1 Anotace Tato práce se zabývá komparativní analýzou děl Henryho Davida Thoreaua, Johna Muira a Edwarda Abbeyho v širším kontextu amerického environmentálního myšlení. Cílem je identifikovat charakter a inspirační zdroje amerického environmentálního myšlení a poukázat na vliv a potenciál environmentální literatury. Teoretická část práce je věnována zejména konceptu divočiny v americkém kontextu a svébytnému žánru environmentální literatury. Pozornost je také věnována hlubšímu zkoumání vlivu amerických Indiánů na myšlení uvedených autorů. Američtí Indiáni tak nepřímo ovlivňují ideový základ environmentálního myšlení v Americe. Hlavním tématem je však analýza přístupů jednotlivých autorů ke konceptu divočiny a jejich dopad na širší realitu amerického environmentálního hnutí. Důraz je kladen i na praktické přínosy v podobě vývoje myšlenky národních parků a jejich dalšího směřování ke komerčnímu využití divočiny, založení Sierra Clubu či radikálního environmentílního hnutí Earth First! Annotation This thesis deals with a comparative analysis of writings of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Edward Abbey in the wider context of American environmental thought. The aim is to identify the nature and sources of inspiration of American environmental thought and to point out the influence and potential of nature writing. The theoretical part is devoted especially to the concept of wilderness in American context and to a distinct genre of nature writing. Some attention is also given to a deeper examination of American Indians‟ influence on personal viewpoints of the selected authors. American Indians thus indirectly influence the ideological basis of American environmental thought. The main topic, however, is an analysis of the individual authors‟ concepts of wilderness and their impact on the wider realities of the American environmental movement. An Emphasis is also put on practical achievements such as the development of the idea of National Parks and their subsequent move toward the commercial use of wilderness, foundation of the Sierra Club, or foundation of the radical environmental movement Earth First! Rozsah práce: 28 999 slov
Transcript
1
Anotace
Tato práce se zabývá komparativní analýzou děl Henryho Davida Thoreaua, Johna Muira a
Edwarda Abbeyho v širším kontextu amerického environmentálního myšlení. Cílem je
identifikovat charakter a inspirační zdroje amerického environmentálního myšlení a poukázat
na vliv a potenciál environmentální literatury. Teoretická část práce je věnována zejména
konceptu divočiny v americkém kontextu a svébytnému žánru environmentální literatury.
Pozornost je také věnována hlubšímu zkoumání vlivu amerických Indiánů na myšlení
uvedených autorů. Američtí Indiáni tak nepřímo ovlivňují ideový základ environmentálního
myšlení v Americe. Hlavním tématem je však analýza přístupů jednotlivých autorů ke
konceptu divočiny a jejich dopad na širší realitu amerického environmentálního hnutí. Důraz
je kladen i na praktické přínosy v podobě vývoje myšlenky národních parků a jejich dalšího
směřování ke komerčnímu využití divočiny, založení Sierra Clubu či radikálního
environmentílního hnutí Earth First!
Annotation
This thesis deals with a comparative analysis of writings of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir
and Edward Abbey in the wider context of American environmental thought. The aim is to
identify the nature and sources of inspiration of American environmental thought and to point
out the influence and potential of nature writing. The theoretical part is devoted especially to
the concept of wilderness in American context and to a distinct genre of nature writing. Some
attention is also given to a deeper examination of American Indians‟ influence on personal
viewpoints of the selected authors. American Indians thus indirectly influence the ideological
basis of American environmental thought. The main topic, however, is an analysis of the
individual authors‟ concepts of wilderness and their impact on the wider realities of the
American environmental movement. An Emphasis is also put on practical achievements such
as the development of the idea of National Parks and their subsequent move toward the
commercial use of wilderness, foundation of the Sierra Club, or foundation of the radical
3.1. Henry David Thoreau: Wilderness Means Preservation ............................................... 39
3.2. John Muir: Wilderness Means Home ............................................................................ 45
3.3. Edward Abbey: Preservation Means Wilderness .......................................................... 49
3.4. National Parks: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” .................................. 55
3.5. Industrial Tourism: from Muir to Abbey toward the National (Amusement) Park
System .................................................................................................................................. 58
4. Conclusion: One Brave Deed and a Thousand Books ........................................... 62
Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 65
Index ......................................................................................................................................... 68
3
1. Introduction: American Environmentalism
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”1 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
