The Garden and its Influence on John Muir and the Preservation Movement in the United States
p. 81-94
Texte intégral
“Garden- and park-making goes on everywhere with civilization, for everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul1.”
1For centuries, the Americans have had two contradictory visions concerning their land and its resources: the aesthetic and spiritual value as opposed to the anthropocentric utilitarian use of land in the US. The Europeans who went to the New World were fascinated by the contradictory aspects of the North American continent. Although the Edenic beauty of the landscapes and the mild climate reminded them of an earthly paradise, they were also struck and attracted by the fertility and abundance of the New World, which motivated them to restore an American version of a newly-recovered and fruitful Garden of Eden. The redefinition of the myth of the Garden was at the origin of the concept of national parks in the United States and led to the preservation of the scenic beauties of the West. We will mainly concentrate on the role and legacy of John Muir in the preservation of Western wilderness which had a symbolic value for him and epitomized the original Garden of Eden.
2The challenge of transforming the wilderness into civilized gardens became the mission of generations of pioneers until the late nineteenth century. The agrarian dream dominated American culture until well into the mid nineteenth century. Those who believed in progress and technology tried to shape American mainstream culture for centuries by recovering the Garden of Eden and transforming the wilderness into garden farms. Thus with the advance of civilization and the westward movement, the Americans gradually changed the forests, grasslands and deserts of the frontier into cultivated gardens, but by doing so nature and Eden-like landscapes were gradually changed and their ecological balance destroyed.
3But a change in the vision of nature appeared in the nineteenth century. While those who believed in progress and technology wanted to recover the Garden of Eden, nature lovers started to struggle to recover the original garden by preserving nature and its pristine beauties. Gradually a handful of writers, naturalists and explorers questioned the consequences of progress and technology, and the impact of the “machine in the garden” to use Leo Marx’ expression2. More and more Americans advocated the preservation of the Western land for its beauty in Edenic landscape gardens. Henceforth, pristine nature was glorified and appreciated for its beauty as an antidote to the corrupting vices of civilization.
4One of the most influential voices, that gave shape to the concept of wilderness preservation, was John Muir (1838-1914)3, the cofounder of Sierra Club, known as the “Father of National Parks”. He was also at the origin of the Preservation Movement, a movement that split away from the Conservation Movement in the early twentieth century. John Muir gave voice to a momentous vision of man’s place in nature. Many elements of his writings “have influenced generations of nature (lovers and) writers, and through them, the shape of environmental thinking today4”.
5After a brief introduction to Muir’s background, the first part of this article will trace how he shaped the notion of wilderness and its preservation in the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part will explain the different sources of inspiration of John Muir and his fascination for the Original Garden. The last part will focus on several crusades by preservationists, John Muir and later his followers, to save the American pristine landscapes, while the conservationists had a more pragmatic approach, and how a schism appeared within the Conservation Movement in the early 20th century which illustrated the contradictory attitude towards American land and its resources. The conflict between the idealism of the preservationists and the utilitarian approach of the conservationists embodied the dual vision concerning the myth of the garden in US history which still prevails today.
John Muir’s background and history
6Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Muir was a scientific as well as a poetic voice for the American wilderness. He was a very complex figure, wearing so many hats: he was a trekker, an explorer, a scientific observer, a naturalist, a writer, and a passionate conservationist or more precisely a preservationist. He had also been an inventor, a farmer, and a sheepherder in his life. He was in fact influenced by a myriad of different theological and philosophical tendencies. Muir, who was at the origin of the schism, introduced a biocentric and even theocentric perspective to wilderness preservation, in opposition to the anthropocentric attitude of the conservationists, which gave primacy to human use and interest. His efforts led to the creation of national parks, which he referred to as “landscape gardens”, in an attempt to recover the Garden of Eden, with rivers, animals, flowers and beautiful scenery to be preserved for the use, enjoyment and “spiritual renewal” of the future generations.
7John Muir’s philosophy was based on his own experiences in the wilderness. Born in 1838 in a strict Presbyterian family, the seeds of his passion for nature were planted in his childhood in Scotland and later in the Wisconsin countryside. When he was eleven, the Muir family emigrated from Dunbar5, Scotland, to the US and settled in a homestead in Wisconsin, where he experienced communion with nature’s peace and beauty. In the story of his boyhood in Scotland, which was published in March 1913, less than two years before his death, he described the influence of his family garden in Dunbar, Scotland on his perception of nature, and how his father tried “to make it as much like Eden as possible6”. Each member of the family had a corner and he described how he was impressed by the lilies his aunt grew in her corner of the garden instead of beans and peas and how he admired their beauty but at the same time seemed like a luxury he could not afford. Later he found the same sensation of awe when he came across the wild flowers in what he called the “wild lily gardens of California” that he fought so hard to preserve towards the end of his life, for all generations of Americans to admire in the Yosemite National Park.
