John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism

In the wild garden of an early America there coiled and crawled the devil’s own plenty of poisonous vipers—cottonmouths, copperheads, coral snakes, the whole nasty family of rattlers and sidewinders. A naturalist roaming far from the settlements regularly ran the risk of a fatal snake bite. Fortunately, he was reassured by the field experts of the day, the deadly reptile always furnishes its own antidote. It conceals itself in the very plants whose roots can counteract its poison, plants like the so-called “Indian snakeroot.” As the viper sank its sharp fangs into your leg, you simply pulled up the roots of that plant, quickly chewed them down, and laughed in the viper’s face. You were instantly immune. How many backwoods naturalists and hunters died from believing that bit of advice is not known. Science, ever improving its hypotheses, now suggests carrying a snakebite kit in your pack or calling in a helicopter. But before we dismiss the old advice as completely foolish, we might ask whether it might not have had some useful, genuine logic in it. Sometimes the remedy for wounds does indeed lie near at hand among the shrubs and weeds in which the reptile lives; and sometimes dangerous forces do indeed suggest, or even contain, their own antidote. Take, for instance, the case of North America’s continuing environmental degradation. What we humans have done over the past five hundred years to maim this continent and tear apart its fabric of life is in large degree the consequence of the Judeo-Christian religious ethos and its modern secular offspring—science, industrial capitalism, and technology. I would put almost all the blame on the modern secular offspring, but I have to agree that religion too has been a deadly viper that has left its marks on the body of nature. Paradoxically, I would add what no one else seems to have noticed: an Indian snakeroot for this venom has appeared in the reptile’s own nest. The antidote for environmental destruction has been a movement called environmentalism and that movement has, in the United States, owed much of its program, temperament, and drive to the influence of Protestantism.

History as Natural History

Forty years ago a wise, visionary man, the Wisconsin wildlife biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, called for “an ecological interpretation of history,” by which he meant using the ideas and research of the emerging field of ecology to help explain why the past developed the way it did. At that time ecology was still in its scientific infancy, but its promise was bright and the need for its insights was beginning to be apparent to a growing number of leaders in science, politics, and society. It has taken a while for historians to heed Leopold’s advice, but at last the field of environmental history has begun to take shape and its practitioners are trying to build on his initiative. Leopold’s own suggestion of how an ecologically informed history might proceed had to do with the frontier lands of Kentucky, pivotal in the westward movement of the nation. In the period of the revolutionary war it was uncertain who would possess and control those lands: the native Indians, the French or English empires, or the colonial settlers? And then rather quickly the struggle was resolved in favor of the Americans, who brought along their plows and livestock to take possession. It was more than their prowess as fighters, their determination as conquerors, or their virtue in the eyes of God that allowed those agricultural settlers to win the competition; the land itself had something to contribute to their success. Leopold pointed out that growing along the Kentucky bottomlands, the places most accessible to newcomers, were formidable canebrakes, where the canes rose as high as fifteen feet and posed an insuperable barrier to the plow. But fortunately for the Americans, when the cane was burned or grazed out, the magic of bluegrass sprouted in its place. Grass replaced cane in what ecologists call the pattern of secondary ecological succession, which occurs when vegetation is disturbed but the soil is not destroyed, as when a fire sweeps across a prairie or a hurricane levels a forest; succession refers to the fact that a new assortment of species enters and replaces what was there before.

