Sacrifice and Wilderness
Senior Seminar 2003
By Jared Pruch
We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation. –Theodore Roosevelt
The rise of what we today call “the American environmental movement” signified a change in the way we, as Americans, think of ourselves in relation to the earth. The first productions of this movement, the creation of a National Park system and a few landmark works of literature such as Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, were as pebbles thrown into a still pond, the echoes of which ripple onto the shore of our national consciousness even today. There is a sense in this movement, and in these productions, that we owe some degree of respect to the natural world, that nature is more than a means to the end of profit and expansion, but rather an end in itself. This idea that the natural world is deserving of respect and consideration, and perhaps even preservation, is a relatively new thought in American history. Wilderness has traditionally symbolized wasteland, malign desert pitted against our efforts at cultivation and civilization: chaos surrounding our precarious order. Such a conception of wilderness should come as no surprise; after all, the invention of agriculture was a catalyst for human civilization, the first step toward a sedentary lifestyle that gave us more time to think about God and our human place in the cosmos. Learning to manipulate the land around us, to put it to our own use, for our own benefit, was an evolutionary step that led to what is today a predominant attitude of utilitarianism toward nature. [i] Cultivation of land was one of the earliest expressions of human order in a chaotic wilderness, an axis mundi around which to center our cosmology. This sort of imposed order has permeated our sense of the human relation to the natural world ever since. This is especially evident in the Christian, and American, context. Eden, after all, was a garden, not a forest.
Today, we live in a world in which manipulation of natural resources has become so taken for granted that we have a hard time conceiving of a world in which concrete, tractors, and electricity do not exist. We are masterful creatures; we have shaped the world to our own needs, and done so with such success that we have, in some countries, moved by and large past the point where we even need to consider where our food comes from or how the automobiles we drive work. But there is a sentiment today, expressed especially by those we call “environmentalists,” that we have gone too far in our use of the natural world. In our manipulation of natural resources we have created penicillin, central heating, and flush toilets. These inventions have improved the quality and duration of human life, and brought with them some semblance of a universal standard of health and sanitation. In America, we have a recent legacy of a standard of living that far exceeds that of most nations. But our legacy also includes widespread deforestation, to the tune of 95%, of the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Our legacy includes the near decimation of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains. It includes the invention of DDT, nuclear waste, and smog from Los Angeles that obscures the view from the rim of the Grand Canyon on days when the wind is right. There is a sense today that we live in a world of “too much” and “too many:” too much waste, too many people. These are the attitudes that we see in the works of environmental literature and thought today. The “prophets” of the environmental movement were the John Muirs and Ralph Waldo Emersons of our American history; those who cautioned us to “conserve, slow down!” before the machinery of industry and capitalism carried us to a world in which wilderness was no more. The environmental movement today is concerned primarily with promoting this idea of conservation, and with finding a way to imbue a sense of remorse at the too-muchness of our country into the national consciousness.
Although it has seldom been utilized explicitly, the language and logic of religious sacrifice has clearly been an important tool in the environmental movement’s struggle to introduce a sense of responsibility into the American conscience. If the ultimate aim of the environmental movement is to create a national environmental ethic that guides and regulates our use of natural resources, then the means by which this ethic has been introduced has come in part through the use of religious symbolism. The early Romantics were not shy about drawing the connection between nature and God; today this association comes in more subtle forms. The unstated structure and ideology of the environmental movement today includes a sense of connectedness to a higher order, a set of moral standards against which to judge our own success or failure, and a tradition of saints and martyrs. The body of this paper is an exploration of the ways in which the environmental movement has made use of the language and logic of sacrifice: both how it has done so and why. My goal is to demonstrate how the logic of sacrifice could be utilized more effectively in the future, and my contention is that the idea of sacrifice for the benefit of the global ecosystem is a crucial element in a healthy and meaningful environmental ethic in America.
