LA River News

The LA Weekly has a blog post about the opening of a section of the LA River last week.

"I feel a little itchy, I'm not going to lie." Tyler Sedustine has just emerged from the Los Angeles River, his dripping wet two-and-a-half-year-old son Elijah ensconced in his arms. That his first instinct is to hose off will likely strike few Angelenos as strange. Just twenty-four hours previous, the idea of dipping your toddler in the our eponymous waterway could have been deemed not just mildly odd and possibly toxic, but also illegal.

On May 27, however, the city threw open a 2.5-mile stretch, known as the Glendale Narrows and located between Fletcher Drive and Oros Street, for the first time since the whole river was encased in concrete and re-classified as a "flood control channel" back in the late 1930s. Suddenly on the list of approved activities are boating or fishing for the bass, tilapia and catfish who call the river home. "I've been told they're good eating," swore Fernando Gomez, Chief Ranger for the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority (MRCA), on hand for the official kickoff.

The post ends by questioning who could lose from the recovery efforts. That's actually a given - the gentrification process will kick in and we will have Chavez Ravine all over again. That's typically the result of recovery projects across the nation. 

Full story here: http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2013/05/la_river_recreation.php

My Walden

Reading Walden this week felt like taking a mini-vacation for me. Not that I’m as big a fan of Thoreau as I am of Austen, although his little jokes do crack me up, but I have another connection to Walden Pond and Thoreau than this class.

I have a sorority sister who lives in suburb of Boston that I used to visit at least once a year, usually on St. Patrick’s Day, and for a week we’d bop around the surrounding areas and sightsee. The first year I visited her was for my first St. Pat’s Day in Boston. Rolling with an Irish family full of cops in Boston on March 17 is a singularly entertaining experience. J 

During the week I stayed there I wanted to see as much as I could because I didn’t know if I would ever be able to go back. We went to Salem and Concord to do the witch-hunt and the Transcendentalist thing. I grew up reading books by Louisa May Alcott and once I got older, her children’s books led me to her novels for adults and her father’s writings. The Alcott’s led me into other Transcendentalist authors, including Emerson and Thoreau. Once I knew I would be visiting Concord, I knew I had to see Orchard House and Walden Pond.

As I was reading Walden, I kept envisioning the place I visited. Even as a tourist attraction it is peaceful and imparts that sense of vitality and fertility that Muir and Thoreau talk about in their writing. I remember the first time that I read that Walden was not written out in the wilderness. Like many others, when I was reading I assumed that Thoreau cut off most of his contact with the outside world and that he was somewhere without contact with the “modern” world. I remember feeling disappointed, as though I had been lied to.

After re-reading I feel like maybe I wasn’t so at fault for thinking that he was off on his own away from everywhere and everything. The text lends itself to the trope of “the man off in the woods”. This reminded me of the nature that isn’t natural idea that we’ve been reading and talking about this quarter. Walden is written as though Thoreau is one man who retreats from the world and into the forest and when he comes out he has been enlightened and has this amazing account to share with the world. This is that fictional nature idea. He wasn’t far from other people or civilization, he only gave up those luxuries that it amused him to do without. His account came from a journal that he revised over and over; it’s not the divinely inspired account that it seems at time. I’ve been having a problem with the idea of “fake nature” but after connecting that idea with my memories of Walden, I’m not sure that it’s such a big problem anymore. That this little bit of pastoral beauty was preserved because someone wrote a sort of fantasy of the wild is okay with me.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience the pond in three of four seasons. You haven’t lived until you’ve hiked around the pond while inhaling snow during a blizzard. The blazing colors in the fall and the vibrant greens and blues of the summer setting will be something that I never forget. The fact that I was able to experience a bit of this pastoral/rural fantasy because of the pretense of the wild makes me only grateful that Thoreau and Muir wrote what they did. This pretense and the fiction of other “wild” spaces (like National Parks) seem essential to preservation and conservation in this modern, capitalistic society. That pretense allows a value to be placed on the wild and if that’s the only way to save places like these, I think I need to come to an uneasy truce with the practice. I’ll settle for this approach at least until public opinion changes or becomes more enlightened and the reason to preserve “nature” need only be that it exists and not for what it can provide to humans.

Weekly Digest

The Concord Elite (Jane Dubzinski)

            Jane mentions the fact that that she went to school near Walden Pond and has always loved reading Walden, due to the beauty of the connection between man and nature. Yet she finds Thoreau to be somewhat of an elitist in that he advocates a lifestyle (“unplugging” and living out in the woods) that most do not have the luxury to adopt. The everyday person has responsibilities, deadlines, obligations and, more often than not, mouths to feed other than their own. These people are implicitly looked down upon in Thoreau’s philosophy, possibly even characterized as cowards for their unwillingness to drop everything and become hermit-philosophers. She also finds the chapter “Reading” to be indicative of an elitist attitude.

Self-awareness and Self-criticism: Paths to Humility and Respect (Ms. Valdes)

            Valdes reflects on Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” pointing out the author’s observation that what we consider “nature” needs to be redefined, needs to be thought of as our everyday environments as opposed to something “out there.” Also she makes an interesting observation on how Western culture may have adopted a “lasses-fair” attitude towards the environment as a result of our Judeo-Christian belief in the Apocalypse, or end times. For example, we need not worry about the longevity or long-term health of the planet because it’s all going to end anyway.

Cronon and Nature (Rosanna Cacace)  

            Rosanna focused on Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” as well. She “appreciated Cronon’s article because it provided a more balanced approach to nature,” further stating that “if we only focus our attention to the wild, then we run the risk of losing ourselves in the process.”  Rosanna argues that “what we need to do is figure out how we can live with nature in a way that is environmentally responsible,” and that “no matter what we do, we will always have some kind of impact on the natural world … Regardless of how much we try to protect nature, it will always be affected by us … we can’t just stop progressing as a society for the sake of nature, instead we should take Cronon’s advice and ‘set responsible limits to human mastery.’”

Reflections on William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (Ryan Briggs)

            Ryan appreciated the way Cronen’s essay destabilized the “meaning of the wilderness by offering an informative and revealing historical analysis of the word's changing denotation, (and) especially its varying connotations across cultures.” He felt that “Cronon's penetrating analysis of the various parties belonging to the environmentalist movement, specifically their peculiar and often contradictory definitions of ‘the wilderness,’ represents what seems to (him)to be just the kind of clear-minded thinking that the environmentalist movement requires to win the hearts—and perhaps more importantly the minds—of those like (himself) who are only beginning to familiarize themselves with the movement's ideologies.”

