude Thoreau realizes the benefits of a simple life close to and in harmony with nature and launches a critique of capitalist society. Even now, 160 years later we can see how pointed his critique was because it is still largely applicable. Thoreau introduced the concept of voluntary simplicity, which has important environmental implications and has been re-discovered again in the twentieth century, when the western society, facing massive environmental degradation, started to reflect on its impacts on the environment. Thoreau’s questions resonate over the span of those 160 years: “Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?” (Walden 35). A key to a happy life of the wise is according to Thoreau simplicity without the distraction of unnecessary luxury. Only then a clear vision and critical thinking is preserved:
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor. […] None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. (Walden 14)
Thoreau claims that the basic human needs are food, shelter, clothing and fuel (Walden 12-13), the excess and want, after the basic needs are satisfied, are a sign of a shallow life on the surface that mistakes the glittering appearance for the fundamental truth: “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be” (Walden 94). Thoreau far-sighted observation that under the material abundance “[t]he mass of men lead their lives of quiet desperation” (Walden 7), has been true for many generations to come long after his death. Thoreau not only sets an example how to live more deliberately, he also invites others to
work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that allusion which covers the globe through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake. (Walden 95-96)
This deliberate life rooted in reality cannot apparently be found in society. For Thoreau the real “[l]ife consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest” (“Walking” 240). Wealth and abundance means detachment from reality and we pay for it with our critical judgment , however, there is also much higher price for comfort and that is freedom. Thoreau was aware of the choice and opted for freedom: “As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture […] (Walden 67).
Thoreau calls for a different kind of sensitivity that embraces wildness and freedom of the nonhuman world and acknowledges us as a part of this world. When one merges with nature and becomes a conscious part of its interrelationships, he or she reveals the true freedom that cannot be experienced in society. In Walden he describes his full immersion in nature: “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. And I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself” (125). His views on natural processes and human place within them precede the inclusive biocentric ethics of what later became deep ecology. Thoreau’s interest in organic processes put him on the cutting edge of evolutionary principles as they were described soon afterwards by his contemporary Charles Darwin. His biocentric view included human beings into the organic matter in nature: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (Walden 134). Through his identification with the freedom and wildness, his low instincts got awakened. In the following passage Thoreau describes his possession by the wild and savage instinct. What was quite unacceptable for a young gentleman of Concord seemed natural in the woods beyond the town limits:
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of a savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild no less than the good. […] I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. (Walden 202)
Wilderness in Thoreau’s view inspires higher spiritual truths and instinct as well as wildness and rawness of the connection to its organic flux. The sojourn at Walden Pond gave Thoreau some hands-on experience with natural processes and made him realize the complexity of nature. Unlike his contemporaries who perceived nature either as a dark place full of confusion and danger, or, as his fellow transcendentalists, as a place to encounter God’s higher laws, or simply as a source of raw material, Thoreau looked at nature as a “perennial source of life” (Walden 129).
In “Walking” Thoreau presented his wilderness philosophy in its most condensed form. Having discovered the deeper meaning of life in the woods, Thoreau set out to spread the word among people. In the opening of “Walking” he candidly declares: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (225). According to Thoreau walking, if done properly in full immersion in the activity that requires forgetting “obligations to Society” and “shak[ing] off the village” (“Walking” 229) is a way to broaden our senses and realize the higher natural laws.
Our civilization emerged from wilderness but then it lost touch with its sustaining source. Thoreau uses the metaphor of nature as mother: “Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children […]; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man” (“Walking” 248). The future according to Thoreau is a matter of returning to our roots; it lies in wilderness, not civilization. This assumption leads Thoreau to declare, “in wildness is the preservation of the World” (“Walking” 239). “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (241). In awe and humility he exclaims: “Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! […] When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickets and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. […] the same soil is good for men and for trees” (“Walking” 242). Our true nature is thus wildness and our true home is wilderness. We are sustained by the same source as the rest of creation. “In short,” as Thoreau remarks, “all good things are wild and free” (“Walking” 246).
Thoreau identifies wilderness as a precondition of cultural evolution. He picked up the popular theory of his time about the westward progress of the race and comes to a conclusion that wilderness and an advanced stage of civilization are related terms. Only wild nature can sustain prospering society. If a civilization kills wilderness, it basically commits suicide because it cuts itself from its source. The Old World has done that and therefore, unless something was done, Thoreau expected a collapse. “The civilized nations – Greece, Rome, England – have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! Little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers” (“Walking” 243). Thoreau celebrated the New World as opposed to the Old World. As an American patriot Thoreau asks:
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? […] The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader. (“Walking” 236-37)
The quality of the land is reflected in the American character. If the natural world is richer in America and if it is the sustaining source of people and culture, the American people must also be of superior character.
I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky – our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains – our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests – and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. (“Walking” 238)
Wilderness in Thoreau’s view is a source of life as well as a source of culture. In this interpretation, America’s vast wilderness is not a sign of underdevelopment but it is a sign of American superiority and therefore patriotic pride.
3.2. John Muir: Wilderness Means Home
John Muir is widely recognized for putting the (Thoreau’s) theory into practice. He is known as a wilderness champion but not as a wilderness philosopher as Thoreau. Max Oelschlaeger presents arguments against this claim and points out that Muir was more than a popularizer of wilderness philosophy, but that he also contributed to this philosophy. The reasons why his achievements have been underestimated are according to Oelschlaeger his style of writing (he wrote voluminously, more like a naturalist than a philosopher, and never published his idea on wilderness comprehensively), his tendency to theology rather than to philosophy (his vocabulary and style were more religious than philosophical), and finally, his versatility (Muir was known as a mountaineer, naturalist, scientific observer, passionate conservationist, popular writer, etc.) (173-75).