A few qualifications before I begin. A common critique of the environmental movement and the effort to preserve wilderness is that the proponents of such ideologies are members of an elitist group of wealthy tourists, concerned primarily with preserving wilderness for their own purposes, as a sort of playground for the rich from which minority ethnic groups and lower income Americans are excluded. Indeed, I cannot deny my own position of privilege as an affluent white male American, and I cannot remove myself from the biases that such a position may have endowed me with. Nonetheless, I believe that the ideas expressed in this essay bear witness to a broader sentiment that transcends boundaries of class and race. I would like to think that my own beliefs have their root in an exposure to the natural world and stem not from a particular social affiliation but from a sense that I have acquired, in nature, that there is a wider and deeper order in the world than that which we have constructed for ourselves as humans, an order that both includes and transcends our own. Perhaps a skeptical reader would point out that not everyone has the opportunity to spend the time in nature that might lead one to such a belief. Indeed. And yet, the fact that non-human species and systems exist is not a disputable fact. The question is how we ought to treat these species and systems, and what responsibility we owe them. I would encourage the reader to bear with me, as I believe that my ethical construction has a place for everyone, and is not aimed at simply improving my own world, but at improving the quality of life of the global community, which includes not only humans but also oak trees, spiders and salamanders.
Most of my examples have an American and Christian context. This is because my paper focuses on the American environmental movement; our American heritage is deeply Christian, and it is primarily Christian beliefs and values that have guided the way we act towards and conceive of wilderness. Also, the resources that I have relied on most heavily, especially William Cronon’s Uncommon Nature and the anthology Christianity and Ecology, have a similar context of American Christianity. I will leave aside the sticky issue of what the meaning of this word “nature” is; the connotations and definitions of the word are too myriad for me to address, so I will confine my use of it to refer to areas of the world that are not populated or directly manipulated by humans. Finally, when I talk about “the environmental movement,” I am referring generally to the group of people that believe that we, as humans, have had a disproportionate and destructive effect on the natural world, and that we have an ethical and practical obligation to curb our destructive activities for our own good. There are countless factions and ideologies within the environmental movement, but implicit in the movement is a compulsion toward change and redirection of our modern attitudes and practices.
As an introduction to the ways in which the language and logic of religious sacrifice have been used by the American environmental movement, it might be useful to provide a brief history of the ways in which humans, and particularly Americans, have regarded their own place in the natural world. Earlier, I alluded the idea of wilderness that was often conceived of as the dichotomous opposite of human civilization: the chaos surrounding human order. Again, this was a perfectly logical conception of wilderness (literally, wilde+ deor: the land of wild animals) in a world in which human civilization stood as a vulnerable island in a sea of wild lands and creatures. In the Abrahamic traditions, wilderness was associated primarily with the abode of the devil; it was wilderness that stood outside of God’s Garden of Eden, and it was in the wilderness that Jesus was tempted by Satan. Wilderness was not only a physical state but also a moral threat; it represented the damned and the inhospitable, and humans were given the task of subduing it by resisting temptation within and cultivating wild lands without. In short, wilderness was the antithesis of everything good and holy. [ii]
This was the conception of wilderness that the Pilgrims, and later the Puritans, brought with them to the new world in the 17th century. The Pilgrims goal of constructing “a city on a hill” was clearly contingent on bringing order and civilization to the wild lands and inhabitants of the American continent. This goal was achieved, by and large, over the next 150 years, as Americans divided the Eastern seaboard into a land of “fields and fences” and spread West, establishing farms, ranches and cities. It was not until the late 19th century that the sentiment began to arise that we had gone far enough in our subjugation of nature, and that perhaps wilderness was even owed some degree of respect and admiration. Where did this sentiment come from? In her essay “Mission to the Environmentalists,” Patricia Limerick articulates this attitude toward wilderness and argues that it is analogous to that of a victor toward a vanquished opponent. “Since you have turned out to be no particular threat at all, we now feel free to find you likable and cute, cute enough to where we will be spending our vacations with you.” [iii] William Cronon goes further than Limerick, arguing that wilderness had not only ceased to pose a threat, it had undergone an essential transformation, from damned to sacred. He credits the transformation of wilderness to two ideals: the sublime and the frontier. “Sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God.” [iv] Instead of dwelling in the ordered garden, God, and the holy, resided, in this cosmology, in the wild places, untouched by human influence. The Romantics were the primary proponents of this view, although Muir himself contributed to the subversion of the “Garden of Eden complex,” arguing that the real garden of plenty and blessedness was the wild. [v] Cronon also argues that, as we gradually laid railroad tracks across the prairie and killed off or concentrated the native Indians, we effectively destroyed the frontier that was so important in shaping our American identity. Wilderness, in the 20th century, was the last place we could find the frontier in which to test our individual strength and will. [vi]
For whatever reason, our American idea of wilderness has fundamentally changed over the last 300 years. In the last 30 years there has been an explosion of scholarly work offering various explanations for our new conception of the role and place of wilderness. This is evidenced especially in such landmark works as Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” in which White points to Christian theology as the culprit responsible for environmental degradation. [vii] The clearest implication of this blame is, of course, that what has been done is morally wrong. In “Reinventing Common Nature,” Kenneth R. Olwig highlights a trend of the modern environmental movement that he calls the “idolization” of nature. Especially in movements such as Deep Ecology and Earth First!, Olwig argues, we see evidence of a growing conception of nature as an objective, unchanging standard of goodness and purity against which to judge our human success or failures. The idea of an “idolized” wilderness will be a useful context for the rest of this essay. To idolize an object is to imbue it with divinity and worship it as a God, and it is in this framework that the logic of sacrifice makes sense.
