Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

By Evan Berry

Devoted to Nature explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement’s religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement’s orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans’ passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780520961142

Evan Berry

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Codirector of its Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master's program.

Book preview

Devoted to Nature

Devoted to Nature

The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

Evan Berry

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berry, Evan, 1977– author.

    Devoted to nature : the religious roots of American environmentalism / Evan Berry.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28572-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-28573-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96114-2 (ebook)

    1. Human ecology—Religious aspects—Christianity.    2. Human ecology—United States.    3. Environmentalism—Religious aspects—Christianity.    4. Environmentalism—United States.    5. Nature—Religious aspects—Christianity.    I. Title.

BT695.5.B465    2015

    261.8’80973—dc232015004613

Manufactured in the United States of America

24    23    22    21    20    19    18    17    16    15

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Whither Religion?

1. Recreation and Soteriology

2. Congregating around Nature

3. Sacred Space and the American Environmental Imagination

4. Recreation and Spiritual Experience

Conclusion: The Mechanics of Religious Change

Notes

For Further Reading and Research

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the guidance and mentorship of Jim Proctor, who helped shepherd me through graduate school and helped prepare me for the complex challenges of academic life and scholarly work. His ideas, rigor, and support are among the chief reasons why I was able to bring this book to fruition. There are a number of ways to think about and write about the social construction of nature, and I have enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with various approaches against Jim’s friendly and consistent critical feedback. A mentor who can help you develop your own voice is the very best kind. Wade Clark Roof and Thomas Carlson were also instrumental to the ideas developed in this book: Clark’s ideas about how religion operates in American society are evident throughout, and Tom’s influential lessons about the impact of Christian theology on the specific shape of Western modernity is the foundation on which this work is grounded.

I have also been very fortunate over the past couple of years to share conversations with a number of distinguished scholars across a diversity of academic disciplines that inform this work. Bron Taylor, a guiding light in the study of religion and nature, has provided me with helpful counsel about the theoretical questions that shape the field. Among my colleagues at American University, Paul Wapner and Jeff Reiman have been tremendously helpful interlocutors. Paul consistently pushed me to be particularly mindful of the lessons that can be gleaned from American environmental history. This project would not succeed at much if it did not clearly explain how the strengths and weaknesses of previous environmental movements inform the present moment. Since my first day on campus, Jeff has pushed back against almost every moral and historical argument I’ve tried to advance. His intellectual full-court press has helped me distinguish between my rigorous ideas and my wishful ones, and I am much more confident in what I say here because of his help determining what not to say.

A number of close colleagues have helped by critiquing various drafts and talking through insufficiently developed parts of the manuscript. Caleb Elfenbein went far above the ordinary demands of friendship by closely reading the entire manuscript and offering insightful comments both about its overarching themes and about its textual minutiae. In thinking through questions particular to the study of religion and the environment, Luke Johnston and Robin Globus provided useful counsel. Megan Sijapati and Rahuldeep Gill contributed insights and ideas about the writing process and the saliency of the arguments presented here for scholars working outside the narrow area of religion and the environment.

More recently, Whitney Bauman, Kevin O’Brien, and one anonymous reviewer proffered incredibly insightful reviews. The clarity and framing of my central claim—that modern American environmental thought is deeply shaped by its relationship with Christian theological tradition—is clearer and more forceful because of their crisp comments. I have been writing and rewriting this book over a number of years and have been able to regularly rely on excellent research assistants. In particular, Shannon Williams, Marissa Escajeda, and Lauren Zahn have been instrumental in helping organize my notes, identify archival materials, and tighten bibliographic references. I would like to thank my editors at the University of California Press: Reed Malcolm for his interest in this project and Eric Schmitt for his steady hand in guiding the manuscript to completion. Joe Abbott’s discerning eye significantly improved this book’s rigor and precision. The staff at the Burchfield Penny Art Center are also to be commended for their collaboration in arranging the compelling image on the cover. The work of Charles Burchfield is insufficiently appreciated and resonates closely with a devotion to nature.

Most important, I want to express my gratitude to my family. Their support, patience, and encouragement are the reasons why my intellectual curiosities mean anything in the first place. Gina, my wonderful wife, has been my biggest champion, despite having to hear the same ideas repeated ad nauseam. Her groundedness and eye for the genuine have kept my tendencies to theorize in check and are the real reasons why I am satisfied with what this text accomplishes.

Introduction

Whither Religion?

