Writing a history of dark green religion raises many questions about what individuals and groups to include: Do they have to clearly state that they consider nature to be sacred and intrinsically valuable? Were they inspirations to it but not fully a part of it? Should indigenous peoples or people engaged in religions that originated in Asia be included? Instead of setting out to write a comprehensive history of the phenomena, which would pose these and other insurmountable questions, I have opted for a descriptive and analytic strategy that looks for patterns and resemblances without laboring obsessively to demarcate boundaries. There is, however, a historical dimension to this study. This chapter examines some of the critical figures, especially from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, who were responsible for the emergence and subsequent strength of dark green religion in North America.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir are often and properly credited with catapulting nature-related spiritualities into prominence in North American life and environmental politics; this chapter provides a fresh reading of their contributions. But this holy trinity did not drop from heaven or spontaneously generate. Instead, these figures emerged from and were shaped by cultural currents even as they followed their own unique trajectories. Exploring the cultural milieu that gave rise to these giants will make it easier to understand them, their widespread influence, and also the twists and turns of dark green religion that followed. This requires a brief look at the ways in which Europeans encountered and made sense of American Indian societies and their religious practices.
From the beginning of European contact with North America, the religious narratives immigrants brought with them shaped their relationships with and impacts on the land and its first peoples. Conversely, the land and its native peoples had an impact on these immigrants and their perceptions, narratives, and cultures. Scholars who study religion and nature in North America since the arrival of Europeans generally provide the following account.
European Americans were deeply conditioned by attitudes typical of the continent from which they had come. Their perceptions and feelings regarding nature were often characterized by fear and hostility, or at least by deep ambivalence toward the wild landscapes that differed so greatly from the domesticated agricultural and pastoral ones they had left behind. In the region the new arrivals labeled New England, these attitudes were decisively shaped by Christianity, especially Puritanism. American Indians were often considered physically and spiritually dangerous, even in league with Satan. The early colonial leader and minister William Bradford, for example, described his first impressions of the landscape as “a hidious & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & willd men.”1 Few of European heritage had affinity with the continent’s native peoples, who generally respected and valued the land and its denizens more than the colonists.
In other parts of North America, Spanish explorers and friars founded missions and settlements in what would become Florida, Mexico, and the American Southwest. These newcomers held many of the same ambivalent views about the North American landscape and its inhabitants. With notable exceptions, such as the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, they generally sought to convert both the land and native populations from “savage” to “civilized.”2 Such beliefs played an important role in the often-violent subjugation of the continent’s indigenous peoples.
Native Americans had dramatically different orientations to and perceptions about the natural world than those found among Europeans at the time of contact. Religious historian Catherine Albanese lists some religious beliefs common to North America’s first peoples: a fundamentally relational universe, a belief that nature is inhabited with other-than-human persons, a sense of kinship with such presences and a corresponding “ethos of reciprocity,” mythic narratives that included birth-out-of-nature origin accounts, rituals to restore harmony with nature, a belief in shape-shifting (i.e., humans and animals are able to change physical forms with one another), and an understanding that primary foods had sacred origins.3 For these reasons, Native American religions are often said to hold nature sacred or to be place-based spiritualities. In contrast, the cosmology and theology of Christianity in general, and Puritanism in particular, reinforced the tendency among European settlers to consider land, not as something sacred and worthy of reverence, but as a resource to be exploited for both material and spiritual ends. For such Christians, both of these ends had to do with glorifying and satisfying a deity who resided beyond the earth and who thus should not be too closely identified with it.
Such views did not have a monopoly, however. Some early colonial writings presented a contrasting view that one could learn about this deity through nature and that people could grow spiritually through the challenges and dangers posed by natural processes. For some early settlers, nature was not only a material inheritance or a dangerous place. It was also a spiritual gift from God.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather and the famous theologian and revivalist Jonathan Edwards, for example, promoted a Platonic doctrine of correspondence, in which nature on earth was seen as corresponding to divine realities. Expounding upon the traditional Christian doctrine that the book of nature complemented the book of scripture, Mather encouraged people to take walks in nature’s “public library.” While most famous today for his fire and brimstone sermons, Edwards was also keenly interested in science and viewed it as one way to observe the divine signs in nature. The literary historian John Gatta even concluded that Edwards anticipated Aldo Leopold’s biocentric land ethic when he wrote, “A thing appears beautiful when viewed most perfectly, comprehensively and universally, with regard to all its tendencies, and its connections with everything it stands related to.”4 For Edwards, the natural world was not merely a commodity but had inherent worth because it reflected the glory of God.
This sort of thinking comes close to dark green religion but shrinks from the idea that nature is itself sacred; in good theistic fashion, the sacred is reserved for God alone and his heavenly realm. Nevertheless, given the influence of figures like Edwards and Mather, their hints about reverence for nature likely helped prepare the American soil for an appreciation of the natural world. This appreciation would grow wildly, particularly in transcendentalism and the variety of nature religions that would follow. In any case, it is apparent that nature in early European American culture was invested with complicated religious meanings.5
Most historiographies suggest that attitudes in North America did not shift toward nature appreciation until this had first occurred in Europe, beginning with ferment precipitated by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, all of whom had published their most important works in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Although Burke is best known for his counter-revolutionary writings against the French revolution, his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a remarkable work that deserves consideration as one of the earliest examples of the scholarly study of religion. One can perceive his conservative political philosophy within its pages—but it is primarily a work that purports to explain how the affective states that he referred to as the sublime and the beautiful arise from the human experience in nature. In a nutshell, he argued that the experience of the sublime is evoked by and thus associated with the feeling of “Astonishment” that comes from encounters with great and terrifying power: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other [thing]. . . . Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.”6 In his views about “inferior effects” we can see how Burke linked the experience of astonishment, and its aftermath, to the perception of the holy, whether conceived of as a sacred place, object, or divinity.7
Most important for the present purpose is the epistemological premise Burke articulated through his observations: the sacred is experienced especially in wild, untamed nature, for example, in powerful oceans, dangerous dark forests, and encounters with fierce, wild animals:
Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror. . . . The ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.8
Moreover, the angry cries of animals “may be productive of the sublime” and the least-tame and most-powerful animals evoke the sublime. Beauty, on the other hand, Burke associated with mere pleasures and with the emotion commonly called love: “The sublime and beautiful are built on principles very different, and that their affections are as different: the great has terror for its basis; which, when it is modified, cause that emotion in the mind, which I have called astonishment; the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul that feeling, which is called love.”9
From this passage it is easy to see why there would be tension between Burke and Rousseau. On the one hand, “Rousseau . . . heaped such praise on the sublimity of wilderness scenes in the Alps that it stimulated a generation of artists and writers to adopt the Romantic mode.”10 But unlike Rousseau, who found a close association between beauty and the sublime in nature, Burke found natural beauty (and its associated emotion, love) different from and inferior to astonishment and the sublime. This difference also reflects their political disagreements. While Rousseau believed that in a true state of nature there is sublime harmony, equality, beauty, and contentment, for Burke the natural state was one in which the powerful (people and animals) inevitably evoked feelings of the sublime in others and thereby easily and properly ruled over them.