Muir’s departing point was also Transcendentalism, he studied works of Thoreau, Emerson and other transcendentalists and they became his most influential source of inspiration. Transcendentalism enabled Muir to reconcile his father strict religious indoctrination with his love of nature. Natural objects that like windows to eternity reflect God’s power and glory justify young Muir in his pursuit of natural studies. The Bible and Nature were for him “two books [which] harmonize beautifully” (qtd. in Wilderness 124). Muir prefers to ‘read’ Nature rather than the Bible for a sense of divinity. Nature is a text to be read and interpreted.
On a metaphorical level, nature is in Muir’s vision portrayed as a temple. One can worship God in a church or a cathedral but the true divinity can be experienced in nature. In a fervent description of the Sierra Mountains, Muir declares: ”This I may say is the first time I have been at church in California, led here at last, every door graciously opened for the poor lonely worshiper. In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars” (My First Summer 301). Nature is free of restrictions; it leaves “every door graciously opened” in contrast with hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church. Muir believes that nature offers the same teachings as the Bible does, albeit in a purer form. Muir was aware of this distinction since he was a child in Wisconsin: “On Sundays, after or before chores and sermons and Bible-lessons, we drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily time, getting lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes, and muskrats. In particular we took Christ’s advice and devotedly ‘considered the lilies’” (My First Summer 60).
Muir’s view of God in nature was not purely transcendental, nature was not a mere reflection of God, it was godlike, a place where God resided. As a naturalist, Muir was interested in natural processes and was aware of nature’s organic quality. The lofty ideas of transcendentalism alone did not offer him satisfactory answers. Although he stayed an ardent believer, his religiosity moved toward more universal values of biocentrism. Max Oelschlaeger aptly formulates Muir’s understanding of God: “Muir believed in God throughout his life, but his God was neither the Cosmic Hitler of Daniel Muir nor the Transcendental Oversoul of Emerson, but a God incarnate and in process” (192). For Muir, as for Thoreau, nature is the key to understand higher spiritual truths as well as the simple facts of life. As Muir puts it, “[t]he clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness” (qtd. in Oelschlaeger 177).
Muir’s split with Transcendentalism (at least the Emersonian Transcendentalism of New England) and move toward his own natural theology was marked by Emerson’s visit in Yosemite. This visit represented a great disappointment and had an impact on the formation of Muir’s wilderness philosophy. Muir proposed a camping trip to Emerson but was turned down. Even though he never stopped admiring the aging philosopher, he got a picture of an “indoor philosophy” from Boston that celebrates nature but is completely detached from its mysteries.
I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean; and forgetting his age, plans, duties, ties of every sort, I proposed an immeasurable camping trip back in the heart of the mountains. […] But alas, it was too late – too near the sundown of his life. The shadows were growing long, and he leaned on his friends. His party full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plans, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be led to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping. (Parks 131-32)
It was not so much Emerson himself who turned Muir down. Emerson was “past his prime” and therefore “as a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends who seemed as full of old-fashionable conformity as of bold intellectual independence” (Parks 135). Muir made fun of the delicacy and solicitousness of Boston people but he was actually really hurt. The attitude of Emerson’s company forced Muir to reevaluate Transcendentalism. When the company preferred the “carpet dust and unknowable reeks” of a lodge to the “beauty and fragrance of sequoia flame” and “the stars look[ing] down between the great domes”, he remarked: “And to think of this being a Boston choice! Sad commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism” (Parks 134). However, the natural surroundings made Muir’s frustration flow away. “And though lonesome for the first time in these forests, I quickly took heart again, – the trees had not gone to Boston, not the birds; and as I sat by the fire, Emerson was still with me in spirit, though I never again saw him in the flesh” (Parks 136).
Thoreau went to the woods “to live deliberately” and “to front only the essential facts of life” and Muir retreated from society for similar reasons: “I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money and baggage” (My First Summer 153). By living “like the wild animal”, he also fronts the essential facts of life and connects his wilderness retreat with freedom. Muir is a member of Thoreau’s “ancient and honorable class” of “Holy-Landers” or “Walkers” who form the “fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People”, and who understand “the art of Walking” or rather “Sauntering” (“Walking” 226). “The secret of successful sauntering” writes Thoreau, is “having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere” (“Walking” 225). Thoreau would have been proud of how his successor embraced Walking. Like Thoreau, Muir knows that only sauntering is not enough; one has to reach a certain state of mind, to make peace with the world and leave all “baggage” behind. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness” (qtd. in Oelschlaeger 182).
Muir made himself at home anywhere but especially in wilderness and he made an effort to accommodate there others too. Drawing from Thoreau, Muir promoted wilderness as a source of civilization. Wilderness is our original home but we lost our connection with it. His metaphor that presents wilderness as home was a successful practical incarnation of Thoreau’s theoretical concept. “Going to the woods is going home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally” (Parks 98). Muir believes that wilderness can be protected only when it is experienced and familiar. His lifelong work was to publicize the idea of wilderness on social and political level. Muir invites Americans to experience and enjoy “freedom and glory of God’s wilderness” (My First Summer 161).