Reflecting on William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (Jeff Anderson)

            Jeff feels that “Cronon is unduly harsh in arguing ‘[nature is] entirely a creation of the culture it holds dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.’” He argues that Cronen “takes a huge leap in suggesting that this desire to classify nature is a means to deny our history of modernization simply because the word deny implies an active and conscious refusal to believe or recognize.” This denial Jeff speaks of “might encompass a complete neglect and lack of concern for the wilderness” after one has taken a token visit to some wildlife preserve or a  “weekend jaunt to the woods.” He finds it absurd to “assume that enjoying the benefits of an undeveloped area is tantamount to an escape from all of humanity that we might never remember or return.”

Cronen’s Conundrum (Alfred Valrie)

            Alfred argues that our “concept of wilderness is not natural because it presumes a ‘virginity,’ an untouched quality that precludes Native Americans and which assumes that wherever man isn’t, nature is.” He goes on to state that “wilderness is a myth because we assume that what isn’t owned by the federal government, a state, or a private individual is untouched,”  and that “this fallacy allows us to pursue a course of unimpeded annexation, whereby lands that are already owned or falling into ownership are purposed, re-purposed, and plundered yet again beyond all possibility of sustainability.” Alfred rejects the notion that one must drive hundreds of miles out to some remote landscape in order to “wake up to (one’s) God-given, innate qualities of humility and start treating (one’s) fellow beings with more respect and compassion,” when this act should be possible in one’s own neighborhood.

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism (Dimitrios Sotiriou)

            Dimitrios explores the historical connections between wilderness or nature and our sense of the sacred, along with our sense of nationalism. A few hundred years ago wilderness was seen as a scary place, or the home of the devil. Slowly but surely it started to become the area where one was closest to God and his authentic creation. This configuration is not without its problems, however, as he notes that “Within this complex of ‘religious’ belief and national identity, certain problems and contradictions emerge.  One of these involves class.  The wilderness as an artificial place of authenticity and Americianness can only be enjoyed and benefited from by the middle and upper classes who have the money and leisure to travel.  It is a place of recreation and of internal renewal separate from the urban centers where thesevisitors live and work.  The wilderness allows them to purify themselves of the corruption of a greedy, ugly, industrial-capitalist world, thus absolving them of any complicity in its injustices.

It’s the Economy, Stupid (William Cooper)

            Bill breaks down the meaning of economy for all those who are in “no danger of ever reading Walden.” According to him, “The purpose of an economy is to maximum the benefit of a society’s material resources by creating a system of exchange. Thus if A grows wheat and B owns a forest, A, after putting aside all the wheat he needs to make bread, exchanges his surplus wheat with B for the surplus wood that he has after he has built his cabin. This way they can each have a life, so to speak, which would not have been likely if A lived in the elements and B went hungry.” But in the case of Thoreau, he continues “But what if someone can provide shelter and food by his own industry, and still have time for a life, in fact only has to work six weeks out of the year? He then has a very successful economy of one. He is Henry David Thoreau.”

Rejecting Adam’s Curse: Thoreau’s Call to a Better Life (Scott)

            Scott points out that Thoreau wholeheartedly rejects the notion that “a man must work hard in order to earn (his) daily bread”; a belief also known as Adam’s Curse. He goes on to state that “Thoreau argues (against the notion that idle hands are the devil’s tools) that men should work less so that they can spend more leisure time contemplating the lessons to be found in nature, thereby improving their souls.” Scott argues that Thoreau is not against labor and hard work in general, but that what he is against is the misdirected toil of those working for material gain. These laborers waste their lives laboring in vain; in Thoreau’s words they "labor under a mistake."

Human Culture Can Be Destructive (Zully Henry)

            Zully comments on the differences between Native American culture and Anglo-American culture, how the former preserved their habitats and how the latter brought destruction and exploitation to the landscape. In her words, “The Native Americans have lived in the North American territories for a long time. Their culture lived in Nature and their treatment given to the environment was most advantageous for Nature than for them. They had a clear idea to what should be to live for ‘the preservation of the world’ (to use Thoreau’s quote in Cronon’s). So the culture they practiced worked to maintain Nature as pure as possible. However, European and world-wide immigrants brought with them cultures that when compared to the Natives could be quite destructive.” 

Walden: Narrative Tone

          Since I am presenting on Walden this week I decided to save the profundity for class and organize this blog around rather glib observations, specifically the narrative tone of the book. This was my second time reading the thing and my first time really thinking about what I was reading; whereas the first time I merely scanned over pages with the indifferent eye of a CSULA undergrad. My close reading, however, failed to change my original opinion of the work and especially my opinion of the narrator of Walden: a self-righteous, egotistical, overzealous penny-pinching fanatic with the charisma of a cold sore, who constantly moralizes and tactlessly shoves his extreme views down the reader's throat. 

          While reading Walden I couldn't shake the feeling of one being lectured at, condescendingly, by a puritanical know-it-all who would look down on me for wearing clothes unadorned with rips and patches. Also implicit in the narrator's tone was a sense of superiority and/or elitism, as if only the great prophet Thoreau knows what is best for mankind. And prophet is indeed what Thoreau takes himself for, evidenced by his regular use of biblical references as well as references from various other holy books and holy men. I found it to be a bit much; I wonder if it caused any eye-rolling in its own time, or if this style of narration was the norm for the 1850's. 

          Being a fan of Emerson's writing, I found myself comparing their two styles while reading Walden. Emerson, in my opinion, always comes across as approachable and charming; he doesn't make the reader feel stupid, lazy or ignorant--all feelings that Thoreau excels at instilling in his audience. Emerson comes across more like a father giving advice, patiently and good-naturedly, while Thoreau, with the coldness of a Victorian schoolmaster, pontificates and finger wags with his words. It's a wonder these two men were so close; I'm sure the charismatic Emerson had to do more than his share of damage control for this uncouth fellow-transcendentalist.  

May 30 Office Hours?