In my exploration of the language and logic of sacrifice as it applies to the rite of communion and expiation and of consecration and desacralization, I will make use of two central case studies that effectively illustrate my points. The first is Yosemite National Park, in the Sierra Nevada range of central California. Yosemite valley was first explored in the 1850s by a military expedition with the objective of removing the Ahwahneechee Indians. Based largely on reports from two of the prominent figures of the early American environmental movement, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Muir, Yosemite was designated a National Park in 1890. [viii] Yosemite covers an area of nearly three-quarters of a million acres, and today about three and a half million people visit Yosemite every year.
My other case study is Rocky Mountain Arsenal, on the eastern plains of Colorado. The arsenal was established in 1942 to produce munitions for World War II, and was later used by private companies to produce chemical weapons and pesticides. The liquid waste produced in the process was dumped into basins and trenches, and in this process the groundwater of the area was contaminated. One of the ponds in the arsenal has been described as “the most polluted square mile” of ground in America. [ix] These two examples represent two poles of the American policy and attitude toward land use.
After my exploration of Yosemite and Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I will turn to some of the individual sacrifices that are made in the name of the environmental movement. The most obvious example of martyrs in the modern environmental movement are tree sitters: those people who climb trees in areas where logging is set to take place in order to symbolically and practically fuse their own fate with that of the trees. Tree sitting has been an increasingly widespread practice in the Pacific Northwest over the last 30 years, and in the spring of 2001, a tree sitter named Julia Butterfly Hill published The Legacy of Luna, an account of her two-year stint perched high in the branches of a redwood tree she called Luna. The book has quickly become a part of the constellation of modern environmental classics; it details Hill’s struggles through an El Nino winter and her encounters with loggers, who, in some cases, tried to knock Luna over by cutting trees nearby, a practice that eventually resulted in the death of one of her fellow activists. [x]
In my exploration of an individual communion with nature, I will use an account of a solo backpacking trip as my primary lens. Backpacking, setting off into the wilderness carrying only what one can fit into a pack, represents a sort of self-sacrifice that has parallels in asceticism, fasting, and renunciation of speech. These sacrifices are undertaken with a mindset focused on generating a connection to a sacred natural energy; their goal is an exploration of the self as well as an exposure to and immersion in sacred energy.
