An Earth Seminar Background Paper
for the Partnership for Earth Spirituality

Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold:
Nature Spirituality and the American Earth Ethic

by Charles E. Little

One of the stories that gets written over and over again in newspapers and magazines is about how religion has, all of a sudden, discovered “the environment.” Actually the impulse is ancient, although given modern form by scientific findings during the 1970s and ‘80s that issues of air and water pollution, global warming, food supply, species extinction were not only global, they were intractable and incapable of solution by ordinary political means. In the early 1990s, distressed by these findings, religious leaders in the U.S. met with influential scientists to develop a concerted effort to deal with the environment in ethical and spiritual terms, since the revelations of science alone were clearly not enough to move people to action.

Optimism was high that something would come of this. It would be a “great turning,” in the words of Joanna Macy, philosopher and deep ecologist; an ecological reformation, comparable to the big-R Reformation 400 years ago, according to Deiter Hessel, a prominent Protestant theologian; it would create a “renewal of religious life,” in the view of Paul Gorman, the social-activist head of the then-newly organized National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

And yet, fifteen years later, after all the hoo-ha, people concerned with the relationship of denominational religion to environmental reform are asking themselves, “What happened?” Yes, local congregations turn out to clean up the creek. Fine language comes from the hierarchies, and is endlessly quoted. Churches have organized nationally to made their buildings energy efficient. Even the Evangelicals, for whom “the environment” has traditionally been but a way-station to eternity, and full of sinners into the bargain, are trying to figure out how to get involved with global warming.

Still, most congregations are having a hard time getting past substituting real coffee mugs for styrofoam cups and picking up roadside litter. The rising up of people in the pews, who number in the tens of millions, to demand the preservation of God's Green Earth as a matter of faith and human decency simply has not happened.

The underlying reasons for the failure of the environmental message to find truly fertile soil in congregations are several. To begin with, there's no real tradition for concern for the environment, as such, in Christianity, which is where the big numbers are. For Christians, heaven, not earth, is what religion is all about. And for these reasons, front line clergy are reluctant to take to the environmental ramparts.

Perhaps such orthodox views are changing, but the rate of change is much too slow in comparison to the speed at with the planet is being degraded. I would suggest, therefore, that it is time to get back to the drawing boards on nature spirituality and earth ethics, back to science, and, yes, back to God, although not necessarily the deity described on Sunday mornings inside large, dimly-lit buildings.

Indeed, if such a thing as a true “Green Church” could in fact come to pass in North America, I would submit that its major prophets ought to be Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), John Muir (1839-1914), and Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), whose spiritual sensibilities are as profound and timeless as they are unorthodox.

The minor prophets are abundant, of course, and important: from Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of the republic to Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey in our own time. But in the view of many if not most of those who have studied the conservation movement in a serious way (and the “environmental movement” which has lately expanded, though not replaced, it), the peculiarly American earth ethic, derived from a scientific as well as spiritual understanding of natural processes, is informed primarily by the teachings of three great and unstilled voices. “The core of American thinking about conservation,” writes historian Stephen Fox, “runs from Thoreau to Muir to Leopold . . . ”

It is important to know what Fox means here by the word conservation. In
this context, it is not the utilitarian natural resource conservation of Gifford Pinchot or Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the charge for the enlightened management of, respectively, forests and soils in the early part of the 20th century. Their kind of resource conservation had to do with, in the Benthamite words of Gifford Pinchot, “the greatest good, for the largest number, for the longest time.” The objective was economically practical and wholly anthropocentric, which definitely does not describe Thoreau, Muir, or even Leopold, a professional forester. Their ethic was derived from a spiritual apprehension of nature so closely observed, it was, in the larger sense of the word, religious. Their thought was more akin to that of St. Francis, to whom we shall return, not Jeremy Bentham.

Let us begin with Leopold, and work backward. Named after a family friend, Aldo was born in Iowa of solid German-Lutheran stock. The Leopolds were well enough off, from the family-owned Leopold Desk Company, to send their son (one of three) to Lawrenceville, an eastern preparatory school of the first rank, and Yale, where he received a classical education, and then to the fledgling Yale School of Forestry. After graduation he got a job with the U.S. Forest Service and was assigned to “District 3,” headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which over the next 15 years provided the grounding for his proposals for statutory wildernesses, which became law in 1964, and the management of natural areas based on ecological principles (a word that he, in fact, was among the first to popularize), not mere economics.