Muir’s wilderness philosophy is well stated in his paraphrase of Thoreau’s famous dictum from “Walking”. Muir adjusts Thoreau’s “in wildness is the preservation of the World” into “in God’s wildness is the hope of the world” (qtd. in Holmes 5). “Wildness” is for Muir also the highest virtue and quality that is contained in wilderness. The most philosophical parts of his writings occur when Muir is exposed to the self-ruled wilderness and he realizes the natural connections and laws and indifference to other life forms. “Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality” (My First Summer 175). To be in wilderness means to merge with it and to become a part of those organic processes, that is the true freedom. Muir also touches on the earthly experience of immortality and eternity as opposed to the detached idea of heavenly eternity. Immortality can be experienced on earth through universal unity with nature:
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. (My First Summer 161)
These thoughts lead Muir away from the anthropocentric tradition to acknowledge the inherent value of nature and move toward an ecosystem point of view. Just as Thoreau did during his time in the woods Muir also comes to the conclusion that some things have a meaning of their own regardless to human needs.
Poison oak or poison ivy […] is somewhat troublesome to most travelers, inflaming the skin and eyes, but blends harmoniously with its companion plants, and many a charming flower leans confidingly upon it for protection and shade. […] Sheep eat it without apparent ill effects; so do horses to some extent […] Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself. (My First Summer 166)
Once again, by observing and actively immersing in nature, Muir inevitably comes to a conclusion that was picked up much later by deep ecologists. He sees nature as a web of life, an interrelated biotic community of all living organisms. A strong push toward the ecosystem way of seeing the world was a moment when he found that “[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers” (My First Summer 245). Muir believed that every natural object is alive so he did stop to speak to the plants and animal but also rocks and water. His colorful depiction of Yosemite waterfalls is full of sounds, colors, and forms as the water rushes down the gorge. Muir observes that the water as it “leaps out into the freedom of the air […] does not seem to be under the dominion of ordinary laws, but rather as it were a living creature, full of the strength of the mountains and their huge, wild joy” (My First Summer 245).
Muir’s metaphor of Home, his wilderness philosophy, or rather wilderness theology, with a strong emphasis on the divine aspect of wilderness, and the biocentric inclinations as outlined in this chapter had important implications on Muir’s practical achievements in wilderness protection and the development of national parks system. This issue is the key in public perception of wilderness in American history so I will come back to this topic in depth in chapters 3.4. and 3.5.
3.3. Edward Abbey: Preservation Means Wilderness
If Henry David Thoreau is known as the “wilderness philosopher”, John Muir as the “son of the wilderness” Edward Abbey is a “wilderness defender” in the very sense of the word. The concept of wilderness is by Abbey’s time so firmly rooted in the American mind that, as Abbey claims, “[t]he idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders” (The Journey Home 223). Unlike his nineteenth-century gentleman predecessors, Abbey defended wilderness in a rowdy way. His term “monkeywrenching” have been generally adopted for various acts of civil disobedience in the name of environmental protection and his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang became the “bible” of the new movement. Abbey also took up a role of a founding father just like Thoreau (nature writing, philosophy), or Muir (modern environmental movement) by inspiring the development of the radical environmental movement.
Although Abbey refused being called nature writer and being associated with Thoreau, Muir and the likes, he went in their footsteps and there are more similarities than it is apparent at the first sight. Desert Solitaire is often compared with Walden. Both books are personal accounts of an individual retreat to wilderness and both condense two years into one. Both are a powerful voice in favor of wilderness and a sharp critique of the society. Both authors were trained philosophers and both were rebels opposing and questioning authority as well as sincere American patriots, both played the flute, both loved the West and irony, etc. The list could go on. Thoreau was Abbey’s imaginary companion in the wilderness. In an essay “Down the River with Henry Thoreau” Abbey writes about a river trip with “five friends plus the ghost of a sixth”; he takes “a worn and greasy paperback copy of a book called Walden, or Life in the Woods” and maintain a conversation with Thoreau’s ghost throughout the trip (13). Despite Abbey’s sarcasm and humorous tone on the edge of blasphemy, when he calls Thoreau “the arrogant, insolent village crank” and makes fun of his puritan ways (“To hell with him. I do not approve of his fastidious Puritanism. For one who claims to crave nothing but reality, he frets too much about purity.”) (“Down the River with Henry Thoreau” 36), his reverence for Thoreau stands out in the texts. America in the twentieth century need more Thoreaus than ever before: “The deeper our United States sinks into industrialism, urbanism, militarism – with the rest of the world doing its best to emulate America – the more poignant, strong, and appealing becomes Thoreau’s demand for the right of every man, every woman, every child, every dog, every tree, every snail darter, every lousewort, every living thing, to live its own life in its own way at its own pace on its own square mile of home” (“Down the River with Henry Thoreau” 36).
Abbey heartily agrees with Thoreau’s “[t]hat government is best which governs not at all” (“Resistance to Civil Government” 226); for in his conception, “anarchism does not mean ‘no rule’, it means ‘no rulers’”, it “means maximum democracy; the maximum possible dispersal of political power, economic power, and force – military power. An anarchist society consists of a voluntary association of self-reliant, self-supporting, autonomous communities” (“Theory of Anarchy” 25-26, 27). Abbey was particularly inspired by Thoreau’s maxim, “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right” (“Resistance to Civil Government” 227). Abbey only adds that “strict legality isn’t always a very good standard by which to judge right and wrong” (The Plowboy Interview 18). In his master thesis called “Anarchy and the Morality of Violence” Abbey posed the question if violence in anarchy can be morally justified. His conclusion that illegal tactics and even violence may be morally justified in case of defense became his lifelong persuasion. However, Abbey never approved of violence against people as morally justifiable. He makes a clear distinction between sabotage and terrorism. The “monkeywrenchers” of his novel are saboteurs; their acts of violence are aimed at inanimate objects (machinery and property). Terrorism, on the other hand, is violence against human beings and it is not morally justifiable (The Plowboy Interview 18).
