Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism 9780520961142

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Whither Religion?
1. Recreation and Soteriology
2. Congregating around Nature
3. Sacred Space and the American Environmental Imagination
4. Recreation and Spiritual Experience
Conclusion: The Mechanics of Religious Change
Notes
For Further Reading and Research
Index

Citation preview

Devoted to Nature

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Devoted to Nature The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism Evan Berry

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berry, Evan, 1977– author. Devoted to nature : the religious roots of American environmentalism / Evan Berry. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28572-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-28573-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-96114-2 (ebook) 1. Human ecology—Religious aspects— Christianity. 2. Human ecology—United States. 3. Environmentalism—Religious aspects— Christianity. 4. Environmentalism—United States. 5. Nature—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. bt695.5.b465 2015 261.8′80973—dc23 2015004613 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Whither Religion? 1 1. Recreation and Soteriology 25 2. Congregating around Nature 60 3. Sacred Space and the American Environmental Imagination 102 4. Recreation and Spiritual Experience 148 Conclusion: The Mechanics of Religious Change 177 Notes 191 For Further Reading and Research 241 Index 255

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ack nowledgm ents

This book would not have been possible without the guidance and mentorship of Jim Proctor, who helped shepherd me through graduate school and helped prepare me for the complex challenges of academic life and scholarly work. His ideas, rigor, and support are among the chief reasons why I was able to bring this book to fruition. There are a number of ways to think about and write about the social construction of nature, and I have enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with various approaches against Jim’s friendly and consistent critical feedback. A mentor who can help you develop your own voice is the very best kind. Wade Clark Roof and Thomas Carlson were also instrumental to the ideas developed in this book: Clark’s ideas about how religion operates in American society are evident throughout, and Tom’s influential lessons about the impact of Christian theology on the specific shape of Western modernity is the foundation on which this work is grounded. I have also been very fortunate over the past couple of years to share conversations with a number of distinguished scholars across a diversity of academic disciplines that inform this work. Bron Taylor, a guiding light in the study of religion and nature, has provided me with helpful counsel about the theoretical questions that shape the field. Among my colleagues at American University, Paul Wapner and Jeff Reiman vii

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have been tremendously helpful interlocutors. Paul consistently pushed me to be particularly mindful of the lessons that can be gleaned from American environmental history. This project would not succeed at much if it did not clearly explain how the strengths and weaknesses of previous environmental movements inform the present moment. Since my first day on campus, Jeff has pushed back against almost every moral and historical argument I’ve tried to advance. His intellectual fullcourt press has helped me distinguish between my rigorous ideas and my wishful ones, and I am much more confident in what I say here because of his help determining what not to say. A number of close colleagues have helped by critiquing various drafts and talking through insufficiently developed parts of the manuscript. Caleb Elfenbein went far above the ordinary demands of friendship by closely reading the entire manuscript and offering insightful comments both about its overarching themes and about its textual minutiae. In thinking through questions particular to the study of religion and the environment, Luke Johnston and Robin Globus provided useful counsel. Megan Sijapati and Rahuldeep Gill contributed insights and ideas about the writing process and the saliency of the arguments presented here for scholars working outside the narrow area of religion and the environment. More recently, Whitney Bauman, Kevin O’Brien, and one anonymous reviewer proffered incredibly insightful reviews. The clarity and framing of my central claim—that modern American environmental thought is deeply shaped by its relationship with Christian theological tradition—is clearer and more forceful because of their crisp comments. I have been writing and rewriting this book over a number of years and have been able to regularly rely on excellent research assistants. In particular, Shannon Williams, Marissa Escajeda, and Lauren Zahn have been instrumental in helping organize my notes, identify archival materials, and tighten bibliographic references. I would like to thank my editors at the University of California Press: Reed Malcolm for his interest in this project and Eric Schmitt for his steady hand in

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guiding the manuscript to completion. Joe Abbott’s discerning eye significantly improved this book’s rigor and precision. The staff at the Burchfield Penny Art Center are also to be commended for their collaboration in arranging the compelling image on the cover. The work of Charles Burchfield is insufficiently appreciated and resonates closely with a devotion to nature. Most important, I want to express my gratitude to my family. Their support, patience, and encouragement are the reasons why my intellectual curiosities mean anything in the first place. Gina, my wonderful wife, has been my biggest champion, despite having to hear the same ideas repeated ad nauseam. Her groundedness and eye for the genuine have kept my tendencies to theorize in check and are the real reasons why I am satisfied with what this text accomplishes.

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Introduction Whither Religion? The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe—persists. Indeed, these seem to be renewing their life today in this growing love for all natural objects and in this increasing tenderness towards all forms of life. If we do not go to church as much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were. —John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature

We hear different stories about environmentalism. In contemporary political debates in the United States it is not uncommon for environmentalism’s public detractors to insinuate that it is “eerily close to a religious belief system” or to call Al Gore a “false prophet of a secular carbon cult.”1 Conversely, it is possible to hear mainstream environmentalists eschew religion altogether in favor of scientific reason and policy analysis, arguing that “environmentalism [is] an ideology, a political movement, even a lifestyle; but it sure as hell isn’t a religion.”2 However reactionary these particular utterances may be, how do we make sense of such contrasting claims about the religious character of modern environmentalism? Is there any truth to the suggestion that environmentalism is like “a religious belief system,” or can we be “sure 1

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as hell” that it is not? If we accept these as the two basic possibilities, then our appreciation of environmentalism’s social origins is restricted to two dissatisfying hypotheses: either environmentalism is a fake religion, whose pious followers are unwitting idolaters, or it is unequivocally secular, with little resemblance to the claims made by its ideological opponents. How did this confused bifurcation come about? This book argues that these positions are both misunderstandings, though for reasons that might frustrate conventional modes of cultural and political interpretation. American environmentalism is related to religion, not out of serendipitous resemblance but by way of historically demonstrable genealogical affinity with Christian theological tradition. The conceptual origins of the social movement we now call environmentalism are rooted in religious thought and practice, even if these roots have long been obscured for reasons convenient to both political progressives and conservatives. By the middle of the twentieth century, the struggle for environmental protection had been thoroughly politicized, requiring an increasingly secular, empirical, and rational framework to achieve collectively desired legislative outcomes.3 But the legal and regulatory achievements of midcentury environmentalists grew from a social movement with rather different foundations. The moral basis of environmentalism—its abiding concern with nature as an object of the utmost ethical value—was not produced by a calculative view of the public good. It was produced by a confluence of social factors, the most important of which was a theological commitment to the redemptive capacities of God’s creation. Although this fundamental ingredient has receded from public view, it was readily apparent in earlier instantiations of environmentalism and continues to influence the way that nature and the natural are wielded as salient values in contemporary political contestations. This book does not attempt to systematically identify the vestiges of theology in our current body politic. Rather, it provides a modest attempt at historical recuperation, a remembering of the connective tissues between religious discourse and environmental sentiments that sustained the movement in its

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formative years. I articulate a genealogical history that locates American environmental thought in its religious contexts, drawing direct linkages between the expressly Christian character of its romantic foundations and the forms of nature spirituality noted by its contemporary observers.4 Environmental history has tended to corroborate the antagonism between nature and religion prevalent in popular discourse. As environmental history has matured as a discipline over the past half century, scholars have typically located American environmentalism within one of two frames of reference, neither of which adequately interrogates the movement’s religious underpinnings. The first looks primarily to nineteenth-century sources and emphasizes the romantic themes present in the transcendentalist efforts of luminaries like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.5 Scholarship in this vein has done much to attend to the religious elements present in early environmental literatures, especially in the texts of American nature writers. The second frame of reference engages primarily with post–World War II sources and emphasizes the tightening connection between ecological science and legislative policy evident in figures like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich.6 Scholarship in this area has tended to conceptualize environmentalism in political and economic terms. Both frames of reference provide useful points of entry to understanding American environmentalism, and it is reasonable to assume that, given the movement’s complexity, both historical aspects inform contemporary environmental thought. There is, however, a conceptual tension between these two foci, an implicit assumption of the conventional historical narrative evident in the phrase “modern environmental movement.” This referent serves to distinguish the social and political manifestations of environmentalism that arose during the 1960s from those that came before. Modern environmentalism includes Rachel Carson’s plea against the harms of DDT; the establishment of the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency; legislative outcomes like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered

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Species Act; and even the formation of local grassroots organizations like the Love Canal Homeowners Association. Because these engagements signal a commitment to ecological science and to the bureaucratic, rational management of natural resources, the preoccupation of post–World War II environmentalism with policy and regulation is even occasionally lauded as “environmental activism [coming] of age.”7 Although it is certainly true that environmental historians readily acknowledge the nineteenth-century roots of American ideas about and practices toward the natural world, their accounts often suggest that the romantic leanings of the Gilded Age were displaced by the rise of manifestly political organizations.8 The conventional history of the American environmental movement rests on a rather uncritical application of modernization theory, by way of which the baldly theistic language and religious underpinnings exemplified by the transcendentalists and featured throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were increasingly subsumed by the need for legislative advocacy and political activism through the course of the twentieth century. Borrowing a page from the Enlightenment playbook, this historical understanding of environmentalism suggests that religious elements became increasingly irrelevant to the movement’s self-identity and to the elaboration of its sociopolitical projects. As John McNeill puts it, “in science more than religion, ideas from earlier eras exerted an impact on environmental history in the twentieth century.”9 To where, though, did the movement’s religious elements dissipate? If the roots of environmentalism grew in religious soil, how can the modern movement be called secular? When and by what processes did the influence of religion fade into the dusky opacity of history? If environmental thought was formerly bound up with the religious aspects of transcendentalism, then should the rise of the modern environmental movement be read as a story of secularization? Is the modern affection for nature bound to theological tradition or radically free of its influence? How are we to understand potential relations between environmentalism and religion? How are we to assess the significance of these

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relations? What kinds of analyses effectively advance our understanding of the cultural characteristics of our environmental inheritance? Devoted to Nature takes these questions as its primary objects. Against a convenient framing of environmentalism as an essentially secular undertaking, I advance the argument that religious ideas, practices, and persons played critical roles in establishing the American environmental movement. More explicitly, this book situates the emergence of environmentalism as a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern Western ideas about nature, a history largely, but not exclusively shaped by religious factors. The following pages develop an argument that extends beyond a general theory of religious influence: I argue not only that the formation of the American environmental movement drew on religious sources but that these sources are its central conceptual ingredients, playing crucial roles in shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engaging with environments and landscapes, and generating modes of social and political interaction. Specifically, I argue that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation grounded the environmental movement’s orientation toward nature. Theologically rooted notions of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress provided a context for Americans enthusiastic about the outdoors and established the horizons of possibility for the national environmental imagination.10 Although notable research has appraised the depth with which American ideas about nature were colored by religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, overtly religious considerations remain a sporadic feature of scholarship about subsequent historical currents. By tracing these threads of religious influence into the twentieth century, I hope to indicate some of the channels through which these elements remain vitally constitutive of our environmental inheritance. Primary among these channels is the notion that nature is morally salient, both as an object of intrinsic value and as a means of advancing human moral goods. The particular histories through which the American environmental movement’s moral claims took shape are closely intertwined with theological discourse.11

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Popular accounts of American environmentalism frequently sketch the movement as a trajectory plotted by a handful of “great men” (of whom at least several are women). The list of notable figures comes in different forms but invariably includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Historical analyses of their contributions concede the religious orientation of nineteenth-century luminaries (Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir); however, they lack a theoretically rigorous account about why religion matters, where it came from, or how it influenced the environmentalism of subsequent generations. Many histories simply abscond with the religious content apparent in nineteenth-century sources, failing to venture whether the richly theological implications of transcendentalism were carried forward.12 Theology, though, was never far beneath the surface. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century the manifestly Christian language with which many Americans framed their understanding of nature afforded the concepts that would shape the environmental movement for generations. Ideas of wilderness, recreation, stewardship, and scenic beauty were all common features of early twentieth-century discourse about nature and were intelligible primarily in terms of a theistically grounded understanding of the human position in the created order. Special attention to the decades between the late nineteenthcentury zenith of transcendentalism and the formation of advocacy and activist organizations in the post–World War II era highlights a lush variety of sources—persons, groups, and practices—in which the connections between religion and environmentalism were publicly transparent and socially malleable. The theological concepts around which the environmental imagination was constructed were not themselves entirely new, and in order to effectively situate twentieth-century environmental discourse in its religious context, Devoted to Nature looks into the deep recesses of Christian thought as a critical locus of environmental meaning. Although the primary focus of the pages that follow is the period between 1914 ( John Muir’s death) and 1949 (the publication

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of Leopold’s influential A Sand County Almanac), the narrative is not chronologically organized. Instead, the chapters seize on key themes— salvation, community, place, and experience—and draw connections linking deeper currents of Christian history and the ferment of American society during the first half of the twentieth century. There was a tremendous amount of activity, dynamism, and experimentation among Americans interested in the outdoors and in the protection of nature during the interwar years. These decades have also received much less attention from environmental historians than have, for example, the 1890s or the 1960s. It was during the 1920s and 1930s—decades more or less coextensive with the Progressive Era—that the ideas and lifestyles advocated by the transcendentalists achieved widespread popularity and gave rise to many of the institutions and practices that are now collectively referred to as environmentalism.13 The conventional history of American environmentalism posits the Progressive Era as a transitional period in which “the tension between Muir’s romanticism and conservation faded.”14 During the Progressive Era the industrial and intellectual tumult of the late nineteenth century took more expressly social and political forms: broad constituencies of Americans organized around a number of political causes, including temperance, child welfare, urban design, and the conservation of natural resources. Historians, perhaps foreshadowing the legalistic tenor of environmental politics in the late decades of the twentieth century, have described the Progressive Era as a “prelude to the Environmental Movement” replete with organizations designed to harmonize the romantic vision of the transcendentalists with modern sentiments of efficiency.15 But to interpret the environmental zeitgeist of the Progressive Era as a transition away from romanticism toward more rigorously scientific, legalistic modes of social action misses the complexity and intellectual richness of this period. As David Stradling claims, “postwar environmentalists had to develop the means . . . in improving their environments . . . [but their] interest[s] derived from an environmentalist philosophy developed

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decades earlier, in the middle-class Victorian values of late-nineteenthcentury American cities.”16 The first several decades of the twentieth century saw a remarkable flourishing of naturalist societies and outdoors associations (the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Mountaineers Club, the Appalachian Trail Club, etc.), all of which were situated at a remove from their romantic roots but had not yet become the advocacy- and activism-oriented organizations that we today understand as their descendants. Put another way, many of the most influential mainstream environmental organizations in the contemporary United States began during this period, growing and flourishing in the religious milieu of the Progressive Era. Early twentieth-century American environmental thought is at times kaleidoscopic in its wildly combinatory fusion of religious imagery, scientific data, bourgeois social norms, and allusions to romantic poetry, but a close analysis of sources from this era yields tangible insight into the cultural substrata of our environmental imagination. The Progressive Era is also distinguished by a number of underappreciated environmental figures. Muir wrote until just before World War I, and Leopold began to achieve national notoriety before the Great Depression. Their personages have often overshadowed a host of lesser-known naturalists, recreational enthusiasts, and regionally influential conservationists, all of whom attest to the breadth and multifaceted nature of the period’s environmental legacy. Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Burroughs, Mable Osgood Wright, Ernest Thompson Seton, Benton MacKaye, William Frederic Badè, Edmond S. Meany, Asahel Curtis, and many others offer glimpses of the variegation of environmental attitudes in the early twentieth century.17 The history of the American environmental movement has typically been narrated by a close attention to its “guiding lights,” but an account that focuses exclusively on the legacy of the most celebrated nature writers offers only a partial view of the movement’s intellectual development. Daniel Philippon employs a slightly different approach to the prominent nature writers of the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that

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they were not just thinkers but also catalysts for political mobilization and, in several key cases, were personally responsible for founding influential environmental organizations. Specifically, Philippon discusses Teddy Roosevelt (Boone and Crockett Club), John Muir (Sierra Club), Mable Osgood Wright (Audubon Society of Connecticut), Aldo Leopold (Wilderness Society), and Edward Abbey (EarthFirst!). Borrowing from this model, the present study pursues what Philippon calls the “ecology of influence,” the circulation of ecological ideas and environmental practices through social networks at various scales.18 Devoted to Nature relies on nature writing as one of its primary resources but eschews the biographic method in favor of reading such texts as representative of broader cultural currents that can be verified and reanimated by locating them within patterns of cultural behavior and social interaction. In other words American environmental thought includes, but is not defined by, the contributions of the nation’s most illustrious nature writers. As Philippon puts it, “at the same time that these nature writers and writings were influencing people’s attitudes and behavior, people’s attitudes and behavior were exerting a counterinfluence on them.”19 If it is an error to take the textual products of nature writings as the lone sources of American environmentalism, then it is also true that biographic histories of environmentalism overdetermine the movement’s moral characteristics. The degree to which historians have asserted the significance of religion in the formation of environmentalism has generally been proportional to the salience of religion in the life and letters of the most influential conservationist leaders. The theory of religious influence developed in this book focuses primarily on religion as a shared mode of social discourse. American environmentalism is theologically rooted not because some select few individuals successfully evangelized their religious view of nature in the public arena but because such a view of nature was already in wide public demand. The personage of John Muir affords a paradigmatic case. Contemporary interpreters of Muir’s work universally acknowledge the significance

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of his religious upbringing and the prevalence of religious terminology throughout his corpus; however, they disagree in fundamental ways about how to locate Muir’s personal religiosity.20 Given the tremendous influence of Muir’s writing and its continued popularity, it is reasonable that his modern readers desire greater clarity about his theological commitments, but, in thinking retrospectively about the roots of environmentalism, it is crucial not to confuse causality with correlation. Muir’s biographical particularities are not the determining factors in how the environmental movement is shaped by religion. His religious upbringing, his penchant for scriptural allusions, and his deeply spiritual engagement with nature are all common features of his era. In the cultural conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muir’s case is rather ordinary: Christian theology and biblical rhetoric were the standard means by which most Americans made sense of the natural world and framed their experience in moral terms. Muir’s reverence for living creatures, anger about the despoliation of western landscapes, and intimate personal relation with the goodness of creation were elegantly written and widely circulated, but they were hardly unusual or abnormal. Muir’s writings certainly speak to his genius but also indicate the religious milieu in which they were formed. Religious energies contributed to the environmental movement’s foundations, but the scholarship exploring these contributions often lacks a coherent theoretical account of religious influence.21 Perhaps more precisely, scholarship on the history of American environmentalism draws on a multiplicity of incompatible ideas about the relationship between religion and environmentalism, which are only occasionally rendered in explicit terms by social historians. Of the steadily growing number of studies treating the interplay of religion and environmental sentiments in American history, only a select few have been written by scholars formally trained in the study of religion.22 Tremendous interdisciplinarity characterizes the scholarly literature in this field: environmental historians, art historians, urban designers, landscape architects, sociologists, political theorists, and theologians have all

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contributed insights to the understanding of religion and environmentalism. Across this eclectic body of knowledge there is an incredible range of ideas about what religion is and how it operates in relationship to various kinds of cultural activities. It is exceedingly difficult to distill from the diverse scholarship on these issues a singular theory about the origins of environmentalism. Yet a common feature of many accounts is that the emergence of the modern environmental movement involves a resacralization of nature. There are (at least) four conceptual orientations by way of which scholars have asserted this resacralization in the American context. Positioning Devoted to Nature over against these narratives helps clarify my argument that the birth of the American environmental movement was facilitated by a religious understanding of nature, which held that nature was always already sacred. The first interpretive position is the idea that environmentalism offers a substitute for conventional religion to those rationally minded persons who aspire to spiritual understanding.23 Authors operating under this assumption occasionally refer to environmentalism as “quasi-religious” or claim that it is “akin to religion.”24 A significant portion of such scholarship, however, comes from outside the formal study of religion, where historians, political scientists, and sociologists have taken interest in the relevance of the sacred to ecological issues. Many scholars working in this area tacitly accept the Weberian notion that the forces of secularization have drained industrial societies of their metaphysical zeal, leaving behind a mechanical, disenchanted, bureaucratic social structure. In this view the emergence of the environmental movement appears as a new shoot among the ashes of modernization, a novel and unforeseen resacralization of nature.25 A second view argues that religious traditions are themselves in the midst of a resacralization of nature evident in the emergence of “religious environmentalism,” the environmental mobilization of traditional religious actors and institutions. Scholars have sometimes asserted that this cultural development is an expansive historical process in which religions, both in the United States and globally, are “enter[ing] their

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ecological phase.”26 Other treatments of religious environmentalism have more narrowly focused on the development of theologically grounded responses to contemporary environmental issues among particular religious constituencies.27 Manu champions of this resacralization narrative suggest that religious actors have increasingly engaged environmental concerns by coming to grips with the ecological ambivalence of their theological traditions, forging new alliances, reinterpreting textual traditions, and reworking ritual and liturgical practices.28 A third interpretive stance suggests that twentieth-century environmentalism broke away from its religious roots but not away from religiosity altogether. This approach holds that environmentalism’s founding figures articulated a biocentric view of nature that effectively displaced Christian orthodoxy and paved the way for animistic and neopagan spiritualities. This school of thought brings to the fore the pantheistic leanings of late nineteenth-century naturalists like Ernst Haeckel and John Muir, both of whom articulate unorthodox theologies of nature, even where they use manifestly Christian vocabularies to do so.29 Religious analyses of this type play down the continuities between Christianity and religiously inflected visions of nature, emphasizing the greater significance of the discontinuities.30 This theoretical approach advances a particular notion of secularization in which modernization does not deracinate religion altogether but forcefully and actively reshapes it to conform with contemporary cultural conditions. Here resacralization refers to the articulation of historically novel nature spiritualities intended as antidotes to Christianity’s antinaturalistic aspects. The fourth notion of resacralization holds that environmentalism is a kind of crypto-Protestantism, in which certain features of Christianity exerted secret influence over American attitudes toward nature.31 Donald Worster articulates a classic formulation of this thesis in The Wealth of Nature: “Protestantism in fact provided an important spawning ground for environmental reform movements . . . exercis[ing] a decisive influence over the American moral imagination.”32 Carolyn Merchant’s feminist critique of American environmental thought, with its special

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attention to the role of the Eden myth in shaping Western cultural ideas about nature, likewise belongs to this category. It would be more charitable perhaps to describe analyses of this type as identifying the subterranean influences of religion in Euro-American understandings of nature. Modern societies, from this perspective, have experienced profound disruptions of their religious traditions: secularization fragmented moral traditions, leaving shards and remnants of the sacred evident in unanticipated areas of contemporary life.33 If religious elements are scattered throughout contemporary societies, then the method appropriate to their recovery is akin to intellectual archaeology—a theological forensics. The interpretation developed in the following pages falls somewhere between the third and fourth of these approaches; however, my approach is distinguished by an insistence that the impact of Christian theology on environmental thought was as much about continuity as it was about discontinuity. Historical evidence strongly suggests that the cultural and intellectual framework of Christianity shaped American environmental thought, but this influence was not predicated on the fixity of doctrine. Theological vocabularies, especially those related to salvation and to the goodness of creation, provided the basis for an emergent environmental imagination, which branched out in novel, unpredictable ways. At the same time, I go to great lengths to make it clear that the genealogical influence of Christianity on American environmental thought was neither cryptic nor esoteric nor predicated on the false consciousness of environmentally engaged citizens. My analysis of the influence of Christianity on the environmental movement does not assume that theological precepts are immutable. The chapters that follow trace not just the influence of Christian soteriology on American attitudes about the natural world but also examine the way that ideas about salvation and spiritual progress evolved as they operated outside their traditional institutional contexts. American environmental discourse is fundamentally shaped by religious influences, but such forces are not absolute. Many contemporary environmentalists pursue explicitly secular moral values, seeking to

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purge any vestige of metaphysics from their ecological sentiments. While secular environmental values are commonly discussed in circles where moral claims can be conceptually isolated and examined independent of one another (among environmental ethicists, legal experts, etc.), American environmental discourse has always included a messy plurality of values and has seldom, if ever, featured movements, ideas, or persons free from religious influence. One of the primary aims of this book is to suggest that a rigid compartmentalization of religious and secular discourses does little to advance our understanding of the historical development of American environmental thought. The particular forms of nature spirituality that became popular during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were not radically new religious modalities, nor are they reducible to their historical sources. Devoted to Nature expands on previous scholarship about the relationship between religion and the environment by tracing the deep genealogical links between Christian theology and the American environmental imagination. Concepts derived from Christian theology were necessary yet insufficient conditions for the emergence of a complex cultural formation in which nature afforded the material, spatial, and experiential basis for spiritual redemption. It is certainly the case that any interpretive position that depicts a neat and tidy antagonism between religion and nature radically oversimplifies matters. Conversely, an interpretive approach that asserts only harmony between religious tradition and environmentalism does disservice to the complexity of environmental thought. The theoretical agenda appropriate for this subject, then, requires a perspective that not only indicates how American environmentalism was religiously inflected but also captures in a more nuanced way precisely the shape, extent, and limits of religious influence. Through what social processes do the powers of religious tradition operate outside their supposed confines? What are the mechanics governing how religious discourse functions in extraecclesial settings? Among contemporary scholars of religion there is perhaps no more active area of theoretical inquiry than that concerning the conceptual

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tensions posited in the binary classificatory schema of the secular and the religious.34 A generation of scholarly attention to the ambiguity of the distinction between the religious and the secular has reshaped the understanding of religion across a variety of disciplinary contexts: anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, and, of course, scholars of religion have become increasingly attuned to the subtle shades of gray that distinguish secular from religious phenomena. Analyses that work to complicate and destabilize the distinction between the religious and the secular have expanded and enriched academic knowledge about political economy, globalization, popular culture, and many other important issues. These insights, however, have yet to be fully integrated into the study of religion and nature. To a significant degree scholarship on nature and American religious life has always involved debates about the subtle interplay of religious and secular forces. Some of the field’s earliest works—for example, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (written first as a dissertation in 1949 and published as a monograph in 1964) and Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959)—raised some version of these questions more than fifty years ago. Subsequent work in this area, however, has been slow to incorporate the theoretical advances on offer from scholars of religion in other subfields. Where environmental historians have been intermittently attentive to religious questions, scholars of religion have established a growing body of knowledge about the array of linkages between religion and the environment, drawing on a diversity of methodologies and theoretical orientations. When scholars of religion and environmentalism assess the history and trajectory of research in their field, they almost invariably point to “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” a 1967 essay by Lynn White Jr., as its point of inception. The essence of White’s argument was that the fundamental cause of environmental degradation was a uniquely Western and specifically Christian devaluation of nature. Embedded in his argument was a theoretical assumption that religious worldviews were among the most salient elements of environmental

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behaviors, though his analysis did not specify whether such influence operated at the level of individual agency or at the scale of broader social mentalities.35 The simple and compelling quality of White’s theory has ensured its legacy over more nuanced, but labyrinthine, studies like Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore.36 Roughly contemporaneous with White’s critique, other midcentury scholars asserted complementary connections between religious traditions and environmental concern, as in the work of cultural anthropologists such as Roy Rappaport and Julian Steward.37 The American case, however, was much more complicated than could be accounted for by White’s nonspecific theory of “religious other-worldliness” or by a structuralist approach to traditional and tribal societies. The heterogeneity and dynamic cultural admixture evident in American environmental thought pushed historians such as Roderick Nash, Peter Schmitt, and Donald Worster in more synthetic directions.38 Their interpretive histories established a view of environmentalism suggestive of a range of cultural influences, including economic conditions, agricultural practices, political contexts, and religious traditions. Subsequent historians—Catherine Albanese, Mark Stoll, John Gatta, and Thomas Dunlap, for example—began to explore the specificities of American environmentalism’s religious dimension in much greater depth.39 The insights of historians into the religious roots of environmental thought have been the basis of a very active field of social scientific research seeking to examine and corroborate contemporary practices in light of their latent religious character. Among a rapidly growing body of scholarship, Bronislaw Szerszynski’s Nature, Technology, and the Sacred; Rebecca Kneale Gould’s At Home in Nature; and Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion stand out as sustained interrogations of the religiosity of modern environmentalism.40 These more recent works bring to the fore a set of theoretical concerns about the influence of religion in shaping the environmental imagination. Is environmentalism religious because it has ritual characteristics? Because its founding figures were, as individuals, confessionally committed? Because it

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includes secular moral commitments closely resembling theological counterparts? Continuing the conversation developed by these and other scholars interested in the confluence of religion and ecology, Devoted to Nature aims to elaborate the specific implications that Christian theology has had for American environmental thought. Following a lineage of environmental historians who acknowledge the religious roots of American environmentalism, I offer a theoretical corrective designed to clarify how the religious origins of environmentalism remained publicly vital components of the movement well into the twentieth century. The success of this corrective does not turn on the question of whether environmentalism was religiously rooted but on narrower concerns about how its religious aspects functioned and how they affected the movement’s historical development. This study assumes that the work of environmental historians and scholars of religion is conjointly beneficial. My method is animated by questions shared by both disciplines: What is the meaning of the natural world? How has such meaning been socially articulated in American life? The fruit of such interdisciplinary exchange is such that it enhances the study of religiosity outside the confines of its institutional expression and strengthens the treatment of religion in American environmental history. For decades now those desirous of safeguarding healthy ecosystems have been faced with ongoing crises both large and small. The atomic specter has threatened the longevity of civilization, and contemporary anxieties about climate change are but the latest chapter in a century of worry about resource depletion, soil erosion, wildlife extinction, water pollution, toxic waste, and environmentally vulnerable communities. As environmental actors encountered each of these problems, they labored to articulate sufficient social, legal, and political responses, but now climate change, with its global, economic, and temporal complexities, has pushed our environmental imagination to its very limits. How can we respond meaningfully to a crisis that has no singular technical or political solution? Climate change turns our attention to the global

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nature of environmental issues, and environmental activists can no longer be content to promulgate a provincially American view of the public good. Though expressed in a different tenor, there has been significant discord among environmentalists about the relevance and utility of the movement’s foundational concepts. Prominent voices, most notably Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, have publicly decried the environmental movement as “dead”—or at least grounded in antiquated ideas, such as the notion of “pristine nature.”41 In the face of the global threat posed by climate change, environmental discourse has become cacophonous, with social justice advocates, animal welfare activists, international development agencies, renewable energy technocrats, and transnational actors all diverging from what once constituted environmentalism’s party line. The alliance between resource conservationists and wilderness preservationists that fueled the successes of midcentury environmentalism no longer holds the center, and it appears increasingly difficult to determine whether there can be a particular center in the multifaceted politics of climate change. If American environmentalism is in the middle of an identity crisis, perhaps it makes sense to rethink how and where the movement came from as a way to reimagine where it might be headed. Confusion about environmentalism’s cultural contexts underscores the need for a better understanding of its concept of human flourishing and its vision of human relations with the biophysical world. The material conditions necessary to well-being are, more or less, objective facts, but environmental goods—including the way such goods are asserted, protected, and distributed—are cultural products. Environmental movements are social spaces in which such goods are publicly discussed and inscribed in collective practices. Devoted to Nature argues that American environmentalism was grounded in a vision that linked nature with spiritual redemption. This is a particularistic approach to human flourishing, which helps explain some degree of the difficulties that major American environmental groups have experienced in trying to build a coalition with environmental

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groups in the Global South, with indigenous organizations, with communities of color, and with green socialists.42 As William Cronon argued in his persuasive essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” the central values of the environmental movement are not natural ones but are quite culturally specific and merit an ongoing commitment to revision and rethinking.43 In this spirit the present inquiry explores the links between the main body of twentieth-century American environmental thought and deeper currents of European intellectual history in a way designed to secure a more solid grounding for moral critique and to establish a candid appraisal of our environmental inheritance. Early twentieth-century environmental thought carried within itself all the complexity and contradiction of American society. It envisioned alternatives to unadulterated resource exploitation and to the industrialization of everyday life, but by the same measure it recapitulated the racist and sexist ideologies prevalent in turn-of-the-century Protestant America. The genealogy of American environmental thought rendered here is predominantly concerned with the contributions of white, Protestant Americans, not because the environmental movement was racially or religiously monolithic but because the core logic on which the movement was founded was deeply wrapped up with the cultural commitments of white, Protestant Americans. Critical of the racial and gender biases on which early environmental movements were predicated, contemporary historians have advanced compelling analyses of the ways in which Native Americans, African Americans, women, and the working classes were systematically excluded from public deliberations about ecological issues.44 Rather less has been written about the implications of environmentalism’s Protestant foundations for Catholic inclusion, but the movement’s record in the American Southwest certainly aligns with the history of Anglo marginalization of Latino communities.45 Historically grounded criticism of the environmental movement’s relationship to social hierarchy is essential to a successful account of the failings of modern environmental politics. Devoted to Nature supplements such criticism by focusing less on what has been

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historically marginalized from environmental discourse than on how the hegemonic conceptual structures of American environmental discourse were constructed from the outset. The internal logic of American environmental thought is wrapped up with the cultural hegemony of mainline Protestantism, and unpacking that relationship provides a useful foundation for critical appraisal on contemporary ecological politics. This book is not primarily about secularization, nor is it exclusively about the ways that religious elements endure long after they cease to be labeled as such. Beyond these dimensions, Devoted to Nature also engages several closely related questions. Was premodern Christian thought as monolithically antinaturalistic as many of its modern critics would make it seem? Are our contemporary ideas about the natural world—saturated in scientific knowledge and codified in the vocabularies of policy, management, and economic productivity—really as secular as many impassioned activists would assert? Read in one light, this book offers a more nuanced account of religious influence for those interested in the origins of environmentalism. Read in another light, it encourages a greater appreciation of the symbolic potency of nature in twentieth-century American religious history. Some of the key terms employed throughout the following pages have fallen out of favor among environmental advocates and theorists. In particular, the term nature has, throughout the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, been increasingly displaced by ecology and environment.46 These shifting rhetorical patterns correspond to the aforementioned modernization of environmentalism, in which the movement’s religious qualities are superseded by scientific ones. The ecological sciences supplied a solid intellectual basis with which to conceptualize the internal dynamics of environmental systems, without having to take recourse to the essentialist rhetoric of the natural.47 Yet the orientation to the biophysical world that emerged in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America runs much deeper than vocabulary. The mentalities that characterize the environmental

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imagination have not been radically overturned by the articulation of a coherent scientific frame for ecological issues. Rather, American environmentalism appears to have remained committed to the notion that human beings are ontologically independent of the biophysical world and that the well-being of the world presents humanity with a spiritual challenge irreducible to scientific, technical terminology. Even in the age of ecology we remain deeply indebted to our religious inheritance. What, then, does it mean to be indebted to history? Do historical genealogies imply fixed pathways along which cultures evolve? In The Genesis of the Copernican World Hans Blumenberg argues that although heliocentric astronomy was a revolutionary scientific achievement, the preceding centuries had established a series of necessary preconditions for this revolution. That is to say, where Copernicus broke with history and tradition, he did so only along routes that had been laid out for him in advance. I share this basic orientation—that history is not merely a narrative to which particular critical actors contribute but rather a dynamic social process within which particular kinds of moments and achievements are made possible by the conditions of a given era. The proliferation of ecological insight that characterized the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth cannot be sufficiently understood as a radical break with historical precedent. The era that gave birth to evolution, to ecology, and to outdoor recreation—the constellation of concepts that together constitute the “environmental milieu”—was not discontinuous with what came before. The primary endeavor of this book is to open up and describe some of the historical continuities between the ideas of nature operative in American society during the twentieth century and the ideas of nature developed across centuries of Christian thought. Such an analysis must begin “in the beginning.” Accordingly, chapter 1 frames the specific vein of theology that presages environmentalism, tracing the status of the material world from ancient to modern sources. In judgment of original sin, God binds Adam to the land, saying, Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it

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all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.48

These lines capture the core problematic of Christianity, that hubris is at once that which alienates us from God and that which alienates us from the rest of creation. Expressing this alienation, ancient and medieval Christians described the arc of human life in the terminology of homo viator. Materiality has thus always been implicated in the quest for redemption: the world of nature was full of travails and vistas, all of which were meaningful primarily as landmarks along the soul’s journey of its return to God. The various changes in European thought about the intelligibility, beauty, and orderliness of nature that attended the coming of the modern age had significant soteriological implications, which provided the basic cultural conditions necessary for the forms of nature appreciation that arose in the romantic movement. Chapter 2 outlines the profoundly naturalistic soteriological tendencies of late nineteenth-century American culture and describes how outdoor recreation served as a key conduit for ideas about the moral benefits of nature. These pages focus on how recreational practices shaped American religious life and on how distinctly Christian ideas about the outdoors were publicly instantiated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Expanding beyond a reductive reading of environmentalism as romanticism recapitulated, this chapter looks to the role of community and congregation in the political organization of environmental concern. The chapter concludes with close analyses of the moral rhetoric built into preservationist writings about wilderness and an examination of the explicitly Protestant activities

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of several major environmental groups, including the Sierra Club of California and the Mountaineers of Washington State. Chapter 3 explores the transformation of Euro-American attitudes toward mountains and forests that underwrite modern nature appreciation. Nature enthusiasts were aflame with the love of wild landscapes, and in the view of many intellectual and social historians this enthusiasm marked them as radically different from premodern intellectuals. By looking specifically to the changing rhetoric about wild places— deserts, forests, and especially mountains—this chapter asserts the connection between spatial images of redemption and the practices on which the American environmental movement was founded. Ascent, vision, insight, and the spiritual appreciation of creation formed the raw materials for medieval pilgrimage every bit as much as they were the bases of national parks tourism in the early twentieth century. Chapter 4 surveys literary accounts of outdoor experiences such as hiking, camping, and mountain climbing, all of which were fundamental elements of the social and political cohesion of early environmental groups. Recreational practices were instrumental in the organization of environmental constituencies: the shared experience of time spent in the outdoors afforded a sense of cohesive community. The communities that formed among early twentieth-century nature enthusiasts were predominantly Protestant, and almost exclusively white, but were also important forums for women’s leadership and for the expression of antiindustrial ideologies. Communities that understood themselves as devotees of nature were adamant in expressing the moral character of their collective projects. Against the popular image of the solitary individual in the wilderness, the activities of Progressive Era environmental organizations suggested that communal association formed the bridge between the nineteenth-century romantic appreciation of nature and the political activism in the later decades of the twentieth century. One of the key questions addressed in this book concerns how to best understand the radical changes in the way that Euro-American societies conceptualized the natural world that took place between the

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fifteenth century and the twentieth. These diverse changes—at once revolutionary and pedestrian—included the rise of the environment as an object of moral concern and the displacement of human beings as the sole possessors of ethical value. While it is inarguable that these changes were critical for the emergence of the modern environmental movement, the case for understanding how they came to pass is often overstated. Some intellectual historians have claimed that premodern ideas about nature were “discarded” or “overturned” as a modern paradigm of nature took shape. For a variety of reasons this is deceptive.49 Many long-held ideas about the natural world—for example, the belief that the world was fashioned by a single creator for human purposes— eroded very slowly over time, and this idea continues even in the present to operate in the background of public conversations about the environment. Likewise, as the sentiment that nonhuman animals were worthy of moral concern entered the mainstream during the nineteenth century, it would be more accurate to say that this belief challenged, but did not eliminate, claims to the exclusivity of human moral worth.50 The subtlest, but perhaps most powerful, misleading dimension of this assertion is that it treats premodern ideas about nature as being of a piece. It is certainly true that some ideas about nature were discarded as scientific epistemology became an increasingly central cultural force, and it is certainly true that some new ideas emerged as industrialization made humankind’s footprint ever more glaringly obvious. But not all premodern ideas about nature vanished so easily. An integrative perspective, capable of describing the development of modern environmentalism as a complex hybrid, as a mixture of premodern and modern ideas about nature and about the place of human beings within it, offers an appropriate means to understanding the historical contexts of the environmental imagination.

cha pter on e

Recreation and Soteriology Nature-Worship is assumed to be an essentially pagan characteristic, and Christianity . . . aiming at things that appear not, seems to centre its efforts on drawing man away from the contact and tangle of matter, that he may rise to a life supernal. —Rev. Joseph McSorley

To seek the cool breeze of a remote alpine meadow or to spend an afternoon scrambling up a mountainside in hopes of a commanding view are undoubtedly modern desires. Such leisurely pursuits would not have appealed to Europeans of the Middle Ages but might already have been intriguing to early American settlers. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about the natural world in Christian societies changed dramatically: this historical shift is but one element of a broader historical revolution, the advent of modernity, which included simultaneous changes in human self-understanding, scientific curiosity, technological capacity, anthropological awareness, and sociopolitical organization. Gradually, outdoor recreation entered the cultural mainstream, and by the middle of the twentieth century the family camping trip had become an utterly unsurprising image of domesticity. To the medieval mind, however, venturing into the forest with women and children in tow would have seemed akin to the beginning of a morbid folk story and would certainly have provoked great 25

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anxiety. The modern American enthusiasm for vigorous movement in pristine environments—mountain biking, rock climbing, camping, hiking, geocaching, kayaking, surfing, and the like—does not square with the seriousness of antiquity. Recreational enthusiasts themselves have long been aware of this historical convolution: “Why is it that we camp and hike and ski and climb cliffs and scale peaks? Until the last two hundred years such things were simply not done. What brought about the change? What is its significance? [Why] among the peoples we are accustom to call ‘the Ancients’ were there apparently no activities resembling those of the modern hiking or mountaineering club?”1 How is it that Western ideas about nature and the activities appropriate for its enjoyment have shifted so dramatically during the past several centuries? Precisely when and how did these changes come about? The central differences between modern and premodern ideas about nature are theological. For its first fifteen centuries, Christianity took nature as profane and juxtaposed it with a radically transcendent God. Human beings were the point of connection between two ontological extremes: the human body is material but animated by an immaterial, immortal soul. Medieval theology destabilized this arrangement, and as modern habits of mind evolved from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth, new ideas about nature and its theological significance flourished. These ideas celebrated the beauty and ingenuity of the created world and represented a major divergence from centuries of theological tradition. Yet no matter how far modern ideas of nature strayed from their sources, the trajectory they followed was charted by their theological histories. The disjuncture between modern and premodern ideas about physical nature, generally, and mountain and forest landscapes, in particular, is nowhere more eloquently treated than in Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Nicolson derives the terms gloom and glory from John Ruskin and uses them to distinguish between a premodern sentiment about rugged landscapes primarily characterized by apprehension and disdain and a modern celebration of the sublime in

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nature. In her view “mountain gloom” dominated the Western aesthetic from the Hellenistic period until the eighteenth century, when it was gradually displaced by the ascendency of “mountain glory.” Although Nicolson gives ample attention to the theological origins of this massive shift in European perceptions of nature, her narrative is premised on the view that the romantic aesthetic was a radical break with the Western intellectual heritage. She claims that the various “literary, theological, and philosophical conventions and traditions” that underwrote the European disregard for mountains and forests necessarily had to “disappear before the attitudes we take for granted [could] emerge.”2 While it is clear that the onset of modernity was accompanied by radically new ideas about nature, Nicolson’s insistence that such newness requires old ideas to disappear falsely posits modernity as an absolutely secular epoch. In fact, the realization of modernity cannot be reduced to a rejection of theological tradition in favor of reason and empiricism. The new sensibilities that emerged from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the period with which Nicolson is most concerned, were not divorced from Christian thought; rather, they were born of it, produced in response to it, and perpetually indebted to it. Accounting for these debts is the primary work of this chapter. A deeper look into theological history helps us to map the role of certain elements of religious thought as they conditioned the emergence of modern environmental consciousness, what some have called the contemporary “environmental milieu.”3 Of chief importance among these theological elements were the soteriological ramifications of the human position within the natural world. The material world had long been understood as the backdrop for the divine drama of the Creation, Fall, and redemption. The appearance of modern environmental sensibilities, evident in the aesthetics of “mountain glory” and in the proliferating enthusiasm for the natural sciences, brought nature into the foreground of this divine drama. Nature became a potential agent of salvation rather than its obstacle. This chapter charts the core features of this theological transmutation and recounts the emergence of outdoor recreation as a

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distinctively modern form of leisure, characterized by its potential to “re-create” persons.4 For recreation to attain its contemporary cultural position, the theologically conservative view of nature, that is, the idea that nature is no more than brute material, eroded in three significant areas.5 First, notions of “mountain gloom” were superseded by a distinction between human depravity and the positive moral status of the natural world. This was a resolution of a long-standing debate about whether persons and nature shared equally in the consequences of the fall from grace. Second, Christian anthropology needed to warm to the idea that human beings could be powerful agents in their own redemption, capable of achieving progress toward their own salvation. A theology premised on a God who was the sole possessor of redemptive capacities was limited in its ability to develop soteriological rituals rooted in worldly, physical practices. Such concerns were among the central contestations of the Protestant Reformation but had been active ingredients of theological dispute since antiquity; the rise of recreation tells a story of Pelagianism’s modern resurgence. Finally, specific bodily practices had to be invested with salvific possibility. Although a variety of practices, including running, yoga, and tattooing, might now be described in such a way, walking developed as the original form of recreational salvation. Modern thinkers articulated a renewed commitment to peripatetic practice, and walking was generally associated with the capacity for self-transformation. In particular, walking in unpeopled landscapes (variously understood as countryside, wilderness, or, more simply, nature) was taken to be the most soteriologically potent activity. These three general changes were not the cause or result of an explicit rejection of theological tradition; rather, the broad arc of medieval and early modern Christianity bears evidence of gradual transmutations through which the possibility of “mountain glory” arose. An inquisitive rereading of the Western theological treatment of nature suggests some of the threads that connect our modern ideas about recreation to their theological roots.

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the nature of human depravity Already by the era of Augustine (AD 354–430), Christianity had developed into what Lynn White Jr. proclaimed as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”6 The charge of anthropocentrism asserts that Christian theology is so preoccupied with its gaze toward heaven that it turned away from the material world and repudiated bodily pleasures. Augustine’s Confessions exemplifies this dualistic cosmology, describing God as the ontological source for the physical world but cautioning those who might be tempted to seek his presence in material terms. For example, Augustine treats the five senses as insufficient means to pursue knowledge of God and argues that our hunger for food, our desire for music, our aesthetic sensibilities, and even our curiosity to learn are as much temptations as necessities. In a moment of clear frustration with the tendency of his compatriots to revel in experiential knowledge of the physical world, he goes so far as to compare our longing to see and understand the world around us to finding pleasure “in the sight of a lacerated corpse.”7 Augustine’s notion of Christian duty requires the individual to devote his entire attention to God’s holy grace and to avoid mere curiosities and the distraction of material desires. This theological rendering imagines the natural world as a kind of spiritual wilderness through which human souls wander during life before being reconciled to God in the ever after. In fact, Augustine refers to mortal life as an “immensa silva,” an enormous forest, “full of snares and dangers.”8 Commentators on the Confessions have variously translated this term as wilderness, forest, and jungle to capture Augustine’s view of human life as a demanding sojourn made heavier by the burden of alienation from God.9 The metaphor of life as a journey through an inhospitable landscape directly invokes a biblical tradition brimming with images of triumph over barren places as a precondition for salvation.10 Our lives are but a wandering through a wasteland of sensory temptations, and we are called to enjoy only what is necessary for sustenance.