The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe—persists. Indeed, these seem to be renewing their life today in this growing love for all natural objects and in this increasing tenderness towards all forms of life. If we do not go to church as much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were.

—John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature

We hear different stories about environmentalism. In contemporary political debates in the United States it is not uncommon for environmentalism’s public detractors to insinuate that it is eerily close to a religious belief system or to call Al Gore a false prophet of a secular carbon cult.¹ Conversely, it is possible to hear mainstream environmentalists eschew religion altogether in favor of scientific reason and policy analysis, arguing that environmentalism [is] an ideology, a political movement, even a lifestyle; but it sure as hell isn’t a religion.² However reactionary these particular utterances may be, how do we make sense of such contrasting claims about the religious character of modern environmentalism? Is there any truth to the suggestion that environmentalism is like a religious belief system, or can we be sure as hell that it is not? If we accept these as the two basic possibilities, then our appreciation of environmentalism’s social origins is restricted to two dissatisfying hypotheses: either environmentalism is a fake religion, whose pious followers are unwitting idolaters, or it is unequivocally secular, with little resemblance to the claims made by its ideological opponents. How did this confused bifurcation come about?

This book argues that these positions are both misunderstandings, though for reasons that might frustrate conventional modes of cultural and political interpretation. American environmentalism is related to religion, not out of serendipitous resemblance but by way of historically demonstrable genealogical affinity with Christian theological tradition.

The conceptual origins of the social movement we now call environmentalism are rooted in religious thought and practice, even if these roots have long been obscured for reasons convenient to both political progressives and conservatives. By the middle of the twentieth century, the struggle for environmental protection had been thoroughly politicized, requiring an increasingly secular, empirical, and rational framework to achieve collectively desired legislative outcomes.³ But the legal and regulatory achievements of midcentury environmentalists grew from a social movement with rather different foundations. The moral basis of environmentalism—its abiding concern with nature as an object of the utmost ethical value—was not produced by a calculative view of the public good. It was produced by a confluence of social factors, the most important of which was a theological commitment to the redemptive capacities of God’s creation. Although this fundamental ingredient has receded from public view, it was readily apparent in earlier instantiations of environmentalism and continues to influence the way that nature and the natural are wielded as salient values in contemporary political contestations. This book does not attempt to systematically identify the vestiges of theology in our current body politic. Rather, it provides a modest attempt at historical recuperation, a remembering of the connective tissues between religious discourse and environmental sentiments that sustained the movement in its formative years. I articulate a genealogical history that locates American environmental thought in its religious contexts, drawing direct linkages between the expressly Christian character of its romantic foundations and the forms of nature spirituality noted by its contemporary observers.⁴

Environmental history has tended to corroborate the antagonism between nature and religion prevalent in popular discourse. As environmental history has matured as a discipline over the past half century, scholars have typically located American environmentalism within one of two frames of reference, neither of which adequately interrogates the movement’s religious underpinnings. The first looks primarily to nineteenth-century sources and emphasizes the romantic themes present in the transcendentalist efforts of luminaries like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.⁵ Scholarship in this vein has done much to attend to the religious elements present in early environmental literatures, especially in the texts of American nature writers. The second frame of reference engages primarily with post–World War II sources and emphasizes the tightening connection between ecological science and legislative policy evident in figures like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich.⁶ Scholarship in this area has tended to conceptualize environmentalism in political and economic terms. Both frames of reference provide useful points of entry to understanding American environmentalism, and it is reasonable to assume that, given the movement’s complexity, both historical aspects inform contemporary environmental thought. There is, however, a conceptual tension between these two foci, an implicit assumption of the conventional historical narrative evident in the phrase "modern environmental movement. This referent serves to distinguish the social and political manifestations of environmentalism that arose during the 1960s from those that came before. Modern environmentalism includes Rachel Carson’s plea against the harms of DDT; the establishment of the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency; legislative outcomes like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act; and even the formation of local grassroots organizations like the Love Canal Homeowners Association. Because these engagements signal a commitment to ecological science and to the bureaucratic, rational management of natural resources, the preoccupation of post–World War II environmentalism with policy and regulation is even occasionally lauded as environmental activism [coming] of age."⁷

Although it is certainly true that environmental historians readily acknowledge the nineteenth-century roots of American ideas about and practices toward the natural world, their accounts often suggest that the romantic leanings of the Gilded Age were displaced by the rise of manifestly political organizations.⁸ The conventional history of the American environmental movement rests on a rather uncritical application of modernization theory, by way of which the baldly theistic language and religious underpinnings exemplified by the transcendentalists and featured throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were increasingly subsumed by the need for legislative advocacy and political activism through the course of the twentieth century. Borrowing a page from the Enlightenment playbook, this historical understanding of environmentalism suggests that religious elements became increasingly irrelevant to the movement’s self-identity and to the elaboration of its sociopolitical projects. As John McNeill puts it, in science more than religion, ideas from earlier eras exerted an impact on environmental history in the twentieth century.⁹ To where, though, did the movement’s religious elements dissipate?