There are, nevertheless, important affinities between these otherwise competing visions. Both Rousseau and Burke are Enlightenment figures who started not with religious revelation but with sensory experience and observation. As Adam Phillips put it with regard to Burke, “In Burke’s Enquiry . . . we find the beginnings of a secular language for profound human experience: in rudimentary form an erotic empiricism.”11 The same could be said of Rousseau, and even of Kant, whose own book on beauty and the sublime seems a derivative of Burke’s (published seven years earlier).12 This turn toward the sensuous experience in nature as the key to both secular and sacred knowledge became central to the romantic movement, which then fertilized the ground for many subsequent forms of nature religion in the West.
These eighteenth-century figures were extremely important to subsequent developments related to nature religion and dark green religion. They represented an epistemological turn toward viewing nature itself as the source for the direct human apprehension of the sacred. Moreover, they raised a set of related issues that would be dramatically contested during the following generations: In political philosophy—is one form of political organization “natural” and somehow consecrated by its embeddedness in nature, properly understood? And in environmental ethics—are some organisms more valuable than others? Although none of these figures promoted what in contemporary parlance would be called intrinsic value theory (in accord with Western culture at the time, they were anthropocentric), they opened the door to considering that wild nature and wild creatures have special value and deserve respect. In this, they countered much that was typical of the Scientific Revolution, at least in its mechanistic form as led by Francis Bacon (from the early seventeenth century), which viewed nonhuman organisms as having only instrumental value for human beings.
Indeed, from the late eighteenth century in western Europe, ideas about the sublime and the beautiful in nature—and related political and ethical ideas—were fully in play within the romantic movements growing rapidly there, and were finding expression in philosophy, poetry, visual art, and music. These powerful movements have too many dimensions to do more than identify a handful of the most influential writers, in addition to Burke and Rousseau: Goethe, Shelling, Blake, and Wordsworth. More important is that this broad movement grew as people were increasingly alienated from rural landscapes during the Industrial Revolution; and that unease was in part grounded in growing concern about the negative effects of industrialization and a corresponding nostalgia for a time when people were closer to nature. While often represented as a rebellion against Enlightenment thinking in favor of an interior spirituality and affective connection to nature, the priority of direct experience that these romantic movements represented actually had affinity with the empirical emphasis of Enlightenment epistemologies, which subverted faith in divinely revealed religions. Romanticism also fueled the democratic and republican impulse, as problematic and violent as this sometimes was.
By the early nineteenth century, romanticism began to influence significantly the literate classes in America as they became acquainted with romantic writers and artists, some of whom visited America to experience wild nature in all of its sublime power.13 These writers and artists reshaped the perceptual horizons of the urban intelligentsia, many of whom took to romantic ideals with an enthusiasm equal to their European counterparts. That Americans could see wild landscapes retreating rapidly also contributed to the impulse, while imbuing American romanticism from early on with a deeper environmental concern than romanticism in Europe. An appreciation for the sacred dimensions of nature rapidly gained momentum; and this development had many sources.
Deism—based on Christian teachings purged of their supernatural elements and traceable to mid-seventeenth-century Europe—for example, has long contributed to nature religion in America. Deists understand God to be revealed exclusively through the laws of nature. The deistic third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, exemplifies how deistic thinking contributed to the sense of the land’s sacredness. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) linked the “sacred fire” of liberty to people’s connection to the land. Additionally, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a number of prominent figures from the Religious Society of Friends (popularly known as the Quakers) conveyed their own perceptions of nature’s sacredness and articulated a kinship ethic with nonhuman creatures.14
Many famous nineteenth-century Americans promoted the idea of the sublime in nature. The art of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School painters depicted wildlands as mysterious, sacred places. The poet William Cullen Bryant’s “A Forest Hymn” (1825) exalted the Creator’s hand that could be found in the very forests that most European Americans had previously found perilous. Walt Whitman, an even more famous poet, wrote in Leaves of Grass (1855), “This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and animals,” articulating an early, religious kinship ethic.15 The novelist James Fenimore Cooper, in his five-part Leatherstocking tales (1826–1841), not only expressed reverence for nature, but an appreciation for Native American lifeways, understood to be dependent on and embedded in nature. Cooper’s perspective later became typical of much environmentalist thinking, especially the dark green sort; but this stance was also evident in early calls for nature preservation, such as when in 1832 George Catlin, “an early student and painter of the American Indian,” was the first to promote setting aside large national parks that would include both wild natural beauty as well as Indians. Susan Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper’s daughter, added her own contributions, including in Rural Hours (1850), which the historian Lawrence Buell has called “the first major work of American literary bioregionalism.”16 She articulated a number of the views then being advanced by Henry David Thoreau, such as a preference for natural over domesticated landscapes and a deep, affective connection to the land.17
Better known are developments that gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, some of them precipitated by the transcendentalists, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and advanced influentially through his essay “Nature” (1836). Emerson articulated, in sometimes novel ways, a number of themes that would appear repeatedly in nature religions and dark green religion, including a mystical/pantheistic sense of belonging to nature, animistic perceptions, an epistemological call to experience nature directly, a belief that all natural objects can awaken reverence, a critique of the shallow and myopic human cultures that do not have such understandings, and a claim that spiritual understanding in nature comes more easily to children than adults. The following passages from the first section of “Nature” convey these themes and Emerson’s style in expressing them:
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. . . .