Abbey thus shifts Thoreau’s acts of civil disobedience toward the environmental concern; his acts of civil disobedience are always in defense of the wilderness. Moreover, Abbey also makes use of Muir’s metaphor of home to justify these illegal tactics by comparing them to the morally justified physical resistance in case of an “invasion of our homes or an attack on our loved ones”; similarly, “when a place you love […] is being invaded by strip miners and road builders and clear-cut loggers, and when all the usual political means of persuasion, all the legal means of preventing this invasion, have failed, then I think you may be morally justified in adopting illegal tactics. In other words, sabotage” (The Plowboy Interview 18).
The passion in wilderness is grounded in spiritual values. Abbey shifts Thoreau’s lofty spirituality and Muir’s religiosity toward a more down-to-earth kind of spirituality. Although he discusses the existence of God on a philosophical level, he claims his allegiance to the earth. “There is nothing here, at the moment, but me and the desert. And that’s the truth. Why confuse the issue by dragging in a superfluous entity? […] Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.” (DS 208). Abbey’s spirituality is firmly grounded in the earth.
In his attitude toward wilderness, Abbey goes in steps of Thoreau and Muir; he also sees wilderness as a precondition of civilization. “[W]ilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself” (DS 192). Thoreau’s famous dictum “in wildness is the preservation of the world” is reworked once again into Abbey’s “wilderness complements and completes civilization” (DS 148). David J. Rothman makes an interesting observation about Abbey’s paraphrase:
Abbey’s revision of Thoreau intensifies and specifies it […] and making both nouns more particular from ‘wildness’ to ‘wilderness’, and from ’Word’ to ‘civilization’. Insofar as civilization must involve common, social aspirations, Abbey’s version suggests, even more than Thoreau’s that wilderness is both real and imagined. […] Far more than Thoreau’s ‘is’, Abbey’s ‘complements and completes’ requires some notion of human agency even to make sense, just as Thoreau’s ‘world’ comprehends a good deal more than Abbey’s ‘civilization’, which is just the human part of it. Abbey’s formulation emphasizes that the otherwise invisible connections between the human and a sublimely wild environment can thus literary give meaning to social life. (55-56)
“Wilderness complements and completes civilization” but it is a higher level than civilization itself. Wilderness will be here, and even more so, when civilization disappears. On the other hand, civilization cannot exist without wilderness. Wilderness preservation is thus an attempt to save civilization. Abbey as a true “earthiest” knows that wilderness will outlive us. As a true “humanist”, he is concerned with the future of his own kind and assumes that to save ourselves we must save wilderness because, “[w]ho needs wilderness? Civilization needs wilderness. The idea of wilderness preservation is one of the fruits of civilization, like Bach’s music, Tolstoy’s novels, scientific medicine, novocaine, space travels, free love, […]” (JH 229-30).
Abbey’s chosen landscape is desert, not Thoreau’s cultural landscape around Concord or Muir’s sublime mountains of California. Also his feelings are not Muir’s welcoming optimism but rather anger. Just like Muir, Abbey writes to make a change. Writing becomes a form of activism as well as a form of a personal and intimate relationship with nature. Abbey’s personal experience with nature is based on different principles than Thoreau’s. Whereas Thoreau denounces mere appearances and searches for the reality under the surface of things, Abbey is “pleased enough with surfaces” (DS xi). Nevertheless, in Desert Solitaire, his wilderness book, Abbey also wants to penetrate deep into the essence of life while facing the wild. He states the reason for his retreat into the wilderness in similar terms as Thoreau:
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock. (DS 6)
Similarly to Muir’s longing to gain “independence of money and baggage”, Abbey also wants to escape “the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus”. Like Thoreau who “wanted to live deep and stuck out all the marrow of life”, Abbey has the same desire to expose “the bare bones of existence” or “the essential facts of life”; his “hard and brutal mysticism” and “risking everything human” parallels with Thoreau’s urge “to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” which is adequately hard and brutal. Both expect to meet something higher, be it “God”, “devil” or “Medusa”.
Abbey exposes his personality to the reader with all humanly qualities and honestly records his contradictory nature. Paradox is his bedrock. Like Muir he uses anthropomorphisms to describe the nonhuman world despite his conscious effort to suppress and eliminate for good personification of the natural (DS 6). The true immersion in wilderness requires not only different kind of sensitivity and seeing, but also a language that is not so heavily biased and dominating.
Having the advantage of living after Darwin’s evolutionary principles became accepted, Abbey moved Thoreau’s and Muir’s tentative conclusions about the organic unity of the living world even further. Still before Arne Naess coined the term deep ecology, all principles of this school of thought were already present in Abbey’s works. Like Muir thinking about the inherent values of poison ivy and poison oak, Abbey talks about snakes who have “beautifully selfish reasons of their own” (DS 24). The interconnected web of life as makes Abbey declare a similar realization as Muir had made: “We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred” (DS 24). In an attempt to join this web of life and face the bedrock of existence, Abbey is seized by a prospect of a predator and prey relationship with a cottontail rabbit he encounters on his walk. Abbey did what Thoreau did not do with the woodchuck.