I know I'm supposed to have office hours on Thursdays from 3:30-6pm, but I'm hoping to attend the ACP symposium for at least a bit, and I encourage anyone else looking for intellectual stimulation and free food (at least I think there will be free food (?)) to attend. Perhaps to make up for lost time, we can conclude class early and anyone who wants to talk about papers can see me after class.

The Concord Elite

I always enjoyed reading Thoreau, mainly for two reasons. One, I feel the romantic relationship between man and nature described by the author is so beautiful, so ideal. To “live deliberately” with only the essentials necessary to life seems like such a simple, yet wonderful concept, that it makes me want to unplug and go for a hike. And two, I actually went to high school about ten minutes away from Walden Pond, so it was always fun to drive past the woods and be reminded of the rich history surrounding me. But let’s check back into reality. I should be ashamed to admit this (though I’m clearly not) – I am NOT a big fan of nature. I hate camping. I hate bugs. I loathe any environment without a proper heating or running water system. What I do enjoy are the aspects of nature artificially developed by man to make me feel like I’m one with Mother Earth, but I can still use my GPS and take a shower with vanilla coconut body wash, ironically not made from nature. Also, I never went to Walden Pond. Did you catch what I said earlier? I drove past it. Always.

So yes, reading Thoreau is an escape into the ideal relationship I should have with nature, which is what the author wants his readers to experience in Walden. He argues for simplicity, and that we should “keep our accounts on our thumbnail” and eliminate the superfluous items overcomplicating our lives. The only cure for our cluttered surroundings is simplicity, which Thoreau argues is the elevation of purpose. Nature, therefore, becomes the place where one should go to experience the sublime feeling of God’s existence. Subsequently, one will also recognize what is not divine by comparing the experiences of the social world to those of the woods. Of course, these ideas are great and wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to check out for a few days without worrying about emails and deadlines? However, Thoreau’s ideas are not only idyllic, but elitist, and in today’s society, this would be a difficult argument to debate against those who don’t have the luxury to escape.

In Thoreau’s “Reading” section, he also appears elitist in his ideas on the comprehension of the written word as the “perfect knowledge.” He argues that reading is a noble intellectual exercise that should not be done to merely pass the time. “The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,” he says, “for only great poets can read them.” Therefore, Thoreau argues that we should become literate in these great texts in order to build wiser, more cultivated villages of noble men. “It is time that villages were universities,” he says, and that the inhabitants of these universities can pursue, with leisure, liberal studies for the rest of their lives. It seems too obvious to point out Thoreau’s idealistic thinking, but it is important to note that sense of elitist ideology. To whom is Thoreau writing? Men, of course. But his argument is meant to be understood universally. If that is the case, his ideas fail to connect with certain socioeconomic groups, and the unfortunate implication is that these individuals are inferior, for they are not wise, worldly, and they have yet to experience God. 

Self-awareness and Self-criticism: Paths to Humility and Respect

     William Cronon’s “The Trouble with the Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” provides practical solutions to the troubling notions the cultural construction of the wilderness has taught us. The notion of needing to protect a wilderness that is “pristine” and out there, rather than the nature that surrounds us in our neighborhoods and cities, is a serious impediment to the host of environmental issues we face. In this respect, Cronon’s argument echoes the concerns articulated by Price. We need to be more self-conscious about the spaces we inhabit for ourselves and future generations. However, most people cannot think, or do not care to think, of life on Earth beyond their own moment in the sun. Peter Guther’s observation that man has a linear relationship to time is what inhibits man from taking environmental issues seriously (Byerly 54). As Cronon notes, the idea of the wilderness allows us to think of it as our “real home,” as opposed to the homes we live in, and “evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead” (81). Unfortunately, I think the Christian doctrine of apocalypse and afterlife erroneously contributes to a laissez-faire attitude regarding the environment in which people are comforted by the idea of rapture and Heaven or the afterlife as their “real home.” The idea of separate states of being, life on Earth and life in Heaven, is analogues to the notion of life in and outside of nature and “reinforce[s] environmentally irresponsible behavior” (89). Thus, Cronon notes that “[o]ur challenge is to stop thinking […] according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world” (89). Instead, we must resist the urge to be “dismissive and contemptuous of humbler places and experiences” and through “self-awareness and criticism” allow the wilderness and the natural world to “teach profound feelings of humility and respect” (87).
Cronon’s introduction of the wilderness as being constructed in our image, which he acknowledges is the image of the “elite tourist and wealthy sportsman” really drew me in as a reader (79). I am very interested in Milton’s use of images and reflections in Paradise Lost, especially in discerning “good” images and reflections from “evil” ones. Cronon acknowledges the difficulty of seeing the wilderness as unnatural and a construction since it “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural” (69). The wilderness, according to Cronon, holds up a mirror in which we “too easily imagine we behold Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longing and desire” (69). The call of the Romantics seems to advocate the importance of self-consciousness and being able to recognize “the Other within” as well as “the Other next door” (89). We are called not to separate ourselves from nature but rather to recognize “the autonomy of the nonhuman world” and how our perceptions and understanding shape our relationship with ourselves, the natural world, and others (87).    

Cronon and Nature

         Our relationship with nature has always been complicated to say the least. It seems rather impossible for us to figure out how we relate to the natural environment.  What I enjoyed most about Cronon’s article is that he was able to find common ground between what is nature and what we want it to be. 

I think Cronon is right in that the problem lies with how society defines nature and/or the wilderness. If we see it as something wild, then we immediately take ourselves out of the equation. If nature is at its purest when it is not inhabited by humans, then how are we supposed to interact with it?  More often than not, it is easy for us to forget that nature is not something “over there,” but in fact, it is all around us. 

I appreciated Cronon’s article because it provided a more balanced approach to nature. If we only focus our attention to the wild, then we run the risk of losing ourselves in the process. Cronon argues that “idealizing the distant wilderness too often means not dealing with the environment in which we actually live” (85). I think sometimes it might be easier for us to focus on protecting the latest endangered animal instead of dealing with more controversial issues such as, “the toxic waste exposure to the ‘unnatural’ urban and agricultural sites” because the solutions to toxic waste may more difficult to grapple with. Cronon is correct in that if we do not pay more attention to the environmental issues at home, “then too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their fate” (85). 

