THE WILD PLACES By THOMAS MERTON 1968, for Earth Day
(You can also read the article as it was originally published in the Catholic Worker Newspaper in this pdf https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/imageserver.pl?oid=CW19680601-01&getpdf=true ) on Page 4
Man is a creature of ambiguity. His salvation and his sanity depend on his ability to harmonize the deep conflicts in his thought, his emotions, his personal mythology. Honesty and authenticity do not depend on complete freedom from contradictions such freedom is impossible—but on recognizing our self-contradictions and not masking them with bad faith. The conflicts In individuals are not entirely of their own making. On the contrary, many of them are imposed, ready made, by an ambivalent culture. This poses a very special problem, because he who accepts the ambiguities of his culture without protest and without criticism Is rewarded with a sense of security and moral justification. A certain kind of unanimity satisfies our emotions. and easily substitutes for truth. We are content to think like the others, and in order to protect our common psychic security, we readily become blind to the contradictions—or even the lies—that we have all decided to accept as "plain truth.”
One of the more familiar ambiguities in the American mind operates in our frontier mythology, which has grown in power in proportion as we have ceased to be a frontier or even a rural people. The pioneer, the frontier culture hero, is a product of the wilderness. But at the same time he is a destroyer of the wilderness. His success as pioneer depends on his ability to fight the wilderness and win. Victory consists in reducing the wilderness to something else, a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway; a mine, a factory, a city and finally an urban nation. A recent study of Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, Yale University Press is an important addition to an already significant body of literature about this subject. It traces the evolution of the wilderness idea from the first Puritan settlers via Thoreau and Muir to the modern ecologists and preservationists—and to their opponents in big business and politics. The really crucial issues of the present moment In ecology are barely touched. The author is concerned with the wilderness idea and with the "irony of pioneering which was that success necessarily involved the destruction of the primitive setting that made the pioneer possible."
Nash does not develop the tragic implications of this inner contradiction but he states them clearly enough for us to recognize their symptomatic importance. We all proclaim our love and respect for wild nature, and in the same breath we confess our firm attachment to values which inexorably demand the destruction of the last remnant of wildness. But when people like Rachel Carson try to suggest that our capacity to poison the nature around us is some Indication of a sickness in ourselves, we dismiss them as fanatics.
Now one of the interesting things about this ambivalence toward nature is that it Is rooted in our Biblical Judeo-Christian tradition. We might remark at once that it is neither genuinely Biblical nor Jewish nor Christian. Nash is perhaps a little one-sided in his analysis here. But a certain kind of Christian culture has certainly resulted in a manichean hostility towards created nature. This, of course, we all know well enough, the word manichean has become a cliche of reproof (like communist or racist.) But the very ones who use the cliche most may be the ones who are still unknowingly tainted, on a deep level, an unconscious level. For there is a certain popular, superficial and one-sided "Christian worldliness" that is, in its hidden implications, profoundly destructive of nature and of "God's creation” even 'while It claims to love and extol them.
The Puritans inherited a half-conscious bias against the realm of nature and the Bible gave them plenty of texts that justified what Nash calls "a tradition of repugnance" for nature in the wild. In fact, they were able to regard the "hideous and desolate wilderness” of America as though It were filled with conscious malevolence against them. They hated it as a person, an extension of the Evil One, the Enemy opposed to the spread of the Kingdom of God. And the wild Indian who dwelt in the wilderness was also associated with evil. The wilderness itself was the domain of moral wickedness. It favored spontaneity therefore sin. The groves like those condemned in the Bible suggested wanton and licentious rites to imaginations haunted by repressed drives. To fight was not only for physical survival, it was above all a moral and Christian imperative. Victory over the wilderness was an ascetic triumph over the forces of impulse and of lawless appetite. How could one be content to leave any part of nature just as It was, since nature was "fallen” and "corrupt”?
The elementary Christian duty of the Puritan settler was to attack the forest with an axe and to keep a gun handy in order to exterminate Indians and wild beasts, should they put in an appearance. The work of combating, reducing, destroying and transforming the wilderness was purely and simply "God s work." The Puritan, and after him the pioneer, had an opportunity to prove his worth—or indeed his salvation and election—by the single-minded zeal with which he carried on this obsessive crusade against wildness. His reward was prosperity, real estate, money, and ultimately the peaceful "Order” of civil and urban life. In a seventeenth-century Puritan book with an intriguing title Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence (The "Great Society"?)—we read that it was Jesus Himself, working through the Puritans, who “turned one of the most hideous, boundless and unknown wildernesses In the world . . . to a well-ordered Commonwealth."