These were important new ideas, but his greatest contribution was what he called the “land ethic,” with the word land standing for all of nature’s living things and their interactions with the environment. According to Curt Meine’s definitive biography (Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work), Leopold was influenced by Thoreau and Emerson, by Henri-Louis Bergson, and others. But the strongest influence was Russian philosopher-mystic, Piotr Ouspensky, who suggested that nature possessed mystical powers as well as mechanical ones, and that the two components should be reconciled. And so the young District 3 forester and game manager set about to do just that. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “one cannot round out a real understanding of the [natural resource management] situation in the Southwest without likewise considering its moral aspects.”

Throughout his career—in New Mexico and then Wisconsin where he taught game management at the university—he recorded his findings in short essays that suggested that his true vocation was, after all, that of a literary artist. The ouvre is small, but the impact enormous. His posthumously published A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There became the bible of the post-World War II conservation movement.

Here are some passages from the book.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world. . . . Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal
change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. . . In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

Aldo Leopold was 27 when John Muir died in 1914. But the eremitic wanderer of the Sierra Nevada was of a different era—the late 19th century, rather than the 20th. And from different personal circumstances. Born in Scotland, Muir’s strict Presbyterian father thought the Church of Scotland was not strict enough and removed to Wisconsin where he joined the Campbellites, which advocated a return to scriptural simplicity in organization and doctrine. As historian Stephen Fox relates, by the age of eleven, the young Muir had learned to recite “by heart and by sore flesh” all of the New Testament and most of the Old. As a young man, Muir was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor, and pretty much on his own economically. It was not until he was 22 that he could enter the University of Wisconsin, where he began his scientific training that was to serve him all his life. He made a chemistry lab out of his college room, and read nothing, a classmate complained, except his textbooks and the Bible.

After a good bit more knocking about, Muir finally got to California at the age of 30 and discovered the Sierra Nevadas, the first real mountains he had ever encountered. After college, as a pacifist, he had repaired to Canada to escape conscription during the Civil War. Then he took a job in a factory in Indianapolis, where he was injured in an accident, and then set off on a thousand-mile hike to Florida.

But it was in California’s Sierra Nevada range, says Fox, that he found “psychic integration” for the first time after years of wandering. He was, finally, at a place where his intuitive notion of the “indivisible harmony of the natural world” was confirmed. “There is no mystery,” Muir wrote in his journal, “but the mystery of harmony.”

A simple awe of nature was not Muir’s way however. He approached his surroundings scientifically and in fact developed theories of glaciation that were quite new, well-documented, and finally accepted, replacing an earlier theory that the formation of Yosemite Valley and other sublime Sierra landscapes had been a function of random “cataclysmic” shiftings and heavings of the earth’s crust. That the valleys were formed by glaciers, Muir’s careful measurements and comparisons of striations in the granites of the region definitely affirmed. “The cataclysmic theory made God a prankster,” writes Fox, “while Muir’s glacial theory suggested a cosmic plan. . . It harmonized science and religion by adducing empirical evidence of the divine scheme. . . Proving the glacial origin of Yosemite became an act of devotion.”

Given his absorption with the mountains, and especially the glaciated valleys of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy, Muir soon found that he had to become their protector. He lost the battle for Hetch Hetchy, a bit of tragic history, but, as everyone knows, he created an organization, the Sierra Club, that has ever since carried the banner for earth ethics in an extraordinarily effective way.

Thus the mystical seeker had to become a conservationist, and in due course a writer with an avid following. In much of his work, Muir describes the natural scene in the language of religion, with which he was familiar. But it was not the religion of his father, adhering slavishly to biblical texts. His was the religion of nature. Muir writes in his Journals,

I am sitting here in a little shanty made of sugar pine this Sabbath evening. I have not been at church a single time since leaving home. Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes within the broad overwhelming influences of the place fails not to worship as they never did before. The glory of the Lord is upon all God’s works; it is written plainly upon all the fields of every clime, and upon every sky, but here in this place of surpassing glory the Lord has written in capitals.