In the woods, too, a man casts off his years. . . . Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.18
Emerson shared Edmund Burke’s belief that the sublime is to be found in wild nature but rejected Burke’s contention that such encounters were tethered to fear and horror. In this, Emerson exhibited the sentimental view of nature that characterized most post-Burkean romanticism.
Some interpreters assert that Emerson’s Platonic idealism led him to view nature more as the pathway to spiritual truth than as a spiritual end, making environmental concern difficult to achieve.19 Yet Emerson contributed decisively to the dramatic rise in nature spirituality in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and it is hard to imagine what contemporary nature religion and environmentalism would look like without him. Emerson’s influence on Henry David Thoreau and John Muir has certainly been well documented, but they were, by most accounts, more interested in nature itself than was Emerson. The present question, however, is whether Thoreau and Muir are more suitable exemplars of dark green religion than Emerson. A further question is whether they set in motion trends that precipitated such spirituality.
The answer to the first question turns on two main issues: (1) Did Thoreau and Muir come to understand nature as sacred and/or its creatures as beings with whom one could be in a consecrated relationship? That is, did these thinkers embrace a pantheistic, animistic, or otherwise pagan spirituality, moving beyond a view of nature as spiritually important only as a means of understanding truths beyond it? (2) And did Thoreau and Muir exhibit a biocentric perspective with a corresponding kinship ethic?
Definitive answers in the case of Thoreau are complicated because he died at forty-four years of age (in April 1862), when he was in the middle of many scientific and literary projects. Most provocatively, his thinking was in transition, having read Darwin’s Origins of Species in February 1860 (it was published in London on 24 November 1859). Although Thoreau clearly found Darwin’s theory compelling, he had little time to fully assimilate its implications. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify in Thoreau’s writing at least eight themes that would become common in dark green religion. These are documented in the Thoreau excerpts, provided in the appendix, which I recommend reading concurrently with the summary of the following eight themes:
The simple, natural, and undomesticated (free) life. Thoreau’s loyalty was more to nature in general, and wild nature in particular, than to the city and what he considered the banalities and evils common in human societies. This includes his notion that wild animals and plants are preferable to domesticated ones and that citified humans are inferior to those who are in touch with their animal nature and in communion with the wider natural world. Most people, he thought, are desperate to be free from the meaningless and trivial prison that characterizes most human civilization; but they do not even know what they need or are missing, for they toil in meaningless pursuit of material things. If they become perceptive they will see that in wildness is the salvation of people and the rest of nature. With such recognition they can work with rather than against nature—which is in the interest of all life and nature herself.
The wisdom of nature. For Thoreau, wisdom and knowledge come through direct experience of nature. Thoreau’s embrace of his animality is the basis of his epistemological sensuality. In places, however, he expressed a puritan distaste of sexuality, which he viewed as unimportant compared to the pursuit of the proper way to live in the world. Yet he craved direct, visceral, and personal contact with all of wild nature; he sought to belong to it and to understand his embeddedness in it, even though in some of his writings he is inconsistent in this regard. Thoreau thus held in creative tension an empirical understanding of nature (which grew in importance over time) combined with an intuitive, personal, and affective relationship with the natural world. He strongly opposed any kind of positivistic reductionism that would hinder communion between people and natural forces and beings.
A religion of nature. Thoreau’s thinking can be considered religious in view of his emphasis on the sense of belonging to nature, but many other dimensions to his thinking and life practice also can be seen as religious. He related experiences and perceptions that could variously be called pagan (or heathen), pantheistic (or organicist)—including notions of the sublime in nature—and animistic (although some of these terms can only be applied after the fact because they had yet to be coined when Thoreau was alive, such as with Animism). Additionally, he made it clear that he was post-Christian, indicating at one point that he had much to learn from Indians (and implicitly from their spirituality and life practices) but nothing to learn from missionaries or even from Christ.20 He expressed neither a fear of death nor belief in an afterlife, apart from delight with the idea of being reunited with nature in a fitting homecoming. Indeed, in his most mature thinking Thoreau seemed convinced that there was a divine dimension to the universe and that science alone could not and never would be able to account fully for the sacredness of nature or our affective and spiritual lives in nature, even though he appeared to believe that the actual characteristics of the divine forces of nature were beyond human ken. Despite acknowledging the mysteries of life to the end of his own, he maintained a strong faith and trust in nature, metaphorically expressed in his last manuscript when he confessed “faith in a seed,” namely, that life would continue to renew itself.21
Laws of nature and justice. Thoreau expressed outrage over slavery early in his life and considered the U.S. government evil for allowing it. He also disapproved of U.S. imperial ventures and expressed sympathy for the plight of American Indians. He encouraged civil disobedience and resistance to laws he thought unjust, arguing that they were unnatural and illegitimate. His criticism of government was so strong that many subsequently considered his social philosophy libertarian if not anarchistic. Thoreau cannot accurately be said to be either, in part because he rejected what he considered to be status-seeking and pretentious philanthropy (which he clearly considered most political activity to represent), and in part because he was not optimistic enough about human nature to endorse utopian hopes and expectations. Indeed, he was impatient with impractical, philosophical hairsplitting and more interested in real-world change than in utopian social philosophy; instead, he signaled the possibility of a harmonious existence with nature if people would learn from her and, through simple and wise living, act in concert with her. His central recognition was of the interdependence (and mutual dependence) of all aspects of nature.
An ecocentric moral philosophy. Contemporary scholars debate the extent to which Thoreau achieved a biocentric or ecocentric point of view. Partisans of ecocentrism can cite many more passages in which such moral sentiments are eloquently presented, however, than there are passages inconsistent with such a perspective. It seems clear that Thoreau expressed a sense of love and kinship with wild nature that moved dramatically toward life-centered ethics: he rejected the prevalent, anthropocentric notion that the proper role of humanity was to dominate nature; he urged vegetarianism with increasing intensity (while sometimes celebrating the wildness involved in killing and eating animals); and he attacked hubris, including the homocentric belief that humans could “improve” the land. Closely related was his criticism of the commodification of land, and he spoke approvingly of Native American societies that held land and waters in common.