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With this image of homo viator—the human as traveler—at the heart of the Confessions, Augustine’s work can be read as a formative literary expression of the spiritual journey.11 Although this narrative technique would have been familiar throughout Mediterranean antiquity (it was, after all, also employed by Homer and Virgil), Augustine’s journey is distinctive both because it is written in the first person and because it describes the movement of a person through life as dictated by the magnetism of God’s grace. Homo viator, the trope of wandering toward salvation, was tremendously influential for subsequent Christian apologetics as diverse as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Unlike his literary successors, though, Augustine cannot fully lay claim to his own journey, which is initiated and impelled by God. Human beings are but wishful wanderers drawn toward God’s immovability. Our movement toward God is hampered, however, by our propensity to be distracted from the eternal by the material and mundane. Augustine’s homo viator is premised on a tension, more readily apparent in medieval theology, between a good and all-powerful God working to reconcile humankind to himself and a created world that threatens to disrupt the redemptive order. In Augustine there is a delicate balance between the capacity of free will to accept God’s grace and the human tendency to gravitate toward material pleasures. This brittle arrangement attenuated the theological conflicts of Augustine’s era, though it proved difficult for subsequent Christian thinkers to maintain. Augustine was compelled to find this balance because of the potential for heresy on either side. On the one hand orthodoxy was threatened by Pelagianism, which overestimated the capacity of human beings to affect their own salvation. On the other hand Manichaeism too strongly repudiated the natural world as corrupt and mistook evil as a coequal force in the universe. Augustine devoted a significant portion of his intellectual energy to combating these two philosophical views, and his effort to fend off the dual hazard they presented established a lasting set of boundaries for the contours of orthodoxy.12 In short, a theology that simultaneously defends against Pelagi-

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anism and Manichaeism necessarily articulates a view of the material world as good but not so good that it lacks the need for redemption. Pelagius (AD 354–420) had directly challenged one of the central tenets of Christian doctrine, namely the view that human depravity is essential to our natures and is inherited by all persons from Adam himself. If humans are not fundamentally sinful beings, then the soteriological project of Christianity looks rather different: the beliefs, behaviors, and will to be reconciled to God are within the reach of human mastery. Augustine’s intellectual commitment to God’s perfection and absolute omnipotence placed him foremost among Pelagius’s critics, who collectively condemned the notion of self-perfectibility as heresy at the Council of Carthage. Augustine argued that because a good God would not have created moral agents doomed to sin and because no sinful creature could affect salvation without God’s grace, theological orthodoxy required that free will was the sole cause of the Fall and that all persons share equally in the resulting depravity.13 He further insisted that the journey through life and toward God was necessarily divinely directed, for if human souls can achieve redemption of their own initiative, God’s grace would be superfluous. This argument raises a complex set of theological questions that motivated Augustine’s extensive work on the will and memory, all of which aimed to articulate a view of the human as a moral agent helpless without God’s benefaction. This extreme skepticism about the spiritual capabilities of human souls would seem to risk a Manichean view of creation, another theologically fraught philosophical position. If life is indeed a movement from a depraved material world to a divine spiritual realm, and if this journey is precipitated and guided solely by God, then it would seem that the world of bodies and things stands fundamentally apart from the divine.14 The idea of life as an ascent from matter to spirit risks collapsing into a Gnostic disdain for God’s created world, a view that Augustine had rejected after his youthful Manichean encounter. Believing that a benevolent and loving God created the material world, Augustine refutes the Manichean view that matter is inherently and fundamentally corrupt. The world and human souls alike were created by

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God and are necessarily good. In the view of some contemporary readers Augustine’s arguments along these lines indicate that he did not turn away from nature altogether and that his writings do include moments of natural veneration.15 For example, in City of God he describes at length the “wonderful qualities” of plants, the “manifold and various loveliness” of the landscape, the “grand spectacle of the sea,” and the amazing “plumage and song” of various animals.16 His tempered vision of nature, however, was little more than a hedge against Gnosticism. It is clear that he believed that contemplation of things other than God and the human soul were of no soteriological benefit: the wonders of nature are only wondrous within a carefully delimited framework aimed at praising God’s beautiful and useful gifts to humankind. Augustine codified Christian antiquity’s view that the goodness of nature was to be defined exclusively in terms of its utility for our creaturely needs. When Augustine describes God’s creation as a world particularly suited for spiritual development and human flourishing, modern readers might detect allusions to a naturalistic theology, but this interpretation is anachronistic. In the Confessions Augustine regards bodily pleasures, social amusements, and natural beauty as distractions from a contemplative devotion to God. Worldly pleasures are sinful precisely because they alienate people from God, and, strikingly, Augustine holds that this is equally true of spectator sports, idle games, eating, and sexuality.17 The Christian should not deny the pleasure of eating nourishing food but should recognize that this form of pleasure is vain and impermanent. Augustine’s theory of bodily existence is clearly indicated by his declaration that food is to be “taken as medicine” (10.31.43). We are by nature sick creatures and must endure the alienation of an earthly lifetime if we are to have any hope of salvation. This perspective was formative for generations of theologians who followed Augustine in seeking to understand the subtle distinction between asceticism and moderation. Various passages of the Confessions indicate Augustine’s anxiety about how to care for the body without garnering undue pleasures: “[my body] is glad that it is not clear as to what is sufficient for the modera-

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tion of health, so that under the pretense of health it may conceal its projects for pleasure” (10.31.44). Imagine his disapproval at the modern American obsession with gourmet foods and exercise regimes! Healthful living in contemporary culture has become deeply intertwined with physical pleasure, but the belief that spiritual transcendence is at odds with materiality has not disappeared from our conceptual landscape. How has it come to pass that certain sensory pleasures are celebrated as wholesome, but others remain tainted by the ethical critiques leveled by theologians of ages past? Simply put, by what means have exercise and natural foods come to inhabit a separate category of pleasure from more licentious pursuits like gambling, gluttony, and masturbation? For Augustine these were all of a piece—what happened? One answer might begin with a famous medieval anecdote prominently featuring the Confessions. On April 26, 1336, nearly a millennium after Augustine’s death, the early Renaissance poet Petrarch decided to climb Mount Ventoux, near Avignon, to take in the view. Petrarch’s ascent is forever remembered in his letter describing the ascent, in which he claimed to be the first to have sought the peak merely for pleasure’s sake. On reaching the summit and enjoying the vista, Petrarch claims to have sat down and opened the Confessions and alighted on a passage from book 10 that reads, “Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves” (10.13.15). Dumbfounded, Petrarch shifted his attention inward, away from the vista, and found his way back to the foot of the mountain, where he wrote a penitent letter recounting the experience.18 Centuries later, Petrarch would be celebrated by outdoor enthusiasts as the father of alpinism and remembered as much for his pioneering embrace of the natural world as an aesthetic object as for his theological apologetics. This vignette illustrates two things about the role of Christianity in shaping Western attitudes about nature. First, Augustine’s strict separation between the materiality of the natural world and the immateriality of the immortal soul proved a powerful conceptual

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framework for a great many centuries. It endured in Petrarch’s imagination and beyond. Second, even as Augustine’s voice reached through the pages of Petrarch’s slim volume to warn him of his hubris, the European outlook on nature had already begun to shift as early as the fourteenth century. The irony of Petrarch’s letter is that, despite his selfchastisement, he had still enjoyed the view from atop the mountain and spoke enthusiastically about the journey. Though it was yet unnamed, the Renaissance had begun. Petrarch stood at the dawn of a budding humanist celebration of personhood and rediscovery of Greco-Roman ideas about nature (bucolic idylls and georgic revelries). Petrarch’s legacy is more complex than a simple break with tradition, and it is clearly more than a reluctant return to it. The ascent of Mount Ventoux represents a transitional moment in Western thinking about nature: even as Petrarch claims to defend against the idea of landscapes as the backdrop of the soteriological drama, he signals the possibility of the mountains, the sea, and the stars serving as a means of human selfcontemplation. In the centuries that followed his famous climb, religiously motivated marveling at the soul within and marveling at the world about us were no longer mutually exclusive. Although a strict Augustinian would have considered it a distraction from spiritual matters, outdoor recreation developed precisely as the practice of embodied marveling at the created world. Practices such as hiking and mountain climbing developed primarily as vehicles for the very kind of soteriological soul-searching that Augustine took as fundamental to the Gospel message. The evolution of the Western environmental imagination is easily misinterpreted. Contrary to the popular view that movements like the scientific revolution and romanticism displaced the Christian ontology articulated by Augustine and his compatriots, the emergence of modern environmental thought drank deeply from the well of theology. The transformation of Western ideas about nature was subtle; while new ways of conceptualizing the natural world challenged the primacy of otherworldly concerns, emerging sentiments about the moral signifi-

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cance of the natural world remained linked with enduring ideas about human depravity. Again, what happened? How did nature, or perhaps more modestly, the natural landscape, become an instrument for spiritual pursuits? The social and cultural revolutions that gave rise to modern ideas about nature are surely too complex to describe in their entirety.19 But keeping an eye to the elements of Christian tradition that survived the upheavals of the early modern period provides a more nuanced historical perspective than is available to those who take modernity as an absolute break.20 Although the myriad thinkers who helped fashion modern environmental thought were often exploring uncharted conceptual territory, they looked to the past for inspiration and were constrained by tradition even where they sought liberation from it. As with Petrarch’s cagey invocation of Augustine, EuroAmerican attitudes about nature have always been flavored by an ambivalent marriage of tradition and originality. The complicated legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), at once modern and reactionary, epitomizes this dual tendency. Rousseau chose to title his autobiography Confessions in a gesture that clearly placed him in contradistinction to Augustine, but the contrast is not one of opposites. Rousseau’s theory of human depravity strangely echoes Christian theology: like Augustine, he was preoccupied with the condemnation of the theater as manifestation of social decadence; like Augustine’s, Rousseau’s argument asserts that culture itself is a distraction from the inherent good of the created world. Augustine and Rousseau share a concern that social life is riddled with spiritually vapid pursuits: the dramatic arts, sports, fashion, and literature. But there are limits to the overlap between their respective views of human depravity. Most obviously, although Rousseau is critical of social forms of decadence, he parts company with Augustine’s condemnation of certain bodily pleasures, namely food, sex, and sleep. In fact, Rousseau celebrates the body and perhaps values the love of self above all things, and self-love obliges bodily pleasure. Mindful of the trappings of an ethic rooted in materiality, Rousseau was careful to clarify that the worldly pleasures are not rooted in anything

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“external to the self” and are instead products of “nothing but oneself and one’s own existence.” Because “everything in the world is in a state of constant flux,” genuine pleasures drawn from bodily experience are, of course, fleeting, but, more important, they are also generated by the interaction “between [one’s] immortal nature and the constitution of the world and the physical order . . . reigning in it.”21 This modern Confessions, then, draws a rather different picture of human depravity, one that impugns human society in collectivity but absolves individual human persons of any particular blame. This is a tremendously important conceptual shift that certainly reflects the new ideas about human subjectivity that emerged in the centuries between Augustine and Rousseau.22 In Rousseau, and the romantic thinkers who followed him, individuals are cleansed of the taint of original sin, but sin does not disappear, enduring instead as the limiting factor for human potential more generally. Romanticism inverted Christian soteriology by remaking sin as social rather than personal. It was, however, more than just the entrenchment of moral individualism that eroded older theological ideas about the depravity of nature and set the stage for Rousseau’s critique of social depravity. Precisely how did Rousseau corroborate Augustine’s views of human depravity yet simultaneously celebrate certain corporeal pleasures?23 On what grounds did they agree about the debased nature of the theater yet disagree about the spiritual value of natural observation, gustatory pleasures, and sexuality? Although it is in some ways contiguous with Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s own autobiography makes significant departures that highlight how the advent of modernity reshaped the way that Western thinkers understood the relationship between human beings and the natural world.24 Rousseau’s nostalgia for a time before social pressures dominated our lived experience radically differentiates him from theological tradition: his conceptual permutation of the Fall was limited to the social sphere and did not extend to human nature or the natural world itself. Writing against figures like Hobbes, who were cynical about human nature, Rousseau championed the inherent goodness of human beings. We are depraved, according to his view, not

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because we are tainted by original sin but because we are alienated from our created natures and from the world as it was first made. For Rousseau redemption is thus a project of recovery, an attempt to return to our original nature, not an effort to overcome it. The romantic remaking of Christianity established restoration as the standard by which the trajectory of human spiritual progress should be charted. To put this in theological terms, the specific point of disagreement between Augustine and Rousseau concerns the moment and meaning of the Fall. Where Augustine’s position begins with the belief that we are by nature fallen, Rousseau asserts that the fall from grace was a historical phenomenon that occurred after Creation. We are in our natures good, but the corrosive effect of living among the unnatural demands of society has debased humankind. Rousseau’s philosophy of history located human depravity as something that emerged after our time in the proverbial garden and retains much of the Christian skepticism about the moral foundations of human institutions, while explicitly rejecting the doctrine of original sin. Despite the fact that Rousseau was harshly criticized by the religious mainstream of his time, his critique of cultural decadence and nostalgia for a golden age before the emergence of rigidly structured societies is a strange reflection of Christian teleology.25 In tracing the roots of human wickedness to social causes, Rousseau effectively partitions the kinds of pleasure and distraction that had so worried Christian moralists since antiquity. For Rousseau and his romantic disciples cultural pleasures like music, theater, and the arts were distinct from natural ones like walking, botanizing, and even sexuality. Natural pleasures are laudable because they are forms of self-care that seek to ameliorate the corrupting influence of society and return the individual to his or her natural state. In a passage that seems almost to respond to the excerpt from Augustine that had arrested Petrarch, Rousseau asserts that “lonely meditation, the study of nature, and the contemplation of the universe necessarily make a solitary person strive continually for the author of all things and seek with a sweet anxiety the purpose of everything he sees and the cause of everything he feels.” Rousseau defends outdoor

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leisure and curiosity about the natural world against claims that it is spiritually distracting by differentiating between the pursuit of knowledge as a means to social status and the pursuit of knowledge as a means to “inner enlightenment.”26 Especially in his later writings, there is no pleasure more basic or natural for Rousseau than walking, which “functions as an emblem of the simple man and as . . . a means of being in nature and outside society.”27 In a word, Rousseau was an early advocate of recreation as a means to restore human souls to their prelapsarian status. Rousseau stands as one of the romantic movement’s foundational figures; his scrutiny of overreaching claims of moral progress and graceful style were echoed throughout subsequent centuries. The intellectual revolution that was romanticism is conceivably understood as a release from the strictures of rationalism, but it would be an oversimplification to reduce the movement to a critique of Enlightenment triumphalism. The self—and self-care—at the heart of Rousseau’s project was not merely an expression of Descartes’s subject as thinking thing, nor was his disdain for social conformity merely the product of a rigidly hierarchical European social order. Though he certainly viewed civilization as artificial and the main source of immorality, his turn to nature addresses what he takes as an existential problem. Our depravity is the product of an inevitable social alienation, the solution for which can only be found in a return to our origin, to our most basic nature. Rousseau’s glorification of walking, botanical studies, and simple earthly pleasures as means to self-knowledge and to moral redemption represents a novel answer to long-standing theological questions about whether humans are capable of grappling with their fallen nature and about the extent to which bodily and material pleasures are obstacles to such grappling.

nature and soteriology in medieval theology The contrast between Rousseau and Augustine might be taken as evidence that modern thinkers are distinguished by a romantic idealization

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of nature not found in ancient sources. The romantic movement’s tendency to reject religious conformity in pursuit of poetic self-expression would seem to confirm this perspective, and for these reasons environmental historians generally take romanticism as one of the brightest stars in the constellation of modern environmental thought, alongside scientific empiricism and evolution by natural selection. But despite its formative position in the history of environmental thought, the romantic movement is not sui generis. A cursory examination of the romantic tradition suggests that although it was revolutionary, it did not spring full grown from Zeus’s head.28 For instance, Rousseau’s clashes with many of the prevailing ideas of his time followed a well-established countercultural mode that echoed late medieval doubts about the legitimacy of humanist celebrations of progress. Romanticism is also an expression of a broader pattern of changing Christian attitudes about the material world, one that radically “recast, into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise.”29 Momentous changes, including the development of scientific methods of observation and the articulation of a heliocentric universe, dramatically shifted European sentiments about nature during the early modern period. Yet even as they did so, early modern thinkers clung to certain central theological elements, notably God’s omnipotence and the fallen, yet redeemable, condition of human beings. During the late Middle Ages the influence of medieval Islamic intellectuals like Avicenna (980–1037) and Averroes (1126–98) helped reestablish the prominence of textual sources from antiquity in European centers of learning.30 As late medieval theologians became familiar with the Hellenistic philosophies from which they had been estranged during the early Middle Ages, they began increasingly to see their intellectual undertaking in terms of cultural restoration.31 Resuscitating the ideas that had animated the highest achievements of ancient Mediterranean societies empowered late medieval intellectuals to see

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themselves as significant historical actors. In conjunction with an ever more linear concept of history, a Renaissance mentality of progress and confidence in human capabilities slowly took shape during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.32 The ends to which humanistic notions of progress were put redirected medieval theology; the growing confidence of Renaissance intellectuals was built from the rubble of the Middle Ages yet was still indebted to it.33 This historiographic self-awareness differentiated late medieval thinkers from previous generations in that it signaled a budding optimism about the positive possibilities for human agency. The attempt to establish a secure basis for human achievement, the central aim of both Renaissance humanism and early modern empiricism, was a response to a cultural crisis of faith. Rene Descartes is typically credited as the intellectual figure that established a theoretical basis for objective knowledge about the material world, but his efforts in this regard were shared by many of his contemporaries who also sought to demonstrate the human capacity for understanding and manipulating the natural world. This pursuit is taken as the fundamental moment in the history of secularization. Retrospectively, the efforts of figures like Descartes and Francis Bacon to make humans the agents of their own destiny and to render the physical world as a manipulable entity seem quintessentially secular. Even so, however much the desire for objective knowledge about physical properties seems to imply a disenchanted view of nature, Descartes’s great experiment cannot be separated from the motives he and his contemporaries shared. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ turn to nature as something humans could enjoy, appropriate, understand, and master grew from a deep uncertainty about the intelligibility of the created order. The project of creating certainty and harnessing nature to a new apparatus of knowledge was the byproduct of internecine theological debate. The first significant intellectual movement to develop from the recuperation of Hellenistic learning was Scholasticism. Although Scholasticism became the dominant theological tradition in Europe between

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the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, it also quickly found itself under intellectual attack, and the most successful critics were the nominalists. The nominalists objected to Scholasticism on grounds that its deployment of Platonic realism infringed on God’s omnipotence. Realism is the metaphysical doctrine that the actual world is a manifestation of underlying universal ideals. Plato’s famous image of the cave, in which shadows cast on the rear wall are but our dim perception of real objects beyond our comprehension, neatly describes this metaphysical position. The Neoplatonic orientation of Scholasticism held that phenomenal objects are crude manifestations of underlying universal truths. For example, individual human beings are but particular examples of the idea of man, which is, of course, God’s own mental image. Insofar as Scholasticism was premised on realism, the world was understood as the manifestation of the perfect forms generated in the mind of God. This view, however, was worrisome to nominalists, who were concerned that if the universal categories to which particular things belong are fixed and immutable—tables, persons, animals, stars, and so forth— then God’s creative capacity was essentially constrained. If the being of things in the world was conditioned on perfect, eternal ideas, then God’s creative power mattered only at the moment these ideas themselves were issued into being. God could not, by the logic of realism, create a thinking pebble or a star that did not emit light, let alone a human being who could survive death. Echoing Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s excessive realism, medieval thinkers like William of Ockham and Duns Scotus articulated the ontological disunity of things and their natures. In short, nominalists argued that the category to which a thing belonged was not to be confused with that thing itself. For example, individual persons are members of the class of beings called humans, but that category is an abstraction with uncertain ontological status. Human beings recognize one another as members of a species, but the category human does not share the same kind of being as that of actual persons. For nominalists universal categories were merely constructions that cannot be said to exist independent of particular instantiations of that category—there is

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no such thing as a star without actual stars. Nominalists argued that God’s omnipotence is necessarily a freedom to act in any manner whatsoever, including in direct contradiction to his previous decisions. Although many contemporary ethologists would disagree, philosophers of the Middle Ages believed that God created humans as the only talking creatures, and nominalists maintained that God could easily choose at any moment to bring articulate beasts into being. At the heart of the debate between nominalists and Scholastics was the question whether God is appropriately characterized as a will or as an intelligence: nominalists emphasized God’s omnipotent will, while Scholastics maintained the Neoplatonic view of the world as a reflection of God’s inherently rational nature. If God is understood in terms of absolute will, the world reflects his choices, which are by definition good but are not necessarily transparent to rational scrutiny. The tendency of this theological emphasis is toward otherworldly mysticism. If, however, God is understood in terms of absolute reason, his created order is necessarily rational, and, being created in his image, human beings possess the rational capacities to see and understand the underlying cosmic order. For realists like the Scholastics, the order observable in nature was a reflection of the orderliness of the divine mind. Theological commitment to the correspondence between the world and God’s rational blueprint for it gave rise to the concept of the Great Chain of Being, which asserted that the cosmos is necessarily a gradated hierarchy of all possible forms of being, from the tiniest grain of sand to the angels of heaven. The Great Chain of Being was central to the Neoplatonist strains of Christian theology that flourished from the latter centuries of the Roman era well into the modern era. In the name of preserving God’s omnipotence, the nominalist critique asserted a material world that was not transparent to reason and that the order we perceive in the world is but mere perception.34 Homer Simpson comes close to pointing out this problem when he asks whether “Jesus could microwave a burrito so hot that even he himself could not eat it?”35 Theologically speaking, Homer is perplexed about whether God’s power is in any way

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constrained by the existence of a physical universe defined by its regularity and ontological consistency. Centuries of Christian thinkers have experienced the world we inhabit as a continuation of the world created by God at the beginning of time. Why this stable world of observable natural laws and not some radically contingent world that God creates and recreates each day anew? The nominalist critique raised important new questions about the relationship between empirical observation and theological ontology. From the nominalist perspective the patterns apparent to human perception—gravity, the rhythm of the seasons, the plentitude of creation, and so on—remain stable only insofar as God chooses not to overturn them. Rather than accept the world as anchored by immutable ideal forms, nominalists distinguished between God’s potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, between his omnipotent capacity and his actual will. God could do anything he pleased, and as such, the created order must be understood as contingent and provisional, requiring God’s renewed assent at each moment.36 This distinction proved theologically troubling: if the potential for God’s will was limitless, then why did he refrain from doing all things? Nominalists imagined a God who made the world as we experience it yet also restrained himself from making it otherwise. What kind of a God appears never to adjust his creation? What kind of God would position himself at such a remove from the scrutiny of his would-be worshippers? Nominalists themselves strictly maintained that God was ultimately unknowable and that his choices about when to act and when not to act are beyond comprehension. Radicalizing the concept of omnipotence was, after all, the basic motive of the nominalist movement. But this effort raised questions that proved tremendously challenging for late medieval and early modern theologians who struggled not only to understand an impenetrable divinity but also to make sense of the created world without the advantage of a transparent divine logic. The most basic answer to these questions was put forward in the doctrine of voluntarism, which argues that the distinction between God’s potentia absoluta

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and his potentia ordinata represents a voluntary choice made by God in his infinite and essentially unintelligible wisdom. The consistency of natural phenomena reflects God’s choice not to further manipulate the original created order. Voluntarism describes a created world that operates independent of an actively engaged Deity—this is the theology of Deus absconditus, the God who withdraws from the scene after his work is complete. In this sense voluntarism presages Deism (and perhaps even the death of God) in its depiction of a creator God who magnanimously established this world of regularity and sufficiency and then withdrew into the ether.37 Here the radicalism of the nominalist movement is most evident: in order to safeguard God’s absolute omnipotence, nominalists articulated an unassailable and absolutely otherworldly Creator. In the wake of such theological upheavals the natural world was sanitized of miracles, and the order of nature came to be fixed with a heretofore unknown mechanical regularity. Although it seems at first glance like a trifling and decidedly technical philosophical disagreement, the metaphysical divergences between the Scholastics and the nominalists were to have tangible and lasting impacts for the way European cultures thought about and engaged with the material world. Nominalism never secured a place for itself within the theological mainstream and, for the most part, remained a position of philosophical critique. That said, its influence was culturally pervasive, especially with respect to the origins of modern attitudes about the natural world. The intellectual fallout of nominalism powerfully reshaped theological attitudes about the ontological status of the material world and opened new avenues toward salvation and salvific processes. Medieval metaphysical debates had indirect, but important, influence on Western perspectives about the place of human beings in the natural world and were significant forces in establishing a modern mentality in which time spent outdoors could come to be invested with soteriological possibility. The central philosophical impact of nominalism was the displacement of abstract universals in favor of concrete particulars.38 As this

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view permeated late medieval thought, theologians and philosophers articulated new modes of thinking about and interacting with the created, material world that placed new priority on particularity and empirical observation. Generally speaking, medieval science had looked to the material world as a confirmation of rationally ascertainable, eternal principles established at the moment of creation. The nominalist revolution did not do away with this approach to knowledge, but it helped open new possibilities for understanding and effectively ushered in an era in which the natural world illuminated, not just validated, divine reason. Neoplatonic ideas about divine order had limited the ability of European thinkers to understand the world around them, and they had spent centuries trying to fit the square peg of nature into the round hole of theological necessity. The geocentric cosmos and the gradated plentitude of beings are good examples of the conceptual limitations of theological Scholasticism and indicate the obstructions to naturalism inherent in the kind of world European thinkers imagined a rational God would necessarily have created. A theology that did not presuppose God’s will thus freed Christian thinkers to consider the workings of nature unencumbered by an anthropocentric (or, perhaps more exactly, misanthropocentric) Platonic ontology. In weakening the claim that nature had to be understood in light of a philosophically consistent theology, nominalism established the cultural conditions for an era in which nature became as instructive a source of religious understanding as was scripture. Though nominalist theologians themselves would have objected, the idea of nature as a book became the central metaphor for creation during the late Middle Ages and early modernity.39 In the theological fallout over radical omnipotence, opponents of nominalism sought to decipher the book of nature, and from their endeavors were born many modern ideas about the physical world.40 The implications of nominalism were both reactionary and reformative. Many thinkers responded to the doctrine of radical omnipotence with trepidation and sought to develop a direct response to its intimation of a

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distant and impersonal God. Others absorbed the nominalist critique and transformed it in ways that were foundational for the development of modern ideas about nature. Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), Nicolas of Cusa (1401–64), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Rene Descartes (1596– 1650) can be counted among the intellectual giants writing either in response to or in appropriation of nominalist insights. A closer examination of two distinct modes of responding to the nominalist challenge— Eckhart’s mysticism and Descartes’s empirical skepticism—suggest how deeply medieval theology influenced subsequent Western concepts about nature and the place of humans within it. Nominalist theology was so troubling for late medieval and early modern theologians that they devoted significant intellectual energy to elucidating a more knowable, present, and worldly God. Eckhart’s mystical ontology was just such an effort and might even be described as doubling down on the logic of nominalism. Like the nominalists, he argued that the being of all things is utterly dependent on God’s will, but Eckhart took a further step, claiming that because the being of God cannot be reduced to the being of things, God must be the “operative force that determines their becoming.”41 That is to say, although the Creator cannot be synonymous with his creation, his activity is evident in the sustained being of all things. For a mystic like Eckhart the nominalist emphasis on the radical contingency of all being did not suggest a Deus absconditus but rather an active, omnipresent God. The God of such mystical sustenance is the cause of all actualities and, more important, is also the source of all possibilities. Eckhart viewed the world as an “incarnation, [as] the body of God [who] is in the world as the soul is in the body, omnipresent as the motive principle.”42 This position counters the radical transcendence of voluntarism with a theology of radical immanence: from the perspective of mysticism God’s absolute omnipotence does not suggest a world distant from him but one immediately and universally pervaded by his presence. The radical contingency of the physical world asserted by the nominalists is here transformed into an affirmation of creation that

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allows, if not encourages, the faithful to seek God’s presence in nature. A world in which all things are at all times infinitely dependent on God’s continued sustenance is a world where natural observation is by definition an examination of the contours of God’s will in action. Eckhart’s contributions to the history of philosophy are well documented, but his role as a bridge between medieval and modern ideas about nature is less well demonstrated. Through vehicles like Eckhart’s mystical ontology, the aftershocks of the nominalist revolution underwrote a protonaturalist view that renders the processes of nature as a perpetual and providential unfolding of God’s grace.43 Such a view is first visible in Eckhart, but this perspective was also taken up by a variety of intellectual movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The belief that the natural world is pulsing with the divine later became a mainstay of romantic thought and helped invest early modern observations of nature with religious purpose. A world wherein an omnipresent Deity animated all beings meant that encounters with nature—countryside forays, agricultural labor, and so on—could become new forms of theological contemplation. The kind of reverential celebration of God’s creation found in Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne would not have been possible without Eckhart’s protonaturalist mysticism. The mystical approach, though influential, was not in the theological mainstream. More formal attempts to grapple with the haunting image of a radically unknowable, inscrutable God imagined in the doctrine of Deus absconditus were a regular feature of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury theology, and it is in light of these rebuttals that Cartesianism appears as a rejoinder to the kind of uncertainty provoked by the nominalist critique. Writing almost three centuries after Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, Descartes set out to establish a more reliable basis for philosophical ontology and to triumph over the uncertainty inherent in a world that can no longer be explained as the manifestation of divine reason. Nominalists had presented a tremendous obstacle to the possibility of reliable scientific knowledge: the empirically observable properties of nature could not accurately be called laws so long as God’s

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absolute power could change them at will. The quest for scientific certainty, which he considered the linchpin necessary to achieve significant human progress, brought Descartes into direct engagement with the nominalist debates. Even in laboring to secure a bulwark against the ontological instability of nominalism, Descartes “clearly accepted the nominalistic premise that God created the world because he wanted to and not because he was determined to do so by some antecedent reason or necessity.”44 Descartes’s quest was to harmonize this basic nominalist insight with a Scholastic pursuit of the manifest order of nature. Certainty about the created order was the first step toward a unique new form of human independence, an independence that perhaps seemed necessary because of voluntarism’s depiction of God’s remote position from human affairs. Where Eckhart’s response to nominalism was itself theological, Descartes developed a practical rebuttal, attempting to place humanity at the helm of the natural order. The Cartesian desire for certain knowledge answers the challenge of nominalism with a lurch toward mastery—and here the Cartesian project seems a subtle reprise of Pelagian hubris.45 The voluntarist notion of a God that deliberately chose to restrain himself from his infinite creative capacities in favor of natural laws empowered early modern thinkers to look to the operations of nature as a means to know and understand God. Descartes reasoned that the human mind was uniquely capable of such reflection and that our status as imago Dei enabled humanity to achieve some measure of sovereignty over nature. Although the reverberations took centuries, the nominalist revolution provoked Christians of various quarters to begin to look to the natural world as a means to knowledge of God, as a means to self-knowledge, and as a mechanism for social transformation. Pelagianism snuck back into theological consideration where the religious impulse sought a distant and unknowable God: “To be modern is to be self-liberating and selfmaking, and thus not merely to be in a history or tradition but to make history. To be modern consequently means not merely to define one’s being in terms of time but also to define time in terms of one’s being, to

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understand time as the product of human freedom in interaction with the natural world.”46 In this sense the rise of nominalism and its subsequent impact on theological tradition gave birth to a new conceptual geography for homo viator. Christian thinkers in antiquity and the early Middle Ages had mapped the journey of life in metaphysical terms. The human being was, in their view, a spiritual being in the material world and thus soteriologically predisposed to return to God in an ascent from matter to spirit. The theological tumult of the Middle Ages generated a less abstract topography for Christian salvation: the material world itself became a soteriological landscape in which believers endeavored to read and understand God’s presence in the actions of nature.

recovering the peripatetic tradition As the terrain through which homo viator moved became less metaphorical, the role of bodily practices took on new soteriological significance. Walking has a long history as a vehicle for moral reflection and selfcultivation, and its functions in these regards help account for the growth of outdoor recreation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The connection between walking and thinking is especially associated with Aristotle, whose school was dubbed Peripatetic given his propensity to walk around the Lyceum as he taught. In one sense the peripatetic tradition was resuscitated when medieval Islamic and Christian theologians rediscovered Aristotelian texts characterized by a restless self-searching. The peripatetic tradition, however, is more than a designation of a philosophical school—it also denotes a method, an embodied practice of thinking and reflection. The nominalist turn away from universals meant that Renaissance and early modern thinkers became much more attendant to empirically observable physical processes than had their medieval predecessors, and this attentiveness suggests a (renewed) willingness to think and learn outside the confines of textual tradition. As natural history became a significant branch of learning in the early modern era, the

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countryside wanderings of European literati became a crucial source of both philosophical introspection and scientific analysis. The place of walking as one of modernity’s primary contemplative techniques has been a tertiary question for most cultural historians, who have generally been more concerned with economic and material conditions. Walking is sometimes dismissed as a pedestrian practice, as a plodding concern with the ordinary and the everyday, and it is this conceptual association that may explain the degree to which the cultural significance of walking has been overlooked.47 However neglected, walking—as a form of recreation, as a way to think, and as an object of literary interest—has long served to underscore visions of human life as a journey. The metaphor of life as travel is concretely realized in literary accounts of travel by foot. Critics have amply demonstrated the relationship of romantic poetry with respect to other homo viator traditions, but the metaphor of life as a journey by foot can be applied much more broadly to medieval pilgrimage accounts, to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and to naturalistic works like Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne or John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.48 Even the very origins of modern thought cannot be separated from the act of walking: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, Mill, and many other philosophical luminaries considered walking integral to their thinking.49 If the practice of walking is indeed so deeply embedded in the fabric of Western modernity, how did it come to be invested with spiritual significance? And what is the relationship between walking as a spiritual practice and Euro-American ideas about the natural world? Medieval Europe would not have been a particularly safe place to walk: wild animals, lawless forests, and poor roads posed real obstacles for travelers. An even more significant check on perambulatory pursuits was the medieval imagination, which associated the wilderness beyond the city walls with both mortal and moral threats.50 Religious practices that ritualized walking were, however, common throughout the Middle Ages. Pilgrimages, like those to the Holy City of Jerusalem or along the Camino de Santiago Compostela, have been important to

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Christian practice since late antiquity. In the Middle Ages, however, the peripatetic practices of pilgrims and mendicants were often marginalized as being tinged with paganism or labeled as otherwise subversive. Unlike the later outdoor wanderings of the romantics, medieval pilgrimages were also often carefully managed and hierarchically organized. Thus, while walking has been a long-standing conduit for spirituality in Christian cultures, it was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when intellectual movements like humanism and empiricism were coupled with social and agricultural improvements, that the conditions were right for walking to become an instrument of scientific curiosity and unscripted moral reflection. Petrarch’s desire to take in the view from a mountain summit had been a harbinger of what was to come in the following centuries. Walking took on profound new spiritual and philosophical ramifications as it was disassociated from the pursuit of fixed goals and given over to, as Thoreau put it, “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”51 Walking became a worldly practice with otherworldly implications. As a modality of modern spirituality, the connection between thinking and walking grows from the belief that the free association of thought is a precondition for genuine contemplation. Petrarch’s letter recalls a moment when he “transferred my winged thoughts from things corporeal to the immaterial . . . [and] these thoughts stimulated both body and mind in a wonderful degree.”52 Rousseau similarly enjoyed walking because it allowed him to let his “mind wander quite freely and [his] ideas [to] follow their own course uninhibited and untroubled.”53 The basic function of walking—to provide a space for selfcultivation—was articulated nowhere more clearly that in British romanticism, whose champions claimed that “as a deliberate mode of travel, walking accomplishes material and metaphorical educations, explorations of world and self that can be regarded as cultivation of both the individual and his society.”54 Romantics crystallized the idea that recreational walking is imbued with soteriological qualities, and over

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the course of the nineteenth century this view became commonplace in Western societies, particularly in Anglophone cultures. As Szasz puts it, “by the early nineteenth century this natural religion—seeing the hand of the creator in the woods, rivers, animals, plants, and mountains—had almost merged with the idea of Revelation.”55 The romantic emphasis on movement as thinking sought the reconciliation of “past and present, body and earth, life and death.”56 The narrated walk became a central romantic motif, providing writers with a mechanism to capture not only their physical movement through the landscape but also the syncopation of this movement with inward transformation—with the shifting terrain of mentalities, emotions, and beliefs. By the nineteenth century, celebrations of walking argued that “the natural, primitive quality of the physical act of walking restores the natural proportions of our perceptions, reconnecting us with both the physical world and the moral order inherent in it.”57 This commitment to peripatetic movement portrays “walking as a making of the self, emphasizing that laboriously creative sense of ‘recreation.’ ”58 In the nineteenth century, socially engaged intellectuals like William Morris and John Ruskin championed the potential of walking as a mechanism of social reform and as an important medical technology. Ruskin even claimed his walking tour of the Alps had cured him of lifelong health problems, including tuberculosis.59 By the twilight of the century, the mentally restorative, bodily healthful, and spiritually redemptive powers of walking achieved near ubiquitous acceptance.60 Literary accounts from this era present the transformative power of walking as its inevitable result, which occludes the fact that its powers were very much culturally generated expectations about what the action of recreational walking does to persons. Advocates of walking as spiritual recreation claim that peripatetic movement harmonizes individuals with the landscape through which they move and, more dramatically, that walking carries individuals both into the future and into the past. Thoreau’s famous essay “Walking” describes this latter element as a personal form of participation in the westward historical movement

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that is modern progress.61 And, at the very same time, this progress is grounded by a realization of the history of the human race. For Thoreau the urge to walk signals our most basic nature as aspiring, mobile creatures. Becoming a walker, then, puts people in the position to harness the entire history of humanity for the purpose of self-cultivation. Rousseau would have concurred. If walking is a kind of movement that restores individuals, even temporarily, to a more natural state of existence and is conducive for moral growth, then it should come as no surprise that this kind of recreation is densely entangled with vernacular Christian praxis. The various strains of “muscular” Christianity that flourished in Anglophone Christian societies during the nineteenth century formulated explicitly Christian recreational pursuits aimed at self-cultivation. Christian leaders had struggled with the very same problematic of pleasure that troubled Augustine. Echoing his repudiation of the theater and other idle amusements, Victorian evangelicals like William Wilberforce and Charles Kingsley argued that the vices of urban life were a direct affront to Christian morality and threatened to deprave those who sought out such profane pleasures. Idle pastimes, including gambling, drinking, and spectator sports, were objectionable to these revivalists on the grounds that they prevented personal spiritual development. Victorian Christians demanded a restoration of wholesome pastimes but were distinguished in their efforts from previous generations by a direct confrontation of the theological problem posed by bodily recreation. Rather than repudiate sports and other physical activities, as had Augustine and the church fathers, nineteenth-century religious leaders took a new tack: fashioning a culture of recreation designed to bend sporting life to the moral project of Christianity.62 This move came to be known as muscular Christianity, a label that designates a range of ideas, practices, and organizations that aimed to “get religion out of the pale of the chapel into the fresh air of heaven and to give it full exercise in that world which it came to beautify and animate.”63 Protestant leaders were eager to reform bodies and minds in

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accord with what they perceived as the inherent order of nature, an order that turned on the proper relation of the sexes. The nineteenth century saw a turn away from spiritual practices that were perceived as overly feminine: piety, quietude, domestic forms of contemplation. Under the banner of muscular Christianity, a new emphasis on the cultivation of moral virtue through bodily rigor emerged in their place. Such practices grew directly from the romantic claim that natural beauty facilitated “imputations of grace” and that “aesthetic experiences . . . encountered in nature . . . could act as spontaneous triggers of virtue.”64 If, as the Victorian natural theologians claimed, God’s handiwork was manifest in every aspect of creation, then the proper enjoyment of nature was certainly morally beneficial. The founding figures of muscular Christianity (e.g., Charles Kingsley, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Hughes) acknowledged this debt, particularly to the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge’s romanticism sought to demonstrate the moral benefits of nature without straying as far from Christian orthodoxy as had the German romantics. His Aids to Reflection posed “the question of how far Christianity could exploit moral sources beyond itself, the sources of godliness that lay beyond explicitly religious activities.”65 Drawing on one of the most basic elements of romantic thought, many British and American Christians in the nineteenth century felt (perhaps even more than they thought) that the order and reason apparent in the natural world acted as a positive influence on the moral disposition of individuals. Exposure to the workings of nature was believed to be inherently beneficial. This sentiment can be found throughout the corpus of romantic and idealist philosophy: in Rousseau, whose pedagogical work Emile extols the virtue of learning by exposure to nature; in Kant, whose Critique of Judgment locates natural sublimity as the bridge between the actuality of the social world and its potential for perfection inherent in reason; and, of course, in Emerson, whose essay “Nature” claimed this idea as the foundational aspiration of the American psyche. Enthusiasm for walking emerged as a result of the conjunction of romantic philosophy and a unique strain of Christian enthusiasm for

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worldly engagement and bodily recreation. Such enthusiasm was only able to flourish, however, under the social conditions produced by the industrial revolution.66 Peripatetic texts and practices gained prominence in response to the social pressures generated by tremendous changes in agriculture and transportation.67 During the eighteenth century, agricultural developments like enclosure and colonial trade regimes effectively displaced many rural farmers and sped the processes of industrialization. By the nineteenth century these revolutionary changes had fomented a nostalgic relationship to agricultural production: British and American working-class populations were increasingly urban and the landowning classes had drifted considerably from their rural traditions. Various forms of outdoor recreation grew in popularity as means to reconnect people with pastoral pastimes, though these traditions were invented as much as remembered.68 New technologies of transport reordered the human capacity for movement, and the invention of steam power had a curious dual effect on the nascent cult of walking. On the one hand locomotion seemed to many an unnatural mode of transport that dislocated the human body in time and space, severing it from its inborn capacity for sustained travel at speeds no greater than a few miles an hour. For such critics walking provided an appropriate antidote. On the other hand steam engines greatly increased the mobility of the middle classes on land, as well as sea, enabling enhanced access to well-preserved landscapes. The effect of locomotion on the outdoor recreation movement was explosive. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century the sporting vacation became an increasingly important leisure activity. More subtly, the twin engines driving the growth of the sporting holiday—anti-industrialism and leisure travel— suggest the ambivalent approach to nature now typical in Western societies. Time spent walking in pristine environments is understood as a necessary counterbalance to the stresses of urban life, but such experiences are achieved in and through the very same processes of industrialization that they are designed to escape.69 The popularization of walking tours in England and the United States in the early and middle

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decades of the nineteenth century demonstrates this marriage of primitivism and industrialism, which now structures so much of the EuroAmerican relationship with the natural world. Technological mastery is clothed in an aura of ecological attunement, a relationship evident in myriad recreational pursuits, like car camping, scuba diving, and oxygenated mountaineering. Outdoor recreation became the most prominent remedy for the harms of industrialization and became much more than a pursuit of truth and natural beauty by individual romantic thinkers and writers. Social reformers of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era took up recreation—especially walking and hiking—as a vital element of a healthy, moral society: “recreations that were perceived as character building were promoted as one means to the improvement of the working classes, in pursuit of the larger goal of a stabilization of the social order.”70 As a recreational pursuit, walking (as well as its sporting cousins: cycling, hunting, and bird-watching) has sometimes been enjoyed by individuals and sometimes by groups. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, fraternal organizations devoted to walking sprouted in cities across the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Although these clubs variously conceived of themselves as devoted to rambling, walking, hiking trails, or mountaineering, they all drank from the same elixir of peripatetic cultivation and, with few exceptions, tended toward a vaguely Christian strain of romanticism. Again, despite its instrumentalization as a means to spiritual liberation and social renewal, walking fades into the cultural background of cultural noise. Although it is a nearly universal human activity, the past three centuries have seen a resuscitation of peripatetic practices, the deployment of walking as self-cultivation. In fact, the cult of walking can quickly be identified in the pages of many popular magazines and self-help books that promise health, happiness, and wholeness to those who take up its one ritual. But the modern cult of walking is quite different from the pacing philosophers of the Lyceum because it lays claim to a kind of imaginative time travel. Walking provides a break from the

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precise schedules of urban industrial life, returning walkers to their natural thoughts. More important, as it enacts a romantic idea of human being, walking is taken as an activity that temporarily restores our Edenic status. As British historian Anne Wallace writes: We see walkers not only re-creating themselves but going back in time— and to what an astonishing temporal location! They return simultaneously to a world filled with the green of wild vegetation, to “this nation’s infancy” when “basic pioneer virtues”—not just “self-reliance and simplicity” but communiality and generosity too—were the norm, and to a time somehow also like the middle ages (we assume in piety). . . . Descriptions like this assert . . . [that] anyone who goes walking . . . will reconnect with his own past and his nation’s past, indeed with the human race’s past as he imagines and longs for it.71

As modern societies drift further from Christian hegemony, the vision of Eden is increasingly laced with secular, ecological embellishments, yet pedestrian movement through undeveloped landscapes continues to act as an imaginative exercise in which the walker becomes his or her most primordial self, a bipedal ape aligned with the workings of nature.

christianity’s recreational legacy Could there be anything more secular than the vanity that is the modern American obsession with exercise? The complicated status of the human body in Christian thought—at once the source of our depravity and the object of the crucifixion—certainly seems to establish a tension between piety and physicality. Augustine’s disdain for the spectacle of gladiatorial combat and his concern about the limits of human sexuality initiated a theological distinction between religion and irreligion that was as much a metaphysical distinction between the worldly and the otherworldly as it was an antinomy between the embodied and the disembodied. Among Augustine’s many contributions to the history of Christianity was his mandate that contemplation worthy of God is to be intellectual and inwardly focused. The perspective that attentiveness to

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matters of the soul and to pleasures of the body are mutually exclusive can be found throughout the history of Christianity. Antagonistic ideas about recreation were characteristic of American religious attitudes even at the same time that European romantics were articulating a new Christian vision of bodily movement.72 Although the eternal soul was to be the lone object of salvific concern, the twists and turns of history made it possible for pleasurable bodily practices to take on soteriological potential.73 The development of modern recreational pursuits as a means for making and remaking the self and as a means of seeking proper relations between persons and the natural order were unlikely historical turns, but these changes were generated by questions very much within the corpus of Christian theological tradition. From Augustine’s time there were active debates among Christian intellectuals about the ontological status of the created world. The popularity of Neoplatonism and Manichaeism throughout the Mediterranean region imbued early Christianity with a strong dualistic tendency that dismissed nature as distant from the source of being. Despite his involvement with Manichaeism, Augustine, like many of his contemporaries, worked to attenuate excessive ontological dualism. Centuries later, such moderation would give way to more robustly positive valuations of the natural world: late medieval figures like Eckhart and Petrarch explicitly celebrate the wonders of creation, as did a host of others not treated in this episodic history (Bonaventure, St. Francis of Assisi, et al.).74 Conventional historical narratives “associate indifference to all the beauties of nature with medieval Christianity . . . but this is doubtless an error . . . [for] among the early Christians there had been some appreciation of nature.”75 Late medieval and early modern thinkers became increasingly affirmative in their appraisal of nature and even began to assert that knowledge about the order of nature offered human beings unprecedented new power. This assertion of confidence in the possibility of human progress is the foundation of modernity. Such cultural assurance altered the terrain through which homo viator traveled; as this landscape became more terrestrial than metaphysical,

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life’s journey toward salvation became self-actualized. Romanticism was an especially important transformative force. The concept of grace had long stood at the center of Christian thinking about soteriology, guarding against Pelagian heresy. Redemption from sin required God’s impetus, and, understood metaphysically, the mechanics of his grace operated directly on the human soul. For Augustine grace flowed directly from God to the individual, affecting one’s innermost being. The Confessions describes Augustine’s conversion, the moment when he most directly experienced God’s grace, as a psychic reception: having been called by the voice of a child to “pick it up, read it,” he opened to a passage from the book of Romans and “instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty” (8.29). John Wesley’s conversion experience is also purely an act of reception, his “heart strangely warmed” from without.76 The romantics shared such notions of inward transformation but were moved by the wonder and beauty of Creation. Grace, in the wake of the theological ruptures of nominalism and romanticism, was to be looked for in the living world rather than anticipated in some personal communiqué from God. The salvific possibilities opened by the idea that God’s grace was to be actively pursued in the natural world ushered in a new era of outdoor enthusiasm, which accounts in part for the rise of natural history, the idea of parklands protection, and the popularity of physical recreation. Engagements with nature aimed at social and personal improvement are consummately modern phenomena, especially the forms of recreation that developed in response to anxieties about urbanization and industrialization. As the quest to benefit from the spiritually liberatory powers of nature entered the twentieth century, it began to take shape in forms that are easily recognizable as the foundations of the American environmental movement. In the following chapter I will look more closely at the rise of conservation-oriented recreational associations as expressions of uniquely twentieth-century environmental mentalities.

c h a p t e r t wo

Congregating around Nature If you really want to know just how religious a man is—play golf with him, or go camping with him. Then you will have an intimate acquaintance with the character of his religion. —Harry F. Ward

The conventional historical narrative about the emergence of environmentalism, about how concern and affection for nature entered the cultural and political mainstream, offers a rather dismissive appraisal of the significance of religion. For example, in tracing the movement away from the “elaborate metaphysics of forest-hating” distinctive of Puritan New England, eminent environmental historian Donald Worster claimed that a “Romantic revolt against Christianity” functionally removed theology from the heavens and diff used “the God-principle throughout nature.”1 From Worster’s perspective the prospects of religion and the environment followed opposite trajectories. As nature became the recipient of increasing appreciation, the influence of religious tradition was diluted and eroded. This viewpoint corresponds with standard accounts of the environmental movement, which hold that by the 1960s—when terms like environmentalism and ecology had gained wide currency—social movements directed at protecting nature were primarily defined by their legal, political, and scientific character. American environmentalism, in this view, was aligned with the conservation movement, a technocratic response to resource scarcity.2 This 60

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standard account has been firmly rooted in the conventional understanding of environmentalism, at least since White’s essay criticized the JudeoChristian tradition’s antienvironmental legacy and asserted that environmental concern was conceptually independent of religion.3 White’s essay became an intellectual touchstone and energized scholars and theologians to explore the surprisingly complex relationship between religious history and environmental attitudes. Despite this conventional separation, American environmentalism was from its earliest expressions motivated by a spiritual affection for nature. Such affection did not come from beyond the pale but was drawn from deep wells of religious tradition. This chapter argues that the social movements that came to be known collectively as environmentalism were characterized by much more than a political struggle to secure control of particular public goods, such as scenery, timber, and wild game. Rather, the American environmental movement emerged from a synthesis of religious ideas and scientific knowledge. Environmentalism was the unique historical fusion of romantic ideas about the soteriological potency of nature with newfound understandings about the human capacity for environmental destruction. As the previous chapter indicated, the influence of romanticism on American environmental attitudes was very much a Christian cultural phenomenon and a predominantly Protestant one at that. The admixture of romanticism and ecological awareness generated a host of social institutions and practices that manifested the American devotion to nature.4 It was in these institutions and organizations that environmentalism took shape. Particular modes of outdoor recreation—especially hiking, camping, and mountaineering—were celebrated as spiritually beneficial and became important markers of identity and belonging for large numbers of Americans. Wilderness preservation, one of the first and central aims of the early environmental movement, was pursued primarily to ensure that the kinds of redemptive experiences that the romantics and transcendentalists had so deeply valued could be shared with future generations.

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By the time that the nation had ceased to have an open frontier, American society had developed an eclectic set of social practices intended to reconnect individuals with the forces of nature as a means to moral improvement and spiritual renewal.5 Walking, botanizing, and traveling to the mountains or seaside to “take the waters” were all commonplace practices designed to affect the physical and spiritual wellbeing of the mobile classes at the turn of the century.6 In the latter half of the nineteenth century there had, however, emerged a new awareness of the magnitude of human impacts on the natural environment. George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 book Man and Nature offered an eloquent call for the careful management of natural resources, but his plea had initially been met with objections that the plentitude of nature far exceeded the human capacity for use, especially in the vast wilderness of the American continent.7 As the great flocks of passenger pigeons that had once darkened the skies of the Midwest rapidly disappeared, and the bison that had roamed the Great Plains in tremendous herds neared extinction, Marsh’s worries gained traction with an increasingly concerned public. In the face of increasingly evident environmental problems such as species extinction, soil erosion, and inadequate urban sanitation, concerned citizens began to form organizations to respond to specific issues that affected them directly. Prototypical of such groups was the Audubon Society, founded by George Bird Grinnell and his sympathizers to protect birds from being hunted into decimation merely to produce feathered hats. After a faltering start the society’s early successes included a national system of bird sanctuaries, legal restrictions on the plumage market, and an effective curricular program for primary-school science teachers.8 Such legislative and policy achievements would seem to suggest an organization that was at its heart about political advocacy, but such a focus would obscure the society’s social dimensions. The Audubon Society was also, from its very inception, a vehicle for the dissemination of ornithological knowledge. Local Audubon groups held regular meetings and would arrange outings to local wetlands, nesting sites, and other places

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rich in bird life to educate an increasingly curious public. Like the outings of more decidedly recreational organizations, such bird-watching expeditions became the linchpins of collective action and personal transformation. The Audubon Society was hardly alone in this venture. This emphasis on congregation and personal improvement was woven into the fabric of most of the era’s conservationist organizations. Many of the society’s scientific authorities described how “ornithological science suggested that birds . . . possess traits which, by analogy, could instruct mankind.”9 As they were shaped by romantic sentiments, organizations seldom flourished as single-issue advocacy groups. As they grew and gathered support, they functioned more like fraternal clubs, with social events, shared rituals, codified credos, and a special emphasis on collectively managed experiences of natural landscapes. During the Progressive Era Americans chartered a tremendous number of civic organizations devoted to nature: the Sierra Club, the Izaak Walton League, the Boone and Crockett Club, the American Civic Association, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Wilderness Society are but a few notable examples. These groups unified the desire to conserve natural resources with a spiritual enthusiasm that typified turn-of-the-century popular culture.10 Recreation and conservation organizations from this period are widely seen as the ancestors of the modern environmental movement, but their historical position as conduits for metaphysical and soteriological ideas about the natural world remains underappreciated.11 In other words, although it is clear where the roots of the environmental movement can be found, there is little consensus about the meaning or significance of this history. Environmental historians have also tended to lionize the role played by prominent individuals (especially John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson) and to focus on the national policy efforts and major political victories (e.g., the creation of Yosemite National Park and the establishment of the National Park Service). In remaining inattentive to the ubiquity of recreational and conservationist organizations, these emphases have obscured the religious underpinnings of the

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popular dimensions of early environmentalism. Even where they were not engaged in high-profile political struggles for the preservation of natural resources, formally organized groups of nature enthusiasts flourished in every corner of the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter looks more closely at the era in which many such groups emerged and examines the ideologies, practices, and personalities of several representative organizations. What the most successful groups achieved has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, but what remains to be fully considered is just why these groups were so popular in the first place.

recreation in american religious life To speak today of a “religion of nature” is to distinguish the term religion from its usage in everyday speech. Even where contemporary American religious organizations openly agitate for environmental causes, only a small minority of Americans would be likely to explicitly describe a spiritual affinity for nature as the nexus of their belief and practice.12 Such discord between institutional, confessional religion and more naturalistic forms of spirituality was not, however, characteristic of the United States at the threshold of the twentieth century. In conjunction with the efforts toward more muscular forms of Christianity, many late nineteenth-century Protestant clergymen were convinced that “their charges learned more of natural virtue from outdoor life than they could ever teach them.”13 Synchronicity between the religious mainstream and a spiritually inflected enthusiasm for nature was a defining characteristic of Progressive Era religiosity. The turn of the century was shaped by an awareness of rapidly mounting social changes—urbanization, industrialization, immigration, etc.—and the place of religion in public life was ambiguous and in flux.14 Progressives pursued the promise of a reformed America, but they remained anxious about the challenges posed by social and cultural modernization. Revivalism flourished, especially the brand of

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masculine Christianity championed by evangelical circuit preachers like Billy Sunday.15 The vision of Christianity espoused by Sunday and his contemporaries asserted that America needed Christian discipline and a Protestant work ethic in order to rise to the challenge of modernization. According to this logic the Christian faith could and should be harnessed to effectively manage business and social affairs in the face of mounting social pressures. Although such optimism about the redemptive power of industriousness was (and always has been) a central tenet of American religious life, beneath the enthusiasm for a robust, effective Christianity lay a special attention to the relationship between the individual and society.16 Breaking away from the social compartmentalization of the denominational subcultures that structured American religious life prior to the Civil War, Progressive Era religiosity attempted to harness the social power of Christianity for cultural and political ends.17 In this transformative period efforts to establish “the kingdom of heaven” on earth could be found across disparate social movements, including the City Beautiful movement, the expansion of organized labor, and the social gospel movement. The Progressive Era engendered the idea—now associated with conservatism—that religion fills the breach between the personal and the political. Religion offered the appropriate mechanisms for inspiring and orienting the actions and experiences of individuals, and in various social sectors organizations emerged to grapple with the core question of Progressive politics: to find the right balance between unfettered individualism and restrictive political authority. Conservation and recreation organizations pursued just such an end. Marrying romanticism to this new confidence in the power to affect social improvement through religious reform, many Progressive Era organizations sought to address social ills by yoking the spiritual power of nature. For example, the City Beautiful movement aimed to use public planning and landscape architecture to cure the moral decay brought about by the pressures of urban life. Much in the same way as muscular Christianity grew in response to the decline (or perceived decline) of a predominantly

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agrarian economy, the City Beautiful movement addressed the woes of urbanization in America, where large cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago were crowded, dirty, and often unsafe. The primary mechanism of the City Beautiful movement was to build large public parks in order to expose the working classes to the charms of outdoor recreation and thus provide “moral sanitation.”18 Frederick Law Olmstead was the most prominent exponent of such social engineering, and his ideal of the improvement of the public through recreation was widely shared. Lauding a soteriological view of recreation, Olmstead spoke in favor of “opportunity and inducement to escape at frequent intervals from the confined and vitiated air of the commercial quarter, and to supply the lungs with air screened and purified by trees, and recently acted upon by sunlight, together with the opportunity and inducement to escape from conditions requiring vigilance, wariness, and activity toward other men——if these could be supplied economically, our [conditions of corruption and of irritation, physical and mental] would be solved.”19 The movement that funded and celebrated Olmstead’s massive parks projects in cities across the continent was less an organization than an ideology that flourished at local, as well as national, levels. This ideology, the celebration of the power of the outdoors to counteract the corrosive forces of urbanization and modernization, was the impetus for many of the era’s reform-minded social organizations, including the National Geographic Society, the Playground Association of America, and the hundreds of local recreational clubs devoted to hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting. Groups like these were designed to broaden the reach of nature, extending its capacity for moral improvement to new constituencies, especially children, the poor, and the swelling ranks of clerical workers alienated from bodily labor. To a significant degree, the late nineteenth-century proliferation of recreational organizations was geared toward young people and youth issues. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Fresh Air Fund, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Camp Fire Girls exemplify the era’s commitment to social reform and personal redemption through recreation. Why was the pro-

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gressive push for reform through recreation so focused on youth and urban populations? These organizations used scouting, woodcraft, and “exertive” forms of recreation like swimming, boating, ball games, and equestrianism to provide young people with wholesome, characterbuilding activities.20 Perfectly embodying the ideology of recreation as a key vehicle for moral improvement, Progressive Era organizations of this type laid the groundwork for the social structures that shape middle-class American ideas about childhood (youth sports leagues, playgrounds, summer camp, etc.). More proactive than nostalgic, these efforts sought to establish lasting institutional structures that engendered the same kinds of wholesome character traits as had (the perhaps mythical) life on the farm. Interestingly, many of these youth organizations reiterated the conceptual schism, latent in Christian social thought since ancient times, between recreation as means to spiritual renewal and recreation as banal amusement. Progressive reformers worried about the corrupting influence of candy shops, amusement parks, and movie theaters, which in their view were recruiting grounds for pool halls, saloons, and brothels.21 Augustine would have agreed! Under the almost utopian optimism of the Progressive Era, in which social problems could be fully overcome by careful, scientifically informed management, local neighborhood committees and parks associations were formed to oversee the construction of playgrounds. Playgrounds were a social engineering tool only recently imported from Germany and many subscribed to the ideology of recreation as a means to spiritual improvement. They were designed to counteract the hypercompetitive individualism of commercial capitalism by encouraging cooperative forms of play and by exposing children to the morally “wholesome” and “delightful” play of previous generations that were “close to nature.”22 In its mission to expose young people from New York City’s poorest neighborhoods to the salubrious pleasures of rural landscapes, the Fresh Air Fund rendered this ideology manifest. Founded in 1877 in a Presbyterian parish in northeastern Pennsylvania, the Fresh Air Fund was based on the notion that physical and

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moral well-being are closely linked and that rural environments are necessarily healthful. The organization’s founder, the Reverend Willard Parsons, had little trouble convincing his Progressive Christian peers of the soundness of this project, which went on to provide services to hundreds of thousands of children from urban communities. These Progressive Era youth reform organizations demonstrate the degree to which the ideology of healthful recreation shaped turn-ofthe-century American society. The ethos of the outdoors was readily taken up by the religious establishment, which increasingly saw recreation as appropriate to its domain and took such activities as an opportunity to increase youth participation. Clerical authorities championing the engagement of religion with the national project of social reform argued that the higher energies of life, the spiritual capacities, those impalpable, indefinable characteristics that make the soul of a people . . . are developed chiefly by two forms of association—when people gather together for worship and when people play together. . . . It is because of the religious possibilities of the universal instinct for play, of the elemental instinct for recreation, that . . . the churches today, at least the [thirty denominations of] the social service movement in the churches, are trying to teach the membership that they must stand for all the inalienable rights of all the children of the community, and that among those is the God-given right to the development of the play faculty, and to all the educational and moral advantages that come out of the cultivation of that faculty.23

Adequate access to recreational opportunities became a basic feature of the Progressive cause and was frequently a basis for cooperation among religious groups, urban reformers, and conservationist organizations. Many large churches took to hiring staff to oversee recreational programs such as summer camps, sports leagues, game nights, and weekend excursions.24 Some denominations embraced wholeheartedly the recreational paradigm. The Church of Latter Day Saints, for example, had formulated its faith around the pioneer experience and was loathe to lose

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touch with its rural roots. Mormon Elders wanted to make sure that younger generations were not corrupted by the comforts and distractions of being raised in cities or commercially successful settlements. From the closing years of the nineteenth century, church leaders had worked to develop recreational opportunities to refine and toughen the character of young Mormon men, and in 1913 the church formally partnered with the Boy Scouts of America as a means to this end.25 The push toward more muscular expressions of Christian faith, common at the close of the nineteenth century, was readily absorbed and refashioned to suit progressive purposes. Many of the organizations devoted to the ideology of salvation by recreation were manifestly religious: the YMCA and the hundreds of church-affiliated summer camps founded in the early decades of the twentieth century furnish the most notable examples. Many other groups, like the Boy Scouts of America (1910), the Camp Fire Girls of America (1910), and the League of Woodcraft Indians (1902), shared much in common with traditional religious institutions but were not officially chartered as such. These organizations are perhaps more accurately described as parareligious groups: they were typically founded in partnership with denominational institutions and explicitly invoked various Christian creeds in their initiatory rituals but were run by secular religious authorities (that is, by staff, not clergy). Such groups drew heavily on ideas about the salvific capacities of nature and referred directly to religious sources in their efforts to articulate and pursue such redemptive ends. Youth organizations like these typified the early twentieth-century nature craze. Their orientation was conditioned by uniquely Christian theological concerns, even where they made allusions to Native American traditions and engaged in racialized appropriations of American Indian culture.26 Progressive Era Americans sought ways to offset the increasingly frenetic pace of urban industrial life, and they did so with an eye to wholesome social programs that actively cultivated young boys and girls in the image of the men and women they were expected to become. The pursuit of spiritual progress in the outdoors was hardly a peripheral

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aspect of the Progressive Era. The nation’s religious vernacular was replete with traditions that borrowed on the redemptive capacity of nature: camp meetings, outdoor revivals, circuit riders, and other common features of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious life drew on this currency. Evidence of a renewed enthusiasm for nature can be found in the resurgence of camp meetings and other outdoor formats of Christian worship. Leigh Eric Schmidt has chronicled how “evangelicals organized summer revivals around the harvest, performed outdoor baptisms in rivers and streams, and held camp meetings and sacramental occasions under the canopy of forest and stars.”27 In fact, one of the primary drivers of the turn to nature was the worry about the decline of religion as a force in the lives of many Americans. As Rebecca Gould puts it, the “nature craze” of the late nineteenth century saw the Christian “camp meeting” develop into the idea that camping itself was “a religious experience, to which large numbers were being converted.”28 The tremendous popularity of the Chautauqua movement suggests just how well established camp meetings were as a ritual convention that established “an interior space where guests could reflect on the divine presence in Nature [and] apprehend God’s immanence.”29 Chautauqua congregants gathered in “wilderness worship” tent cities designed with biblical precedent in mind.30 Fearing the demise of agrarian values, Americans sought natural settings for their worship practices. The kind of nature they sought, however—their desired aesthetic and imagined meanings—shifted in significant ways as the new century emerged. At the turn of the century, much as today, American society was striving to harness the morally salubrious benefits of nature. During this period the celebration of agrarian life, a consistent theme in American life since the time of Crevecoeur and Jefferson, was translated into a postfrontier vernacular in which uninhabited landscapes, rather than farms, were identified as the source of moral vitality. Although religious groups often took up such discourse, these ideas were just as formative for secular elements of society. As religious groups became more involved in recreational activities, so, too, were recreational pursuits imbued by religious ideas and

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practices. Early twentieth-century America was characterized by a “fear of national degeneration” and the notion that “without the fountain of Nature to drink from, Americans would become just like the rest of the world.”31 Efforts to understand, preserve, and protect the “fountain of nature” moved to the very center of American public life. The flourishing trade in books and magazines about recreation suggests that the religious vocabularies were fecund source material. How did the thriving recreational culture of the early twentieth century emerge, and how did it fuse conservation ideals with theological concepts?

wilderness as a social ideal The dawning of the twentieth century saw wilderness “replace nature as the foundational concept” at the heart of the recreational enterprise.32 Nature had been the intellectual apparatus by which Emerson’s generation had understood the transcendental organization of the cosmos, but by the time John Muir and John Burroughs had become the preeminent American authors concerned with the preservation of natural beauty, the wilderness ideal had moved to the forefront of the American environmental imagination. Wilderness, for this generation of thinkers and writers, was not primarily an ecological category, as it would come to be during the subsequent decades. It emerged first as a spatial category necessary to the quest for spiritual purity in nature: “wilderness coalesced first as a social ideal, not the environmental ideal that distinguishes it today.”33 This seems surprising today, given the emphasis on the preservation of natural conditions that guided the formation of national parks and other important federal lands management programs.34 During the decades that the national parks system was built up, neither managers nor bureaucrats made much of an effort to “define what it meant to maintain natural conditions.”35 Even as advocates began to agitate for more rigorous schemes to protect wilderness areas, the very idea of wilderness remained an abstract philosophical concept independent of rigorous scientific scrutiny.