1 Further abbreviated as “The Trouble”.
4
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
5
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,2 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.3 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”4 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
2 For more information about the pre-Thoreauvian nature writing see Buell pp. 398-423. 3 Though the connection between the two and Abbey is often mentioned, for example on the cover page Abbey‟s
book, Down the River, William McKibben of New York Post writes: “A record as important and lovely as Muir‟s
or Thoreau‟s.” 4 “Keep it like it was” became a war outcry of Abbey‟s monkeywrenchers (The Monkey Wrench Gang 82) but it
could also characterize Muir‟s approach toward wilderness management.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.5
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 polluter6
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
5 According to the above stated criteria, Aldo Leopold, whose contribution to the foundation of the Wilderness
Society and the impact of his “land ethic” are undeniable, would equally qualify. However, I preferred John
Muir as his close predecessor and a representative of the era between Thoreau and the modern environmentalism
of the second half of the twentieth century. 6 The United Stated has only recently been overtaken by China in the role of the world‟s leading polluter (The
New Ecologist).
9
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 subject7 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 Solitaire8 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
7 The best study on wilderness in the American context is still Roderick Nash‟s Wilderness and the American
Mind (1967). A very thorough and more recent study which exceeds the limitation on the United States is Max
Oelschlaeger‟s The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (1991). Also William Cronon
contributed into the discussion about wilderness with his highly controversial essay “The Trouble with
Wilderness” (1995). 8 Further abbreviated as DS.
10
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 Mind9 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
9 Further abbreviated as Wilderness.
11
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
12
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 artists10
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
10 Wilderness appeared in many American works of literature just as in novels of James Fenimore Cooper. In the
mid-nineteenth century with the emergence of Emersonian transcendentalism and Thoreau, a whole literary
genre of nature writing was developed (see 2.3. Nature Writing). Also painters of the Hudson River School were
strongly influenced by the romantic notion of primitivism and portrayed wild sublime landscapes with a sense of
religious awe. The cult of the wilderness is also reflected in photographs of Ansel Adams or music of John
Denver.
13
opposing tradition is represented by ecocentrism, which was successfully picked up by deep
ecology.11
1.2. Nature Writing: An American Phenomenon
Nature writing12
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.13
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)
11 For more information on current approaches to wilderness see Oelschlaeger ch 9: “Contemporary Wilderness
Philosophy” pp. 281-319. 12 I use the term nature writing even though some authors like Lawrence Buell point out its limitations (Buell
429 n16). On the other hand, I believe that the genre is very inclusive and hard to specify in a similar way as the
term nature. 13 The core of Henry David Thoreau‟s writing career was his Journal. This multivolume record of Thoreau‟s
academic studies and his own reflections on the natural world was probably started on Emerson‟s incitation
when Thoreau was twenty years old (Van Doren Stern 18). Also John Muir‟s My First Summer in the Sierra is
composed of individual journal entries. Moreover, Thoreau‟s Walden was written as a personal meditation, a
record of his sojourn in the woods. Similarly Abbey‟s Desert Solitaire is a personal reflection on various
environmental and social issues.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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 life14
, 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”15
(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.16
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 months17
(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.
14 Thoreau died aged 44. During his lifetime, he only published two books: A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). 15 A similar impression also inspired John Muir and Edward Abbey. Edward Abbey‟s siblings recall their
brother‟s “sense of superiority” and “high and mighty attitude” when they were kids (Bishop 65). Even later as a
well-known writer, he remained “shy and aloof” (Bishop 23) in social context. John Muir was also regarded as a
solitary mountain man until he became a well known public figure. 16 Emerson knew Thoreau and helped him even before when Thoreau was still at Harvard. Emerson recognized
Thoreau‟s talent and encouraged him to become a writer; he also wrote a letter to President Quincy of Harvard to
ask for financial help for Thoreau (Van Doren Stern 9). 17 Thoreau lived in the woods by the pond from 1845 to 1847 but he was not completely isolated, less than a year
earlier trains started running along the western shore of Walden Pond and it was an easy walk to Concord.