Loyalty to and the interconnectedness of nature. All of the above contribute to understanding the interconnectedness of everything in nature and to deep feelings of belonging and connection to her. Such perceptions and feelings corresponded to an epistemological and political turn to the local—to the bioregion—and to all of its inhabitants. Moral and spiritual growth comes from a long-term engagement with nature that is both open-hearted and empirical. This depends on a reorientation of observations and loyalties concerning the nature to which a person has access, namely, to the local bioregion. When this occurs people understand they belong to nature and are mutually dependent on her—and that defending and protecting nature and wild animals is critically important to human well-being. When people understand these interconnections, human pettiness and repressive behavior will decline. To Thoreau, recognizing one’s place in nature also meant an appreciation for one’s own eventual reuniting with the earth after death.
Moral evolution: the necessity of human moral/spiritual/scientific growth. Thoreau had a complicated moral anthropology that was related to all of the above points. In many ways he was disaffected from mainstream society and preferred solitude in and communion with nature. He nevertheless also sought and maintained close friendships throughout his life and clearly enjoyed nontrivial human sociality. At the same time he thought that most people were shallow and hubristic, that many perpetuated or were indifferent to injustice, and that few had insight into reality or how to live properly. Those with more distance from what he considered superficial and unhealthy civilized lifestyles potentially had more legitimacy, but even this approval was a reserved one. He believed, for example, that some rural people, and especially indigenous peoples, had a depth of insight and wisdom unfamiliar to most Europeans (especially in recognizing the spiritual dimensions and value of wild nature). But despite being drawn to native people (he studied them in depth and sought out their company), he could also be condescending, viewing them as superstitious and unscientific, unable to provide a model for civilized humanity. Nevertheless, at various points Thoreau indicated that he thought European Americans could learn from them how to develop kinship with nonhuman living things; and he believed that if this were to occur, it would lead people to design townships with sensitivity to nature, to give up eating animals, and to otherwise protect and restore the natural environment.
Ambivalence and enigma. By and large, the trajectory of Thoreau’s writings pointed beyond anthropocentrism and Western dualism toward a metaphysics of interconnection and belonging. Thoreau mused in ways both animistic and pantheistic, expressing a reverence for life and intimating a biocentric kinship ethics. He also expressed respect for the animistic (and sometimes pantheistic) spiritualities of American Indian and Asian cultures, as he understood them. Yet some of his writings suggest he had not consistently adopted such views and was skeptical even about animistic and pantheistic experiences of his own that had moved him greatly. At times Thoreau appeared torn between his scientific and spiritual epistemologies of nature. Ultimately, however, he valued and sought to integrate both into his worldview. He did not wish to dismiss his most intimate experiences in nature, including his animistic ones. This helps explain why he never embraced without qualification positivistic science. If his writings exhibit ambivalence, enigma, and some inconsistency, they also reveal an ambivalent resolution in his fusion of spiritual and scientific perspectives.
For three reasons, I have provided detailed documentation for the just-summarized themes in appendix A: First, because of Thoreau’s importance. He is properly considered to be the most important innovator of American environmental thought.22 Second, despite the substantial attention he has received, his religiosity is poorly understood—and the only way to appreciate it fully is to read the critical passages, which the appendix provides in one place. Third, the appendix allows readers to evaluate my interpretation by reviewing the passages upon which it is based.
Given Thoreau’s intellectual dynamism and ambivalence about certain matters, it is not surprising that he would be interpreted differently. Catherine Albanese, for example, concluded that Thoreau retained a transcendentalist perspective throughout his life despite becoming more comfortable with nature itself than did Emerson. Transcendentalism expressed a perennial religious dilemma in a distinctly American form, she argued, the philosophical tug-of-war between an understanding “of matter as ‘really real,’ the embodiment of Spirit and the garment of God, and—on the other hand—a view of matter as illusion and unreality, ultimately a trap from which one needed to escape.” According to Albanese, in the end “Thoreau did move further than the older, more conservative Emerson toward the spiritual paganism of one kind of nature religion. But he never fully got there. . . . Thoreau had not found the world illusory . . . but . . . he had found it penultimate.”23 If she is correct and nature was penultimate for Thoreau, he could hardly be the true intellectual godfather of deep ecological biocentrism, as many today claim.
Albanese found support for her conclusion in Donald Worster’s statement that Thoreau vacillated “between pagan naturalism and a transcendental moral vision.”24 But she did not also cite Worster’s next sentence: “What remains is to suggest that these polarities could become complementary views rather than simple opposites.” Nor did she mention that he afterward quoted passages in which Thoreau indicated that he “reverenced” both his mystical spirituality and his “primitive savage life.” Indeed, Worster has underscored his belief that “pagan animism” was a central aspect of Thoreau’s religiosity, averring that Thoreau maintained this perception simultaneously with his neo-Platonic/idealistic, transcendental beliefs.25 Lawrence Buell also seemed to agree with Albanese’s interpretation when he wrote that she “rightly insists that although Thoreau moved further toward ‘spiritual paganism’ than Emerson, ‘he never fully got there,’ at least not by the time Walden was completed.” However, Buell’s last clause was a significant qualification, which he followed by observing that Thoreau’s “personal intimacy with nature continued to grow, notwithstanding his increasingly scientific approach to nature study.”26
Others familiar with Thoreau have been less reluctant to consider him as a pagan or deep ecologist. Emerson himself seemed to recognize Thoreau’s ecocentrism when he paid “tribute to him as the attorney of the indigenous plants.”27 The scientist Joseph Wood Krutch, who would achieve near-canonical status within the growing pantheon of twentieth-century nature writers (and dark green religion proponents), praised Thoreau’s “reproach to anthropocentrism.” Krutch was, moreover, certain that Thoreau “would have opposed the later desacralization of wilderness,” and he also perceived in Thoreau’s writings both animistic and pantheistic themes.28 The philosopher/historian Max Oelschlaeger agreed, concluding that Thoreau anticipated a biocentric perspective and achieved an almost mythic, organicist, and animistic consciousness, which Oelschlaeger also speculated was common among Paleolithic hunter-foraging peoples (and presumably also among contemporary indigenous peoples).29
In The Rights of Nature, Roderick Nash made a similar point, citing as evidence of Thoreau’s antianthropocentrism his 1852 statement, “There is no place for man-worship,” and quoting a number of passages that express kinship with nonhuman animals. “Thoreau was not only unprecedented in these ideas,” Nash concluded, “he was virtually alone in holding them.”30 Additionally, Thoreau biographer David Robinson was one of many who concluded that Thoreau’s perceptions have affinities with deep ecology.31
Answering several additional questions might account for some of the differences in interpretation. Was Thoreau gravitating more toward the naturalistic than the transcendentalist pole of his spirituality in his final years? If so, was this in part due to his reading, barely two years before his death, of Darwin’s Origin of Species? Should Thoreau be considered an early exemplar and inspiration for dark green religion? Like all people, of course, Thoreau was a creature of his time and social milieu; what seem to be unique ideas often have identifiable precursors. He was certainly influenced by Euro-American nature romanticism and agrarian literature, social justice–oriented liberal Christianity and transcendentalism, and what he learned of Asian and American Indian religions. Yet in a novel way he integrated such influences with scientific knowledge as well as with his personal and sometimes mystical experiences in nature. The outcome was, I think, an early expression of dark green religion, perhaps the earliest that can be clearly identified in American literature.