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Wilderness named the realm of the natural world that embodied radical alterity and afforded transcendental experiences. This was in keeping with Thoreau’s often-misquoted assertion that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” which identifies wild nature as the necessary and chief object of spiritual pursuit.36 For Thoreau, and the following generations of wilderness champions, the concept of wild nature was a dialectic foil for human possibility before it was a check against it. Put another way, the conceptual basis of wilderness in the first half of the twentieth century differed from its articulation in the second half of the century in that it concentrated more on the soteriological benefits of nature than on the intrinsic value of plants, animals, and ecosystemic functioning.37 As a social ideal, wilderness was decidedly anthropocentric and served to designate the spaces that could serve as “means for . . . the more virile and primitive forms of outdoor recreation.”38 For example, an internal memo among the founding members of the Wilderness Society distinguished between “campers,” whose “prime desire is solitude. This demands total absence of metropolitan influence (of sounds as well as sights)” and “non-campers,” whose “prime desire is variety. This demands partial absence of metropolitan influence (of sights but not all sounds).”39 The memo was intended to bolster advocacy efforts for more nuanced federal management of recreational areas that might establish a distinct typology of land uses, with wilderness areas as the sacrosanct domain of the most devout recreationists. Before it was anything like an objective scientific term, wilderness was a conceptual ideal that oriented a cultic sensibility about nature. Wilderness was a composite of EuroAmerican ideas about nature that did not focus on the functioning of ecosystems lacking significant human population but rather imagined and mythologized the importance of such ecosystems. Prominent conservationists thought of wilderness explicitly in these terms. Benton MacKaye, the originator of the Appalachian Trail, wondered if wilderness “is land in a certain state, or is it the human mind in a certain state? I think that we’d agree that it’s the latter. It is an influence

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on the human mind, it is the influence of wilderness, the influence of the primeval world from which we sprung.”40 Wilderness was important because it was the proper cure for the disease of industrial modernity, “the antidote for over-rapid mechanization . . . the thing whence first we came and toward which we ultimately live. It is the source of all our knowledge—the open book of which all others are but copies.”41 Robert Marshall, founder of the Wilderness Society, was among the champions of the view that wilderness was necessary to counter the psychic and moral disruptions of “mechanization”: “In the sudden change which man has undergone in the past 2,000 years, from the rude barbarian dweller of the simple forest, to the highly civilized inhabitant of the complex city, it has been impossible for his body and subconscious mind to keep pace. Thus it is that not only his instincts, but also his entire physical well being crave the forests, where for thousands and thousands of years his forefathers lived. Such an instinct cannot be controlled. It is a factor which must be dealt with as any force of nature which cannot be eliminated.”42 Antimodern anxieties were rampant in the Progressive Era. In the wilderness ideal these anxieties combined the alienation of the industrial factory worker, the romantic insistence on authentic embodied experience, and distaste for the hubris of an ever more automated mechanized civilization. Defenders of wilderness used the word civilization scornfully, indicating the myriad material ills of the modern world: “machinery, squalid tenements, subways, concrete roads, and country clubs, and 23 million automobiles.”43 Wilderness also designated spiritual respite from civilization: “a person might die spiritually if he could not sometimes forsake all contact with his gregarious fellowmen, and the machines which they had created, and retire to an environment where there was no remote trace of humanity.”44 The critique of civilization by wilderness enthusiasts was not, however, totally misanthropic. Echoing the calls of their muscular Christian predecessors, they argued that the corruptions of urban, industrial society could be ameliorated by contemplative experiences in the outdoors. Long journeys, like the multiweek outings organized by the Sierra Club,

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Mountaineers Club, and Appalachian Trail Club, served to strip away “the veneer of civilization. The rough, hard country, the constant nearness of nature, the full dependency on yourself and your meager resources . . . force upon you a new feeling which you can not have elsewhere. . . . For once the spirit of the primitive conquers your soul; you can truly live and find hitherto unknown enchantment in nature.”45 Time in the wilderness restored the basic virtues cherished in particular by Americans: self-sufficiency, ingenuity, camaraderie, and fortitude. Wilderness was an ideal that emerged in retrospective admiration for the frontier experience, in which the basic project of American history had been to subdue the natural environment and exploit its economic benefits. Progressive Era Americans identified a need to switch tacks and preserve undeveloped, unpopulated landscapes: “instead of destroying the frontier, we now seek to restore it in its proper proportions.”46 Recreationists who lauded camping, backpacking, and mountain climbing claimed that the frontier, or more precisely, the ruggedness of life away from the stultifying luxuries of urban society, had been instrumental in shaping the American character. Wilderness advocates held the rather uncontroversial view that the central virtues of the American project had been forged in the crucible of nature. As long as Americans prized “individuality and competence,” Robert Marshall wrote, “it is imperative to provide the opportunity for complete self-sufficiency. This is inconceivable under the effete superstructure of urbanity; it demands the harsh environment of untrammeled expanses.” But not only did wilderness facilitate self-sufficiency; it incentivized “independent cogitation . . . due to the fact that original ideas require an objectivity and perspective seldom possible in the distracting propinquity of one’s fellow men.”47 Like the concept of wilderness itself, however, these virtues were not produced immediately by forces of nature but rather by the performance of certain kinds of activities in untrammeled environments. Recreational pursuits like backpacking (newly popular in the 1920s) and mountaineering (a sport of gentlemen imported from Europe in the 1880s) were the keys to unlocking the moral benefits of nature:

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“Backpacking offers a cross-country exploring program of romance and adventure that creates self-reliance, leadership, and personality. [It] arouse [sic] a true love for nature and hardy pioneering that is greatly needed in our too-artificial and too-mechanical civilization.”48 It was this kind of profoundly urbane celebration of undeveloped landscapes as the necessary complement to societal progress that distinguished the wilderness approach from previous inculcations of romantic nostalgia for agrarian values. Progressive Era nature enthusiasm was conservative insofar as it looked to traditional modes of social intercourse as the normative bases for contemporary life, yet conservationists hedged their bets. The hustle and bustle of the modern industrial city represented a spiritual threat, but this threat did not merit a wholesale repudiation of progress and industry. Urbanites desired to renew themselves in the temple of nature, but few returned to life on the farm. Instead, they articulated a novel vision of wilderness as a way to correct and guide the machinations of modern industrial life.49 Nature was symbolically potent: it was not the finite and fragile spaces of undisturbed wilderness that became the center of midcentury environmental concern but a font of healthfulness and vitality that could be judiciously used by recreationists as a means to guide social and economic progress. The wilderness movement, in contrast to previous manifestations of the American fascination with agrarian values, was only tangentially concerned with domestic matters and almost wholly fixated on recreational pursuits. Wilderness was an orientation for leisure activities, conditional on the development of a modern economy with clear partitions between work and play, labor and recreation. Under this social model recreational pastimes were answers to the social questions provoked by the decline of manual labor and the growth of urban modes of domesticity. Outdoor recreation was more than a substitution for manual, agricultural labor; it was a culturally refined and improved means to access similar benefits. This newfound spirit of wilderness cannot be explained away as a nostalgic yearning for life on the farm: it represents a new cultural mode in which human relations with the natural world

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were based more on recreation than on production. The wilderness ideal incorporated the romantic vision of nature embedded in America’s agrarian tradition, but it also modernized these values and deployed them in ways uniquely suited to contemporary society. In particular, the wilderness movement fused the romantic insistence on the spiritual benefits of outdoor recreation with a scientifically informed concern about resource depletion. The fusion of agrarian sentimentalism, romantic naturalism, and Progressive conservationism is the true genesis of the environmental movement. Tracing the movement’s roots to this complex cultural assemblage rebuts some of the prevailing wisdom about when and how modern American environmental attitudes took shape. At one time such historical convention asserted that environmentalism was born of “scientific management,” describing the movement’s history primarily in terms of bureaucratic administration of public lands and resource use. In analyzing the vast technocratic resource management schemes of the Depression Era, Samuel Hays powerfully linked the environmental movement with the Progressive Era’s faith in the “gospel of efficiency.” Seen from this perspective, worries about the disappearance of wilderness landscapes were but part of a larger anxiety that federal powers of regulation were not being adequately employed to keep corporate exploitation in check. The contrasting oversimplification, discussed above, claimed that the emergence of environmental values was little more than a warmed-over version of nineteenth-century romantic nostalgia for rural life. Although wilderness advocates were at times tiringly ideological, their doctrine was never truly escapist, nor did they seek the “naive and anarchic primitivism” of which their critics sometimes accused them.50 Both the efficiency thesis and the nostalgia thesis obscure the tremendous internal variation within the discourse about wilderness. As the wilderness ideal took shape, there were robust debates among its exponents about whether wilderness was to be appreciated for its utility or for its aesthetic and spiritual qualities (and whether these qualities were themselves a kind of utility). Besides John Muir, perhaps

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the most widely read expositors of the wilderness movement were Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold, both officers of the Wilderness Society at its inception. Their writings, published in an eclectic variety of public policy briefings, forestry journals, and popular magazines, suggest a view of wilderness as neither romantic nor efficient, premised neither on mere sentimentality nor on raw utility. Both Leopold and Marshall were trained at Ivy League institutions at a time when forestry sciences still borrowed heavily from industrial management techniques.51 Yet each of these prominent voices pushed back against the mechanism and reductionism of scientific forestry. Leopold loathed the tidy rows of trees that ordered the German forests held up as textbook examples of maximal timber yields. Marshall likewise worried that scientific forestry had lost sight of its calling to “retain the natural state.”52 What was needed, they argued, was to put the professionalism and effective techniques of scientific conservation to a higher purpose, toward the protection of those landscapes by which Americans could continue to cultivate the “spirit of wilderness.” Their voices were prominent expressions of an increasing awareness that the American environment was very rapidly being degraded. Public perception of the growing scarcity of pristine environments was partly grounded in a deepening of the ecological sciences. The theory of ecological succession, the central tenant of the period’s botanical sciences, heightened worries about wilderness landscapes and grounded the idea that “primeval succession can never return once continuity has been severed.”53 Scientific claims that biological systems were fragile and contingent underwrote a sense of duty to “preserve under scientific care, for the observation, study, and appreciation of generations to come, as many, as large, and as varied examples of the remaining primitive as possible.”54 Yet this emerging environmental sensibility was much more than a desire to procure and set aside specimens of intact ecosystems. It was based on a deeper appreciation of the environmental significance of human civilization, a rejection of the “idea that natural resources in the form of forests and wildlife were inexhaustible.”55 Threading the needle

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between unadulterated utilitarianism and excessive sentimentalism, outdoor enthusiasts noted that there was “plenty of evidence that man’s interference may cause a complete disappearance of those living things which form raw materials and furnish man with the necessities of life.”56 Whether couched in the language of sound economic policy or in the occasionally dogmatic rhetoric of antimodern naturalism, wilderness advocates shared an unambiguous commitment to the spiritual significance of their cause. The movement’s luminaries, Marshall and Leopold, described the love of nature as a spiritual vocation and linked measures to protect outdoor recreation in an economy of spiritual goods. Their sentiment was hardly marginal. That wilderness was a source of spiritual goods animated most all the literatures treating outdoor recreation, and the central position of spiritual matters in the struggle to protect wilderness is readily discernible among the writings of its less well-known expositors, like Benton MacKaye and Robert Sterling Yard of the Wilderness Society, William Frederic Badè and Joseph LeConte of the Sierra Club, and Edmond S. Meany and Henry Landes of the Mountaineers Club. Their works, which were instrumental to the establishment and organization of important conservation organizations, echoed the valuation of “nature’s spiritual impact above its economic importance.”57 In an essay tracing the emergence of the “wilderness concept,” Harold Anderson, a founding officer of the Wilderness Society, reminded readers that the long-since-defunct Northwoods Walton Club had published a pamphlet in 1859 that contained the following significant expressions: “the Mountains and Lakes of the Empire State: The habitations of the moose, the eagle, the red deer, and the trout; the uncontaminated temples of God. May they never be desecrated by the feet of the ‘money changers and those who sell doves.’ ”58 Even in the earliest reflections about the wilderness ideal, religious language, almost universally from the Christian scriptures, was never far from hand. In the Progressive Era, nature spirituality had no more celebrated figure than John Muir. Scholars of American environmentalism have long

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recognized that Muir’s scientific wanderlust was intensely spiritual, noting the influence of his writings on generations of nature enthusiasts.59 A century of historical perspective has led to an increasing acknowledgment of the complexity of Muir’s theological views, and recent scholarship has explored how powerfully his message resonated with the era’s spiritual yearnings. Despite this almost hagiographic retrospective, environmental historians still struggle to classify and describe Muir’s religious views, labeling his asystematic writings as “secular pantheism,” “transcendentalism,” and “post-Protestant.” Tellingly, Muir’s biographers are divided about whether his strict Campbellite upbringing pushed him away from Christianity or deeply instilled his worldview with the redemptive message of the Gospels.60 Linnie Marsh Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning midcentury biography accorded a central place to Muir’s religious upbringing but hedged on the precise influence of Protestantism on his mature thought. Writing in the opposite tack, Donald Worster, perhaps the leading historian of American environmental thought, claimed that “the old Christian theology . . . was weakening its hold [on American society]; and Muir was one of those cutting away at its roots.”61 Among Muir’s many commentators, critics, and biographers there are (at least) two prevailing, incommensurable interpretations of his religiosity. In the one, more commonly championed by social and political historians, the frequency and intensity of religious language in his essays is cynically read as a ploy to avoid alienating his bourgeois Protestant readership. Here Muir’s Christian overtones are either disingenuous or intended as signposts along the road away from tradition. In the other, favored by contemporary scholars of religion, Muir’s insistently theistic naturalism indicates a spirituality grounded in but unconstrained by dogma. In this view Christianity serves as a springboard from which Muir was able to launch his unique brand of mystical ecospirituality. Neither of these views seems sufficient, and both treat the manifestly Christian rhetoric of Muir’s corpus to some form of obfuscation. It is certainly true that Muir took issue with central tenets of mainstream Christian belief, notably the idea that human beings have utter

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dominion over creation and that only human beings are ensouled. This, however, is not necessarily evidence of an “abandonment of Christian orthodoxy.”62 Muir affirmed Emerson’s “expansive concept of God that went beyond all organized religion,” which thus required extrareligious practices to achieve knowledge or experience of the divine.63 From the emerging perspective of nature spirituality, explicitly Christian rites and ceremonies were not to be rejected but rather “spiritualized.” For Muir “the mistake of traditional religion . . . was in letting the beauties of spiritual things become points of dispute and arguing over who should be allowed to take communion or how baptism should be performed.”64 It would be inappropriate to interpret this stance as irreligious or anticlerical; Muir “never urged anyone to leave a church or give up any religious customs, but only to discover deeper levels of themselves and reach out for broader understanding.” The popularity of Muir’s sentiments signaled a moment of radical flux, in which Americans along the West Coast were “most open to new spiritual explorations.”65 Muir’s wilderness gospel was not intended to overturn the centrality of Protestantism in the American religious imagination. The most straightforward interpretation of his theological divergences, then, would seem to be that he was a reformer responding to the failings of tradition and very much focused on the core problematics of Christianity. As John Gatta puts it, “his faith preserved some essential traits of biblical Christianity,” including notions of salvation by grace, conversion experience, monastic asceticism, and evidence of design in the architecture of nature.66 Muir’s pursuit of a naturalistic theology unhampered by radical anthropocentrism situates him as the first of many twentieth-century thinkers who worked to harmonize theological ethics with a post-Darwinian view of the position of human beings in the natural order. More than a half century after Muir’s death, Lynn White Jr. challenged Christian thinkers to account for the woeful environmental legacy of anthropocentrism. Syncopating ecological interconnectedness with Christian ideas about salvation and human purpose was already a mature topic of consideration in Muir’s writings,

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and there is much among the cacophonous response to White’s essay that follows the theological trails Muir blazed.67 In the central inspiration for preservationism and the founding father of the Sierra Club, we find a critical pivot between medieval (and antiquarian) Christian ideas of a universal Fall and a modernized theology in which only humans have fallen into depravity. Muir was “sympathetic to the traditional Protestant emphasis on human depravity . . . [convinced] that wild nature remained peculiarly exempt from the universal corruption linked to the fall.”68 In My First Summer in the Sierra he repeatedly wondered about human dirtiness, about our feelings of shame and profanity unique in the animal kingdom.69 As the early environmental thinker most explicitly engaged with the issue of the Fall, Muir’s assertion that wilderness was the fundamental source of and site for human redemption is prescient. The primal spirituality that Muir sought in undeveloped landscapes is not metaphorically parallel to Christian soteriology; it is drawn directly from it. Probing beyond the Progressive platitude that civilization is corrupt, Muir articulated a theological vision in which people in modern societies were afforded— by the grace of God’s creative magnanimity—natural temples in which to redeem their depraved natures. The prophetic message of repentance was straightforwardly transformed into a preservationist morality: “his writings never lost their message of repentance from the sins of overcivilization, baptism in wilderness, and ejection of the money-changers from the mountain temples.”70 Muir’s scriptural style was of course an effective way to communicate the profundity of his message: “with a style based on intimate knowledge of the Bible and Milton, he described with incomparable eloquence all that he had learned from long communion with nature. He considered his mission in life to send other people to the wilderness to learn to know it as he knew it and to share in his great love.”71 Perhaps one of the reasons why Muir is so frequently taken as figuratively religious is that his audiences often thought of him as a kind of prophet and of themselves as disciples. Charles Keeler, a Berkeley socialite and companion on the famous

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1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska, recalled that “it was an oft-repeated observation of his friends that this prophet of God’s out-of-doors had the serenity of the mountains in his own soul.”72 Direct comparisons to both Jesus and John the Baptist were frequent (and were occasionally extended to Thoreau, Burroughs, Keith, and other prominent conservationists).73 Sentiments of this kind were especially common in the western states, where Muir’s writings were expressly used as the basis for forming a number of conservation and recreational organizations.74 Muir’s moral doctrine of preservationism remained very much aligned with liberal theological conventions of the turn of the century, conventions shared by fellow nature essayists John Burroughs and Liberty Hyde Bailey. The theology of nature developed by these authors and built into the identity of conservation groups did not carefully demarcate the boundary between the enjoyment of nature and religious worship. American religious life has always been as deeply grounded in practice, mentality, and experience as it has been in texts and doctrines, and during Muir’s lifetime there were few attempts to incorporate his “gospel of nature” into worship, ritual, or liturgy. In the years following his death, however, clerical manuals for “nature sermons,” as well as outdoor-themed hymnals and devotionals, began to emerge in Progressive American churches. The heavy involvement of Protestant congregations with the birth of the Scouting movement and the various ecumenical efforts to bolster support for protoenvironmentalist ceremonies like Arbor Day and Nature Sunday characterized a short-lived era in which the nature religiosity of Muir (and others) found widespread liturgical and ritual expression in American Protestantism.75 The translation of transcendentalist writings about nature into religious ritual—that is, the incorporation of romantic ideas about nature into American patterns of worship—was a part of the spiritual project of the Mountaineers from the club’s earliest years. The depth and complexity of Muir’s religious life is widely recognized, but less well known are the parallel “glacier gospels” of his peers and collaborators, which similarly translated the good news of Christian resurrection into an ecological parlance.

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The mistake that many contemporary commentators make in their efforts to parse the religious tenor of Muir’s tremendous contribution to American environmental thought is that they place too much emphasis on the power of his authorship. As much as he was an innovator and an influential figure, Muir was also a product of his times, and his fresh ideas fit closely with the zeitgeist of the Progressive Era. The prevalence of liberal Protestantism around the beginning of the twentieth century “encouraged . . . the kind of eclectic spirituality that Muir sought to develop.”76 The religion of nature traced by the movements of Muir’s pen was not something he produced but something in which he participated. The purchase that wilderness held over the American spiritual imagination could be found in many quarters of society. Foresters, policy makers, local activists, journalists, preachers, and professors eagerly discussed how the nation ought to think about, enjoy, and protect the natural environment. Spiritual rhetoric was a primary vehicle for this discourse and, in the decades leading up to the Second World War, was an ordinary and unsurprising discursive element. In the second half of the century, however, as environmentalism took clearer ideological and legal shape, the language of religion receded into the background. Scholarly accounts of the rise of environmental attitudes in American culture have neglected this distinctive quality of the movement’s foundations, tending to overemphasize the scientific and political dimensions that dominated midcentury environmental discourse. To recall the religious elements present at the genesis of the modern environmental movement—and to return them to the center of the narrative about how, why, and when nature appreciation became a basic feature of American culture—helps explain what made the movement hold together as a coherent whole. Recollecting the religious roots of American environmentalism provides a more satisfactory account of the movement’s composite character. When and why was the social ideal of wilderness—the belief that it had salvific potential, that it was morally cleansing, that it could repair the damages of a life of urban industrial alienation—separated from its

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religious roots? How did the close association of moral hygiene, social religion, and outdoor recreation recede from public view? One answer is that, after the gospel message of love of nature was fully evangelized in the 1920s and 1930s, environmental organizations were increasingly professionalized and politicized during the 1950s and 1960s. Pursuant to national legislation on wilderness preservation, clean air, and clean water, midcentury environmental organizations forsook religious and romantic rhetoric in favor of more cautious legal language. The abandonment of the explicit spiritual emphasis of American environmentalism is part and parcel of the broader currents of secularization operative throughout the twentieth century. Environmental issues “tend not to be discussed in our time as they were a century ago . . . in poetic language with religious overtones, without irony. . . . Now our public lives are largely secular, prosaic, tamed if not civilized, and insured against risks of all kinds.”77 Most narratives about American environmentalism relegate religion to the margins and focus instead on scientific developments, policy platforms, and administrative histories.78 My closing chapter will examine the ways that religious elements have continued to guide the course of American environmentalism, but the task here is to more closely examine the character of organizations devoted to nature in an era when the movement’s religious, recreational, and social aspects could not easily be decoupled. In the 1910s and 1920s it would have been exceedingly difficult to draw any kind of rigid distinction between parareligious organizations with an emphasis on outdoor recreation (e.g., the Boy Scouts, the Young Men’s Christian Association) and their ideological counterparts lacking formal religious affiliation (e.g., the Sierra Club, the Mountaineers, the Fresh Air Fund). The distinction between conservation groups, fraternal organizations, and sportsmen’s clubs was often blurry: “more and more Americans [took] as their standard the gospel of the holy earth.”79 Prominent individuals typically belonged to a variety of groups that channeled their energies toward the understanding, protection, and enjoyment of the natural world. Civic leaders from this era exemplified the multifaceted

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social instantiation of nature spirituality, like George Bird Grinnell (president of the Audubon Society of New York from 1886 to 1912 and of the Boone and Crockett Club from 1918 to 1927), William Frederic Badè (president of the Sierra Club from 1919 to 1922), and Edmond S. Meany (president of the Mountaineers Club from 1908 to 1935). Each was an active member and officer of (at least) one amateur scientific association, one wilderness recreation club, one Christian church, and one organization with environmental preservation as its chief mission. A closer look at organizations like these, often led by persons working in the shadows of giants like John Muir or John Burroughs, indicates an era that saw frequent collaboration between conservation groups and churches, between moral educators and scientists. Archival materials from recreational clubs and conservation organizations during the early decades of the twentieth century amply feature religious language, document regular worship services, and indicate the largely Protestant moral orientation of their constituencies. The Mountaineers Club is one such example of this blurry relationship between recreation and religion. As an organization unhesitant to invoke religious language and channel religious energies in new directions, the organization was hardly unique. The club’s documents are representative of Progressive Era nature enthusiasm: they organically and unselfconsciously wed nature-spirituality with the religious mainstream and zealously preach the soteriological ideal of outdoor recreation.

reconfiguring protestantism In 1906, amid a flurry of enthusiasm for the new federal practice of protecting lands as national parks and in conjunction with a mood of exuberance for the economic prospects of the Pacific Northwest, several dozen prominent Seattleites decided to meet regularly and share their love of the mountains with each other in an incorporated outdoor club. They named their group the Mountaineers Club and modeled it after the Sierra Club of California. In the following decades the organization

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became a fixture in the social and natural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Gathering together local business leaders, educators, clergy members, and socialites, the club played an instrumental role in the development of Mount Rainier National Park and the establishment of both North Cascades and Olympic National Parks.80 The Mountaineers thought of themselves as a recreation club first and as a conservation organization second, but the love of mountains and forests that motivated the club’s founders makes sense as an early expression of environmentalism.81 Club members gave voice to their appreciation of nature by way of a deeply spiritual discourse, intelligible to those with strong and weak religious commitments alike. The Mountaineers’ writings neatly capture the permeability between scientific and spiritual modes of expression. From the inception of the club onward, its leaders framed their purposes in religious terms, not because such terms were merely convenient or persuasive but because their project grew from fertile religious soil and always bore traces of its origins. The social and natural environment of the Pacific Northwest was luxuriant enough to allow the Mountaineers to experiment with the diverse ingredients of Progressive Era spirituality: romantic concepts of nature, frontier yearnings, economic boosterism, Pagan allusions, and Protestant narrative frameworks. This fusion is evident from the very first paragraph of the club’s journal, the Mountaineer, which offers an intriguing description of the spiritual meaning of mountains and recreation among them: “After drinking to the full of the pure joy, thorough rest, and good health of the mountains, and we again descend to the plains to begin with hand and brain the old routine of life, we understand better than ever the song of David, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ ”82 The reference to the Psalms is more than mere trope, as articles from nearly every issue of the Mountaineer also deploy scriptural quotations and references. Club publications during the group’s first three decades pursued the ideal of “the spirit of the mountains,” which was used to orient club activities and frame human

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relationships with nature. How was this religious discourse composed and how did it become the dominant leitmotif for a generation of outdoors enthusiasts? Henry Landes, the first president of the Mountaineers Club and professor of geology at the University of Washington, was one of the first to invoke Psalm 121, imploring members to lift their eyes to the hills in a 1907 address at the club’s first public gathering. His remarks emphasized the importance of rapturous experiences of life among the mountains, juxtaposed such profound experiences with the normalcy of everyday life, and sermonized the tension between city life and life on the trail. Landes’s remarks borrow heavily from the tried-and-true conventions of romanticism (alienation from the crowd and the city, praise for restorative pilgrimages into wild uplands, etc.), but they depart from romantic convention in significant ways. Affirming community over individualism and relying heavily on metaphors of economic productivity, Landes wrote in an almost alchemical vocabulary that “the Mountaineers is an association of kindred spirits who love the out-of-doors and to whom the wildwood, the flowery mead and the mountain fastness afford a rest, a solace, and an inspiration. The mountains contain Nature’s mightiest workshop, where there is ever wrought a titanic struggle between the forces of fire and those of water; between vulcanism and upheaval, and the chiseling or sculpturing action of ice and running water. In this workshop there is fashioned our grandest scenery, and we need travel but a day’s journey into our mountains to find Nature at her best.”83 Many new threads are here woven into the tapestry of nature appreciation. In addition to the importance of productivity and community, these sentences emphasize the magnitude of the forces of nature as they are known to men of science and, hinting at a Darwinian struggle for existence, suggest that beauty itself is a result of such terrible powers. Do Landes’s remarks indicate a coherent philosophy? What is this faith in the “spirit of the mountains”? How was it that religious language functioned as such a powerful mode of expression for the captains of industry, intellectuals, and educators who

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formed the ranks of membership in the Mountaineers and its many sister organizations throughout the Nation’s urban centers?84 The Mountaineer seldom employs the term spiritual, preferring more straightforward references to “spirit” to describe the capacity of nature to heal the wounds of human alienation.85 One journal contributor offered this helpful glimpse into the club’s close association of God, human physicality, and social freedom: “Many of our natural aptitudes are smothered alive in the mad scramble of everyday life. . . . The boy feels the divine urge to be an artist, but instead of following the gleam and climbing into the attic at once with his talent and brush, he slithers off on a bread-winning tangent or grubbing spree into mercantile life. . . . If we would but encourage our natural ability, our various Godgiven talents and practice without end what would we not achieve? What mental and spiritual satisfaction would we not experience?”86 Though this particular statement stands alone as a discussion of “natural vocation,” its tone and perspective are echoed widely by other club authors. For the Mountaineers, climbing mountains, outdoor recreation, and time spent away from cities were means by which to live one’s life in the most fulfilling way. This moral posture often took an explicitly Christian shape, though some members preferred more abstract, poetic vocabularies to address the “spirit of the mountains.” Keeping with the general climate of liberal Protestantism that conditioned the public discourse of American society during the Progressive Era, the Mountaineers saw their cause as progressive and enacted it with missionary zeal. Much of the era’s liberal theology aimed at breaking down barriers between “God and man (the indwelling spirit), between God and nature (the immanent spirit), and between Jesus and man (the human potential).”87 Immanence ruled the day; labors against dualism were at the forefront of Protestant theology and provided fertile ground for efforts to synthesize science and religion and to combine traditional and innovative modes of religious expression. Such fluid, experimental theological trends were particularly strong in the western states, where “boundaries of individual and social identity [were]

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fluid, and . . . religious institutions [were] relatively weak.”88 In the West the reconfiguration of theological boundaries was greatly aided by a social environment where “individuals and groups develop belief, practice, and sensibility under little pressure to conform and [had] considerable freedom to experiment and innovate.”89 Despite this freedom, the Mountaineers, like its cousin organizations (e.g., the Sierra Club, the Appalachian Trail Club, the Mazamas), maintained close relationships with religious institutions, especially the mainline Protestant churches with which most of their members were affiliated.90 The founders of American conservationism, especially persons in Muir’s immediate circle (e.g., landscape painter William Keith or geologist Joseph LeConte), seem to have followed the loose theism of the transcendentalist movement; their writings rarely made direct claims about doctrinal or theological matters. Others, especially the generation who inherited leadership over conservation and recreation organizations during the 1910s and 1920s, were more willing to speak in overtly Christian tones. William Frederic Badè, Muir’s first biographer and the fourth president of the Sierra Club, was an ordained minister and a noted scholar of ancient Near Eastern religion. Under his leadership the Sierra Club cooperated closely with churches in the Bay Area to provide liturgical and ritual structure to the theological sentiment Muir had so successfully popularized. The same was true in the Pacific Northwest, where under Edmond Meany’s long tenure as Mountaineers Club president a close relationship between religious and recreational activities flourished. At first glance, worship services organized by the Sierra Club or by the Mountaineers were rather predictable expressions of mainline Protestant spirituality, emphasizing bourgeois values and underscoring the theological bases of civic duty. On closer inspection, however, it is striking how subtly theology structures their environmental message. Badè’s activities among several organizations offer good examples of this recreationalist religiosity. In 1920, under the auspices of the Contra Costa Hills Club, Badè and his associates organized an explicitly Christian application of nature spirituality in the “first annual open-air

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Easter Sunset Vespers” near the “living cross of trees” in the hills above Oakland. The Contra Costa Hills Club was a local organization dedicated to the protection of public lands in the hills east of San Francisco Bay and, being chartered primarily by individuals also belonging to the Sierra Club, including Badè and Harold French, was almost a subcommittee of the Sierra Club. The program from the Easter Services describes a thoughtful synthesis of civil religious themes, mainline Protestant traditions, and Muir’s “glacier gospel” lauding the spiritual virtues of communion with nature. Coming at the close of the First World War, with soldiers just recently returned, the ceremony opened with “America the Beautiful” and closed with a benediction and releasing of doves, symbolizing the peace established by the Treaty of Versailles. Congregants sang hymns and read scriptures that invoked the spiritual motif of the mountaintop (e.g., “How Firm a Foundation” and Isaiah 2:2).91 In lieu of a sermon, passages from the writings of Joaquin Miller and John Muir were read aloud to foster “a deeper appreciation of the natural beauties of these lovable hills.”92 In the 1910s and 1920s Badè and other Sierra Club officers organized a series of annual Thanksgiving worship services. These were sometimes held in the Natural Amphitheatre in the hills above the University of California and sometimes atop Mt. Davidson in San Francisco, near the site of a large cross commemorating victims of the Armenian genocide.93 In 1921, while president of the Sierra Club and dean of the Pacific Theological Seminary, Badè composed an “Outdoor Liturgy” for these services, which became the standard format for the Thanksgiving program. His liturgy began with an invocation of the beauty of creation reminiscent of the Psalms and, in its inaugural year, included a sermon titled “Children of the Open Air.” In that address Badè made an explicitly Christian appeal for wilderness conservation: “there is no duty which seems clearer or higher than that of handing on to [those who come after] undiminished facilities for the enjoyment of some of the best gifts that the Creator has seen fit to bestow upon his children.”94 Preaching this message annually at Sierra Club Thanksgiving services,

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as well as delivering frequent guest sermons at Protestant worship services throughout the Bay Area, Badè had ample opportunity to proselytize the “Religion of Muir.”95 In addition to these annual services, Sierra Club members regularly gathered at the Yosemite National Church, one of only a few developments in the Yosemite Valley to predate the declaration of national park status.96 From Badè’s perspective as one of Muir’s closest confidants, this religion was a reenvisioning of Christian tradition, in which “everything turns into religion; the world itself seems the temple of the Lord, and the mountains his altars.”97 The scriptures favored by recreationist writers are telling. They frequently cited Matthew 21:12, where Jesus overturns “the tables of money changers and the benches of those selling doves,” as a doubly evocative image that both captures the profanity of commerce in a holy place—unspoiled wilderness—and insists that God’s abode can be reconsecrated. Sierra Club worship services were aimed at heightening congregants’ appreciation of natural beauty and inspiring them to continue to act for the preservation and conservation of nature. The ultimate audience of this message was the American public, for the implicit message of these liturgies was a Progressive insistence that public protection of wilderness was a national responsibility predicated on the grandeur of the lands bestowed on the American people by a gracious God. America was nature’s nation and was blessed with the grandest temple of outdoor worship. The Mountaineers Club archives include programmatic materials from a handful of worship services (held between 1913 and 1930) that closely resemble the Sierra Club’s synthesis of mainline Protestant liturgy and Muir’s nature theology. These materials also indicate that similar services were held on a semiregular basis over this twenty-year span. For example, one of the club’s early officers, the Reverend F. J. Van Horn, informally considered the club’s honorary chaplain, was responsible for a trio of official club worship services at Plymouth Church, a Congregationalist church in downtown Seattle.98 These three “Mountain Services” were intended for Plymouth Church’s regular congregation but were devised with a scriptural emphasis on “high places” and a liturgical

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accent on the spiritual meaning of mountains. Van Horn’s sermon of November 22, 1913, for example, was entitled “Kulshan, the Great White Watcher,” and it elaborated on the religious significance of Washington’s third highest peak, Mt. Baker. The Mountaineers organized several “Sunrise Services in the Hills,” though substantive documentation exists for only the 1913 and 1919 services. In 1913 this gathering was popular enough that several club members arranged for their own churches to host similar mountain-themed services.99 The liturgical model developed by recreational organizations was attractive to traditional Protestant congregations in the Pacific Northwest and seems to have fit well with the spiritual fashion of the times. The “Sunrise Service in the Hills” program bulletin describes an eclectic, yet decidedly Protestant, worship service that supplemented scripture with Hindu poetry, invoked civil religious themes, and kept with the Progressive Era emphasis on muscular Christianity. The liturgical model employed in these services departs from Protestant convention in two subtle ways. First, the liturgical emphasis advances a subtle, but insistent, political message, calling on worshippers to link their affection for scenic natural beauty with their national patriotism. The program for the 1913 “Sunrise Service in the Hills” includes an editorial from the Wall Street Journal as an epigraph. Entitled “What America Needs” and published in 1912, this editorial calls for a revival of “traditional piety” very much in line with Progressive values: What America needs more than railway extension, and western irrigation, and a low tariff, and a bigger wheat crop, and a merchant marine, and a new navy, is a revival of piety, the kind father and mother used to have—piety that counted it good business to stop for daily family prayer before breakfast, right in the middle of the harvest; quit field work a half an hour early Thursday night so as to get the chores done and go to prayer meeting. That’s what we need now to clean this country of filth, of graft and of greed, petty and big, of worship of fine houses and big lands, of high office and grand social functions.100

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Unsurprisingly, this editorial was widely republished in the printed materials of numerous denominational groups across the country. In the Baptist and Jehovah’s Witness publications, where the editorial was also reproduced, it was part of an ongoing call for “national revival.”101 Its inclusion in the Mountaineers’ service served a somewhat different purpose. Although the Mountaineers must have appreciated the Progressive tenor of the editorial and its conjunction of civil religious discourse with a general desire for religious revival, they were especially drawn to its invocation of work ethic and the daily rhythms of nature. In the “Sunrise Service in the Hills” and many other club publications, recreation is treated as spiritually essential because it requires careful attention to basic tasks of survival, like gathering wood and water or cooking and eating with small groups of compatriots. Conversely, urban life is treated as a spiritual threat precisely because it confuses and upends the rhythms of daily life that patterned society for countless generations. Behind the Wall Street Journal nostalgia for agrarian lifestyles is a deeper desire that America find a way to rekindle the piety “that mother and father used to have.” The Mountaineers believed that recreation afforded this possibility. Second, the “Sunrise Service in the Hills” inconspicuously shifts the theological tone, attempting to compel righteous Americans to enter into deeper communion with God’s creation. Following an image of “Cathedral Rock, Cascade Range,”102 the worship service program turns its attention fully to the importance of natural rhythms, articulating what might be described as a ritualization of everyday life. Provided to the Mountaineers “from the Sanskrit,” the service continued with the prayer Salutation of the Dawn, which called on congregants to “look to this day” to glimpse the “bliss of growth” and “the splendor of beauty.”103 These verses state that those who wish to lead a pious life must begin each day conscientiously (perhaps with some intimate version of the “Sunrise Service in the Hills”). With this the liturgy returns smoothly to a more standard Protestant service, with readings of the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms. The inclusion of exogenous religious

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materials indicates the increasingly doctrinal flexibility of American nature spirituality, even if the service’s core message was a conservative one, which championed patriotism and economic progress. A typical selection of Psalmic responsive readings preceded the sermon, hinting that outdoor enthusiasts are among the chosen, that they constitute the flock of the righteous. The reading opens with a question: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place?” (Ps. 24:3). Only “he that hath clean hands, and pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully” (Ps. 24:4) is allowed to enter such sacred spaces. Considering that the service itself was already set in the hills, this opening responsive is a tacit articulation of the congregation’s status as having “clean hands, and a pure heart.” The two following cycles of call and response celebrate God’s creative capacity and the natural world that results from him. The next responsive returns to the most frequently quoted biblical verse in the Mountaineer, wherein the author promises to “lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help” (Ps. 121:1). The congregational response— “whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord” (Ps. 122:4)—clearly identifies high places as places of worship. The verses of these Psalms absent from this service reinforce the spiritual significance of altitude, identifying the city of Jerusalem as the chief mountain of worship. The Mountaineers’ “Sunrise Service in the Hills” imagines the mountains of Washington as the New Jerusalem; in fact, the symbolic power of Jerusalem is again applied to the Mountaineers’ sacred geography in the penultimate responsive: “as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so even the Lord is round about His people from hence forth even for ever” (Ps. 125:2). The response explicitly invokes the idea of covenant. Reaching beyond the Psalms, the covenant is understood primarily in terms of the land given to the chosen people: “Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers” (Exodus 6:4). The cycles of call and response have, by this point, rejected the interpretation of covenant theology as primarily concerning chosen nations, imagining in

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instead a new, tangible land of milk and honey. The mountains among which the worshippers stand are not symbolic backdrops for a theological drama played out in the scriptures; rather, they are the divine gift to the righteous at the very center of that drama. This worldly interpretation of the covenant furnishes security from harm’s way; “the mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness” (Ps. 72:3). “For He is our God; and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of his hand” (Ps. 95:7). God’s covenant, told from this angle, promises the righteous (read nature lovers) a land of Canaan set aside for their exclusive use and enjoyment (read recreational paradise). Without making too much of the allusions to chosen-people status suggested by the “Sunrise Service in the Hills,” it is certainly not inconsequential that the Mountaineers mapped these biblical passages directly onto the spaces that oriented their spirituality. This scriptural framework allowed them to understand outdoor recreation not just in terms of “worship” and “pilgrimage” but also coherently with a narrative structure that organized such terms around broader concepts like destiny and purpose. After a “sermonet,” ostensibly similar to the ones delivered by the Reverend F. J. Van Horn at other services, the Mountaineers’ worship service concludes with two traditional hymns and an unconventional prayer. First, the congregation was to sing the classic “Rock of Ages,” which develops and adapts the geologic metaphors for God.104 While Peter was the rock of faith on which the early church was founded, Jesus was the “rock of ages” on which faith itself was to be grounded. The hymn draws on a biblical passage wherein David proclaims that “the Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation” (2 Sam. 22:3). Comparing the safety afforded by the nooks and crannies of a mountain spring to the curative power of the stigmata, “Rock of Ages” implores Jesus to provide that same comfort and security to the soul as it “soar[s] to worlds unknown.”105 Returning to themes of strength and security, crucial notions in the theology of the Mountaineers, these lyrics set the tone for the benediction and closing hymn.

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The benediction unites the disparate theological and symbolic components that the Mountaineers wished to synthesize as a coherent whole. Excerpted from the devotional handbook Some Outdoor Prayers, compiled by a club member in 1911, the closing prayer expresses a familiarity with romanticism, a willingness to engage with the liberal Protestant and metaphysical conceptualizations of God, a focus on spiritual “solace and strength,” and a connection between outdoor recreation and a nominally Christian soteriological narrative: We lift our eyes unto the hills from whence cometh our help! From the silence of the valleys and the majesty of the mountains we draw solace and strength! The strong battlements lift their heads in power for the faint. The upper summits shine with snowy peaks in glorious white and dwell in silence there alone! If the glory of the Eternal dwells anywhere upon the earth, it must be in the regions that rise higher till they are lost in cloudless blue above the mists below! Could not these mighty fastnesses be some eternal playground for spirits of just men who love them because they are like Thyself, high and strong and true? If the eternal hills be more glorious than these, we wait with bated breath the moment when our feet shall stand amid their radiant summits and we shall see Thee face to face!106

This prayer relocates the drama of human life and death from an allegorical terrain to a tangible one, thus simultaneously identifying the seat of “the Eternal” in the “snowy peaks” and articulating an anthropology in which man, especially those “just men who love [the mighty fastnesses],” can approach the face of God both physically and spiritually. In concretizing the landscape of the divine, the benediction to the “Sunrise Service in the Hills” reimagines the sovereign God of the Bible as an eternal force characterized by his nobility, radiance, and beauty. This willingness to name God with titles such as “the Eternal” or “the Infinite” indicates the influence of metaphysical traditions on relatively mainstream Protestant discourse. The theology embedded in this prayer no longer stresses God’s ongoing role in history—his immanence is personalized and naturalized. God continues to govern the “other world,” a kingdom of wondrous beauty that penetrates our world

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at higher elevations. These sites of contact between this world and the one beyond are understood as “playgrounds of spirits” of the chosen few who know well enough the sacred nature of nature itself. The service closes with another hymn, “Jesus Lover of My Soul,” again cycling through the rhythmic structure of the service, a cycle of oscillation between the familiar and the novel, the scriptural and the literary, the traditional and the innovative. “Jesus Lover of My Soul” highlights some of the key themes developed throughout the service, particularly security from the ravages of the world. Just as the Mountaineers asked, in “Rock of Ages,” for safe refuge in the fortitude of stone, in “Jesus Lover of My Soul” they call on Jesus to “hide me, O my savior, hide / Till the storm of life is past.”107 In 1919 the Mountaineers hosted another “Sunrise Service in the Hills.” The 1919 liturgy was almost identical to the 1913 service, although it did not include the Wall Street Journal editorial and arranged the hymns and prayers differently. The continued demand of club members for outdoor worship compelled club officers to organize another service. According to a flyer for a 1922 service at Rev. F. J. Van Horn’s Plymouth Church, a Congregationalist establishment in downtown Seattle, a “lecture sermon” entitled “Scaling the Heights” had drawn a crowd so large that “hundreds were turned away,” thus prompting “those within” to have “eagerly asked [for] a repetition.”108 While the tone of this flyer betrays the hyperbole of advertising, it makes plain how popular this kind of hybrid of religious and mountaineering rhetoric was in the Pacific Northwest throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. The handful of materials from outdoor worship services preserved by history represent only part of the explicitly religious material produced by the Mountaineers. Perhaps most intriguing among these is an adaptation of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” written by club member F. W. Greiner. Entitled “The Mountaineers Hymn,” Greiner’s version capitalizes on the ubiquity and popularity of “Nearer My God to Thee.” Before articulating the theological and literary differences between “The Mountaineers Hymn” and Sarah Flower Adams’s origi-

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nal, it is worthwhile to describe the place of “Nearer My God to Thee” in the popular imagination at the threshold of the twentieth century. The hymn was not merely popular; it secured for itself an important place in the American vernacular religious landscape, having been played at the funerals of assassinated presidents McKinley and Garfield and, purportedly, as the Titanic sank as well. Drawing on the widespread popularity and general familiarity with the tune and refrain of “Nearer My God to Thee” in American religious culture at the turn of the century, a prominent member of the Mountaineers reworked the words, framing his project in the following light: To those lovers of “God’s great out of doors,” who have felt that inward desire to express in words the feelings of wonder, admiration, or devotion, experienced while viewing some of the wonderful manifestations of God’s great handiwork, the accompanying version of “Nearer My God to Thee,” is humbly presented as an expression of the sentiment in that beautiful old hymn, put into words intended more fittingly to give utterance to some of the inspirational thoughts and devotional feelings of that splendid body of Nature lovers. In appreciation of the privileges afforded by The Mountaineers Club to visit and enjoy the mountains we love so much, it has been named “The Mountaineers Hymn.”109

Closely following the structure of the original, “The Mountaineers Hymn” puts into lyrical form much of the religious perspective developed in the sunrise services and elsewhere: Though camped in Nature’s wild, Far, far from home, Dear Lord be Thou with us Where’er we roam; Help us each day to be Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee. On winding forest trail, Or mountain side,

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Unfold Thy wonders Lord Like vistas wide; And teach us thus, to be Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee. Reveal Thyself, oh Lord, ’Neath sun-lit sky, In forest, rock, and stream— On mountain high— That we may long to be Nearer—my God—to Thee, Nearer—my God—to Thee, Nearer to Thee. Beneath Thy temple’s dome, The vaulted sky, Guard Thou us while we sleep, Oh Lord Most High; E’en while we sleep, we’d be— Nearer my God—to Thee Nearer my God—to Thee, Nearer to Thee. When life’s long outing ends, No more to roam, Guide Thou us o’er the trail That leads us home; We’ll sing for joy, to be Nearer my God to Thee Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee.110

Unmistakably, the Mountaineers were not, in their early years, a secular organization. Their theological rhetoric, formal Protestant worship services, and deeply religious club president indicate the multidimensional quality of conservationism in the early twentieth century. But just what do these religious ties indicate? How can we gauge the

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strength, depth, and meaning of the various associations between the Mountaineers and explicitly religious institutions? More difficult still, to what degree can we clearly identify the intellectual, theological, and symbolic influences of institutional religion on the Mountaineers? The cooperative efforts between local Protestant congregations and the Mountaineers provided explicit assurance that the spiritual path along which club members were journeying was divinely sanctioned. Ultimately, however, the role of sunrise services and mountaineeringthemed sermons in churches throughout the Puget Sound area served only as a secondary mode of engagement between Christian tradition and an emerging spirituality of nature among club members. Traditional ritual structures proved too scripted as sites of religious hybridization, and the terrain of nature itself served as a much more fluid and adaptable medium for the symbolic exchanges central to the Mountaineers’ religious labors. In the chapter that follows, I turn my attention to the more fecund attempts to elaborate the moral meaning of nature through writings and practices regarding outdoor spaces and experiences. If liturgy was an awkward means for the spiritual project of the Mountaineers to apply myth and meaning to the problems of modern life, then experiencing and celebrating outdoor recreation would prove to be a much more powerful frame of reference. Perhaps the popularity of Protestant outdoor worship services can be attributed to the theological potency of the symbols used to describe natural beauty. This is especially true insofar as the image of the frontier served to ground American notions of recreation. Here, the figure of the wanderer (the pioneer, the hiker, or the mountaineer) linked literary treatments of time spent away from urban life and deeper currents of Christian spiritual writing. Evoking previous ideas of homo viator, this image helped secure a redemptive narrative structure for outdoor literatures. Just as the frontier was a geographical representation of new beginnings for American society and politics, so, too, was it a representation of new beginnings within a spiritual geography.111 The narrative employed to tell the story of the American frontier

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followed a loosely Christian soteriological structure: social and moral decay, a move by persons seeking a better life away from stagnant social norms, and the construction of a new life in the West. On a small scale this structure also applies to the figure of the mountaineer, through whom ministers and writers on spiritual matters had access to the basic hopefulness that undergirds the Christian desire for the absolution of sin and the redemption into a new and everlasting life. The close connection between moral redemption and the journey into unknown lands has for centuries served as a way to glean theological significance from social practices like exploration, adventure, and recreation.

chapter three

Sacred Space and the American Environmental Imagination Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. —John Muir

The specific conditions of the American experience amplified and intensified changes in Christian concepts about the natural world that had been evolving for centuries. Although it is true that certain strands of American religiosity, fundamentalism in particular, preserved the tradition’s intense otherworldliness and Augustinian fixation on the return of the immortal soul to God, the prevalence and power of theological repudiations of the natural world were greatly diminished in twentieth-century American culture. Forests and mountains, once the monstrosities of the medieval Christian imagination, abounded in North America and, through the course of the nation’s history, became objects of affection and wonder. By the twentieth century, a rich tradition of nature writing had emerged, drawing on and reworking the theology of immanence to voice a deep moral connection with the created order. Far from being spaces of bewitchment, mountains and forests became key symbols of beauty, healthfulness, and power in American environmental thought. Moreover, this symbolic reversal did 102

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not result from the excision of Christian theology from the environmental imagination but developed directly in relationship to that tradition. This chapter explores the rise of outdoor recreation as a national pastime and as an expression of American environmental sentiments profoundly indebted to religious treatments of mountains in Western history. As extensions of long-standing textual and literary traditions, the symbolic status of mountains came to bear significantly on nature writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

reexamining mountain gloom and mountain glory Almost every mythological corpus includes high places that serve as homes to gods or demons, as the object of quests, or as cosmological anchors and axis mundi. In the Western theological tradition mountains—and their forested hillsides—have a specific history that has long proved a potent source for environmental imagination. Intellectual historians interested in the intersection of Christian theology and unpeopled landscapes (deserts, forests, mountains, and wilderness generally) have tended to assert that there is a fundamental antagonism between the crude materiality of the natural world and the lofty metaphysics of the spiritual world.1 The stark dualism at the heart of the Christian worldview was so profound that the affection for nature that emerged in Euro-American societies in the romantic era represented for many historians a fundamental break in the relationship between theology and cultural representations of nature. The argument that this shift in symbolic meaning—where mountains and forests once meant danger but now indicate sublime beauty and spiritual inspiration—has had no more eloquent advocate than Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Her view that modern nature appreciation signifies a radical break with tradition deserves some scrutiny, especially in light of the countervailing theological tendencies documented in the previous chapters.

