When Wonder Is Not Enough
Sept 14, 2020 | By Bradley Yam SY ‘20
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
– Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us
With a pithy sestet Wordsworth summarizes the wonder of the wilderness wrapped in mythological glory: Proteus rising from the sea, Triton blowing his horn. Wordsworth wrote during the Industrial Revolution when the divisions between the civilized city and the natural wilderness became sharply defined. He articulated a dualism between civilization and wilderness that closely parallels the Platonic dualism between physical and spiritual. The world is bad, nature is good. The side that the poet chose is unambiguously the wilderness, even if his appreciation was limited to a paganism whose creed was out of fashion for the day. Wordsworth may have been prescient in predicting the vast numbers of the spiritual-but-not-religious and their deep connection with the wonder of nature, but he would not have predicted that wonder would not be enough to protect either the wilderness or the fragile civilization built on top of it.
The wilderness is a source of wonder, awe, and feelings of sublime beauty to many. As the number of Americans who identify with religious traditions and institutions dwindle, many are re-discovering their spirituality in nature. [1] Respondents to surveys on “peak experiences” describe their time in the natural beauty of the wilderness as a state of “flow” or “connectedness.” More specifically, it is the grand mountains and sweeping valleys of the wilderness that are most conducive to this sense of awe and wonder. They describe feeling small, humbled, a sense of being annihilated, and simultaneously connected with the universe. [2] It is a moment of “unselving.” These experiences are often described as spiritual.
Even the self-proclaimed “fourth-generation atheist” Barbara Ehrenreich is not exempt from a spiritual experience in the wilderness. In her book Living with a Wild God, Ehrenreich describes a mystical experience in the California desert, where she felt a fiery and “furious encounter with a living substance.”[3] It is described in the article as having been as violently ecstatic as it was euphoric.
The spirituality of the wilderness has made it all the way into our classrooms and universities. Hamilton College has fielded a nature experience course, “Religion in the Wild,” taught by Professor Brent Rodrigeuz-Plate, who claims that “religious figures, like Mohammed, Buddha and Jesus, have central tenets of belief rooted in the bodily experience of the wild.” [4] Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim at Yale Schools of Forestry and Divinity run the course “Journey of the Universe.” [5] The course aims to expand the scope of the traditional religious narrative all the way out to the formation of the universe. Its central sentiment is that of wonder: wonder at the universe, wonder at ourselves as emergent properties of the universe.
By marrying religion and the wilderness, one may think that we are doing multiple goods: breathing new life back into old, stuffy traditions, smoothing over the apparent divide between religion and science, and providing an inclusive entryway into religious experiences available to all of us: the wonder of the wilderness. [6] Each of these points deserve its own separate essay, but this article will focus on the last point: how the wonder of the wilderness by itself is not enough to meaningfully connect to a specific religious ethic.
Wonder, like any sentiment, is malleable. It can be molded to many different and conflicting ethics and still seem to fit. The natural wonder of the wild is generic enough to find admirers in everything from pagan earth cults to atheists to mainline Christian denominations. For this reason it cannot be itself a religion, and cannot by itself generate an ethic toward the environment. That wilderness can evoke a sense of wonder seems like it would result in some good for the environment, but it may instead add fuel to a fight over the future of environmentalism that is leaving casualties in its wake.