In their seminal work Sacrifice, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss contend that every sacrificial rite falls into two categories, communion and expiation. Although Hubert and Mauss acknowledge that most sacrifices have elements of both of these functions, [xi] I will be focusing on their distinct purposes, namely, to connect with the divine and to expel sin. In a number of the communion sacrifices Hubert and Mauss explore, the victim is ritually imbued with divine energy, and then sacrificed and consumed. Through the consumption of the sacred flesh, the sacrifier partakes of the divine energy of the sacrificed. Their “moral condition,” in Hubert and Mauss’s language, is modified through this absorption of sacred energy. In the expulsion of Azazel’s goat in the Hebrew tradition, one of the priests places his hands on the head of the “scapegoat” and confesses the sins of the community. After this symbolic transfer of sin into the body of the scapegoat, the goat is driven away from the village, exiled in an expiation of communal sin. In the context of our American attitudes toward nature, we can see the logic of the communion and expiation sacrifices in the creation of Yosemite National Park and Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
But what is the sacrifice that takes place in land management? What are we sacrificing when we set aside an area of land and declare it to be, theoretically at least, outside of the sphere of human influence? In the case of Yosemite, we are sacrificing the potentiality of the places, the material resources and wealth that it represents, were it to be converted into such. Yosemite Valley, were it to be dammed as the neighboring Hetch-Hetchy Valley, could provide a new source of water and energy for San Francisco. The sugar pine, Douglas fir and incense cedar of the valley could be converted into lumber: both fir and cedar are valuable wood, and the slopes of Yosemite Valley are carpeted with trees. Cattle could be grazed on the valley floor, or the Merced River could be used to irrigate crops. The granite walls could be mined, crushed into gravel for driveways of homes in the valley. Certainly the valley would make a nice place to live. We could fill it with condos and highrises, each reaching higher than the next for the best view of the Sierras. Indeed, there was a village in Yosemite, which was razed in 1959 by the National Park Service. [xii] The village was destroyed, or sacrificed, in order to preserve the natural condition of the valley, and to enhance the communion rite that created a bridge between the sacred land and the profane human. The sacrificed, then, is the potential material resources and wealth that the valley represents. We Americans are both the sacrifier and sacrificer; we actively prevent the exploitation of Yosemite in order to incur a beneficial “moral modification” through communion with the divine.
The creation of National Parks and wilderness is aimed primarily at preserving natural land: in effect, protecting it from our own tendency toward exploitation. Implicit in this goal is an assumption that there is something special about these places, that they have a quality that distinguishes them from the surrounding land. Beautiful natural scenery is a characteristic of this special quality, but surely the motivation for creating wilderness areas is more than aesthetic. There is a sense that these places are sacred, and what we hope to gain from our sacrifice of the potentiality of the land is a connection to divine energy, a spiritual improvement available nowhere else. It is perhaps worth noting that our sense of the sacred in these places is enhanced by the fact that, in many cases, the original inhabitants of the land considered them so, such as the Makalak people’s legends surrounding Crater Lake, or the connotations of the name early Mormon settlers gave to a valley in southeastern Utah: Zion. The early environmentalists in America often described areas of natural beauty as sacred; John Muir called Yosemite Valley a “vast display of God’s power” and Thoreau said of the mountains in Maine “this land is not prepared for [humans].” [xiii]
On one level, National Parks are created to preserve this natural beauty so that all Americans can see it. On a deeper level, what we are preserving is an experience, an experience that can only be found when confronted with a wholly non-human reality. We come to these places to marvel at creation and to find a connection to a sacred energy. Accounts of this are so numerous as to become cliché: epiphany on the mountaintop, standing dumbstruck at the base of Yellowstone Falls or El Capitan, mystical conversion in the wilderness. It might be appropriate here to return to the example of Jesus who, after all, found not only wild beasts in the wilderness, but also angels. Wilderness is a place where we expose ourselves to divine forces, be they good or evil. Our idea of which of these traits is more commonly encountered in wilderness is part of the transformation that our American conception of nature has undergone.
In the case of Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the sacrifice is analogous to the scapegoat, sent off into the wilderness to be hidden away forever. In the case of the scapegoat, it is the sins that are exiled from the village; in the case of Rocky Mt. we are effectively exiling ourselves from the contaminated ground. As with Yosemite, Rocky Mt. is an area of land set aside, sequestered from human use and inhabitation. The difference is that, while Yosemite is separated from the realm of American capitalism as a sort of sanctification of sacred space, Rocky Mt. represents the purging of human sin: this is a land where the collective “evils” of modern industry are concentrated. We mark the land with warning signs and stay out of it: we exile ourselves from it. This land represents physical danger to us, primarily in the form of injurious energy that we cannot see, touch or taste. The land is dangerous, and we have made it so. But it is not only dangerous physically. Just as Yosemite Valley represents both physical beauty and a kind of moral purity and sanctity, Rocky Mt. represents a moral evil: an utter desecration of the land that represents our quest to build the most destructive weapons of killing that we can. The companies that used the Rocky Mt. facilities were unaware of the level of hazard of the chemical waste they produced, but as the groundwater of the area was polluted, the companies became not only legally compromised but also morally remiss because of the physical threat they were creating to their fellow Americans. Essentially, Rocky Mt. represents the side of American culture that we would like to ignore and sweep under the rug: our propensity for creating chemicals and weaponry that often turn against us, as with DDT or nerve gas.