In considering Thoreau as a dark green religionist, one can find evidence of both Naturalistic Animism and Gaian Naturalism. These naturalistic spiritualities grew stronger during his final years as his interest in philosophical abstraction and transcendentalism weakened.32 Given Thoreau’s strong and clear turn toward a sensuous (scientific) epistemology, had he lived longer and had more time to assimilate the Darwinian worldview, I think that he would have continued to gravitate toward a more naturalistic nature spirituality.
In analyzing where Thoreau might best be located on the ecospiritual and moral spectrum, this question is provocative: To which social groups would Thoreau have been drawn had he been living and writing around and after the first Earth Day in 1970? During his time there was no neopagan, deep ecology, radical environmental, or green anarchist movement; there was only at most an inkling of an environmental movement. Had he lived during a time characterized by greater social support for feelings and ideas like his, he likely would have been engaged with and expressed affinity for such related movements, just as he did with the transcendentalists, the closest social group available during his time. Had he lived in the second half of the twentieth century instead of the mid-nineteenth, I would not be surprised to hear Thoreau call himself a pagan, given his periodic sympathetic references to pagan writers and myths and his animistic and pantheistic perceptions; nor would I be surprised if he called himself a deep ecologist or radical environmentalist, given that he wrote some of the earliest and strongest antianthropocentric statements in American letters, while also expressing at least protobiocentric sentiments.33 These leanings were also combined with a strongly articulated rationale for resisting social and environmental evils, which could easily be drawn upon as a rationale for radical tactics.
More important than these conjectures is how Thoreau has been understood by thinkers and activists during and since his own time. Thoreau has become something of a Rorschach test for people—he is taken as an exemplary social-justice advocate, antiwar crusader, abolitionist, conservationist, deep ecologist, radical environmentalist, and even as an anarchist. These interpretations are often a projection by the interpreters who wish to consider him one of their own. One thing is clear: many who have been engaged in the production and spread of dark green religion have taken inspiration from Thoreau and consider him an ecospiritual elder. Certainly, deep ecologists and radical environmentalists have enthusiastically embraced him. On a number of occasions in green enclaves I have heard activists speak of Thoreau’s writings as sacred texts; writings by others evoke similar reverence, typically those by John Muir and Aldo Leopold but also increasingly those of Rachel Carson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Loren Eiseley, and a number of others. Analysis of these figures and their influence could be possible with all environmental writers who appear to be on the way to canonization.
An analysis of dark green religious leadership would also observe the ways in which those moved by Thoreau’s writing often make pilgrimages to the sites where he lived or traveled. The pilgrims seek to enter imaginatively into his spiritual and moral world and to pay their respects to if not venerate their prophet-saint.34 The Thoreau scholars among them might even be considered priests of Thoreauvian religion. (I am aware that this analytical lens could also be turned on me to suggest that I am another scholar engaged in canon formation, both with regard to Thoreau and the other luminaries I spotlight in this book.) Such observations indicate that while Thoreau has typically been considered an intellectual elder of the environmental movement, he has also played a pivotal role as a spiritual elder, which helps account for the persistence of his influence.
To provide just two more examples of how interest in Thoreau’s life and teachings resembles the kind of religious productivity that often surrounds charismatic religious leaders: Many volumes have been devoted to Thoreau’s works and commentary on them. This resembles the intensity of effort that Christian biblical scholars and theologians have put into understanding that tradition’s sacred texts. Intense exegetical work suggests that there is something special if not sacred about a text. For a second example, Robert Richardson Jr., one of many devoted Thoreau scholars, concluded his introduction to a volume that published for the first time many of Thoreau’s most mature writings with words that show the ongoing salience of the Thoreauvian pilgrimage. After noting that Thoreau once told a dear friend, “When I die you will find swamp oak written on my heart,” Richardson wrote, “On my next visit to Walden Pond, I think I will put an acorn instead of a stone on the growing cairn that marks the place where he lived.”35 This expressed intention is beyond scholarship—Richardson planned to participate in a popular ritual of veneration and commemoration.
The Western calendar divides history into periods before and after Christ. If the many interpreters who consider Thoreau a watershed figure are correct, then the extensive attention I have devoted to him is merited. A demarcation of time, such as AHDT, might amusingly make the point.
There have been other seminal figures in the historical emergence and fecundity of dark green religion, of course. In the remainder of this chapter I discuss John Burroughs and John Muir. They were both influenced by Thoreau and represent two main streams of dark green religion that flowed from him. The first involves a bioregional impulse, the quest to return to and commune and live in harmony with nature in a particular ecoregion. The second involves an activist impulse, whose chief moral priority is to engage in political action to prevent the desecration of nature.
I devote less space to the American naturalist and essayist John Burroughs (1837–1921), because although he was popular in his time his influence did not endure to the extent of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Consequently, Burroughs has been less of a canonical figure in the minds of those engaged in dark green religion. Nevertheless, he was a remarkable figure and one who might well be poised for cultural resurrection.