Thinking Like a River

When we drive by a modern farm, we still expect to see green plants sprouting from the earth, bearing the promise of food or cooking oil or a cotton shirt. Pulling up one of those plants, we are still prepared to find dirt clinging to its roots. Even in this age of high-tech euphoria, agriculture remains essentially a matter of plants growing in the soil. But another element besides soil has always been a part of the farmer’s life-water. Farming is not only growing crops on a piece of land, it is also growing crops in water. I don’t mean a hydroponics lab. I mean that the farmer and his plants inescapably are participants in the natural cycle of water on this planet. Water is a more volatile, uncertain element than soil in the agricultural equation. Soil naturally stays there on the farm, unless poor management intervenes, whereas water is by nature forever on the move, falling from the clouds, soaking down to roots, running off in streams to the sea. We must farm rivers and the flow of water as well as fields and pastures if we are to continue to thrive. But it has never been easy to extract a living from something so mobile and elusive, so relentless and yet so vulnerable as water. If there is to be a long-term, sustainable agriculture in the United States or elsewhere, farmers must think and act in accord with the flow of water over, under, through, and beyond their farms. Preserving the fertility of the soil resource is critical to sustaining it, of course, but not more so than maintaining the quality of water. In many ways, the two ideals are one. And their failure is one, as when rain erodes the topsoil and creeks and rivers suffer. But there are differences between those two resources, differences we must understand and respect. Unlike soil, water cannot be “built.” It can be lost to the farmer, or it can be diverted, polluted, misused, or over-appropriated, but it can never be deepened or enhanced as soil can be.

Paths Across the Levee

In 1821 a man came exploring across the prairies and plains of the North American continent. His name was Jacob Fowler, and with his companions he would be the first Euro-American to ascend the whole length of the Arkansas River from what is now Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the Rocky Mountains. After eight days of poling against the current, “we stoped,” he writes in his untutored spelling, “at the mouth of a bold sreem of Watter” emptying into the Arkansas, a tributary about seventy feet wide. They followed that stream north through the sand hills that cover part of present-day Reno and Rice counties in the state of Kansas. Only a few cottonwood trees grew along its banks, affording scant shelter from the big sky, but the bluestem grass was so high one could not see the river ahead as it meandered across the prairie. Beyond the rich moist bottomlands the vegetation became buffalo grass, and the bison grazed there in black, drifting multitudes; the local Indians called the stream after the female bison, a name that became “Cow Creek” in the white man’s tongue. There were pronghorn antelopes in those days, so light and agile, counterpointing the shaggy herds. Fowler and his crew might also have seen deer, elk, coyotes, and dense flocks of ducks and geese. Then, their curiosity satisfied and their senses pleased, they pushed on west. Fowler had no idea that almost three centuries earlier another European, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, had come here from the opposite direction, crossing this very same Cow Creek on his quest for the fabled city of Quivira. Coronado found in the vicinity only the Wichita Indians living in domed huts thatched with grass, but he did remark that . . . the country itself is the best I have ever seen for producing all the products of Spain, for besides the land itself being very fat and black, and being very well watered by the rivulets and springs and rivers, I found prunes like those of Spain and nuts and very good sweet grapes and mulberries. . . .

The Wealth of Nature

Whoever made the dollar bill green had a right instinct. There is a connection, profound and yet so easy to ignore, between the money in our pocket and the green earth, though the connection is more than color. The dollar bill needs paper, which is to say it needs trees, just as our wealth in general derives from nature, from the forest, the earth and waters, the soil. That these are all limited and finite is easy to see, and so also must be wealth; it can never be unlimited, though it can be expanded and multiplied by human ingenuity. Somewhere on the dollar bill that message might be printed, a warning that you hold in your hand a piece of the limited earth that should be handled with respect: “In God we trust; on nature we must depend.” The public is beginning to understand that connection in at least a rudimentary way and to realize that taking better care of the earth will cost money, will lower the standard of living as it is conventionally defined, and will interfere with freedom of enterprise. By the evidence of opinion polls, something like three out of four Americans say they are ready to accept those costs, a remarkable development in our history. The same can be said for almost every other nation on earth, even the poorest, who are learning that, in their own long-term self-interest, the preservation of nature is a cost they ought to pay, though they may demand that the rich nations assume some of the cost. Having money in one’s pocket, no matter how green its color, is no longer the unexamined good it once was. Many have come to realize that wealth might be a kind of poverty. The human species, according to a team of Stanford biologists, is now consuming or destroying 40 percent of the net primary terrestrial production of the planet: that is nearly one half of all the energy fixed by photosynthesis on the land. We are harvesting it, drastically reorganizing it, or losing it through urbanization and desertification in order to support our growing numbers and even faster growing demands.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Water