8When he immigrated to the US in February 1849, the wilderness became his refuge. “That glorious Wisconsin wilderness” became his “Garden of Eden”, where he escaped from his harsh homestead life with his father, a Calvinistic preacher, who believed the wilderness was home to evil. In his spare time after working long hours in his family homestead, he would take refuge in nature and read about the Romantics and their vision of nature. Thanks to devices he invented, Muir later obtained a grant to study at the University of Wisconsin where he became acquainted with different literary and philosophical tendencies, reconciling religion with the scientific theories of the time. One of his professors, Ezra Carr and his wife, Jeanne, were instrumental to his intellectual developments. He didn’t obtain a degree and left for what he called the “University of the Wilderness” to Canada to escape from the Civil War. There in the remote Canadian countryside, he became yet more attached to wild life forms, such as a rare species of white orchid he wrote about, the Calypso borealis, and realized that those life forms existed for themselves, not for man.
9He moved away from his Judeo-Christian anthropocentric education during his famous four-month walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. After an accident in a Minneapolis factory, where he almost lost his eyesight, he freed himself both from his father’s influence and from factory work and then set on his famous walk to the Gulf Coast. In the description of his “Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf”, he talked about the “forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden”. Finally in 1869, he decided to go to the West where his professors Ezra and Jeanne Carr7 had settled. Muir went to California, to the Yosemite Valley, which he described as “so holy a wilderness”, although he did not go into much depth as he was more of an essayist than a philosopher. He became a shepherd and for ten years wandered through the Sierras, climbing mountains and studying glaciers, further developing his wilderness philosophy and inspiring his most powerful writings in defense of wilderness preservation.
Sources of Muir’s fascination for the Original Garden
Literature and Science
10Muir was influenced by a myriad of literary, scientific and philosophical tendencies. In his youth, he had read the philosophical works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as those of the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, who developed a non-anthropocentric philosophy, and attempted to resacralize the world by identifying God with nature, unlike Descartes who was the leading philosophical spokesman for the Scientific Revolution and believed in human dominion over nature. But Spinoza was not totally ecological because of his utilitarian view of animals. Spinoza’s pantheism influenced some of the leading figures of the European Romantic Movement, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, who in their turn influenced John Muir in developing his philosophy. Some of his writings were also influenced by the Puritan poet, John Milton and his Paradise Lost and his vision of Eden.
11Many 19th century figures also helped shape Muir’s ecological egalitarianism. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Malthus triggered the environmental debate with his population thesis. But his theory was not ecocentric as it concerned the negative effects on humans. The British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who questioned the results of industrial progress, explored Malthus’s theory in a larger ecological perspective. A decade later, Charles Darwin was responsible for another controversy by putting humans into the ecological web of life.
Transcendentalism
12Transcendental philosophy was one of his main sources of influence. During his college years, he read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, which influenced some of his famous articles. For instance, in the American Forests, he extensively quoted both Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalism “provided psychological support for a young man who, like Thoreau before him, was out of step with materialism and American culture8”.
13Muir’s analysis goes much deeper than Emerson’s anthropocentric distinction between good and evil. Whereas Emerson approached nature with an established belief in God, finding confirmation of his existence in nature, for Muir, wilderness itself was divinity. Emerson was a theist and believed that nature played the role of linking man to God, allowing man to learn more about himself and thus be closer to God, while Muir experienced a religious conversion that finally made him conscious of the sacred essence of the wilderness. Nonetheless, Muir continued to revere Emerson and even met his hero, who was 68 at the time, in the Sierras in 1871, although he soon was disappointed by his anthropocentric vision of the natural world. The Concord philosopher accepted nature in human terms. Muir reasoned in the opposite direction, bringing humans to the test of nature and usually finding them deficient9. But he continued to admire Emerson in spite of their philosophical differences. This admiration was mutually shared, as Emerson added Muir’s name to an unpublished list entitled “My Men”, in his private journal before his death.