By examining and processing our urban world, not only can we work toward confronting some of the environmental issues at hand, but as Cronon explains we can also experience nature without going “over there.” Before I signed up for this class, I never really tried to define nature; I just thought that it was anything nonhuman and not man made. When I heard birds chirping on my balcony, or if I saw my dog running outside chasing a squirrel, I considered it apart of nature. I Never thought of nature as something far removed from me, I only thought that there was less of it my daily life. I also don’t think it is very realistic to preserve nature in its “purest form” because that would mean we couldn’t be apart of it. What we need to do is figure out how we can live with nature in a way that is environmentally responsible. No matter what we do, we will always have some kind of impact on the natural world. Regardless of how much we try to protect nature, it will always be affected by us. The truth is, we can’t just stop progressing as a society for the sake of nature, instead we should take Cronon’s advice and “set responsible limits to human mastery” (87). Now, we just need to figure out what those limits are...

Some Resources for Austen and Mansfield Park

More than a couple are thinking about (or actually) writing on Austen's Mansfield Park. Since I have undoubtedly given random information at random moments to random people, I thought it might make sense to offer a brief compilation of what I think I have said to some but not all of you. Said's chapter on Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism remains a key text for those interested in culture, imperialism, economics, postcolonialism, and so forth. The chapter has been frequently anthologized as "Jane Austen and Empire" in several collections. Susan Fraiman offered an interesting expansion of Said's argument by drawing greater attention to gender and the politics of gender. Her essay appeared in Critical Inquiry (?).

On estates and gardens, the key text is Alistair Duckworth's The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. I believe there is an article version of his chapter on Mansfield Park available in JSTOR. There is also an older article by Ann Banfield on the relationship between moral judgments and aesthetic values in the novel. There's also a more recent article by Mary Chan on the effects of education (a kind of improvement) that ran in Persuasions (the Jane Austen Society journal). A good place to start for a more theoretical view of improvement is the chapter on the morality of improvement in Williams' The Country and the City. (I'm pretty sure you can find most of the book in Google Books.)

I have no doubt forgotten some (if not most), so if you know of other interesting criticism that might supplement our focus on Mansfield Park please feel free to add to this brief list.

Reflections on William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness: or,Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

   William Cronon’s, “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” is the most impressive theoretical reading assignment to date, as deftly unpacked is society’s evolving meaning of the word “wilderness” to reveal a tangled web of contradictions that Cronon argues if not somehow reconciled will lead to the failure of the environmentalist movement. In an eye-opening introduction Cronon explains why there has never in fact been a wilderness to speak of in human history––at least, not if what we mean by the wilderness is a place standing wholly apart from civilization in some ineffable way. Yes, there have been (and surprisingly) still are places on earth untouched by human contact. But the brilliance of the article is how Cronon shows that despite this fact, inextricably there always is an all-to-human element to its significance that demands critical attention: 

Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [the wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation––indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but sill transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. (Cronon 69, italics mine)

Now, upon first reading the above, I found myself anticipating a sweeping post-structuralist claim about the material world, that is, that Cronon would argue that literally the existence of everything depends on language, a la Barthes, including the wilderness itself. However, much to my relief, Cronon is in fact not arguing from this perspective. What he very much is referring to is the concept of the wilderness. And of course, he is right. Any concept is inevitably the product of the human mind, and therefore has much about it that has a basis in language. His deeper point, then, is that often people, including earnest ecologists and environmentalists, unknowingly conflate the biological reality we know as the wilderness, with a problematic understanding of the concept of the wilderness itself, leading to a profound misunderstanding about how the two are distinct and should remain so. 

What I particularly appreciated about the reading is Cronon’s destabilizing of the meaning of the wilderness by offering an informative and revealing historical analysis of the word's changing denotation, but especially its varying connotations across cultures. A great deal of the meaning of the wilderness, in fact, is taken for granted. For instance, most famously, the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century give a particularly high importance to the respect and sanctity of the natural world, as indicated in their preoccupation with the doctrine of the sublime, which argues there are certain locations in nature or features of the environment that are capable of bringing one into contact with the divine. Whether it be Wordsworth’s Prelude or later John Muir’s raptures over the beauties of the Sierras, the Romantic writers’ ideology represents a positive attitude toward the environment that continues to be influential. 

Cronon sets the stage early of his discussion of the Romantic writers by explaining how early in European history, the physical wilderness had been perceived as a place of darkness, danger, and corruption, that one would be wise to avoid. Religion was particularly significant in shaping the discourses about the natural world. The King James Bible is replete with pejorative references to nature, profoundly impacting the ideologies of the era’s Christian communities: 

The wilderness was where Moses had wandered with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol. For Pharaoh will say of the Children of Israel,” we read in Exodus, “They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.” The wilderness was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: “And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness for forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.” (Cronon 70-71)

As Cronon makes clear, for the Romantic meaning of the concept of the wilderness to be adequately understood, there needs be a familiarity first with the word's historical, pre-nineteenth century context. What Cronon does with great skill is exploit the word's semantic mutability to warn of society's remaining ignorant to the fact that a problematic ideology belonging to one group or another is often substituted for a truer understanding of both the concept of and the material reality that defines the wilderness. Precisely because Cronon, as most of us do, wants both himself and his descendants to live in a world that is unimpaired by pollution, he does not hesitate to identify the most contradictory and just plain nonsensical beliefs about the wilderness that pervade both the ecological and environmental discourse communities. The best example is his deconstruction of the paradox lying at the heart of what is known as the "Deep Ecology" movement, which essentially argues that nature’s salvation depends on what amounts to human kind’s exit from the planet. Or, to sum it up in Cronon’s words: “[I]f nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves” (Cronon 83). Expressing a sentiment that many people can sympathize with, including those who would consider themselves to be fervent advocates for the environment, Cronon calls the Deep Ecologist position here an “absurdity,” arguing that any proposition that would essentially have all of humankind commit suicide is, to say in the least, unlikely to attract very many followers or be helpful in environmental discourses. 

As a reader, what I most took away from Cronon’s article was how important it is to be aware of the shifting semantic changes that take place in our language when we attempt to make profound decisions about our collective treatment of the environment. Few if any would argue for the goodness of a polluted, filthy planet. Such a view, to the extent there may actually be one, is not worth taking seriously. One can also be certain that virtually nobody would be anxious to participate in a global suicide either as a way to solve our problems. Cronon seems to want to appropriate sentiments such as these into productive starting points from which to proceed in our professional and public discourses. Lastly, Cronon's penetrating analysis of the various parties belonging to the environmentalist movement, specifically their peculiar and often contradictory definitions of “the wilderness," represents what seems to me to be just the kind of clear-minded thinking that the environmentalist movement requires to win the hearts—and perhaps more importantly the minds—of those like myself who are only beginning to familiarize themselves with the movement's ideologies.