Max Weber and others have long since helped us recognize the influence of the Puritan ethos on the growth of capitalism. This is one more example. American capitalist culture is firmly rooted in a secularized Christian myth and mystique of struggle with nature. The basic article of faith in this mystique is that you prove your worth by overcoming and dominating the natural world. You justify your existence and you attain bliss (temporal, eternal or both) by transforming nature into wealth. This is not only good, but self-evident. Until transformed, nature is useless and absurd. Anyone who refuses to see this or acquiesce in it is some kind of half wit—or worse, a rebel, an anarchist, a prophet of apocalyptic disorders.
Of course, let us immediately admit that there is also superimposed on this, another mystique: a mystique of America the beautiful, America whose mountains are bigger and better than those of Switzerland, scenic America which is to be seen first, last and always in preference to foreign ports; America which must be kept lovely for Ladybird. (So don’t throw that beer can in the river—even though it is polluted with all kinds of industrial waste. Business can mess up nature, but not you Jack!)
Here again nature is not valued for itself but as a business asset. Nevertheless a cult of nature appeared in the 19th Century.
The Romantic love of wild American nature began in the cities and was an import from Europe which benefited, first of all the rich. But at the same time it had a profound effect on American civilization. Not only did poets like William Cullen Bryant proclaim that the "groves were God’s first temples," and not only did the nineteenth century landscape painters make America realize that the woods and mountains were worth looking at; not only did Fenimore Cooper revive the ideal of the Noble Primitive who grew up in the "honesty of the woods," and was better than city people; but also it was now the villain in the story (perhaps a city slicker) who ravished the forest and callously misused the good things of nature.
The Transcendentalists, above all, reversed the Puritan prejudice against nature, and began to teach that in the forests and mountains God was nearer than in the cities. The silence of the woods whispered to the man who listened, a message of sanity and healing. While the Puritans had assumed that man being evil, would only revert to the most corrupt condition in the wilderness, the Transcendentalists held that since he was naturally good, and the cities corrupted his goodness, he needed contact with nature in order to recover his true self.
Walden One
All this quickly turned Into cliche. But nevertheless the prophetic work of Henry Thoreau went deeper than a mere surface enthusiasm for scenery and fresh air. It is true that Walden was not too far from Concord and was hardly a wilderness even in those days. But Thoreau did build himself a house in the woods and did live at peace with the wild things around the pond. He also proved what he set out to prove: that one could not only survive outside the perimeter of town or farm life, but that one could live better and happier there. The fictions, rites and conventions of New England society did not deserve the absolute allegiance that they claimed. There were other and better values.
On the other hand, Thoreau explored the Maine woods and had enough experience of the real wilds to recognize that life there could be savage and dehumanizing. Hence he produced a philosophy of balance which, he thought, was right and necessary for America. He already saw that American capitalism was set on a course that would ultimately ravage all wild nature on the continent—perhaps even in the world. And he warned that some wildness must be preserved. If it were not. man would destroy himself in destroying nature.
Thoreau had enough sense to realize that civilization was necessary and right. But an element of wildness was necessary as a component in civilized life itself. The American still had a priceless advantage over the European, one that would enable him to develop a greater and better civilization, if he did not miss his chance! He could, in Thoreau’s words, "combine the hardiness of the Indian with the intellectualness of civilized man." For that reason, said Thoreau, "I would not have every part of a man cultivated." To try to subject everything in man to rational and conscious control would be to warp, diminish and barbarize him. So too, the reduction of all nature to use for profit would end In the dehumanization of man. The passion and savagery that the Puritan had projected on to nature in order to justify his hatred of it and his fanatical combat against it, turned to be within man himself. And when man turned the green forests into asphalt jungles the price he said was that they were precisely that: jungles. The savagery of urban man, untempered by wilderness discipline, can be arbitrary, ruthless and pure. It Is wanton savagery for its own sake.
Thoreau, basing himself on the Chinese cosmology of Yang and Yin, preached an Inner integration and proportion between the conscious and unconscious that anticipated the discoveries of Freud and Jung: civilized man needed an element of irrationality, spontaneity, impulse, nature to balance his rationalism, his discipline, his controlled endeavor. These two should have the same “proportion that night bears to day, winter to the summer, thought to experience." For this reason, Thoreau was one of the first to advocate wilderness preservation. He thought the very township ought to include an area of wild nature "for modesty and reverence's sake."
