Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest

2. Emerson's Children

2 / Emerson’s Children A s a reform, environmentalism followed conservation’s program of managing natural resources by science and held to preservation ’s goal of saving wild areas for their beauty. As an expression of the human impulse toward religion, it went beyond arranging our use of nature to ask how we were related to it and what need we had for it, warning that in destroying the wild we killed something in the human spirit. Environmentalism spoke to the human need for a place and purpose in the universe and looked for a way of living with nature inspiring enough to guide people over a lifetime and change society’s goals as well. Even at these depths, though, it spoke from within American society and Western culture. Its vision of nature as part of a human life came from a hundred years of nature appreciation, its expression from Romanticism as interpreted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his disciples. Environmentalism needed to movebeyondtheindividualspiritualquesttofindultimaterealityinnature to form social values that would allow us all to live in harmony with nature—a task for religion. Its vision developed through the generations, as each used current science to find beauty and reality in nature. Thoreau relied on natural history, Muir on natural history and geology, later generations on evolution and ecology. The last two were crucial. Evolution showed nature around us as the visible sign of the invisible forces of life, holy because it was the heritage of the ages. Ecology showed our continuing and immediate ties to life, and together these sciences held out the present as the promise of the future, for what would come depended on 42 the survival of what now lived. Environmentalism also used ecology to fashion a moral yardstick for our relations with the land—most famously in Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. “A thing is right,” Leopold said, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community . It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”1 endless fascination Environmentalism built on science, but it also appealed to humans’ fascination with nature and their desire to understand, and it satisfied these needs in ways the established view did not. That picture, with its vision of triumphant humanity exercising its God-like powers of reason to shape matter, appealed to the intellect and the passion for power and control. The environmental one dealt with home and place and purpose and described a way to take part in the great work of preserving and rebuildingtheforcesof life.Moreimportant,itspoketotheimmediatepullnature exercised on many people, a pull they had felt before they had any science lessons. Sights most adults passed over without a second glance and other children, who (unfortunately) were not gifted with curiosity about nature, saw as commonplace struck these children deeply and permanently . A clutch of eggs in a robin’s nest, a rabbit sleeping in a drainpipe, a pickerel hanging in the current of a small stream fixed nature in their minds as a place of wonders, and the scent of spruce gum (or sagebrush or wolf willow), the taste of chewed grass ends, the feel of granite boulders stayed with them, perhaps to the end of their life. We now associate deep feeling for nature with wilderness, but for most people feelings began in more settled surroundings and, even among the eloquent defenders of nature, stayed there. Henry David Thoreau grew up and lived in the town of Concord and made his retreat from society a mile or so from the village and a few hundred yards from the railroad tracks. He may have turned his steps westward because there they ran free, but they ran, pretty much, in Concord. John Muir made the Sierra Nevada his home as an adult, but came to nature in boyhood rambles along the shore and in the fields of Scotland and sharpened his sense of nature on the Wisconsin farm of his adolescence. Alfred Russell Wallace, Emerson’s Children 43 who went on to collect in Malaya and define the bioregional division named for him, Wallace’s Line, learned botany while surveying in Britain. He described “the solace and delight of my lonely rambles among the moors and mountains” that came with “my first introduction to the variety , the beauty, and the mystery of nature as manifested in the vegetable kingdom.”2 Young Charles Darwin avidly collected beetles. Modern naturalists nourished their passion for nature in the suburbs, along canals, and in visits...