14John Muir had closer affinities with the works of Thoreau, recognized as the first ecocentric philosopher of the nineteenth century10, and an ecologist even before the word was coined in 1866. Thoreau believed that different parts of nature fit together into a single organic and spiritual unit created by God. His holistic belief in an “Oversoul” was defined by historian Roderick Nash as a sort of “theological ecology11”. In the beginning, Thoreau was in the shadow of his anthropocentric mentor, Emerson. Thoreau’s famous 1851 sentence, “In wildness is the preservation of the world12”, emphasized his ecocentrism which he developed throughout the 1850’s. Preoccupied with America’s economics and materialism, Thoreau equated freedom with wildness. Thoreau was one of the first to give the wilderness attractive pastoral qualities rather than the negative repulsive connotations, common amongst the followers of a rural agrarian condition. This very philosophy inspired Muir and his work.
Pantheistic Theology
15Another source of inspiration for Muir’s philosophy was rooted in the strong religious upbringing that he rejected at an early age, but nonetheless had an enormous influence on his work. His father’s Calvinistic beliefs undoubtedly were at the origin of his fascination for the “original garden”, which contained all species of plants and animals, and that each species was worth of preservation. “God” appears in the title of his first article, entitled “God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests” published in February 1875 in Record Union in Sacramento. He often used Biblical phraseology. Daniel Payne wrote in 1996: “Biblical language is the vehicle with which Muir expresses his discovery of spirit through nature13.” Muir’s literary style was influenced by the King James Version of the Bible. Besides he used more theological than philosophical phraseology14. Muir frequently alluded to Genesis: “Eden”, “expulsion from Eden” or “the Eden fruit”. Repeatedly John Muir substituted the words “nature” and “beauty” for “God” and “Lord”. His insistence on the spiritual benefits of the wilderness reminds the reader of Thoreau’s holism. Most of his manuscripts revealed a pantheistic vision in which God and the garden of Eden were indivisible concepts. As one of his biographers wrote: “God was to be reverenced not as a person but as a living intelligent spirit creating, permeating, and controlling the universe15.”
16Gradually, Muir rejected the Calvinistic theology of his father and developed a biocentric wilderness vision, which transformed his father’s Christian teachings into a sort of spiritual ecology, making him one of the precursors of deep ecology, even cited as a “seminal deep ecologist16”. He questioned Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism and chose to embrace a spiritual religion in harmony with nature. His writings on the “unity of all living things” challenged the dichotomy between man and the rest of the natural world. Muir was critical of religious teaching according to which only man, among all living organisms, had a soul.
17Muir developed an ecological awareness to respect the “rights of all the rest of creation17”, again referring to the original Garden of Eden. However in his writings, he countered the belief that nature (that is the garden) was to serve man, and rejected the Christian dualistic separation of man and nature. He also dismissed the common belief that some creatures were created by Satan not by God. For him, no one element of creation was to be privileged over the others and deliberately chose animals at the bottom of the hierarchy of earthly creatures: “Though alligators, snakes, etc, naturally repel us, they are part of God’s family18.” He even showed a preference for animals over mankind: “If a war of races should occur between the wild beast and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears19!” He also wrote: “Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation20?” Muir gradually moved away from an axiom derived from Genesis: “Nature has no reason for existence, save to serve man21.” Thus the traditional anthropocentric God of Judeo-Christianity, the God of his father and Ralph Waldo Emerson who privileged humans above all other elements of creation, is metaphysically transformed from an eternal and transcendent creator (theism) into a temporal, immanent, and continuing process of divine creation (pantheism)22.
18The theme of “divine harmony” was recurrent in his writings. His religious awe was based on his belief of the divinity of the wilderness. The words “divine” and “God” are recurrent in his writings. For instance in describing the Yosemite National Park that he would later fight to preserve he wrote:
“Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded with divine light, every landscape glows like a countenance hallowed in eternal repose; and every one of its living creatures, clad in flesh and leaves, and every crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface shining in the sun or buried miles deep in what we call darkness, is throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God23.”
19His “wilderness theology”, that God was present in the wilderness, goes far beyond Transcendentalism and is more a sort of pantheism. He gradually became a mystic, the garden being his temple, his church, the place where he perceived and worshipped God, the creator and the landscape gardener. He said: “No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park—Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world24.”
