| OCR Text |
Show 181 as modifiers and reformers of soils, the glacier is the only great producer." It is a democratic agent, giving "soil to high and low places almost alike; water-currents are dispensers of special blessings." The language here is so suggestive that I have always suspected a veiled social and theological argument, perhaps influenced by Henry George's plea that every man should be allowed to own land. Certainly Nature gives fertile land to high and low places alike. Unlike the social and economic system of California, which Muir's old teacher Professor Carr found so inequitable, Nature in California had spread her blessings. According to Muir, the great ice sheet had provided the soils of the Owens, Walker, Carson, Sacramento, and San Joaquin Valleys, but his heartfelt interest was found in the central soil band of the Sierra. Above the gold-bearing slates and below the middle Sierra, on the great moraine, grew the great green wall of climax forest. Thus Nature as Book was slowly supplanted by Nature as Path, and as a footnote, Nature as Gardener. In all of these, the glacier was the key agent, who wrote the book, carved the path, and distributed the soil. No single metaphor was adequate to convey the various significances of the Sierra's natural history. Finally, Muir turned to more organic metaphors - Nature as Tree, or Nature as Cycle. At the same time he began to resolve in his own mind the paradoxical process of geological change which troubled his contemporaries. |
