The segments of Ken Burns’ documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea that we watched in class last Tuesday were drawn from the first episode, entitled “The Scripture of Nature” (1851-1890). While I showed the segments that featured John Muir and his role as an early American environmentalist and promoter of the national parks idea, larger questions associated with the birth of our national parks infuse these segments:
- Should the federal government have the right to take land and keep it from private use?
- Why should national parks and preserves exist?
- What should be allowed in their borders?
- Who should control them?
Yosemite is the starting place for this story of America’s “scripture of nature.” After the California Gold Rush, after tourists enter Yosemite Valley in 1855, words and images of Yosemite quickly spread, and visitors begin pouring into the valley. One visitor said it is easy to imagine that he was standing “under the ruins of an old Gothic cathedral.” Another compared it to the churches of Cologne. Another quoted the Bible. Many noted that “peculiar exalted feeling” one gets in a place like Yosemite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson had been telling Americans: “God is more easily found in nature than in the works of man…here is sanctity which shames our religions.”
Henry David Thoreau said that we find our innocent self, our authenticity, in “little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization.”
The message: “if you want to know God firsthand, go not to the cathedral but to the mountaintop.”
In a time when Americans were looking for their own identity in the arts and literature, this language reflects Americans’ desire to stake our claim in the history of civilization, to break new ground.
In his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes,
“There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile…perhaps a generation or two…dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place…the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today….They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.“
Whitman is considered by many to be the “father” of modern American poetry. He called for (and acted as) a new American poet that broke free from the forms and subjects of European poetry: “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people…His spirit responds to his country’s spirit…he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes…The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new.” Through its poetry and through its preservation of wild places, Americans would offer the world something wholly new, something wholly American.
John Muir came from a strong Christian tradition, with a strict Presbyterian minister father who made him memorize the Bible. In his writing, the rhythm and cadences and word choice come from the Bible, but he established his own, new Christianity, which was “not about the worship of God but worship of God’s creation.”
In 1867 at the age of 29, Muir walked for a distance of 1000 miles , from Louisville, Kentucky, to Cedar Key, Florida, in less than two months.On March 27, 1868, John Muir arrived in San Francisco from New York, by steamer. When he got off the boat in California, he was asked, “where do you wish to go?” He replied, “anywhere that’s wild.” Muir then chose to walk to Yosemite. The act of walking created a faith for him, just as Thoreau suggested it might in his essay entitled “Walking” (where he says he favors walking West, which he aligns with “wildness”).
Muir came to work in, explore, and love Yosemite. He once drank water with a the cone of a sequoia, “to render myself more sequoiacal.” He became its greatest advocate and influenced the federal government’s decision in 1864 to set aside federal land in Yosemite so that it would be preserved for the enjoyment of all Americans and never transferred to private ownership (it would be under the care or the state of California before ultimately becoming a national park, a land transfer unheard of in human history.) Frederick Law Olmstead (landscape architect who designed Central Park) said that rich men “provide places of recreation for themselves, and the great mass of society is excluded.” He advocated steps by the government to keep this land “from the grasping hands of the individual.”
As for Muir, he left the wilderness for a time, moving to the city of Oakland, California, where he hoped to “spread the Gospel of Nature” and to “preach Nature like an apostle” through his writings for such publications as Harper’s. He married and for a time successfully managed his in-laws’ orange grove. But then he grew restless to travel again. Seeing how his work eroded him and nature replenished him, his wife convinced Muir to go back into nature, and ultimately “released” him from the duties of the farm and orchard (and home life). A climb up Mt. Rainier exhilarated him. A trip to Alaska with Klingit guides exposed him to Indian beliefs. His return to Yosemite revealed that his “cathedral” had been turned into a commercialized carnival. He spent years trying to convince Americans that “wildness is a necessity,” that commercial interests should not always take precedence over public.
Muir said: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us.” When he visited Alaska, he wrote, “Any man who does not believe in God and glaciers is the worst kind of unbeliever.”
On March 1, 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park in the history of the world. Muir pushed for Yosemite and other parts of the Sierra Nevada high country to be preserved as national parks. (Yosemite became a national park in 1890.) Muir spent many years pushing for more parks and bigger parks. Burns’ documentary says of Muir: “If Yosemite was a temple, he would become its high priest.” And “Everywhere he turned, he believed he was witnessing God who revealed himself through Nature.” Muir believed that by living wholly in civilization “we risk losing our souls.” We “recover ourselves, remember who we are, and connect with all that is sacred in ourselves” when we return to the wild.
Question: Can one be a “priest” of nature and part of a family and society as well? Or does it require severing ties with civilization?