17
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.18
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.
18 An interesting discussion on this topic offers Robert F. Sayre: Thoreau actively helped slaves but his interest
did not go further since he hardly ever wrote about slaves. Unlike the cause of American Indians, the issue of
slavery was topical, particularly during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. As for the American Indians,
he scarcely did a thing for them but he studied them and wrote about them extensively throughout his life. Sayre
points out that Thoreau was passive also because of his acceptance of the illusions of savagism: Whereas the
slave needed help to have a future, “the Indian, old and solitary, was beyond help. His Future was extinction.
The slave was a pathetic figure, the Indian a tragic one” (24-25).
18
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 writers19
and social reformers20
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.21
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)22
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
19 There is a tradition of nature writers in American literature that can be directly linked to Thoreau. Especially
the tradition of seeking a refuge in nature and solitude, away from the corrupted society, has proven as a strong
influence for future generations. Many writers followed Thoreau‟s example and went to the woods to put
together their thoughts in an individual response to the natural world and the society they lived in. Works like
Edward Abbey‟s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968) or John Daniel‟s Rogue River Journal: A
Winter Alone (2006) suggest that the Thoreauvian legacy has been carried to the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. 20 Thoreau‟s strong sense of justice and moral obligations of an individual toward his nation influenced many
public figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, or Leo Tolstoy, who, being
very much ahead of his time (in 1900), advised Americans to “listen to what Thoreau had said rather than follow
the percepts of the military-industrial complex that even then dominated the country‟s thinking” (Van Doren
Stern 166-67). 21 For further discussion about Thoreau‟s motives in keeping such extensive notes on American Indians and the
possibility of intending to publish a book, see Sayre pp. 101-22. 22 The story of his life as he presents it in his autobiographies (particularly in The Story of My Boyhood and
Youth (1913) and My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)) is very interesting and offers a good read; it has
fascinated a number of his biographers, most notably William Frederic Badè‟s The Life and Letters of John Muir
(1924), Linnie Marsh Wolfe‟s Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), James Mitchell Clarke„s The
Life and Adventures of John Muir (1980), Donald Worster‟s A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (2008).
A more recent biography that attempts to look critically on the way Muir‟s life story is presented, The Young
John Muir: An Environmental Biography (1999) by Steven J. Holmes, is concerned with the shaping of Muir‟s
relationship with his environment and takes the approach of psychoanalysis.
19
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
Youth23
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.24
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
23 Further abbreviated as The Story. 24 Muir attended a grammar school as a boy in Scotland. In America‟s frontier realities he could not be spared
from his father‟s farm except one short term of a couple of months at a district school (The Story 136).
20
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 Mexico25
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
25 The diary that he kept during this first trip was later published as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916).
21
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 1914.26
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
26 Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all biographical information is taken from Chronology of Muir‟s life
written by William Cronon in John Muir: Nature Writings (pp. 835-849)
22
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
(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.
23
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”27
, 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 Service28
; 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.
27 This phrase is credited to a Western writer Larry McMurtry although his exact words were: “Eastlake is the
Kafka of the American desert; Abbey is its Thoreau” (qtd. in Cahalan 163). 28 Similarly, Henry David Thoreau, a great critic of progress and defender of nature, earned his living as a
surveyor, measuring the land into discrete parcels so that it could be traded (Steinberg 50-51).