Among the truly outstanding books written in this century about the American frontier—and the shelf of such books is rather small—is Great Basin Kingdom by Leonard J. Arrington, published in 1958. When it appeared, it had only a few rivals either in scholarship or ideas. There was Henry Nash Smith’s work on the West as symbol and myth, Bernard DeVoto’s vigorous account of explorers and imperialists, Paul Morgan’s saga of the Rio Grande valley, Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell, and Walter Prescott Webb’s sweeping survey of Europeans on the global frontier. All of those books appeared in the 1950s within a few years of each other. All were well researched and brilliantly written, in many cases by accomplished novelists whose talents in creating plot and character recruited a wide audience for frontier and western history. Arrington’s study of the Mormon frontier was different from the others in that it was the work of an economic and social historian who was interested in how institutions took shape in one small part of the West and how they differed from those in other parts of the region and in the East. Like the other historians, he gave his story a compelling plot and filled it with arresting, complex characters; but for him the chief interest was how a vague, half-articulated set of ideas had migrated to Utah and taken shape there as a thriving, distinctive economic order. Better than any of his contemporaries, moreover, and better than most of his successors, he understood how powerful the drives of capitalism had been in developing the West, how thoroughly those drives had entered into the region’s overall sense of purpose, and how fiercely the battle had been waged, at least in Utah, to prevent that from happening. As romance, his story may not have been able to compete with DeVoto’s lusty adventurers or Morgan’s brown-robed padres preaching among the Indians, but in its implications it may have been the most important story of all. Arrington’s thesis was that nineteenth-century Mormon Utah was at once an intensely materialistic society, intent on achieving wealth, and a determinedly anti-capitalistic one.

A Sense of Soil

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark event in American agricultural and conservation history, and few seem to be aware of the fact. In April 1935, Congress passed the Soil Erosion Act, the first effort in the United States to establish a nationwide, comprehensive program to preserve the very earth on which farming and rural life depend. That act committed the nation to a permanent program of research and action to stop “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands.” Describing erosion as “a menace to the national welfare,” it promised action on private as well as public lands, even to the point of condemning and purchasing private properties when inducements to good practices proved ineffective. And the act established within the Department of Agriculture a new agency, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), to carry out the work. Now, after fifty years, it is appropriate to ask what cultural forces produced this 1935 commitment and to speculate about what our attitude, our commitment, is today. What have we as a people done with our soil since the act was passed? What have we learned about preserving the soil and what have we forgotten? The South, soil-conscious and erosion-plagued beyond other regions, played an extraordinary role in preparing the way for the 1935 act. It furnished both lessons in consequences and leaders for reform. From an earlier period, a succession of southern leaders had warned of the dangers of soil depletion and erosion. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote in 1819 of a land carelessness that, if not ended, would force planters to abandon their Virginia fields and “run away to Alibama (sic), as so many of our countrymen are doing, who find it easier to resolve on quitting their country, than to change the practices in husbandry to which they have been brought up.” After him, men like Edmund Ruffin preached the gospel of lime, of “calcareous manure,” up and down the land, earnestly calling for stability, conservation, and a permanent agriculture for the region.