Growing up in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs was deeply influenced by Emerson as well as by the poets Wordsworth and Whitman, who became friends. After completing seminary and securing a job as a U.S. Treasury Department bank examiner, in 1871, Burroughs began publishing a steady stream of essays. In 1874, while still working in New York City, he purchased a farm. By 1886 he withdrew entirely from urban life, focusing much of his writing on his new life as a farmer and promoting a simple, agrarian life. In this, Burroughs was exemplary of the Arcadian impulse in American culture and a progenitor of bioregionalism. This Arcadian vision is rooted in the idea that rural and pastoral landscapes are idyllic places where communities flourish. Burroughs was also deeply influenced by Darwin and took a dramatic turn toward a naturalistic form of dark green religion, while retaining traces of a mystery-infused Pantheism (or Panentheism), which suggests that he never rejected his Emersonian roots. He seemed to retain a belief (or hope) that a divine consciousness remained mysteriously behind the natural world that he considered sacred.36 In this he was complicated and contradictory, which he acknowledged in his later works.37
Whatever ambiguities and seeming contradictions one discovers in his writings, a number of themes emerge that clearly express dark green perception. Among these is a rejection of theistic religion and anthropocentrism; a feeling of delight, wonder, reverence, and belonging to nature as well as ecological appreciation for all natural processes—we should even gladly accept death as a wellspring of life.
When we come to see that the celestial and the terrestrial are one, that time and eternity are one, that mind and matter are one, that death and life are one, that there is and can be nothing not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look for or expect a far-off, unknown God.38
Nature exists for man no more than she does for monkeys, and is as regardless of his life or pleasure or success as she is of fleas. . . . [While] man is at the top in his own estimation . . . Nature values him only as manure—squanders him as recklessly as autumn leaves.39
We must get rid of the great moral governor, or head director. He is a fiction of our brains. We must recognize only Nature, the All, call it God if we will, but divest it of all anthropological conceptions. Nature we know; we are of it; we are in it.40
The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe—persists. . . . If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were.
. . . Death is a phase of life, a redistribution of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.41
Like so many before and since, however, Burroughs did not find it easy to accept the evolutionary and “animal origin of man.” But once he did, he integrated evolution into a post-theistic nature religion, writing, “It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life, because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.”42 Not incidentally, here Burroughs echoed the heart of Darwin’s conclusion to Origin of Species.
According to Rebecca Gould, who has written about Burroughs and the nature-oriented spiritualities of the American back-to-the land and homesteading movements that he helped inspire, Burroughs’s dilemma represented “the competing influences of Emerson and Darwin on his own view of nature [and also] . . . gave voice to the cultural anxieties of his age, anxieties about having to choose between outmoded Christian doctrine and a secularized world without meaning.”43 This is certainly true, as is her judgment that homesteading movements are engaged in “a post-Enlightenment historical process, one more far reaching than is often assumed” wherein people turn “to nature for moral authority and spiritual renewal.” Gould views Burroughs as an especially good example of this stance because he “was quite intentionally . . . relocating religion” in nature itself. Burroughs has this in common with what I am calling dark green religion, a religion that challenges conventional definitions and that represents a much more widespread religious shift than is usually recognized.
Gould also examined how Burroughs became a popular figure and his farm a pilgrimage site. This dynamic resembles Thoreauvian pilgrimages, as when several decades after Burroughs lived, two prominent vegetarians and socialists, Helen and Scott Nearing, left urban life to return to the land, first in Vermont and later in Maine.44 As Gould put it: “Like Burroughs in his time, the Nearings became representative symbols for the spiritual benefits of living close to nature and away from a materialist society. Helen’s Theosophical background (which included a belief in reincarnation and a reverence for the sacred in nature) and Scott’s early Social Gospel . . . shaped their back-to-the-land experiments, which centered on organic gardening, strict vegetarianism, pacifism, anti-materialism and a staunch work ethic.” Many who flocked to the Nearings’ homestead during the 1960s and 1970s “continued to live rurally and practice relative self-sufficiency through growing their own food and producing local crafts.”45
Gould aptly labeled stories about homesteading and the decision to do so—by Burroughs, the Nearings, and their followers—as “conversion narratives.”46 Research exploring back-to-the-land and bioregional movements makes it clear that what people in such movements convert to is one or another form of dark green religion.47 The streams of dark green religion that flow from Thoreau through Burroughs and the Nearings continued in the bioregional movement after Earth Day.48 A related channel flows from Thoreau through John Muir and his progeny, who instead prioritized the preservation of nature over simple rural living.
Muir is better known in American culture today than Burroughs, the Nearings, or other bioregional figures and movements, in part because he founded the Sierra Club in 1892, which has become one of the world’s most influential conservation organizations. No one was more instrumental in inaugurating the era of environmental activism than Muir.
Born in Scotland in 1838, John Muir immigrated to rural Wisconsin as a youngster. In 1861 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he developed an interest in geology and natural science. Muir subsequently enjoyed brief success as an inventor and manufacturing foreman before suffering an eye injury that temporarily blinded him. Nearly losing his sight convinced him he should pursue his deeper longings for nature. When sufficiently healed, he began long wanderings that were prompted in part by transcendentalist writings (including Emerson and Thoreau) and by the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), whose pathbreaking analyses help account for Muir’s keen awareness of ecological interdependence.
Thus inspired, Muir became an adventurer, naturalist, writer, and eventually the driving force behind the Sierra Club, which promoted the preservation of wilderness and provided the underlying philosophy that, at least in theory, would shape the management strategies of the National Park Service in the United States. This philosophy was in turn incorporated into international national parks movements in subsequent generations. Despite his important role in shaping the national parks model domestically and internationally, Muir’s sense of the sacredness of nature as the ground for environmental protection may be his most enduring legacy.
Although there are, as with Thoreau, contending interpretations of Muir’s spirituality, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Muir’s tendencies were first and foremost animistic and pantheistic. His prose is indebted variously to transcendentalism and romanticism (nature as sublime weaves throughout his descriptions of dramatic natural areas, intimate beautiful places, and scenes involving weather-related transitions). He also regularly invoked God in his writings, including expressions of gratitude to the Deity for nature’s beauty, which some readers have interpreted as evidence of theism.49 A more likely interpretation is that Muir thought it politically useful to use language that would be compelling to the various publics he sought to enlist in the cause of environmental protection, which included romantics, transcendentalists, and theists. Two seminal studies portray Muir as more pagan than theistic.50
Certainly Muir’s writing often viciously (and humorously) attacked the Christian thinking prevalent in his day. Although neither anthropocentrism nor biocentrism had been coined, he clearly had contempt for the former and affinity with the latter. Indeed, while Muir echoed most of the themes articulated earlier by Thoreau, his biocentric moral sentiments were more consistently and clearly expressed than Thoreau’s. Muir heaped scorn, for example, on the arrogant human “conceit” that the world was made entirely for man, an idea Muir associated with Christianity. He promoted the sense of kinship he felt with all forms of life by writing about other species as “peoples,” such as of “precious plant peoples” and even “insect peoples.”51 By portraying them as persons, Muir subtly implied that human persons have obligations to them. Muir likened wildlands to sacred places, sometimes calling them holy and often using the romantic trope “sublime” to express the same idea.