I am taken by the notion to experiment – on the rabbit. Suppose, I say to myself, you were out here hungry, starving, no weapon but your bare hands. What would you do? What could you do? […] To my amazement the stone flies true (as if guided by a Higher Power) and knock the cottontail head over tincups […] He crumples, there’s the usual gushing of blood, etc., a brief spasm, and then no more. […] For a moment I am shocked by my deed; I stare at the quiet rabbit, his glazed eyes, his blood drying in the dust. […] But shock is succeeded by a mild elation. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots […] I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but unmistakable. What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by process too subtle to fathom, to my own soul. I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger of another world, I have entered this one. (DS 37-38)
This passage usually horrifies readers; Abbeys deed is seen as unnecessary, irrational and futile, however, Abbey would argue that it was an entrance toward an ecological view of the world, a way of merging with the nonhuman world and formed organic ties with other members of biotic community. By killing the rabbit he formed a very intense intimate relationship with it. He stooped being a visitor of the wilderness and became a member, for this moment, he was a predator but the next moment he could become a prey. There was no sporting pleasure of taking a life in Abbey’s deed; after all it was the same man who declared: “I prefer not to kill animals. I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake” (DS 20).
The connection between wilderness and freedom is especially strong in Abbey’s work; he stresses the need of open space as a precondition to freedom and democracy. The ideal society according to Abbey is a Jeffersonian utopia of independent, self-reliant freeholders, which ensures decentralization of power (The Plowboy Interview 17). For Abbey freedom is directly dependent on wilderness: “We can have wilderness without freedom; […] But we cannot have freedom without wilderness” therefore “Every square mile of range and desert saved from the strip miners, every river saved from the dam builders, every forest saved from the loggers, every swamp saved from the land speculators means another square mile saved for the play of human freedom” (JH 235-36). Abbey also invests wilderness with political meaning as a refuge in case of centralized authoritative regime. He states, “the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny” (DS 149).
3.4. National Parks: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People”
By the 1850s the focus of American life shifted from idyllic rural and agricultural to urban and industrial perspective. As the bustling tempo and materialistic tone of industrial revolution separated people from their natural environment, wilderness was not worthless anymore. It became a valuable commodity and the demand for outdoor experience increased significantly. Thoreau himself was an advocate of outdoor recreation facilities that, as he claimed, would preserve mental sanity of urban dwellers who are otherwise separated from nature. In 1859, Thoreau noted in his journal: “Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should not be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation” (qtd. in Philippon 285 n51).
The idea of a park was not a new concept. As historian Hans Huth points out, public parks were in America since the beginning of colonization. When William Penn designed the city of Philadelphia, he “assigned for public use a number of squares […] These were to be graced with trees and not to be built over, except perhaps with a few public buildings. Likewise there were ‘commons’ such as those in England in most of the New England settlements. Primarily intended to serve as pastures, they were also used as parade grounds or for recreational purposes” (qtd. in Philippon 123). In the beginning of the nineteenth century, gardens and parks were designed in eastern cities as a man-made and man-managed landscape resembling the pastoral arcadia. The idea of National Parks was not based on the notion of garden, as Roderick Nash points out,
Gardening or park-making consisted of shaping the environment to man’s will. The idea of a wild park was self-contradictory. The ideal environment, and the one a park was intended to display, was the pastoral, the arcadian. Wilderness was the frightening, unordered condition from which man was relieved to have emerged. Parks were symbols of this emergence, of control over nature. (qtd. in Philippon 123)
Nash thus reveals that Americans built a civilization from wilderness and the civilization created wilderness in return (Wilderness xi). The western wilderness as it was created and manufactured by the Park Service, was an icon of pristine, untouched nature, an image of paradise.
Outdoor leisure activities were initially sought by elites – wealthy urban dwellers who were slowly discovering the outing opportunities in wilderness. The wilderness advocates such as Theodore Roosevelt, George Perkins Marsh, George Catlin and John Muir helped to promote the idea of National Parks, however, environmental concern was not at the birth of national parks as one should think. In 1872, Congress voted to set aside two million acres of land that was “worthless”, i.e. with limited agricultural and ranching prospects and no valuable minerals, and created Yellowstone, the first National Park. It was rightly recognized that even though the area was unfit for development it was not entirely economically worthless – the monumental grandeur would once sell well. Ted Steinberg points out the iconoclastic quality of the monumental wilderness in a young nation:
Unlike European countries, the United States, a much younger nation by comparison, had a few cultural icons to match the castles and cathedrals that gave Old World states unique national identities. With the country emerging from the divisive Civil War, its status as a unified nation still a quite fragile, congressmen searched the landscape for awe-inspiring physical features – stunning mountain scenery, vast and colorful canyons, spectacular geysers – for citizens to rally around. (148)
Major role in establishing of Yellowstone National Park was also played by railroads. Northern Pacific company claimed that bringing tourists to the park would serve the cause of conservation. In 1883, the Northern Pacific completed the second transcontinental railroad and put Yellowstone within reach of tourists nationwide (Steinberg 148).
Thirteen years after the creation of Yellowstone National Park a vast patch of wilderness in northern New York that miraculously escaped development was set aside as Adirondack state park. However, it was not until the creation of Yosemite National Park and John Muir’s campaign for wilderness that wilderness was preserved for the sake of wilderness. Nash points out that both Yellowstone and Adirondack parks were preserved for utilitarian reasons. Yellowstone was established to prevent private acquisition and exploitation of geysers, hot springs and other natural wonders, whereas Adirondacks were protected under the argument of an adequate water supply for big cities bellow the park. “In both places wilderness was preserved unintentionally. Only later did a few persons begin to realize that one of the most significant results of the establishment of the first national and state park had been the preservation of wilderness” (Wilderness 108).