It has been consistently proved true that what early nature philosophers, like Thoreau, said in terms that seemed merely poetic or sentimental, turned out to have realistic and practical implications. Soon a few people began to realize the bad effects of deforestation, and already in 1864 the crucial importance of the Adirondack woods for New York's water supply was recognized. About this time, too, the movement to set up National Parks was begun, though not always for the most fundamental reasons. The arguments for and against Yellowstone Park (1872) are instructive. First of all, the area was "no use for business anyway." And then the geysers, hot springs and other "decorations" were helpful manifestations of scientific truth. Then of course the place would provide "a great breathing place for the national lungs." Against this, one representative advanced a typical argument: "I cannot understand the sentiment which favors the retention of a few buffaloes to the development of mining interests amounting to millions of dollars."
Masculine Mystique
John Muir is the great name in the history of American wilderness preservation. Muir’s Scotch Calvinist Father was the kind of man who believed that only a sinner or a slacker would approach the wilderness without taking an axe to it. To leave wild nature unattacked or unexploited was, in his eyes, not only foolish but morally reprehensible. It is curious incidentally, that this attitude has rather consistently been associated with the American myth of virility. To be in the wilderness without fighting it, or at least without killing the animals in it, is regarded as a feminine trait. When a dam was about to be built in a canyon in Yosemite Park (1913) to provide additional water for San Francisco, those who opposed it were treated as "short haired women and long haired men.” Theodore Roosevelt, though a friend of John Muir’s, associated camping and hunting in the wilds with his virility cult, and this has remained a constant in the American mystique. Muir tried without success to persuade Roosevelt to stop hunting.
Muir seems to have worked out his wilderness philosophy on a very deep symbolic level in personal conflict and crisis, through which he attained an unusual level of psychic integration. His decision to travel on foot through a thousand miles of wild country from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico seems to have been an act of self-liberation from a Father dominated super-ego. And the reason he gave: "There is a love of wild nature In everybody, an ancient mother love, showing Itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties." This was not mere regression, but a recognition of the profoundly ambiguous imbalance in the American mind. Muir saw intuitively that the aggressive, compulsive, exploitative attitude of the American male toward nature reflected not strength but insecurity and fear. The American cult of success implied a morbid fear of failure and resulted in the overkill mentality so costly not only to nature but to every real or imaginary competitor to our "manifest destiny." A psychological study in depth of John Muir would probably reveal some very salutary information for modern America, and help us deliver ourselves from the demon of overkill.
Muir was of course completely committed to wilderness preservation. But at first he thought he could accept the compromise of those conservationists who were content with a policy of forest management. There is an important difference. Forest-management implies exploitation of the woods by selective cutting which "helps” the woods by “weeding out unwanted trees.” It also puts emphasis on the development of forest areas for recreation, opening up roads, campsites, hotels, and so on. Muir soon saw that this was only a milder form of exploitation. He felt it was essential to preserve areas of actual wilderness, completely undeveloped and even without roads, in which no cutting, no hunting, no exploitation whatever would be permitted. These areas would be open only to those who were willing to camp out In the most primitive conditions in direct contact with wild nature.
Muir’s basic insight was not simply the romantically religious one that "God's good tidings” are heard in the mountains, but the realization that man needed to feel a part of wild nature. He needed to recognize his kinship with all other living beings and to participate in their unchanged natural existence. In other words, he had to look at other living beings, especially wild things, not in terms of whether or not they were good for him, but as good for themselves. Instead of self-righteously assuming that man is absolute Lord of all nature and can exterminate other forms of life according to his own real or imagined needs, Muir reminded us that man is part of nature. He must remember the rights of other beings to exist on their own terms and not purely and simply on his. In other words, as Nash remarks, Muir here anticipated the teachings of the recent ecologists who have shown us that unless man learns this fundamental respect for all life, he himself will be destroyed.
An investigation of the wilderness mystique and of the contrary mystique of exploitation and power, reveals the tragic depth of the conflict that now exists in the American mind. The ideal of freedom and creativity which has been celebrated with such optimism and self-assurance runs the risk of being turned completely inside out if the natural ecological balance, on which It depends for its vitality, is destroyed. Take away the space, the freshness, the rich spontaneity of a wildly flourishing nature, and what will become of the creative pioneer mystique? A pioneer in a suburb is a sick man tormenting himself with projects of virile conquest. In a ghetto he is a policeman shooting every Black man who gives him a dirty look. Obviously, the frontier is a thing of the past. The bison has vanished and only by some miracle have a few Indians managed to survive. There are still some forests and wilderness areas, but we are firmly established as an urban culture. Nevertheless the problem of ecology exists in a most acute form. The danger of fallout and atomic waste is only one of the more spectacular ones. There is an almost Infinite number of others.