This linking of wildness with sacredness led Muir to contrast wild places with civilized and domesticated spaces, viewing humans and their domesticated animals as agents of desecration. He evocatively expressed a deep sense of belonging, connection, and loyalty to nature (even at times intimating a greater loyalty to nature than to human society). He spoke regularly of feeling “Nature’s love” from mountains, waterfalls, plants, birds, and other animals, which may explain why he also believed in the healing power of wild places. Muir found a divine harmony in nature that was absent in human civilization and articulated many now-famous and often-quoted aphorisms of metaphysical and ecological interdependence. He also wrote of dramatic, ecstatic experiences in nature that, like much mysticism, erased his perception of individuality and intensified his feelings of being a part of a great cosmic whole, such as when he felt rescued by a mysterious natural force while engaged in dangerous mountaineering. Such experiences gave his life meaning and reinforced his sense of the sacred power of nature, even suggesting an organicist perception that the earth is alive and the idea that interspecies communication is possible. Muir’s enthusiasm about a Yosemite earthquake is telling. He wrote in a letter to Emerson that its rumblings “are the first spoken words that I have heard direct from the tender bosom of mother earth.”52 These perceptions can be summed up in what may be his most famous aphorism: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” But equally representative is the next, more animistic line, which is far less often quoted: “One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as fellow mountaineers.”53
Despite the pantheistic and animistic perceptions that are apparent to the alert reader, Muir also seemed to express, or at least to consider, an entirely naturalistic nature religion, one that is reminiscent of Thoreau’s later thinking. Like Thoreau (and Burroughs), Muir understood death not as something to be feared or escaped but rather appreciated as a part of nature’s beautiful cycle.
Muir’s biocentrism is evident in his earliest writings. Although his feelings of connection to nature had roots in his childhood, his nature mysticism apparently crystallized in an epiphany he had when he was twenty-five years old (in 1864). Encountering a rare white orchid, Calypso borealis, he exclaimed, “I never before saw a plant so full of life; so perfectly spiritual, it seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.”54 According to Stephen Fox, “years later [Muir] ranked this encounter along with meeting Emerson [in Yosemite in 1871] as the two supreme moments in his life,” which suggests the long-term influence of the transcendentalists as well as Muir’s central epistemological premise: that one must seek spiritual experience and wisdom directly in wild nature.55
The development of Muir’s nature-grounded spirituality was further recorded in journal entries penned during his long walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867 (posthumously published as A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf) and during his first encounter with California’s most spectacular mountains in 1869 (recalled in My First Summer in the Sierra).56 Passages from both books—along with essays first written a little later, published originally between 1875 and 1882 and then printed together in The Mountains of California (1894)—provide a feeling for Muir’s passionate and often humorous style as well as for the substance of his religious environmental ethics.
The essay “Cedar Keys,” written at the end of Muir’s walk to the gulf near where the Suwannee River meets Florida’s Gulf Coast, expressed many of the views for which he would eventually become famous. In what was then a stunning and direct rejection of anthropocentrism he wrote: “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.”57 He then lampooned those who believed that the Creator made everything for people, asking, “Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him?” He continued sardonically: “In the same pleasant plan, whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells.” Then he concluded with his definitive evidence: “venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that whole world was not made for him [man].”58
After citing additional examples to debunk anthropocentric conceit, Muir expressed a contrasting spirituality, one that involved kinship with nonhuman organisms and animistic perceptions regarding many of them. He even suggested an ethics in which one’s sense of self extends affectively beyond one’s own human body in a way that presaged Arne Naess’s notion of the deep, ecological self. Muir’s reflections also anticipated the idea of a sacred “Universe Story,” popularized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries foremost by the Catholic priest and “geologian” Thomas Berry.59 For example, Muir wrote:
Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit–the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry “Heresy” on everyone whose sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. . . .
Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?60
This passage also reveals his animistic perception.
Another sentence, originally in a section of Muir’s journal that became “Cedar Keys,” suggested not only biocentrism but discomfort with human beings and their societies: “I have precious little sympathy for the myriad bat eyed proprieties of civilized man, and if a war of the races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man I would be tempted to side with the bears.”61 This passage was abandoned before publication. Perhaps Muir or an editor thought it would be too controversial, that it would distract readers from Muir’s already radical environmental message. The passage displaced humanity from the seat of exclusive moral consideration and would have directly challenged what Muir considered to be hubristic “ecclesiastical fires and blunders.” Indeed, apparently feeling that he had prevailed against such errors, Muir concluded in his published account, “I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.”62 This hints at a naturalistic spirituality and suggests that, for Muir, nature was sufficient as a sacred source.63
By 1869, Muir was recording in his personal journal most of the remaining perceptions and convictions that would propel him to prominence in America’s fledgling environmental-protection movements. In eventually published journal passages that recounted his first summer in the Sierra Nevada, for example, Muir described the mountains as “The Range of Light” and places in it as “holy” and its trees “sublime,” even labeling its stone cliffs “altars” and speaking of “stone sermons” that revealed divine truths.64 About Yosemite (which became a national park), Muir wrote, “No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this Mountain Park—Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime.” And in a passage focusing on Cathedral Peak, one of the most impressive granite spires in Yosemite, Muir wrote:
No feature, however, of all the noble landscape as seen from here seems more wonderful than the Cathedral itself, a temple displaying Nature’s best masonry and sermons in stones. How often I have gazed at it from tops of hills and ridges, and through openings in the forest on my many short excursions, devoutly wondering, admiring, longing! This I might say is the first time I have been at church in California, led here at last, every door graciously opened to the poor lonely worshiper. In our best of times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.65
This was for Muir a lasting perception. A few years later, writing about the alpenglow of the High Sierra evening, Muir wrote similarly:
Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me one of the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting like devout worshipers. Just before the alpenglow began to fade, two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of flame, rendering the sublime scene yet more impressive; then came darkness and the stars.66
This was in a passage describing his long “first assent” to the summit of Mount Ritter, one of the tallest and most imposing peaks in the Sierra Nevada. The following day, scrambling up a talus slope toward a glacial lake nestled below Ritter and its slightly lower cousin Mount Banner, he came across cassiope, a rare alpine flower, that moved Muir much like Calypso borealis had earlier: “I met cassiope, growing in fringes among the battered rocks. . . . No evangel among all the mountain plants speaks Nature’s love more plainly than cassiope. Where she dwells, the redemption of the coldest solitude is complete. The very rocks and glaciers seem to feel her presence, and become imbued with her own fountain sweetness.”