And,

The world we are told was made for man. A presumption that is totally unsupported by facts. There is a very numerous class of men who are cast into painful fits of astonishment wherever they find anything living or dead in all God’s universe which they cannot eat or in some way render what they call useful to themselves. They have precise and dogmatic insight into the “intentions” of the Creator.

Both Leopold and Muir came to writing about nature as a result of scientific inquiry. By contrast, Thoreau set out to be a writer, but a kind that derived from “fronting” of the facts of nature through close, personal observation. “Let us not underrate the value of a fact,” he wrote in A Natural History of Massachusetts, “it will one day flower in a truth.”

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, then as now a suburb of Boston, Thoreau graduated from Harvard and was expected to take over the family business, a quite successful manufacturer of pencils—considered by many to be the best made. Although Henry did work at the factory from time to time (at one point inventing a new manufacturing method), it was in the fields and woods of Concord and New England that he sought to understand the essence of the great transcendental spirit.

Although part of the Concord Circle of Transcendentalists, and a protegé of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great preacher-philosopher of nature, Thoreau eventually grew away from his mentor (who had loaned him Walden Pond on the Emerson property). In a posthumous essay on Thoreau, Emerson dealt more harshly that he should have—as if a disappointed parent—about Henry’s seeming lack of purpose in life. “Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”

What Emerson failed to predict, of course, was that Thoreau would become a dominant figure in the American literary canon, and that his huckleberry party would become the American conservation movement, and he, its Isaiah.

Though the two are often linked in literary studies, where Emerson saw nature as the symbol of God, Thoreau resisted such a dualism. Writes biographer Richard J. Schneider, “The difference from the Emersonian view is crucial. Thoreau expected to find spiritual truth in, not merely through, nature.” In this regard, Thoreau demonstrated to his fellow citizens what he considered to be a better life, spending two years and two months in a handmade hut near the shore of Walden Pond. In nature. Even then he saw emerging in America what a hundred years later would be called a society of “organization men,” those whose ambitions empowered industrial urbanization to approach the village of Concord. He heard it screeching out of Boston, defiling a pure countryside. . .

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks!

And in his famous essay “Walking,”

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter the swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. . . . A town is saved not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

The studies and writings of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold spanned more than a century—from before the Civil War until after World War II. Moreover, they had entirely different personalities and family backgrounds, and their primary work took place in widely separated parts of the country. And yet their philosophical, religious, political, literary, and scientific views and investigative approaches are remarkably alike. I would take this assertion a step further. The work of these three naturalists led them, and therefore us, through their writings and civic actions, to an understanding about conservation as a clearly ethical proposition, quite distinct from the prevailing view, a utilitarian matter having to do with the management of natural resources for human use.

And so the question arises, where did their revolutionary earth ethics come from? Some years ago, in a discussion about Aldo Leopold with a Presbyterian minister, I observed that while he was brought up a Lutheran (however vaguely), he was never a religious person. “But surely he must have derived the idea of the land ethic from biblical sources, biblical ethics,” said the minister. Actually not. Indeed, he rejected this as a source. “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land,” he wrote in the Foreword of A Sand County Almanac. Adding, later in the book, “Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth.”

Without getting into a recondite philosophical discussion of the origin of ethics and moral codes (although we have already treated with Bentham) whether ethical perceptions are innate or derived from experience, a pretty good case can be made that for Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold whatever a priori ethical considerations they may have possessed when entering life, they became fully developed through their close contact with nature. All studied natural processes with great care and concentration, and reached the same conclusion. Nature was not merely mechanistic, it was spiritual. It was a mystery. It was either the gift of God, or God itself, or both. Therefore it was sacred, and because it was sacred, its thoughtless desecration was blasphemy, to use a term from orthodox religion that I cannot recall any of the three using.