Reflecting on “The Trouble With the Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”

            Cronon goes to great lengths in questioning Thoreau’s famous notion that “In wildness is the preservation of the World” (69). Cronon’s argument is summed up well when he states, “as we gaze into the mirror [nature] holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” (70). The concept of the wilderness, for Cronon, is ultimately defined and instituted by human beings. It seems Cronon points to the tendencies many individuals have to simultaneously exoticize and classify the natural world. It is indeed laughable to think that the collection of gentle streams and calming trees, otherwise known as protected natural spaces today, were the vast, desolate, and creepy territories of earlier periods.

Yet it seems Cronon is unduly harsh in arguing “[nature is] entirely a creation of the culture it holds dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny” (79). Undoubtedly, the few open spaces we have carved out in the US would certainly suggest the natural environment is a creation of the state. But this assumes that the natural world may only be appreciated within the confines of designated grounds or the places people identify as exotic. It seems Cronon takes a huge leap in suggesting that this desire to classify nature is a means to deny our history of modernization simply because the word deny implies an active and conscious refusal to believe or recognize. In a certain sense, a denial might encompass a complete neglect and lack of concern for the wilderness after a weekend jaunt to the woods. It seems absurd to assume that enjoying the benefits of an undeveloped area is tantamount to an escape from all of humanity that we might never remember or return. I would imagine, and at least hope, that forests and protected lands remain preserved because the population seeks to maintain part of their past rather than for purposes of escape or denial.

            Cronon’s argument changes slightly near his conclusion and he seems to recant his original statements regarding the denial of nature by society. His argument ultimately culminates with the idea that when society regards nature with a certain distance, perhaps embodied in the notion of the Other, there is a loss of appreciation or perhaps an undue exoticism taking place in our perception of nature (84). He argues nature can be experienced in the subtly of weeds growing out of miles of concrete or a few trees amongst a cluster of buildings. Although he takes a different angle on the same argument, his indictment of society on the whole is misplaced. The early developments in business and industry forced the government and fledging forest service to respond by both demarcating and commoditizing natural spaces that demanded preservation. It seems practically impossible to avoid the commoditized aspects of nature in society, but especially considering the motto of the National Forest Service: “Land of Many Uses.” The kneejerk reaction of government to protect natural spaces, in light of societal developments that continue to blight the environment, seems justified and necessary for their time and the current day. In so doing, it is plausible to suggest that nature has been marginalized or othered, but it seems illogical to place blame upon those who might want to experience wooded acres and vast hills rather than a few weeds emerging from a seldom-used concrete path.     

Cronon’s Conundrum

Our concept of wilderness is not natural because it presumes a “virginity,” an untouched quality that precludes Native Americans and which assumes that wherever man isn’t, nature is.  How homocentric!  If man has a religious or near-religious experience in the nature encounter, is his own nature as city-dweller wholly divorced from any personal redemptive qualities?  In other words, cannot man summon a sense of humility for his fellow beings without running to the wilderness and drinking in the sublimity?  Cronon grounds his discussion of wilderness in Scripture, wherein the wanderings of the ancient Israelites and the temptation of Christ occur in desert-like surroundings, not woods, teeming with life.  This is an important distinction.  Wilderness up to the late eighteenth century had been considered apart from creation and abysmal.  The use, then, of the term “wilderness” in the context of the nature encounter represented by the mid-nineteenth century a radical co-opting of religion to approximate, ironically enough, religious experience.

As the frontier became increasingly settled, the myth of wilderness as bestower of “rugged individualism” rose in prominence and embellished—burnished even—the extant American mythos as a land of opportunity for those willing to rise to the occasion.  Wordsworth’s sublimity less than fifty years on was supplanted by the economic opportunity immanent in farming, ranching, and owning large swaths of “wilderness.”  The secularization of the scriptural ideal of wilderness saw the transformation from wilderness as the place where God met the pilgrim on his spiritual journey to the place where God is made fully manifest in the life of the blessed citizen.  For those with money who could travel, going to the wilderness was a luxury, the benefits of which could not be experienced, understood, and enjoyed by the lower classes.  Analogously, for those with money, buying wilderness for the purpose of economic benefit was a privilege equally not to be enjoyed by the lower classes.

Wilderness is a myth because we assume that what isn’t owned by the federal government, a state, or a private individual is untouched.  This fallacy allows us to pursue a course of unimpeded annexation, whereby lands that are already owned or falling into ownership are purposed, re-purposed, and plundered yet again beyond all possibility of sustainability.  I prefer Cronon’s essay because it sticks a finger in the eye of boutique environmentalism, the idea that only by driving hundreds of miles out of the way—to Joshua Tree for instance—can the city-dweller wake up to his God-given, innate qualities of humility and start treating his fellow beings with more respect and compassion.  What hogwash.  Why do I need to go the forest to have a near-religious experience when we have religion available in the sunset at Venice Beach or the sunrise from my apartment stoop?

Why has a near-religious experience supplanted a religious one?  I don’t understand this.  As someone who is religious, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that a devolved form of Wordsworth’s sublimity is environmentalist grandeur run amok.

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

            In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon examines the complex nexus of values and beliefs centered on the concept of wilderness in the United States.  Rather than a pure, natural given, the wilderness is an “unntural” cultural creation.   In the idea of wilderness are intertwined two American obsessions: religion and nationalism.  The signifiers of these cultural categories are not always obviously apparent, as they undergo revalutation and take on disguises.

            Cronon organizes his analysis by exploring the influence of the concepts of the sublime and the fontier on the creation of “wilderness.”  We find religion interacting with both these concepts while nationalism primarily relates to the second.  Previous to the reinterpretation of the sublime in the Romantic period, wilderness generally had negative connotations.  It caused one to feel terror or “bewilderment.” In antiquity, the wilderness was also a place of temptation and spiritual purification.  This trandformative possibility of the wilderness was valued and developed so that by the late 18^th century the wilderness was where one could encounter the divine.  In the United States, due to the influence of writers like Muir, the transformation of wilderness was complete: “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple” (72).  Wild nature became sacred.