Fruits of Greed
Much of the stupendous ecological damage that has been done In the last fifty years Is completely Irreversible. Industry and the military, especially in America, are firmly set on policies which make further damage inevitable. There are plenty of people who are aware of the need for "something to be done", but just consider the enormous struggle that has to be waged, for instance in Eastern Kentucky, to keep mining interests from completing the ruin of an area that is already a ghastly monument to callous human greed. Everyone will agree that "deforestation is bad" and when flash floods pull down the side of a mountain and drown a dozen wretched little towns in mud, everyone will agree that it’s too bad the strip-miners peeled off the tops of the mountains with bulldozers. But when a choice has to be made, it is almost invariably made in the way that is good for a quick return on somebody's investment—and a permanent disaster for everybody else.
Aldo Leopold, a follower of Muir and one of the great preservationists understood that the erosion of American land was only part of a more drastic erosion of American freedom—of which it was a symptom. If "freedom’* means purely and simply an uncontrolled power to make money in every possible way, regardless of consequences, then freedom becomes synonymous with ruthless, mindless and absolute exploitation. Such freedom Is in fact nothing but the arbitrary tyranny of a wasteful and destructive process, glorified with big words that have lost their meaning. Aldo Leopold saw the connection, and expressed it in the quiet language of ecology.
“Is it not a bit beside the point to be so solicitous about preserving American Institutions without giving so much as a thought to preserving the environment which produced them and which may now be one of the effective means of keeping them alive?"
Aldo Leopold brought into clear focus one of the most important moral discoveries of our time. This can be called the ecological conscience. The ecological conscience is centered In an awareness of man's true place as a dependent member of the biotic community. Man must become fully aware of his dependence on a balance which he is not only free to destroy but which he has already begun to destroy. He must recognize his obligations toward the other members of that vital community. And incidentally, since he tends to destroy nature in his frantic efforts to exterminate other members of his own species, it would not hurt if he had a little more respect for human life too. The respect for life, the affirmation of all life, is basic to the ecological conscience. In the words of Albert Schweitzer: "A man is ethical only when life as such is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow man."
The tragedy which has been revealed in the ecological shambles created by business and war is a tragedy of ambivalence, aggression and fear cloaked in virtuous ideas and Justified by pseudo-Christian cliches. Or rather a tragedy of pseudo-creativity deeply' impregnated with hatred, megalomania and the need for domination. This is evident in the drama of the Vietnam war, cloaked as it is in the specious language of freedom and democracy. The psychological root of it is doubtless in the profound dehumanization and alienation of modern Western man who has gradually come to mistake the artificial value of inert objects and abstractions (goods, money, property) for the power of life itself, and who Is willing to place immediate profit above everything else. Money is more important, more alive than life, including the life and happiness of his closest and most intimate companions. This he can always Justify by a legaslistic ethic or a casuistical formula of some sort: but his formulas themselves betray him and eventually lose even the meaning which has been arbitrarily forced upon them.
As against this ethic of money and legal verbalism, Aldo Leopold laid down this basic principle of the ecological conscience: "A THING IS RIGHT WHEN IT TENDS TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY, STABILITY AND BEAUTY OF THE BIOTIC COMMUNITY. IT IS WRONG WHEN IT TENDS OTHERWISE.”
In the light of this principle, an examination of our social economic and political history in the last hundred years would be a moral nightmare, redeemed only by a few gestures of good will on the part of those—and they are many—who obscurely realize that there is a problem. Yet compared to the size of the problem, these efforts are at best pitiful: and what is more, the same gestures are made with great earnestness by the very people who continue to ravage, destroy and pollute the country. They honor the wilderness myth while they proceed to destroy nature. Aldo Leopold has defined the ecological conscience. Can such a conscience be formed and become really effective in America today? ls it likely to be? The ecological conscience is also essentially a peace-making conscience. A country that seems to be more and more oriented to permanent hot or cold war-making does not give much promise of developing either one. But perhaps the very character of the war in Vietnam—with crop poisoning, the defoliation of forest trees, the incineration of villages and their Inhabitants with napalm— presents enough of a stark and critical example to remind us of this most urgent moral need. Catholic theology ought to take note of the ecological conscience, and do it fast.
Meanwhile some of us are wearing the little yellow and red button with a flower on it and the words "Celebrate Life!" We bear witness, as best we can, to these things.
ED. NOTE: Thomas Merton Is a frequent contributor to the CATHOLIC WORKER. His article “The Vietnam War: an Overwhelming Atrocity” appeared in the March issue.
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