Of course, while intention varies in these two cases, Yosemite focused on fostering connection to divine energy and Rocky Mt. expelling human sin, form does not. The mechanism in effect here is one of separation of human energy and presence from non-human. In both cases we define the boundaries of a land where humans are effectively taboo: our McDonalds and our malls, our TVs and our automobiles do not belong here. Perhaps this is a point that must be taken with a grain of salt in today’s world where national park boundaries cannot keep consumer culture out, but the point stands that what they symbolically represent is a place where people come to commune with that which they did not create.
So, we have two plots of land; one removed from the sphere of human influence for its own protection, to preserve the sanctity and spirit of the place, the other removed from the scope of human activity because of the danger it represents, a reminder of our own capacity to destroy life. The irony of this sort of land management comes when we look at how the land itself has changed over the years. Three and a half million people visit Yosemite every year; there are hotels, restaurants and campgrounds to accommodate them, as well as miles of nature trails to facilitate the “wilderness experience.” Because of this traffic, the sacred ground on the floor of Yosemite Valley is, in many places, literally trampled into dirt. In our collective American search for a connection to nature, we concentrate ourselves in areas of the most spectacular beauty, or most sacred energy, such as Yosemite. In the process, we, in many ways, desecrate the very beauty we sought to preserve. Rocky Mt., the exiled plot of land that represents the human capacity to destroy each other and infect the land, has none of the amenities of modern life available in Yosemite; there are no souvenir shops selling radioactive trinkets or grandiose “lodges” from which to watch the sun set over the contaminated ponds. No one has trampled the soil of this place during the last few decades. Instead, in many cases, the earth has, as it were, healed itself. Rocky Mountain Arsenal today is a National Wildlife Refuge where birdwatchers come to look for wood ducks and bald eagles. We have effectively created wilderness by letting it create itself in Rocky Mt. Arsenal, while in Yosemite we have trampled the wilderness that we sought to preserve. So, the paradoxical legacy of communion and expiation in land management is this: the land that we seek to protect from human influence can, in many ways, suffer from the traffic that such a novelty brings. We come here to feel a connection to nature: to gaze up at the granite walls and confront our own diminutive nature. And yet, when enough of us seek this experience, it is diluted. On the other hand, when we exclude ourselves from a patch of land for our own good, because of our own excesses there, the land comes more and more to resemble the wilderness we originally sought.
In the ancient Hebrew grain sacrifice, the first grain of the harvest was burned in the temple in order to desacralize the rest of the harvest. The spirit of the grain was present in all of the individual stalks; by sanctifying the first of the harvest, the spirit was symbolically concentrated in a small portion of the total, and, in sacrificing this concentrated sacred energy, the rest of the crop was desacralized, and thereby made fit for human use. The distinction between this rite and the rites of communion and expiation is that, while the communion and expiation rites are performed primarily to modify the moral condition of the sacrifier, either to imbibe sacred energy or to expel sin, the grain sacrifice is performed to fulfill a practical purpose. Yes, the conception of the grain as sacred implies that its sacrifice is a moral act, but the first of the harvest is sacrificed because the survival of the community is dependent on it. The community needs the rest of the harvest to eat. A similar logic is at work in the case of land management in America. We sacrifice the potentiality of a place like Yosemite Valley, in part, to assure ourselves that the sacred is maintained; that we are doing our part to ensure the continuation of a human connection to the divine. Because we have sacrificed the potentiality of such an area, we feel free to use the rest of the land as we please. By performing the physical act of drawing a boundary around the sacred land, we are effectively pronouncing the land outside of this boundary profane, non-sacred, utilitarian.