            Related to this revaluation, the wilderness also became a place where one could return to certain core human experiences.  In the wilderness, human beings experienced some primitive essence that had been covered over by corrupting and artificial layers of “civilization.”  This primitivism was given a nationalist tinge by writers like Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw American democracy emerging from the encounter bewteen primitive human nature and the wilderness.  This American democratic spirit could be reinvigorated by returning to the wilderness.  The wilderness must be protected because it is “the last bastion of rugged individualism,” which can ensure the renewal of an essential Americanness (77).  Wilderness as frontier also connotes a place of authenticity.  The wilderness is the irreducible “real” – the place where we can experience the “truth” of the world and ourselves.  The real and the authentic, according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade, are preeminently qualities of the sacred.  Thus, as Cronon observes, modern environmentalism is replete with “quasi-relgious values” founded upon such a conception of the wilderness (80).  The assumption of wilderness as sacred and authentic represents a structure of belief homologous to what is usually undertood by the word “religious.”

            Within this complex of “religious” belief and national identity, certain problems and contradictions emerge.  One of these involves class.  The wilderness as an artificial place of authenticity and Americianness can only be enjoyed and benefited from by the middle and upper classes who have the money and leisure to travel.  It is a place of recreation and of internal renewal separate from the urban centers where these visitors live and work.  The wilderness allows them to purify themselves of the corruption of a greedy, ugly, industrial-capitalist world, thus absolving them of any complicity in its injustices.  Poet and farmer Wendell Berry has often drawn attention to the need to live responsibly in a place where we both make a home and work.  When we preserve the wilderness because we expect it to purify us of our corruption and sins, we accept more easily the faults of the “profane” world we inhabit.  This mentality can tacitly accept political and economic structures that cause injustice and destruction, thus devaluing most of the earth and many of our fellow human beings.

It's the Economy, Stupid

The Cronon article makes an excellent companion piece to Jenny Price’s “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” The ideological framework that Cronon provides for Price’s observations helped me to more fully appreciate her article. The two pieces bracket the course nicely.

In the beginning Cronon makes Thoreau into a whipping boy for myth making, be it the myth of the mountain as cathedral or the myth of the wilderness. In the end, though, he seems to give Thoreau a reprieve. In distinguishing between wildness and wilderness, Cronon notes that Thoreau was right in attributing to the former the agency to preserve the world. Nevertheless, it requires a close reading to remove the impression of Thoreau as the mother of all tree huggers, particularly from someone already predisposed to such a view. I can imagine the reaction of those who arrange their reading schedules to suit their seatings on the throne: “Wildness, Wilderness, what’s the difference?” There’s no danger of these people ever reading Walden. So here’s my digest for them. It’s an ideal length.

The purpose of an economy is to maximum the benefit of a society’s material resources by creating a system of exchange. Thus if A grows wheat and B owns a forest, A, after putting aside all the wheat he needs to make bread, exchanges his surplus wheat with B for the surplus wood that he has after he has built his cabin. This way they can each have a life, so to speak, which would not have been likely if A lived in the elements and B went hungry. But what if someone can provide shelter and food by his own industry, and still have time for a life, in fact only has to work six weeks out of the year? He then has a very successful economy of one. He is Henry David Thoreau. Granted, it would be difficult if not impossible for someone to do in today’s advanced industrial, urbanized society what Thoreau did over 150 years ago. But, ironically,  (speaking of irony, I would have enjoyed reading Thoreau more if he occasionally displayed a little irony of his own. Reading a book without any irony in it is like driving cross country without a pit stop . . . alright, no more potty metaphors) technology is approaching the day—if we are not there already—when half the current work force can produce all the current goods and services. This creates the potential for people to work half the time they currently work and to have more leisure time to read and take nature walks that don’t add to carbon emissions. Now that’s a Thoreau thought.

This is not to suggest that Thoreau had no ecological impact on his environment. The white pine trees he cut down contributed to the erosion of soil, the crops he planted emitted carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and his second-hand nails were produced by machines powered by fossil fuel. As Cronon suggests, in order to pass through this world without leaving your mark on nature would require reverting to a hunter-gatherer culture. But this would not necessarily be prosperous for Man. For instance, seventeenth century capture narratives show that the early Native Americans were often plagued by starvation, especially in the winter. So there is no danger of this blogger succumbing to the myth of the frontier. But I agree with Cronon that we should explore the middle ground—investigate ways to improve the world for “humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, white folks and people of color. . .” . . . wait a minute, the rich people? I don’t think that the one-percenters need my help. But all people would do well to contemplate another Thoreau thought: “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”

Rejecting Adam's Curse: Thoreau's Call to a Better Life

 There is a popular notion, that Americans associate with our Puritan roots, that a man must work hard in order to earn their daily bread, an idea known as Adam's curse. Thoreau wholeheartedly rejects this notion in Walden when he denies the biblical curse that resulted in man's fall from grace: "It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do" (64). There is a related idea that idle hands do the devil's work, a cliche that suggests that a man with leisure time is likely to sin, so keeping busy is a way to stay on the path of righteousness.  Thoreau argues contrariwise that men should work less so that they can spend more leisure time contemplating the lessons to be found in nature, thereby improving their souls.

The problem that Thoreau finds in those that are chained to their labor is not that they labor, but that they "labor under a mistake" (7); the mistake being that men waste their efforts pursuing unnecessary material good to the neglect of their own personal inner-development. Thoreau is concerned that in a mad attempt to keep up with the Jones's, to use the parlance of our day, people are starving their souls. People are so concerned with purchasing material comforts that they forget to take care of their spiritual needs.
 
Thoreau forces readers to consider whether or not they can truly afford the material goods that they purchase. Is exotic food necessary or will simpler fare suffice? If your old coat is still intact, why do you need a new one? Most importantly, can you afford the things that you buy? Or are you living, as Thoreau puts it, on "another's brass" (8) -- living on credit and establishing debt that condemns man to toil in conditions that perhaps would be best avoided. Thoreau specifically addresses his neighbors in Concord but his message is universal and applicable to all. Furthermore, Thoreau puts his money - or lack thereof - where his mouth is by demonstrating that it was viable to work less and live more; Walden is a call for men to "live deliberately" - a call for people to contemplate life as they experience it.

