BeFriending Creation
Books on `faithful stewards' are antidotes for environmental blues
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) and John Muir (1838–1914) lived in America at a time when land was looked on as a commodity to fill human needs. Growing up in Vermont, Marsh saw whole forests being destroyed to make charcoal and potash. Working in Europe gave him a global perspective of the adverse impact human activity was having on the earth and inspired him to write his epic work Man and Nature to wake up a populace wallowing in the self-deception of endless resources.
Muir's family was part of the huge wave of immigrants attracted by cheap land out West. As a boy, John Muir saw plots quickly drained, cleared, and planted—displacing the beautiful meadows of wildflowers he reveled in. It moved him to embark on a lifelong mission to protect the landfirst the beautiful marshes near his home in Wisconsin, and later Yosemite in California, which led to the formation of the national park system.
Two books, Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa (University of Virginia Press 2006) by John Elder and Yearning for the Land (Pantheon Books New York 2002) by John Warfield Simpson, focus on these early conservationists and how they relate to our times.
John Elder follows George Perkins Marsh from Vermont to Italy, where he served as Abraham Lincoln's envoy and wrote his book, which influenced Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Marsh's idea that "awareness of ecological disasters was a first step toward social and economic changes that could realign our culture with the larger cycles of nature," is a springboard for Elder, who feels we can still make changesnot only in wilderness but in the places we live and work. A sense of wonder will fuel our courage to act. "We are not called upon to manage nature from without or above. We are invited to step back into the house of life with the heart of a child."
In Yearning for the Land (Pantheon Books New York 2002) John Warfield Simpson embarks on a quest to understand how it feels to "be native to a place, to know the landscape in which I live, to sense its changing moods and rhythms, to pattern my life in response."
Simpson gives us a history of the westward expansion and its effect on the land, and he interviews present landowners in Dunbar, Scotland, Muir's ancestral home, and in Marquette County, Wisconsin, to discover what the land means to them. Family and community are integral. But "for most Americans the history of place begins when whites settled the area." The Ho-Chunk people, a small group of indigenous people living in Marquette County, have a different view—they call the earth "Grandmother." For them "Land, language, and identity are inseparable.… Unfortunately they never were for most of the aliens who displaced them. John Muir was an exception," says Simpson.
Making connections is a recurring theme in both books. Elder, who tends sugar maples at home in Vermont, discovers a stand of maples that Marsh planted at the ancient forest at Vallombrosa before he died. Elder's wife connects with her Italian relatives. While in Scotland, Simpson finds his direct ancestor, Johne Symson, who emigrated to America in 1677.
Both Elder and Simpson write from a deep love for the earth. Simpson wonders why we define land only in terms of property values, legal descriptions and location. "But what does the heart say?" he asks. For him there is more to land than just appearance and physical descriptionthere is "history, myth, legend, and folklore." Elder weaves those elements into his narrative with the poetry of Words-worth, Basho and Frost, which helps him see the land as "a receptacle of aesthetic, spiritual, and familiar values."
In the closing section, Elder returns to Vermont and lays out his vision of stewardship: faithful service, effectiveness, awareness of a community's living history, and inventiveness in the context of current conservation initiatives there.
These books have much to teach us, as we become stewards of the Creation. Antidotes for environmental blues, they inspire and inform. The authors change on their journeys; we, too, change as we travel with them. •