Restoring a Natural Order

A few years ago I came down a backcountry road in Wisconsin looking for a place where a man had given his life. The road had once been the route of pioneers moving west, then a farm road running through dry, sandy, marginal fields. In the days of Prohibition it had carried illegal whiskey distilled hereabouts, some of the last trees having been cut down to cook the bootlegger’s brew. Then in 1935 another sort of settler came along. It was the time of the Great Depression, and he could buy a lot of land, 120 acres in all, land abandoned by its owners, for a little money in back taxes. The land had no economic value left in it. The man, whose name was Aldo Leopold, knew that but did not mind; he was not after gain or even subsistence. He began coming out regularly from the city of Madison, where he taught at the university, to plant trees. For thirteen years he planted and nurtured. Then, in 1948, he died fighting a forest fire on a neighbor’s land. Knowing those few details, I came wanting to know what manner of man he was and what he had died for. There was no publicity, no tour guide provided, but the dense forest of pines was a sufficient announcement that here was Leopold’s place, now all grown up again to natural splendor. I walked through an open field rich in wild grasses and forbs to a small, gray, weathered shack where he had stayed on those weekends, regaled by the smell of his new pines coming up and the sound of birdsong and wind in their branches. From the shack, I found my way down a short path to the Wisconsin River, rolling silently between its pungent banks, the warm summer sun glinting on its ripples. One August years ago Leopold, as recalled in a sketch he wrote and collected in A Sand County Almanac, found the river “in a painting mood,” laying down a brief carpet of moss on its silty edges, spangling it with blue and white and pink flowers, attracting deer and meadow mice, then abruptly scouring its palette down to austere sand.

An End to Ecstasy

Back in the halcyon days of 1951, when the United States was entering its golden years of wealth and power and proclaiming that this was the American Century, there seemed no limit to what we could do with nature. Were some climates too hot? We could air-condition them. Were some too cold? We could thaw them out or raise tomatoes under glass. Were some too dry? We could, through hydraulic engineering, make them over into a veritable Eden of delights. In that year a Time magazine reporter traveled to the arid West to write about “the endless frontier” being won there by the engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation. They promised to develop enough water to redeem fifty million acres from aridity, enough acres to feed the equivalent of a whole new nation the size of France or Germany. And the engineers were not in the least reluctant to say what pleasure they got out of the work: “We enjoy pushing rivers around,” they told the reporter. Whether the pushing had any real direction, any clear sense of ends, was secondary; they (and by extension, we Americans) were a people who enjoyed dominating nature and we would look for rationales later. In a spirit of what the magazine called “engineering ecstasy,” almost every river in the western part of the country came under control and was made to raise alfalfa, fruit, and cotton. Our agricultural base shifted abruptly westward into the desert, and eastern and midwestern farmers suffered substantial damage to their fortunes. By the last agricultural census, the West counted over 45 million irrigated acres, producing one-fourth of the nation’s annual farm market sales. Though it irrigated only a small percentage of that acreage, the Bureau of Reclamation was unexcelled among water pushers for ambition and scale. It was the Bureau that had erected some of the biggest dams ever: Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Teton, Navajo, Flaming Gorge, etc., the clearest, brightest expressions we had of our national drive to conquer the land. But the big dams were more than that.

Good Farming and the Public Good

Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing. But when it rains and rains, for forty days and nights, as it did for Noah, then the waters rise and destroy. Life is everywhere like that. Too little is a curse, too much is a plague. For thousands of years, the philosopher’s task has been to discover an optimum point where men and women can live modestly and securely, avoiding the extremes. The philosopher may seek a point of environmental balance where there is neither too little nor too much of nature’s gifts. Or he may try to define the point where private ambitions and collective needs are in harmony, where individual appetites do not overrun the commonwealth and society’s demands do not cut too deeply into individual freedoms. When philosophy is applied to the definition of a society’s welfare, we call that point the "public good." Farmers, more than most people, ought to be responsive to that philosophical quest for a harmonious, balanced good, for it has been their aim over a long history to seek moderation from nature and cooperation from their neighbors. Yet it has been a while since American agriculture, as a whole, has enjoyed a feeling of balance. The problem has not been in nature so much as in our society. We have not had a feeling of balance because we have come to hold extravagant ideas of what agriculture should contribute economically to the nation and the farmer. These days we are not a people noted for moderate thinking, so perhaps we have no reason to expect the idea of moderate farming to thrive. The most serious consequence of an immoderate culture, I will argue, is that the public good will not be well understood and therefore will not be achieved—in agriculture or in other areas. Another consequence is that farmers in the aggregate will suffer immensely and so will the practice of farming. That has indeed happened in America, and we can blame it on our extreme dedication to the goal of maximizing agricultural productivity and wealth.