The experiment of living solely by the efforts of his own hands (aside from the help he hires for farming and the occasional dinner party he attends) is the basis for Walden. Thoreau offers detailed accounting of all his expenses, crowing over how little money and time sustainability costs. He was able to purchase enough food for eight months with a mere $8.74, equivalent to $185.61 today (that's a couple of weeks for me and I know I could eat cheaper but convenience and freshness counts). He even estimates he could have lived on three dollars less if he not indulged on luxuries such as dried apples and a pumpkin. Thoreau elsewhere gives the average rate of a day laborer as one dollar per day, which means that a person could earn his food for eight months - even with the luxury items - in nine days.

The Irish laborer John Field is offered as an example of someone who's inefficient labor practices condemn his family to perpetual poverty. Field is "an honest, hard-working, but shiftless man" (184), an oxymoronic description that exemplifies Thoreau's point perfectly. Field works hard to scrape together a living for his family but is unable to get ahead, which is why he is shiftless.  Thoreau tries to teach Field about economy and suggests that the Irishman could escape the bonds of wage-slavery if he would forgo luxuries such as tea, coffee, butter, and fresh meat. Thoreau further illustrates Field's lack of economy when they go fishing . Field uses worms to catch shiners, small fish that he uses as bait to catch larger perch; Thoreau uses worms to catch perch. When the two fish together, Field "disturbed only a couple of fins while I [Thoreau] was catching a fair string" (187). The message is clear: Field works twice as hard for less reward.

Blog Review For Week 8

Zully: “Sketch with a Purpose”

Work: John Muir and Alison Byerly

Main point: To suggest that Nature has been seen by all of us with a purpose whether our actions are in or out of human culture; often that purpose is due to commodity which is a harsh view that everyone tries to distance. But the bottom line would be on human control which provokes change in our thinking while the argument continues between the preservationist and the conservationists. Therefore Muir is part of the controlling force to bring forth Nature the way he perceived it, as it was those behind the picturesque movement.

William Cooper: “Suburban Fields Forever”

Work: Cosgrove “Sublime Nature”

William references at least three significant points that have a domino effect: The artist as tradesman to fulfill the middle-class’ demands, the artist as genius-organic, and the sublime as an ideology. William wants to see the romantics’ works ‘in a new light’ which suggests there is more to poetry. This opens up a discussion on how autonomous the artist wants or can be from the market. Though artists’ prestige suffered with the Industrial Revolution, it was beneficial in that their works were more widely distributed. Still they fought to retain “the privileged status of their work” (Cosgrove 225) and defended it by asserting their works disclosed truth “against the falsity of a social order” (Cosgrove 226). Artists were suspicious of the “British social formation” (Cosgrove 223) that they themselves had to function within. In their suspicion they created the sublime, claiming it was exclusively in their own construction of nature, paintings, poetry, literature, and human emotions. Once the romantic works are embedded in society, the romantic landscape inevitably became an ideology (Cosgrove 234).

Amber Vasquez

Work: John Muir My First Summer in the Sierra

Amber writes about Muir’s notion of ‘utility’ and the comparison between a shepherd in Scotland and one from the states. Amber’s observation suggests her connection with Nature has been not only with flowers, bugs, and school assignments but with her mother. This is meaningful because Amber’s memories of human nurture and recollection of community are based on the natural world. It speaks to how Romantic ideology survived in how it envisioned human emotions coupled with natural world aesthetics as sources for meaning. On the subject of utility, Muir reminisces on how Indian women were harvesting their crops, laughing, and enjoying the task (Muir 135). For Muir, the value of the landscape is not only in that it feeds people but that it produces satisfaction. A sustainable relationship to the land brings joy while also providing viable ways to trade and build relationships with neighbors: “The tribes of the west flank of the range trade acorns for worms and pine nuts” (Muir 136). Muir understands the ecosystem is bound up with human life and sees that the two can coexist.

Rosanna Cacace – General Thoughts on Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra

Rosanna brings two ideas Muir carefully overlays through his writings: the landscapes blooming with life and the relationship music has with Nature and the sublime. While Rosanna writes “the natural setting as if it is alive and connected,” her recollection matches Muir’s experiences in the wilderness. He sees the mountains, though non-living, full of life “as the features of a human face” (Muir, Chapter XI, 154). This comparison evokes familiarity between Man and the outside world. In fact Muir is doing the work of the Romantics who not only make Nature as the background for Man’s history but made Nature part of human emotions. One would recall in Wordsworth’s poem Michael, the relationship Michael had with the landscape as his son, Luke, was sent to the urban settings. Like Wordsworth, Muir is not settling for a pastoral view but one in which Man can live, laugh, and struggle.

Ryan Briggs - Reflections on Muir's Curious Prose Style in My First Summer in the Sierra

Ryan provides a thoughtful discussion of how Muir’s language situates My First Summer in the Sierra in between Romanticism and scientific discourse. Muir narrates a unique genre that is interested in the wonder of nature along with an in-depth account of biology and ecosystems. Whereas a human encounter with the sublime in Romantic art could bring awe and fear, Muir’s account will invite an intimate relationship with the smallest of creatures, like insects, with the greatest of interest. When writing of poison ivy, Muir writes that it is a plant with few friends, describing a pesky plant to humans as one that is also a social creature. And while scientific discourse may appear rational and detached, Muir makes it personal. Muir combines something of science and romanticism while writing in a style quite different from both. Ryan’s use of the word “curious” to describe Muir’s tone echoes how Muir is an explorer who is a mature intellectual and at the same time full of the wonderment of a child encountering nature for the first time: “How interesting everything is! Every rock, mountain, stream, plant, lake, lawn, forest, garden, bird, beast, insect seems to call and invite us to come and learn something of its history and relationship” (Muir 145).

Alfred Valrie

Work: My First Summer in the Sierra and “The American Forests”

Alfred’s most interesting observation is that ‘Muir becomes one with nature,’ which is subject to many interpretations. One can see it as if Muir has left humanity to harbor within nature, even turning down a position at Harvard offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir emancipates himself from society to join God’s nature. Perhaps, Alfred is suggesting that the Noble Savage has been returned to its origin. But what was there in nature that Muir wanted so badly? Do you want to go there too and for how long? In the wilderness is found flora, fauna, bugs, and snow, living and non-living things, and drastic climates, all except people. Was Muir tired of humanity? Perhaps Muir fell in love with Nature and fell out of love with humanity. Muir was a fervent follower of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who wrote about self-reliance and the purity of being individual. Muir’s work fits in a model of self-reliance as he lives in the wilderness with too little to survive while he plays the role of the good Adam, doing what Adam failed to do. Alfred writes that Muir gives ‘anthropomorphic qualities’ to living things in the solitude of Nature, which can be seen as Muir channeling Adam in the Garden of Eden before Eve.  