24
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.29
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.30
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
29 Muir‟s inspiration in Thoreau confirms e.g. Richard F. Fleck: “With the exception of The Mountains of
California and Our National Parks, all of Muir‟s books were written under the influence of Henry David
Thoreau. […] Muir dedicated himself to twenty years of writing and in the process felt he needed a philosophical
and literary guide. Henry David Thoreau was his guide” (24). Edward Abbey confesses his inspiration in
Thoreau in his essay “Down the River with Henry Thoreau”: “Thoreau‟s mind has been haunting mine for most
of my life” (13). 30 For instance, Thoreau‟s biography Henry David Thoreau: Writer and Rebel by Philip Van Doren Stern
published in the early 1970s does not give Thoreau‟s lifelong interest in American Indians more than a mention.
On the other hand, a good book-length study of Thoreau‟s interest in American Indian cultures is Robert S.
Sayre‟s Thoreau and the American Indians (1977).
25
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
26
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).
27
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
Indians31
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.32
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
31 Thoreau‟s notes on his visits of Maine were published posthumously into “Thoreau‟s most Indian book” The
Maine Woods (1864). 32 Thoreau‟s The Maine Woods (1864) as well as Muir‟s Travels in Alaska (1915) contain glossaries on the
respective American Indian languages. There are also other striking similarities between these two works that
Richard F. Fleck concluded that Muir studied The Maine Woods before his Alaska trips (and he even might have
brought Thoreau‟s book along). For further discussion on comparison of Thoreau‟s and Muir‟s adventures
among American Indians, see Fleck pp. 41-90.
28
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 Men33
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
33 During one of his sermons at a Chilcat village in Alaska, Muir verbalized his inclusive notion of the
brotherhood of men: “all men [are] brothers, regardless of color or race” (qtd. in Fleck 57).
29
American Indians in his writings.34
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
34 The first serious study concerned with the relationship of Muir‟s own environmental philosophy and the
philosophy of American Indians is Richard F. Fleck‟s Henry Thoreau and John Muir among the Indians (1985).
Also Michael P. Cohen in The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (1984) devotes a few pages
to comment on Muir‟s attitude toward American Indians.
30
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.35
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 Sierra36
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.
35 It is interesting that whereas some his companions – Billy and Carlo (a dog) – are referred to by their names,
this Digger Indian and a “Chinaman” remain unnamed. One of the possible explanations is Muir‟s cultural bias
at this early stage of his life. 36 Further abbreviated as My First Summer.
31
Muir realized the paradox of starving in the middle of the natural abundance37
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 pure38
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.39
Later on, especially after
37 “Strange we should feel food-poor in so rich a wilderness. The Indians put us to shame, so do the squirrels”
(My First Summer 195). 38 “Nothing truly wild is unclean” (My First Summer 285). 39 Cohen focused on Muir‟s negative feelings toward American Indians as those he described when he
encountered a band of Indians during one of his solitary roams in the Yosemite: “They were wrapped in blankets
made of skins of sage-rabbits. The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have
a geological significance; some were strangely blurred and divided into sections by seams and wrinkles that
32
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 Indians40
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 Parks41
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
looked like cleavage joints, and had a worn abraded look as if they had lain exposed to the weather for ages. I
tried to pass them without stopping, but they wouldn‟t let me; forming a dismal circle about me, I was closely
besieged while they begged whiskey and tobacco, and it was hard to convince them that I hadn‟t any. How glad I
was to get away from the gray, grim crowd and see them vanish down the trail!” (My First Summer 281-82) It is
highly possible that Muir due to the lack of understanding of the American Indian traditions mistook ritual
decorative coloring of faces, as his ample description “strangely blurred and divided into sections” might
suggest, for mere dirt. 40 “Yet, it seems sad to feel such desperate repulsion from one‟s fellow beings, however degraded. To prefer the
society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural” (My First Summer
282). 41 Further abbreviated as Parks.
33
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.42
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.43
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.44
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
42 For a detailed analysis of Muir‟s encounter with the Thlinkit Indians see Fleck pp. 48-60. 43 For a detailed analysis of Muir‟s travels in arctic Alaska and Siberia see Fleck pp. 60-70. 44 “Unless some aid be extended by our government which claims these people, in a few years at most every soul
of them will have vanished from the face of the earth; for, even where alcohol is left out of the count, the few
articles of food, clothing, guns, etc., furnished by the traders, exert a degrading influence, making them less self-
reliant, and less skillful as hunters. They seem susceptible of civilization, and well deserve the attention of out
government” (qtd. in Fleck 66).