In Yosemite’s case, we can see this logic in the controversy surrounding Hetch-Hetchy Valley. Hetch-Hetchy lies to the north of Yosemite Valley and the geological and biological compositions of the two valleys are comparable: both had open, park-like floors and towering granite walls carved by small rivers. John Muir called Hetch-Hetchy “the most precious and sublime feature of the Yosemite National Park, one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people.” In 1913, despite a long opposition from the young Sierra Club, led by Muir, Hetch-Hetchy was dammed in order to provide a water supply for San Francisco. Although today it is widely acknowledged that a series of smaller dams in the surrounding foothills would have provided a more efficient source of water, O’Shaughnessy dam in Hetch-Hetchy valley was created primarily because it was the most economic solution. Through the creation of Yosemite National Park, the sanctification of the space in and surrounding Yosemite Valley and the symbolic sacrifice of the potential utility of this land, the land outside of the valley, including Hetch-Hetchy, was desacralized. [xiv]
This concept of division, of drawing boundaries, might have its root in the division between the sacred and the profane that we once used to distinguish our own civilization from the wild lands that surrounded it. Whereas we once drew lines to keep nature out, we are now beginning to need to draw lines to keep ourselves out of nature. Furthermore, even the concept of drawing boundaries around nature has become problematic as we gain more and more scientific evidence that fragmentation of habitats is nearly as degrading as habitat destruction. Ecosystems cannot function within humanly-imposed lines, and the lines we have drawn around National Parks, while they may protect the scenery of the place in the short term, constrict the organisms that inhabit the parks to the degree that they cannot live as they naturally would.
The next section of this essay is a brief exploration of some of the individual activities in the environmental movement that resemble, to some degree, elements of religious sacrifice. Tree sitters represent the possibility of martyrdom in the environmental movement, while backpackers demonstrate the motivation for wilderness protection.
In the context of religious sacrifice, martyrs act as witnesses to religious truth; they demonstrate ultimate loyalty, devotion and faith to the cause for which they give their lives. Martyrdom is often motivated by a belief in a divine reward, as in the case of Islamic martyrdom in which the martyr is instantly granted entrance into paradise, or the Christian doctrine of heavenly afterlife as a reward for a good life or death on earth. Martyrdom is most often symbolic in the environmental movement, seldom involving death but rather such self-sacrifices as arrest, incarceration or isolation. However, there are a number of environmental activists who might, by the strength of their sacrifice, be considered martyrs.
In the summer of 2002, two tree sitters died in the Pacific Northwest after falling from their trees. While the debate over these deaths today is centered around the safety practices and protocols that could have prevented the deaths, the central issue in the context of martyrdom is: what did these people die for? They died while defending old growth forests and the ecosystems they represent. The fact that they were not actually murdered or executed is perhaps secondary to the fact that they died; they chose a particular direction of defense which put their lives in danger, and eventually paid the ultimate price for this. With the huge success of Julia Butterfly Hill’s book The Legacy of Luna and the subsequent publicity surrounding the activist, the phenomenon of tree sitting has made its way to the forefront of the environmental movement. Physical and verbal intimidation are threats that tree sitters face on a daily basis; they are essentially persecuted for their beliefs in the sanctity of trees. Of course, the fact that tree sitters are trespassing on private property and causing a great deal of trouble for private lumber companies is worth considering. In the eyes of the law, it is the tree sitters, not logging companies, that are morally remiss. However, in areas such as the Opal Creek wilderness in Oregon, as well as in the Headwaters area of California, where Hill sat for two years, tree sitters effectively prevented the logging of an area now designated as wilderness. This sort of result is doubtlessly seen as a vindication of their illegal activities by tree sitting activists: a sort of short-term sacrifice justified by later vindication. Tree sitters are, to themselves at least, a suitable example of the martyrdom mentality: persecution and threat of death in the name of an under-recognized truth, followed by justification in the form of collective acknowledgement of that truth.
A more subtle example of the logic of martyrdom at work in the environmental movement lies in the fight to protect endangered species. In this case, the martyrs are endangered or extinct species that are direct witnesses to habitat destruction and overhunting. The popularity of books such as The Snow Leopard and the cause to protect the spotted owl attest to the current sentiment toward endangered species (especially when they are cute or majestic). Why do we place such value on a species primarily because its population is threatened? Why do they derive such importance simply from being rare? Essentially, they are effective reminders us of our human power to destroy an entire species. Most people today have heard stories of passenger pigeon flocks that darkened the sky, or buffalo herds that covered the Great Plains. These stories reveal a cultural legacy of biotic genocide: we have the power to kill off enough of a species to ensure that the species will die out, forever. If there is an implicit lesson, or moral, here, it is that such destruction does occur, we cause it, and with such power comes a deep responsibility to use it wisely.