Joseph Mottola: “John Muir’s Environmentalism”

Ignorant of Muir’s book and a little confused about how to classify it, Joseph creates a new category for it: philosophical travel literature/nature porn.  Muir travels, while offering thoughtful interpretations of what he sees and does – all the while engaging in an orgiastic encounter with nature.  Nature is like a lover and a god, and accordingly he worships it.

Jane Dubzinski: “Romantic Paintings, Sublime Landscape”

Jane focuses on the tension between Romantic artists, nature, and society, using Cosgrove’s analysis.  In making the natural world and human beings resources for exploitation subjected to market forces, capitalism divided humans and the environment.  Society became a place of mechanical production and profit, so the Romantics sought unspoiled nature as a place where they could escape alienation.  Specifically, they sought the sublime, experienced through sight.  Using Friedrich’s painting "The Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog," she explores the complexities of humans in nature: Is man saved or threatened by nature, united to or separate from nature, subordinate to or superior to nature?

Yuliana Valdes: “The Picturesque is Pure Intentionality”

Yuliana elucidates Byerly’s article on the artificiality and constructedness of the image of the national parks.  To attract visitors, the park service wants the park to seem to be wilderness.  However, more appropriate to the way the parks function is the category of the picturesque.  The wilderness can only be wild if people are not there to tame it.  However, paradoxically, people want to go to the wilderness for leisure and aesthetically view it as wilderness. The wilderness is available to all, but they must have the leisure and money to travel.  Thus the wilderness is actively created to offer people the picturesque under the guise of the sublime.

Rabelais: John Muir: The Original Tree-Hugger Reignites Class Divide

Rabelais highlights the class tensions in Muir’s book.  Muir doesn’t idealize the shepherd. He portrays him as a hired worker who is not particularly fond of the sheep and not receptive to the beauty of nature.  Muir implies a certain training or refinement of the sensibility is required to perceive the wonders of nature.  Muir cannot tolerate the impoverishment of their diet, while the hardier workers can.  Ironically, Muir requires some of the benefits of civilization, like bread, to enjoy the wilderness.

Jeff Anderson: “A Reflection on My First Summer in the Sierra”

Jeff examines some of metaphors of Muir’s work.  His religious rhetoric includes language and symbols from the Bible: the flood, for example; the natural world as our inheritance; human beings as sheep who cannot handle freedom and who are in awe of the sublime.  Based on Cosgrove’s discussion of the sublime, Jeff observes that by applying the sublime to perception of the natural world, Muir implies that it is accessible to all people, whereas formerly it was associated with the majesty and solemnity of epic literature, which mainly the rich and educated could read.

Sublimity and Alienation

In his chapter on “Sublime Nature,” Cosgrove describes the reaction of artists in the Romantic period against the increasing mechanization of England, as it was being transformed by capitalist production.  These artists began to privilege the organic and natural over the mechanical and manufactured.  Suffering alienation in society due to the capitalist order of production, they sought to flee society altogether and find integration in a natural, moral order.  This led them to more and more wild and remote places, which seemed to exemplify some essential moral order, which was being corrupted by the man’s greed.  As Cosgrove observes, “Romanticism seeks divinity in the mountains and sermons in the stones” (232).  This tendency is clearly evident in John Muir’s description of his stay the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1869.  Like Turner and Ruskin, Muir’s emotional responses to nature are intimately connected to his careful and learned observation of plants, animals, rocks, and all kinds of natural phenomena.  Indeed, what Cosgrove says of Ruskin could be applied to Muir: “It is the duty of every individual to observe and seek to understand the messages written by divinity into natural forms and of that individual’s life and work to submit to them” (249).  Close observation of nature could also one to “see into the life of things,” that is, perceive the moral and providential significance of nature.

Alone in the wilderness, Muir does not feel alone. Deep in the mountains above Yosemite Valley, he paradoxically feels close to his friends and family: “The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness, and the nearer our friends” (81).  Nature offers him an unalienated existence, but he can only experience it when he is separated from society and other people.  However, one must have the sensitivity and perception to see and feel the beauty and meaning  of nature, for he earlier had noted that the shepherd in California, “seeing nobody for weeks or months …finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so” (19).  Muir, on the other hand, attempts to read God’s writing in the pine trees: “Definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with sunbeams. Would I could understand them!” (18). He can also hear the “sermons” in the stones. The animals and plants seem to call to him, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song” (44).  The particulars of nature reveal the very being of the divine: “Every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator” (94). 

Many of us might have a tendency to look down upon such beliefs and such raptures as Muir expressed.  They must be self-induced, we say.  And indeed they might, since it is impossible to know the truth of his subjective experience.  However, the positivism -- “with its separation of subject and object and its search for causal laws modeled upon Newtonian physics” -- that came to dominate in the 18^th century is not more valid as a schema for understanding the phenomenal world (252).   Cosgrove effectively argues that causal reasoning was an ideology tied to the rise of capitalism: “The shift from analogical to causal reasoning is logically related to changes in social organization between pre-capitalist and capitalist formations” (252).  Thus as a hegemonic ideology, this form of reasoning cannot bring us closer to “truth” than previous forms of reasoning. 

I was troubled, however, by some elitist implications in Muir’s book.  He says that the shepherd Billy is “asleep, or smothered and befogged beneath pleasures and cares” because he does not want to see Yosemite Valley (90).  Billy considers the valley “a lot of rocks” where one would be exposed to the danger of falling.  Similarly, the Native Americans are seen as degraded, unappreciative of nature’s beauty: “A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness” (124).  He’s most troubled by their uncleanliness, which he interprets as a sign of their unnaturalness, since “nothing truly wild is unclean” (135).

He goes into nature to escape alienation.  In the wilderness, he can experience his ecstasies and raptures before its divine beauty.  But he cannot tolerate those who don’t have the same sensibility as his, and so he experiences another kind of alienation: “To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural” (132).