Crusade to preserve the Garden
The Hetch Hetchy Controversy
20Hence his philosophical theology was translated into political activism in an effort to protect the national parks, which he even nicknamed: “God’s First Temples”, the gardens he made his mission in life to preserve for future generations. The conflict between the preservationists and the conservationists reached a climax over the construction of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park, when the project of constructing a dam on the Tuolumne River to supply water to San Francisco, was strongly supported by the conservationists and their leader Gifford Pinchot, another important figure in the Conservation Movement. Pinchot had a utilitarian approach to the management in the national parks and forests25, whereas John Muir and his preservationist followers believed gardens and parks should be preserved for the use and enjoyment of future generations. Muir referred to the “Hetch Hetchy Valley as […] a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain mansions. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls glow with life, whether leaning back in respose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes giving welcome to storms and calms alike26”. For the final struggle of his life, John Muir had recourse to religious language and alluded to Biblical references to the Garden of Eden and how he was fighting to prevent its fall. He used expressions such as the “expulsion from Eden”, “Jerusalem temple” or “Christ” to describe national parks. John Muir wrote a series of essays in which his idealistic stance reached its peak.
21The notion of the aesthetic value of the garden was omnipresent in his writings. In his famous article “The Yosemite” he gave a detailed description of the unique variety of species of trees, plants, flowers, and fruit. Many times, John Muir described the national park as a unique “garden” to be preserved. As he wrote: “These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man27.” He also used anthropocentric and utilitarian arguments to defend the need for gardens and parks and their benefits for mankind. He wrote: “Garden-and park-making goes on everywhere with civilization, for everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul28.”
22Finally29 in 1913, after several years of battle between the conservationists and the preservationists, an act of congress was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, allowing the construction of the dam in Yosemite. The loss of the Hetch Hetchy battle was a major political defeat for John Muir and for all advocates of wilderness preservation. Many believe that the decision broke Muir’s heart and he died the following year.
23But in the long run, it proved to be a valuable experience for the preservationists in the twentieth century, who became even more determined to prevent the construction of dams in other national parks, such as the Dinosaur National Monument in the 1950’s or the Grand Canyon in the 1960’s. The preservationists lost the battle of Hetch Hetchy, but did succeed in gaining recognition of the notion of wilderness. Even Muir showed some consolation when he said that “the conscience of the country has been aroused from sleep”30. The Hetch Hetchy controversy also openly questioned the anthropocentric approach to land management, and brought spiritual and ethical issues into the debate over the wilderness and later environmental protection. John Muir’s influence was particularly important as he was the first biocentric or ecocentric activist to have recourse to both direct action and lobbying, to influence politicians, and essay-writing to mobilize the public.
Long-Lasting Influence of Muir’s Biocentrism
24In the half century that followed Hetch Hetchy, public policy was clearly dominated by the resource conservationist tendency and the federal government assumed a greater role in managing nature. Nonetheless, “radical” preservationist ideas were often manifested in public policy debates. New leaders such as Stephen Mather, Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, Howard Zahneiser, or David Brower took up John Muir’s crusade to continue his wilderness legacy.
25The year following the Hetch Hetchy defeat, Stephen Mather, a friend of John Muir and a member of the Sierra Club, started a campaign to protect the national parks. His efforts led to the creation of the National Park Service within the Interior Department in 1916, forty-four years after the first national park (Yellowstone). It represented the first victory of Muir’s preservationist friends over the conservationists. At the same time, it aroused an even more profound debate in the Senate and in public opinion. The National Park Service was created with a dual mission: to preserve nature and promote public recreation in order to democratize the notion of national parks. This was not against John Muir’s philosophy that favored roads in national parks, claiming that they would allow people to have access to wilderness areas and therefore strive to protect them. Stephen Mather who became its first director faced numerous financial problems, and spent all his energy and personal fortune for his ideal He even encouraged the creation of the National Parks and Conservation Association to defend the missions of the parks. Unlike the National Forest Service, the National Park Service implemented a more ecocentric approach to its wilderness policies. Hence resource extraction has been forbidden in national parks31.
26Muir and his ecocentric philosophy remained alive from the 1920’s through the 1950’s in the works of some professional ecologists32 such as Aldo Leopold, who, in the 1920’s, made the transition from being a trained resource manager (in the Pinchot tradition) to adopting a Muir-like philosophy. Aldo Leopold and his land ethic33, which was set in a larger evolutionary frame. He took natural systems (including inorganic organisms) as the dominant reality of the world, whereas Muir insisted on living organisms. Leopold went beyond the biocentric preservationism of John Muir and spoke of the interconnectedness of nature from an ethical viewpoint and advocated the transformation of human values which destroy the intrinsic value of natural systems. “Ecocentrism weds the preservationist idea that nature is a living process with the idea that natural systems possess intrinsic values that undergird and are independent of human values34.”
