Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest

3. Journey into Sacred Space

3 / Journey into Sacred Space W ilderness,” like “nature,” has many, contradictory meanings, and Americans have used them all and added a few of their own. The European settlers arrived with biblical ideas of wilderness—as exile and the Devil’s haunts, the place where God met and led the people of Israel, the prophets took refuge from their enemies, and Christ prepared for his ministry—and with European ones—of wild lands as the haunt of wild beasts and wild men—and they looked in the wilds of America for fabulous kingdoms and unknown animals. After independence they came to see the land as an endless storehouse where all could prosper. By the end of the nineteenth century they believed the encounter with wilderness had shaped the national character. They also found in wilderness, following Muir, the doorway to reality and a refuge from society. The generations that followed fixed on landscapes without visible evidence of industrial society as the place for a spiritual journey. Here, where the veil between human society and the world’s realities thinned, those who abandoned modern technology and immersed themselves in the land could come to an emotional understanding of the intellectual truths of our ties to nature. Wilderness became a key conservation cause by the 1960s, and a decade later a geographer described it as “a contemporary form of sacred space, valued as a symbol of geopiety and as a focus for religious feeling.”1 If it seems too much to call wilderness sacred or to see wilderness journeys as spiritual quests, go back to the reactions people have to everyday nature. Each fall, the leaves of New England’s trees turn from green to 68 “ yellow and red, first individual leaves, then a few trees, then entire mountainsides . That predictable and repeated spectacle brings out enough people, most of them otherwise insensitive to “nature,” to make “leaf season ” a distinct peak in the New England tourist industry, with buses and festivals and “leaf-peepers’” dinners (“6 p.m. Saturday night at the town hall,” as the sign on one village green in central New Hampshire advertised ). Thousands seek out canyons in the Southwest where only the wind and an occasional bird cry break the silence, and the only sights are sandstone and sky. Public interest made photos of the canyons into a minor industry. Even without the spectacle, nature aªects people who have never read Emerson’s essays. The kids in my basic-training platoon took the sergeant and the casual violence of the training cycle in stride, but on a field exercise, oª the road, looked with awe at the Southern pines around us. People who feel pulled to the wild find enchantment in even small breaks from the social world. In a northern winter snowstorm, a few steps into woods on snowshoes or skis takes you to a place where there is only leaden sky, spruce trees, falling snow, and fallen snow, and the only sounds the hiss of falling snow or blowing crystals. If you are one of those who could not live without wild things, what price in extending that isolation, being where miles stretch away without any human structures, where no one has ever systematically cleared the land of its plants or killed most of the animals or bulldozed the ground, and where wild lives and wild communities go on without humans? What value in just knowing that world still exists? Unless we define the sacred as something beyond this world, wilderness functions as sacred nature for millions, the site of experience or an anchor for hope. While Americans embraced nature in various forms from the first days of settlement and gave wilderness many meanings, they never gave it a permanent place. It was raw material for civilization, land that should be turned into farms and pastures as quickly as possible, and even when they set areas of land aside for their natural qualities, they did not include wilderness. The national parks preserved monumental scenery and geological wonders that visitors could view in comfort—not primeval landscapes . Only in the 1920s, as roads and tourist lodges approached the last large roadless areas in the continental United States, did a few people ask Journey into Sacred Space 69 if wild land could have or should have a place in industrial civilization. Over the next two decades a few worked within the Forest Service to make wilderness a land use, and in 1935 a group established...