The American understanding of “wilderness” comes from the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the legal definition of wilderness as a place where “earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Environmentalist Howard Zahniser, who drafted the bill, intended it to express a “forward-looking perspective about the future of land and ecosystems,” where “wilderness is to be allowed to express its own will.” Although untrammeled actually means uninhibited, or unopposed, it has often been misconstrued to mean “untrampled.” This has led to the idea of the wilderness as being pure and virginal, untouched by human civilization. [7] The error leads to defining the wilderness via its “physical or ecological condition of the land or its past land-use history,” rather than the ongoing relationship between man and his use of the land. This definition has been used to deny adequate conservation to land with a history of human use and adequate protections to indigenous people who live on conserved land. [8]
The purity doctrine of the empty wilderness has led to a brand of radical “anti-people” environmentalism that has come under fire for ignoring the histories of indigenous people and results in the displacement of those who depend on the land for their livelihood. [9] These criticisms are well deserved. [10]
The pristine wilderness of Kruger National Park was artificially created from a land already populated by indigenous Shangaan Tsonga. “The South African village of Dixie still bears the name of a place that no longer exists.” Dixie is a small town on a precious island of communal rangeland boxed in by wildlife reserves on all sides. Its inhabitants have been forced to relocate since its original location was slated to be “conserved” under Kruger National Park. The white nationalist government of the 20th century marched the indigenous people out of their homes to cramped sites on the edge of the park’s western border, in service of an ideal of a pure wilderness. [11]
The story of Dixie is repeated ad nauseam across the world. The establishment of conservation areas by colonial powers in Africa and Asia have come at the expense of relocating their original inhabitants. These wildlife parks then become attractions for ecotourists hailing from formerly colonizing nations. These stories continue to echo on in the fight against climate change in the same areas that have historically been disadvantaged by the colonial strategy. A VICE article details how the World Bank-funded Kenya Forest Services have been evicting an indigenous Sengwer community from their ancestral homeland in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills, for the sake of reforesting lands dubiously funded by “carbon credits” from the emerging global carbon market. [12]
On the extremes, people like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, are simply and fundamentally anti-people, requiring no further pretext. By identifying over-population as the source of the environmental scourge, they justify anti-immigration and population control strategies. [13]
However, the critics of radical environmentalism tend to conflate different aspects of the movement that ought to be kept separate. Genuinely anti-people extremists like Dave Foreman are lumped in together with figures like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold simply on the basis of their whiteness and the spiritual value with which they treat nature, without even pausing to consider the real differences in their religious persuasions. This kind of spurious condemnation by association is the result of careless thinking. In the effort to decolonize environmentalism, we risk implicating some of the best traditions that have the resources to guide us toward a better movement.
To begin with, the Judeo-Christian scriptures do not characterize the wilderness as a sacralized, virginal land, but instead as a land that is uncultivated and unsuited for human habitation. When Jesus retreated into the wilderness––eremos, a place of isolation––for forty days, he was not going there for its spiritual qualities but its lack of physical and social amenities (Matthew 4:1-25). It was a place to be alone. More importantly, it harkened back to the forty years that the Israelites wandered the wilderness in Torah, an experience that was spiritual but decidedly not sublime. [14]
Early Christian monastics such as the Desert Fathers also embraced the wilderness as a place of meditative solitude. It was not the spiritual quality of the desert wilderness that attracted the Desert Fathers, but the exact opposite: the desert wilderness drawing out the temptations of hunger, of power, of beauty, the trappings of the ego and the flesh. These were temptations to be overcome. It was the testing ground of faith. [15]
The conservationists of the early 20th century, John Muir in particular, did indeed understand the wilderness with a religious eye. He understood nature as a kind of revelation through which he could understand the mind of God. “I bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.” Muir, a born tinkerer and engineer, had a deeply cerebral relationship with nature. In the wilderness, he taught himself the principles of science and natural ecology. It was the furthest thing from a casual and careless spirituality, and it was the furthest thing from an anti-people environmentalism. [16]
Although the Wilderness Act and other nature preservation legislation has recently come under fire, it is apparent that its writer Howard Zahniser intended for a mutually beneficial relationship between the land and its inhabitants. He meant to curb the excesses of industrial society, not prevent indigenous peoples from exercising their right to the land. He was inspired by a deep religious appreciation for nature that went beyond a mere sense of wonder, that dared to envision a more beautiful relationship between man and earth, where both sides could be “untrammeled,” uninhibited in their existence and their pursuit of God. [17]
All of this is a far cry from the biocentrism of Dave Foreman’s “Earth First!” movement, which rather than being grounded in a Christian tradition, is more inspired by earth-worshipping cults and anarcho-Marxist philosophies. In a letter to the members of Earth First, he declares that “Earth is Goddess and the proper object of human worship.” [18]
This is not to say that all nature worshippers are radical environmentalists, or that Christians have never misused Scripture to justify a practice of environmental dominance. For example, the early Puritan settlers in North America carried forward an antagonism toward the wilderness to new extremes with a pioneer mentality. The wilderness, instead of a place of meditation and solitude, became a land to be subdued. However, environmental dominance came to a fuller manifestation as a result of converging cultural forces, including Jeffersonian political philosophy, public interest of the federal government, and business priorities.