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The rather narrow field of mountain studies knows no more influential work than Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Her 1959 masterpiece set out to explain how and why by the early nineteenth century, mountains had become “ ‘temples of Nature built by the Almighty’ and ‘natural cathedrals, or natural altars . . . with their clouds resting on them as the smoke of a continual sacrifice.’ A century and a half earlier . . . they had been ‘Nature’s Shames and Ills’ and ‘Warts, Wens, Blisters, Imposthumes’ upon the otherwise fair face of Nature.”2 The development of what Nicolson dubs an “aesthetics of the infinite” required, first, that “various fundamental assumptions, accepted for generations, had to be broken down” and, second, that a new sensibility toward nature in general and to mountains in particular had to be elaborated.3 In a word, Nicolson traces in literary history the revaluation of nature and natural landscapes and argues that the modern Anglophone tradition of nature enthusiasm is discontiguous with religious history. The assumptions she identifies are reducible to a single theological principle: that the world as it was originally created must “have been the ultimate model for beauty.”4 Early modern poets, Donne and Milton especially, asserted that the earth had been created as a “mundane egg,” as an orb without blemish, and referred to the exegetical authority of foundational figures like Basil and Abelard. The scriptural condemnation “cursed is the ground for thy sake” tempered medieval perspectives on mountains with guilt and frustration.5 Nicolson claims the transition from the view that mountains are the tangible results of the fall from grace to the view that they are natural monuments of divine majesty occurred between 1660 and 1800. Her insistence on the reprehensibility of mountains in the Western theological tradition has been widely endorsed by scholars working in related fields, including the geography of religion, the study of sacred space, as well as literary, intellectual, and environmental histories. Her work is the template for subsequent humanistic treatments of mountains in Western culture, and her basic thesis shows up again and again.6 The “mountain gloom” thesis is not incorrect, for there is clear and compelling evidence that key figures throughout Christian history have looked

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at mountains with trepidation and scorn. But Nicolson’s dual rendering of Western attitudes of mountains is not nuanced enough to account for the historical continuities present in the emergence of “mountain glory.” “Mountain gloom” offers an unnecessarily monolithic view of Christian environmental thought and fails to recognize other streams within the tradition that approached mountain landscapes more positively. A basic accounting of the ambivalence of mountain images in the Christian Middle Ages offers a more open view of the tradition’s environmental inheritance. In addition to the oversimplification of theological attitudes, there is some confusion in the “mountain gloom” thesis about the historical sources of theological disdain for rugged, uninhabited landscapes. Although it is true that since the Patristic era Christian thinkers have questioned the ontological status of mountains and decried the world as topographically imperfect, repudiations of geological irregularity are as much a product of the early modern fixation on mathematical symmetry as they are a result of ontological orthodoxy. Nicolson’s assertion that “the Great Sculptor . . . was rather a classical aesthetician to whom symmetry, proportion, and the restraint of the circle were of first importance” says as much about modern sensibilities as medieval ones.7 With respect to mountains, the symbolic repository of biblical scripture is not predominantly characterized by fear and trepidation. Analyzing more than five hundred uses of the term mountain [hor] in the Hebrew Bible, exegetes have documented at least three types of positive images: security, height, and fertility.8 Mountain images from this period emerge in relation to theological patterns common across a variety of Canaanite traditions centered on concepts of the “cosmic mountain” and share an ancient Near Eastern tendency to render mountains as axis mundi, as the central geographic point of contact between the sacred and profane worlds.9 Such positive imagery abounds in the Psalms, especially in the Songs of Ascent, a collection of pilgrimage prayers gathered in Psalms 120 through 134. Mountains play central roles throughout the broad arc of the biblical narrative: Mount Zion is the site of King David’s fortress and the basis of his military successes (1 Kings 8:1–2); Mount Carmel is

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the location of Elijah’s victory over the idolaters (1 Kings 18); and Mount Moriah was home to the temple mount (2 Chron. 3:1) and was the site of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22:2). More fundamentally, mountaintops were the sites of the first two biblical covenants: the covenant following the great flood was delivered to Noah as his ark rested atop Mount Ararat (Gen. 8:4), and the Mosaic covenant was given to Moses from the mist-shrouded peak of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19). This later image is echoed when, after leading his people out of Egypt, Moses was allowed to see, but not to enter, the Promised Land from Mount Nebo, the crest of Pisgah (Deut. 34:1–4). The Psalmist’s famous verse “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my strength” (Ps. 121:1) neatly captures the sense of mountains as sources of security.10 The security afforded Israel by its mountainous geography was both political and spiritual. Throughout their history the Hebrews were secure in their knowledge that they could take refuge in the mountains to avoid any number of aggressive interlopers. Mount Zion, in particular, was an effective strategic stronghold, but the security of Israel’s mountains was not merely a means to military advantage. The images of mountain fastness deployed dozens of times throughout the Hebrew Bible are references to Yahweh’s protective capacities: it is often unclear in scripture “whether the ‘mountains’ referred to are earthly or celestial . . . [but in either case] they . . . promise divine help.”11 The importance of mountains is hardly surprising: Israel’s geography was mountainous. Its hills, with their fertile pasturelands and sunny slopes, provided agricultural and strategic advantages. Especially in the Psalms, but throughout the Pentateuch as well, images of mountains are associated with the immensity and grandeur of God’s creation. In numerous places mountain heights are associated with the power of sight and of voice. A geographic frame of spiritual ascendancy pervades biblical treatments of mountains: high places serve as points of contact between the earth and heaven. Mountain heights facilitate the prophetic voice, and on numerous occasions proclamations and condemnations are made from “on high,” signifying their divine legitimacy.12

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Numerous books of scripture present a recurring theme of transformation through ascent, as with the story of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22) and the forty days of fasting Moses twice undertook atop Sinai before receiving the commandments (Exodus 34:28). Biblical images of mountain ascent as means to elevate the human spirit share several characteristics: they posit mountains as symbolic reservoirs of divine power, describe the organizational structure of the cosmos in terms of verticality, and utilize mountains as a comparative indication of human finitude. God dwells “on high,” and it is through physical ascent that persons come into contact with the divine and ascertain his will. This is consistent with broader patterns of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, which consistently feature mountains as the dwelling place of the gods.13 As points of contact between the worldly and the divine, images of mountains in Hebrew scripture exemplify what historian of religion Rudolph Otto classically described as the mysterium tremendum, the terror at that which is beyond apprehension.14 Nicolson acknowledged this nascent “sense of the sublimity” present in Hebraic literature but claimed “the messiah of the Christians showed little feeling for the mountains loved by the patriarchs.”15 In the half century since the publication of Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory a small coterie of biblical scholars have traced the ways that the mountain motifs that are developed in the Hebrew Bible are taken up and carried through by the Gospel authors.16 The New Testament is certainly not lacking in vertical topography: the transfiguration of Jesus takes place atop Mount Tabor (Matthew 17:1–9); the Mount of Olives is the site of Jesus’s prayerful night in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:30) and of his later ascension (Acts 1:9–12). Perhaps the most explicit topographic image in the Gospels comes in Matthew 4, when “the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me’ ” (Matthew 4:8–9). These are not marginal moments or poetic flourishes. Just as in the Hebrew Bible, mountains are celebrated at critical moments throughout the

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gospel narrative, especially where the divine and the earthly come into contact. Advocates of the “gloom thesis” assert that the literary styling of the New Testament places Christ “center stage” and that “the everlasting hills are no longer considered worthy of comment.”17 The onset of “mountain gloom” is in their view concurrent with the rise of Christianity. Two arguments support this perspective. First, the Christian emphasis on a universal redemption wherein “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” worked to establish a conceptual bias against elevation itself. Second, to Nicolson and those who have expanded her thesis, Christian affirmations were “only allegory and symbol,” unconcerned with actual mountains. But to what degree might such allegorical affirmations be coextensive with earlier theological celebrations of mountain heights? What if the complex symbolic status of mountains in the Christian imagination is a product of their intercessory position between heaven and earth, between human fallibility and divine grace? What if a theological aversion to mountains is conceptually linked with the theological celebration of mountains? In The Shape of Sacred Space Robert Cohn notes that “applied to humans, height is negative; high mountains remind the [biblical] poet[s] of human self-exaltation.” He who climbs to the top of the mountain can do so to listen more carefully to God’s word, but such activity risks presenting a “human challenge to divine authority.”18 A number of passages in Isaiah criticize the hubris of Babylonian kings who sought to enshrine themselves in mountaintop temples, harking back to the image of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.19 The image of Jesus’s temptation is clearly aligned with this abiding scriptural concern. The sacred transcendence afforded by mountainous heights is, from a biblical perspective, at God’s discretion and not accessible to the vanity of humankind. The symbolic tension implicit in the mountain image between humility and transcendence becomes confused in the theological context of Christianity. For those who believed that God himself had walked among men and died on a cross on a hill, the pro-

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phetic task of climbing upward to more clearly hear the divine whisper is taken at the risk of hubris. From the perspective of Patristic and medieval Christianity, the act of ascent is theologically fraught, though a close examination of the relationship between the rhetoric of ascent and Christian soteriological thought brings into focus a rather different impression of medieval thinking about mountains than the one articulated by Nicolson. Distinct from the aesthetic critique of mountains as the physical manifestations of sin, Christian thinkers have long been concerned about mountain climbing as an immodesty, as a prideful attempt of individual persons to reach toward the heavens.20 A critique of this immodesty runs through the center of Christian texts about landscapes generally and mountains in particular. This concern is quite emphatic in book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions but also famously appears in Petrarch’s letter, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux.” Writing, respectively, at the beginning and end of the Christian Middle Ages, these two authors express a theological anxiety about mountains, worrying, in Augustine’s words, that “wonder at the heights of the mountains” comes at the expense of a forgetfulness of the immortality of the human soul. Simon Schama describes the central theme of Petrarch’s letter as being “the tension between physical and metaphysical exertion.”21 Here we see an aversion to mountains that is not so much about geological variation as it is about the core theological problems of the Christian Middle Ages: faith versus works, the earthly versus the celestial. In the Puritan context Bunyan reiterated this position in identifying mountains as “proud” and valleys as “humble.”22 Although the association of mountains with human pride is relatively peripheral among scriptural sources, the resultant tension between naturalistic and antinaturalistic narratives of human transcendence is easily traced across canonical sources. Where the complementary images of Zion and Sinai are paradigmatic in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, medieval texts are less uniformly positive. Any robust exploration of this shift would exceed the limits of this study. Conjecturally, Nicolson herself

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postulates that it was the Romanization of Christianity that diminished the affinity for mountains, or perhaps the encounter with the more severe ranges of central Europe and exposure to various forms of mountain-revering paganism made medieval writers less apt to celebrate their virtues. Rather than explain the rise of “mountain gloom,” this analysis posits that the diversity of mountain images available to medieval Christians in the repository of scripture underscores a rather variegated geographic imagination. Her historical claim that in the Christian Middle Ages “ ‘mountain gloom’ so clouded human eyes that never for a moment did poets see mountains in the full radiance to which we have become accustomed” is drawn primarily from an analysis of texts produced between 1500 and 1750.23 Yet the historical period Nicolson most associates with “mountain gloom” is also characterized by celebrations of “ascent” and of “high places.” Especially during the late Middle Ages Christian texts contained many elements that prefigure what she might consider “mountain glory.” A brief consideration of mountains as they appear across a variety of textual genres—monastic, pilgrimage, mystical, and protoscientific—suggests that Christian orthodoxy included a heterogeneous body of mountain images. From Patristic times monasteries were often built on mountains—for fortitude, certainly, but also because these sites are religiously charged. The ancient monastery of Saint Paul on Mount Athens, the chapel on Croagh Patrick, and the abbey at Glastonbury Tor are significant because they were designed to displace “the pre-Christian gods who used to hallow the heights of sacred mountains.”24 The Christian annexation of sacred heights was a widespread pattern that worked at both ends: it was certainly intended to displace and scatter pagan practitioners, but it also absorbed that very topography into the lexicon of Christian meaning.25 Even where Christian tradition repudiates the inherent sacredness of mountains, it does so by co-opting that sacredness for its own purposes. As former president of the Royal Geographical Society Douglas Freshfield put it, “the monk driven out of the world by its wickedness fell in love with the wilderness in which he sought refuge, and soon learnt to give

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practical proof of his love of scenery in his choice of sites for his religious houses.”26 Biblical images of mountain fastness are echoed in one such justification by the archdeacon of Aleppo, who, in the mid-seventeenth century, described a Balkan convent as “a handsome strong edifice, guarded by the river and high mountain summits and pathless woods.”27 Medieval pilgrimage practices and their attendant literatures express a profound undercurrent of desire to ascend peaks and come closer to divinity. The convention of the “mountain gloom” thesis counterintuitively dismisses this tendency, as when one historian remarked, “Medieval travelers disliked mountains, but nevertheless traversed them regularly.”28 The notion—or, perhaps more accurately, the fact—that mountains presented real dangers to travelers was omnipresent in pilgrimage treatises. But despite the dangers of bandits, chasms, altitude sickness, and the terror of dragons, mountain pilgrimages and mountain monasticism flourished throughout the Middle Ages. For example, the popularity of Jerome’s fourth-century account of the quasi-mythical Mount Eden, with its mountaintop oasis, in the Palestinian desert became the “archetypal parable of the Christian holy mount, repeated in images and narratives of ascent all the way through to the High Renaissance.”29 Jerome’s allegorical account of the spiritual journey asserts that risk and difficulty are necessarily linked with soteriological reward: one must struggle to reach the mountaintop in order to come nearer to one’s own salvation. In medieval pilgrimage accounts, “the labor of atonement” is frequently described in terms of “an arduous climb, the angle of ascent often steep enough to require scrambling up the stone face on hands and knees. And in keeping with the tradition of spiritual mountaineering, the going gets easier as it gets higher, until, at the very summit of purgatory . . . the terrestrial paradise is discovered.”30 The bodily toil on which penitential and pilgrimage practices were grounded points forward to modern recreational practices, which recapitulate the struggle for atonement in structurally parallel labors of ascent and movement. A handful of Christian mystics mapped such practices, tracing the contours of salvation in language that often looked favorably on mountains.

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Saint John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel is the most famous example, but a long excerpt from the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic John Ruusbroec furnishes an even more rapturous illustration: In Mountainous country, in the central part of the earth, the sun shines upon the mountains and brings about an early summer, with much good fruit, strong wine, and a land full of joy. The same sun also shines in flat country, near the outer reaches of the earth. Here the land is colder and the power of the sun’s heat less, yet even here the sun produces much good fruit, though not so much wine. . . . A person who wishes to experience the radiance of the eternal sun, which is Christ himself, must have the power of sight and must make his abode in mountainous country by gathering together all his powers. Free and unencumbered by attachments to pleasure or pain or any creature, he must be raised up to God with all his heart. There Christ, the sun of righteousness will shine into his free and uplifted heart. This is the mountainous country that I mean.31

Nicolson dismisses such images of mountains, claiming that the topographical features of Christian allegory have little to do with actual mountains and are thus distorted and “unreal.”32 This arbitrarily dismisses allegorical and fictive sources from consideration as the roots of “mountain glory.” The rejection of allegory fails to acknowledge historical continuities between Hebrew scripture and Christian writings, with their contiguous emphasis on mountains as key sites of spiritual transformation. Moreover, to exclude positive images of mountains (and other rough and unpeopled landscapes) because of their allegorical origins overlooks the influence that such texts—especially ascetic monastic manuals—had on nature writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.33 Though mountain images in the Pentateuch are certainly tinged with a realistic naturalism, their treatment in the Psalms is markedly allegorical. The Songs of Ascent depict worshippers ascending a figurative “holy mountain” to bring themselves nearer to God. When Nicolson excludes allegorical mountain imagery, the centrality of mountains in medieval Christian soteriology is obscured. Dante’s Divine Comedy is definitive here: its mountains may be fearsome, signifying the

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impossibility of unaided ascent, yet they are the primary metaphor for a topography of redemption.34 Given the degree to which early modern writers drew their authority from Dante, this is important. The historical record suggests that by the fourteenth century medieval mountain voyages had shifted from the allegorical to the actual. An account of the exploits of Peter of Aragon dated to the 1280s claims the monarch climbed to the top of Canigou in the Pyrenees, though this ascent is of doubtful veracity.35 Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux, though dramatically composed and enamored by the annals of history, was not actually the first recorded summit of the peak. Twenty years prior to Petrarch’s climb, Jean Buridan had reached the top of Ventoux but apparently had less “capacity for story telling and sentimental ability to make a mountain out of a molehill” than did the father of humanism.36 In 1492 King Charles VIII charged a member of his court, Antoine de Ville, with the task of climbing Mount Aiguille, a mountain of some two thousand meters with a sheer rock spire at its summit. Realizing the peak required several days of climbing and the installation of a series of ladders designed for castle siege, de Ville remained encamped atop the mountain for six days while he and his party awaited the court’s official notary to certify the achievement.37 This ascent was made at the whim of a traveling monarch, but the exploration of mountain landscapes became more common throughout the 1500s. Renaissance Europeans even began to develop “a new love for nature,” posited, at least in part, on the idea that “growing boys should be taken on nature trips” as part of their moral education.38 By the mid-sixteenth century a community of climbers and alpine enthusiasts was beginning to take shape in the Swiss Alps. In particular, climbing historians celebrate Conrad Gesner’s 1555 ascent of Mount Pilatus. Locals had for centuries forbidden its ascent, claiming that the peak was the burial site of Pontius Pilate and that disrespectful visitors would perish or irritate Pilate’s ghost and cause him to generate intemperate weather. This folktale squares well with Nicolson’s thesis, and Gesner is regularly credited as braving such gloomy superstition to

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provide one of the earliest moments of “mountain glory.” In but one of many gushing passages, Gesner wrote that in the mountains “the mind is strangely affected by the amazing altitude, and carried away to the contemplation of the great Architect of the Universe.”39 Here, the Augustinian dilemma, echoed by Petrarch, begins to dissipate: adventures in the theater of nature are no longer a zero-sum choice between contemplation of the soul and contemplation of the material world. The late Middle Ages had given birth to a naturalistic theology, and its maturation allowed early modern figures to follow their curiosities about the natural world where they may, with seemingly little concern about hubris.40 Petrarch’s readers in this era would likely have begun to think differently about the closing lines of his letter: “If we are ready to endure so much sweat and labor in order that we may bring our bodies a little nearer heaven, how can a soul struggling toward God, up the steeps of human pride and human destiny, fear any cross or prison or sting of fortune?”41 Gesner’s alpine enthusiasm is widely credited as the first “literary expression of the mountain cult,” but many sources documenting his ascent opaquely refer to climbs by two separate parties of Swiss scholars in 1518 and to the arrest of six clergymen who attempted the summit in 1307.42 The “gloom thesis” accounts for why fourteenth-century authorities would have arrested six men for having tempted Pilate’s ghost to brew evil weather, but it fails to explain why Renaissance men of learning would be so eager to risk the challenges of alpine heights in the first place. This unanswered question surfaces again in Benedict Marti’s account of a 1558 ascent of the Stockhorn, in which he claims to have found the words The love of mountains is best inscribed in Greek on a rock at the summit.43 Who, we might ask Professor Nicolson, carried with them a chisel to 2,190 meters prior to the mid-sixteenth century? Perhaps, as the above reading suggests, affection for mountain landscapes was at least present throughout the Middle Ages. It then seems unsurprising that mountains came to be vested with salvific potency during the romantic era. Two and a half centuries before the height of

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romanticism, and concurrent with many of the “gloomy” sixteenthcentury texts that Nicolson cites, Gesner and his contemporaries were lauding the mental and physical benefits of time spent in the mountains. Perhaps the development of modern attitudes toward mountains is more accurately understood in terms of the shifting theological dynamics of the late Middle Ages. From the perspective of religious studies the “fear and trepidation” Nicolson ascribes to “mountain gloom” is not necessarily the same thing as disdain. That is, fear and trepidation are built into the theological lexicon of Christianity by way of the fear of God. If the scriptural sources cited above are to be taken seriously, and mountains are in some sense dwelling places of the divine, then perhaps medieval expressions of “mountain gloom” are harbingers of sublimity, with its emphasis on “awe.” That the Christian Middle Ages generated a discordant assortment of mountain images suggests that the romantic movement’s embrace of mountains is less a break with tradition than a reworking of it. In the context of a growing field of mountain studies contemporary scholars warn against the “oversimplified assumption that the human interaction with mountains is a distinctly modern development, one that began with the empowerment of the individual, whether in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism or Romantic subjectivity.”44 We are further reminded that “although mountains did not arouse significant interest in the medieval world, at least not at first sight, they have often left a considerable impact on people’s minds.”45 What was this impact and how might we recalibrate a theory of the rise of “mountain glory” to incorporate the heterogeneous sources explored above? I contend that the “theological and philosophical conventions, . . . which must disappear before the attitudes we take for granted could emerge” were not medieval ones but were themselves modern.46 Chief among Nicolson’s sources is Thomas Burnett’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in 1681, a text that exemplifies the theologically grounded disdain for variegated topography. Burnett sided with the view that geological upheavals—attended by mountains and canyons—were a

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product of the Fall and argued that mountain landscapes’ “gross irregularities and lack of symmetry offended his sense of proportion.”47 But frustration with systems that do not conform to geometrical rationality seems a decidedly modern attitude, for even the most committed medieval Neoplatonist would not have so emphasized mathematical regularity. Burnett’s critique is in keeping with the opening salvo of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, which argues that “buildings conceived and completed by a single architect are usually more beautiful and better planned than those remodeled by several” and that “ancient towns are very badly arranged compared to one of the symmetrical districts which a city planner laid out on an open plane.”48 Literary critics of Nicolson’s generation, Arthur Lovejoy in particular, associated the affinity for geometrical “regularity, proportion, and restraint” with classicism and located the turn away from such a rigid aesthetic of forms in the Gothic revival’s appreciation for irregularity and asymmetry.49 Ironic then, is it not, that Descartes’s enthusiasm for mathematical order is rooted in skepticism about the epistemological legitimacy of the Western intellectual inheritance? Even if the “mountain glory” identified by Ruskin and analyzed by Nicolson is a uniquely modern possibility, it seems to have emerged as a refusal of the pressures of modernity: the strictures of mathematical certainty, the insistence on idea over form, and the central but insecure position of humanity amid the created order. “Mountain glory” cannot be simplified as but one element of modernity’s break with tradition. It must be understood, at least in part, as an insistence on tradition and as a repudiation of the tightening grip of calculative rationality. Let it suffice to say that there seems to be a distinction between the theological grounds from which medieval thinkers expressed their anxiety about mountains and the theological grounds on which early modern critics expressed parallel concerns. In the one, typified by Augustine and Petrarch, mountain landscapes were legitimately dangerous places, and inquiry about their mysteries brought to the fore the moral ambiguities of human mastery over nature. By the seventeenth century, however, the negative views of mountains by European writers

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were couched primarily in the language of rationality and aesthetics. That Burnett and his contemporaries thought of mountains as aesthetic blights was, to be sure, a theologically motivated unease, but their concerns were nonetheless distinct from those of earlier generations. Oddly, champions of the mountaineering clubs that flourished across Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth century mounted a similar argument, anticipating Nicolson’s critique by nearly five decades. At the 1904 meeting of the British Geographical Society, Freshfield contended that this popular belief that the love of mountains is a taste, or, as some would say, a mania of advanced civilization, is erroneous. On the contrary, I allege it to be a healthy, primitive, and almost universal human instinct. I think I can indicate how and why the opposite belief has been fostered by eminent writers. They have compared the nineteenth century, not with the preceding ages, but with the eighteenth. . . . The eighteenth century was, as we all know, an age of formality. It was the age of Palladian porticos, of interminable avenues, of formal gardens and formal style in art, in literature, and in dress. Mountains, which are essentially romantic and Gothic, were naturally disgraceful to it.50

Perhaps it makes more sense to think of “mountain gloom” as an early modern attitude. If this is the case, then it also makes sense to approach the rise of “mountain glory” as a modern reprisal of older narratives of rapturous ascent. As actual undertakings and as narrative vehicles, mountain ascents lend themselves to a language of introspection that ties together the dueling geographies of the inner world and the material world. The increasingly naturalistic tenor of theology between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth eroded the distinction between scientific observation and spiritual self-examination. As Simon Schama writes: “By the middle of the fifteenth century . . . the informed contemplation of nature became not only compatible with awe of the Creator, but a way to affirm his omniscience. Respected, inspected, regarded with pious attentiveness, the sheer diversity of the outward slopes of the world

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attested to the inexhaustible creativity of God. The more fantastic the terrestrial forms, the more prodigious must be his power.”51 Since the composition of the Hebrew Bible, mountains have stood as the primary literary image through which the whole of nature can be visualized. The revelatory experience of ascending to the highest point has featured centrally in humanist narratives from Petrarch and Dante to the romantic era and beyond. During the nineteenth century a new genre of mountain-climbing literature emerged and became tremendously popular. Drawing on both allegorical sources and natural histories, these texts became the primary carriers of what might be called romantic soteriology, the widespread view that direct experiences of the natural world are of moral and spiritual benefit to individuals. This idea is integral to “mountain glory,” and although it was popularized primarily through romantic poetry, I hope to have shown that its roots can be detected in older sources. Long after Wordsworth and Shelley, these soteriological qualities flourished in myriad social phenomena: scouting and the woodcraft movement, muscular Christianity, even the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s.52 Many of the forms of recreation that fueled the nature enthusiasm of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth were symbolic manifestations of masculine power and colonial conquest. Developed in part as an outgrowth of “the Grand Tour”—the British practice of culturing young men through travel to the capitals of Continental Europe— mountaineering emerged as a sporting pursuit in the mid-nineteenth century.53 Established by and for genteel, aristocratic European men, mountain climbing served as a means to display wealth and physical prowess through dangerous leisure activity.54 Mountaineering first became competitive in the Alps, where climbers jostled to be the first to ascend the range’s most dramatic peaks. At the height of British international power alpinism captured the essence of colonial masculinity and rapidly became popular in European colonies around the world: in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Southern Alps (New Zealand). Not only the British, but French and German colonialists, extended the Age of

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Exploration by attempting ever higher, ever more precarious mountain heights. The zeal for mountaineering caught on quickly in North America, where there were hundreds, if not thousands, of alpine peaks waiting to be conquered. In each of the world’s mountainous regions, mountain climbers (as well as the hikers, backpackers, and campers who followed in their tracks) ventured into alpine landscapes within a particularly colonial concept of territoriality: mountain ranges were conceptualized as physical challenges—not as homelands, watersheds, or places of origin. Verticality and remoteness were nature’s means of measuring power. The role of romantic soteriology as a driving force of these recreational conquests can hardly be overstated. The ethic of personal transformation through ascent typifies numerous forms of contemporary spirituality, though it is perhaps nowhere more clearly evident than in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to set aside and protect America’s most profound mountain landscapes. The generation of mountain enthusiasts that had grown up with romantic idols—with John Ruskin, Leslie Stephens, and John Muir as its exemplars— strongly emphasized that the “physical experience [of climbing] yielded the truth.”55 Late nineteenth-century nature writers frequently focus on mountains as the axis around which the experience of transcendental revelation turns. As the preservationist strain of American environmentalism took shape around the formation of a robust system of national parks, the protection of mountain landscapes was at the center of the endeavor to reserve untrammeled nature for the pleasure and well-being of the nation. Of the twenty-seven parks established before the Second World War, seventeen enshrined a mountain or mountain range. The rhetoric deployed around the establishment of Mount Rainier National Park in 1899 is paradigmatic. Park boosters publicly “admired Mount Rainier most for what it did to the men and women who tried to scale it. It made them better people.”56 Local preservationists, the leadership of the Mountaineers Club in particular, sought to “spread what John Muir called the ‘glacier gospel’—the secular faith that nature appreciation

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humbled and improved the human spirit.”57 Insofar as the history of land conservation in the Anglophone world has been premised on the possibility of such recreational pursuits—the spiritual refashioning of persons through bodily activity in the outdoors—the mountain has long stood as an essential fixture, a precondition for the elevation of the human spirit. Recreationist writings relied heavily on concepts of healing, solace, and purification. Muir’s exhortation to let “Nature’s peace . . . flow into you as sunshine flows into trees” and his assurance that “the winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves” became guiding principles of the generation.58

the spirit of the mountains From the 1870s, when Yellowstone National Park was first placed under federal protection for its aesthetic value, to the 1930s, when the vastly expanded national parks and national forest lands were radically transformed by the labors of the Civilian Conservation Corps, recreational groups celebrated the mountain landscapes of the American West as “playgrounds” for a growing leisure class. Most organizations established publications to document their achievements, to promote their outings, and to express their fondness for nature in poetry and prose. The era was marked by publications devoted to nature: most regional recreational organizations published annual or semiannual journals with modestly successful circulation numbers (e.g., the Sierra Club Bulletin; the Mountaineer; and High Spots, the journal of the Adirondack Mountain Club) and national magazines like Overland Monthly, Forest and Stream, and Garden and Forest were at the peak of their popularity.59 Outdoor enthusiasts used the pages of these journals to claim that unpeopled landscapes— especially mountains and alpine forests—were essential spaces for a particular form of sacred experience. This proclamation that national parks and national forests were sacred, transformative spaces was sometimes explicit and sometimes

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implicit, though it always rested on two interlocking ideas. The first of these was the idea that mountain and forest landscapes were endowed with their own intrinsic power to affect the lives of humans wandering among them. Utilizing the ornate rhetoric of the period, nature enthusiasts offered images of mountain heights heavily brocaded with allusions to Christian and Hellenistic sources, positing recreational spaces in richly imaginative terms meant to emphasize their power and potency. Nature worshippers rarely expressed twinges of anxiety about their pantheist leanings. The second core idea of the period’s recreational literature was the view that recreationists were initiates to the sacred order of nature. Textual presentations of outdoor exploits describe how experiences of divinity in nature could be enhanced and improved by proper technique. In retrospect these techniques appear quite similar to contemporary claims about spirituality: keeping an open heart and an open mind was seen as essential for absorbing the more profound benefits of the outdoors, but so were more mundane practices, like using the right equipment, possessing good woodcraft skills, traveling light, and choosing the right companions. Although the founders and early leaders of prominent conservation clubs almost unerringly remained committed Christians, their writings often deployed an extended analogy between mountains and gods.60 At times flirting with idolatry, this analogy asserted the superhuman power of mountains to call out the human soul to join it in a primordial celebration of creation itself. A fitting example is provided in the first essay of the Mountaineer: “These mighty sentinels of rock and ice become to us living beings, primeval deities, gods of the elemental world, each of whom we might imagine to join in the sublime song of the Earth-spirit in Faust, which Goethe imagines to sing: ‘Thus at Time’s humming loom / ’tis my hand prepares / The garment of light that the / Deity wears.’”61 Calling Mount Rainier “his Parnassus,” longtime Mountaineers Club president Edmond S. Meany attributed his poetic inspiration to the alpine ecstasies of The Mountain That was God.62 Sierra Club and Mountaineers Club publications were dotted with references to the

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“spirit of the mountains,” referring to experiences of mountains as anthropomorphized agents that inspired, but also overwhelmed and dominated, their human visitors: “Every mountaineer who has caught the spirit of the mountain knows when the mountain looks him straight in the eye. The peak lies vaguely cold and distant, passive and unconcerned, when he approaches it from the bulging back, or sweeping sides. But if he steps into the shadow of its front, he can feel the massive head look him over, he can feel its breath, hear its rumbling throat, and sense its inherent power.”63 Nature writers espoused the superhuman presence of mountains in several ways, primarily treating mountains as teachers and sites of great learning. Such a view can be traced back to Emerson’s quip that students (at Williams College) should “print the names of these [Berkshire] mountains in the college catalogue with the members of the faculty.”64 Mountains served as teachers and mentors in a world hungry for guidance, and although the lessons they taught never seemed to follow any careful curriculum, they demanded the same authority over knowledge, as did the “high places” of the scriptures. The mountains with their “untrodden solitudes and spiry summits have much to teach the inquiring spirit. ‘Faith has still its Olivet and love its Galilee.’ Again and again the soul of every man and woman stood at salute before scenes of wild, incredible beauty and immensity. The ‘sound of streams that seek the sea’ gave praise to Him who holdeth all in the hollow of his hand.”65 Twentieth-century recreationists used religious sources in much the same fashion as their transcendentalist predecessors had: with a preference for personal over historical revelation. Spiritual experiences of mountains, as well as of other dramatic landscapes, required powerful symbolic frames to achieve full expression, and biblical scriptures were replete with effective, evocative imagery available for redeployment. For example, in the above passage, the powerful symbol provided by the Mount of Olives is decoupled from the historical presence of the Son of God, and instead, the “hills” of the Bible become allegorical representations of “high places” where the weary soul can “lift up” its eyes to gain spiritual strength from the profound teaching of mountains themselves.

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This transposition underscores the complex relationship between contemporary spiritual practices and traditional theological positions: soteriological discourse became symbolically, rather than historically, related to the incarnation of God in man. One of the chief lessons taught by mountains was “spiritual strength,” a category that derived from muscular Christian sources and that animated much of the emergent nature-based spirituality of early twentieth-century America.66 The fluidity and flexibility of religious language in recreational publications meant that clashes between theological traditionalism and anthropomorphic conceptualization of mountains were few and far between. Publications by early environmental groups were characterized by an easygoing synthesis of theism, naturalism, and pagan flourishes, as when one author imagined the mountain climber as a religious supplicant who “bows to the earth and involuntarily communes with the immortal and the invincible. One wishes that he might take the wings of the morning and fly from peak to peak and build a shrine on each with the first beams of the sun. But poor slow creatures that we are, we must slowly and painfully climb, step by step. But it is well. We touch the sacred heights with our feet, and Antaeus-like draw their might at every step.”67 The presence of a singular sacred power is evident in the phrase “the immortal and the invincible,” but this power permeates the world not just through the pages of revealed truth but in particular spaces, the “sacred heights” of spiritual power. Mountain lovers were especially eager to communicate the fact that geological greatness transcended human history. Especially along the Pacific Coast, where the long chain of volcanic peaks served as sacred embodiments of eternity and otherworldliness standing eerily above the cities below: “What Milton is to poets, what Webster is to orators, what Wagner is to musicians, what Hannibal is to warriors, what St. Peter’s is to churches, what the Columbia is to rivers, what Sirius is to the stars—such is our great king-peak to mountains, the symbol of all that is majestic, elemental, mysterious, sublime.”68 In the western states, Mount Rainier was reverentially called the “king-peak,” but Mount Shasta, Mount Baker,

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Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and many other large iconic peaks were similarly revered by the communities that found their slopes ideal playgrounds. Gilded Age and Progressive Era conservation centered on the interests of the urban middle classes. Resource conservation protected their economic status, and guaranteed access to recreational opportunities ensured their spiritual well-being; so state and federal governments responded by creating public lands management bureaucracies to serve these interests. Public conservation of parks and forests was often at odds with other public interests (mining, grazing, etc.) but was especially antagonistic to the interests of Native Americans. Throughout the nineteenth century the political and territorial domain afforded to Native Americans was increasingly restricted by the reservation system overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (originally established in 1824 as part of the War Department). The reservation system regulated the lands available to American Indians, the General Land Office (now the Bureau of Land Management) regulated corporate access to federal lands, and a variety of federal agencies regulated recreational and aesthetic sites (the National Park Service, the Forest Service, etc.). In the scramble to capitalize on the abundance of natural resources in the western states, these regulatory agendas came into intense conflict. The interests of Native American stakeholders were almost always undermined by corporate and conservationist concerns, and, as the conservation movement grew stronger, it exerted profound pressure on Native American communities.69 Driven by the recreational enthusiasm of a burgeoning urban middle class in ever more populous western states, huge tracts of land were preserved under the nomenclature of “uninhabited wilderness.” Most, if not all, of the national parks were part of the traditional territory of local tribes. The enjoyment of these territories—as sacred sites, as grazing ranges, as summer gathering grounds, etc.—declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only as “the result of policies to keep Indians away from these areas.”70 Between the establishment of

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Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the neighboring Grand Teton National Park in 1929, the rapid expansion of the parks system regularly involved efforts to forcibly remove indigenous residents from the newly protected federal lands.71 David Mark Spence has documented the production of “separate islands” across the American West, a process in which Native American inhabitants were dispossessed of their holdings in and around public lands intended as “playground[s].”72 During the Great Depression the federal government became much more heavily involved with the strict regulation of its protected landholdings. With an eye to economic interests the National Forest Service and National Park Service eagerly prosecuted traditional Native American land-tenure practices. Hunting became poaching, gathering fruits and herbs became trespassing, and many tribal efforts toward economic development were stymied in the name of conservation.73 Even as the politics of land conservation intensified the territorial displacement and economic marginalization of native peoples, American environmental discourse was absorbing the idea that American Indian cultures were environmentally benign and worthy of emulation. Appropriation of supposed native rituals and iconography were frequently included in recreational practices: campfire programs, woodcraft handbooks, and other hallmarks of recreational associations were commonly styled as being based on Indian lore.74 Progressive Era environmental thought, much as today, had the capacity to absorb tremendous internal discord and to subvert its injustices as necessary for the greater good. Recreationist authors developed a genre capable of moving fluidly back and forth between a mythical rhetoric of heroes, demigods, and supernatural creatures and a Christian rhetoric characterized by a commitment to the core elements of natural theology, that nature could be read as a book supporting a theology of a creator God uniquely interested in reconciling humans to himself. Mountains played a special role in facilitating the spirituality necessary to such reconciliation, especially because of the way that mountain landscapes fostered an appreciation of sacred time. Human history deposited thin layers of meaning on the

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inherent majesty of the “king-peaks,” and the true believer in the “spirit of the mountains” is able to grasp the truth of each historical layer. We can imagine how the divine vision of the nature enthusiast identifies this residue of sacred history in the forest glade or mountain meadow from a 1917 edition of the Mountaineer: Though the days when the little people roved unmolested through the forests and up the mountainsides, have receded far into the dim and romantic past, the fairy spell of the forest glades has never disappeared. It beckons from the topmost peaks, it is abroad in the green woodland, it sparkles from the frozen hillsides, the lure so insistent that few mortals can resist it. Over the centuries that fairy glamour has endured, to invest the soul of the hardy hiker . . . imbued with the divine unrest, early or late, on long trips or short, to attain that serenity of spirit that the wee folk seem to have possessed and that only the great outdoors can yield.75

People in ages past would also have found sacred meaning in the frozen hillsides and forest glades, and this message remains accessible to modern Americans willing to step outside urbane conventionality. Mountains and forests were sacred sites that enabled special access to the primordial meaning of the cosmos, with the outdoor-loving soul “scarcely [recognizing its] absorption into his spirit.”76 This deeper meaning was sometimes too profound for verbal expression but sometimes also looked very much like enthusiastic Protestantism.77 At the threshold of the twentieth century, liberal Protestant circles were enamored of the idea that religious differences were cultural superficialities and that below the surface lay a subterranean universality that encompassed all forms of spirituality.78 Proponents of this view argued that Protestantism, as the highest form of religious evolution, directly expressed the universal truth of religion generally, which could be found, though perhaps obscured, in all the “religions of the world.”79 This sentiment is likely the basis for the untroubled ease with which nature writers synthesized Christian sources with folk imagery and Greek myth. Publications that sang the praises of rapturous experiences in the outdoors were more than merely romantic: essays and articles in this genre

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celebrated recreation not as the authentic core of religion itself but as part of a genuinely religious labor that included producing, managing, and sharing those experiences in a community of like-minded individuals. Nature writers of this era were generally quite well educated, familiar with the essentials of Christian theology, conversant in Greek and Roman mythology, as well as Native American culture, and, given their affinity for transcendentalism, often had at least a peripheral familiarity with metaphysical traditions.80 Early twentieth-century nature spirituality was anchored by a space for publications that moved with considerable freedom among each of these religious vocabularies, never straying far from an essentially Protestant framework. From the perspective of mainstream Christianity at the turn of the century, the pagan religions of Greece and Rome were less highly evolved than Christianity but still expressed fundamental religious truths in a rougher, more germinal form. And though such “primitive” religious concepts were cruder than their modern-day counterparts, they were for many Americans quite appealing in their simplicity and purity. Syncretism ruled the day, though religious borrowing was largely confined to stylistic matters. Forests and mountains made for effective sites of religious reformulation because they invoked primordial and primeval ideas and imagery, which were critical as antidotes to the overwhelming effect of contemporary social life and the oppressiveness of religious conformism. The literary deployment of “faeries,” narratives of mythic heroes, and the reference to the archaic forces of “nature-gods” helped recreationists to frame experiences of nature as penetrations beyond the ordinary routines of everyday life into a realm of primeval beauty and truth. Rhetoric about the primal impulse of the human spirit to journey among mountain wildernesses was ubiquitous: “One knows then the glory of the mountaineer, the unappeasable thirst for quaffing from the fountains of grandeur amid the eternal solitudes, the fierce wanderlust of the primeval heart, the gypsy craving for the outdoors, the restless impulse to cast off conventionalities and become a part of those volcanic forces, those thunder gods, that smote the original chaos into form.”81 The

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affection for sacred mountains that inspired so many essayists could not be captured by an exclusively Christian vocabulary because, as devotees claimed, their meaning transcended the limits of revealed truth. The appeal to mythical rhetoric bolstered the claim that “the spirit of the mountains” was not at the periphery of religion but at its primordial core. A commitment to the sacred power of natural landscapes could be most forcefully expressed if it was grounded in a religious truth that held across all cultural and historical contexts. The salvific power of nature entered the American consciousness by way of Christianity, but its celebrants also asserted that pre-Christian religious forms were parallel to their own. Again and again nature writers return to the image of the Psalmist, who “lifts up” his “eyes to the hills” in the first Song of Ascent. For the nature lovers who prefigured the contemporary environmental movement, this verse neatly expressed the turn away from the bustle and distraction of civilization toward the solace and sublimity of the mountains. It is interesting that the Psalmist, much like the professional, urbane members of outdoor recreation organizations, lives at the base of the mountains, presumably in the valley—agricultural, urban, and civilized. Devotion to nature was grounded on the idea that mountains and forests were sacred places set aside from civilization and its attendant ills. Protection of these places was doubly providential: God made mountains as remote fastnesses, and the American continent was especially wealthy in this spiritual resource. A common convention among recreational publications was a reflection on the spiritual well-being achieved while traveling in remote landscapes: “I had a vacation fit for a king. It was a golden parenthesis of leisure from motorcycles, circulating libraries, bill-collectors, and daily newspapers. The sights and sounds of ‘snivelization’ became a hazy reminiscence. I laughed in the face of the clock and jested with schedules. I crawled out of the rushing current of life’s employment and sat on the bank of complete rest and sunned my soul.”82 The comical tone of this passage ought not encourage the reader to dismiss the strong duality between cultural and natural spaces. Cut

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off from the corrupting forces of the city by “dense forests, the craggy and irregular ridges . . . and the almost perpendicular declivities” that “guard [alpine meadows] as a sacred shrine,” outdoor enthusiasts were eager to capture the salvific benefits of the wilderness experience.83 The stark division between the soothing, purifying effects of nature and the artificiality of the city was a consistent theme in recreationist literatures, which regularly featured accounts of club outings. For instance, this tension appears vividly, in the description of the Mountaineers’ annual outing of 1916, “a soul stirring experience” that had freed participants “from the artificialities of life in the world of work.” Campers celebrated the opportunity to sleep under the open skies, the gypsies of the mountain-sides, learn the lessons of the deep silences, and feel the purifying breath of the winds from off the mountain tops. No one who has felt these things can ever be the same again. He has gained that magic something, perhaps he’s touched with the fairy spell, that makes him forever long to return once more to the high places. At intervals he must go back to feel again the wide free air, and to catch again that fleeting vision of the meaning of life and the Infinite that seems to come to him who holds the communion of the hills.84

Crossing over the threshold between the city and the mountains “magically” touches the soul of the nature lover, furnishing a mystical comfort in “the meaning of life” that beckons devotees into the hills again and again. In these texts city life is synonymous with anxiety, which can only be cured with the “thorough rest” of time spent in the outdoors. Urban anxieties in the early twentieth century were particularly acute in the American West, where decades of perpetual transformation and an uncertain future characterized “a region in flux, with high social mobility, heavy immigration, and rapidly changing social and economic patterns.”85 The outdoors afforded a refuge for those who wanted to set themselves at a remove, if temporarily, from the turbulence of an era of incredibly rapid social and technological transformation, but this escapist desire was frequently attended by racist, sexist, and nationalist undertones.

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Nationwide, pressures on the middle class were mounting in the form of “disruptions to the fragile social and political order of the late nineteenth century: gathering pressures for the emancipation of women, racial strife in America, class unrest, rebellions against colonial rule.”86 During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era these changes provoked deep worries about the morally corrosive effects of cities and emasculating influences of urban life. American nature writers were especially attentive to these problems, as essayists, journalists, city planners, and poets wondered aloud how modern societies might overcome their docility and decadence. The manly virtues infused into recreationist discourse by its affinity with muscular Christianity underwrote a variety of bodily practices designed to repudiate the effete tendencies of white urban men and to naturalize heterosexual virility. This sentiment is explicit in Thoreau’s question, “Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?”87 To reside exclusively in the wilderness was to be a savage, but perhaps worse still, to live exclusively in the city was to be decadent. University of Washington president Henry Suzallo powerfully captured this latter sentiment when he exhorted Mountaineer Club members to “give us annual example! The hordes of men below you are still too occupied with the tasks of tilling, making, buying and selling to follow you now. But your song of mountains is in their ears. They are succumbing. Someday they will follow you into the glory of mountains, never again to return as they were.”88 It is not surprising that the worries about urbanization were particularly troublesome to the burgeoning professional class of doctors, teachers, and lawyers in western cities: the desire to separate oneself from the “hordes of men below” is not a desire to renounce society but to secure one’s own place among its upper echelons. Recreationist accounts regularly featured hierarchical images of the social order, in which spiritual insight, bodily vigor, and social power accrued to those persons who occupied the pinnacle, a physical and metaphorical space that linked nature enthusiasm with cultural privilege. Aristides

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Phoutrides, professor of Classics at Yale and a prominent member of the Sierra Club, put this to a point when he promised that mountains “reward their worshippers with strength and light and beauty. . . . May you long remain true devotees in their most lovely mysteries; and may your eyes be turned from all the mire of the lowlands.”89 Because “only some in each swift hurry-crowd”90 are drawn away from the bustle of the city into the charm of the mountains, the salvific power of mountains is highly selective. Only the elect few called by the “song of mountains” are able to extract themselves from the noise, confusion, and banality of life in the modern city. The anxiety that characterized attitudes toward nature in the opening years of the twentieth century was not exclusively about the corruption and ills of city life. It was also concerned with the closing of the frontier, which meant that, as Roderick F. Nash puts it, “Americans of the late nineteenth century realized that many of the forces that had shaped their national character were disappearing.”91 Nostalgia for the perceived heartiness and independence of the pioneer prompted a major revision in literary treatments of nature. For the better part of the nineteenth century nature had been the adversary of the frontiersman, but in retrospect this adversarial relationship seemed a key factor in the greatness of the American project. In other words “the villain, it appeared, was as vital to the play as the hero, and, in view of the admirable qualities that contact with wilderness were thought to have produced, perhaps not so villainous as had been supposed.”92 With nature no longer popularly conceived as a villain, writers across the country turned to nature with a new enthusiasm for its ability to cultivate and channel the raw strength and vitality lying dormant in urban Americans. This literary turn—or perhaps return—to nature was a contrived tactic to reinvigorate the American virtues of individualism, honesty, perseverance, and the conjoined nobility and brutality of the pioneer.93 From a literary perspective, this turn to nature as the necessary antidote to the corrupting and emasculating forces of urban life often focused

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on mountain heights as places where experiences of natural danger were still available. As the twentieth century unfolded, recreational pursuits became ever more daring, and groups like the Sierra Club, the Mountaineers, and the Mazamas organized increasingly ambitious climbing expeditions to satisfy impulses for adventure and excitement. Mountain climbing offered the ideal recreational vehicle for managing the anxieties of modern life: “If temporary, surprise and anxiety can be pleasant as long as we have ultimate control. . . . Adults, seek pleasurable stress— ‘eustress’—the happiness that comes from overcoming fear in risky sports like mountain climbing. Risk should be differentiated from danger. Experienced climbers abhor danger while welcoming risk, because risk presents difficulties that can be estimated and controlled.”94 The terms challenge, risk, and danger thoroughly populate the pages of recreationist literatures. This is evident in Muir’s well-known account of climbing Mount Rainier in 1909 and afforded a ready-made narrative in which overcoming obstacles and achieving a vision of energy and purity from above were fundamental elements. The leader of a Mountaineers Club expedition to climb Mount Rainier in 1934 employed precisely these terms: “Mountaineers who have lived and breathed under the shadow of Rainier’s front have accepted its final challenge. . . . The mountain, however, would not face us alone, and threw us back down its sides in a driving blizzard. Two months later, with greater determination, with yet greater determination, we approached the mountain again, hoping at least for an even break in the contest. . . . At last we had come to the first of the three thrilling moments in a climbers [sic] day—coming to grips with the mountain.” The author goes on to describe virgin peaks as “an open challenge. If accepted by the climber, a struggle on even footing ensues, provided the mountain does not enlist the services of the weather-gods. . . . After the battle, the conquered peak still rears its head unbowed.”95 Religious rhetoric effectively frames mountaineering as a recapitulation of the struggle between humans and nature in miniature. The triumph of reaching the summit of a mountain represents a victory over human alienation from nature—at the summit the successful

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mountain climber finds himself at home in the world. The powerful modes of experience available through climbing, backpacking, and other intensive recreational activities were almost universally framed as individual struggles against the forces of nature, but narratives of this kind were not developed in antagonism to raw nature. Rather, the dangers posed by mountain landscapes were wondrous, providential forces uniquely suited to keep modern individuals spiritually attuned in an age of social banality and urban depravity. Writing about mountains in religious terms asserted the necessity of undeveloped landscapes in facilitating spiritual liberation—what many outdoor enthusiasts came to call the “freedom of the hills.”96

the road to nature The early twentieth-century emphasis on natural landscapes as spaces for spiritual sojourns was not confined to pedestrian recreations like climbing and hiking. As national parks and national forests were expanded and as their overseers became powerful federal agencies in their own right, automobiles became a key conduit for experiencing the spiritual dimensions of nature. This sentiment is expressed clearly in a brochure from the 1920s claiming that driving in national parks was not just “a joy ride, but a pilgrimage for the devotees of nature . . . a spiritual experience—nothing less.”97 At such a moment in American history, and perhaps today as well, the line between tourism and pilgrimage, between recreation and religion, was impossibly blurry. During the 1920s and 1930s automobiles became more common and radically reshaped public access to undeveloped landscapes, and the rhetoric of tourism and pilgrimage fused in the commonplace assertion that roads perfected recreational lands. By making public lands available to the appreciative gaze of outdoor enthusiasts, automobiles democratized the spiritual goods that outdoor enthusiasts had been lauding for decades. Faith in the capacity of roadways and automotive infrastructure to complete nature was inscribed in

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landscapes across the nation.98 Tracing these inscriptions demonstrates the seemingly paradoxical connection between nature and machines, a connection that animates the middle ground between the sacred and the profane, between pilgrimage and tourism. The ease with which wilderness areas were developed into automobile-friendly landscapes was a product of the Progressive Era’s commitment to the romantic interpretation of landscapes as scenic narratives.99 Movement through space, according to the reigning Olmsteadian ideal, provided access to an unfolding of the “artistic compositions of the picturesque and sublime.”100 The same organizations and publications that championed vigorous forms of outdoor recreation readily adapted to automotive travel as an alternative method of entering a deeper communion with nature. Automobiles made access to federally protected landscapes much easier, and the result was a cult of car travel appropriately described as a kind of pilgrimage. In fact, sites for automotive recreation—car camps, skyline drives, vista points, etc.—became chief symbols of the belief that urban life could be harmonized with bucolic settings. The language that recreational enthusiasts employed in elaborating this vision of the American environment continued to draw heavily on religious vocabularies, lending shape to new forms of devotion and spirituality. The nationwide parks and preservation movement intensified in the decades after the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, and by 1929, when the Great Depression became the primary driver of American political life, the federal government had created nineteen national parks, ninety-eight national forests, and thirty-five national monuments.101 This massive reshaping of federal land jurisdiction was reinforced by reciprocal actions on the part of state governments and coincided with massive public investment in infrastructure for automotive transportation. The development of roadways dramatically expanded the audience for a spiritually redemptive interpretation of nature, especially in the western states, where the preponderance of protected lands were located. These developments in American land use proved potent forces. According to David Louter, “when thrown together in National Parks, primeval

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nature and modern technology could even elicit reactions of wonder that bordered on the spiritual.”102 As early as 1912, in an article titled “Glaciers and Gasoline,” publications like Sunset brandished religious rhetoric of nature spirituality (e.g., “a deep cathedral wood,” “heavy with silence, as of prayer”).103 Journalists echoed the idea that touring natural wonders by car was a kind of pilgrimage, and, seizing on the popularity of the “See America First” movement, they described the potential of natural landscapes to transform the spirit of vehicular America.104 Pilgrimage is a conceptually fraught category.105 For some scholars of religion, it is a highly specific term designating only those ritualized journeys that draw on a collectively recognized set of symbols in order to produce a renewed sense of “communitas.”106 For others it offers a flexible terminology for describing the sacred objective at the heart of many forms of travel.107 In either case, pilgrimage is a kind of social activity that conjoins religious fervor with economic opportunism and locates sacred sites in the context of marketable goods. Pilgrimage practices manifest “a range of aspirations and individual needs for therapy of the spirit and the body, a collective goal on which a set of media, run by a more or less well-organized structure, constantly focus the attention of the devotees and pilgrims.”108 The pursuit of spiritual solace in the outdoors was greatly aided by the rise of automobile travel, and over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the road trip joined the class of travels in pursuit of a sacred end, alongside Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road and John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. In understanding how nature spirituality was physically inculcated, it is helpful to take the automobile as one of the most powerful reagents in the construction of modern outdoor recreation. Despite the emphasis on hiking and mountain climbing, pilgrimages to natural sites were as much about scenery and vision as they were about bodily praxis. Recreational practices in the late twentieth century had long been intimately associated with automobile touring.109 Automobile tourism is perhaps the single most important cultural modus operandi through which the conservation and preservation movements, the various

