God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature (Environmental History Series) [Hardcover]

Dennis C. Williams (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I am quite taken with Nature and Soul. Dennis Williams offers the most convincing articulation of what I’ve always believed: that John Muir was a fundamentalist about nature who learned his passion, his way of organizing the world, and his principles in the malevolent world of Calvinism. Williams makes his case in powerful ways, offering a necessary corrective to environmental history as left-wing advocacy. His articulation of the differences between Pinchot and Muir are far more astute than any prior set of observations on those two, and his location of Muir in Bob Crunden’s Ministers of Reform formulation rings true and solid. The response to this work will tell us much about the maturity of the field of environmental history as the new century begins. In short, I think this is a book that can have considerable impact. It covers the turf in a direct kind of detail that is thoughtful and powerful, and it revises an important historical figure.”--Hal Rothman, Editor, Environmental History

(Hal Rothman, Editor, Environmental History )

About the Author

Dennis C. Williams is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Southern Nazarene University. He has worked as historian for the United States Environmental Protection Agency and has published numerous articles and pamphlets in the field of American environmental history. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: TAMU Press; 1 edition (February 13, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585441430
• ISBN-13: 978-1585441433
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,089,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Baptizing John Muir, May 22, 2011

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Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature (Environmental History Series) (Hardcover)

John Muir is usually seen as a pantheistic nature mystic heavily indebted to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. Dennis Williams disagrees. He argues that Muir was firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity, and that modern Green thinking and counter-culture has misunderstood the point of his writings on Nature.

Personally, I have no opinion on the matter, since I never read Muir's own writings (although I obviously heard of the man).

Firmly evangelical or not, Muir certainly had some ideas modern evangelicals (or Christians in general) would consider rather strange, even heretical. Thus, Muir believed that nature was inherently good and unfallen. Man was a fallen creature, but nature was still in pristine condition, just as God had created it. Love and harmony were the ruling principles of nature. Therefore, humans could learn something about God by studying it, from which follows that nature must be preserved. Muir considered exploitation of nature to be sinful, and seems to have believed that God didn't create it for the benefit of man, something proven by malarial swamps or dangerous predators, which obviously don't exist to benefit humans. And yes, Muir quipped that he would defend the beasts if there ever was a war between humans and animals. There was certainly a streak of nature mysticism in John Muir, but he believed it somehow pointed to the Christian God and revealed something about his character.

Williams believes that the counter-culture of the sixties read Muir's writings through their own, secularist spectacles and turned him into a pantheist. Perhaps.

But is that really so surprising? Somehow, I get the feeling that what Muir really accomplished, was to baptize pantheism...

"God's Wilds" is a scholarly work and could be difficult for the general reader, since it presupposes a great deal of foreknowledge of Muir, his writings and the general intellectual and political climate of 19th century America. Still, the book should be of considerable interest to those who already have a working knowledge of Muir or the relationship between religion and Green thinking.