Here and elsewhere in The Mountains of California, Muir repeated the idea of nature as a personal, loving, redemptive, and healing presence. This seems prescient given the next part of the story when, after ascending the glacier and then working his way up the dangerous north face of Ritter, he became stuck, unable to ascend or descend, with a dawning realization that his doom had become inevitable:
When this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the first time since setting foot on the mountains, and my mind seemed to fill with a stifling smoke. But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I seemed to suddenly become possessed by a new sense. The other self, bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel,—call it what you will,—came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.
Muir was describing an experience reported by some mountaineers, surfers, and other adventurers, whose sense of self diminishes or seems to disappear entirely during practices that involve mortal danger.67 These people sometimes describe moments of extraordinary clarity as they engage in their practice, in which time slows down and it seems as if an extraordinary force is flowing through them, taking away their agency. Those with such experiences often struggle, as Muir did, to find words to describe what they felt or encountered—they may call it nature, or the universe, or the lifeforce, or God—and it is not unusual for them to attach profound spiritual and moral meaning to such experiences. Such experiences sometimes evoke feelings of connection to nature and perceptions of its sacredness.
This experience of redemption by the mysterious forces of nature helps to explain why Muir’s text is replete with passages about nature’s love and healing power. Nature’s love is expressed, for example, by plants and animals as well as by entities most Westerners would consider inanimate, such as waterfalls. Writing about high mountain passes, Muir urged people not to fear them for they “are full of the finest and most telling examples of Nature’s love; and though hard to travel, none are safer.” Indeed, Muir argued, such places are redemptive both spiritually and physically.68
The perceptions of love and healing coming from nature, as well as the belief that there is no more fitting and authentic death than in a wild place, are typical of dark green religion. Muir also regularly expressed a spirituality of belonging and kinship, another key marker of such religion. During his first summer in the Sierra, Muir referred to its entire high country as “the Sierra Cathedral,” likening it metaphorically to Sinai and thus to divine revelation. But the Sierra Nevada’s revelation differed from Sinai’s: “The Sierra Cathedral, to the south of camp, was overshadowed like Sinai. Never before noticed so fine a union of rock and cloud in form and color and substance, drawing earth and sky together as one; and so human is it, every feature and taint of color goes to one’s heart, and we shout, exulting in wild enthusiasm as if all the divine show were our own. More and more, in a place like this, we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything.”69 This passage followed a paragraph that exulted in the cycles of life and death in which all living things are intertwined.70
This linking of ecologies and metaphysics of connection with an appreciation for the cycles of life, including the regenerative role of death, is common in dark green religion. In mainstream culture, it can also be controversial, and the expression of it subversive. I think Muir intended it that way in an early essay, “Wild Wool,” which he did not include when, decades later, he prepared the manuscript for his book on his first Sierra summer. The immediately preceding quotation (with gentler prose) replaced this earlier, more overtly subversive (and heretical) expression of what is essentially the same idea:
To obtain a hearing on behalf of nature from any other stand-point than that of human use is almost impossible. . . .
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right to understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.
I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation is said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; and no matter what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.
Were it not for the exercise of individualizing cares on the part of nature, the universe would be felted together like a fleece of tame wool. We are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another—killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook, and consume, to the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires. Stars attract each other as they are able, and harmony results. Wild lambs eat as many wild flowers as they can find or desire, and men and wolves eat the lambs to just the same extent. This consumption of one another in its various modifications is a kind of culture varying with the degree of directness with which it is carried out, but we should be careful not to ascribe to such culture any improving qualities upon those on whom it is brought to bear.71
Although Muir did not call this ecological cycle of eating and being eaten, killing and being killed, a sacrament (as Gary Snyder did generations later), he did in his own way treat it as a sacred process, even though he understood it to be entirely natural. For Muir “divinely common” processes are nevertheless miraculous: “The natural and common is more truly marvelous and mysterious than the so-called supernatural. Indeed, most of the miracles we hear of are infinitely less wonderful than the commonest of natural phenomena, when fairly seen.”72 A few years after writing this, Muir confided to one of his dearest friends that he had lost his ability to hear the earth’s voices, as he had during his first years in the mountains.73 In another suggestive passage, after speaking again about sublime wildness and how nature kept him safe by “a thousand miracles,” Muir wrote of “glorying in the eternal freshness and sufficiency of Nature.”74 These passages are among those that lead me to conclude that Muir may well have left behind any vestige of a supernaturalistic worldview, finding nature itself to be absolutely sufficient for his spiritual and religious needs.
Thoreau, Burroughs, and Muir are prototypical of the forms of dark green religion that followed. Although lauded by those who feel affinity with them, these three men have also been considered dangerous or misguided. Thoreau and Burroughs were criticized for their supposed lack of commitment to democratic polity.75 Muir’s occasionally misanthropic statements, his indifference to the injustices faced by the urban poor, Indians, and African slaves, have also drawn harsh criticism.76 So has the national parks model that Muir inspired, which has often displaced indigenous peoples from their lands, a pattern for which some explicitly blame Muir.77 Those engaged in salvation-oriented religions have also considered the forms of nature spirituality expressed by these figures to be a spiritual path to nowhere, or worse. So for some, dark green religions cause real harm and danger.
Whatever one concludes about these seminal figures, their lives pose possibilities and templates for thinking about the nature-related spiritualities that would follow. The next generations have included both charismatic figures and social movements, and the ideas experimented with and promoted by them have increasingly been reflected in American culture at large. Indeed, dark green religion has grown to such an extent that it would take many volumes and authors to explore all of its manifestations. Instead of attempting such a systematic history, I turn to case studies of the irruption and growing, global influence of dark green religion.