27The voice of another wilderness enthusiast arose in the 1930’s: that of Robert Marshall who took up Leopold’s efforts in the Forest Service and gained recognition as a new champion of the wilderness. In his short life35, Marshall was a pillar of support for the wilderness and founded the Washington-based Wilderness Society in 1935, which became an important tool for preservationists in the decades that followed. One of the first was in the 1930’s concerning preservation of Quetico-Superior in Minnesota36. During the height of the New Deal, he stressed the threats of certain public works projects and called for the cost-benefit analysis of government programs, over thirty-five years before the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)37.
28A half century after the Hetch Hetchy controversy, wilderness preservation once again became the center of a heated nationwide debate. This time it concerned the proposal of a dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, to be constructed on Green River on the Colorado-Utah border. The possibility of flooding the canyons in the Monument led friends of the wilderness to protest. The debate soon reached enormous proportions and became a test case for both sides, as similar projects were pending to build dams in other national parks around the US: Glacier Canyon, Grand Canyon, or Kings Canyon near Los Angeles, to mention a few.
29Two of Muir’s followers, David Brower and Howard Zahneiser, the executive directors of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society respectively, took up John Muir’s cause in the Echo Park controversy. They blended Leopold’s concepts of ecology and land ethics and Muir’s tactics such as lobbying and essay writing, centering their rhetoric on the benefits of wilderness for people. David Brower had the same mysticism and used very similar religious references to describe his love for the national parks: “Like the Sistine Chapel, the Grand Canyon was one of the world’s treasures38.”
30Thanks to better advertising, as well as organizational, and financial resources, they led a significant nationwide campaign in defense of wilderness preservation. They wrote numerous articles in periodicals and influential newspapers around the country, and also made a motion picture as well as a collection of essays and photographs (1950-1956). With their lobbying efforts and a half-century of political experience, they finally overcame the arguments of the other interest groups and Congress decided in their favor in 1956, stating that “no dam […] would be [built] within any National Park or Monument39”.
31The Echo Park victory encouraged preservationists to take the offensive and push for the creation of a National Wilderness Preservation System. Between June 1957 and the passage of the Wilderness Act, which set up the system in May 1964, more than 6000 pages of testimony were collected in nine Congressional hearings, where the names of Thoreau, Muir and Leopold were heard time and again. Nevertheless, wilderness preservationists were disappointed as only nine out of the sixty million acres of public land were set aside as wilderness areas.
32In 1952, David Brower became the executive director of Sierra Club. Sharing the same mystical vision of national parks as John Muir, David Brower was referred to as “Muir reincarnate”. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s, he moved the Sierra Club philosophically in an ecocentric direction. Although he was fired from the presidency of the Sierra Club for managerial reasons, some believe it was because he was too radical for the conservative mainstream environmentalists. Steward Udall, JFK’s secretary of the Interior even mentioned John Muir as a role model in his 1963 publication of The Quiet Crisis40, forwarded by John F. Kennedy, and called “The Muirs and the Olmsteads and the Pinchots of the decades ahead” to continue the fight.
***
33Another landscape that became the scene of an important controversy was the Grand Canyon41. The project of building a dam in Grand Canyon occupied public policy debates between 1963 and 1968. Although the project had the full support of Johnson’s administration, it prompted hundreds of thousands of protest letters. Since the American population knew the Grand Canyon, in part thanks to Ansel Adams and his photographs, they showed an unprecedented tide of support for wilderness preservation. Brower even said: “Like the Sistine Chapel, the Grand Canyon was one of the world’s treasures42.” The debate over the Grand Canyon also brought forth different definitions of progress and raised the question of priorities in American society. Preservationists took care not to dismiss the values of progress and civilization, but merely set limits, in spite of the economic sacrifice entailed. Finally after years of struggling, the preservationists won their second great victory on October 2, 1968, and two days later the President signed a bill establishing the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.
***
34To conclude, it could be said that a new American intellectual and social force emerged with the Environmental Movement of the 1960’s, spurring the transition from anthropocentric conservation to ecology. In fact, John Muir became one of the guiding lights for twentieth century ecologists who aspired to preserve the American gardens, with their scenic landscapes in their original state. Some call it a philosophical shift from Pinchot back to Muir. Today John Muir is remembered as the first ecocentric American to have had recourse to direct action and political lobbying in favor of nature. The goals of wilderness protection have also shifted from an emphasis on aesthetics and recreation to the protection of the wilderness, endorsing a “deeper” ecocentric philosophy. Nonetheless, economic welfare cannot be neglected, and thus the “sustainable development” of natural resources has remained a pragmatic approach in the conservation of American land and its resources. Hence up to the present day, the two major orientations in environmentalism, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, have been competing with each other.