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strands of American nature religion, and middle-class recreational pursuits were channeled together.110 David Louter’s provocative phrase captures this synthesis perfectly. He describes automobile tourism as “knowing nature through machines,” a phrase that captures the importance of the automobile as an enabling and mediating technology. As he puts it, “autos and highways have made it possible to think of national parks—to understand their meaning—not as wild places reserved from progress but known because of it.”111 Thinking through the history of nature as a space most appropriately experienced by automobile reveals the conjugation of American desires for the “primordial” and the ritualistic patterns of behavior that contextualize this desire. During the mid to late 1920s Harriet Geithmann, an officer of the Mountaineers and frequent participant in club outings, wrote a series of articles about the pleasures of car touring in the American West, celebrating that people of all classes have “taken up the sport of crosscountry motoring with divine enthusiasm” and lauding “the pioneers of today, these motoring gypsies.”112 After publishing articles in Sunset, Outdoor Recreation, the Seattle Times, and World Traveler, Geithmann entered the employ of the Buick Motor Company and wrote extensively on the culture of auto camps and the joys of rambling through scenic landscapes by car. She utilized the language of pilgrimage to accentuate a sentiment of spiritual meaning shared by campers and motorists.113 Geithmann’s writing typifies an era in which the pilgrimage trope provided the standard frame for tours of the nation’s most prized landscapes. This trope is sometimes opaque: “the automobile . . . has made these trans-continental pilgrimages possible for the world and his family” or “these trans-continental pilgrims hail from every state of the Union.”114 But the rhetoric of pilgrimage is not applied as a mere superficial label. Summarizing the national impetus to travel the West by car, Geithmann linked automobile travel to the same pioneer experience that outdoor recreationists had been applauding for decades: “Call them what you will, trippers, tourists, travelers, drifters, overland motorists, vacationists, ‘sagebrushers,’ pilgrims, motor wanderers, rovers, vaga-

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bonds or gypsies, you will find after interviewing a few thousand of them that they are but average men and women even as you and I. We are all gypsies at heart with wanderlust playing hide and go seek in our blood. Most of them are focusing on all points west of the Rockies. The old, old urge of ‘Westward Ho’ is dancing in their corpuscles.”115 This rich passage locates automobile tourism in a western landscape animated by the rugged individualism and democratic spirit of the pioneers. Her claim that “average men and women” are compelled by a “gypsy” wanderlust intimately associated with Manifest Destiny is a striking exposition of the belief that traveling through nature’s grandeur was an almost genetic calling for Americans. Geithmann identifies the importance of acquiring souvenirs throughout a motorist’s travels. Somewhat disparagingly, she watches tourists “get a tag or sticker on their windshield to show off to the home folks at the end of the trip.”116 Coupled with the importance of photography in automobile culture, this “action of taking home a [memento to give] . . . an assurance of proximity” makes the categorization “pilgrimage” all the more compelling. Automobile travelers “pay homage to forests, flowers, and glaciers” and in so doing hope for renewed health and respite from their workaday worries.117 Recreational ventures made possible by automobiles were treated as very much in line with previous strands of nature spirituality, resting on the faith that by “driving into nature’s wonders, Americans would find sustenance for the soul and physical wellbeing.”118 Despite the fact that it was a modern mechanical contraption, the car was a technology that resonated with deep currents of the American psyche. The wanderlust that fueled the expansion of roads and automotive infrastructure ran parallel to the same impulses that compelled individuals to climb mountains and hike lengthy trails; as Emerson put it, Americans “wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”119 Valuing change over immutability and movement over stasis has long been a cultural characteristic of the United States and points to the values that animated the growth of car culture. The road trip, a cultural artifact rooted in these early

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automotive pilgrimages, ceased on the journey rather than on the return, as the telos that bestowed growth. Much as with hiking and camping, travel by car through scenic landscapes was treated as transformative in and of itself. The impact of automobiles on American recreational practice was the displacement of embodied practice in favor of an almost purely visual experience of nature and landscape. That traveling through parks and forests in cars was widely popular as a way to lift one’s spirits and refresh one’s soul was not lost on park planners. Public officials worked to maximize the benefits of automotive recreation by incorporating them into their long-range strategies. Planners designed recreational areas as places “where one could find refuge and solitude from modern life; [and] . . . where a person could visualize and sense America’s frontier past.”120 From the earliest years of the twentieth century, when cars began to carry outdoor enthusiasts beyond the confines of the city, public administrators, business interests, and recreationists both cooperated and struggled to develop roadways to structure the intimate relationship between automobiles and nature. Before wilderness came to designate the management of roadless areas, preservationists generally conceived of road development as a completion of nature’s splendor. Scenery had little value if it were not publicly visible, so public infrastructure was widely seen as necessary to fostering the values and practices lauded by nature enthusiasts. Even John Muir, the vociferous champion of wild places, “embraced the automobile as a way to expand the political support for parks,”121 and his preservationist brethren believed that modern transportation technologies were an important part of parks development. Much as Emerson had a century before celebrated the train as the vehicle for America’s great reconciliation with nature, the visionaries who developed national parks and public lands insisted on the transformative power of cars. At the dawn of the automobile age automobiles provided a “new way of knowing” nature that “did not necessarily signal the destruction of nature, but the beginning of something promising.”122

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This “something promising” was a utopian ideal that imagined a harmonious resolution to the tension between an expanding industrial economy and the spiritual solace provided by the outdoors. The decades in which automobiles so radically transformed American natural landscapes were years of “suburbanization, resource use and a consumer economy, higher education and greater leisure time, rising interest in outdoor recreation—forests, parks, and wilderness—and a growing awareness that these and other natural areas were not just America’s playgrounds but were also essential elements in one’s quality of life.”123 The pressing question for nature enthusiasts of this era concerned how the transformative powers of nature could be integrated with the built environment to create an appropriate counterbalance to the landscapes of industrial capitalism. Ironically, roads were the means out of the landscape of industrial society. A paradigmatic example of how road building was intended to establish harmony between nature and industry was the infrastructure linking Mount Rainier National Park with the urban areas of the Puget Sound region: “Urban patrons considered the mountain a symbol of their region’s and cities’ scenic beauty and a source of tourist revenue. They also thought of the park in terms of their new mobility. The automobile not only brought the park closer to them physically; it also altered how they thought of it conceptually. Their road proposals suggest that they interpreted the park within the context of the nation’s urban industrial order, an order in which business and nature preservation coexisted.124 Mount Rainier had for many years served as a symbol of the burgeoning Pacific Northwest. Specifically, the mountain symbolized a conjunction between an emerging natural resources economy and an aesthetically pleasing natural landscape. Seattle and Tacoma had for years squabbled about the name of the mountain (Seattle wanted to keep the name Rainier; Tacoma wanted to employ the Native name Tahoma) because city leaders believed that whichever city was most closely associated with “The Mountain That Was God” would become the region’s magnet economy.125 Ultimately, this was a struggle between boosters in the Puget Sound region to

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monopolize the mountain as a symbol that could “package the Pacific Northwest as a place that offered an exceptional quality of life.”126 Mount Rainier symbolized a prosperous, healthful modern lifestyle in which nature was intimately woven into the built environment through a network of roads and railways. Protected natural environments, like Mount Rainier, were not “isolated from the influence of modern life and inventions like the automobile, but [were] there because of such inventions— growing more connected all the time to urban areas through roads and automobiles.”127 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, efforts to expand the connections between cities and wilderness environments continued apace, helping more and more devotees reach their shrines by car. The particular marriage of wilderness preservation and automotive pilgrimage took shape not just through road building and tourism campaigns (e.g., See America First) but through a careful management of the aesthetic experience of car travel. Park planners and wilderness groups cooperated in efforts to preserve roadside timber so that drivers on their way to recreational destinations would not directly encounter the massive deforestation that characterized the era. The social and commercial elite in large western cities, whose ranks also largely corresponded with membership of recreational organizations, were primarily responsible for the successful protection of scenic beauty alongside the roads and highways leading to national parks.128 Echoing the sentiments of nature enthusiasts and making an argument in direct confl ict with the standing economic order, regional boosters claimed that the natural landscapes were more valuable as sites for scenic tourism than they were as commodities for extractive industries. To this end it was imperative for those parties interested in the preservation of natural treasures to work together with timber barons, politicians, and automobile enthusiasts to enhance the system of roads connecting the national parks and forests with nearby cities and to ensure that these roads were bordered by stands of virgin timber, not clear-cuts. The mobilization of political support and financial resources to these ends were “products of the automobile revolution” developed in

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conjunction with similar efforts to “regulate roadside billboards . . . to protect wild flowers and shrubs from hordes of newly mobile bouquet gatherers . . . and to prevent electricity, telephone, and telegraph companies from mutilating trees along roads.”129 The leadership of preservationist organizations frequently overlapped with that of tourism promotion groups and recreational organizations. For instance, Asahel Curtis, one of the founding members of the Mountaineers Club and brother to the famous photographer Edward Curtis, was simultaneously a board member of such influential organizations as the Rainier National Park Joint Committee, the National Parks Association, and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.130 The conceptual proximity of environmental preservation, economic utilitarianism, and enthusiasm for outdoor recreation is evident in a remark made by one of Curtis’s colleagues in the National Parks Association, Madison Grant: Let me plead with you to [protect roadside timber in Washington State] on a big scale. If you spend . . . now you will receive a great deal for it; if you postpone it you will save very little for it. If you do now you will have almost the only spot on earth that is unspoiled; and can keep one portion of this land of ours in a condition fit to live in, fit to fight for, and which will show to those that come after us part of the beauty that nature has lavished upon us.131

A similar sentiment was expressed by one of the group’s allies in the Washington State legislature: “we of the Northwest are just beginning to realize the value of our natural resources in climate and scenic beauty, and if we are to reap . . . full value from the tourist trade there has to be got money used in preserving scenic spots of timber along the highways.”132 The core argument for setting aside public lands for recreational enjoyment and protecting them from economic overuse relied on an appeal to commercial sensibilities: “the advocates of parks and parkways were building for the future, and through bonds future residents . . . were being asked to help pay for the benefits they would enjoy.”133 These sentiments are noteworthy because they cannot be

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reduced to raw economic utility; instead, they were part of an aesthetic ideology that emphasized the value and meaning of nature as seen from the windows of an automobile. This value was, of course, in part the commercial value of tourism, but the very possibility of a recreational industry rested on the intrinsic capacity of natural landscapes to move viewers. Nature was a visual resource, scenery translated into economic value because of its spiritual significance. Efforts to promote and develop nature-oriented tourism worked against the notion that protected wildernesses were “simply land set aside . . . and designated as ‘unusable,’ and argued instead that automotive tourism through the scenic landscapes of the American West were valuable as sources of ‘unrivaled experience,’ scientific knowledge, and inspiration.”134 In coupling these two kinds of value, economic and spiritual, in their case for the protection and development of scenic roadways, advocates of nature pilgrimage operated without clear boundaries between economic and religious spheres of discourse. The emergence of automobile culture in the 1920s and 1930s was sweeping in its transformation of the social codes of travel, perceptions of nature, and the project of land conservation. Train travel during the nineteenth century had produced an upper-class mode of tourism that was “hegemonic and cultural,” with sites and tastes primarily conditioned by railroad companies and wealthy individuals with private rail cars. As automotive travel rose in popularity, new forms of tourism arose that were more “democratic” and “recreational” in focus.135 Railroad barons autocratically constructed the infrastructures of tourism, controlling and mediating the tourist’s experiences of nature and western life in ways that benefited their bottom line and reflected their bourgeoisie experience. But the automobile circumvented the established patterns of travel, moving tourism “away from the tastes of elite . . . and toward the more common tastes of ordinary people, often oriented towards recreation.”136 Cars fostered an atmosphere of intimacy: “in contrast to viewing the landscape cinematically as it flashed by the train window, the automobile brought the tourist into the landscape.”137

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Americans increasingly understood the purpose of travel to be restoration rather than improvement. Where the forms of tourism predominant in the nineteenth century were meant to educate and advance the position of the upper class, like the Grand Tour tradition in Europe, the recreational forms of tourism that blossomed in the early twentieth century were meant to restore citizens “to their native condition, the way they had been before the rigors of urban civilized life wore them down.”138 The healing properties of nature praised by the growing body of outdoors enthusiasts rapidly became available to anyone with access to automotive transport.139 This development proved to be a much more culturally pervasive instantiation of the belief that nature had spiritually curative attributes. Given this dynamic combination of transportation capabilities and recreational soteriology, it is not surprising that national parks and forests became such pivotal spaces in twentieth-century automotive culture. A deep current in Christian theology, the idea of humans as homo viator, as beings defined by their journey, realized a unique form in the phenomenon of the road trip. The system of interstate highways connecting America’s national parks, implemented at the behest of National Park Service director Stephen Mather, supported an “experiential freedom . . . that came from navigating roads, trails, and paths of the American West.”140 Frederick Jackson Turner’s diagnosis of the American anxiety about the closing frontier here rings true yet again. Just as the outdoor enthusiasts of the Gilded Age turned to nature in hopes of rejuvenating the pioneer spirit, the automobile enthusiasts of the Jazz Age employed a new technology to live out the same dream.141 But the democratic ideal at the heart of automotive tourism did not give rise to a recreational culture of absolute freedom. Business interests and state institutions, like the National Park Service, worked to shape and channel the possibilities of experience for those traveling America’s highways. The amenities inside national parks resembled the hegemonic tourism of the railroad era, with grandiose lodges, clearly delineated sites for accessing nature, and hierarchal structures of public administration. Commercial elites and

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national parks officials sometimes worked together to differentiate sacred spaces from merely recreational ones.142 Around Mount Rainier National Park, for instance, local businessmen bought up vast tracts of land in order to purge the local economies of “unnatural” products and services, like dance halls and gas stations. The tension between the demands of a new class of nature recreationists and older models of an idealized nature demonstrates a deep-seated cultural negotiation of the meaning of nature in American society. While widespread access to unpopulated landscapes became the norm in the age of automobiles, competing class interests worked to sanctify and popularize publicly protected areas. The idea that parks and wilderness areas should be developed in order to maximize scenic beauty was a central feature of the publications and political engagements of many of the larger recreational organizations.143 In 1918 National Park Service director Stephen Mather wrote an editorial imploring Mountaineers Club members to lobby for the protection of roadside forests: “There is even a greater opportunity, one of the greatest in the scenic world today! That is the preservation of timber along the beautiful passes which carry the Eastern tourists over the Cascades to your wonderful west side slopes. Through these passes the future will bring endless processions of motorists to see the famed beauty of the Cascades and the Olympics. Let them always come, as now, by grandly scenic highways through forests saved from the ax.”144 Chief forester of the National Forest Service, William Greeley, offered a similar message a few years later. Already, by 1925, the questions concerning the proper development of public lands involved more than just scenic roadways. Building codes and campground design also presented pressing issues for nature lovers: “Belts of uncut timber are reserved along well-traveled roads, around camp-grounds, and as a setting for groups of vacation homes. Lake shores and other areas of special scenic beauty are guarded from any form of use that would mar their natural charm.”145 This extension of aesthetic standards to all features of recreational development is indicative of how citizens’ groups, park

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planners, and tourism companies worked to institute an aura of sacredness around sites of automotive tourism. So thorough was the commitment of federal park planners to the ideal of harmonizing development with scenic beauty that road builders went to great lengths to create the illusion of aesthetic continuity between the shrines of nature and the “expert systems of technology and transportation” constructed to fill these cathedrals with worshippers.146 The tremendous energies expended not just on road development and design reminds us that during the early decades of the twentieth century, “nature was a visual rather than an ecological condition. Landscape architects cared more about how nature appeared to the eye than they did about what they knew (and could not so easily see) of a road’s effects on the natural systems.”147 Conforming to the visual conditions of nature, roads were built so as to blur “the line between the natural and built environments, [creating] the illusion that roads emerged naturally from the earth.”148 This was accomplished using a variety of tactics, using native timber and stone in the construction of bridges and barriers, careful attention to topography to avoid road cuts, and architectural mandates that roadside facilities use hewn wood and log cabin frames wherever possible.149 The protection of roadside timber along the highways leading to parks and public lands was an equally essential design technique. Protecting “native forest borders” along routes carrying carloads of nature enthusiasts ensured that “generations of the future . . . will continue to enjoy longer and longer strips of enchantment which can be truly called God’s Gardens” along the nation’s highways.150 For would-be nature pilgrims it was important that roadways appeared in harmony with nature, setting a tone of authenticity. The development of automotive tourism was located within the broader perspective that conceptualized nature as a “cathedral,” “temple,” or “shrine.” Roads were necessary to reach sacred sights, but upon arrival, tourists demanded development standards that enhanced the appearance of an unblemished landscape. This tension between the demand for recreational infrastructure and the desire for undeveloped spaces was

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borne out in political advocacy. Recreational groups tended to be great champions of road building outside public lands but vigorously fought against development inside preserves. Editorialists in recreational publications demanded that inside national parks “all roads, settlements and power transportation are [to be] barred. But trails and temporary shelters, features such as were common long before the advent of [the] white race, are entirely permissible.”151 The value of nature was defined in primarily visual terms, a scenic backdrop where nature pilgrims could imagine themselves as part of a landscape unspoiled by the “white race.” The particular notion of despoliation to which this racialized history of the American West pointed was profoundly ironic. White settlers displaced native communities and economies with successive waves of development: first, with the extraction of resources (furs, minerals, timber, etc.); second, with the spread of agricultural lands; and finally, with the advent of manufacture and industry. In historically accurate terms a return to the conditions “before the advent of the white race” would not have involved establishing uninhabited landscapes nor in managing ecosystems with the aim of minimizing visual evidence of human activity. These aims are deeply tied to racialized ideas about the ecological Indian and the noble savage, ideas that obscure the real impact of white settlement and that posit modern conservation techniques as the appropriate responses to environmental overreach.152 Although it is seldom explicitly mentioned, there is a theological significance to this imagined purity of undeveloped landscapes, one that returns the recreationist to an Edenic scene and allows individuals to picture themselves as participants in an environment unblemished by the depravity and fallenness of colonization. The American geographic imagination recapitulated the Genesis narrative in which natural splendor is shattered by moral rupture and followed by a desire to return to the primordial order. Although the paradoxical union of road development and wilderness preservation—the strange possibility of “knowing nature through machines”—remained part of the core logic of public lands administra-

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tion, this synthesis began to break down in the years immediately before the Second World War. Recreationists expressed increasing disappointment about “losing park[s] they had had virtually to themselves. . . . They wanted to reclaim some of their relationship with the mountain[s] before it was too late.”153 The aesthetic ideal that shaped public lands to appear as undeveloped as possible did not change, but the presence of parking lots and heavy traffic was too difficult to overlook. Roads were, of course, necessary for pilgrims to approach their shrines, but the ease of access afforded by road development went too far. A Saturday Evening Post article by Mountaineer Club member George Vanderbilt Caesar criticized the Park Service for “excessive road construction,” arguing that “subjecting parks to ‘jazzing hordes’” eroded “their aesthetic value.”154 This shift in the politics of preservationism was a rejection of the spiritually infused aesthetic that encouraged road development in the first place. As the movement to bar roads from publicly protected wildernesses gained momentum, the idea that roadways completed and perfected natural landscapes gave way to a more purist viewpoint: natural reserves should be places in which “man would not try to improve upon God.”155 Environmental dogma was born, and this vision was publicly enshrined in the 1964 Wilderness Act. Concerns were often expressed in terms of “original conditions—as witnessed by the first white settlers.”156 Although perhaps the utopian synthesis of industrial development and wilderness preservation collapsed under its own weight, the idea that nature’s power lay in its aesthetic purity remained intact. Roadless preserves—like the new class of federally sanctioned wilderness areas or the new national parks in Alaska—more literally captured the natural landscape “before the advent of the white race.”157 The decades of subsequent legal and political battles aimed at blocking road building on public lands were still very much indebted to a generation that sought to develop landscapes as sites of pilgrimage.

c h a p t e r f ou r

Recreation and Spiritual Experience The heaven of which we are surest is the one to which we climb together or help another to climb. —David Starr Jordan

Documents from each of the major American recreational organizations of the early twentieth century demonstrate a sustained focus on experiences generated by hiking, climbing, and camping in the outdoors. The main energies of most clubs’ various subcommittees were related to the planning, promotion, and publications of group outings, most especially the annual summer outings, which guaranteed the participation of the most fervent community members. The pages of the Mountaineer, the Sierra Club Bulletin, and the Mazama Bulletin were filled with recollections of sojourns through the woods and celebrations of the outdoor life that drew on a variety of rhetorical and imaginative tactics to express the profundity of these experiences. It was crucial for recreational advocates to share their experiences, and the genre they developed emerged from an easy harmony among romanticism, natural history, and theological reflection. Authors regularly published versions of essays recounting their recreational experiences across multiple literary venues and, in the face of strong demand for literary products of this kind, established a set of textual conventions that aspired to capture a flourishing spirituality of nature. 148

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This chapter examines the variety, significance, and character of the early twentieth-century accounts of recreational experience in the outdoors that were primary instruments in constructing and advancing a coherent vision of environmental concern.1 Specifically, it analyzes the claims to spiritual experience that underlie texts of this kind and surveys attending issues of collective identity, gender, and moral norms established therein.2 Communicating the soteriological benefits of nature and articulating a strong apologetic for their public utility forms an important basis for modern environmental movements. By asserting their spiritual vision in positive, inclusive, communalistic terms, the generation of writers and recreational enthusiasts who first fully capitalized on the power of print media were able to establish an eclectic but wildly popular expression of nature spirituality. Working to link personal transcendence with social solidarity, while at the same time attempting to conjoin disparate constituencies (e.g., women, commercialists, scientists, clergy, and artists), recreational writers seized on experience as a primary focus. Club journals developed a format in which lengthy narrative essays about local outings were punctuated by shorter accounts of members’ travels abroad, lessons in natural history, poems, photographs, editorials about various conservation issues, and information about the organization’s planned events. Accounts of club outings were typically autobiographical; however, the subject of experience in these essays was as much the community as it was the individual writer. In contrast to contemporary hiking and camping practices, Progressive Era recreationists often sought solace in nature in large groups. It was not uncommon for annual outings to include one hundred or more club members, who would hike and camp together as a small, mobile village for weeks at a time. Club outings looked to undeveloped landscapes as sources of spiritual inspiration, though their efforts often also relied on the collective effervescence natural to a large group of compatriots, men and women together, with ample leisure time. The vocabulary used to describe these collective manifestations of nature spirituality straddled the divide between the public and the

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private, between the sacred and the secular. Writers extended and reworked religious imagery to marry a subdued faith in the Christian gospel with a weak animism, perhaps in an effort to underplay the theological implications of this synthesis and reach broader audiences. Recreational narratives became a genre in which subtle strains of paganism could flourish alongside liberal Protestantism without challenging the conventions of the day. Retrospective analyses of nature spirituality have disagreed about why this mixture of novel and traditional religious sentiments was not more volatile. To some, this mixture indicates that environmental discourse was actually not religious in the first place and that the use of religious terminologies was simply rhetorical posturing.3 To others, the talk of enchanted glades and the spiritual teachings of wild creatures made this genre seem the very origin of the animistic and neopagan elements of modern American religious life.4 Neither of these lines of interpretation is, by itself, sufficient to the complexity of Progressive Era nature spirituality. That nominally Christian nature spirituality was a critical element of mainstream American religious life is a historical fact that has grounded generations of environmental discourse, though the precise position of religion and religious ethics in this discourse has always been fraught and contested. No matter the interpretive stance taken with regard to the meaning and significance of religious vocabularies among conservationist and preservationist texts, however, a close reading of the era’s recreational accounts indicates a strong sense of community in which were embedded moral claims about the relationship of human beings to the natural environment. The language of early twentieth-century recreationists certainly proved to be morally salient, but it was also influential in giving shape to local communities and in establishing modes of identity that became formative elements of environmentalism as a broader social movement. The popularity of recreational groups was generated by both male and female members, who shared alike in the valorization of outdoor experience even if they sometimes emphasized different aspects of nature spirituality. One feature of the emergent nature spirituality was

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a commitment to service. Understanding theirs as a vocational calling, recreationists described their experiences as spiritual impetus for the political protection of the places where nature could be properly enjoyed. The preservationist campaign aimed principally at the public enshrinement of the necessary conditions for nature worship. Contemporary readers of recreationist writings would likely be tempted to classify such texts as recapitulations of romanticism, but this label fails to fully capture their multiple valences. Recreationist writers drew on romantic sources for inspiration but pointed beyond the limits of nineteenth-century environmental thought: the optimism and forwardlooking orientation of the Progressive Era held in check traditionally romantic tendencies toward nostalgia. Likewise, the fraternal organization of recreational clubs limited the individualism and solipsistic leanings of romanticism, pursuing instead a collectivist enterprise. Early twentieth-century nature writers and outdoor enthusiasts were eager to embrace social and political solidarity in their pursuit of transcendental experiences. Their idealized vision of nature was, among other things, a surprisingly social one. The romantic poets had claimed that only by turning outward to nature could they penetrate the deepest recesses of the self, uncovering its innermost truths. Their refashioning of Christian soteriology had centered on the redemption of the artistic individual, relying on the contemplation of natural landscapes only insofar as they afforded visual liberation from the mundane conventions of the early nineteenth century. But the transcendentalist movement opened cracks in the narrow individualism of literary romanticism: American writers became increasingly engaged with Eastern philosophies and Native American cultures.5 Although Buddhist and Hindu ideas about nature were received through thoroughly orientalist channels, the inclusion of these elements was part of a growing desire to articulate a universal view of nature, one that subsumed cultural and personal particularities and thoughtfully synthesized scientific and spiritual approaches. The generations that inherited the repositories of romantic and transcendentalist thought harnessed these textual traditions for the

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purpose of constructing a collective understanding of recreational soteriology. Where the romantics had fled to nature to escape spiritual banality, their heirs pursued and protected natural landscapes as a means to rekindle old traditions. Amid the tumult of the twentieth century, “a time when the force of religion seemed vitiated by the new scientism on the one hand and social conflict on the other, wilderness acquired special significance as a resuscitator of faith.”6 As the cult of nature made strong inroads into mainstream American religious life, it met with careful resistance from clerical authorities and theological conservatives. Religious thinkers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth had not yet retreated into an antagonistic retrenchment against the violations of evolutionary theory. Progressive Era religious leaders were generally much more open in their attitudes toward the natural and biological sciences and operated in an intellectual environment free from the theological polarization that emerged in the wake of the 1925 Scopes Trial. Parish clergy and national leaders alike were much more inclined to invoke the natural sciences in substantiation of various claims about natural theology.7 Given their accommodationist orientation, theologians and clergy members tended not to reject the era’s religious sentiment for nature out of hand. Instead, they cautioned against its excesses, worrying that “those who love sweet Nature best are most readily deluded into an unreal worship.”8 Such “unreal worship” referred primarily to the pantheistic leanings of nature spirituality but also to the proper balance between the book of nature and the book of scripture. Theologically minded nature enthusiasts granted that “this world thrills with divine beauty” but wondered whether “these things [are] God?”9 Sharing the same impulse for religious regeneration that motivated many recreationists, clerics identified an appropriate middle ground “between the neo-Pagan . . . and the Pantheist” that afforded opportunities for appropriate spiritual engagement with nature “based on an accurate estimate of Nature’s relationship to God on the one hand, and to man on the other.”10 From the perspective of Christian traditionalism there were at least two primary troubles with nature spirituality.

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First, it did not articulate a personal God, and, second, it was often expressed in crass, excessively public ways: “We declare ourselves out of sympathy and sickened with commonplace eulogy of ‘scenery’ and ‘beautiful sights’; but those very objects which to the shallow, or the frivolous, are but occasions for ecstatic outbursts of washy sentimentalism, have a native dignity and significance ranking them with the highest, most sacred influences in a man’s life.”11 Pronouncements like this make it clear that mainstream religious leaders agreed that “appreciation of the real grandeur of the universe . . . [is] the offspring of religious contemplation” but that they were also anxious about the potential of nature worship to erode the theological foundations of Christianity, especially with respect to the idea of a personal savior.12 Nature spirituality risked sliding into either pantheism or, worse, idolatry if it did not carefully articulate its ontological presuppositions. Theologically speaking, beautiful landscapes are but material phenomena, except where they are taken as the manifestations of a benevolent and loving creator God, for “true affection and real worship cannot exist apart from personality.”13 Perhaps concerned that nature worship was seeking a solution to the problem of alienation posed by the Christian doctrine of the Fall that did not give sufficient recourse to divine agency, some traditionalists pushed back against what they saw as the hubris of recreational soteriology. Ultimately, however, the representatives of establishment religiosity accepted the spiritual enthusiasm for nature, agreeing that “all of us as we go farther in the worship of Nature will grow closer to Nature’s God.”14 Devotion to nature required theological care, and if pursued properly, “the worshipper [is] led through Nature up to Nature’s God [and] he can read the world as a Divine Scroll.”15 If theologians took note of the burgeoning nature spirituality with a cautious but optimistic eye, many others embraced it more humorously. The Sierra Club Bulletin was nonplussed that “the practice of hiking with packs in the mountains, or outings, as they came to be called, naturally spread with alarming speed, as does any slightly masochistic activity, for as everyone knows, ‘suffering builds character.’ ”16

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sacred communities Spiritual experiences of natural landscapes were the primary stuff of early environmental writing and departed in significant ways from previous forms of nature spirituality. For American transcendentalists nature had served primarily as a symbolic and rhetorical mirror in which the depths of the self could be unearthed, but among subsequent generations of recreationists, the outdoors also provided a locus for community building. Both the construction and articulation of these experiences took a much more communal shape than it had for earlier generations of romantics, transcendentalists, and pioneers. As Leigh Eric Schmidt notes, “Transcendentalist nature quests, suff used with romantic individualism, were not the stuff of which festival and communal liturgy were made. . . . Communion with nature was a private feast, outdoors and alone: its high days were those observed in the souls of rambling, solitary pilgrims. Corporate liturgy in the enclosed space of a church appeared antithetical to this romantic sacramentalism of nature and the individual.”17 Perhaps the central distinguishing feature of Progressive Era enthusiasm for nature was its emphasis on communal and collective experiences. The centrality of the annual outing in the annals of the Mountaineers and the Sierra Club speaks to the importance placed on these clubs’ social functions. For these groups, as well as their cousin organizations across the nation, natural landscapes and outdoor recreation were vehicles for mobilizing communities that saw their bonds as spiritually grounded. In fact, the rhetorics of spirituality and community were deeply comingled in recreational publications, because the “love of the mountains forms a strong bond and an enduring one: all mountain peoples and all mountain lovers are akin.”18 Union among nature lovers effectively sanctified recreational communities. The strong currents of antimodern anxiety running through early environmental discourse frequently manifested as the desire for authentic human bonds, as the pursuit of friendships based on shared interests and experiences and solidarity grounded in common struggles. Extended travel in remote areas with the duties of cooking, cleaning, and foraging

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as collective tasks was a powerful influence on recreationists. Fraternity was intensified by the fact that these experiences took place outside the confines of wage-labor and were free from the restrictive norms of everyday social interaction. If nature was a liberatory force for individuals, with its spiritual benefits typically framed as freedom, then groups of people enacting their spiritual liberation in close proximity were bound to conceptualize their experiences as profound, collective, and set apart from the kinds of relations generated by ordinary modes of social interaction. Extrapolating the experience of individual emancipation in the outdoors as the basis for common bonds, one author implicitly rejected the solipsistic nature envisioned by the romantics: “We do not all have the time, ability, or inclination either to lead or even enjoy small, private parties in the mountains. The majority prefer both the sociability and the comfort of the regular scheduled outings. They are incomparable with any other form of recreation. We make lifelong friends and store up a fund of memories which are invaluable. That which is the dross of civilization disappears in the clear air of the mountains.”19 Nature spirituality afforded a shared language for transformative experiences, and the act of creating and sharing these experiences flourished on both local and national scales.20 The earliest visionaries who implored others to venture away from cities and into the hills to aid personal spiritual transformation could not have foretold to what purposes their clarion call would be put. As classically romantic treatments of nature gave way to innovative, perhaps more populist, modes of engaging with the natural world, American nature spirituality became less inwardly focused. The fascination with sublime aesthetics as the mechanism of communion between a personal God and an individual soul characterized Anglophone environmental thought for generations, but that mechanism did not maintain its conceptual monopoly in twentieth-century American thought. The inward turn demanded by the awesome terror of nature’s raw power was theologically consistent with Augustine’s demand that contemplation of worldly beauty further the contemplation of the human soul’s debt to its

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creator. This debt, however, was only peripheral for recreationist writers, for whom the turn demanded by natural beauty was not exclusively an inward one. Rather, for the congregants of nature worship, the beauty of the outdoors provided a countercultural opportunity in which the nature lover could turn toward others, sharing rapturous experiences of life in the mountains and reinvigorating modes of relation suppressed by “mechanistic civilization.” By this logic recreational organizations were clubs that gathered together hundreds of “men and women who love the mountains. They also love the forests and valleys, the rivers, lakes and the boundless sea, they love the trees and flowers, the birds and animals, they love the beauties and wonders of nature, among which the mountains seem but one sublime manifestation. By seeking the joy of seeing and knowing these beauties they gladly turn and point the way for thousands of their fellows to see and know in pure and endless joy.”21 Early twentieth-century recreational groups appear here as a pivot between the highly individualistic modes of nature appreciation that characterized the better part of the nineteenth century and the large, sometimes bureaucratic, organizations that led the fight to protect the environment in the second half of the twentieth century. Progressive Era nature lovers were gathered in highly organized nonprofit associations, but their orienting principle was to collectivize and promote nature spirituality. Sharing transcendent experiences of nature fostered fellowship among the community of outdoor enthusiasts, and it did so with the explicit aims of evangelizing recreational soteriology and initiating new members into the temple of nature. According to Mountaineers Club president Edmond S. Meany, the true lover of nature is compelled to spread the “gospel of nature” to an ever-widening circle of “pure and endless joy.”22 This missionary zeal was integral to nature spirituality and, according to one editorialist, part of a civic response to the various social and economic upheavals experienced at the turn of the century: “We, who have learned to lift up our eyes unto the hills, owe to others an invitation to enjoy the vision. Here is a mission in which, by initiating others into the joys we so well know, we could add immeasurably to their pleasures in life. The

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times offer a call of duty, a call answered by the friendly out-of-doors. There is an invitation from Mother Nature to bring more of her children into her sanctuary—for health, for pleasure, for a better, happier America.”23 The vision of nature put forward by recreationists was a surprisingly social one—in pursuit of a “better, happier America”—that promised to gather communities together by way of a shared source of joy. Recreational groups were styled as idealized communities in which the camaraderie of the camping trip established a lasting social cohesion, visible in every step along “life’s trail, whether in the quiet of mountain solitudes or in the cities of men, [where] the friends we have made greet us. There is a spirit permeating all as we travel the mountain trails and sleep under the stars of the high country, which to me is friendship. This is symbolic of all true friendships which continue until our trail runs out in the distance.”24 Club members identified their organizational unity as a result of their spiritual synchronicity: “The Mountaineers as a group have body; as a group they also have a soul.”25 The “animating spirit of [their] collective body” was readily indicated as a force that could move across time and space, for instance in sending blessings to the troops during World War I or in agitating for public reforms in the federal government. Hardly shy about invoking their moral agency, the Mountaineers ceremonially invited servicemen to join their community to “become our comrades in the hills to enjoy the blessing of the dawn, the glory of the sun, the benediction of the stars.”26 This insistence on the collective enterprise of nature spirituality represents a major revision of the romantic inheritance. The kind of alienation alleviated by communal recreational outings was not grounded in a rift between the human individual and the created order but instead among members of a complex, fragmented, and psychologically distressing society. The outdoors provided the appropriate cure for modern alienation, and that cure was the result of both the experiential authenticity of time spent living according to nature’s rhythms and the special kind of social cohesion facilitated by the camping life, a kind of togetherness impossible to the routines of workaday society.

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In California, Oregon, and Washington, annual summer outings gathered upwards of three hundred people in places remote from civilization for up to a month at a time, where from base camps participants climbed various nearby mountain peaks, frolicked in glacial streams, sang songs, cooked, slept, and ate together. Recreational clubs in all quarters of the United States organized large traveling parties like these as the standard format for hiking and mountaineering trips at least until the austerities of the Great Depression put a damper on recreational expenditures. Adherents celebrated the “enforced socialism of trail and camp” and the togetherness of persons “drawn from the four points of the compass.”27 Writers celebrated their experiences as an Edenic return to authentic modes of human intercourse. Annual outings were difficult to explain to outsiders, with apologists acknowledging that “it sounds rather alarming at first—to camp for a month with a party of one hundred and fifty persons, strangers for the most part,” but made sense in the context of the nation’s commitment to progressive values.28 The close association made possible by the simplicity of life outdoors prepared campers in “body and soul, ready to find your place in the socialist’s Utopia which you inhabit for a few short weeks.”29 Ordinary social interaction was plagued by the “soft vicissitudes” of impersonal relations, yet in the peaceful companionship of the fireside recreationists found “on closest scrutiny no evidences of ugliness, gloominess, or growl . . . fresh proof of the joyous soundness of normal human nature.”30 The purity and power of the “one common bond, the love of nature,” was sufficient to animate temporary communities and to generate lasting relations, for “the faces you have seen illuminated by the leaping flames can never be indifferent to you.”31

women approach the summit As a recreational form, mountaineering has its roots in nineteenthcentury social institutions heavily shaped by Victorian notions about gender, and historians of environmentalism have tended to emphasize

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the centrality of men’s interests in the development of mountain climbing as a sport. Alpinism was a critical cultural conduit linking deep currents of romantic thought with the still emerging structures of American environmental thought. Although transcendental visions of sublimity and the pursuit of masculine vigor were constitutive elements of mountaineering, twentieth-century modes of outdoor recreation were not exclusively the domain of men. Women’s active participation in recreational organizations, especially in the annual outings that were the central social focus of such groups, indicates the rich breadth of experiential possibilities available to outdoor enthusiasts. Rugged individualism and moral authenticity that male conservationists celebrated as the chief virtues of recreation were not the only motives present in Progressive Era America’s turn to nature. Traveling and writing in the same spaces, recreationists and conservationists of the early twentieth century oriented their activities according to gendered norms about bodily capabilities, the emotional character of nature, and spiritual fulfillment. As outdoor organizations refined their social and textual practices, the range of embodied experiences widened, opening new spaces for women’s voices and spiritual needs. The texts that charted the expanding interest in nature spirituality frequently employed feminized images of nature to express appreciation of beauty and sublimity.32 The vocabulary preferred by most American nature writers was heavily gendered: a rhetoric of maternal care typified descriptions of creaturely interaction. In the parlance of recreational publications mountains were “bosoms,” forests were “veils,” and the most desirable landscapes were predictably virginal. Muir’s unceasing affection for the Sierra Nevada, for example, routinely described the peaks as female, as the surfaces of the world that reflected back on “their God and father . . . with responsive love.”33 Remote, pristine mountain landscapes provided an image suitable to Victorian notions of female propriety and gender hierarchy: “women were to be secluded, nurturing, and selfless . . . pure, passive, and transparent more often than mysterious or life-giving . . . mirrors in which men could see

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themselves.”34 Anglophone writing about nature has long drawn on sexualized imagery, and it seems rather unsurprising that the influence of this vernacular tradition persisted into the twentieth century.35 What is surprising, however, is that despite the expanding role of female nature writers, recreationist texts continued to feature the imagery of “virgin nature” throughout the course of the century. In many quarters women were held at bay from the emerging nature spirituality. Late nineteenth-century religious publications, like the Methodist monthly the Ladies Repository, cautioned their primarily female readerships to resist the era’s proclivity toward natural theology. Conservative religious thinkers were concerned that young women would be tempted to accept natural science as a guide to spiritual matters and forcefully reminded them that “Divine Revelation makes up for all the lacks of Nature. . . . The bleeding Savior . . . [directs] us across life’s troubled sea.”36 Women were excluded from many outdoor recreational practices, not just by theologically grounded concerns of the Augustinian variety but also by the hypermasculine culture that dominated athletics in general and mountaineering in particular. Itself an attempt to prove that hardy individuals could resist the emasculating forces of modernity, alpinism first flourished as a sporting contest among aristocratic European men. The modes of expression and experience developed by the early generations of climbers were closely linked with muscular Christianity and with romantic strains of thought that conceptualized sublimity as coming to terms with terrifying finitude. Mountains and their attendant dangers provided nineteenthcentury men with a means to measure their masculinity. Throughout its history mountain climbing has been a decidedly masculine pursuit, focused primarily on securing bragging rights and on bagging the tallest and most fearsome peaks. As outdoor clubs emerged as instruments of social belonging in the early decades of the twentieth century, the hypermasculine tendencies of mountain climbers softened to accommodate a range of other styles of nature appreciation. Botanists, peakbaggers, poets, bird-watchers, hunters, photographers, and hikers were

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participants together in the many extended club outings that such groups held throughout the Progressive Era. The marginalization of women from the sources of American nature spirituality was partially counterbalanced by a narrow but important stream of female nature writers. Beginning in the nineteenth century, women like Susan Fennimore Cooper had made important contributions to the emerging American tradition of nature writing, expressing from a female perspective many of the same themes that preoccupied her male counterparts, notably “ardent nationalism . . . fascination with the need for moral improvement in American society . . . and a strong Protestantism.”37 Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850; revised 1887) opened new territory for American environmental thought, showing a deep “empathy for nature’s rhythms as a corrective to the human built.”38 Women’s voices became increasingly influential as the new century dawned. In the West, naturalist and water rights advocate Mary Hunter Austin was a celebrated voice among women nature writers. Her 1903 Land of Little Rain is considered a classic of Californian literature and outlined a subtle response to the masculine hyperbole of many of her contemporaries. Austin remained wedded to her Christian faith but saw the spirit evident in the actions of the weather and the daily rhythms of life in the inland deserts and mountains of the Golden State. The involvement of recreational organizations with conservationist and preservationist politics is at least in part an effect of their inclusion of women. The modes of nature spirituality on which such groups were founded centered on men’s sporting concerns but transformed to become critical connective tissues for conservationists in large part because of women’s contributions to recreational thought and practice. The rise to prominence of recreational associations was contemporary with large increases in the number of women formally trained in the natural sciences and growing public recognition of women’s sporting accomplishments. Beginning with its first annual outing (1901), the Sierra Club included women in its organized activities, as did the Mountaineers Club (annual outings beginning in 1907) and the Mazamas (1894).

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Though many organizations were slow to include women among their ranks of officers, women were prominent figures in setting the direction for recreation and conservation groups from the very beginning. For instance, Marion Randall Parsons was one of the most important figures in the early decades of the Sierra Club, attending every annual outing from 1903 onward and assuming her husband’s duties on the board of directors after his death in 1914. Her election made her the club’s first female board member, a position she held in various forms until her death in 1953. Parsons’s most lasting contributions were her literary exploits: she chaired the club’s publications committee for more than twenty years, edited Muir’s Travels in Alaska, and wrote seventeen “major articles” for publications, including the Sierra Club Bulletin, Sunset, and Out West.39 Her celebrated status as a club leader signals the intimate linkages among outings as fonts of spiritual experience, the importance of writing about those experiences, and the articulation of values instrumental to wilderness preservation. Although the prominent recreational clubs had all embraced female membership in constitutional charters, no major organization was led by a female president until Aurelia Harwood became the president of the Sierra Club in 1927.40 Throughout the 1910s and 1920s the major groups on the West Coast (the Mountaineers, Mazamas, and Sierra Club) maintained membership enrollments that indicated roughly equal participation by men and women.41 Women’s contributions to conservationism highlight the movement’s tendency toward masculine, heteronormative modes of association and participation. Recreational clubs regularly organized outdoor events designed to help young nature enthusiasts mingle with members of the opposite sex in a wholesome outdoor setting. The August 1936 edition of the Mosquito Buzzette, a circular for members of the Olympic Peninsula chapter of the Mountaineers Club, included the following note: “Clarence, we must cancel the moonlight rendezvous on Desolate [Peak]. Papa knows all. Virginia.”42 Outings were important matchmaking events, and many couples brought together in the spirit of the mountains chose to rekindle their affection with annual participation

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club adventures. In the early decades of the twentieth century, romance and matchmaking became increasingly visible components of outdoor recreation organizations, and today most such groups have formalized singles programs designed explicitly to provide recreational enthusiasts a space to meet and mingle with potential partners. The social conventions of early twentieth-century American society kept the energies that nature enthusiasm channeled within the narrow confines of contemporary gender norms. Homosexuality was excluded from the conceptual topography of American conservationism, and, leaning heavily on the rhetoric of naturalness, early environmental thinkers asserted clear distinctions between domestic and recreational pursuits. The merry community of “trail and camp” that so pleased outdoor recreationists was to be enjoyed apart from the social conformity from which they sought refuge. Outdoor recreation provided respite from the constricting patterns of modern, industrial life, but it was not intended as a challenge to those patterns. The Progressive enthusiasm for nature was reformist, but with respect to questions of gender, sexuality, race, and economic inequality, it was certainly not revolutionary. In the outdoors the relations between sexes were regulated according to the sexual mores of the day. “Girls’ camps” were pitched separately from “men’s camps,” and the division of duties reenacted conventional domestic life: women were charged with cooking and washing, and men were tasked with fishing, hunting, and pitching camp. The constitution of domestic life was bourgeois to be sure. Most Sierra Club outings in the early decades of the twentieth century maintained a paid staff, including local guides and Chinese cooks. Outings organizers were particularly attentive to women’s dress in the outdoors. At the recommendation of recreational club publications, women climbers at the turn of the century generally wore ankle-length skirts, but many organizations softened these guidelines, and by the 1920s it was not uncommon for women to wear boys’ knickers, with the approval of tour officials. Accounts of these trips make it clear that women enjoyed their expanding freedom of dress and associated that freedom with the outdoors as

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a space isolated from the trappings and conventions of society. “High altitudes” released female alpinists from the “vanities and clothes” of their everyday lives, freeing them to be, for a time, “a barbarian and a communist, a homeless and roofless vagabond.”43 Women’s narratives frequently championed the concept of a “gypsy lifestyle” as one of the foremost pleasures of outdoor recreation, emphasizing the central importance of carefree, unconstrained experiences in American nature spirituality. The tendencies of women’s accounts of outdoor recreation invoked images of God different from those typically featured in men’s narratives. They also deemphasized the conquest of peaks and asserted the spiritual joy of sustained periods of physical exertion. As participants in the flourishing trade in firsthand accounts of recreational journeys, women’s voices “described moral empowerment, aesthetic satisfaction, freedom, and spiritual pleasure in climbing.”44 Susan Schrepfer has gone so far as to say that women nature enthusiasts advanced a vision of the sublime that “emphasized the warmth, life, intimacy, freedom, and comfort provided by the natural world. They achieved spiritual transcendence in the wild by right of a life force that they felt pulsing through themselves, the plants, the animals, and even the rocks.”45 Club excursions also provided opportunities to create and share artistic works—primarily poems, sketches, and watercolors—and this aspect featured more frequently in women’s narrative accounts. Despite the preservation of some conventional gender norms, many recreationalists found the outings to be revelatory experiences about the relations between the sexes. Referring to women’s participation in club outings as a “new aspect of feminism,” Chester Rowell insisted that female hikers were physically superior in their endurance and fortitude.46 Women participated not just in hiking trips but in more technically oriented climbing expeditions as well. The summit of Mount Rainier offered the most “heavenly moment” in which the indescribable beauty spoke “for the soul” of one Fay Fuller, the second woman to scale the peak (1890). Fuller wrote that climbing the great mountain was a means to “fall in

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love with the world again.”47 Anna Dickinson, a suffragist spokeswoman and outdoor enthusiast, championed women’s equality through a wellpublicized climb of Colorado’s highest peak, Mount Long. Writing about her experience, Dickinson invoked a vision of spiritual authenticity in which mountains “touch the brain and soul, the heart and life, of mortals who really live, and do not merely exist.”48 Writing with a jocular phraseology, turn-of-the-century poet and naturalist Ella Rhoads Higginson claimed that her exposure to the beauty of dawn in the American West moved her to “never worship in church again.”49 Another woman even claimed that “the Sierra club was my religion for several decades.”50 Contemporary with the flourishing of recreation and conservation organizations, women’s clubs were also an increasingly vital fixture in the social landscape of the Progressive Era. Women’s groups often collaborated with conservation organizations on the protection of public lands and other civic issues.51 As president of the Sierra Club, Aurelia Harwood championed the complementarity of women’s issues and environmental conservation. She was an active leader of the Camp Fire Girls in the Los Angeles area and, as a donor to Mills and Pomona Colleges, demonstrated a strong commitment to educating girls about science and the outdoors. She held memberships in multiple recreational organizations, including the Mazamas, the Mountaineers, and the Green Mountain Trail Club and was outspoken about California conservation issues, like the Save-the-Redwoods movement. Her tenure as Sierra Club president was cut short by her untimely death in 1928, and her obituary memorializes her “satisfaction in mountains [as] a quality of character” for whom “nobility in human conduct was linked . . . with the majesty of the star-lit heavens . . . and the stalwartness of the mountain pine.”52

serving nature The idealized communities claimed by outdoor organizations coupled the salvific power of nature with commitments to duty and service.