If the growing-up relationship of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold to normative religion was relatively traditional (except Muir’s which was excessive), their intense intimacy with nature in their maturity enabled them to move beyond the quite limited vision of nature’s purposes presented in biblical texts. They reached, finally, a realm of earth spirituality that, in my view, is extremely difficult to access through the filter of normative religious (especially Christian) practice. Certainly, none of the three were given to biblical quotation. The most likely person to use such material was the one who knew all of the New Testament by heart and most of the Old—John Muir. In a book I recently acquired, Meditations of John Muir: Nature’s Temple, Chris Highland, a Protestant chaplain, outdoorsman, and graduate of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, has collected what he believes to be the most spiritual, if not religious, passages from Muir’s writings. Perhaps a closer reading will belie this impression, but while Highland’s extracts are filled with churchy words like God, temple, sanctuary, cathedral, sacredness, and the like, nowhere is there a single scriptural reference, except in quoting something Emerson said to Muir (on his one, brief visit to Yosemite) about the “new heaven and the new earth.”

What then does this mean for the current effort to conform nature-derived earth ethics with Judeo-Christian ideas drawn from scripture? One of the things it means is that the current effort of the Sierra Club to enlist religious denominations in support of environmental policy reform is probably causing the Founder’s bones to rattle just a bit. The problem is the fatal duality that all three of our subjects struggled with and finally conquered through their apprehension of nature as spirit. Man is not apart, as Muir said.

For the current denominational efforts to weigh in on environmental issues such as air and water pollution, global warming, and the like, an anthropocentric approach is not necessarily a distraction. The social doctrine of Christianity can be adapted to meet environmental challenges if they are understood as hurtful, either directly or indirectly, to the welfare of the human species. But in the realm of earth spirituality, and the formation of a profound and persuasive set of ethics deriving therefrom, the duality problem gets harder to deal with.

In the view of Medieval historian Lynn White, Jr., an anthropocentric interpretation of the creation has been disastrous. In an explicit passage, in which one can hear echoes of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, White famously stated, in his 1967 article in Science magazine ( “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”), that “we shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

Few Christian theologians paid any attention to the article except for that sentence. Whole books were written to refute it. Even as august a theologian as John F. Haught (a friend) said he thought White’s argument was “exceedingly lame.”

Actually, it is not lame. For it is an axiom that’s at fault, not a faith—at least not necessarily. Furthermore, this one vivid sentence has tended to obscure a discussion that in my view is exceedingly helpful. “The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history,” White writes, “proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation. . . . The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.”

To which I say from the unbuilt nave of the Green Church (along, surely, with Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold), “Amen.”

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References and Suggestions for Further Reading
(In order of their mention in the text.)

Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. (Paperback edition.) Originally published in 1981 under the title John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement by Little, Brown and Company, Inc. Chapter 11, “Lord Man: The Religion of Conservation,” presents a first-rate analysis of nature spirituality in the conservation movement, with reference to Thoreau and Leopold as well Muir and many others.

Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Several subsequent paperback editions are available.

Charles E. Little, Hope for the Land. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Includes several essays on Leopold, the land ethic, nature spirituality, and related topics.

William Cronon, ed., John Muir: Nature Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1997. Contains The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My first Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Stickeen (the famous account of a dog that led Muir through a treacherous glacier), a selection of 18 essays, a chronology, and helpful notes, including a lengthy one quoting from Muir’s journals and used in this paper.

Chris Highland, Meditations of John Muir: Nature’s Temple. Berkeley, Calif.: Wilderness Press, 2001. A short (145 pages) collection of brief passages from his books and journals.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden. In many editions.

Henry David Thoreau, Excursions. New York, Corinth Books, 1962. A facsimile reprint of a posthumous collection of some of Thoreau’s essays, published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1863. The reprint contains an excellent critical introduction by literary historian Leo Marx and includes Emerson’s loving but cranky “Biographical Sketch” of Thoreau. The nine essays include “Walking,” which is not to be missed, even though Marx considers it to be “page after page of tedious, homiletic assertion.”

Richard J. Schneider, Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Science, 10 March 1967, pp. 1203-1207. The essay is reprinted in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 184-193.

John F. Haught, The Promise of Nature. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. In my view the best of many efforts to reconcile normative Christian theology with the demands of the ecological crisis.

Placitas, New Mexico
January 2, 2007