The creation of National Parks meant inventing an artificial environment that involved forceful removal of American Indian tribes residing in the area, prohibition of hunting and fishing and setting artificial borders that restricted animals in their migrations. “Conservation, as it played out in the national parks, essentially transformed such ingrained and acceptable behaviors as hunting, collecting, and fire setting into crimes like trespassing, poaching, and arson” (Steinberg 152). The myth of “pristine wilderness” is thus entirely manufactured and further culturally constructed. Simon Schama reveals the contradiction between the myth and the reality in Yosemite: “Though the parking is almost as big as the park and there are bears rooting among the McDonald’s cartoons, we still imagine Yosemite the way Albert Bierstadt painted it or Carleton Watking or Ansel Adams photographed it: with no trace of human presence” (7). To attract tourist to national parks, the images of nearly extinct buffalo and American Indians who were previously driven away were used. Ted Steinberg comments on the deceiving reality that the myth of the American West was built on:
Bison and Indians were the two icons that, more than anything else, symbolized the destruction of both nature and culture in the American West. Employing them to sell the American people on the need to visit the newly conserved and “unspoiled” parks amounted to one huge exercise in cultural self-deception. Could anything be more paradoxical than using contrived groups of animal and people, annihilated in the so-called winning of the West, to lure tourists to supposedly “untouched” wilderness? (156)
Quite ironically, wilderness areas designated as National Parks were preserved “for the Benefit and Enjoyment of the (white Euro-American) People” while for other people (those without the capital P), they meant dispossession and misery. Despite this unfortunate history, the national parks are promoted with the same kind of egalitarianism. Since they were created for (and owned by!) the American people, they make their best to accommodate all of their legal owners. Young, old, colored, disabled, overweight…in America everybody should have an equal opportunity and that applies to the national parks too. In the next chapter, I will use the example of Muir and Abbey to trace the trends in the development of the National Park System as it is today.
3.5. Industrial Tourism: from Muir to Abbey toward the National (Amusement) Park System
Although Yosemite National Park was the United States’ first national park, it stands as a turning point in shaping the idea of national parks and its protection, which is largely ascribed to John Muir. The Yosemite Valley was known and popular before John Muir made it to California. In 1864, president Lincoln granted the area to the State of California as a state park (Philippon 126). The development of the park before and after John Muir became its advocate is interesting, particularly when compared with its consequences today. In a way, Edward Abbey was a direct heir of Muir’s legacy in the National Park Service.
For many years, Abbey seasonally worked as a park ranger or a fire lookout in number of American national parks and commented on the development that this institution went through from its beginning. In the second half of the twentieth century Abbey could see the outcomes of the park policies at the end of the nineteenth century when the concept of industrial tourism was started. It would have been interesting to see John Muir’s response to Abbey’s essay “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks”, which is included in Desert Solitaire. If he had the detached view from the end of twentieth century, Muir would probably have agreed with Abbey. He even might have changed his views on tourism in his own time. However, he did not have this opportunity.
After Yosemite was declared a state park, there was an increased number of visitors in the park. Today’s mass tourism with all facilities included was started in 1860s as a historian Richard West Sellars describes:
[M]uch of the valley floor was developed to satisfy the whims of the tourist industry. Under lax state management, the Yosemite Valley emerged as a crazy quilt of roads, hotels and cabins, and pastures and pens for cattle, hogs, mules and horses. Tilled lands supplied food for residents and visitors, and feed for lifestock; irrigation dams and ditches supported agriculture; and timber operations supplied wood for construction, fencing, and heating. (qtd. in Philippon 126-27)
Years later, living with the outcomes of this first wave of development in national parks, Edward Abbey was a fierce opponent of the second wave of this process in the 1960s. He felt that what he called industrial tourism “tends to reduce the natural world” to “museum-like diorama” (DS 217) or some kind of a Disneyland free and available (once you pay the entrance fee, of course) for everyone anytime.
One of the first advocates of Yosemite Park, who predicted the future development of the transition toward industrial tourism, was a landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was appointed to the park’s board of commissioners in 1864. In an important report prepared for the commission, Olmsted described the park with “the most tranquil meadows, the most playful streams, and every variety of soft and peaceful pastoral beauty”, however, he also warned that these places “might become private property and […] their value to posterity be injured” (qtd. in Philippon 126). To keep the park open, Olmsted recommended free access to the valley, construction of a public road to provide better transportation to the valley, establishment of a circuit trail for carriages around the valley, and building of several rental cabins also within the valley (Philippon 126). Olmsted also predicted that those hundreds of visitors to Yosemite “will become thousands and in a century the whole number of visitors will be counted by the millions” (qtd. in Philippon 126).
Olmsted’s vision turned true mainly due to the rise of the automobile industry, which made recreation and tourism easy and popular. National parks were suddenly easily accessible for an increasing number of Americans. The National Park Service adjusted to the new conditions and accommodated the automobile tourism. Yosemite National Park was opened to traffic in 1913; Yellowstone followed four years later (Steinberg 241) and most of other national parks were soon also “developed”. National parks were advertised as tourist attractions and this approach is still propagated by the National Park Service today. It does not make much of a difference whether you visit the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the White House or Yellowstone National Park; everywhere you meet the same people from different parts of the world looking through their cameras, walking in groups, hunting for souvenirs in specialized shops selling more-or-less the same kind of Chinese-made products with different designs, eating in adjacent cafeterias and restaurants and buying magazines and postcards. In Desert Solitaire Abbey gives an ironic description of hard lives of motorized industrial tourists who
roll up incredible mileages on their odometers, rack up state after state in two-week transcontinental motor marathons, knock off one national park after another, take millions of square yards of photographs, and endure patiently the most prolonged discomfort: the tedious traffic jams, the awful food of park cafeterias and roadside eateries, the nocturnal search for a place to sleep or camp, […] the endless lines of creeping traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes, the ever-proliferating Rules & Regulations, […] the irritation and restlessness of their children, the worry of their wives […]. (58)
In stark contrast with the long line of discomforts and troubles of industrial tourists, Abbey points out those “who have given up the struggle on the highways in exchange for an entirely different kind of vacation – out in the open, on their own feet, following the quiet trail through forest and mountains, bedding down at evening under the stars, when and where they feel like it, at a time when the Industrial Tourists are still hunting for a place to park their automobiles” (59). Abbey clearly demonstrates that although there is no doubt that “Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks, […] the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves” (59). Abbey does not only condemn the way automobiles penetrated into the very structure of national parks, he speaks against the whole automobile culture that took over the United States and urges to resist in the name of both wilderness and civilization: “The automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000 lives a year), and it is the responsibility of the Park Service, as well as that of everyone else concerned with preserving both wilderness and civilization, to begin a campaign of resistance” (DS 59).
