OCR Text |
Show 260. Men like Marsh and LeConte pointed the way to a program of "Resource Conservation and Development." Perhaps this was a form of ecological consciousness, but it ran in a shallower stream than Muir's. If LeConte thought that Man could "elevate his plane of life" by using "rational knowledge" to make the laws of Nature his servants, then Muir thought in 1871 that this abstraction from Nature was likely to be disastrous. A case in point was a dead bear Muir found in Yosemite Valley. Men killed bears because they did not respect God's other children. Men felt that they were above bears, but Muir knew bears were "made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters." It was evil to kill beings who were part of the same Nature as we. Muir was led by this incident to consider the permanence of Nature and the transitory existence of civilization: Our tidal civilizations will ebb and flow, we will continue, heaven only knows how long, to choke our minds in moulds of our own making, and discover discord in Earth's simplest harmonies, but God's creation as a whole is unchangeably pure, unfallable, undepravable ~ one of his own expressions, one thought, one spoken unalterable word. When men perceived evil in Nature, they were simply creating an excuse to follow their own selfish ways. |