If the roots of environmentalism grew in religious soil, how can the modern movement be called secular? When and by what processes did the influence of religion fade into the dusky opacity of history? If environmental thought was formerly bound up with the religious aspects of transcendentalism, then should the rise of the modern environmental movement be read as a story of secularization? Is the modern affection for nature bound to theological tradition or radically free of its influence? How are we to understand potential relations between environmentalism and religion? How are we to assess the significance of these relations? What kinds of analyses effectively advance our understanding of the cultural characteristics of our environmental inheritance? Devoted to Nature takes these questions as its primary objects. Against a convenient framing of environmentalism as an essentially secular undertaking, I advance the argument that religious ideas, practices, and persons played critical roles in establishing the American environmental movement. More explicitly, this book situates the emergence of environmentalism as a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern Western ideas about nature, a history largely, but not exclusively shaped by religious factors. The following pages develop an argument that extends beyond a general theory of religious influence: I argue not only that the formation of the American environmental movement drew on religious sources but that these sources are its central conceptual ingredients, playing crucial roles in shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engaging with environments and landscapes, and generating modes of social and political interaction. Specifically, I argue that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation grounded the environmental movement’s orientation toward nature.

Theologically rooted notions of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress provided a context for Americans enthusiastic about the outdoors and established the horizons of possibility for the national environmental imagination.¹⁰ Although notable research has appraised the depth with which American ideas about nature were colored by religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, overtly religious considerations remain a sporadic feature of scholarship about subsequent historical currents. By tracing these threads of religious influence into the twentieth century, I hope to indicate some of the channels through which these elements remain vitally constitutive of our environmental inheritance. Primary among these channels is the notion that nature is morally salient, both as an object of intrinsic value and as a means of advancing human moral goods. The particular histories through which the American environmental movement’s moral claims took shape are closely intertwined with theological discourse.¹¹

Popular accounts of American environmentalism frequently sketch the movement as a trajectory plotted by a handful of great men (of whom at least several are women). The list of notable figures comes in different forms but invariably includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Historical analyses of their contributions concede the religious orientation of nineteenth-century luminaries (Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir); however, they lack a theoretically rigorous account about why religion matters, where it came from, or how it influenced the environmentalism of subsequent generations. Many histories simply abscond with the religious content apparent in nineteenth-century sources, failing to venture whether the richly theological implications of transcendentalism were carried forward.¹² Theology, though, was never far beneath the surface. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century the manifestly Christian language with which many Americans framed their understanding of nature afforded the concepts that would shape the environmental movement for generations. Ideas of wilderness, recreation, stewardship, and scenic beauty were all common features of early twentieth-century discourse about nature and were intelligible primarily in terms of a theistically grounded understanding of the human position in the created order.

Special attention to the decades between the late nineteenth-century zenith of transcendentalism and the formation of advocacy and activist organizations in the post–World War II era highlights a lush variety of sources—persons, groups, and practices—in which the connections between religion and environmentalism were publicly transparent and socially malleable. The theological concepts around which the environmental imagination was constructed were not themselves entirely new, and in order to effectively situate twentieth-century environmental discourse in its religious context, Devoted to Nature looks into the deep recesses of Christian thought as a critical locus of environmental meaning. Although the primary focus of the pages that follow is the period between 1914 (John Muir’s death) and 1949 (the publication of Leopold’s influential A Sand County Almanac), the narrative is not chronologically organized. Instead, the chapters seize on key themes—salvation, community, place, and experience—and draw connections linking deeper currents of Christian history and the ferment of American society during the first half of the twentieth century. There was a tremendous amount of activity, dynamism, and experimentation among Americans interested in the outdoors and in the protection of nature during the interwar years. These decades have also received much less attention from environmental historians than have, for example, the 1890s or the 1960s.