Like Abbey, Muir detested tourists in his early years in Yosemite. Both men considered it a disgrace to their beloved patches of wilderness that it was flooded with tourists whose interests were mainly to visit and take it off their lists. In a letter to his life-long mentor, Jeanne Carr, from May 1970, Muir writes: “All sorts of human stuff is being poured into our Valley this year, and the blank, fleshy apathy with which most of it comes in contact with the rock and water spirits of the place is most amazing” (qtd. in Philippon 130). Those riding horses, Muir continues, “climb sprawlingly to their saddles like overgrown frogs pulling themselves up a stream-bank through the bent sedges, ride up the Valley with about as much emotion as the horses they ride upon, and comfortable when they have ‘done it all’, and long for the safety and flatness of their proper homes” (qtd. in Philippon 130). Muir and Abbey especially detested these refined urban dwellers who did not belong to wilderness. In this way they contrasted pure and pristine nature with dull and corrupted society. Interestingly enough, both Muir and Abbey put themselves in a position of a local who does not approve of new visitors. As they devotedly defended their beloved places, they, unconsciously, moved to a role of a self-appointed authority. Their efforts to keep wilderness intact overlapped with their desire to keep people out of it without including themselves.
With contempt Abbey observes that “[w]here once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out” (DS 51). With enormous campgrounds, comfort stations, flushing toilets, electricity, visitor centers, etc, parks lost their charm because most of their beauty lies their being wild, hardly accessible, and even dangerous. People who ventured on foot into wilderness were rewarded by nature’s beauty and closeness. Effortless automobile tourism which enables to see few times as much in a single day can never substitute for or simulate the feelings of being in the wilderness, being part of it and rely on one’s own abilities.
Abbey proposes radical changes in the management of National Parks which would lead to sustainability and better protection. First of all, the immediate and complete ban of cars. “Let the people walk. […] We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums […] and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places” (DS 60). He offers bikes, horses and mules instead along with free shuttle buses which can transport supplies to camps. This plan involves the roads that were already built but no more new roads should be built in National Parks. People should free themselves from paved roads and venture further to explore hiking trails and paths. There will also be much more space for everyone because once people start walking instead of driving they occupy much less space. Last but not least, park rangers should be put back to work. “Kick them out of those overheated airconditioned offices, yank them out of those overstuffed patrol cars, and drive them out on the trials where they should be” because “they’ve wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling” (DS 63).
Abbey’s fierce critique and a reform plan were not heard or accepted. Although there are still more voices like Abbey’s, Industrial Tourism is a business and every business is money-oriented. The goal is to open national parks to as many people as possible and thus earn more money. The key word is therefore accessibility, not sustainability.
4. Conclusion: One Brave Deed and a Thousand Books
As I have suggested in this thesis, American Environmental thought is shaped by two main sources of inspiration – wilderness and nature writing. However, the idea of wilderness and nature writing is also shaped by the environmental thought in return. On a deeper level, I searched for the underlying principles of American environmental thought and found them in American Indian cultures. All three authors whose works I examined (though Thoreau and Muir in particular) were concerned with American Indian cultures; their extensive studies and personal experience with American Indians had a profound effect on the way they related to the natural world. Although American Indians have been recently glorified and culturally appropriated by champions of environmental movement, it is seldom acknowledged, that they were a primary source of inspiration of nineteenth-century middle-class men who became the “official” founding fathers of the environmental thought.
I called Thoreau, Muir and Abbey “wilderness prophets”, I did so because wilderness was the core of their work and their ideas had a significant effect on the society’s attitudes toward the wilderness. Their idea of wilderness contrasted with the mechanical anthropocentric and exclusive official definition of wilderness. Following the example of these wilderness prophets many future nature writers and philosophers of nature claim their allegiance to wilderness. However, they often identify with “the wrong nature” as the subtitle of Cronon’s essay claims. The cultural significance of wilderness in the United States is an important factor in the way it is perceived. Because of its historic cultural connotations, and also through its link to patriotism, the term came to prefer landscapes that were, in the nineteenth-century vocabulary, more “sublime”, or, in the twentieth-century vocabulary, more “sexy” (it is interesting how these tho words can become so close).
So what is wilderness and how does it look like? It is a more subjective term than it seems to be; the wilderness of Thoreau, Muir and Abbey was not just the iconic monumental landscape as it has often been interpreted. Thoreau saw wildness in mild Walden woods around Concord; despite his advocating of the dramatic sceneries of the national parks, Muir claims that: “[t]o the same and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, […] for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be” (Parks 2); and finally, Abbey’s wilderness were not woods nor mountains but the vast nothingness of desert. As Gary Snyder notes, “[a] person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness” (qtd. in “The Trouble” 108).
