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Yearning for the Land
Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place by John Warfield Simpson Pantheon Books, 2002 289 pp. $24 
God's Wilds
God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature by Dennis C. Williams Texas A & M Univ. Press, 2002 246 pp. $39.95 |
These three books meditate on care of the environment in the United States across a wide range of issues, from Native American religion to emerging public policy. The questions they raise—above all, the unresolved tension between environmental care and business growth—are not new, nor are they easily answered. Nevertheless, thoughtful women and men of faith do well to think again and again about land as God's gift and about the environment as the habitat of the creator's will for creation—especially because at the present time, the tilt in public posture and policy is all toward economics at the expense of the environment.
In Yearning for the Land, John Warfield Simpson contrasts older European practices of land ownership with the new attitudes inspired by the seemingly limitless available land of the U.S. frontier. This contrast is illustrated through the life of John Muir, a transplanted Scotsman who became the key advocate and educator of the United States on land care. Muir supported the preservation of Yellowstone National Park, was decisive in the founding of Yosemite National Park, founded the Sierra Club, and, through contact with Gifford Pinchot, influenced the great environmental policies of Theodore Roosevelt.
Simpson visits the original Muir home in Dunbar, Scotland, where he reflects that in Scotland—and in Europe generally—land is not purchasable because it has all been owned in families—for a very long time—and is transmitted from generation to generation. When young Muir and his family arrived in Wisconsin in 1849, they were surrounded by endless cheap land, a setting in which everyone could start again, regardless of previous economic history.
Simpson takes this American frontier reality as an unambiguous good. An alternative reading, while acknowledging the democratic accessibility of land, might suggest that in the new environment land is pure commodity to be bought and sold without regard to the deep connections of land and occupant. This critical alertness to land as commodity might be relearned from Naboth (1 Kings 21), or Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), or, currently, Wendell Berry. Simpson's take on Native Americans, moreover, seems not particularly sensitive to the European assault upon them and their lands, but uses other criteria to sort out favored and unfavored tribal groups. His book plunges into these hard issues; the other two books I will mention greatly advance our critical reflection beyond that of Simpson.
Worship
and Wilderness:
Culture, Religion,
and Law in Public
Lands Management
by Lloyd Burton
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002
341 pp. $24.95, paper
Dennis Williams has written a thoughtful, critical assessment of Muir's life and work. His particular interest in God's Wilds is the way in which Muir's evangelical faith propelled his passion for the environment. Here another contrast was crucial: the contrast between the fixed order of Scottish Presbyterianism, into which Muir was born, and the freewheeling religious marketplace of 19th-century America, where his family joined the Disciples of Christ. Muir's outlook was decisively informed, so Williams concludes, by a faith that took seriously the will of the creator, the beauty of the creation, and the need for respectful connections between human persons and "the wild." Muir's embrace of a faith other than Scottish Calvinism, Williams argues, permitted him to ponder the "purity" of creation and the capacity of human persons to make good choices with reference to creation.
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