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Notes de bas de page
1Muir John, “The Hetch Hetchy Valley”, Sierra Club Bulletin, vol. VI, no 4, January 1908.
2Marx Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1964.
3Muir’s family allowed the opening of the archives around 1975.
4Payne Daniel G., Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics, Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1996, p. 174.
5In fact a statue of John Muir in his youth stands at the High Street in Dunbar quoting John Muir that it was in his birthplace that he “learnt to gaze and wonder at nature”.
6Teale Edwin Way, ed., The Wilderness World of John Muir, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co, 1954, p. 8-9.
7They later taught at the University of California in Berkeley.
8Oelschlaeger Max, Idea of Wilderness, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1991, p. 179.
9Fox Stephen, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, p. 7.
10His publication of Walden in 1854 came before Darwin’s work.
11Nash Roderick Frazier, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 37.
12Muir John, “Walking”, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 9, no 56, June 1862, p. 663.
13Payne Daniel G., Voices in Wilderness…, op. cit., p. 86.
14Idem.
15Ibid., p. 96.
16Oelschlaeger Max, Idea of Wilderness, op. cit., p. 301-306.
17Muir John, Our National Parks, Boston/New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1901, p. 57-58.
18Muir John, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1913, p. 324.
19Ibid., p. 343.
20Muir John, A Thousand Mile Walk, chapter 6, 1916.
21Genesis: 1:28, p. 1207.
22Payne Daniel G., Voices in The Wilderness…, op. cit., p. 180-181.
23Muir John, “The Yosemite National Park”, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 84, Boston, August 1899, p. 145.
24Muir John, My First Summer in the Sierra, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1911, p. 138.
25Although the Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Ethan Hitchcock opposed it.
26Muir John, Sierra Club Bulletin, vol. VII, no 4, June 1910, Plate LXXXV.
27Payne Daniel G., Voices in the Wilderness…, op. cit., p. 101.
28Muir John, “The Hetch Hetchy Valley”, Sierra Club Bulletin, vol. VI, no 4, January 1908.
29Muir was not even invited to the White House Governors’ Conference for Conservation in 1908.
30Letter to the editor of the Century, Robert Underwood Johnson.
31Nonetheless, by the end of the twentieth century, the 357 different parks have attracted crowds of tourists and have turned into “ecological” theme parks or attractions.
32Also in the works of some writers such as D. H. Lawrence.
33His land ethic, expressed in Leopold Aldo, The Sand County Almanac, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1949, was published posthumously one year after his death.
34Nash Roderick Frazier, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967, p. 295.
35He died young due to heart failure at the age of 38 in 1939.
36The poet Sigurd Olson was the most important figure and wrote: The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point.
37Signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970, the NEPA put in place cost benefit analyses for all government policies.
38Nash Roderick Frazier, Wilderness and the American Mind, op. cit., p. 231.
39US Congress, Colorado River Storage Act of 1956 signed by President Dwight Eisenhower.
40Udall Steward Lee, The Quiet Crisis, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, p. 182.
41The controversy concerned the construction of dams at the Bridge and Marble Canyons.
42Nash Roderick Frazier, Wilderness and the American Mind, op. cit., p. 231.
Auteur
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Gelareh Yvard-Djahansouz
Maître de conférences en civilisation américaine à l’université d’Angers, membre du CIRPaLL (EA 7457) et co-responsable de l'axe « Patrimoines et héritage ». Elle est l'auteure d’un ouvrage intitulé L’histoire du mouvement écologique américain dans la collection « Les essentiels de la civilisation anglo-saxonne » et elle a participé à l’élaboration de plusieurs ouvrages collectifs, (American Presidents and Environmental Policy since the Sixties, 2008 ; Environmental Consciousness and Social Unrest in the Sixties, 2011 ; FDR, the Environmental President, 2013). Elle travaille actuellement sur la voix des femmes dans le mouvement écologique. Elle a écrit de nombreux articles dans le domaine de la politique de l’environnement aux Etats-Unis, sur les écologistes tels que John Muir et Rachel Carson, sur le mouvement pour la conservation en France et aux États-Unis, sur le mouvement écologique américain, sur la présidence américaine et l’environnement, et plus récemment sur Franklin Delano Roosevelt et la politique de la conservation pendant le New Deal, ainsi que sur les partis politiques et l’environnement.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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