Thoreau, Muir and Abbey, when faced the dilemma between nature and culture, always took side with nature and wilderness. They spoke out for the weaker or the one who could not resist the pressure of expanding civilization. They spoke highly about the purity and moral qualities inspired by the wilderness as opposed to the corrupting influence of civilization. And yet, even though they claimed their allegiance to wilderness, rather than to society, none of them could (or even wanted) to break up with society. The success of the primitivist school was that it operated within the anthropocentric tradition as a critique of civilization. Although Thoreau retreated from society to his cabin on Walden Pond, for over two years, first, it was not really wilderness and, second, he took it as an experiment of a life in solitude and voluntary simplicity. Also Muir though he declared mountains as his true home, always came back to society and never really considered solitary life in wilderness. Last but not least, Abbey gladly retreated to wilderness feeling “loveliness” instead of “loneliness” (DS 15) but he also declared, “the only thing better than solitude, is society” (DS 111) and chose to live in a city. The reason is the already mentioned romantic notion of primitivism as a form of social criticism. Nature is a fountain of life, whereas civilization is a pool of vice. The authors’ ambivalent attitude toward society deepened by their realization that they are part of it and that is where they belong. Only through their work within the structures of society can they help to promote a different kind of sensitivity toward wilderness. An individualist escape to the wilderness without any feedback to society would not have created the effect. Wilderness was a refuge for these authors and therefore they were protective of it. They liked to perceive themselves as natives of wilderness whereas others were only its visitors, although they tied to accommodate others in wilderness through their writing. Nevertheless, they were aware of their need of company (however they denied it) and the heaviness of solitude. The romantic solitary retreat was not a viable option and they knew they would not remain.
For Thoreau, Muir, and Abbey wilderness embodied two key concepts: Home and Freedom. They used wilderness as a metaphor for the ideas of freedom and home and contrasted it to the American society entangled in its institutions. None of these writers were in fact a misanthrope or a social misfit as they were often regarded. Instead, they were deeply concerned with the social conditions of their country. They were social reformers and American patriots. In wilderness they saw the roots and stable basis of the American society and wanted to heal the split between the two. As I have pointed out, nature writing is not only a detailed depiction of the natural world but, first and foremost, it can be seen as a link between nature and society. The great impact of Thoreau is reflected in the fact that in 1985 a history magazine American Heritage rated Walden as the first of “ten books that shaped the American character” owing to its breadth and appeal. “From libertarians to the civil rights marchers, the right wing to the vegetarians, almost every organized (and unorganized) American ism has found something to its taste in Walden, so wide is the net it casts” (qtd. in Buell 313). The scope of nature writing far exceeding the subject of nature is why Edward Abbey resisted to be labeled as a “nature writer” a category too narrow for him.
As to the impact of the selected writers on the public perception of nature and American environmental thought, I think it is undeniable. The public perception of wilderness has significantly changed since Thoreau went out into the woods. Muir managed to stimulate the need of wilderness nationwide and although he lost the last battle over Hetch Hetchy, his legacy has been carried on in form of the Sierra Club. Abbey’s writing ignited radical environmentalists around Dave Foreman who founded Earth First! and started a new chapter in the American environmental movement. However, the success of these authors within the environmental movement speaks only indirectly about their impact on lives of individuals. Here, although I agree with Buell’s observation of the discrepancy between the theory and practice, I do not share Buell’s pessimism. There are some tendencies to change the consumption patterns according to Thoreau’s conviction that “that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (Walden 68). Voluntary simplicity and intimacy with a local environment are becoming a way of life for an increasing number of people.
Literature is good if it is inspiring and leads to a social change. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”, proposed Thoreau in his Resistance to Civil Government (233) and Abbey made it his life’s credo. In a memorable letter to Earth First! Abbey declared: “One brave deed, performed in an honorable manner and for a life-defending cause, is worth a thousand books […] Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul” (qtd. in Cahalan 217). To use Dave Foreman’s paraphrase there are not many books that launch brave deeds but Thoreau’s, Muir’s and Abbey’s are of them. Thoreau’s thoughtfulness, Muir’s enthusiasm and Abbey’s anger are qualities that have made a difference.
Works Cited
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991
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---. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
---. The Plowboy Interview. “Edward Abbey: Slowing the Industrialization of Planet Earth.” The Mother Earth News. May/June 1984. 17-24.
Bishop, James Jr. Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist: The Live and Legacy of Edward Abbey. New York: Touchstone, 1994.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.
Cahalan, James M. Edward Abbey: A Life. Tucson: The Arizona University Press, 2001.
Campbell, SueEllen. “Magpie.” Coyote in the Maze: Tracing Edward Abbey in a World of Words. Ed. Peter Quigley. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1998. 33-47.
Cohen, Michael P. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 182-201.
Cronon, William, ed. John Muir: Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; Selected Essays. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997.
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Rothman, David. “I’m a humanist.” Coyote in the Maze: Tracing Edward Abbey in a World of Words. Ed. Peter Quigley. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1998. 47-73.
Sayre, Robert F. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1977.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
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Van Doren Stern, Philip. Henry David Thoreau: Writer and Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972.
Internet Sources
“The Wilderness Act.” US Congress. Sept. 3, 1964. Web. Nov. 18, 2009. <http://wilderness.nps.gov/document/WildernessAct.pdf>.
“The World’s Biggest Polluters.” The New Ecologist. Oct. 15, 2009. Web. Nov. 4, 2009. <http://www.thenewecologist.com/2009/10/the-worlds-biggest-polluters/>.
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