Perhaps the most difficult and slippery topic of this paper deals with the individual experience of wilderness. If the creation of Yosemite was motivated, in part, by a desire to create a space in which individual Americans can “commune with nature,” and to promote such communion, then what does this communion look like? What is the sacrifice here? Although it is primarily seen as a form of recreation, backpacking shares many of the elements of a self-sacrificial experience, and it is through the lens of backpacking that we can best explore the individual communion with nature.
Let us use, as an example, a young woman setting off, alone, from Tuolomne Meadows in Yosemite, following the Pacific Crest Trail north through the park for a multi-day trip. She carries a sleeping bag and pad, a tarp to sleep under, a stove, enough food to eat for four days, and a few layers of warmer clothes. While Rene Girard might argue that this sort of behavior represents a kind of mimetic desire for a third-world lifestyle that is less cluttered and posh than an American life, backpacking does, in many ways, resemble a sort of hermitage or sojourn in the wilderness. Our backpacker has, at least temporarily, renounced most of her worldly possessions and set off into the wilds, in search of, what? Certainly the danger here lies in over-romanticizing this sort of recreation, but most people who spend extended periods in the woods cite similar reasons for it. The wilderness is a place where concerns and temptations of the city are left behind; it represents a different time and space that some would not hesitate to call sacred. William Cronon would attribute this activity to a search for the sublime and the frontier: wilderness represents a place where we can test our own “rugged individualism” and where we have a chance of experiencing a sacred energy. We find tales of mystical experiences in nature across cultures, from Sakyamuni’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree to Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Today, in an age of cell phones and Global Positioning Systems, the sacrificial aspect of a wilderness experience might be called into question, but backpacking does, ultimately, involve a degree of risk.
So, if our backpacker in Yosemite completes her journey as intended, what has she undergone? She has endured some serious physical exertion and exposure, at the very least. She has not spoken to anyone in four days (if her wilderness experience was truly isolated, an unlikely possibility, granted, on the Pacific Crest Trail in Yosemite). She has probably endured some degree of hunger, thirst, heat and cold. If her journey was successful, she is leaving the wilderness calmer, more collected, and perhaps even wiser than before. Her reward for the sacrifice of everyday amenities and comforts is this peace, this sense of saturation with a sacred energy.
I borrow the title of this section from William Cronon’s essay in a book entitled Uncommon Nature, an anthology of modern environmental theories focused on rethinking our American conception of nature. The trouble with wilderness, according to Cronon, is that modern American environmentalists have created a dualism between humans and wilderness, in which the human realm is fallen, sinful, infectious, and wilderness is pure, blessed, sacred. With such a view, we effectively displace ourselves from the natural world by projecting all of our highest human values onto nature and thereby see nature as “the best antidote to our human selves.” [xvi] It is primarily in this context, or in what Kenneth Olwig calls the “idolization of nature,” that sacrificial language makes sense. In short, we have often seen making nature divine as the only context in which we can sacrifice to it.
Environmentalists borrow and relate to religious language because it provides a schema for their beliefs and actions. It is a secular organization that has many components of a religious tradition. Some of these components include the notion of standing within a tradition founded by legendary historical figures such as Muir, Carson and Edward Abbey, following certain rituals that were prescribed by the “saints” or founding members of the movement, sacred texts such as Desert Solitaire or A Sand County Almanac, an evolutionary creation story, and a distinct moral structure based primarily on acting in an “environmentally friendly” way. Sacrifice fits with the environmental movement because it provides a tapestry of martyrs and rites of communion with a higher power into which we can weave endangered species and backpacking trips.