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Social cohesion among recreationists was supposedly a by-product of their spiritual experiences but not simply because wilderness excursions were constructed as collective activities. Annual outings generated a “positive debt” to others: “the Mountaineer spirit, at its best, is quiet. It is unconsciously unselfish. It finds expression more in deeds than in words. It is obedient, patient, willing to endure. Group service is the keynote, and comradeship is the object; comradeship in the open air.”53 Perhaps because of a conviction that time spent in the outdoors guided a return to a natural state of prelapsarian social harmony, recreationists proclaimed that “love of the mountains is, by its very nature, inseparably associated with service to others—helping others also to learn the love of the hills and forests.”54 Emphasizing its importance as the basis for a utopian natural community, the obligation of service was considered the “fundamental object . . . [and] foundation stone which insures an organization’s permanency and strength.”55 More than espousing a generic concept of civic service, some authors alluded directly to Christian formulations of sacrifice. For instance, in describing the inherent character of mountaineering as a sport unparalleled in its promotion of service to others, one writer identifies Christ’s “supreme sacrifice” as but the highest form of a continuum that includes even the smallest kindnesses: “The really fine thing about mountaineering, and the thing that places it in a class by itself is the growth during the years of a tradition of helpfulness and unselfish service such as is possessed by no other field of human effort. This tradition is all embracing. Its record tells of the sacrifice of life itself in the effort to preserve that of another; and reaches down the way of kindliness and thoughtfulness from the supreme sacrifice to the mere handing of a cup of cooling water to a weary associate of the trail or the ascent.”56 Although this commitment to service follows from a Christian model, it looks beyond historical revelation and toward a primordial simplicity of human nature as a source of ethical purpose and social solidarity. In short, recreationists lived according to Rousseau’s view that human nature is fundamentally good and that the fall from grace is

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tied not to individual souls but to the hubris of civilization. Escape from the strictures of civilization allowed authentic communities to form and to act in accordance with the good of the natural order. As it served as the basic precondition for their deeply moral vision, undisturbed nature needed to be protected by all means necessary, including political organization, social advocacy, and civic engagement. The articles of incorporation of the Sierra Club, which served as a model for those chartered by the Mountaineers, speak to the close association of recreational enjoyment and the civic responsibility to agitate for the preservation of scenic landscapes: “to explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information about them; to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and government in preserving forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”57 The connection between nature spirituality and civic engagement is clear in recreational publications. For example, Seattle-based alpinist A. H. Albertson argued that “greater growth comes with giving. We take strength and inspiration from the hills; they should show forth in works—permanent and of human benefit. As an organization [we] have sufficient resource and talent to make lasting local history.” The spiritual qualities of the mountains—the strength and inspiration they offer to the accepting soul—were fruitless if not translated into good works of “permanent and human benefit.”58 Progressive Era nature enthusiasts saw their contributions as corrections to potentially worrisome utilitarian individualism. The love of nature was to be set against vicious economic opportunism; properly instantiated, “the spirit of the mountains” was to be directed outward toward community rather than inward as an exclusive focus on the self. The cultivation of service as a core value among outdoor recreational organizations was closely linked with ideas about spirituality. Nature was a potent force for personal transformation and for social communion, and harnessing this force in the pursuit of collective improvement remained an enduring theme of club publications: “‘Mountaineer Spirit’ motivates members in all their activities. This spirit is as old as the club

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and a major factor in making The Mountaineers one of the finest outdoor organizations in the United States. It is this spirit of cooperation which leads each member to do willingly anything he may be called upon to do.”59 Clearly, ideas of service, cooperation, and social goods were important ingredients of the communities established by recreational organizations. This voluntary, service-driven orientation of nature spirituality runs counter to a long-standing assumption that American spiritualities have fixated on individualism.60 The corpus of writings that comprise the journals of the major recreational clubs of the West Coast drew on both “biblical tradition” and “civic republicanism,” though maintaining a measured and cautious relationship with political institutions and religious establishments. Given their fondness for large groups and collective celebrations of nature spirituality, early twentieth-century nature spirituality was hardly a private, inward phenomenon.61 Public engagement tied individuals together, allowing them to focus their energies on social and political ends, all the while using spiritual vocabularies to motivate and organize community members.62 As recreational clubs expanded to keep up with the ties of association and desire for service they had established, they became increasingly visible in their political engagement. The history of the Sierra Club’s involvement with preservationist politics, both at the national level and within the political context of California, is well known. But the same patterns were repeated in other regions of the country, where organizations like the Mountaineers Club became critical actors in Pacific Northwest preservationist politics or where the Wilderness Society made a concentrated impact on federal land policy. The evolution from fraternal to political modes of organization is evident in the Mountaineers Club’s 1912 constitutional amendment establishing a permanent committee charged with advocacy, policy recommendations, and other forms of liaison with the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service.63 Through the work of this committee, subsequently named the Legislative Committee, the Mountaineers began to vocalize their support for specific national parks proposals and

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expansions. In 1913 members of the Legislative Committee collaborated with the influential Colorado conservationist Enos Mills to pressure Washington State congressmen to publicly declare their support for the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park.64 Such alignment between clubs like the Mountaineers and their counterparts in other regions of the American West proved a catalytic moment in the development of environmentalism as a social movement.65 In 1915 the club publicly declared its support for the abolition of Mount Olympus National Monument and the creation of a national park in its place. Members were confident that this stronger protective status for the wild lands of the Olympic Peninsula would serve to provide “to the fullest possible extent . . . a national playground.”66 The Mountaineers generated tremendous political mobilization, helping to establish Mount Olympus National Park (now known as Olympic National Park) in 1938; were continually involved with issues related to the development and administration of Mount Rainier National Park; and, in the midcentury, were instrumental in securing North Cascades National Park.67 This intense involvement with the public and political dimensions of wilderness preservation was a core element of the club from its germinal moment. Strikingly, such civic engagement was couched in the vocabulary of nature spirituality that typified recreationalist literatures: “The object of this organization shall be . . . to preserve, by protective legislation or otherwise, the natural beauty of the Northwest coast of America . . . and above all, to encourage and promote the spirit of good fellowship and comradery among the lovers of outdoor life in the West.”68 The joint aims of preserving “natural beauty” and fostering “the spirit of good fellowship” were built together into the founding charter of the Mountaineers. The logic of association that grounded such widespread participation in a community of service was a readily apparent characteristic of recreational organizations. Each edition of the Mountaineer began with a greeting from a distinguished “friend of the club,” and common themes in these greetings were the acknowledgment of the purposeful functions of the club and its role in converting

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the energies of nature spirituality into political capital. In 1928 the president of the University of Washington described the “altruistic purpose” of the club’s activities.69 The secretary of the interior under Calvin Coolidge, John Barton Payne, took notice of the connection of place, community, and activism that animated the Mountaineers: “One only needs to see Mount Rainier to understand why the Society of The Mountaineers exists. It is evident that there is a growing appreciation of the pleasure to be derived from the heritage of nature’s great creations with which we have been richly endowed, and we should consecrate ourselves to the protection and perpetuation of all of our great parks and pleasure grounds. To band together as you have done is a fine way to enjoy the most helpful of all forms of recreation—the great outdoors.”70 Leading figures in national conservation and preservation issues, like Stephen Mather, the long-serving inaugural director of the National Park Service, encouraged citizens to join “a society . . . being organized in [Washington State] to save the timber. Get behind it. Give it your moral and your personal support.”71 A commitment to service was important to the collective identity of recreational groups and was a hallmark of their public image. The political struggles to protect the Olympic Mountains and the surrounding forests are paradigmatic of how a spiritually charged vision of nature motivated a nascent environmental activism. In 1906, when the founding members of the Mountaineers Club, Montelius Price and Asahel Curtis, first imagined a fraternal organization, Olympic National Forest had only just been established. From their earliest years the Mountaineers were heavily involved in the political wrangling over the protected status of the Olympic Mountains. Teddy Roosevelt had designated a large tract of mountains, river valleys, and forests as a federal game reserve primarily as a way to protect the Olympic Peninsula’s large herds of elk. As a “reserve,” the original federal status of the Olympic Range was grounded on the notion of “wise use,” which granted considerable latitude to private interests in extracting publicly held resources. The Mountaineers argued that as a game reserve, the

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Olympics were not protected by the forms of federal interdiction necessary to secure the “greatest benefit for all the people.”72 R. L. Fromme, a club member and Olympic National Forest supervisor, advocated a change in federal status by arguing that the federal guarantee of protection ought to be “as far as possible perpetual.”73 But even this early involvement of club members with the intricacies of federal policies protecting natural sanctuaries drew deeply on an aesthetic, spiritual sentiment about the fundamental meaning of nature. The value of forests was, of course, “not measurable in dollars and cents.” The desire to strengthen legal protections for environmental preservation was ultimately based on a belief that the value of protecting the natural places “for public recreation purposes [is] entirely beyond calculation.”74 Nature was invaluable, but the political manifestation of recreational nature spirituality differed considerably from the transcendentalist refusal to reduce nature into the terms of economic utility. The politics of nature preservation were shaped by the ideal of wilderness, which conjoined a technocratic capacity for resource management with a deeply spiritual aesthetic. In a language resembling subsequent work by Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall, Mountaineers’ president Edmond S. Meany was scrupulously ambivalent in his 1911 essay treating the mounting controversy in the Olympics. Exercising care not to alienate a readership whose economic well-being was based on extractive industries, he made certain to remind readers that the Mountaineers “are by no means eccentric or foolish in their attitude” toward resource use on public lands. In the same essay, however, Meany defined the central motivation for nature preservation as the necessity of saving “generous playgrounds for the whole people,” and he envisioned a day when the “whole Puget Sound region” might become a destination for those seeking solace and rejuvenation in the outdoors. The distinction between the social, economic, and spiritual benefits of this project are ambiguous: “safeguard[ing] the beauties of nature” requires building roads and trails into undeveloped landscapes, but in so doing allows the

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“free enjoyment of all the people.”75 Preservationism, of which modern environmentalism is the direct descendant, already revealed the split personality present in succeeding generations of American environmental thought. Natural beauty and wild landscapes were moral necessities that required large-scale technological and legal interventions for their protection. Human manipulation provided the means to guarantee places to escape mechanistic civilization.76 Balancing the economic interests of resource extraction against the desire for wilderness playgrounds for a leisure class proved a difficult task. Asahel Curtis was closely associated with persons in the mining and timber industry who opposed more broad-reaching proposals to establish a national park on the peninsula. In his capacity as a trustee, Curtis pushed to have the club oppose the national park designation, preferring instead the continuance of national monument status deferential to business interests along the boundaries of the protected area. Several club committees endorsed resolutions to this effect,77 but by the mid-1930s a clear majority of members supported national park status. In an attempt to mediate between those who wanted permissive standards for resource exploitation and those who more strongly valued the aesthetic and recreational benefits of protected landscapes, some club members drafted a plan to strengthen the legal status of Olympic National Monument.78 But the Mountaineers’ National Park Committee unequivocally ruled in favor of the priority of recreation. In 1934, four years before the Olympic National Monument was upgraded to a national park, the committee recommended that the area “be kept in the wilderness state,” forcefully rejecting the claims of commercial interests. The committee wrote that “in making this recommendation we are fully aware of the commercial value of the timber and of the claim that valuable mineral may be present, but in view of the fact that this is probably the last chance for the permanent preservation of a large forest typical of the Pacific Northwest, we are governed by the clear conviction that the scientific and recreation values are paramount and should take precedence over the commercial value.”79 This bold

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statement makes an unbending commitment to the intrinsic value of wilderness, a value premised on an underlying devotion to the moral salubriousness of time in the outdoors.80 The support for national parks as means to expand access to recreation was as closely linked with the development of tourism infrastructures as it was with aspirations to solace and spiritual rejuvenation. These concepts remained primary in recreationist rhetoric but were increasingly obscured by more tangible political concerns, local environmental campaigns, and alliances with broader constituencies. Preservationist politics emerged from the tension between a spiritual aesthetic about the value of untrammeled wilderness and a pragmatic concern for economic development. It was also characterized by ambivalence about the relationship between public goods and private values. In the early decades of the twentieth century, recreationist literatures celebrated the spiritual power of the outdoors as a kind of election, a special benefit for the chosen few with the freedom and desire to wander among the hills. The moral strength afforded by mountains served as a marker of the special status of recreational communities, and this benefit ultimately served as the basis for advocating legal protection for wilderness. The quest to create a nation rich with parks, peaks, and playgrounds indicates an abiding interest in the public good. In many ways recreational organizations were fraternities for an elite who were knowledgeable about natural history and ordained in the practice of mountaineering: “the niche we have carved for ourselves is largely due to our unswerving devotion to the ideals that have been handed down to us by those who founded our Club and who guided its destinies during the early formative years. It is the duty of every member to hold fast to the spirit of cooperation that is the heart of and soul of our group.”81 Yet the tendency toward insularity characteristic of membership organizations was ameliorated by the particular kind of nature spirituality that animated most such clubs. Members seized on the sense of tradition produced by the “spirit of the mountains” and actively sought uninitiated others with whom to share this experience. This was a new tradi-

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tion that conjoined the duties of community life with the individualistic freedom of the hills: “what is needed is the inculcation, by every agency, of beauty as a principle, that life may be made happier and more elevating for all the generations who shall follow us, and who will love their country more devotedly the more lovable it is made.”82 The civic project of advancing wilderness preservation was valuable both because it benefited current generations and afforded the preconditions for proper moral orientation for future generations. Wilderness landscapes and collective, authentic experiences of them were to be enjoyed, but, more importantly, they obligated nature worshippers to intergenerational commitments. The Sierra Club placed great weight on this message: “We are the trustees of the future. We are not here for ourselves alone. . . . We are the heirs of those who have gone before, and charged with the duty we owe to those who come after, and there is no duty which seems clearer or higher than that of handing on to them the undiminished facilities for the enjoyment of some of the best gifts that the Creator has seen fit to bestow upon his children.”83 Recreationist writers were aware that their affections were historically novel—mountain climbing, backpacking, and camping had only become popular pastimes during the late nineteenth century—yet they forcefully asserted that these practices could guarantee the endurance of social values across the generations. Preservationist leaders delighted that “the love of nature is happily increasing” in American society and recognized that this shift made it “all the more important to find means of safeguarding nature.”84 Recreationists leveraged the symbolic potency of nature toward explicitly political ends, binding nature spirituality tightly to civil religious discourse. However much preservationists connected their project of wilderness preservation to “the spirit of the mountains,” they also often framed their goals in terms designed to appeal to national pride. Extolling the virtues of the growing influence of the forest sciences over issues of public policy, Meany claimed, “every patriot should rejoice over this new enlightenment and should do all possible to aid its

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progress. I assure you that there is much in common between forestry and patriotism.”85 In a separate essay on this same topic—the contribution of forest science to the public good—Meany again struck a civil religious tone: “Nature has been too lavish with her forest wealth in America to call from the busy Yankee any thought or worry of the morrow. But now the rainy day has approached and . . . everywhere throughout the Republic bright people have begun a serious study of the science of forestry.”86 Colorado conservationist Enos Mills also lauded wilderness protection as a manifestation of American exceptionalism, indicating the spiritual significance of political progress on environmental issues: “national parks and monuments contain an array of valuable scientific material not elsewhere found. . . . This material is the property of all people, and . . . will hasten the general understanding of conservation, the noblest phase of which is the saving of human life and ideals through recreation in scenic places.”87 This valuation of nature conjoined aesthetic beauty, scientific utility, and salvific potential under the banner of the nation, and this conceptual trio became the federal government’s mantra on land preservation. Chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service William Greeley and National Park Service director Stephen Mather echoed these sentiments again and again in their public remarks throughout the 1920s. Though the appeal to civil religious themes featured prominently in the pages of the Mountaineer and the Sierra Club Bulletin, this was hardly unique to recreational clubs in the western states. Preservationist politics at the national scale were charged with the language of civic republicanism: “scattered like jewels on Nature’s regal robes are areas of great natural beauty. Proper public service demands that such recreational areas be protected and that their use be reserved for those who shall find solace in their restful beauty . . . and health-building energy in their eternal forests.”88 The expansion of the federal lands set aside for recreational purposes likely knew no greater champion than Stephen Mather, who oversaw the National Park Service from 1917 to 1929. Mather’s penchant for stirring rhetoric demonstrates the close intimacy of

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recreational clubs and federal authority, between sporting practices and a civil religious vision for national well being.89 Mather wrote, “With the aid of The Mountaineers, the Sierra Club, and other kindred organizations I hope to see the national park game take first place in our national sport and outdoor life. The terms ‘National Park Service’ and ‘Outdoor Recreation’ are synonymous.”90 The basic impetus of recreational organizations—the “choreographed . . . convergence of spirituality and athleticism”—proved to be an incredibly powerful tool for social mobilization in which “ritualized experience[s] of struggle satisfied religious impulses and suited an agenda of physical development.”91 It was perhaps inevitable that the economic, scientific, and legal management of natural resources would become a ubiquitous political task for twentieth-century Americans, but the modes of discourse through which this task was realized were steeped in religious meanings that shaped the possibilities for public deliberation. Public administrators (like Stephen Mather), not to mention prominent activists (like John Muir) and less well-known ones (like Benton MacKaye), were empowered by the symbolic potency of Progressive Era nature spirituality. Religion acted as a reagent in American environmental thought, one that catalyzed and combined disparate ideas about how and why nature ought to be taken as an object of moral concern. Recreational nature spirituality was morally persuasive for early twentieth-century Americans because it appealed to their sensibilities about nation, community, theology, and physical health.

Conclusion The Mechanics of Religious Change To say that human nature changes is not to claim that the fundamental wishes or needs which motivate behavior are altered; presumably they are not. Rather, it is an assertion that the change is in the behavior itself, by which men seek to meet their needs. —Elmo Robinson, “Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Mountaineering”

The idea that the beneficence of nature is critical to human well-being remains a ubiquitous feature of contemporary American life. The market for beachfront properties, the health foods movement, the enduring commitment to the road trip as a pastime, and the popularity of outdoor recreational activities (hunting, camping, skiing, scuba diving, golfing, etc.) are all heavily shaped by ideas about the restorative capacity of nature and natural landscapes. Naturalness is a key category through which many contemporary Americans think about the healthfulness of consumer products (food, cosmetics, cleaners, clothing, etc.). Naturalness is also at the root of many people’s understanding of bodily practices, including exercise, sleep, sexual conduct, diet, hygiene, and childrearing. Although it dates from 1762, Rousseau’s theory of educating children by relying solely on the model of nature resonates well within the prosperous trade in self-help books intended to provide modern 177

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Americans with the information they need to eat, work, play, and parent more naturally.1 These beliefs and desires are deeply intertwined with religious history, and they are readily apparent on the shelves of local bookstores across the nation. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus put it, “the most visible and common expressions of faith in ecological salvation are new forms of consumption.”2 The potency of soteriological rhetoric in environmental discourse seems as prevalent today as it was in the Progressive Era and, before that, among the romantics. This continued prevalence is doubly significant: it is significant because it indicates some of the mechanisms by which religious elements operate in the broader cultural sphere, and it is significant because it helps provide an opportunity to critically reevaluate the American environmental imagination. The nature-oriented ideas and practices that emerged during the early decades of the twentieth century furnish scholars of religion and ecology with more germane data than do theological abstractions derived from textual traditions. The connective tissues linking religion and environmentalism lie primarily in concrete practices and social institutions rather than in textual interpretations or doctrinal proclamations. This is where Lynn White Jr. had it wrong or, more precisely, half wrong. Theologically animated anthropocentrism is a social and historical fact. But even if modern environmental attitudes may include anthropocentric tendencies rooted in Christian thought, the belief that the redemptive power of nature can be harnessed by individuals has been a much more pervasive feature of American environmental thought. Moreover, the American devotion to the power of nature has been a cultural force both inside and outside conventional religious bodies. Many contemporary nature enthusiasts may well understand themselves as secular or as “spiritual, but not religious,” but the outdoor activities and ideas about naturalness important in so many sectors of modern society are genealogically indebted to religious tradition. One contemporary expression of Christianity is the commitment to biblical literalism held by millions of Americans, and this belief is often

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attended by a repudiation of evolutionary science and a denial of anthropogenic global warming.3 But other, equally impactful manifestations of Christian tradition are visible in the radically plural cultural commitments to the salvific power of nature, including the natural foods movement, contemporary exercise fetishism, and a host of other practices like summer camps, suburban landscape architecture, and outdoor recreation. Celebrating the presence of the divine in nature would seem a more widespread American cultural trait than environmental skepticism fueled by Christian conservatism. One of the key themes explored throughout the preceding pages has been the presence of religious ideas outside their confessional confines— the irreducibility of religion to some set of institutionalized traditions. Scholars have long appreciated this fact, looking to civil religion and private spirituality as important extraecclesial spaces for contemporary religious life.4 The cultural patterns evident in Progressive Era nature enthusiasm are robustly public forms of spirituality, in which personal experience was but one aspect of a socially and politically salient religious configuration. Early twentieth-century American attitudes about nature—visible in the pursuit of leisure, in legislative advocacy, and in popular literature—were theologically derived. By tracing the significance and evolution of specific theological elements, I hope to have advanced the understanding of how religious histories condition contemporary social forms. Ideas about the human position in the natural world were theologically rooted and were reworked through discursive practices shared by secular and religious actors alike. Environmentally minded Americans moved easily among discussions of spiritual experiences, debates about moral values, and rhetoric about the public good. Since the late nineteenth century, American environmental dispositions have shifted in important ways, and the channels along which these shifts have proceeded have often been structured by religious concerns. The evidence afforded by outdoors enthusiasts in the first half of the twentieth century suggests that political mobilization around environmental causes hinged on the purposes to which theological ideas about

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nature were put. For example, conservationists have consistently sought to enshrine in public policy the opportunity of all Americans to marvel at the goodness and beauty of the nation’s natural landscapes. As contemporary theologians like H. Paul Santmire and Rosemary Radford Ruether have shown, Christian thinking about the material world has never been monolithic.5 As they looked to understand and reevaluate the position of human beings in the natural order, nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century Americans had an eclectic set of conceptual resources at their disposal. The flourishing enthusiasm for outdoor recreation that entered the cultural mainstream at the beginning of the twentieth century was indebted to a specific soteriological framework. The emergence of the American environmental movement was not simply the by-product of religious ideas operating in the popular imagination; rather, the theological machinations of the modern era—including the nominalist revolution, the romantic response to rationalism, and the Victorian predilection for natural theology—were all necessary preconditions for the particular formulation of environmental concern that arose in the American experience. Public concern with environmental issues took the particular shape that it did because nature was rendered as an antidote to the moral depravities of industrial society. Perhaps the central contribution of Christian theology to American environmental thought is the deeply held belief that individuals can and should be brought into conformity with an immutable, beneficent natural order. The tradition of natural theology, which focused on the signs of the divine visible in creation, certainly sustained this emphasis, but the explosion of enthusiasm for recreation in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth established a variety of specific bodily practices intended to bring individual persons into harmony with their environments.6 The theism evident in this normative understanding of nature as a key source of moral improvement is elusive: only on occasion did recreationists articulate their desire to achieve harmony with nature as an explicitly Christian undertaking. They did, however, celebrate the outdoors as a means to better themselves and to refresh

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themselves spiritually, employing Christian vocabularies, ritual structures, and soteriological frameworks. The quest for authentic wilderness experiences became a cultural hallmark of the twentieth century, but the internal contradictions of American environmental thought are clearly visible in the pursuit of purity in nature.7 As they imagined it, recreational enthusiasts posited nature as something outside the sphere of civilization, physically adjacent to urban environments but metaphysically set apart as an uncorrupted space conducive to spiritual experience. For decades critical voices within the environmental movement have noted the shortcomings of such a view: it turned a blind eye to the people who inhabited the places deemed by public decree as wilderness, often dispossessing them of their land, and established a tantalizing but unattainable concept of environmental goods.8 Devotees asserted the desirability of pure nature and at the same time took human economic activity as despoliation manifest. A soteriological view of nature was established in the wake of changing theological ideas about the moral status of the created world, yet the Christian idea of human beings as morally depraved remained an active element of American environmental thought. The misanthropic narrative that, given the garden, humans choose the apple continues to characterize many strains of ecological discourse. And although the fever of the wilderness movement has broken, the quest for natural experiences and spiritual restoration continues to orient many aspects of contemporary culture. There are a variety of means by which to critique environmental discourse. For instance, many critics have focused on the marginalization of women’s voices and the exclusion of people of color from environmental decision making.9 Resonating with, rather than repeating, the critiques of historians and ethicists working on such a line of critique, this book has attempted to explicate the internal logic of American environmental thought and to explain how the interests of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class Protestantism was built into mainstream environmental discourse. The idea that nature is fundamentally good and the reciprocal idea that human beings are

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inherently ecologically destructive are extracts from Christianity—the very inverse of White’s thesis. Insofar as these ideas have dominated American public discourse about the environment, theological tradition has set a boundary condition for the environmental imagination. It is difficult to imagine environmentally benign economies or to envision a sustainable future while clinging to a pessimistic anthropology. Likewise, the ontological compartmentalization of nature as something set apart from humanity—the demarcation of the urban from the wild using tacitly metaphysical language—has impoverished our capacity to think about ecosystems as communities inhabited by people. Though in different ways, this critical view corroborates similar concerns raised by ecofeminists and advocates of environmental justice over the past several decades. It remains to be seen whether contemporary rhetoric about rewilding or about living in the age of the Anthropocene offer any serious departure from the pessimistic anthropology that has conditioned environmental thought for more than a century. In the opening paragraphs of this book I juxtaposed the ideological rhetorics of whether environmentalism is a fake religion or a secular social movement. It is worthwhile to revisit this antagonism because it brings to the fore questions of historical authenticity. The genealogical connection between American environmental thought and its theological roots certainly invites dispute from ideologues of various kinds. For those who believe “environmentalism is the religion of naturalistic secularism,” the historical changes that refashioned Christian soteriology as devotion to nature will likely appear as theological perversions.10 To those who frame environmentalism as a secular ideology, the movement’s debt to religion would likely appear to have been fully paid. Both of these hypothetical responses rest on normative claims about what counts as religion, but questions about the intellectual foundations of contemporary cultural formations should not be confused with arguments about their authenticity. Environmentalism’s historical indebtedness to Christianity is less a normative evaluation than a descriptive appraisal of the particular conditions that shaped the character, trajec-

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tory, and possibilities for identifying and securing environmental goods. This descriptive endeavor does, however, lend itself to a normative assessment of the American environmental imagination. Are contemporary responses to environmental challenges limited by their theological foundations? Or, perhaps more evocatively, can the desire to value nature as something unspoiled by human use ground a more robust moral argument because of its theological character? For the past half century or more the energies of the American environmental movement have been chiefly devoted to the pursuit of technical solutions, including regulatory frameworks, clean energy initiatives, and market reforms. The local, national, and global ecological challenges we collectively confront are often framed as failures of governance or failures of knowledge, which indicates that appropriate responses are to be found in legislative improvements or in environmental education. Public discourse about a multitude of environmental issues—climate change, species extinction, water quality, fracking, etc.—are often structured around the same logic as are discussions about corporate management or traffic engineering: juridical oversight, market regulation, better integration of science into policy, and human ingenuity are touted as our best tools for securing human flourishing. Even among the more radical contributions to contemporary green politics, we find similar constraints on the environmental imagination. The criticism of market capitalism as the root cause of environmental ills is often attended by relatively technocratic exhortations for economic policy reform. But lurking beneath the surface of public discourse about environmental issues is a set of much more fundamental normative questions about human beings and their position in the global environmental system. It would be convenient if climate change and other large-scale ecological challenges could be adequately addressed by quick fixes of any kind, but such problems provoke debates about our most deeply held ideas concerning human flourishing and the moral status of nonhuman natures. Climate change exemplifies this challenge. As Mike Hulme writes, “Climate change is not so much a discrete problem to be solved

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as it is a condition under which human beings will have to make choices about such matters as priorities for economic development and the way we govern ourselves.”11 This observation is pertinent to the present challenge of anthropogenic global warming, but it also serves as a reminder that social mobilization around specific cultural values drives the political process, not the other way around. Progressive Era conservationists did not first identify “a discrete problem to be solved” and then select a particular course of action. Technical approaches came much later to the history of the American environmental movement. Environmentalism emerged organically, coalescing around a vision of human flourishing that linked the public good with spiritual well-being. As contemporary religious communities and institutions are increasingly drawn into the conversation about climate change and sustainability, scholars, politicians, and public commentators have expressed perplexity about the proper contribution of religious actors to political ecology.12 The history of American environmentalism clearly indicates that the social landscape in which environmental goods are contested cannot easily be partitioned into secular and religious categories. The relationship between religious sentiment and political organization is fluid and dynamic. The Progressive Era provides a compelling historical example in which religious energies helped mobilize Americans around conservationist causes. American environmental thought is deeply indebted to the logic of salvation. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, public deliberations about ecological issues hold to a conceptual formula derived from Christian theology in which environmental degradation is a result of human sinfulness, our alienation from a natural order that operates according to principles written into the fabric of nature itself. This formula indicates two kinds of morally satisfactory response: in one, human beings have opportunities to transcend their alienation, albeit temporarily, through experiences of nature; in the other, human activities are to be continually measured against and informed by our attempts to understand the immutable order of nature. Nature enthusiasts have

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long sought the meaning and moral message latent in the natural world. Where Georgian naturalists like Gilbert White and William Paley found in nature an invitation to faith, nineteenth-century romantics like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found evidence of the drive for individual self-reliance, and twentieth-century ecologists like Frederic Clements, Eugene Odum, and Aldo Leopold detected the universality of community life.13 In each of these periods Anglophone cultures found in nature what they lacked in everyday life, the environment serving as the backdrop for various redemptive pursuits. Environmental problems are not to be dismissed as theological projections: toxic waste, soil erosion, deforestation, urban sprawl, species extinction, and air pollution are genuine and impactful sources of harm to people, to animals, and to ecosystems. However, the ethical terms on which these harms are understood, the culturally specific ways that ecological degradation is experienced, the means by which the causes of environmental problems are diagnosed, and the kinds of solutions proposed in response to them are very much shaped by the limits of our social imagination. The logic of sin and redemption imposes one such limit on our environmental thinking. One of my hopes is that this book might aid in dislodging environmental discourse from the grip of technopolitics. By this I mean to indicate the way that environmental policies are aimed at reversing ecological problems, perpetually remediating the impacts of human activity in the attempt to compensate for our depravity. Theological questions pertaining to the human position in the natural order remain open and contested, especially those concerning whether human activity should be primarily conservative, that is, primarily oriented by values like restoration and preservation. These are salient and worthy moral criteria, but historically, environmental discourse has deployed these values for aesthetic reasons often in the interests of the wealthy and the socially privileged. If, as I have been arguing, the environmental movement is historically contiguous with religious thought, then its core problematic cannot be a

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narrow, empirical question with specific answers. As a religiously rooted social movement, environmentalism is fundamentally linked with culturally inculcated ideas about human flourishing. A policy-oriented approach to environmental issues might begin with the question “what should we sustain?” But this presupposes yet more fundamental questions. What does it mean to be human? How do we enact humanity? Questions about the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman world are quintessentially religious. To develop answers to these questions, early twentieth-century environmental groups borrowed heavily from Christian theological tradition. The insight that American environmentalism is premised on an ethic of salvation, grounded in efforts to transcend human depravity, invites a critical reappraisal of our inherited environmental categories. Ecological questions do not have easy answers, because they are not technical questions. They can be answered but only insofar as we find ourselves brave enough to commit to a particular answer. Environmental ethics does not hinge on our ability to articulate political solutions but on our willingness to accept that environmental politics is tied up with the very problem of being itself. In the face of technopolitical certitude in contemporary policy debates about climate change, perhaps remembering that the environmental imagination is religiously rooted can help us remain mindful that our relationship to the natural world is fundamentally a cultural condition. Reclaiming and reappraising the ethicoreligious basis of American environmentalism can help refresh the imaginative possibilities with which we respond to contemporary challenges. Perhaps the soteriological framework that structures so much of our environmental discourse is a dead end, conceptually inadequate to the task of thinking through modern environmental issues. I hope to have sufficiently interrogated the latent religiosity of environmental discourse so as to suggest that many of the assumptions built into environmentalism may not be generalizable to cultures that are not predominantly Christian. This substantiates concerns voiced by many environmentalists from the Global South as they encounter the hegemonic emphasis

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placed on pristine environments by European and North American conservation groups.14 Concerns of this kind echo sentiments expressed by Native American environmental thinkers, who have long worried that wilderness conservation is a way of systematically forgetting the place of human beings in a living landscape. In seeking to recover a lost past (that never really was), the Edenic thrust of modern conservationism has done little to develop an egalitarian ideal of human flourishing. The quest for spiritual experiences and aesthetic preferences enshrined in twentiethcentury American environmentalism are not inherently wrong, but they are decidedly partial and incomplete elements of a comprehensive notion of human flourishing. As environmental thinkers and activists— both in the United States and beyond—continue to grapple with global questions (climate change, North-South relations, human rights and development issues, oceanic and atmospheric ecological problems, etc.), their efforts must rely on a more robust, expansive notion of human flourishing. The historical critique of American environmentalism developed in the preceding pages suggests three important lessons useful in the elaboration of such a vision. First, environmentalists should strive to avoid thinking in terms of historical redemption. Environmentalists would do better to think existentially, as agents whose actions cannot and will not redeem persons or groups of persons. Recovering a lost past is not a practical option for contemporary society, nor would it be morally persuasive even if it were. Environmental thought—from Rousseau to the present—has tended to blend conservative and progressive impulses, laboring to balance nostalgia for the past with a vision for social change. It may come as a disappointment for many, but with respect to nature there is no going back. There are currently debates among restoration ecologists about whether “historical fidelity” (the employment of prior ecological functioning as a target for remediation efforts) remains a useful or viable criterion.15 Species extinction driven by human activity, especially on the massive scale at which it is currently occurring, can and should be slowed, but it can never be reversed. The same is true of other large-

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scale anthropogenic environmental changes, including atmospheric carbon concentrations, ocean acidification, and deforestation. Ecological harms like these can and should be curtailed, but it is absurd to pursue an environmental ideology that aims to restore original conditions. Providing for the needs of seven billion humans without abandoning the benefits afforded by modern science, technology, and medicine requires that we embrace an ethic of environmental change premised on the desirable and permissible forms of human ecological influence. As in our lives as moral individuals, we cannot help but have an impact on the world around us, and we should concentrate our efforts on having the kinds of impacts for which we can assume responsibility and of which we can be proud. Second, environmental advocates ought to be wary of aesthetics as a key value for public deliberations about ecology. The influence of Christian theology on American environmental discourse bequeathed a reactive theory of nature in which landscapes transform people, both spiritually and socially. Perhaps in an implicit attempt to grapple with questions of Pelagianism, generations of conservationists fought to enshrine wilderness as an inscrutable other with the power to spiritually transform persons through direct encounters. Humans are most certainly shaped by the landscapes they inhabit and the ecosystems in which they participate, but a central insight of modern ecological science, not yet fully absorbed into our moral discourse, is that human beings can and do influence their environments. No longer can we ask, “Should humans affect their environments?” Instead, the principal question of contemporary environmental ethics is rightfully “In what ways and for what purposes should humans affect their environments?” We need a theory of human ecology that not only allows for, but celebrates, reciprocity and mutuality. In an age when human environmental impacts are the chief driving forces of environmental change—an age many have termed the Anthropocene—it is absurd and impossible to maintain the ontological dualism of the wilderness ethic. We need an ethic that is not constrained by the theologically derived idea that

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human environmental impacts are inherently sinful. Instead we should articulate a vision for social and economic activity that aims toward a more just future. Third, environmental ethics ought to be guided by a central commitment to social justice. Mountaintop vistas are visually arresting, but pleasures of this kind mean little in a world where more than one billion people lack access to safe sources of drinking water.16 In place of values like personal transformation or naturalness, which have long held sway in American environmental discourse, environmentalists should pursue an inclusive vision of justice that does not privilege particular kinds of experience but remains focused on the needs of others.

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notes

introduction 1. The partisan rhetoric about climate change activists as cultists appears widely in the news media; see Paul Lazarro, “Rick Perry: Global Warming Not Proven,” International Business Times, August 18, 2011, www.ibtimes.com /rick-perry-global-warming-not-proven-211049. This frame is also regularly featured on the editorial pages of American newspapers and literary journals; see, e.g., Paul H. Rubin, “Environmentalism as Religion,” Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230451000 4575186343555831322; and Freeman Dyson, “The Question of Global Warming,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives /2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/. 2. James Murray, “Environmentalism Is Not a Religion,” Guardian, June 26, 2012, www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/26/climate-change-skepticreligion. 3. The historical process through which environmental discourses came to be dominated by the logic of policy and regulation is carefully laid out in Maarten Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Hajer’s analysis is also prescient for the present study, which likewise endeavors to describe the discursive practices by which environmental problems are “framed and defined” as cultural constructions (4). 4. The political opponents of green causes are not, of course, the only ones to have suggested the religious characteristics of modern American

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environmentalism (the Cornwall Alliance, the Akron Institute, etc.). Many social scientists describe the various kinds of “nature spirituality” operative in contemporary American society. Bron Taylor is the most prolific researcher in this field, but examples of the idea that environmental collectivities function as religious communities can be found in many areas of research. See, e.g., Bron Taylor, “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part I): From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism,” Religion 31, no. 2 (2001): 175–93; Bron Taylor, “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part II): From Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism and the New Age,” Religion 31, no. 3 (2001): 225–45; Sam Snyder, “New Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 4 (2007): 896– 922; The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World, ed. Steven Kellert and Timothy Farnham (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002); E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Mark Shibley, “Sacred Nature: Earth-based Spirituality as Popular Religion in the Pacific Northwest,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5, no. 2 (2011): 164–85. 5. See, e.g., Donald Worster, ed., American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973); and Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 6. There are numerous historical treatments of post–World War II “policy environmentalism.” See, e.g., Steven Stoll, U.S. Environmentalism since 1945 (Boston: St. Martin’s, 2007); Victor Scheffler, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Riley Dunlap and Angela Mertig, eds., American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970–1990 (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1992); and James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 7. See, e.g., J. Michael Martinez, American Environmentalism: Philosophy, History, and Public Policy (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013), 173. 8. Interestingly, the narrative in which romanticism is displaced by less particularistic, more scientifically-informed, political modes of environmental advocacy squares with the historical self-understanding of several major environmental organizations, especially the Sierra Club; see Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). For additional examples of the historical narrative in which religious themes are displaced by the immediacy of material and political

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concerns, see David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996); and Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 9. John McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2000), 328. 10. The conceptual apparatus afforded by the phrase “environmental imagination” appears sporadically among scholarly texts, but it is indebted primarily to Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1995). 11. Tracing the connections between theological roots and contemporary social forms is not a novel approach to environmental history: distinguished scholars like William Cronon, Donald Worster, and Carolyn Merchant have advanced similar narratives; see, e.g., Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 2003). This study, however, pays close attention to the link between bodily practices and the theology of salvation, a problematic that has been at the foreground of Christian thought for the entirety of its history. 12. See, e.g., Elmo Richardson, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Joseph Petula, American Environmentalism: Values, Tactics, and Priorities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980); and Douglas Strong, Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 13. In the preceding paragraphs I use the term environmental rather loosely: it was not until the 1960s that the term came to be associated with a social movement concerned with the protection of ecosystems and landscapes. Throughout the Progressive Era, environmentalism referred to a theory in the social and psychological sciences that asserted the primacy of nature over nurture. Interestingly, in this usage “environmentalists” held that the mental and emotional well-being of persons was primarily conditioned by their surroundings, a view that emerged in light of concerns about urban overcrowding, industrial labor conditions, and the mechanization of the economy in the late nineteenth century. I try, wherever possible, to make it clear that the texts examined in these pages would have been labeled by their contemporary readers as conservationist or preservationist, not environmentalist. Because, however, it is widely acknowledged that these texts were fundamental contributors to the formation of American environmental thought, I use the term

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environmentalism to refer broadly to the cultural milieu from which the social movement took shape. Similar anachronistic deployment of the term can be found in other historical studies that link Progressive Era developments to subsequent moments in American environmental history—e.g., Daniel Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881– 1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Other authors have ventured neologisms such as proto-environmentalism or pre-environmentalism, which make up for their inelegance by way of accuracy; see, e.g., Gilbert LaFreniere, The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview (Palo Alto, CA: Academic Press, 2007); and Nils Lindahl Elliot, Mediating Nature (London: Routledge, 2006). 14. Stoll, U.S. Environmentalism since 1945, 10. 15. See LaFreniere, The Decline of Nature; and Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 16. Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 4. 17. Stephen Fox develops a similar attention to early twentieth-century conservationist leaders recognized primarily at the regional level in the latter chapters of The American Conservation Movement. David Stradling’s Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004) is an excellent source of primary texts of this type. 18. Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 1; see also Buell, The Environmental Imagination. 19. Philippon, Conserving Words, 4. 20. For additional treatment of Muir’s private religiosity see Michael Cohen, Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: Knopf, 1945), Dennis Williams’s God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); and Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Chapter 2 herein extends this analysis of the connection between Muir’s private convictions and his public saliency. 21. Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003) articulates a coherent history of American environmentalism that emphasizes the contiguous development of

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nineteenth-century thought into twentieth-century politics, but the treatment of romanticism and transcendentalism lacks explicit religious reference. 22. The most prescient treatments of environmental movements by historians of American religion are Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 23. See, e.g., Scheffler, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America; and Donald Crosby, A Religion of Nature (New York: SUNY Press, 2002). 24. See, e.g., Thomas Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 25. Works that describe environmentalism as a form of nature religion that “resacralizes” the material world include Ursula Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Celia Deane-Drummond, Wonder and Wisdom: Conversations in Science, Spirituality, and Theology (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006); and Kocku von Stuckrad, “Reenchanting Nature: Modern Western Shamanism and Nineteenth-Century Thought,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 70, no. 4 (2002): 771–99. 26. This particular phrase belongs to Mary Evelyn Tucker, Worldly Wonder (Chicago: Open Court, 2003). 27. Robert Booth Fowler traces the rise of environmentalism among mainline denominations in his Greening of Protestant Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sarah McFarland Taylor examines the environmental views and practices of Catholic nuns in the United States in her Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Katherine Wilkinson, Between God and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating Middle Ground on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). These excellent studies are but samples of a significant and growing body of literature about the rise of religious environmentalism in the United States and abroad. 28. See Roger Gottlieb, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Laurel Kearns, “The Contexts of Eco-Theology,” in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed.

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Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); and John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014). 29. Notable figures in this interpretive vein include Bron Taylor (see note 4 above), Gilbert LaFreniere (see note 13 above), and Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 30. This understanding of environmentalism as antagonistic to Christian anthropocentrism is the basis for Lynn White Jr.’s tremendously influential 1967 essay and would seem to support the critique leveled by contemporary American Christians that environmentalism per se is heretical. 31. Specific work on the influence of American Protestantism on the shape of environmental thought can be found in the work of Mark Stoll, John Gatta, and Carolyn Merchant, but this theoretical frame is also evident in the work of legal scholars such as Steven Smith; see, e.g., Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 32. Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 189. 33. The narrative of secularization as fragmentation can be found in the work of Steven D. Smith, Stephen Toulmin, Carl Becker, and Bron Szerszynski. 34. There is a vast body of work on issues surrounding religion and secularity in the modern age. Notable examples include Gustavo Benavides, “Modernity,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Michael Warner, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 35. Willis Jenkins and Christopher Chapple, “Religion and Environment,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 441–63; and Evan Berry, “Religious Environmentalism and Environmental Religion in America,” Religion Compass 7, no. 10 (2013): 454–66. 36. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from the Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 37. R. A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1968); J. H. Steward, Theory of

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Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955). 38. Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); and Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 39. See Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature; Gatta, Making Nature Sacred; and Dunlap, Faith in Nature. 40. See, e.g., Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology, and the Sacred (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 41. Although scholars have questioned the conceptual validity of “wilderness” and “pristine nature” for more than twenty years, a flurry of highly publicized books during the past few years has brought this conversation much more into public awareness. See Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Paul Wapner, Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); and Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 42. See, e.g., Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); Joaz Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor (Northampton, MA: Edward Elger, 2003); Nancy Porter, ed., Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit, and the Idea of Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); David R. Lewis, “Native Americans and the Environment: A Survey of Twentieth-Century Issues,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1995): 423–50. 43. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–90. 44. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, environmental historians began to articulate much more critical evaluations of environmental movement. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonialists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) was instrumental in launching this scholarly orientation, and his approach was echoed in Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71–83; Roger Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement

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(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (London: Routledge, 1995); Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For more recent works on race in the history of American environmentalism see Diane Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); and Michael Eugene Harkin and David Rich Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 45. The American Southwest has been an important region in American environmental history: the federal protection of the Grand Canyon serves as a reminder of the conservationist legacies of John Wesley Powell and Teddy Roosevelt; the great tracts of federal land in Arizona and New Mexico were the sites for Aldo Leopold’s ventures with the U.S. Forest Service; and Edward Abbey’s activism was rooted in the desert landscapes of the Four Corners region. Little, however, has been written about Leopold’s marriage to Estelle Bergere, scion of an aristocratic New Mexican family, or about the contributions of Latinos to American environmentalism prior to World War II. Partial accounts of these topics can be found in Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); and, regarding the question of Catholicism in the formation of American environmentalism, Christopher Hamlin and John T. McGreevy, “The Greening of America, Catholic Style, 1930–1950,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 (2006): 464–99. 46. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 47. Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 48. Genesis 3:17–19 (NIV).

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49. There are two, mutually exclusive, ideas about what was discarded from the European environmental imagination as modernity took hold. On the one hand feminist and neopagan scholars have argued against the brutality of the modern scientific view of nature, indicating the ways that the Baconian project of knowledge as mastery disrupted traditions of nature reverence that celebrated nature’s motherly, creative essence; see, e.g., Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Margo Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1997). On the other hand a number of scholars assert the opposite, that the very possibility of nature appreciation is an inherently modern phenomenon, predicated on the collapse of Christianity’s world-hating metaphysics; see, e.g., Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995). 50. Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

chapter one Epigraph: Rev. Joseph McSorley, “Nature Worship a Christian Sentiment,” Catholic World, Nov. 1899, 212. 1. Elmo Robinson, “Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Mountaineering,” Sierra Club Bulletin 38 (1938): 50. 2. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 28. 3. Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 4. Recreation has at least three overlapping meanings, all of which entered into English during the late Middle Ages and all of which date back to Roman usage. Dating from the fourth century, the oldest and most basic meaning of recreation is “to restore to a good or normal physical condition from a state of weakness or exhaustion; to refresh, reinvigorate.” A slightly later development (fifth century) in the usage of the term entails “entertaining oneself through a pleasurable or interesting pastime, amusement, activity, etc. (esp. habitually); amusement, entertainment.” Last, recreation can also describe the action of “creat[ing] again or in a new way.” While this final meaning of the term entered common speech during the early modern era, it reflects earlier notions of recreation in that it designates making something new again. Human well-being is certainly one of the central objects of recreation—we recreate to nourish ourselves,

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to restore ourselves through rest, distraction, or sustenance and are thus “recreated.” The term is manifestly soteriological. There is a slippage between the first and second sense of recreation, however, and it is this distinction that gave rise to the theological tensions that surrounded recreational pastimes in Christian history. If recreation is a kind of spiritual rejuvenation, then it must be more than mere amusement, mere distraction (Oxford English Dictionary). 5. These three changes might also be understood as particular answers to the three questions that Clarence Glacken poses in Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from the Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Glacken’s first question asks whether the earth is “a purposefully made creation.” The second question asks whether environmental conditions, like climate and landscape, have “an influence in molding the character and nature of human culture.” Glacken’s third question is “In what manner has man changed [the earth] from its hypothetical pristine condition?” (vii). 6. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203–7, 1205. 7. Augustine, Confessions, trans. trans. Albert Outler (London: SCM Press, 1955), 10.35.55. 8. Ibid., 10.35.35. 9. For example, Albert Cook Outler, Confessions (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) translates immensa silva as “wilderness”; Robert O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989) uses “forest”; and Henry Chadwick, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) uses “jungle.” 10. Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) is instructive on this point. Augustine’s notion of life as a toilsome journey fraught with spiritual distractions and traps is but one notable example of the poetic notion of uncultivated landscapes, an idea that troubled Western thinkers from Virgil to Dante. 11. The homo viator concept was one of the “essential ingredients of early Christian and medieval thought and life” (Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42, no. 2 [1967]: 233–59). 12. See Gary Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999). 13. See Linwood Urban, A Short History of Christian Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 137–46. 14. See H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 57.

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15. Among Augustine’s champions on this point are H. Paul Santmire and Bronislaw Szerszynski; see, e.g., Santmire, ibid.; and Szerszynski, “Augustinian Ecological Democracy,” Ecotheology 9, no. 3 (2004): 338–58. 16. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22.24. 17. Confessions, 1.10, 6.7. Subsequent citations of the Confessions are provided parenthetically in the text proper. 18. For a more complete account of Petrarch’s letter and its significance see Donald Beecher, “Petrarch’s Conversion on Mont Ventoux and the Patterns of Religious Experience,” Renaissance and Reformation 28, no. 1 (2006): 55–74. 19. There are at least a dozen excellent books devoted to documenting specific aspects of the emergence of a modern view of nature. Prominent examples include Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore; Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (London: Clarendon, 1945); and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 20. This idea of modernity as radically secular and distinct from theological history permeates much of the literature on the history of environmental thought, notably in Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and Merchant, The Death of Nature. 21. Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 55, 27–28. 22. The foremost analysis of the emergence of the modern concept of the self is Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); an excellent companion study is Adam Seligman, Modernity’s Wager: Authority, Transcendence, and the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 23. Additional treatment of this point, especially with reference to Rousseau’s ability to temper “Enlightenment optimism [with] Augustinian pessimism,” can be found in Mark Cladis, “Rousseau’s Soteriology: Deliverance at the Crossroads,” Religious Studies 32, no. 1 (1996): 76–91. 24. One liberty taken here with regard to Rousseau’s autobiographical work is the elision of his two main works of this genre: the Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker. The latter was written in the final two years of Rousseau’s life

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/ Notes to Pages 37–39

and is less caustic and, for the most part, less scandalous than his Confessions. The Confessions and the Reveries are properly understood as separate works but are in many ways coterminous and were originally published under the same binding in 1782 (see Russell Goulbourne’s introduction to his 2011 translation of the Reveries). The Reveries has also received more attention from environmentally focused scholars, as for instance, in chapter 2 of Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion. 25. In her lucid and wide-ranging book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), Rebecca Solnit comments on Rousseau’s rearrangement of Christian soteriology. Solnit claims that Rousseau “reverses the direction of this fall: it is no longer into nature but into culture” (18). She is only partially correct on this point: Rousseau certainly presents an altered vision of the Fall, but the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1 and 2 hardly tells a story of a fall “into nature.” In this sense Rousseau provides a strange echo of Christian dogma when he images the carefree Eden of precultural humanity. 26. Rousseau, Reveries, 22–23. 27. Solnit, Wanderlust, 18. 28. See, e.g., Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 5, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern World (Edinburgh: Ignatius Press, 1990); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971); and Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 29. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 29. 30. A number of excellent scholarly works document this complex cultural exchange between medieval Islamic philosophy and Christian theology in the high Middle Ages. See, e.g., Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Mark Graham, How Islam Created the Modern World (Beltsville, MD: Amana, 2006); and Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). 31. In his The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1995) Peter Gay makes this argument with particular attention to the emphasis on classical learning in seventeenth-century European philosophy. Gay’s view is that Enlightenment philosophers liberated themselves from the hegemony of Christian dogma through their resuscitation of Greek and Roman mythological themes. Although his work is borne out as an analysis of seventeenth- and

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eighteenth-century arts and culture, an ironic rebuttal of his position is that a similar celebration of the recuperation of Greek thought characterized Scholastic theology at the zenith of Christianity. 32. This is a rough approximation of the narrative developed in Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 33. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12. 34. For further examination of this development see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Dupré neatly captures the role of nominalism in opening a gap between the order imposed on nature by the human mind and the unknowable orderliness of the divine mind. Where classical and early medieval thinkers had assumed that human reason was self-same with the divine logos, the nominalist emphasis on omnipotence destabilized this congruity. 35. From “Weekend at Burnsie’s,” The Simpsons, season 13, episode 16, directed by Michael Marcantel, aired April 7, 2002, Fox Television. 36. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 57–58. 37. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 177. 38. Dupré makes this same point when he claims that “nominalist philosophy had, at least negatively, prepared this change [to the empirical study of nature]” (Passage to Modernity, 41). 39. On this point Olaf Pedersen’s The Book of Nature (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Press, 1992) offers a careful consideration of the metaphor of nature as “book” in Christian history. With regard to the metaphor’s prominence in medieval and early modern theology, Pedersen demonstrates that although the metaphor has its roots in Greek philosophy and was well-known to the church fathers, it came into its own as a theological concept in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries as the dynamic interaction of Aristotelian metaphysics, Scholastic methods, and systematic mathematics gave rise to new modes of “reading” the created order. Dupré’s Passage to Modernity also illustrates this point (35–36). 40. Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 38–42. 41. Ibid., 35. 42. Ibid., 32. 43. Gillespie cites Heinz Heimsoeth on the point that Eckhart is perhaps the earliest figure within the Christian tradition to develop a metaphysical argument explicitly affirming the material world (Theological Origins of Modernity,

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302n38). See Heinz Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). 44. Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 190. 45. Ibid., 34. 46. Ibid., 2. 47. See Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3; and Harvey Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside: A History of the British Outdoor Movement (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 54. 48. See Ladner, “Homo Viator.” 49. Solnit, Wanderlust, 16. 50. See Harrison, Forests, 61–64. 51. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1977), 555–90, 559. 52. James H. Robinson, ed. and trans., Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1898), 312–13. 53. Rousseau, Reveries, 11. 54. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, 12. 55. Ferenc Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 3. 56. Ibid., 5. 57. Ibid., 13. 58. Ibid., 170. 59. See Chauncey Tinker, Selections from the Works of John Ruskin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908). 60. A. H. Sidgwick’s Walking Essays (London: Edward Arnold Press, 1912) typifies the kinds of claims about walking bandied about during the Victorian and Gilded Ages. 61. Thoreau, “Walking,” 567. 62. See Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 63. George Dawson, quoted in Ian Sellers, “George Dawson (1821–1876),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7347. 64. Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2010), 91.

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65. Ibid., 90. 66. Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside, 54. 67. For general treatments of this point see Harvey Taylor’s Claim on the Countryside; and Wallace’s Walking, Literature, and English Culture. 68. For an expansive treatment of the recreational foundations of the conservation movement see John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). 69. This dual dynamic of industrial naturalism has been a central current in American environmental thought since the earliest days of the republic. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) is perhaps the first, and most important, source to document and describe technological mastery as a basis for the bucolic. 70. Taylor, Claim on the Countryside, 10. 71. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, 7–8. 72. See Rex Skidmore, “The Protestant Church and Recreation—An Example of Social Change,” Social Forces 20, no. 3 (1942): 364–70. 73. This chapter has focused exclusively on the tension between orthodox soteriological claims and the rise of pleasurable forms of affecting salvation. Of course, Christian history is also characterized by a deep tradition of salvific practices that employ pain, suffering, and even martyrdom. The Christological sources for these types of practice make them a rather different case; while it is hardly surprising that Christianity developed a variety of penitential practices, the flourishing of pleasurable practices represents an unexpected departure from a theologically predictable trajectory. 74. More exhaustive treatments of these figures and others, as well as a more comprehensive treatment of shifting medieval ideas about nature, can be found in Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination; Santmire, The Travail of Nature; and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore. 75. Robinson, “Prolegomena,” 50. 76. John Wesley, The Works of Rev. John Wesley, vol. 1 (London: City Road, 1809), 280.

chapter two Epigraph: Harry F. Ward, “The Church and Recreation,” in The Social Welfare Forum: Official Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, vol. 55 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 372.

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/ Notes to Pages 60–64

1. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86–87. A strikingly similar view can be found in Gary Snyder’s essay “Good, Wild, Sacred,” which claims that the sacredness of nature “returned to the Occident only with the Romantic movement”; see Gary Snyder, “Good, Wild, Sacred,” in The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point, 1971), 84–103, 86. 2. See Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 3. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203–7. 4. This phrase, “religion of nature,” has long been used to designate the various cultural threads that together animate the Euro-American nature mythos. See, e.g., Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Peter Beyer, “Globalization and the Religion of Nature,” in Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 5. This idea of nature as a source of spiritual wealth has been a long-standing characteristic in American life and letters, with the paradigmatic example of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). 6. This argument has been made in a number of quarters but is perhaps most cogently stated in Catherine Albanese’s article “Physic and Metaphysic in Nineteenth-Century America: Medical Sectarians and Religious Healing,” Church History 55, no. 4 (1986): 489–502. 7. Thomas Cox, “Americans and Their Forests: Romanticism, Progress, and Science in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Forest History 29, no. 4 (1985): 156–68, 164. 8. See Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 189; and Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 42. 9. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 36. 10. See, e.g., Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 11. See Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History 10, no. 2 (2005): 184–210. 12. James D. Proctor, “Religion as Trust in Authority: Theocracy and Ecology in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 1 (2006): 188–96.

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13. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 143. 14. The Progressive Era has been the subject of substantial historical analysis by scholars of religion. See, e.g., Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); and James Moseley, A Cultural History of Religion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981). 15. David Morgan, “Protestant Visual Culture and the Challenges of Urban America during the Progressive Era,” in Faith in the Market, ed. John M. Giggie and Diane Winston (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 39. 16. Robert T. Handy, “Protestant Theological Tensions and Political Styles in the Progressive Period,” in Religion in American Politics, ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 228. 17. See Szasz, Divided Mind; and Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 18. For further reflection on this point see Mitman, “In Search of Health”; see also Daniel Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 19. Frederick Law Olmstead, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” paper read before the American Social Science Association at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Feb. 25, 1870; repr. in Donald Worster, ed., American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973). 20. The category “exertive recreation” is Olmstead’s, but the distinction between “robust” and “receptive” forms of recreation was common in turn-ofthe-century literatures. This delineation no doubt draws on the deeper Victorian anxieties about the feminization of nineteenth-century societies, which had spawned muscular approaches to Christianity a generation prior. 21. See Don S. Kirschner, “The Perils of Pleasure: Commercial Recreation, Social Disorder and Moral Reform in the Progressive Era,” American Studies 21, no. 2 (1980): 27–42, 30. 22. George A. Bellamy, “Recreation and Social Progress,” in The Social Welfare Forum: Official Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, vol. 55 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 375–82, 376. 23. Harry F. Ward, “The Church and Recreation,” in The Social Welfare Forum: Official Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, vol. 55 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 370–74, 372.

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24. Rex Skidmore, “The Protestant Church and Recreation—An Example of Social Change,” Social Forces 20, no. 3 (1942): 364–70, 369. 25. See Ian Kimball, Sports in Zion: Mormon Recreation, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. 26. For more analysis on this point see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 27. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (1991): 299–323, 300. 28. Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 143. 29. Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 21. 30. Rieser (ibid., 22) points to the Old Testament verses particularly relevant here: Leviticus 23:42: “Live in booths [tents] for seven days”; and Deuteronomy 16:13: “celebrate the feast of the tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the [harvest].” 31. Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981), 336. 32. Elizabeth Raymond, quoted in Joseph Price, “Naturalistic Recreations,” in Spirituality and the Secular Quest, ed. Peter H. Van Ness (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 414–44, 418. 33. James Morton Turner, “From Woodcraft to ‘Leave No Trace’: Wilderness, Consumerism, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America,” Environmental History 7, no. 3 (2002): 462–84, 476–77. 34. Alfred Runte, “The National Park Idea: Origins and Paradox of the American Experience,” Journal of Forest History 21, no. 2 (1977): 64–75. 35. Richard Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 22. 36. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1977), 555–90, 572. 37. The early chapters of Hays’s Beauty, Health, and Permanence capture nicely the important divergences between pre-WWII conservationism and postWWII environmentalism; see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health , and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 38. Ibid., 465.