But other modern, prominent Christian voices are calling for a more inclusive, more humane environmentalism. In 2015, Pope Francis released the encyclical Laudato Si (Praise Be To You) with the subtitle, “On Care For Our Common Home.” In it, the Pope points out how his namesake, St Francis, “shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.” [19] To this end Pope Francis points us toward an “integral ecology” which broadens our focus to understand environmental, social, economic crises as one complex crisis with many manifestations. In order to adequately address environmental concerns, we cannot ignore the culture of commodification that endangers both biodiversity and human dignity. This vision is perhaps best put into practice by the ongoing work of A Rocha International, an international Christian conservation organization committed to caring for all of God’s creation.
Through community-based projects that pay attention to the people, practices, and places, A Rocha attempts to generate sustainable relationships between humans and the environment. A Rocha’s interventions are designed to be community-led, driven by the people who have the closest relationship with the environment that is being conserved, who also depend on its benefits. In the Atewa Range Forest Reserve in Ghana, A Rocha empowers local communities to restore degraded land from illegal logging and mining operations. They engage local farmers in conservation agriculture to help preserve biodiversity and improve yields. By focusing on non-timber products, local communities are encouraged to grow crops that sustain the local ecosystem rather than destroy it. [20]
The words “integral ecology” are never mentioned in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, but the idea that man and his environment need to be cared for as a unified whole appears everywhere. The Levitical law characterizes sexual slavery as being akin, or almost causal, to the degradation of the land, which is a connection between the proper care for women and nature that is often pointed out by eco-feminists today. The root cause of degradation of both women and nature is almost always the economic pressure to commodify what ought to instead be protected. [21] The cure for the unhealthy dualism that sees everything as either sacred (to be protected) or profane (to be exploited) is to recognize that the very relationship between man and nature is sacred.
Wordsworth’s dualism continues to echo in the fight over the future of the environmental ethic. Whether it is man vs nature, civilization vs wilderness, colonial vs native, exploitative vs inclusive, the wilderness is constantly being defined and redefined in terms of these binaries. As the pace of technological change advances, our desire for a purer wilderness deepens. The more disconnected we are from the wilderness, the more our natural sense of curiosity and even spirituality will be activated by experiences of the wild. However, it is apparent that the wonder generated by these binaries are unhelpful at best for developing a useful ethic of responsibility.
Wonder can only get us so far. Wonder in the wilderness needs to be grounded in a framework of man’s relationship with his environment in order to be transformed into a positive action. In my opinion, there is no better tradition to do this than the Christian one. In the very opening chapters of Genesis, man (adam) takes his place as a creature whose nature is to be formed of the earth (adammah), but to also possess the breath of the divine. In the Christian tradition, man is a liminal creature that stands in between the Creator and the Created. Perhaps it is our in-betweenness that allows us to wonder, having neither the divine mind that understands everything, nor the mindlessness of nature that is just content to be. With the capacity to wonder comes a responsibility to go beyond the sentiment of wonder and into the real act of wondering, as in, thinking for ourselves. Wonder is only the beginning of the Christian ethic, and far from the end of it.
1.https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2015/10/01/nature-can-give-even-non-religious-people-spiritual-experiences/
2.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233309481_The_Nature_of_Peak_Experience_in_Wilderness
3.https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/living-wild-god
4.https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/departments/Courses-and-Requirements?dept=Religious%20Studies
5.https://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org
6.https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/01/13/spirituality-krista-tippett
7.https://winapps.umt.edu/winapps/media2/wilderness/toolboxes/documents/awareness/Doug%20Scott%20-Untrammeled-Wilderness%20Character_article.pdf
8.https://religionandpolitics.org/2014/09/02/the-religious-roots-of-the-wilderness-act/
9.William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1 (1996): 7-28.
10.https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3456-killing-conservation-lethal-cult-of-the-empty-wild
11.https://www.conservation.org/stories/fenced-out-of-nature
12.https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbzn9w/carbon-colonialism-the-new-scramble-for-africa
13.https://blogs.uoregon.edu/rel414w15drreis/earth-first/
14.https://www.notion.so/Historical-Roots-of-the-Wilderness-Concept-82eb4febe2c242a4887d2fa0edf53878
15.https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/interview-discovering-the-desert-paradox
16.https://www.notion.so/Going-to-the-Woods-Is-Going-Home-The-Atlantic-70f0515c876b4e58897261fe66bfde54
17.https://www.nps.gov/articles/aps-v13-i1-zahniser.htm
18.http://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/rcc00098005-0-1.pdf
19.http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
20.https://ghana.arocha.org/projects/community-led-governance-and-management-of-atewa-forest-range-landscape/
21.http://www.rabbishoshana.com/the-land-ethic-of-leviticusShoshana Meira Friedman