Cronon argues that the reason we find so much justification for the cause of environmental protection is that our use of natural resources, in America especially, has been so messy and disrespectful. This is why we idealize primitive people who live close to the land in the rainforests of Brazil, and this is why we think that any interaction or use of nature will be destructive. What we are ignoring here, though, is that humans have always made use of their natural world; that our relationship to the wilderness is not exclusionary but symbiotic. Olwig tells the story of an Ahwahneechee woman who, after being expelled from Yosemite Valley for over 50 years, returns and finds the valley “too dirty.” Muir, one of the most lionized members of the early environmental group, was convinced that fire was a destructive agent in the park, and had advocated the use of Army troops to quell fires and regulate visitor’s use of the park. Ironically, the suppression of fire changed the open, park-like landscape that Muir had originally found so appealing into a more enclosed, brushy valley. [xvii] The common-sense lesson here is that human stewardship of land can often provide landscapes humans find more appealing.
The temptation that the environmental movement has often succumbed to is viewing nature as eternal, unchanging: static. In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant argues that in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century the idea of nature as an organic whole shifted to a conception of nature as mechanical, analogous to a giant clock composed of many interlocking parts that could be systematically explored, explained, and predicted. [xviii] The theory of a “climax state” of wild lands, in which the land will remain in a more or less “ideal” condition until disturbed by a destructive element such as fire or drought, has been more or less disproved by newer ecological studies. The modern conception of a naturally functioning ecosystem is of one in constant flux. Fire and drought are seen now as regenerative occurrences that thin trees and allow new vegetation to grow. Our idea of a directly evolving ecosystem is coming into question as we begin to realize that nature is more chaotic than we wanted to think.
What does all of this mean for the environmental movement? It means, first of all, that there are some inherent problems in the “idolization” of nature. Inferring morality from natural systems consists primarily of inferring morality from the morality we project onto natural systems. Cronon argues that, by projecting all of our highest values and hopes onto nature, we are effectively placing ourselves beneath these values; we are placing them out of our reach. After all, most of us, even those in the environmental movement who are deeply concerned with the protection of wild lands, live in cities. If wilderness is the ultimate good, cities must be the ultimate evil. Ultimately, Cronon is concerned with shaping a new American attitude towards wilderness, one that sees the wildness of a city park or the tree outside the office window as well as the wildness of the trees in the backcountry of Yosemite. By turning the wilderness into Eden, we are by default living outside of it. Cronon and Olwig think that we need to adjust our land use policies accordingly: to place less of a value on roadless tracts of land and look for the wilderness that surrounds us, and that we ourselves represent.
[i] I say this with due consideration of traditions of pagan animism and nature religions. The attitude of utilitarianism is most prevalent in the European and American Christian context.
[ii] Cronon, William (editor). Uncommon Ground, Harcourt and Brace, 1985. “The Trouble with Wilderness,” p. 71.
[iii] Limerick, Patricia. Something in the Soil, W.W. Norton and Co., 2000. “Mission to the Environmentalists,” p. 173.
[iv] “Wilderness,” p. 73.
[v] “Wilderness,” p. 72.
[vi] “Wilderness,” p. 76.
[vii] White, Lynn Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” From The Ecocriticism Reader, Edited by Fromm, Harold and Glotfelty, Cheryll. University of Georgia Press, 1996.
[viii] Olwig, Kenneth R. “Reinventing Common Nature”. From Uncommon Ground, p. 381. While Yellowstone was officially the first National Park, this was because such a designation didn’t exist when Yosemite was made a Federal Land Grant in 1864. It was not until Yellowstone was designated a National Park by default (there was no state of Wyoming until 1890) that Yosemite was given similar designation.
[ix] “Unnatural Nature.” From Uncommon Ground, p. 65.
[x] Hill, Julia Butterfly. The Legacy of Luna, Harper SanFrancisco, 2001.
[xi] Huber, Henri and Mauss, Marcel. Sacrifice, The University of Chicago Press, 1964. p. 17.
[xii] “Common Nature,” p. 389.
[xiii] “Wilderness,” p. 76.
[xiv] It is worth noting that Hetch-Hetchy Valley was actually within the boundaries of the park, although the undisputed gem of the park was Yosemite Valley: it was in Yosemite that the consecration of the land was most concentrated.
[xv] I borrow this phrase from William Cronon’s essay.
[xvi] “Wilderness,” p. 70.
[xvii] “Common Nature,” p. 396.
[xviii] Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature. Harper SanFrancisco, 1990.
[xix] Duncan, Garrett. “The Psychological Benefits of Wilderness.” From the Ecopsychology Institute website: http://ecopsychology.athabascau.ca/Final/duncan.htm.