Environmental history: Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Carson

Environmental Science

Four pivotal people - whose collective positive impact on the environment and on society's understanding of the natural world is powerful - are featured in this paper. They are John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson; an understanding of their lives and professional contributions is necessary for any student who wishes to become informed as to the effect the expansion of American cities and technologies has had on the planet.

Henry David Thoreau, it should be understood out in front, was not a cheerleader for ecological policies he agreed with, and not a scientist investigating man's abuse of the land; he was instead a writer and a critic, a "transcendentalist" and a philosophical person who wrestled with the question of how humankind and the natural world are supposed to interact and coexist. His "transcendental inclinations" (page 134), according to the text, led him on a path of discovery "revolving around the ideas of self, society, and the wilderness and the interrelations among them."

If that sounds a little esoteric, what the author is basically saying is that Thoreau was very experienced in the ways of humans and the wilderness; he lived next to Walden Pond for more than two years; he climbed mountains; he explored forests and hiked a great deal; and yet his "excursions...were not mere physical journeys but contemplative odysseys through which he gradually overcame the alienation of the person..." (137). When he wrote about his journeys into nature, he certainly wasn't writing a travelogue; he was in fact expressing through the creative genius of his mind's eye the many ways the bright spirit can interpret an experience with the wilderness.

In society you will not find health," Thoreau wrote in "Natural History of Massachusetts"; "but in nature...Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so." Clearly Thoreau saw that society had a way of poisoning or disturbing nature, and also, he was intolerant of social small talk, as he is quoted (139) as saying "We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which is hear in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle."

And while he was putting down all the chatter in all the venues of his public life, he asserted (139) that the "...true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience." He isn't really putting science down, but he saying that books and classroom learning cannot lead to the same understanding as actually being out into the wild one's self. And, he was angry at the negative effect society was having on the environment; "The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared," he wrote, in "Natural History." One wonders what Thoreau would write today, if he were alive and could see the widespread destruction to the planet's natural habitat, if he were aware of the number of threatened plant and animal species, and if he could see the melting of glaciers, the rising of sea levels, and the other signs of man-made dramatic climate change in the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth."

John Muir's life spanned from 1838 to 1914, but for many outdoor enthusiasts and conservationists his legacy is very much alive in 2006; indeed, he's thought of as the "father of the American conservation movement." And while it is widely known that he founded the Sierra Club, perhaps it is not as well-known that he made "direct contributions to the creation of no fewer than six of America's premier national parks," as the authors point out on page 172. And whereas Thoreau's contribution to the preservation of the natural world was through a transcendental and philosophical lens, not always easy to understand, Muir's contribution was through naturalistic essays which the average lay person could relate to. "John Muir not only climbed mountains," the author writes on page 175, "but he was able to communicate at least part of the importance of what he contemplated to the public; his writing achieved almost immediate popular acclaim."

Muir, who as a young boy was treated brutally by his father, a fundamentalist (and near fanatical) Christian, escaped Wisconsin to explore nature in Canada and elsewhere, and wrote (to his sisters) that he took "more intense delight from reading the power and goodness of God from 'the things which are made' than from the Bible." In fact, though Muir used Biblical phrases in his writings, he escaped the dogma of his father's church, and instead saw God's strength and gifts through Nature. His life "...went far beyond the confines of conventional Christian practice," the author writes on page 177. "Nature became his temple"; and he wrote beautiful lines such as the following: "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

For John Muir, whose writings were very popular and read by millions of Americans who did not have the same opportunity to explore the out-of-doors as he did, the wild natural world became his religion. "By directly seeing God in nature," the author writes on page 181, "Muir cuts through the cake of social convention and achieves an immediate felt unity with the web of life." In another passage that represents Muir's attitude, he wrote that "One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books....No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul."

And in another passage, quoted on page 182, Muir explains that "Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter." That passage sounded like Henry David Thoreau, with its criticism of the secular, social world; in fact the author on page 182 states that Muir had developed "an authentic wilderness theology." And obviously Muir was greatly impressed with Thoreau, who lived 1817 to 1862,

What is John Muir best known for? Probably his writing is his most revered legacy, but also, he is remembered as the man who walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico and wrote about it in 1867 (A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf); "My plan," he wrote, "was imply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and leas trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest."

In his most widely read book, Our National Parks, Muir explained that he "naturally walked softly and awe-stricken" among the trees; and as he wandered further, he met "nobler trees where all are noble, subdued in the general calm, as if in some vast hall pervaded by the deepest sanctities and solemnities that sway human souls." So, like Thoreau, Muir became very skilled at giving, as the author writes (187), "detailed geological descriptions and observations of all manner of plants and animals."

Aldo Leopold lived from 1887 to 1948, and though he was not a great writer like Thoreau and Muir, he put forward specific knowledge about the need for wildlife ecology and management that transcended Thoreau's and Muir's philosophical / transcendental narratives and became more along the lines of how-to and hands-on. He did rant and rave, though, against the damage humans were doing to the land, and in that sense, took lessons from Thoreau and Muir. In his renowned work, Sand County Almanac, he wrote that America had become "...so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy." Like Muir, he is identified with the University of Wisconsin, and like Muir, he found a direction for his life through his passion for helping heal the land, and offering wisdom and information to the public about how to respect the land. When, as the author writes on page 209, the collective American became thoughts like, "The greatest good for the greatest number was increasingly construed in narrow economic terms," and "Wild nature was conceived as little more than a stockpile of raw materials of no intrinsic value," Leopold's love of nature was the driver to change America. His degree from Yale was in forestry; he understood why the "uncontrolled logging of mountain forests" ruined watersheds and he did something about it by writing articles with quotes like this: "Erosion eats into our hills like a contagion, and floods bring down the loosened soil upon our valleys like a scourge...Science can and must unravel those reactions and government must enforce the findings of science."

When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold were long gone; but Carson in a very real way was picking up where they left off. And indeed, according to an article in the journal Zygon (Bekoff, et al., 2004), if "persons like her were in charge of our global environmental policies, we and our fellow animals would be in much better shape than we currently are." By writing her book, Carson in fact is credited with launching "the modern environmental movement," the authors insist. And her book was far more than just the "cumulative and devastating biological effects of pesticides," Bekoff writes; "it is about life itself, focusing on the many different webs of nature that go unnoticed, misunderstood, and unappreciated until we lose them."