It was during the 1920s and 1930s—decades more or less coextensive with the Progressive Era—that the ideas and lifestyles advocated by the transcendentalists achieved widespread popularity and gave rise to many of the institutions and practices that are now collectively referred to as environmentalism.¹³ The conventional history of American environmentalism posits the Progressive Era as a transitional period in which the tension between Muir’s romanticism and conservation faded.¹⁴ During the Progressive Era the industrial and intellectual tumult of the late nineteenth century took more expressly social and political forms: broad constituencies of Americans organized around a number of political causes, including temperance, child welfare, urban design, and the conservation of natural resources. Historians, perhaps foreshadowing the legalistic tenor of environmental politics in the late decades of the twentieth century, have described the Progressive Era as a prelude to the Environmental Movement replete with organizations designed to harmonize the romantic vision of the transcendentalists with modern sentiments of efficiency.¹⁵ But to interpret the environmental zeitgeist of the Progressive Era as a transition away from romanticism toward more rigorously scientific, legalistic modes of social action misses the complexity and intellectual richness of this period. As David Stradling claims, postwar environmentalists had to develop the means . . . in improving their environments . . . [but their] interest[s] derived from an environmentalist philosophy developed decades earlier, in the middle-class Victorian values of late-nineteenth-century American cities.¹⁶

The first several decades of the twentieth century saw a remarkable flourishing of naturalist societies and outdoors associations (the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Mountaineers Club, the Appalachian Trail Club, etc.), all of which were situated at a remove from their romantic roots but had not yet become the advocacy- and activism-oriented organizations that we today understand as their descendants. Put another way, many of the most influential mainstream environmental organizations in the contemporary United States began during this period, growing and flourishing in the religious milieu of the Progressive Era. Early twentieth-century American environmental thought is at times kaleidoscopic in its wildly combinatory fusion of religious imagery, scientific data, bourgeois social norms, and allusions to romantic poetry, but a close analysis of sources from this era yields tangible insight into the cultural substrata of our environmental imagination.

The Progressive Era is also distinguished by a number of underappreciated environmental figures. Muir wrote until just before World War I, and Leopold began to achieve national notoriety before the Great Depression. Their personages have often overshadowed a host of lesser-known naturalists, recreational enthusiasts, and regionally influential conservationists, all of whom attest to the breadth and multifaceted nature of the period’s environmental legacy. Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Burroughs, Mable Osgood Wright, Ernest Thompson Seton, Benton MacKaye, William Frederic Badè, Edmond S. Meany, Asahel Curtis, and many others offer glimpses of the variegation of environmental attitudes in the early twentieth century.¹⁷ The history of the American environmental movement has typically been narrated by a close attention to its guiding lights, but an account that focuses exclusively on the legacy of the most celebrated nature writers offers only a partial view of the movement’s intellectual development. Daniel Philippon employs a slightly different approach to the prominent nature writers of the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that they were not just thinkers but also catalysts for political mobilization and, in several key cases, were personally responsible for founding influential environmental organizations. Specifically, Philippon discusses Teddy Roosevelt (Boone and Crockett Club), John Muir (Sierra Club), Mable Osgood Wright (Audubon Society of Connecticut), Aldo Leopold (Wilderness Society), and Edward Abbey (EarthFirst!). Borrowing from this model, the present study pursues what Philippon calls the ecology of influence, the circulation of ecological ideas and environmental practices through social networks at various scales.¹⁸ Devoted to Nature relies on nature writing as one of its primary resources but eschews the biographic method in favor of reading such texts as representative of broader cultural currents that can be verified and reanimated by locating them within patterns of cultural behavior and social interaction. In other words American environmental thought includes, but is not defined by, the contributions of the nation’s most illustrious nature writers. As Philippon puts it, at the same time that these nature writers and writings were influencing people’s attitudes and behavior, people’s attitudes and behavior were exerting a counter-influence on them.¹⁹

If it is an error to take the textual products of nature writings as the lone sources of American environmentalism, then it is also true that biographic histories of environmentalism overdetermine the movement’s moral characteristics. The degree to which historians have asserted the significance of religion in the formation of environmentalism has generally been proportional to the salience of religion in the life and letters of the most influential conservationist leaders. The theory of religious influence developed in this book focuses primarily on religion as a shared mode of social discourse. American environmentalism is theologically rooted not because some select few individuals successfully evangelized their religious view of nature in the public arena but because such a view of nature was already in wide public demand.