34
theoretical studies. Muir did what Thoreau could not do during his short life45
: 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
45 Even if he lived longer and had better health, the Concord-based, locally oriented Thoreau would probably
have not traveled in such a grand manner as Muir did.
35
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.46
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
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.
39
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
40
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).47
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.48
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
47 After Thoreau‟s Walden sojourn, the two men never got on as well as before. Although they remained friends,
both were painfully aware of the split of opinion. Thoreau once noted to his journal: “Talked, or tried to talk,
with R.W.E. Lost my time – nay almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no
difference in opinion, talked to the wind – told me what I knew –and I lost my time trying to imagine myself
somebody else to oppose him” (qtd. in Van Doren Stern 113). 48 “When we compare Emerson‟s “Nature” and Thoreau‟s Walden the titles themselves speak, “Nature” abstract
and general, Walden specific and concrete” (Oelschlaeger 135, 170).
41
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
42
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
judgment49
, 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 intelligence50
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
49 “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective
intellectual exertion” (Walden 87); “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers”
(Walden 14). 50 The word “intelligence” is in this context used instead of “communication”.
43
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”51
(“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
51 This frequently cited Thoreau‟s quote is often misleadingly cited as “in wilderness is the preservation of the
World”, though Thoreau intentionally operated with the term “wildness” as determining quality of “wilderness”.
For Thoreau, wilderness is the form, the surface manifestation, whereas wildness is the core characteristic.
44
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.52
“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,
52 Although Thoreau‟s view on religion is at least ambivalent – he disapproves of the institutionalized churches
but nonetheless, he sees divinity in nature – his writings reflect the transcendentalist tradition.
45
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,
46
after or before chores and sermons and Bible-lessons, we drifted about on the lake for hours,
especially in lily time, getting lessons53
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
53 The realization that nature can be as good a teacher as any other, led Muir to leave University of Wisconsin
without a degree. “But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the
University of the Wilderness” (The Story 142).
47
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
48
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)
49
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.54
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”55
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 mind56
that, as Abbey claims, “[t]he idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more
defenders” (The Journey Home57
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),
54 About his inspiration to biocentrism and animism see chapter 2.2. John Muir: Brother of All Men 55 Muir often came to be referred to after the title of Linnie Marsh Wolfe‟s biography of John Muir (Son of the
Wilderness: The Life of John Muir). 56 About the same when Roderick F. Nash published his legendary study Wilderness and the American Mind. 57 Further abbereviated as JH.
50
or Muir (modern environmental movement) by inspiring the development of the radical
environmental movement.
Although Abbey refused being called nature writer58
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
58 Abbey did not see himself as a nature writer. In his Introduction to The Journey Home, he writes: “I am not a
naturalist. […] the only birds I can recognize without hesitation are turkey vulture, the fried chicken, and the
rosy-bottomed skinny-dipper. […] If a label is required say that I am one who loves unfenced country. […] The
only higher honor I‟ve ever heard of is to be called a man. So much for the mantle and britches of Thoreau and
Muir. Let Annie Dillard wear then now” (The Journey Home xiii). In the twentieth anniversary edition of Desert
Solitaire in his own preface Abbey claimed that though he agreed he was “a nature lover […] I did not mean to
be mistaken for a nature writer. I never wanted to be anything but a writer, period.” As James M. Cahalan notes,
Abbey mischievously and disingenuously added: “I have never looked inside a book by Muir or Burroughs and
don‟t intend to.” Yet he paid homage to his predecessors in the Earth First! Journal where he wrote a reading
list of essential authors: Thoreau (“of course”), Muir (“dull but important”), Faulkner, Dillard, Zwinger, Austin
and Carson (Cahalan 242).
51
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
52
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