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39. Harvey Broome and Benton MacKaye, Some Further Suggestions Regarding Definitions of Classes of Outdoor Use Areas, memo, Dec. 2, 1934, Bancroft Library Archives, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter UCB) (emphasis in original). 40. Benton MacKaye, “Personal Correspondence with Bob Marshall,” March 2, 1937, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 41. Benton MacKaye, “The Appalachian Trail: A Guide to the Study of Nature,” Scientific Monthly, April 1932, 330–42. 42. Robert Marshall, “A Policy for the Future,” undated (c. 1930), Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 43. Robert Marshall, “Impressions from the Wilderness,” Nature Magazine, Nov. 1951 (written c. 1932), 481–84, 481. 44. Ibid. 45. R. H. Rutledge, “Recreation Values of National Forest Primitive Areas and Their Administration,” paper delivered at the Institute Conference of Western Division National Recreation Association, Salt Lake City, April 13, 1938. 46. Benton MacKaye to Robert Yard Sterling, “In Regard to Park Legislation: A Separation of Functions,” memo, April 7, 1937, Robert Marshall Papers, Box 8, Folder 12, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 47. Robert Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” Scientific Monthly, Feb. 1930, 141–48, 143. 48. Clinton Clark, “Report to the Advisory Committee on Hiking,” National Park Service, Nov. 1938, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 49. The wilderness movement as a whole did not repudiate participation in urban industrial society; there were certainly persons and organizations that articulated an early version of the “back to the land” idea. This minoritarian strain, too, was colored by religious characteristics and became the basis for the homesteading movement and the back-to-the-land movements of the midtwentieth century. An excellent analysis of this history can be found in Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chaps. 2 and 3. 50. See, e.g., Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), which, in places, levels such a criticism. Marx argues that the literary roots of American environmentalism are to be found in the marriage of a faith in technological mastery with an arcadian idealization of uninhabited landscapes. Marx’s argument to this effect has been quite influential for my thinking about the hybrid character of early twentieth-century American environmental thought, but his insistence

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on the dialectic nature of the interplay between technoscientific and agrarian modes of relating to nature fails to appreciate the depth of their synthesis during the twentieth century and does not adequately acknowledge the degree to which their marriage was sanctioned by a religious view of the biophysical world. 51. Although Marshall’s PhD was from Johns Hopkins and was in plant physiology, his master’s degree was from Harvard University (1930). Leopold was one of the early stars of the Yale Forestry School (PhD 1908). 52. MacKaye to Sterling, “In Regard to Park Legislation” (see note 46 above), 2. 53. The Wilderness Society: Reasons for a Wilderness Society, memo, Jan. 1935, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 54. Ibid. 55. Robert Marshall, Protection of Primeval America, c. 1935, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB; for a more extensive treatment of the relationship between shifting concepts of ecology and the rise of environmental concerns in twentieth-century America see Worster, Nature’s Economy. 56. Marshall, Protection of Primeval America. 57. Schmitt, Back to Nature, xix. 58. Harold C. Anderson, “The Unknown Genesis of the Wilderness Idea,” Living Wilderness, July 1940, 7–15. 59. See, e.g., John C. Elder, “John Muir and the Literature of Wilderness,” Massachusetts Review 22, no. 2 (1981): 375–86. 60. Among Muir’s more significant interpreters, Michael Cohen, Bron Taylor, and Donald Worster might be said to be the leading advocates of the notion that his religiosity is fundamentally a departure from Christianity; see Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As for those who claim a more direct link between Muir’s “glacier gospel” and the Gospel itself, Thurman Wilkins, John Gatta, and Dennis Williams are notable; see Thurman Wilkins, John Muir: Apostle of Nature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Dennis Williams, God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).

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61. Worster, A Passion for Nature, 416. 62. Wilkins, John Muir, 55, 265, 272. 63. Sandra Sizer Frankiel, California’s Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 122. 64. Ibid., 123. 65. Ibid., 157. 66. Gatta, Making Nature Sacred, 150. 67. Contemporary scholars of religion and ecology have raised important questions about White’s assumptions: his simple opposition of Christianity and environmental concern overlooks the easygoing marriage of the two in the works of prominent environmental thinkers, like Muir and Leopold. Retrospectively, it seems that religion and environmentalism were not something that theologians needed to put back together, because American environmental thought had always been pervaded by Christian ideas. See Evan Berry, “Religious Environmentalism and Environmental Religion in America,” Religion Compass 13 (April 2013): 454–66; Willis Jenkins, “After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 2 (2009): 283–309; and Mark Stoll, “The Quest for Green Religion,” Source: Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 22, no. 2 (2012): 265–74. 68. Gatta, Making Nature Sacred, 152. 69. See, e.g., John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Mariner Books, 1998), entries for June 18 and July 7. 70. Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 147. 71. Charles Augustus Keeler, “John Muir’s Birthday,” April 20, 1927, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. 72. “Dr. Badè Talks on ‘Religion of Muir,’ ” Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 21, 1924. 73. See, e.g., Linnie Marsh Wolfe and Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 74. The Edmond S. Meany Papers at the University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection archives contain several brief correspondences between Meany and Muir. Though their mutual friend and Sierra Club officer Edward Parsons often mediated their relationship, these exchanged notes, especially when coupled with Muir’s irregular communications with the broader community of “nature lovers” in the Puget Sound region, demonstrate that

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the connection between Muir and the Mountaineers was more than just a passing one. 75. Schmidt, “Arbor Day,” 305–11. 76. Gatta, Making Nature Sacred, 150. 77. Melanie Simo, Forest and Garden: Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xiv. 78. There are exceptions to this tendency, of course. Catherine Albanese’s Nature Religion in America; Mark Stoll’s Nature, Protestantism, and Capitalism in America; Rebecca Kneale Gould’s At Home in Nature; and Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion afford important counterpoints to the explanatory reductionism of environmental historians more broadly. Their work proves that the mainstream historical view inadequately considers the movement’s religious roots. 79. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 19. 80. Histories of the club’s contribution to preservationist efforts in the Pacific Northwest can be found in Thomas Cox, The Park Builders (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); and Theodore Catton, National Park, City Playground (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). The composition of the Mountaineers Club during its earliest years drew decidedly from the ranks of Seattle’s social elite, especially from the faculty of the University of Washington. The centrality of university educators in the club’s roster resembles the genesis of the Sierra Club, which “was founded in the early nineties by a remarkable group of men, mostly from the University of California and Stanford” (Francis Farquhar, Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam [San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979], 48). 81. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of environmentalism traces back only to 1923, when it was used by a historian to “stress the importance of physical, biological, psychological or cultural environment as a factor influencing the structure or behavior of animals, including man.” Environmentalism did not become the standard description of “concern with the preservation of the environment” until as late as the 1970s. Previously, the diverse cultural threads involved with such political activism were variously called “the green movement,” “ecological ethics,” “conservationism,” and “preservationism.” The story of early twentieth-century environmentalism, or at least of those persons, ideas, and organizations that made the contemporary environmental movement possible, is not satisfactorily told using contemporary schemas of classifying “the secular” and “the religious.” 82. Henry Landes, “Foreword,” Mountaineer, March 1907, 4. 83. Ibid.

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84. The very idea of the Mountaineers Club was conceived by two prominent Seattle businessmen, one of whom was brother to Edward Curtis, the famous photographer of American Indians personally commissioned by President Roosevelt. The club immediately had a profound influence on the upper echelons of Seattle society, as the group comprised “forty-two librarians and teachers, twenty-three businessmen, fourteen college professors, including eleven from the University of Washington, thirteen physicians and surgeons, three attorneys, two photographers, two bankers, and ‘Will’ Steel, founder of the Mazamas and the man who would almost single-handedly promote the creation of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon” ( Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers [Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 1998], 13). 85. During the twentieth century a massive body of scholarship developed in response to the increasing importance of spirituality as a mode of religiosity, but that “spirituality” seems no closer to definitive definition than does religion. Robert Wuthnow has pointed out that confessional scholars often consider spirituality as “all the beliefs and activities by which individuals attempt to relate their lives to God or to a divine being or some other conception of a transcendent reality” (Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s [Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1998], viii). This view identifies spirituality as the entirety of religiosity and delimits “religion” to the institutional organization of spirituality. In direct contrast, others theorize spirituality as a mode of religious expression that functions outside of institutional contexts, arguing that spirituality “is detraditionalized in the sense that it rejects any form of religion which locates authority in a source which transcends the individual—whether that be God, scriptures, a particular community, its rituals, sacraments or priesthood” (Linda Woodhead, Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001], 81). Still others define spirituality as the human quest for the “wholeness of life” or as the development of practical techniques to ameliorate the human predicament. Wuthnow has attempted to mediate the tension among these definitions of spirituality by differentiating between spiritualities of “dwelling” (spirituality in the context of religious tradition) and spiritualities of “seeking” (spiritualities of questing beyond and outside religious traditions). But as Wade Clark Roof has eloquently shown, these two modes of spirituality interpenetrate one another, dispensing with any tangible boundary between the celebration of tradition and questing outside its contexts. See Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Following Roof’s suggestion that spirituality is a primary form of religious life that privileges the dynamic over the static, the existential over the systematic, and lived praxis over abstraction, this study employs the term spirituality simply to signal the embeddedness of religion in the patterning of human life. The processes through which such embedding takes place sometimes flow through channels controlled by ecclesiastical religious authorities, sometimes not. What is fundamental about spirituality is that it signifies a lived dimension of religion, one that arises as a result of a reciprocal exchange between individuals and the communities and cultures to which they belong. In contradistinction to the analysis of many critical scholars, this study rejects the notion that spirituality designates absolute individual autonomy. Spirituality is more complex than subjective religiosity: the symbols, rituals, mythologies, ethical precepts, and devotions that shape modern religious life are part of a cultural discourse. 86. Harriet Geithmann, “Our Natural Bent” (1948), Box 70, Folder 10, Edmond Meany Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 87. Ibid. 88. Patricia O’Connell Killen, “Patterns of the Past, Prospects for the Future: Religion in the None Zone,” in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 11. 89. Ibid. 90. Documentary evidence for this claim comes from extensive archival research on the Mountaineers and the Sierra Club. These pages do not present the details of collaboration between recreational clubs and Protestant churches outside San Francisco and Seattle, but it is clear that the kinds of services outlined in this section were commonplace across the nation, especially in the 1920s. 91. Program bulletin for Easter Sunset Vespers, Easter Sunday 1920, Bancroft Library Archives, UCB. The program also indicates that “How Firm a Foundation” was chosen because it was the favorite hymn of Theodore Roosevelt, the patron president of wilderness lovers. For an extended analysis of the mountaintop motif see chapter 3. 92. Ibid. 93. “Thanksgiving Service Held on Hill Tops,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, Nov. 30, 1922; and “Berkeley Churches Will Hold Special Thanksgiving Services,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, Nov. 28, 1928.

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94. “Thanksgiving Service Held on Hill Tops,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, Nov. 30, 1922. 95. “Dr. Badè Talks on ‘Religion of Muir,’” Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 21, 1924. 96. In 1925 Arthur Gunn, the pastor of the Yosemite National Church, reached out to Badè to enlist the support of the Sierra Club in petitioning the federal government for “the privilege to erect a building for divine worship.” A Christian chapel has been one of the few buildings permitted in the Yosemite Valley, having originally been built in 1879, and the expansion plans that Gunn mentioned to Badè eventually became what is now the “Church Bowl.” Although there appears to be no formal record regarding the Sierra Club’s position on plans to expand the chapel, both the chapel and the Church Bowl became important sites for the club’s official gatherings in the Valley beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the present day. 97. “Dr. Badè Talks on ‘Religion of Muir,’ ” Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 21, 1924. 98. Mountaineers Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 99. Mountaineers Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 100. Ibid. 101. This same text was republished in 1907 in Views from the Watch Tower, the predecessor to the contemporary publication of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower. 102. Mountaineers Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. Photograph by R. B. Kizer. 103. While the Mountaineers simply credit the Salutation to the Dawn as “from the Sanskrit,” it is often attributed to the fifth-century Indian poet Kalidasa; see Mountaineers Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 104. “Rock of Ages,” words by Augustus Montague Toplady, 1776; music by Thomas Hastings, 1830. This hymn was later used by the interpretive guides at Carlsbad Caverns National Monument to ground the tourist experience in a transcendent vocabulary. See Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 161. 105. The relevant verses of the hymn read as follows: Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood,

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/ Notes to Pages 96–99

From Thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power. While I draw this fleeting breath— When my eyelids close in death— When I soar to worlds unknown— See Thee on Thy judgment throne— Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee.

106. George A. Miller, Some Outdoor Prayers (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1911). Quoted in “Sunrise Service in the Hills,” Mountaineers Archives, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 107. “Jesus Lover of My Soul,” words by Charles Wesley, 1740; music by Simeon B. Marsh, 1834. The first two verses of the hymn read as follows: Jesus, Lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly, While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high! Hide me, O my savior, hide Till the storm of life is past; Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last! Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul on Thee; Leave, ah! Leave me not alone, Still support and comfort me: All my trust on Thee is stayed, All my help from Thee I bring; Cover my defenseless head With the shadow of Thy wing.

108. Mountaineers Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 109. Written by F. W. Greiner and “dedicated to The Mountaineers.” Souvenir of Mountain Poems, Box 1, Folder 21, Mountaineers Records, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 110. Sarah Flower Adams’s inspiration for “Nearer My God to Thee” was a verse from Genesis 28 concerning Jacob’s vision of angels ascending a ladder to heaven, thus already prefiguring the Mountaineers adaptation’s spatial location of God as “on mountain high.” That Adams’s original hymn grew

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from this verse is appropriate to the theological thrust of Greiner’s version in two ways. First, the Genesis account of Jacob’s dream imagines a highly spatialized landscape of the sacred wherein movement along a vertical axis describes the salvific economy of the heavenly hierarchy. Second, although Greiner’s hymn requests God’s protection “where’er we roam,” it also inserts the hikers, campers, and nature lovers that constituted the Mountaineers Club into this same heavenly hierarchy. Who does Jacob see “ascending and descending” the ladder? The holy servants of God: angels. With its movement “nearer my God to thee,” “The Mountaineer Hymn” points to the possibility of transformation in the wilderness. The traveler alone beneath the stars far from home reveling in God’s creative splendor is offered as an opportunity of metamorphosis: from mere wanderer toward the angelic. The long climb heavenward “beneath Thy temple’s dome, the vaulted sky” continues even “when life’s long outing ends,” after which time, in language evocative of both Adams’s hymn and Jacob’s vision of the angels, God’s sure hand still “guides us o’er the trail that leads us home.” 111. See chapters 2 and 3 of Roof, Spiritual Marketplace.

chapter three Epigraph: John Muir, Mountaineer, Nov. 1908, 1. On the opening page of each issue of the Mountaineer illustrious members and associates of the club extended greetings to subscribers. This particular quotation was regularly cited as the unofficial motto of the Mountaineers Club. 1. See, e.g., Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959); and Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 2. 3. Ibid., 28. 4. Ibid., 73. 5. Among biblical exegetes and interpreters, both ancient and modern, there is substantial disagreement over the meaning and phrasing of Genesis 3:17. Two primary translations exist: one uses the construction “cursed is the ground in thy work,” the other, “cursed is the ground for thy sake.” The difference is profound: the former interpretation emphasizes agricultural toil as the

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primary stuff of the fall from grace, and the latter more resolutely signals the condemnation of all creation. See Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, chap. 2; and Marjorie Hope Nicolson, “Literary Attitudes towards Mountains,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 2, ed. Phillip Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973). 6. See, e.g., Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2004); Robert Bates, Mystery, Beauty, Danger (Portsmouth, NH: Peter Randall, 2001); Larry W. Price, Mountains and Man: A Study of Process and Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 7. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 77. Nicolson acknowledges as much when she states that “Jerome, Basil, and Abelard had no such complex idea of the structure of the egg. . . . It would more nearly have approached the Cartesian world” (183). 8. See Robert L. Cohn, The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981). 9. Richard Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Terrence Donaldson, Jesus on the Mountain: A Study in Matthean Theology (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1985). 10. At least one school of exegetical analysis argues that this oft-quoted verse is in fact meant to denigrate the mountain-centered religiosity of the Canaanites; see John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 3, Psalms 90–150 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008). 11. Cohn, Shape of Sacred Space, 29. 12. Ibid.; see also Isaiah 42:11. 13. Donaldson, Jesus on the Mountain. 14. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1923; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). 15. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 43. 16. See, e.g., Donaldson, Jesus on the Mountain. 17. Price, Mountains and Man, 11. 18. Cohn, Shape of Sacred Space, 33. 19. See, e.g., Isaiah 28. 20. Perhaps this critique of verticality has some merit beyond mere mountains: the Icarus legend suggests a similar concern in Hellenic thought about the costs of human pride when attempting to conquer height itself. 21. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995), 419. 22. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 44. 23. Ibid., 3. 24. Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 126.

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25. John Howe, “Creating Symbolic Landscapes: Medieval Development of Sacred Space,” in Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 208–23, 215. 26. Douglas Freshfield, “Mountains and Mankind,” Geographical Journal 24, no. 4 (Oct. 1904): 443–60, 447. 27. Paul, Archdeacon of Aleppo, The Travels of Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, trans. F. C. Belfour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1836), 96–109. 28. Larry Price, Mountains and Man: A Study of Process and Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 14. 29. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 415. 30. Ibid., 417. The landscape of salvation, even where not described in terms of mountain ascent, is often punctuated with such a locus amoenus (lovely place); see Howe, “Creating Symbolic Landscapes,” 210. 31. John Ruusbroec, Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. James Wiseman (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). 32. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 44. 33. See, e.g., Judith Adler, “Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 1 (2006): 4–37. 34. Robert Pogue Harrison makes a similar remark about forests, a geographical feature that shares much in common with mountains; see Harrison, Forests, 46–52. Bernbaum, in his Sacred Mountains of the World, similarly describes the Divine Comedy as symbolically structured on the ascent of mountains (see chap. 13). 35. Francis Gribble, The Early Mountaineers (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), 15. 36. Lynn Thorndike, “Renaissance or Prenaissance?” Journal of the History of Ideas 4, no. 1 (1943): 65–74, 72. 37. Jean-Paul Zaunon, “An Invitation to Mont Aiguille,” Alpine Journal 80 (1975): 83–87. 38. Elmo Robinson, “Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Mountaineering,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 505. 39. Arnold Lunn, The Swiss and Their Mountains (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 23. 40. This development is in line with what Hans Blumenberg has termed “the rehabilitation of theoretical curiosity.” See his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 241.

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41. Petrarch, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” www.fordham.edu/halsall /source/petrarch-ventoux.asp. 42. Lunn, The Swiss and Their Mountains, chap. 2. 43. Freshfield, “Mountains and Mankind,” 450; Lunn, The Swiss and Their Mountains, 21. 44. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mountains: Geology, History, Culture,” in Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 1–19, 5. 45. Albrecht Classen, “Terra Incognita? Mountains in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature,” in Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 35–56, 36. 46. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 28. 47. Ibid., 196. 48. Rene Descartes, “Discourse on Method” and “Meditations” (1641; Indianapolis: Bobs Merrill, 1960), 10. This Cartesian origin of the modern frustration with the lack of geometrical regularity in the natural world is nicely described by Robert Pogue Harrison in chapter 3 of Forests. 49. See Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 23; and Arthur Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), 153. The architectural skirmishes between classicists and gothics during the eighteenth century were fueled primarily by a disagreement about which style was “more natural.” 50. Freshfield, “Mountains and Mankind,” 447–48. 51. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 428. 52. See, e.g., Roderick Nash, “The American Cult of the Primitive,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1966): 517–37; and Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 53. Geoff rey Trease, The Grand Tour (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 54. For instance, see Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); and R. D. Eaton, “In the ‘World of Death and Beauty’: Risk, Control and John Tyndall as Alpinist,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013): 55–73. 55. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 505. 56. Theodore Catton, National Park, City Playground (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 19–20.

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57. Ibid., 39. 58. John Muir, Our National Parks (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 56. 59. Shen Hou, “Garden and Forest: A Forgotten Magazine and the Urban Roots of American Environmentalism,” Environmental History 17, no. 4 (2012): 813–42. 60. Longtime Mountaineer Club president Edmond S. Meany was a “deeply religious” man who led services each Sunday morning in camp and orchestrated the singing of hymns around campfires. The notices and announcement sections of the Mountaineer are peppered with information about local churches, and, moreover, two ordained ministers, the Reverends F. J. Van Horn and Frederick Webb, were among the club’s earliest officers; see Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle: Mountaineers Press, 1998). 61. W.  D Lyman, “The Mountains of Washington,” Mountaineer, March 1907, 7. 62. Edmond S. Meany Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection; John H. Williams, The Mountain That Was God (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911). The book of this title, published by a friend of several club founders, was popular enough to go into a third printing in just two years, and while the title obscures the fact that the primary aim of the book was to promote tourism, the author felt compelled to do so by tapping into the public sentiment that the lofty slopes of the northwestern mountains be set apart from ordinary spaces as abodes of divinity. 63. Wolf Bauer, “The North Face of Mount Rainier,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1934, 7. 64. Quoted in Hugh Elmer Brown, “Melodious Days,” Mountaineer, 1913, 45. The Mountaineer was published irregularly, so not all issues carry a month of publication. 65. Ibid. 66. Wilfred Noyce’s 1949 treatise on the meaning of mountains in modern Western thought establishes this link to muscular Christianity. According to Noyce, the premier “prophet” of mountaineering was Leslie Stephen, a lapsed minister in mid-nineteenth-century England, whose initial attraction to mountaineering was a product of his muscular Christianity. He found in mountains the very “basis for worship,” and emphasizing the insignificance of man against the “gigantic masses” of mountains, he advanced an agnostic version of the argument from design. See Wilfred Noyce, Scholar Mountaineers (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949).

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67. Lyman, “The Mountains of Washington,” 11. This reference is important given the prominence of “strength” in the legend of Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, who drew his remarkable physical strength from the ground (his mother, Earth). Heracles was only able to defeat him by discovering the secret of his power and holding him aloft until he died. The fable of Antaeus has been used as a symbol of the spiritual strength that “accrues when one rests his faith on the immediate fact of things” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Antaeus”). 68. Lyman “The Mountains of Washington,” 10. 69. See, e.g., Robert Keller and Michael Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 70. Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. 71. See, e.g., Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 72. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 25, 71. 73. Donald Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998). 74. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 75. Celia Shelton, “Mountaineer Activities,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1917, 50. 76. Charlotte Mauk, “Homecoming,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 552. 77. While apophasis is something of a literary convention, several Mountaineers explicitly invoke the parallels with negative theology, most especially in a 1913 article in which Hugh Elmer Brown claims “what our eyes saw, was and is beyond the potency of word-painting. We must side with the youthful theologue who said in describing the glories of a sunrise: ‘Friends, it is no use; words is a vacuum’ ” (“Melodious Days,” 46). 78. Scholars of religion have been quite attentive to this theological sentiment in the past several decades, not least because the view that all religions are one colored the development of the academic study of religion. For additional analysis on this point see Tomoko Matsuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (New York: HarperOne, 2010).

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79. Linda Woodhead, “Liberal Christianity and Alternative Spiritualities: The World’s Parliament of Religions and the Rise of Alternative Spirituality,” in Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ed. Linda Woodhead (London: Ashgate, 2001), 79–103. Woodhead describes the theological viewpoint that motivated the Parliament’s Christian organizers to emphasize the diversity of religions, eloquently captured in an introductory remark that “as the finite can never comprehend the infinite, nor perfectly express its own view of the divine, it necessarily follows that individual opinions of the divine nature and attributes will differ” (86). This liberal theological explanation for religious pluralism, rooted in Enlightenment era natural religion, was the foundation on which scholars articulated a historical framework through which human history was intelligible as a uniform movement toward the realization of one true religion. While religion in the humanity of today remains manifold and imperfect, the late nineteenth-century view of humanity as a whole, with primitive and modern elements alike, envisioned a trend toward the consummate, universal brotherhood of man. This optimistic appraisal of the future was set against the “disruptions to the fragile social and political order of the late nineteenth century: gathering pressures for the emancipation of women; racial strife in America; class unrest; rebellions against colonial rule” (87). Yet, at the same time as it imagined a utopian religious future for all humankind, the liberal Protestant antecedent to the “New Spirituality” also served as a means to legitimate the status quo: “the universal religion of . . . liberals at the Parliament thus had a scope which, like the Exposition itself, was both global and national. Its promotion went hand in hand with the promotion of a world order in which American supremacy would be guaranteed and the interests of the new propertied middle classes secured” (87). The irony of the 1893 Parliament that Woodhead notes was that the religious universalism to which liberal Protestants believed they had privileged access became closely associated with Hinduism and Buddhism in the minds of exposition visitors. Speakers like Swami Vivekananda electrified audiences with scientifically savvy articulations of the universal truth of religion, to which, of course, Hinduism and not Christianity was the best point of departure for spiritual cultivation. The excitement about “Eastern” religions generated at the Parliament evidences the internal shifts in American liberal Protestantism, notably in the radicalization and subversion of “liberalism’s belief in evolutionary progress towards a new universal religion and culture by broadening the category of those who would be able to participate in this new religion to include women and other races, and by denying that this new

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universal religion would be Protestant” (94). In and through a series of internal shifts, which opened the liberal Protestant worldview to other sources of religious authority and new fields of religious practice and concern, a new current of religiosity was born, a “New Spirituality” that joined traditional values like progress, industry, and service with concepts from outside the mainstream, like metaphysics, self-development, and science. 80. Edmond S. Meany published many books on the history of Washington State, including several about its native inhabitants, and occasional references to Native American, Greek, and Roman mythology fill the pages of almost every issue of the Mountaineer. For a narrower treatment of the role of metaphysical traditions in American environmental thought see Catherine Albanese “Having Nature All Ways: Liberal and Transcendental Perspectives on American Environmentalism,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 1 (1997): 20–43. 81. Lyman, “The Mountains of Washington,” 9. 82. Brown, “Melodious Days,” 42. 83. Lyman “The Mountains of Washington,” 8. 84. Celia Shelton, “Mountaineer Activities,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1917, 52. 85. Sandra Sizer Frankiel, California Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 19. 86. Woodhead, “Liberal Christianity,” 87. 87. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1977), 197–468, 207. 88. Henry Suzallo, “Foreword,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1917, 1. 89. Aristides E. Phoutrides, “Foreword,” Mountaineer, 1935, 1. Phoutrides also includes in his comments a quotation from Isaiah: “For it is a day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity . . . in the valley of vision, breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountains” (22:5). 90. Edmond S. Meany, “Mount Rainier,” Mountaineer, Nov. 1909, plate 1. 91. Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 145. 92. Ibid., 145. 93. To account for the emphasis of these texts on “strength” exclusively in terms of turn-of-the-century anxieties about the emasculation of “pioneer values” perhaps misses a deeper current of American concern with “spiritual strength.” The current of “masculine Christianity” that ran through nineteenth-century considerations of physicality and morality certainly predates the nostalgia for the “frontier.” Well before Turner’s lament, American thinking about the role of nature in the production of a vigorous and virile culture had

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already drawn heavily on the rhetorical and theological resources available to it in the movement toward a more “manful Christianity.” The literary motif celebrating the athletic prowess of the moral hero epitomizes this movement, but in the United States, the fusion of muscular and moral strength closely tied to transcendentalist writings lauding the virtues of self-realization. For instance, Susan Robertson demonstrates how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings align the challenge of self-mastery with athletic competition. In Emerson “the venture of being is so fraught with moral dangers, the task of self-cultivation or selfimprovement is often described as a vigorous, strenuous, and manly undertaking, converting the language of sport into a metaphor for commercial and moral success.” See Susan Robertson, “Degenerate Effeminacy,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150–72. 94. Yi Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Tuan further notes that both “security” and “curiosity” derive from the same Latin word, cura, and argues that throughout human evolution, and most especially in the modern era, curiosity has been used to overcome anxiety and conquer fear. 95. Bauer, “North Face of Mount Rainier,” 3. 96. The Freedom of the Hills is the title of the Mountaineers Press best-selling technical guide to mountain climbing technique. The powerful spiritual liberation achieved through mountain climbing, thus the use of the rhetoric of “freedom,” has much in common with theological discourse. 97. C. G. Thompson, The Rim Road—A Wonder Drive (Portland, OR: Scenic America Company, 1924). Quoted in David Louter, Windshield Wilderness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 11. 98. A comprehensive discussion of the premise that human ingenuity “completes” or “perfects” nature can be found in Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from the Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Glacken locates the origin of this view in Stoicism, especially in the works of Cicero and Seneca, who argued that human ingenuity is a counterbalance to the decline following Hesiod’s golden age. Activities like fishing, agriculture, domestication, and mining offered advantages that could not “have been realized from the brute creation, had not men assisted” (145). In this sense the Hellenistic Stoics were prescient of an attitude that became widespread in and through the scientific revolution. The voluntarist theological perspective of late medieval and early modern thinkers, especially during the Italian Renaissance, suggested

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that form lay dormant in nature. Human effort was required to bring forth from nature God’s perfect design. Thus, early modern science took up the view that nature was latent and incomplete, and the quest to mathematically describe the “true” form of nature was born. This historical trajectory has also been compellingly captured by Louis Dupré in his Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 99. During the Progressive Era, landscape architecture emerged as a discipline at the intersection of the arts and sciences. A key emphasis of landscape architects from this era was the “scenic narrative” established by moving through carefully planned spaces. See, e.g., Frederick Law Olmstead, Civilizing American Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 100. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 13. 101. United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Land Areas of the National Forest System, FS-383, Jan. 2012, www.fs.fed.us/land/staff/lar /LAR2011/LAR2011_Book_A5.pdf; Office of Public Affairs and Harpers Ferry Center, National Park Service, The National Parks: Index 2009–2011, www.nps .gov/hfc/products/pubs/NPS_index2009_11.pdf. 102. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 30. 103. Ibid., 31. 104. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 105. In his essay “American Pilgrimage Landscapes” (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, vol. 558 [1998], 40–56), Juan Campo argues against the idea that modernity universally deracinates the terrain of religion and suggests a typology for pilgrimages in the contemporary religious landscape. He offers three categories: pilgrimages within established religious traditions, pilgrimages in the context of American civil religion, and pilgrimages afforded by American “cultural religion.” Campo warns against grand narratives of modern pilgrimage but argues that, as features of the modern age, each type of pilgrimage is necessarily embedded in “expert systems of technology and transportation, and secular formations of knowledge” (42). Rather than stymie contemporary religious life, these systems, in and through commodified patterns of media and tourism, tend to encourage the proliferation of “the number and variety of sacred places” (42). It is easy to get caught up in normative arguments about whether the “ritual patterns” evident in so-called secular spheres of American culture are authentically religious. Without devoting undue attention to such a circular question, this chapter can, for the time being, focus on those “underlying structural similarities” while avoiding the

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binary language of “substitution for religion” versus “fundamentally religious.” It is more instructive to take a descriptive approach, investigating not just the analogues between tourism and pilgrimage but also the contemporary contexts for the practice of pilgrimage in time and space. Privileging description over classificatory normativity highlights the advantages of theorizing nature spirituality as a hybrid form of religiosity: the binary language of authenticity forces a false choice between “mere resemblance” and “actual religion.” Although Campo’s essay is essentially a survey of the various kinds of pilgrimage sites in America (Disneyland, Mount Rushmore, Graceland, Gettysburg, etc.), it does offer an important theoretical insight: to understand the meaning and role of pilgrimage in modern America, it is necessary to analyze the social and technological systems that give rise to particular kinds of tourism. 106. See, e.g., Enzo Pace, “Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey: An Analysis of Pilgrimage Using the Theory of V. Turner and the Resource Mobilization Approach,” Social Compass 36, no. 2 (1989): 229–44; and Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). It would be a violation of the intent and spirit of these definitions of pilgrimage to include “road trips,” but as this chapter shows, it is certainly not an exaggeration to suggest that experiences of nature draw heavily on “collectively recognized set[s] of symbols” in order to produce and regulate structures of community identity. 107. As Catherine Bell notes, “many studies argue that tourism is closely related to the ritual activities traditionally involved in religious pilgrimage. For some this kinship is a matter of modern secular substitutes for traditional religious experiences; for others it is a matter of underlying structural similarities, that is, a fundamental ritual pattern of transformation by means of a spatial, temporal, and psychological transition.” Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 248. 108. Pace, “Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey,” 231. 109. This development is documented in a variety of places; see, e.g., David Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against the Automobile Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); and Shaffer, See America First. 110. This matrix is explored in fascinating detail in Catton, National Park, City Playground; and Louter, Windshield Wilderness. 111. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 4. 112. Harriet Geithmann, “Just Goin’, That’s All” (c. 1924), Harriet Geithmann Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection.

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/ Notes to Pages 136–141

113. Geithmann’s longer manuscripts, “Just Goin’, That’s All,” “God’s Gardens along Washington Highways,” and “The Olympic Highway,” were, according to the marginalia, sold for publication; however, it appears that these longer essays were published in excerpted form in various touring and recreational magazines. Harriet Geithmann Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 114. Harriet Geithmann, “Just Goin’, That’s All,” unpublished manuscript, Edmond Meany Papers, Box 70, File 10, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection, 1. 115. Ibid., 2. 116. Ibid., 3. 117. Ibid., 4. 118. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 37. 119. Ralph Waldo Emersion, “Circles,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1981), 228–40, 239. 120. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 101. 121. Ibid., 26. 122. Ibid., 4. It is worth noting here that Louter’s critical historical perspective suggests that the “romantic vision” of early twentieth-century preservationists was tempered by a “cultural myopia” that allowed Americans to “ignore the fact that national parks enshrine recently dispossessed landscapes” and to “overlook the ways automobiles shaped their impressions of parks as wilderness” (9). 123. Ibid., 97. 124. Ibid., 34–35. 125. The popularity of John H. Williams’s book The Mountain That Was God played an important role in settling the battle over the mountain’s name. Published at a time when the question was not completely settled, the book represented a final attempt, and failure, by advocates of the name Tahoma. 126. Catton, National Park, City Playground, 63. 127. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 33 (emphasis added). 128. See Thomas Cox, The Park Builders (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). 129. Ibid., 57–58. 130. On a different note: Cox’s article presents an excerpt from Curtis’s obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that speaks to the regional theme at play in northwestern nature spirituality: “If he had been no more than a photographer . . . [his] influence would have been profound. But he was more. The intimate

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acquaintance of the region which he gained in his work was translated, at one point after another, into steps for its development. . . . Washington and the Pacific Northwest need more men with the breadth of interest that was displayed by Asahel Curtis during his life” (The Park Builders, 78). This is an appropriate articulation of the synthesis of the enthusiasm for nature, support for economic development, and deep-seated regionalism that characterized Pacific northwestern nature spirituality. 131. Quoted in Cox, The Park Builders, 63. 132. Ibid., 65. 133. Ibid., 67. 134. Marguerite S. Shaffer, “Negotiating National Identity: Western Tourism and ‘See America First,’ ” in Reopening the American West, ed. Hal K. Rothman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 141. 135. Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 158. 136. Ibid., 148. 137. Shaffer, Reopening the American West, 137. 138. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 150. 139. The impact of cars on America’s natural spaces was enormous, especially as automobiles became available to an increasing number of citizens; see Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 21–24. 140. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 163. 141. Further discussion of nature-based tourism in the American West as a recapitulation of the “pioneer spirit” can be found in Shaffer, “Negotiating National Identity.” 142. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 165. 143. The coupling of road development with the desire for tourist destinations free of the aesthetic blemishes of progress was evident nowhere more than in the political efforts to establish Olympic National Park. Large tracts of forested land on the Olympic Peninsula had been set aside as a “forest reserve” by President Cleveland in 1897, and these lands were afforded additional protections in 1909 when President Teddy Roosevelt designated them a national monument. But by the 1930s, disagreement between preservationists and timber and mining interests over how the land should ultimately be used came to a head. The Mountaineers were key players in the ensuing political battles, their advisory statements bearing significance in both Olympia and Washington, DC. In fact, the club was involved in such contentious debates over the parameters for development in the proposed park that founding member

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/ Notes to Pages 144–147

Asahel Curtis resigned in indignation. Curtis had been appointed to head a committee charged with producing an official recommendation for the establishment of Olympic National Park, but other members of the committee overruled his concessions to industry, which infuriated him. Much of the Mountaineers’ activism regarding Olympic National Park concerned establishing appropriate guidelines for developing the park. On one hand the club sought to ensure that “if a National Park should be created . . . the Act of Congress expressly provide that roads and hotels be excluded from the area and that all commercial use be prohibited” (editorial commentary, Mountaineer Bulletin, March 1936, 2). On the other hand, however, club leaders understood that roads would be crucial to the success of the proposed park and worked to encourage satisfactorily scenic highway development. They recognized “that the scenic value of the Olympic Highway will suffer a distinct loss if the fine timber . . . is allowed to be cut,” and they proposed a solution whereby “the Federal Government . . . [would] purchase a strip sufficient to protect the scenic area . . . for the future” (editorial commentary, Mountaineer Bulletin, March 1935, 2). 144. Stephen T. Mather, “Greetings,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1918, 2. 145. William B. Greeley, “Guarding Our Scenic Heritage,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1925, 18. 146. Campo, American Pilgrimage Landscapes, 42. 147. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 61. 148. Ibid., 62. 149. For further discussion of the use of landscape design in the construction of America’s natural landscapes see Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 150. Harriet Geithmann, “God’s Gardens along Washington Highways” (n.d.), Harriet Geithmann Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 151. Editorial commentary, Mountaineer Bulletin, April 1936, 2 (overleaf). 152. See, e.g., Deloria, Playing Indian; and Shari Hundorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 153. Louter, Windshield Wilderness, 52. 154. Ibid., 57. 155. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, quoted in ibid., 74. 156. Ibid., 127.

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157. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” Scientific Monthly, Feb. 1930, 141–48.

chapter four Epigraph: David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, handwritten note dated Oct. 30, 1923, and published in the Mountaineer, 1923, Mountaineers Club Archives, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 1. See Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How Nature Writers Shaped the American Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 2. The category of religious experience is ambiguous and contested. As one of this book’s constitutive terms, I use experience in consistency with its deployment by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, for whom the term signified the synthesis of bodily function and cognition. Experience, then, is a generic category of which religious or spiritual experiences are particular kinds. These questions are explored more fully in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1902); Robert Scharf, “Experience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Richard Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989). 3. Many environmental historians have brushed aside the conservationist movement’s frequent use of religious rhetoric as a kind of marketing tactic employed only insofar as it was helpful in propagating their political aims; see, e.g., Thomas Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 4. Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) offers an ethnographically reinforced genealogical account of animistic ideas in the Anglophone world, and Muir plays a prominent role in this history. Many others, including Catherine Albanese, have also suggested that the environmental movement has been a conduit for animistic and occult metaphysical concepts. 5. References to the love of “my Buddha” in Thoreau’s notebooks and his assertion that Christian churches were full of “quackery” absent in “Eastern” faiths bespeaks a desire to take leave of doctrine as part of a higher quest to

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forge the soul in nature’s purificatory beauty. See, e.g., Lloyd Burton, Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in Public Lands Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 59; and Catherine Albanese, Reconsidering Nature Religion (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), 10. 6. Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 157. It is debatable just what Nash means by “faith,” but it remains clear that for many, nature afforded a restorative force for American religion. 7. See Jon Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). 8. Reverend Joseph McSorley, “Nature Worship a Pagan Sentiment,” Catholic World, Feb. 1900, 580. 9. Ibid., 588. 10. Reverend Joseph McSorley, “Nature Worship a Christian Sentiment,” Catholic World, Nov. 1899, 216. 11. Ibid., 213. 12. Ibid., 212. 13. McSorley, “Nature Worship a Pagan Sentiment,” 590. 14. McSorley, “Nature Worship a Christian Sentiment,” 226. 15. Ibid., 221. 16. William Siri, “A Fractured History of the Sierra Club,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 83. 17. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (1991): 299–323, 321. 18. Edward Norton, “To The Mountaineers,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1924, 1. 19. Ralph Dyer, “Mountaineer Spirit,” Mountaineer, 1925, 61. 20. The historical literatures treating early twentieth-century recreational and conservation organizations tend to focus on their regional significance. The Sierra Club is widely credited with being an important element of the formation of modern California, and the bulk of scholarship on the Appalachian Trail Club, the Mountaineers Club, and the Mazamas has appeared in regional historical journals like Pacific Northwest Quarterly and Pennsylvania History. The collective significance of the recreational movement more broadly has been a regular feature of scholarly publications with a more national scope, especially Environmental History.

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21. Edmond S. Meany, “Objects of Our Club,” Mountaineer, Nov. 1910, 5. 22. “The Gospel of Nature,” written in 1912, was the title of John Burroughs’s most widely read essay. Burroughs was a powerful influence on the early members of the Mountaineers, perhaps second only to Muir, and his decidedly Christian framing of the salvific power of nature over the outdoorsman underscores the religious dimension of the Mountaineers’ writings on recreation and conservation. 23. Alvaro C. Shoemaker, “The Challenge of the Times,” Mountaineer, 1912, 13. 24. L. A. Nelson, “Thirty Years in Retrospect,” Mountaineer, 1937, 12. 25. S. Edward Paschall, “What Is a Mountaineer? What Is the Mountaineer Spirit?” Mountaineer, 1923, 42. 26. Edmond S. Meany, “Foreword,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1918, 1. 27. Hugh Elmer Brown, “Melodious Days,” Mountaineer, 1913, 42. 28. Marion Randall, “Some Aspects of a Sierra Club Outing” (1905), in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 97. 29. Ibid. 30. Brown, “Melodious Days,” 42. 31. Randall, “Some Aspects of a Sierra Club Outing,” 97. 32. See Peter Bayers, Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003). 33. Muir, “Steep Trails” in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (Seattle: Mountaineers Press, 1992). 34. Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 37. 35. See Carolyn Merchant, Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); and Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). 36. T. D. Bennett, “Nature Not a Sufficient Guide,” Ladies Repository, April. 1863, 241. 37. Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 2. 38. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 48. 39. B. H. Lehmann, “Marion Randall Parsons,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 70.

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/ Notes to Pages 162–168

40. Glenda Riley, Women and Nature: Saving the “Wild” West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 120. 41. Polly Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman’s Voice (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 120. 42. Mountaineers Club Archives (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 43. Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars, 79. 44. Ibid., 68. 45. Ibid., 6. 46. Chester Rowell, “The Mountain and the Sea,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 501. 47. Riley, Women and Nature, 117. 48. Quoted in Kaufman, National Parks, 7. 49. Quoted in Glenda Riley, Women and Nature, 76. 50. Quoted in Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars, 109. 51. See, e.g., Riley, Women and Nature, 99. 52. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, “Aurelia Squire Harwood,” Sierra Club Bulletin, Feb. 1929, 64–65. 53. Paschall, “What Is a Mountaineer?” 42. 54. Ralph Dyer, “Mountaineer Spirit,” Mountaineer, 1925, 60. 55. Ibid. 56. W. J. Costello, “Ethics of the Trail,” Mountaineer Bulletin, 1930, 5. 57. J. N. LeConte, “The Sierra Club,” in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 40. 58. A. H. Albertson, “Suggested Activities,” Mountaineer, Nov. 1910, 70. 59. “About the Mountaineers” (Ephemera), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection, c. 1960. 60. The emergence of institutions like the Mountaineers, which conjoin religious moral frameworks and nondenominational civic engagement, has been thoroughly described and theorized in terms of the “new voluntarism.” See Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). For an examination of “religious restructuring” see Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 61. The analysis of religious hybridization developed thus far indicates that the changes in religious vocabulary, spiritual concerns, and organizational

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patterns are not appropriately understood as derivative of explicitly religious institutions but rather as emerging organically from such phenomena. 62. In thinking about nature spirituality as a communal activity rather than an individual pursuit, it is useful to refer to the Mountaineers Club membership statistics. A hand count of the club’s membership directories shows that in its first full year, 1907, 150 persons had paid enrollment dues. By 1910 that number had grown to 367; 620 in 1915; 712 in 1920; 791 in 1925; 839 in 1930; 566 in 1935; and 740 in 1938 (Mountaineer Club Directories, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection). These membership statistics indicate a general trend of growth and approximately the same levels of affiliation as local churches. These trends change dramatically in the years following World War II: in 1950 the club swelled to twenty-two hundred members, and today it boasts more than twenty thousand active participants. 63. Mountaineers Club Minutes, Jan. 17, 1912, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 64. Mountaineers Club Minutes, Feb. 27, 1913, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 65. In fact, by 1932 these cooperative efforts had gathered such momentum that an umbrella organization, the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs, was set up to coordinate the alliance of local mountaineering groups in their quest to affect federal politics. This organization, like the Mountaineers, persists to this day and has been instrumental in a variety of federal acts to protect undeveloped landscapes, specifically the Wilderness Act, North Cascades National Park, and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. 66. Mountaineers Club Minutes, Dec. 15, 1915, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 67. For a broad overview of this history see Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle: Mountaineers Press, 1998). Specific treatments of the role of the Mountaineers in the history of Mount Rainier National Park can be found in Theodore Catton, National Park, City Playground (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); David Louter, Windshield Wilderness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); and Arthur Martinson, Wilderness above the Sound (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1986). A historical discussion of the involvement of the Mountaineers with Olympic National Park runs through Murray Morgan’s The Last Wilderness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976). Interestingly, there was significant internal discord among board members about Olympic National Park: Asahel Curtis, the first member of the organization, opposed expanding the park’s boundaries. It is not

236 / Notes to Pages 169–174

clear precisely how it came to pass, but Curtis left the club because of this disagreement. 68. Article II, Constitution and By-Laws of the Seattle Mountaineer’s Club (1906), University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 69. Matthew Lyle Spence, “Greetings,” Mountaineer, 1928, 3. 70. John Barton Payne, “To the Mountaineers,” Mountaineer, Nov. 1920, 3. 71. Stephen Mather, “Greetings,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1917, 3. 72. R. L. Fromme, “The Olympic National Forest—What It Means,” Mountaineer, 1913, 9. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 17. 75. Edmond S. Meany, “The Olympic National Monument,” Mountaineer, 1911, 54, 59. 76. This tension within American environmental thought—between scientific mastery and Edenic purity—is a well-known fact. It was perhaps first identified by Leo Marx in his 1949 The Machine in the Garden and has more recently been the subject of scholarly works like Paul Wapner’s Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 77. This fact is documented in Kjeldsen’s The Mountaineers but is also evidenced on the overleaf to the table of contents of the Mountaineer Bulletin of August 1936. 78. See the Mountaineer Bulletin, August 1936. 79. Overleaf, Mountaineers Bulletin, August 1934. 80. The idea of nature’s “intrinsic” value is a well-established feature of environmental ethics, a branch of applied ethics that has tended to differentiate between instrumentalist forms of environmental concern that prioritize human interests and intrinsic (or biocentric) forms of environmental concern that emphasize the value of creatures, species, and ecosystems independent of their relationship with human beings. However distinctly rendered by environmental philosophers, these frames very much overlap in the history of the wilderness movement. Wilderness advocates valued nature “for itself,” not because of its economic instrumentality but because of its spiritual potency, a much more subtle form of instrumentalism. 81. Hollis Farwell, “Dear Fellow Members,” Mountaineer, 1938, 5. 82. “Notes,” Mountaineer, Nov. 1910, 78. 83. James Bryce, “Trustees of the Future” (1915), in Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin, ed. Ann Gilliam (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 500.

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84. Ibid., 499. 85. Edmond. S. Meany, “Citizenship” (undated speech, c. 1908), Edmond S. Meany Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 86. Edmond S. Meany, “Forestry,” Club Journal, 1902, 350, Edmond S. Meany Papers, University of Washington Pacific Northwest Collection. 87. Enos A. Mills, “Our National Parks,” Mountaineer, 1914, 100. 88. William Greeley, “Guarding Our Scenic Heritage,” Mountaineer, 1925, 17. 89. For an analysis of the role of nature spirituality in shaping the orientation of contemporary national parks, their material culture and ideological underpinnings, see Kerry Mitchell, “Managing Spirituality: Public Religion in National Parks,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1, no. 4 (2007): 431–49. 90. Stephen T. Mather, “America’s National Parks,” Mountaineer, Dec. 1924, 22. 91. Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars, 41.

conclusion 1. See Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Emile: or On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 2. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “Evolve,” in Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, ed. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, 2011), not paginated. 3. See H. Whitt Kilburn, “Religion and Foundations of American Public Opinion towards Global Climate Change,” Global Environmental Politics 23, no. 3 (2014): 473–89. 4. See, e.g., Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedelus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21; Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Supermarket: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 5. See H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985); and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 6. See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from the Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley:

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/ Notes to Pages 181–184

University of California Press, 1967), where Glacken argues explicitly that “modern ecological theory . . . owes is origin to the design argument” (423). 7. These “internal contradictions” have been eloquently explored in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, eds., Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene (Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, 2011). 8. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–90. 9. Scholars of American environmentalism have vociferously argued for twenty years or more that the conceptual framework and political model developed by the conservation movement in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century are outmoded. The most forceful and important critiques have come from ecofeminists and advocates of environmental justice, especially those who want to draw attention to the racial injustices left unaddressed by mainstream environmental organizations. Among the most influential critiques proffered by ecofeminist writers are Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978); Carolyn Merchant’s tremendously influential 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row); and Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993). Prominent texts about the inadequacy of American environmentalism with regard to issues of race and ethnicity are Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); and Donald Hughes, American Indian Ecology (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1983). These concerns have been further documented by social historians; see, e.g., Roger Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); and Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 10. See E. Calvin Beisner, “The Competing World Views of Environmentalism and Christianity,” Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, Nov.10,2010,www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/the-competing-world-viewsof-environmentalism-and-christianity/. 11. Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Opportunity, Inaction, and Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xxii.

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12. The complex social landscape in which religious persons and institutions grapple with (global) sustainability issues is skillfully mapped in Lucas Johnston, Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment (Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2013). 13. These revolutions in ecological thought are masterfully described in Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14. See, e.g., Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); and Deepak Lal, “Eco-Fundamentalism,” International Affairs 71, no. 3 (1995): 515–28. 15. See, e.g., Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, eds., Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 16. See “Health through Safe Drinking Water and Basic Sanitation,” World Health Organization, www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/.

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for further r eading a nd r esea rch

introduction The American environmental imagination is the product of a long and complex cultural history, which this book tries to capture in as much detail as possible. Despite environmentalism’s deep roots in Western intellectual and religious history, a handful of familiar books have shaped and inspired American environmental engagements far beyond measure: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature”; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; the entire corpus of John Muir—much of which has been conveniently anthologized in Muir: Nature Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), which includes The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; and selected Essays; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1986); and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Miffl in, 2002). John Burroughs’s The Gospel of Nature (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1905) is perhaps less well known than some of these but equally delightful. The influence of nature writing on environmental thought and politics is explored in Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1995); and in Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). For the past several decades historians and social scientists have generated a rich body of scholarship reflecting on the tremendous complexity of American environmentalism, a social movement with a powerful political history

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and a host of associated ideas about healthfulness, human bodies, social organization, economic behavior, urban design, agriculture, leisure, and so forth. With respect to the emphases of Devoted to Nature, the most pertinent history of environmentalism is Roderick F. Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). Other quality social and political histories of the environmental movement include Joseph Petula, American Environmentalism: Values, Tactics, and Priorities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980); Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Victor Scheffler, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Riley Dunlap and Angela Mertig, American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970–1990 (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1992); John McNeil, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2000); Phillip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003); Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Steven Stoll, U.S. Environmentalism since 1945 (New York: Palgrave, 2007); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); and J. Michael Martinez, American Environmentalism: Philosophy, History, and Public Policy (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2014). Given the pivotal position of the Sierra Club in the formation of environmental politics, a number of historians focus narrowly on this group, including Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club: 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). Likewise, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era have drawn scholarly attention for their formative impact on the character of subsequent environmental movements. Donald Worster’s American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973) offers an excellent compendium of primary sources from the period. Historical analyses concentrating on this period include Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Elmo Richardson, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Douglas Strong, Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago:

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University of Chicago Press, 1992); and David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, environmental historians began to articulate a more critical view of the environmental movement, especially where environmental ideals reflect the interests of power, privilege, patriarchy, and racial superiority. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) was instrumental in launching this scholarly orientation, and his approach was corroborated by Ramachandra Guha’s influential article “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71–83. The 1990s saw a proliferation of related analyses, many of which concentrated on the failures of mainstream environmentalism to reckon with issues of social, racial, or gender justice: Roger Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1995); Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Recent scholarship in the environmental humanities has articulated and reconstructed subaltern strands of American environmentalism. See, e.g., Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); and Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). The religious characteristics of American environmentalism have been well documented, and a deeper analysis of the literature in this area is available in my essay “Religious Environmentalism and Environmental Religion in America,” Religion Compass 13 (April 2013): 454–66. The chief works in this area are Roderick Nash, “The American Cult of the Primitive,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1966): 517–37; Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Rebecca

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Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Thomas Dunlap’s eloquent, but theoretically errant, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). Beyond these important histories, however, are the publications of Bron Taylor, the scholar around whose work contemporary research about environmentalism as “religionresembling” turns. See, e.g., his two-part article “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality,” Religion 31 (Feb. 2001): 175–93, 225–45; and his more recent monograph, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). During the past two decades scholars of religion and ecology have increasingly explored the environmental implications of the so-called world religions. In the 1990s Harvard University Center for the Study of Religion published a landmark series of anthologies concentrating on environmental ethics across nine major religious traditions (Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, series editors). Other excellent works in this vein include Mary Evelyn Tucker, Worldly Wonder (Chicago: Open Court, 2003); Roger Gottlieb, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014). Monographs that apply this approach to specifically American cases include Robert Booth Fowler, The Greening of Protestant Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Sarah McFarland Taylor, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Recently, religion and ecology scholars have begun to produce reference materials, as with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (New York: Continuum, 2005); and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. Roger Gottlieb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Since the roughly concurrent rise of the religious right in the United States and the Iranian revolution, scholars of religion have been preoccupied with questions about the relationship of religion to modern political life. See Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Gustavo Benavides, “Modernity,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Michael Warner, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan

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Van Antwerpen, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

chapter one There are excellent books with which an exploration about how religious thought shapes the Euro-American environmental imagination might begin. Most contemporary writing about religion and the environment begin with Lynn White Jr.’s widely cited essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203–7, though a duo of mid-twentieth-century intellectual histories are perhaps better. Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from the Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) is undoubtedly the most wide-ranging consideration of Western intellectual history with respect to environmental thought; and R. G. Collingwood’s earlier The Idea of Nature (London: Clarendon, 1945) provides a tightly schematized approach to ancient, Renaissance, and modern philosophical treatments of nature. Many other intellectual histories document the evolution of EuroAmerican environmental thought, though few come close to the rigor and erudition offered by Glacken and Collingwood. See, e.g., Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996); Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Gilbert LaFreniere, The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007). Literary critics were also important forerunners to the environmental humanities: Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s 1959 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) and M. H. Abrams’s 1971 Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton) both describe romanticism as a secular theology of nature. Leo Marx’s 1967 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press) captures the implicit love/hate character of American environmental thought, and similar themes are explored in Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), a tremendously stylish text with theoretical aplomb.

