Introduction
Nature
• What is Nature?
– Untainted by human beings? Separate from
human beings?
• Should it be conserved, preserved, or
neither?
• Why should it be conserved, preserved, etc.?
– Aesthetic, Prudential, Moral
• Where did the idea of Nature come from?
– Judeo-Christian picture, Native American picture,
Americans interested in distancing themselves
from Europe, urban yuppie backbackers
These questions matter…
• Should a marine preserve be
implemented off the coast of
Encinitas?
• Should Glen Canyon have
been dammed?
• Should old-growth redwood
forests be protected?
• How bad is global warming?
• What should be done to land
after huge fires?
• Should huge fires (in areas
where humans won’t get hurt)
be left alone?
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Conservation v Preservation
• Conservationists are committed to the notion that we should
make wise use of environmental resources.
• Preservationists are committed to the idea that we should
preserve the natural environment, or at least significant portions
of it.
• Historically, the dispute centers on the use of federal lands. (In
the 12 western states, 52% of the land is owned by the federal
govt.)
• The historical solution has been zoning public lands for either
preservationist or conservationist purposes. But conflicts arise
b/c of changing patterns of use., e.g., changing economies,
animals not knowing the zones.
• Preservationist Legislation
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Wilderness Act, 1964
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 1968
National Trails Systems Act, 1968
Wild Horse and Burro Act, 1971
ESA, 1973
Eastern Wilderness Act, 1975
Federal Land Policy Man Act, 1976
Endangered American Wilderness Act, 1978,
Public Rangelands Improvement Act, 1978
Alaskan National Interest Lands Conservation Act, 1980
Wilderness Act 1964
• DEFINITION OF WILDERNESS
• (c) A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own
works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area
where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,
where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of
wilderness is further defined to mean in this chapter an area of
undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and
influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation,
which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural
conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected
primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work
substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for
solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at
least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make
practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and
(4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of
scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
The Idea of Wilderness
How did it originate and change?
The Western History of
Wilderness in a Nutshell
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Judeo-Christian.
Puritan/Calvinist
Old World Romanticism
Thoreau/Emerson
Muir
Leopold
The Contemporary Idea
Judeo-Christian
• Adam and Eve were banished to the “accursed”
wilderness that will “grow thorns and thistles for you
and none but wild plants for you to eat”
• Moses and his people wander the wilderness for 40
yrs until reaching Promised Land
• Jesus goes into the wilderness for 40 days and is
tempted by Satan
• Wilderness as environment of hardship and evil (still,
there is a current of thought whereby spiritual
catharsis could happen)…
"...The English word paradise
derives from the Old Persian
pairidaeza, which means 'walled
enclosure, pleasure park, garden'.
This term entered Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Greek while still
retaining its original meanings." ﾊ
ﾊﾊﾊﾊ- An Encyclopedia of
Archetypal Symbolism
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Paradise
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Puritan/Frontier View
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William Bradford, one of the US
pilgrims, saw nothing “but a
hideous and desolate
wilderness, full of wild beasts
and wild men”; the Puritan John
Cotton understood nature as “a
wild field where all manner of
unclean and wild beasts live and
feed.”
• Roger Williams: “the Wildernesse is a clear resemblance of the
world, where greedie and furious men persecute and devoure
the harmlesse and innocent as the wilde beasts pursue and
devoure the Hinds and Roes”
• Timothy Dwight, Yale’s president, lamented in 1821 that as the
pioneer pushed further into the wilds he became “less and less
a civilized man”
• Crevecoeur, 1782: those who lived near “the great woods” tend
to be “regulated by the wildness of their neighborhood”…beyond
the “check of shame”
• Andrew Jackson, 1830 inauguration: “what good man would
prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few
thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with
cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the
improvements which art can devise or industry execute.
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• De Tocqueville, 1831: “in Europe
people talk a great deal about the
wilds of America, but the Americans
themselves never think about them;
they are insensible to the wonders of
inanimate nature and they may be
said not to perceive the mighty
forests that surround them till they
fall beneath the hatchet.”
• “Constant exposure to wilderness
gave rise to fear and hatred on the
part of those who had to fight it for
survival and success” (West, 43).
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Mako shika (“land bad”) Lakota Indians
Les mauvaises terres a traverser
Badlands NP
Much of it designated as official wilderness
area
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• Death Valley
• More than 3 million acres designated as
protected wilderness
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What happened?
Old World Romantics/Primitivists
New England Transcendalists
Muir, Roosevelt, Pinchot
Leopold and Ecology
The Contemporary Idea
Manifest Destiny
• 1840’s term for expanding
westward…
• 1783: pop. 3,250,000, one
third of whom were either
slaves or in jail (not
including Native
Americans)
• 1850: pop. 30,000,000
• Urbanization (e.g., NY hits
1 million by 1860),
industrialization, railroads
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Birth: May 25, 1803
Boston, MA
Death: April 27, 1882
Concord, MA
Academic/literary family for 5
generations; graduated from Harvard
in 1821, giving the class poem; taught
secondary school; became minister;
left ministry; young wife died; went to
Europe, meeting Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Hardy; moved to
Concord, MA, 1834; married again,
1835; wrote Nature, 1836;
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Jardin des Plantes
• 1832, leaves ministry for Europen a trip.
Visits museum in Paris…says, “I feel the
centipede in me--the caman, carp eagle and
fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I
continually say I will be a naturalist”
• He never became a naturalist (like his cousin
the botanist), not even in a literary way (like
Thoreau); but he did enjoy nature, teaching
his children to identify birdsong, going for
walks with them, identifying plants, growing
plants…
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• Spends the next 50 yrs or so in Concord, writing influential poems and
books such as Self-Reliance, History,The Over-Soul, and Fate. Friends
with many local writers, together they formed an important literary circle
and the Transcendental movement. “Drawing on English and German
Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson
developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an
ﾒexistentialistﾓ ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of
Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in
Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as
power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity”
Influences
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• Eric Swedenborg (1688-1782)
• Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829): “nature is
externalized mind; mind is internalized nature”
• Coleridge
• Wordsworth
• Plato and Cambridge Platonists
• Process philosophy
• Many others…
Kant
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Religion
• Orthodox Calvinism and liberal New England Congregationalism
• Differences were primarily over the idea that human striving
could be efficacious and a Unity rather than Trinity; even more
liberal felt that Jesus was human
• Emerson 1820’s “discusses with approval Hume's Dialogues on
Natural Religion and his underlying critique of necessary
connection. ‘We have no experience of a Creator,’ Emerson
writes, and therefore we ‘know of none”
• 1838 “Address” to graduates of Harvard Divinity School.
“Emerson rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the
truth of Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak,
but because proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken
view of the nature of religion: "conversion by miracles is a
profanation of the soul." Emerson finds evidence for religion
more direct than testimony in a "perception" that produces a
"religious sentiment" (O, 55).” SOE
Questions
• What are some similarities
and differences between
Emerson’s idea of nature
and later ones used by
environmentalists? By
Thoreau? By Leopold? By
Muir?
• Anthropocentric or not?
• Natural history/ecology?
• Nature v wilderness