The personage of John Muir affords a paradigmatic case. Contemporary interpreters of Muir’s work universally acknowledge the significance of his religious upbringing and the prevalence of religious terminology throughout his corpus; however, they disagree in fundamental ways about how to locate Muir’s personal religiosity.²⁰ Given the tremendous influence of Muir’s writing and its continued popularity, it is reasonable that his modern readers desire greater clarity about his theological commitments, but, in thinking retrospectively about the roots of environmentalism, it is crucial not to confuse causality with correlation. Muir’s biographical particularities are not the determining factors in how the environmental movement is shaped by religion. His religious upbringing, his penchant for scriptural allusions, and his deeply spiritual engagement with nature are all common features of his era. In the cultural conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muir’s case is rather ordinary: Christian theology and biblical rhetoric were the standard means by which most Americans made sense of the natural world and framed their experience in moral terms. Muir’s reverence for living creatures, anger about the despoliation of western landscapes, and intimate personal relation with the goodness of creation were elegantly written and widely circulated, but they were hardly unusual or abnormal. Muir’s writings certainly speak to his genius but also indicate the religious milieu in which they were formed.

Religious energies contributed to the environmental movement’s foundations, but the scholarship exploring these contributions often lacks a coherent theoretical account of religious influence.²¹ Perhaps more precisely, scholarship on the history of American environmentalism draws on a multiplicity of incompatible ideas about the relationship between religion and environmentalism, which are only occasionally rendered in explicit terms by social historians. Of the steadily growing number of studies treating the interplay of religion and environmental sentiments in American history, only a select few have been written by scholars formally trained in the study of religion.²² Tremendous interdisciplinarity characterizes the scholarly literature in this field: environmental historians, art historians, urban designers, landscape architects, sociologists, political theorists, and theologians have all contributed insights to the understanding of religion and environmentalism. Across this eclectic body of knowledge there is an incredible range of ideas about what religion is and how it operates in relationship to various kinds of cultural activities. It is exceedingly difficult to distill from the diverse scholarship on these issues a singular theory about the origins of environmentalism. Yet a common feature of many accounts is that the emergence of the modern environmental movement involves a resacralization of nature. There are (at least) four conceptual orientations by way of which scholars have asserted this resacralization in the American context. Positioning Devoted to Nature over against these narratives helps clarify my argument that the birth of the American environmental movement was facilitated by a religious understanding of nature, which held that nature was always already sacred.

The first interpretive position is the idea that environmentalism offers a substitute for conventional religion to those rationally minded persons who aspire to spiritual understanding.²³ Authors operating under this assumption occasionally refer to environmentalism as quasi-religious or claim that it is akin to religion.²⁴ A significant portion of such scholarship, however, comes from outside the formal study of religion, where historians, political scientists, and sociologists have taken interest in the relevance of the sacred to ecological issues. Many scholars working in this area tacitly accept the Weberian notion that the forces of secularization have drained industrial societies of their metaphysical zeal, leaving behind a mechanical, disenchanted, bureaucratic social structure. In this view the emergence of the environmental movement appears as a new shoot among the ashes of modernization, a novel and unforeseen resacralization of nature.²⁵

A second view argues that religious traditions are themselves in the midst of a resacralization of nature evident in the emergence of religious environmentalism, the environmental mobilization of traditional religious actors and institutions. Scholars have sometimes asserted that this cultural development is an expansive historical process in which religions, both in the United States and globally, are enter[ing] their ecological phase.²⁶ Other treatments of religious environmentalism have more narrowly focused on the development of theologically grounded responses to contemporary environmental issues among particular religious constituencies.²⁷ Manu champions of this resacralization narrative suggest that religious actors have increasingly engaged environmental concerns by coming to grips with the ecological ambivalence of their theological traditions, forging new alliances, reinterpreting textual traditions, and reworking ritual and liturgical practices.²⁸

A third interpretive stance suggests that twentieth-century environmentalism broke away from its religious roots but not away from religiosity altogether. This approach holds that environmentalism’s founding figures articulated a biocentric view of nature that effectively displaced Christian orthodoxy and paved the way for animistic and neopagan spiritualities. This school of thought brings to the fore the pantheistic leanings of late nineteenth-century naturalists like Ernst Haeckel and John Muir, both of whom articulate unorthodox theologies of nature, even where they use manifestly Christian vocabularies to do so.²⁹ Religious analyses of this type play down the continuities between Christianity and religiously inflected visions of nature, emphasizing the greater significance of the discontinuities.³⁰ This theoretical approach advances a particular notion of secularization in which modernization does not deracinate religion altogether but forcefully and actively reshapes it to conform with contemporary cultural conditions. Here resacralization refers to the articulation of