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Theologians and historians of religion began to explicitly address environmental questions in the 1980s, led by H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1985); and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). A series of excellent books in the early 1990s proved catalytic for social, cultural, and intellectual histories of Euro-American environmental movements, including Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and William Cronon’s edited anthology Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995). Roughly speaking, the historical narrative emerging from these works describes the arrival of modernity as a fracturing of the medieval harmonization of reason and revelation in the world of nature. The environmental implications of such fracturing are treated in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology, and the Sacred (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). The wounds infl icted by modernity’s environmental alienation have long been treated by the salve of walking. From Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s 1782 Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) to Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1977), romantics and their inheritors have exhorted people to move their bodies to natural affect. Historians have documented the rise of walking as a means of morally engaging the outdoors, as in Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Harvey Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside: A History of the British Outdoor Movement (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997). Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (New York: Penguin, 2001) provides a popular account of walking as a modern recreational pursuit, though the specifically religious underpinnings of twentieth-century sporting practices are to be found in academic texts, like Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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chapter two The idea that nature, and with it recreational experiences, was a key source of moral and physical well-being has been a long-standing characteristic in American life and letters. This idea appears centrally in Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), though its origins certainly date from much earlier. As the pressures of urbanization and industrialization mounted, Americans turned increasingly to nature as a cure for what ailed them, both physically and spiritually. These developments are well-described in Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); and, more recently, by environmental histories like Greg Mitman’s “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History 10, no. 2 (2005): 184–210; and Daniel Burnstein’s Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). The Progressive Era was a time of tremendous ferment in American religious life, and there is a breadth of excellent scholarship exploring the Era’s complexity. See, e.g., Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); James Moseley, A Cultural History of Religion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982); and Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Before, during, and beyond the Progressive Era, American Protestants grappled with nature in a variety of ways, including considerations of bodily practices and sexualities and questions about evolution by natural selection. With respect to the bodily practice, recreation, and religious life in modern American history, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (1991): 299–323; Joseph Price, “Naturalistic Recreations,” in Spirituality and the Secular Quest, ed. Peter Van Ness (New York: Crossroad, 1996); James Morton Turner, “From Woodcraft to ‘Leave No Trace’: Wilderness, Consumerism, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America,” Environmental History 7, no. 3 (2002): 462–84; and Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). With respect to the mainline Protestant

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engagement with evolution and the natural sciences see Jon Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). Histories of the American environmental movement are often framed in terms of the antagonism between preservationism and conservationism. Whatever the strengths and shortcomings of this narrative frame, it properly locates the proliferation of national parks and monuments in the first half of the twentieth century as the movement’s arrival as a salient political force. This story is well described in both Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); and Richard Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). There was especially intense social and political activity related to the establishment of national parks (and later wilderness areas) in the Pacific Northwest. For regionally specific histories see Thomas Cox, The Park Builders (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle: Mountaineers Press, 1998); and Theodore Catton, National Park, City Playground (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). The story through which environmentalism emerged as social movement and its implications for legislative action at local and national scales is intimately tied to John Muir, his personage and his writings. His intellectual significance has long been clear, with Linnie Marsh Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize– winning biography Son of the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1945) as the standout scholarly contribution. With respect to the questions raised in this book, academic analyses of Muir’s corpus can be divided into those that claim the religious characteristics of his work are fundamentally departures from Christianity and those that emphasize direct parallels between Muir’s “glacier gospel” and the Gospel itself. Prominent examples of the former category include Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The latter category is headlined by Thurman Wilkins, John Muir: Apostle of Nature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); and Dennis Williams’s God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). The relationship between spirituality and nature is deeply tied to the fabric of American religious life, and Devoted to Nature uses the terms spirituality and spiritual experiences in rather loose affiliation with an interpretive tradition that begins with William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 2012). Robert Scharf’s essay “Experience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) is an especially helpful intervention. The patterns of religiosity that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century were heavily shaped by an increasing fragmentation between religious and spiritual frames of reference. These developments are masterfully charted in Richard Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Experience: The Transformation of Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989); Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

chapter three There is a figurative mountain of humanistic literature about mountains in the literary imagination, which describes the religious, symbolic, and sociohistorical facets of alpine landscapes and mountaineering practices. Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s scholarship is neatly summarized in “Literary Attitudes Towards Mountains,” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 2, ed. Phillip Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973). Although it is not exclusively focused on mountains, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995) plumbs the depths of medieval and modern European attitudes about landscapes of various kinds. Other important comparative examinations include Larry Price, Mountains and Man: A Study of Process and Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Robert Bates, Mystery, Beauty, and Danger: The Literature of the Mountains and Mountain Climbing Published in English before 1946 (Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall, 2001); Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (New York: Vintage, 2004); and Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds., Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the TwentyFirst Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012). Specifically Christian ideas about mountains can be found in Robert L. Cohn, The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981); Richard Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); and Terrence Donaldson, Jesus on the Mountain: A Study in Matthean Theology (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1985). For histories that attend

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to the emergence of mountain climbing as a recreational practice, see Francis Gribble, The Early Mountaineers (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899); Arnold Lunn, The Swiss and Their Mountains (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963); and Peter Bayers, Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003). As Europeans and Americans became increasingly enthusiastic about untrammeled landscapes, their recreational pursuits increasingly displaced Native Americans from their lands. The late 1990s saw a slate of histories focused on the dispossession of native lands: Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Robert Keller and Michael Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Donald Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998); and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The subjugation of Native Americans in the name of environmental conservation is both tragic and ironic in that many white American environmentalists cite indigeneity and native cultures as key sources of ecological ethics. This irony figures centrally in Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Shari Hundorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Michael Eugene Harkin and David Rich Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Another, much less brutal, irony of American environmental history concerns the close relationship between conservation and automobiles. The rise of the National Park Service was roughly concurrent with the rise of car culture, and the interplay between the two recreational infrastructures has been excellently documented in Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Marguerite Schaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); David Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against the Automobile Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); and David Louter, Windshield Wilderness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Cars became the nation’s primary mode of transportation, paving the way for new forms of pilgrimage-resembling practices. For theoretical considerations of secular pilgrimage practices see Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); Juan Campo, “American Pilgrimage Land-

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scapes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 ( July 1998): 40–56; Enzo Pace, “Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey: An Analysis of Pilgrimage Using the Theory of V. Turner and the Resource Mobilization Approach,” Social Compass 36, no. 2 (1989): 229–44; and Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). A rich application of these theoretical insights to the religious space afforded by the national parks can be found in Kerry Mitchell, “Managing Spirituality: Public Religion in National Parks,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 1, no. 4 (2007): 431–49.

chapter four The recreational organizations that sprang up in the early decades of the twentieth century were important sites of women’s contributions to American environmental history. More thorough explorations of these contributions can be found in Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); and Polly Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman’s Voice (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Feminist critiques of mainstream environmental concepts—pastoralism, primitivism, conquest, and mastery—are perhaps most effectively captured by Carolyn Merchant in her Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); and Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). Devoted to Nature makes heavy use of archival materials, especially as these help illustrate the experiences, language, and orientation of recreationist discourse in early twentieth-century America. Archival materials were gathered at two separate library collections: at the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library from 2005 to 2006 and at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2011. The special collections holdings at Suzallo Library include the archives of the Mountaineers Club, many of its founding members and important officers (e.g., Edmond S. Meany, Asahel Curtis, and Harold Anderson). Berkeley’s Bancroft Library holds significant collections of archival material from the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, as well as papers of key figures related to these two major environmental organizations. Most notably, the Bancroft’s special collections include some of John Muir’s papers, as well as the papers of Robert Marshall, Benton MacKaye, William Frederic Badè, Joseph LeConte, William Colby, and François-Emile Matthes. In addition to these university collections, a great deal of Gilded Age and

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Progressive Era conservationist literature has been digitalized and posted online, including a significant portion of the early editions of the Sierra Club Bulletin and all editions of the influential magazine Garden and Forest.

conclusion Among contemporary observers of environmental discourse there is growing consensus that many aspects of twentieth-century environmental movements no longer adequately cohere, either in terms of philosophical commitments or in terms of political persuasion. Such observers, sometimes called “environmental modernists,” have tended to seize on two interrelated claims to indicate a new environmental politics. First, they reject the rhetoric of nature as too caught up with teleological, metaphysical, or essentialist baggage. Second, they assert the need to forge pragmatic political solutions that do not eschew technology and that work to reconcile competing environmental values. These broad concerns are explored in depth in Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Opportunity, Inaction, and Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Paul Wapner, Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Much of the dissatisfaction with mainstream environmental politics has come from critics focused on issues of race, gender, and international justice. Many of the hallmark achievements of the American environmental movement focused on the interests of predominantly wealthy, white constituents, leaving aside the environmental needs of the poor and of racial minorities. See Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Nancy Porter, ed., Native American Environmentalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Likewise, ecofeminists have for decades scrutinized the approach of mainstream environmentalism, which has had little to say about the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Theorists like Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism [Boston: Beacon, 1978]) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing [New York:

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HarperOne, 1994]) explore the patriarchal underpinnings of modern culture in order to articulate a more radical approach to ecological solvency. These discursive approaches to environmental issues still tend to focus on the American case, failing to reflect the truly global nature of contemporary environmental challenges. A wave of recent scholarship has done much to advance our understanding of the cultural diversity of environmental movements and the global dispersal of ecological problems. See, e.g., Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); Joaz MartinezAlier, The Environmentalism of the Poor (Northampton, MA: Edward Elger, 2003); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Lucas Johnston, Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment (London: Equinox, 2013).

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index

Anderson, Harold, 78 animism, 12, 150, 231n4 annual outings, 154–155, 158, 159, 162–163, 166 Anthropocene age, 182, 188. See also anthropogenic environmental changes anthropocentrism, 29, 45, 72, 80–81, 178, 196n30 anthropogenic environmental changes, 179, 182, 184, 188 antimodern anxieties, 73, 154–155 antinaturalistic aspects of Christianity, 12, 20, 30–32 Appalachian Trail, 72 Appalachian Trail Club, 8, 74, 89 Arbor Day, 82 Aristotle, 41, 49. See also peripatetic tradition ascent, rhetoric of, 23, 31, 105–114, 117–119, 128, 219n34 Ascent of Mount Carmel ( John of the Cross), 112 “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux” (Petrarch), 33–34, 109, 113 asceticism, 32, 80, 112 Audubon Society, 8, 9, 62–63, 85

Abbey, Edward, 9 Abelard, Peter, 104, 218n7 Abraham, 106, 107 activism, 4, 6, 8, 18, 170, 176 Adam, 21–22, 31 Adams, Sarah Flower, 97 Adirondack Mountain Club, 120 advocacy, 4, 6, 8, 18, 62, 167–168, 183 aesthetic ideal: “aesthetics of the infinite”, 104; and environmentalism, 77, 155–156, 185–188; and “mountain gloom/glory”, 27, 29, 116–117; natural world, 33, 54, 70, 77; and park system, 120, 124, 139, 141–142, 145–147; and preservationism, 171–175; spiritual, 171–173 Age of Exploration, 118–119 agrarian values, 70, 75, 76 Albanese, Catherine, 16 Albertson, A. H., 167 alienation, 22, 32, 37, 153, 184, 246 alpinism, 33, 159, 160, 164, 167 American Civic Association, 63 American Indian culture, 69, 124–125. See also Native Americans ancient thinkers, 21–22, 30, 39, 105, 200n10, 217n5

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Augustine, Saint, 29–38, 53, 57–59, 67, 114; City of God, 32; Confessions, 29–30, 32–33, 36, 59, 109; contemplation of nature, 155–156; and “mountain gloom”, 116 Austin, Mary Hunter, 161 automobile travel, 133–148 Averroes, 39 Avicenna, 39 axis mundi, 103, 105 backpacking, 74–75 Bacon, Francis, 40, 46, 199n49 Badè, William Frederic, 8, 78, 85, 89–91, 251 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 8, 82 Bancroft Library collections, 251 Basil, Saint, 104, 218n7 Bentham, Jeremy, 50 biblical tradition, 29, 168 bird-watching, 62–63 Blumenberg, Hans, 21 Bonaventure, Saint, 58 Boone and Crockett Club, 9, 63, 85 Boy Scouts of America, 63, 66, 69, 84 British Geographical Society, 117 Buddhism, 151 Bunyan, John, 30, 109 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 124 Bureau of Land Management, 124 Buridan, Jean, 113 Burnett, Thomas, 115, 117 Burroughs, John, 1, 8, 71, 82, 85, 233n22, 241 Caesar, George Vanderbilt, 147 Camp Fire Girls, 66, 69, 165 camping, 23, 61, 66, 148 Canaanite traditions, 105 Canigou (Pyrenees), 113 capitalism, 67, 139, 183 Carson, Rachel, 3, 6, 63 Catholicism, 19, 195n27, 198n45 Charles VIII, King of France, 113

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Chautauqua movement, 70 Church of Latter Day Saints, 68–69 City Beautiful movement, 65–66 City of God (Augustine), 32 civic engagement: and nature preservation, 167–169; and nature spirituality, 167; and wilderness preservation, 174 civic organizations. See social organizations/institutions civic republicanism, 168, 175 Civilian Conservation Corps, 120 civil religious discourse, 174, 175, 179 Clean Air Act, 3 Clean Water Act, 3 Clements, Frederic, 185 climate change, 17–18, 183–184, 186, 187, 191n1, 252 climbing. See mountaineering Cohn, Robert, 108 Colby, William, 251 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 54 color, people of, 19, 181 Commoner, Barry, 3 conceptualism, 40. See also Abelard; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Confessions (Augustine), 29–30, 32–33, 36, 59, 109 Confessions (Rousseau), 35–38, 201–202n24 Congregationalists, 97 conservationism, 7, 60, 89, 124, 162; conservationists, 82, 184; land conservation, 120, 125; organizations, 63, 68, 84, 187. See also specific organizations conservatism, 2, 65, 152, 185 continuity/discontinuity, 12, 13, 21, 77, 105, 112 Contra Costa Hills Club, 89–90 Cooper, Susan Fennimore, 161 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 21 Council of Carthage, 31 Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 70 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 54

Index

Croagh Patrick chapel, 110 Cronon, William, 19 Curtis, Asahel, 8, 141, 172 Dante, 50, 112–113, 118, 200n10 Dark Green Religion (Taylor), 16, 202n24 Defoe, Daniel, 30 depravity. See human depravity Depression Era, 8, 76, 125, 134, 158 Descartes, Rene, 38, 40, 46, 47–48, 218n7; Discourse on Method, 116, 220n48. See also empiricism; Enlightenment; rationalism Deus absconditus, 44, 46 development issues, 187 Dickinson, Anna, 165 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 116, 220n48 Divine Comedy (Dante), 50, 112–113 Donne, John, 104 dualism, 29, 88, 103 Dunlap, Thomas, 16 EarthFirst!, 9 Eastern philosophies, 151 Eckhart, Meister, 46–48, 58 ecofeminists, 182 ecological issues, 187; and Christian theology, 184; critical appraisal of, 20; legislative policies, 3, 4; and the marginalized, 19; and misanthropic narrative, 181; and ongoing crisis, 17; and social organizations, 61. See also Carson, Rachel; climate change; Commoner, Barry; Ehrlich, Paul ecology, rhetorical use of term, 20, 60 ecology, age of, 20–21 “ecology of influence,” 9 economics, 3; economic benefits, 171, 173; economic development, 183–184; economic inequality, 163; economic utilitarianism, 141 Eden, Garden of, 13, 57, 146, 187, 202n25 efficiency thesis, 76

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Ehrlich, Paul, 3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6, 54, 80, 122, 137, 138, 185 Emile (Rousseau), 54 empiricism, 27, 39, 40, 51 Endangered Species Act, 3–4 Enlightenment, 4, 38, 42, 115. See also Descartes, Rene; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques environment, rhetorical use of term, 20 environmental discourse: antimodern anxieties in, 154; critiques of, 19–20, 181–182; divergence of, 18; and Native Americans, 125; religiosity of, 13–14, 150, 186; and secular moral values, 13–14; and social justice, 182, 185, 189, 243; soteriology in, 178; and technopolitics, 185, 191n3, 252 environmental historians, 3, 4, 17, 39, 63 environmental imagination, 16; in age of ecology, 20–21; and climate change, 17; constraints on, 183; cultural substrata of, 8; evolution of, 34; genealogical history of environmentalism, 14; historical contexts of, understanding the, 24; limits on, 17; normative evaluation of, 182–183; religious roots of, 186; and theological concepts, 6; theological roots of, 5; theological traditions constraint on, 181–182 environmentalism: and aesthetic ideal, 185–187; and agrarian sentimentalism, 76; as antidote to moral depravities of industrial society, 180; and appropriation of American Indian culture, 125; assumptions of, 186; attitudes in American culture, 83; conceptual/social origins of, 2; conventional history of, 7; critical reappraisal of, 1; critique of, 181, 185–186; emergence of, 61, 180; ethicoreligious basis of, 186; formation of, 5; genealogical history of, 3; global nature of, 17–18;

258

environmentalism (continued) historical critique of, 187; historical development of, 17; history of, 184; influence of romanticism on, 61; post-World War II, 3, 4, 7, 147; and preservationism, 119, 172; and Progressive conservationism, 76; public discourse on contemporary issues in, 183; religious roots of, 63–64, 83; and romantic naturalism, 76; and sacred space, 102–147; social/political aspects, 3, 5, 7, 23; technical solutions, pursuit of, 183; and transcendentalists, 7; use of term, 60 Environmental Protection Agency, 3 ethics, 2, 14, 24; of environmental change, 188–189; and environmental problems, 185–186; and sensory pleasures, 32–33, 36, 58; of service, 166 evolutionary theory, 152, 179 extinction, species, 62, 187 extraecclesial spaces, 14, 179 Fall, the, 27, 31, 37, 116, 181; alienation, 153; debate over consequences of, 28; and free will, 31; and human depravity, 31, 81, 202n25; Rousseau on, 36, 202n25; and tie to civilization, 166–167; and tie to the land, 21–22; universality of, 81 federal government, 124, 125, 134, 171, 175–176 forest preservation, 172, 174–175 free will, 30, 31 French, Harold, 90 Fresh Air Fund, 66, 67–68, 84 Freshfield, Douglas, 110, 117 Fromme, R. L., 171 frontier, 25, 62, 143 Fuller, Fay, 164–165 Garden and Forest, 120, 252 Gatta, John, 16, 80

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Geithmann, Harriet, 136–137 gender issues, 53–54, 149, 150; ecofeminists, 182; feminist critique, 12–13; homosexuality, 163; masculinity, 118, 159, 160; sexist ideologies, 19; sexuality, 163; sexualized imagery, 160; women, 158–165, 181. See also muscular Christianity General Land Office, 124 Genesis narrative, 108, 146, 202n25 The Genesis of the Copernican World (Blumenberg), 21 Germany, 54, 67, 77 Gesner, Conrad, 113–115 Gilded Age: conservation during, 124; conservationist literature, 251–252; and environmentalism, 242; natural theology of, 180; and outdoor recreation, 143; romanticism of, 4; and social reform, 56, 130; and walking, 204n60 girls’ camps, 163 “glacier gospel”, 82, 90, 119–120, 210n60, 248 “Glaciers and Gasoline,” 135 Glacken, Clarence, 16 Glastonbury Tor abbey, 110 global issues, 17–18, 183–184, 187. See also anthropogenic environmental changes; climate change; development issues; ecological issues; global warming; NorthSouth relations Global South, 19, 186–187 global warming, 179, 183–184, 191n1 “gloom thesis”, 108 Gnosticism, 31–32 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 121 goodness, inherent in human beings, 36 “gospel of efficiency”, 76 The Gospel of Nature (Burroughs), 1 Gothic revival, 116, 117 Gould, Rebecca Kneale, 16, 70

Index

grace, divine, 47, 54; Augustine on, 29–31; and mountains, 108; Muir on, 80–81; in natural world, 59; and redemption, 31 grace, fall from, 28, 37, 104, 166–167, 217–218n5 Grand Teton National Park, 125 “the Grand Tour”, 118 Grant, Madison, 141 Great Chain of Being, 42 Great Depression, 8, 76, 125, 134, 158 Greco-Roman ideas of nature, 34 Greek mythology, 126, 127 Greeley, William, 144, 175 Green Mountain Trail Club, 165 green socialists, 19 Grinnell, George Bird, 62, 85 Haeckel, Ernst, 12 Harriman Expedition (Alaska 1899), 82 Harwood, Aurelia, 162, 165 Hays, Samuel, 76 Hebrew scripture, 106, 107–109, 112, 118 heliocentrism, 39 Hellenistic learning, 39, 40, 121. See also Scholasticism heresy, 30–32, 59, 196n30 Higginson, Ella Rhoads, 165 High Spots, 120 hiking, 23, 153, 160; in Antiquity, 26; and recreational organizations, 66, 148; and self-contemplation, 34; social nature of, 61; and social reform, 56; women hikers, 164 Himalayas, 118 Hinduism, 92, 151 historians, environmental: contemporary, 19; and conventional history, 4; critiques of, 181, 197n44; and gender issues, 158; on Muir, 79; and Progressive Era, 7; on religiosity, 9–10, 15–17, 63, 212n78, 231n3; and romanticism, 39; on social justice issues, 182, 185, 189, 243; Worster, 60

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historical authenticity, questions of, 182–183 historical narratives, conventional, 3, 58, 60–61 “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (White), 15–16, 61, 245 Hobbes, Calvin, 36, 50 At Home in Nature (Gould), 16 homosexuality, 163 homo viator (human traveler), 22, 30–32, 49–50, 58–59, 100–101, 143, 200n11. See also pilgrimage; walking Hughes, Thomas, 54 Hulme, Mike, 183–184 human conformity to natural order, 180 human depravity: Augustine on, 29–33, 57; as distinct from natural world, 28, 146; and environmentalism, 185–186; modernized theology of, 81; and Pelagianism, 30–31; Petrarch and humanist view of, 33–35; and recreation, 57–58; Rousseau’s theory of, 35–39, 166–167. See also materiality; urbanization human ecology theory, 188 human flourishing, concept of, 18, 187 human impacts, on natural environment, 62, 188 humanism, 34, 40, 51, 113, 118 human nature, 36–37, 158, 166–167, 177; as fundamentally destructive, 181–182. See also human depravity hunting, 66, 125 imagery: allegorical mountain imagery, 112–113, 122; in Christian theology, 29; feminized images of nature, 159; folk imagery, 126; forest imagery, 29; psalmist imagery, 128; religious imagery, 8, 149–150; sexualized imagery, 160; in theology, 29; typographic images, 107; “virgin nature” imagery, 160; wilderness in Christian theological, 29

260

“immensa silva,” 29 immigration, awareness of, 64 individualism, 159, 168, 174 industrialization, 7, 19, 139; anxieties about, 59; awareness of, 64; and human footprint, 24; and social order, 55; and wilderness preservation, 147 interstate highway system, 143 Isaac, 107 Isaiah, book of, 108 Islamic intellectuals, 39 Islamic theologians, 49 Izaak Walton League, 63 Jefferson, Thomas, 70 Jehovah’s Witness, 93 Jerome, 111, 218n7 “Jesus Lover of My Soul” (hymn), 97 Jesus of Nazareth, 82, 88, 91, 95, 107 John of the Cross, Saint, 112 John the Baptist, 82 Jordan, David Starr, 148 journals, 120 journey: of life, 59; used as narrative technique, 30, 50; of the soul, 22; of the spirit, 29, 30–32. See also homo viator Kant, Immanuel, 50, 54 Keeler, Charles, 81–82 Keith, William, 82, 89 Kingsley, Charles, 53, 54 “Kulshan, the Great White Watcher” (Van Horn) (sermon), 92 Ladies Repository, 160 Landes, Henry, 78, 87 Land of Little Rain (Austin), 161 Latino communities, 19 League of Woodcraft Indians, 69 LeConte, Joseph, 78, 89, 251 “lecture sermon,” 97 legal battles, 147, 172, 173, 183

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leisure pursuits, 55, 120 Leopold, Aldo, 6, 9, 171; on community life, 185; as environmental writer, 8; lionization of, 63; A Sand County Almanac, 7; viewpoint of, 77–78 liberal Protestantism, 126, 150 liturgical models, 92 locomotion, effects on outdoor recreation movement, 55 Louter, David, 134–136 Lovejoy, Arthur, 116 Machine in the Garden (Marx), 15 MacKaye, Benton, 8, 72–73, 78, 176, 251 Man and Nature (Perkins), 62 Manichaeism, 30–31, 58 Manifest Destiny, 137 marginalization, 19, 161, 181 Marsh, George Perkins, 62 Marshall, Robert, 73, 74, 77–78, 171, 251 Marti, Benedict, 114 Marx, Leo, 15 masculinity, 118, 159, 160. See also muscular Christianity matchmaking/romance, and organizations’ annual outings, 162–163 materiality: and Augustine, 33; and Christian theological anthropocentrism, 29; and contemporary culture, 33; and redemption, 22, 30, 38; and Rousseau, 38; Rousseau on, 35–36; secularization, 40; and spiritual transcendence, 33 material world, 26–28; and anthropocentrism, 29–38; and Descartes, 40; and redemption, 14, 21–22; and romanticism, 38–40; and secularization, 40 Mather, Stephen, 143, 144, 170, 175–176 Matthes, François-Emile, 251 Matthew 21:12, 91 Mazama Bulletin, 148

Index

Mazamas: climbing expeditions, 132; Mazama Bulletin, 148; religious ties of, 89; women in, 161–162, 165 McNeill, John, 4 McSorley, Joseph, 25 Meany, Edmond S.: archives of, 251; as environmental writer, 8; on forest science, 174–175; and Mountaineers, 89, 121; and Muir, 211–212n74; mythology references, 224n80; on nature preservation, 171–172; and nature spirituality, 85, 156; religiosity of, 221n60; on wilderness, 78 “mechanistic civilization”, 156 mechanization, 73, 172 medieval Christianity, 28, 109; allegorical mountain imagery in, 112–113; medieval intellectuals, late, 40. See also medieval theology medieval metaphysical debates, 44–45 medieval texts, 109 medieval theology, 26; nature and soteriology in, 38–49 medieval thinkers, 39–40, 41–42 men’s camps, 163 Merchant, Carolyn, 12–13 metaphor of life, 50 metaphysics: conceptualizations, 96; medieval debates, 44–45; traditions, 127 Middle Ages, 104–105; Islamic influence, 39; late medieval theologians, 46; late medieval thought, 39–40; and outdoors, 25–26; writings of, 109 middle classes, urban: and conservation, 124; pressures of, 130–131; and Protestant spirituality, 89; social norms, 8 Mill, John Stuart, 50 Miller, Joaquin, 90 Mills, Enos, 169, 175 Milton, John, 81, 104 mining industry, 172

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misanthropic narrative, and ecological discourse, 181 modern environmentalism, 3, 4, 24, 27, 149, 178; criticisms of, 19–20; emergence of, 34 modernity: advent of, 36; and changing ideas, 25, 34–35; and Christian tradition, 35; indebtedness to Christian thought, 27; onset of, 27, 58; and secularization, 27; and walking, 50 modernization, 12; anxieties about, 64–65; combating of, 66; emasculating forces of, 160 modernization theory, 4 monasteries, 110–111 monasticism: asceticism, 80, 112 moral improvement: environmental thought, 181; by nature, 5; and reconnection with nature, 62; and recreation, 66–67; and recreationists, 180; and theological discourse, 5 morality: environmentalism as antidote to moral depravity, 180; moral authenticity, 159; moral basis of environmentalism, 2; moral benefits of nature, 53–54; moral characteristics of environmentalism, 9; moral concern for environment, 24; moral foundations of human institutions, 37; moral imagination, 12; moral message/ meaning in natural world, 184–185; moral necessities of nature, 172; moral norms, 149; moral rhetoric in preservationist writings, 22; moral salubriousness of time in the outdoors, 173; moral status of natural world, 28; moral strength of recreational communities, 173; moral support for recreational organizations, 170; moral values, secularization of, 13–14; muscular Christianity and, 53–54; and sensory pleasures, 32–33, 36, 58

262

Mormon Elders, 69 Mormonism. See Church of Latter Day Saints Morris, Willam, 52 Moses, 106, 107 Mosquito Buzzette, 162 Mount Adams, 124 Mount Aiguille, 113 Mountaineer, 120, 121, 126, 148, 169, 175 mountaineering, 23, 173; in Antiquity, 26; competitiveness, 118–119; European, 118–119; as immodesty, 109; as masculine pursuit, 160; moral benefits of, 74; mountainclimbing literature, 118; North American, 119; and selfcontemplation, 34; and service/ sacrifice, 166; social nature of, 61; as spiritually beneficial, 61; as sporting pursuit, 118; women, 164–165 Mountaineers Club, 85–89; annual outings, 154–155; climbing expeditions, 132; constitutional amendment (1912), 168; Curtis, Asahel, 141; flourishing of, 8; Geithmann, Harriet, 136; influence on Mountaineers, 233n22; Jerusalem, symbolic use of by, 94; Legislative Committee of, 168–169; and lobbying, 144; and Meany, 78, 89; Mountaineer spirit, 166, 167–168; and Mount Rainier, 132; and Muir, 119–120, 211–212n74, 233n22; National Park Committee, 172; and national parks service, 176; and Olympic Mountains, 170–171; Olympic Peninsula chapter, 162; and preservationism, 119, 168–169; religious ties of, 23, 89; and renewal, 73–74; and romanticism, 96; secularization of, 99–100; and service/sacrifice, 168; spirituality of, 82, 86, 157; and transcendentalist writings, 82; and urban anxieties, 130; women in, 161–162, 165; worship

/ Index

services, 91–95; writings of, 233n22. See also Meany, Edmond S. “The Mountaineers Hymn” (Greiner), 97–99 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Nicolson), 15, 26–28, 104, 107 mountain gloom/glory: aesthetic ideal, 27, 29, 116–117; “mountain gloom,” 28, 108, 110; “mountain gloom” thesis, 111; “mountain glory,” 28, 116, 117; as sacred space, 103–120 mountains: allegorical mountain imagery, 122; and Christian/ Hellenistic source allusions, 121; diversity of images, 110; European disregard for, 27; mountain landscapes, 26; mountain monasticism, 110–111; as sacred space, 103–120; and sacred time, 125; and “spiritual strength,” 123; symbolic status of, 103. See also mountain gloom/glory The Mountain That was God (Williams), 121, 221n62 Mount Ararat, 106 Mount Baker, 92, 123–124 Mount Carmel, 105–106 Mount Davidson, 90 Mount Eden, 111 Mount Hood, 124 Mount Long, 165 Mount Moriah, 106 Mount Nebo, 106 Mount of Olives, 107, 122 Mount Olympus National Monument, 169 Mount Olympus National Park (Olympus National Park), 169 Mount Pilatus, 113 Mount Rainier, 119, 121, 123, 132, 139–140, 164, 170 Mount Rainier National Park, 86, 119, 139–140, 144, 169–170, 235n67 Mount Shasta, 123–124 Mount Sinai, 106, 107, 109

Index

Mount St. Helens, 124 Mount Tabor, 107 Mount Ventoux, 33–34, 113 Mount Zion, 105, 106, 109 Muir, John, 71; and animistic ideas, 231n4; and the automobile, 138; and Badè, 91; biographies of, 79, 89, 248; Christian rhetoric of, 79–81; conservationism of, 7; corpus analyses/anthologies of, 241, 248; death of, 6; and founders of American conservationism, 89; “glacier gospel,” 90, 119–120, 210n60, 248; influence of, 78; lionization of, 63; and Meany, 211–212n74; metaphor of life, 50; moral doctrine of preservationism, 81–82; and Mountaineers, 119–120, 211–212n74, 233n22; Mount Rainier climbing account, 132; My First Summer in the Sierra, 81; nature spirituality of, 78–79, 91, 176; pantheism of, 12; papers of, 248; Philippon on, 8–9; and Progressive Era, 7, 83, 176; quote, 102; and recreationist writings, 119–120, 132; religion/ ecology marriage, 211n67; religiosity of, 8–10, 79–82, 210n60; role in American environmentalism, 6; romanticism of, 3, 7, 119–120; scriptural style of, 81; Sierra Nevada, 159; theological views, 79–81; A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 50, 135; Travels in Alaska, 159, 162; and wilderness movement, 71, 76 muscular Christianity, 69, 73, 92, 118, 123, 130, 160, 207n20, 221n66, 224–225n93; defi ned, 53–54; and modernization, 64–66 mutuality, 188 My First Summer in the Sierra (Muir), 81 narratives: Genesis narrative, 108, 146, 202n25; historical narratives,

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conventional, 3, 58, 60–61; humanist narratives, 118; journey narrative technique, 30, 50; misanthropic narrative, 181; recreational narrative genre, 148–150; resacralization narrative, 11–12; soteriology narrative, 96 Nash, Roderick F., 16, 131 National Forest Service, 125 National Geographic Society, 66 National Parks Association, 141 National Park Service, 124, 125, 143, 144, 175; criticism of, 147; liaison with Mountaineers Club, 168; as major political victory, 63; Mather, Stephen, 170, 175–176 national parks/forests: as access to recreation, 173; politics of, 168–169; as sacred space, 120–121; and tourism, 173; tourism, 23; value of, 175 Native Americans: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 124; and conservation movement, 124; conservation’s antagonism to the interests of, 124; cultural values, 69, 124–125, 151; culture appropriations of, 69; dispossession of territory around public lands, 125; environmental thinkers, 187; land-tenure practices, 125; marginalization of, 181; reservation system, 124 natural history, 49–51, 59, 173 Natural History of Selborne (White), 50 naturalness, 177–178, 189 natural order, 166–167, 180, 185 natural resource management, 176 natural theology, 125, 152, 180 natural world: changing conceptualization of, 34–35; and divine grace, 59; meaning of, 17; moral significance of, 34–35; ontological dualism of, 58; social articulation of meaning of, 17; as spiritual wilderness, 29

264

nature: activities, societal changes in, 26; Christian appreciation of, 58; as cultural force, 178–179; devaluation of, 15; as fundamentally good, 181–182; Greco-Roman ideas of, 34; and human moral goods advancement, 5; intrinsic value of, 5; modern appreciation of, 22, 23; moral benefits of, 53–54; nature/ religion antagonism, 3, 14; reconnection with for moral improvement, 62; restorative capacity of, 177–178; as rhetorical/ symbolic mirror for transcendentalists, 154; rhetorical use of term, 20; role of Christianity in shaping attitudes about, 33–34; and self-contemplation, 34; soteriological potency of, 61; and soteriology in medieval theology, 38–49; theological significance of, 26; and walking, 28 “Nature” (Emerson), 54 Nature, Technology, and the Sacred (Szerszynski), 16 nature enthusiasts, 23, 178, 179–180 nature spirituality, 64, 127; Christian traditionalism’s trouble with, 152–153; and civic engagement, 167; doctrinal flexibility of, 94; and environmental movement, 59; forms of, 3, 14; and fraternity, 155; idolatry, 153; and institutional religion, 64; and marginalization of women, 161; and Muir, 78–79, 176; multifacetedness of, 84–85; pantheism of, 152–153; and political capital, 170; and print media, 149; of Progressive Era, 176; religious rhetoric, 135; and sacred/secular mix, 150; service orientation of, 151, 168; and social reform, 65; and transformative experiences, 155; and women, 160 Nature Sunday, 82

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nature worship/worshippers, 25, 121, 153, 156, 174 Near Eastern religions, 105, 107 “Nearer My God to Thee” (Adams), 97–98 neopaganism, 12, 150, 152 neoplatonism, 58, 116; on divine order, 42; omnipotence, concept of, 41–47; worldview, 41–42, 45, 116. See also Augustine; Scholasticism New Testament, 107, 108, 109 Nicolas of Cusa, 46 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 15, 103–105, 107–108, 109–110, 112–117. See also Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory nominalism, 40, 41–49, 59, 180, 203nn34–38 Nordhaus, Ted, 18, 178 North Cascades National Park, 86, 169 North-South relations, 186–187. See also Global South Northwoods Walton Club, 78 nostalgia thesis, 55, 76, 187 Ockham, William, 41 Odum, Eugene, 185 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 66, 134 Olympic Mountains, 170 Olympic National Forest, 171 Olympic National Monument, 172 Olympic National Park, 86 Olympic National Park (Mount Olympus National Park), 169, 172 Olympic Peninsula, 169, 170 Olympic Range, 170–171 omnipotence, concept of, 31, 41–47 original sin, 21–22, 36–37. See also Fall, the Otto, Rudolph, 107 “Outdoor Liturgy,” 90 outdoor recreation, 25–26, 141; as modern form of leisure, 27–28; and moral benefits of nature, 22; and national parks service, 176; and nostalgia thesis, 55; and pursuit of

Index

divine grace, 59; and selfcontemplation, 34; and social organizations/institutions, 61 Outdoor Recreation, 136 outings, annual, 154–155, 158, 159, 162–163, 166 Out West, 162 Overland Monthly, 120 Pacific Northwest, 85–86; forest preservation, 172; mountains and tourism, 139–140; Pacific Coast, 123, 167, 168; religious/mountaineering rhetoric, 97; and social/civic engagement, 169; and theological reconfiguration, 88–89 paganism, 25, 127, 150 Palestinian desert, 111 Paley, William, 185 pantheism, 12, 121, 152–153 parks movement, 59, 66, 134. See also national parks/forests Parsons, Marion Randall, 159, 162 Parsons, Willard, 68 Patristic Christianity, 105, 109 Payne, John Barton, 170 Pelagianism, 28, 30–31, 48, 59, 188 Pelagius, 31 peripatetic tradition, 28, 49–57 personal transformation, 119, 167–168, 189. See also transcendentalism pessimistic anthropology, 182 Peter of Aragon, 113 Petrarch, 33–35, 37; “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” 109, 201n18; on mountain ascents, 113–114, 116, 118; on nature, 51, 58 Philippon, David, 8–9 Phoutrides, Aristides, 131 physical pleasures, 32–33, 36, 58 pilgrimage: and automobile tours, 136–138; definitions of, 135; medieval accounts of, 50–51; practices, 111; rhetoric of, 136; and tourism, 133–148

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Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 30, 109 pioneering, 33; frontier, 25, 62, 143; view of nature spirituality, 154 Plato, 41 Platonic realism, 41, 45 Playground Association of America, 66 playgrounds, 66–67 Plymouth Church (Seattle), 91–92, 97 poets, 151 politics: alliances, 173; and automobile revolution, 140–141; of climate change, 18; conservationist, 161; criticisms of, 19–20; and obscuring of religious roots, 2; political debate, 1; political ecology, 184; political engagement, 168; political messages, 92; political mobilization, 9; political organizations, 167, 168; political responses, 17; of preservation, 147, 151, 161; Progressive Era, 64–66; and social mobilization, 184; and theological ideas purpose, 179–180 Pontius Pilate, 113 “positive debt,” 166 post-Darwinian views, 80, 87 post-Protestantism, 79 potentia absoluta (absolute power), 31, 43–44, 46, 48 potentia ordinata (ordained power), 43–44 premodern ideas about nature, 23, 24, 26 preservationism: and aesthetic ideal, 171–175, 185; early preservation movement, 134; and environmental movement, 172; Muir’s moral doctrine of, 81–82; and National Park Service, 147; political organizations and, 167; politics of, 147, 168; and public service, 175; and recreational organization, 141; and road development, 147; strain of American environmentalism, 119; and tourism, 141

266

preservationists: and “glacier gospel,” 119–120; and Muir, 119–120; preservationist politics, 173, 175; and social values, 174 primitivism, and industrialization, 55–56 “pristine nature” idea, 18 private spirituality, 179 private values vs public goods, 173 Progressive Christians, 68, 82 Progressive Era: and American Indian culture, 125; and antimodern anxieties, 73; and civic organizations, 63; communal/collective experiences, 154; conservation, 124; conservationist literature access, 251–252; efficiency thesis, 76; Muir as product of, 83; nature spirituality, 150; nature spirituality in, 78–79; politics, 65; as prelude to Environmental Movement, 7; recreationist literature, 173; religiosity of, 64–66; religious thinkers/leaders, 152; spirituality, 86; transcendentalism in, 4; as transitional period, 7; and urban anxieties, 130–131; and utilitarian individualism, 167; women’s clubs, 165; youth reform organizations, 68 Progressives: and social reform, 64, 67; and traditional piety, 92–93 “Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Mountaineering” (Robinson), 177 Protestantism: congregations in Scouting movement, 82; cultural hegemony of, 20; eclectic spirituality of, 83; and environmental discourse, 181–182; of environmental groups activities, 22–23; as foundation of environmentalism, 19; as highest form of religious evolution, 126; and human depravity, 81; influence on Muir, 79; in early twentieth century,

/ Index

liberal form of, 83; and nature religiosity, 82; outdoor worship services, 100; Protestant Reformation, 28; racist ideologies of, 19; reconfiguring of, 85–101; resacralization and, 12; sexist ideologies of, 19; spirituality, 89; and transcendentalist writings, 82; work ethic, 65. See also muscular Christianity Protestant Reformation, 28 psalmist imagery, 128 Psalms, 86–87, 93–94, 106, 112 public administrators, 176 publications, recreational organization, 120, 127, 167 public discourse, on environmental issues, 183 public goods, 2, 18; vs private values, 173; public lands, 125, 146–147 public lands, protected lands, 172 public life, and religion, 64 public service, and preservationism, 175 Puget Sound region, 139–140, 171 purity of nature, 120, 146, 181 race, 19, 163, 181. See also Native Americans railroads, 55, 142 Rainier National Park Joint Committee, 141 Rappaport, Roy, 16 rationalism, 38, 42, 45, 115–116, 180 reactive theory of nature, 188 realism, 41–42 recreation: and American religious life, 64–71; as Christianity’s legacy, 57–59; enthusiasts, 149; rise of, 27–28; and spiritual experience, 22, 23, 148–176. See also outdoor recreation; recreational organizations recreational organizations: and athleticism, 176; as communities,

Index

154–157; fraternity of, 173; local clubs, 66, 160; and national parks service, 176; publications, 120; service obligations of, 166; social functions, 154–155; and social mobilization, 176; and social/ textual practices, 159; and spirituality, 176; and women, 161–162. See also specific organizations recreational soteriology, 28, 151–152, 153 recreationist literature: and artificiality of city, 128–129; and healing, solace and purification, 120; intergenerational commitments, 174; and manly virtues, 130; multiple valences of, 151; in Progressive Era, 173; recreational journey accounts, 164; recreational narrative genre, 148–150; recreation organization publications, 120–123; rhetoric of, 125–127, 173; romantic sources, 151; “virgin nature” imagery, 160 recreationists, 154, 166, 174, 180, 181 redemption, 14, 27, 28; and divine grace, 31, 59; and human depravity, 31; and limits on environmental thought, 185; link with nature, 18; and materiality, 22; and national environmental imagination, 5; redemptive powers of nature, 2, 178, 185; Rousseau on, 37; spatial images of redemption, 23; topography of, 113 religion: influence, fading of, 4; and public life, 64; religion/nature antagonism, 3, 14; religious change, 177–189; religious life, American, 22, 64–71; and social reform, 68; treatment of, 17; use of term, 64 “religious environmentalism,” 11–12 religious imagery, 8, 149–150 remediation efforts, 187 Renaissance, 33–34, 40, 49, 111, 113 resacralization narrative, 11–12 resources, natural, 17, 18, 19, 60, 76, 172 restoration, 37, 185, 187

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Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau), 201–202n24 Revivalism, 64–65 rewilding, 182 rhetoric: of ascent, 109; biblical rhetoric, 10, 29, 178–179; changing, 23; of recreationist genre, 125; rhetorical patterns, 20; spiritual, 83, 154 rituals, 28, 181 road development, 133–147 Robinson, Elmo, 177 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 30 “Rock of Ages,” 95, 97 Rocky Mountain National Park, 169 Roman mythology, 127 romanticism: in ancient sources, 38–39; as brightest star of modern environmental thought, 39; Christian character of foundations of, 3; and Christian ontology, 34; and Christian soteriology, 36; generations inheriting, 151–152; influence on environmentalism, 3, 22, 61; and moral improvement, 54; and recreationist literature, 151; response to rationalism, 180; and restoration, 37; romantic individualism, 154; romantic naturalism, 76; romantic poetry, 8, 118; soteriological rhetoric in environmental discourse, 178; subjectivity, 115; of transcendentalists, 7; transformative force of, 59; view of nature spirituality, 154. See also transcendentalism Roosevelt, Theodore, 9, 170 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: balanced thought of, 187, 201n23; Confessions, 35–38, 201–202n24; Emile, 54; human depravity theory, 35–39, 166–167; on redemption, 37; Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 201–202n24; theory of education, 54, 177–178; and walking, 50, 51, 53

268

Rowell, Chester, 164 Royal Geographic Society, 110 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 180 Rural Hours (Cooper), 161 Ruskin, John, 27, 52, 116, 119 Ruusbroec, John, 112 sacredness: of nature, 11; sacred communities, 154–158; sacred history, 125–126; sacred/secular mix, 150; sacred time, 125 sacred space: and American environmental imagination, 102–147; mountain gloom/glory, 103–120; road to nature, 133–147; spirit of the mountain, 120–133 Sacred Theory of the Earth (Burnett), 115–116 Saint Paul monastery (Mount Athens), 110 Salutation of the Dawn (Hindu prayer), 93 salvation, doctrine of. See soteriology salvation logic, 5, 7, 13, 27, 28, 184 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 7 San Francisco Bay, 90 Santmire, H. Paul, 180 Save-the-Redwoods movement, 165 “Scaling the Heights” (sermon), 97 Schama, Simon, 109, 117 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 70, 154 Schmitt, Peter, 16 Scholasticism, 40–45, 48, 203n31, 203n39 Schrepfer, Susan, 164 scientific curiosity, 25 scientific epistemology, 24–25 scientific forestry, 77 scientific revolution, 20–21, 34, 39–40, 47–48, 199n49, 225n98 Scopes Trial, 152 Scotus, Duns, 41, 47 Seattle, 85; and A. H. Albertson, 167; and Plymouth Church, 91–92, 97 Seattle Chamber of Commerce, 141 Seattle Times, 136

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secular environmental values, 13–14 secularism, 2, 178 secularization, 12, 20, 119–120; of modern environmental movement, 4; and modernity, 27; and theological debate, 40 secular pantheism, 79 secular/religious categories, 184 self-transformation, 28, 31; selfactualization, 59; self-awareness, 40; self-contemplation, 34; self-improvement, 63, 178; selfreliance, 185; self-searching, 49 sensory pleasures, 32–33, 36, 58 sentimentalism, 78, 153 service obligations: as civic service and Christian sacrifice, 166; as fundamental object/foundation stone of recreational organizations, 166; to nature, 165–176; of nature spirituality, 151; and spirituality, 167–168 Seton, Ernest Thompson, as environmental writer, 8 sexuality. See gender issues The Shape of Sacred Space (Cohn), 108 Shellenberger, Michael, 18, 178 Sierra Club: annual outings, 154–155; archives of, 251; articles of incorporation, 167; Badè, William Frederic, 90–91; of California, 23, 85; civic engagement, 167; climbing expeditions, 132; emergence of, 63; flourishing of, 8; intergenerational commitments, 174; LeConte, Joseph, 78; members of, 85, 90; as model for Mountaineers, 167; Muir and, 81; and national parks service, 176; Parsons and, 162; Philippon on, 9; Phoutrides and, 131; preservationist politics of, 168; publications, 121–122; recreational enjoyment, 73, 167; religious ties of, 23, 84, 89; women and, 161–162, 165; worship services, 90–91

Index

Sierra Club Bulletin, 120, 148, 153, 162, 175, 252 Sierra Nevada mountains, 159, 167 sin, logic of, and wilderness ethic, 188–189 singles programs, 163 social change, 64, 187 social communion, 166, 167–168 social depravity, 35–36. See also human depravity social engineering, 66, 67 social gospel movement, 65 social justice, 182, 185, 189, 243 social mobilization, 176, 184 social order, 8, 9, 19; and urbanization, 130–131 social organizations/institutions, 61, 62–63, 178. See also specific organizations social pressures, 163 social reform, 56, 64–66 social solidarity, 149, 166 soil erosion, 17, 62 solace, 120, 135, 149, 173 solitude, 72 Solnit, Rebecca, 202n25 Some Outdoors Prayers (devotional handbook), 96 Song of the Open Road (Whitman), 135 Songs of Ascent, 112 Son of the Wilderness (Wolfe), 248 soteriological framework, 180, 181, 186 soteriology: and Christian theology, 30–31; and cultural conditions, 22; and historical changes, 182; influence of, 13; in medieval theology, 38–49; and morality of sensory pleasures, 32–33, 36, 58; nature as agent of, 27; and recreation/conservation organizations, 63; rhetoric of, 109, 178; rituals of, 28; and romanticism, 36; Rousseau reverse of, 202n25; self-contemplation, 34; soteriological rhetoric, 178;

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soteriology narrative, 96; walking as activity of, 28 Southern Alps (New Zealand), 118 Spence, David Mark, 125 spiritual experience: and environmentalism, 187; and mountains as sacred space, 120–133; and recreation, 148–176; in the service of nature, 165–176; women approach the summit of, 158–165 spiritual improvement and recreation, 67 spirituality: and individualism, 168; and mountains, 125; and recreational organizations, 176; and service/sacrifice, 167–168; and transformative experiences, 188 spiritual rejuvenation, 173 “spiritual strength” and mountains, 123 spiritual transcendence and materiality, 33 sportsmen’s clubs, 84 Stephens, Leslie, 119 Steward, Julian, 16 Stoll, Mark, 16 Stradling, David, 7 suburbanization, 139 Sunday, Billy, 65 “Sunrise Services in the Hills” (services), 92–97 Sunset, 135, 136, 162 sustainability, 184 Suzallo, Henry, 130 Swiss Alps, 113 syncretism (religious borrowing), 127 Szasz, Ferenc, 52 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 16 Tacoma/Tahoma, 139–140, 228n125. See also Mount Rainier Taylor, Bron, 16, 202n24 technopolitics, 185–186 theologians: attitude towards nature spirituality, 153; contemporary, 180;

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theologians (continued) early modern, 46; and peripatetic tradition, 49 theological conservatives, and cult of nature, 152 theological tradition, 2, 9; and environmental imagination boundary, 181–182; and modern affection of nature, 4; modern ideas of nature and, 26; rejection of, 27, 28; as roots of environmental imaginations, 5; Rousseau’s difference from, 36. See also Scholasticism theology, 127; contributions to environmental thought, 180; dualism in, 29; empirical observation, 43; and environmental discourse, 184; on environmental discourse, 188; genealogical history of environmentalism, 14; and human as morally depraved, 181; imagery in, 29; impact of, 13; implications on environmental thought, 17; medieval, 26, 38–49; and the natural order, 185; polarization of, 152; as standard of times, 10; theological foundations, 183; theological trends, 88–89. See also anthropocentrism Thoreau, Henry David: and deriding of Christian doctrine, 231–232n5; Eastern faith references of, 231–232n5; individual self-reliance in nature, 185; and manly virtues of recreationist discourse, 130; as prophet, comparison of, 82; religious orientation of, 6; role in American environmentalism, 6; romantic themes of, 3; and selfreliance, 185; on significance of walking, 51–53; Walden, 241; on wilderness, 72 A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Muir), 50, 135 timber industry, 172

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tourism, 23, 139; infrastructures of, 173; and pilgrimage, 133–148; value of, 141–142 Tower of Babel, 108 Traces on the Rhodian Stone (Glacken), 16 traditionalism, 152–153 traditions, 35, 173–174, 179 “trail and camp” community, 163 transcendentalism: and materiality, 33; and nature writers, 127, 151–152; theistic language/religious underpinnings of, 4; transcendentalists, 7, 61, 71, 79, 122, 154; writings of, 82. See also Muir, John; romanticism; Thoreau, Henry David transportation, 55, 133–148 travel, automobile, 133–148 traveler, human. See homo viator travel literature, 135 Travels in Alaska (Muir), 159, 162 “The Trouble with Wilderness” (Cronon), 19 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 143 universality of spirituality, 126, 151 University of Washington, 130, 170 urbanization, 66; anxieties about, 59; awareness of, 64; combating of, 66; corrupting forces of, 128–129; and human depravity, 133; and recreation, 66; and social order, 130–131; urban anxiety, 128–130 U.S. Forest Service, 124, 168, 175 utilitarianism, 78 utopian natural community, 166 values: agrarian values, 70, 75, 76; bourgeois values, 8, 89; cultural values, 184; plurality of values, 14; preservationist social values, 174; private values vs public goods, 173; Progressive values, 92–93; secular values, 13–14

Index

Van Horn, F. J., 91–92, 95, 97 variety vs solitude, 72 Ville, Antoine de, 113 Virgil, 30, 200n10 vocabularies: Christian, 12, 181; gendered, 159; nature spirituality, 169; nature writers, 171; secular, 20 voluntarism, doctrine of, 43–44, 46, 48, 234n60 Walden (Thoreau), 241 walking: Aristotle and, 49; and environmental alienation, 246; and industrialization, 55–56; Petrarch on, 51; pilgrimages, 50–51; romanticism and, 51–52; Rousseau on, 50, 51, 53, 246; and social reform, 56–57; as soteriological activity, 28, 51–52; thinking connection, 51; Thoreau on, 51–53, 246. See also homo viator “Walking” (Thoreau), 52–53, 246 Wallace, Anne, 57 Wall Street Journal editorial, 92–93, 97 wanderlust, 79, 127, 137 Wanderlust (Solnit), 202n25, 246 Ward, Harry F., 60 Washington (State), 141–142, 158, 169, 170 The Wealth of Nature (Worster), 12 Wesley, John, 59 “What America Needs” (editorial), 92–93, 97 White, Gilbert, 47, 50, 185 White, Lynn, Jr.: and anthropocentrism, 29, 80–81, 196n30; “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 15–16, 61, 245; refutation of, 178, 182, 211n67 Whitman, Walt, 135

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Wilberforce, William, 53, 54 wilderness: as anthropocentric social ideal, 72; in Christian theological imagery, 29; intrinsic value of, 173; as resuscitator of faith, 152; social confl ict, 152; as social ideal, 71–85, 171; and walking, 28; wilderness ethic, 188–189 Wilderness Act (1964), 147 wilderness movement, 71, 75, 76 wilderness preservation: and automotive pilgrimage, 140; civic project of, 174; and environmentalism, 61; and industrial development, 147; legal battles, 147, 173; public/political dimensions of, 169; and road development, 146–147; and spirituality, 188 Wilderness Society, 9, 63, 72–73, 78, 168, 251 William of Ockham, 47 Williams, John H., 121, 221n62, 228n125 Wolfe, Linnie Marsh, 79; Son of the Wilderness, 248 women, 158–165; ecofeminists, 182; feminist critique, 12–13; marginalization of, 181. See also gender issues World Traveler, 136 worship services, outdoor, 100 Worster, Donald, 12, 16, 60, 79 Wright, Mable Osgood, 8, 9 Yard, Robert Sterling, 78 Yellowstone National Park, 120, 125 Yosemite National Park, 63, 91 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 66, 69, 84 youth organizations, 66–68