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Show 449 extraordinary everyday experience in Nature - was reduced to a kind of behavioral or subjective experience. The Sierra Club and other organizations like it would represent, at least from the perspective of young Muir in the early seventies, a sacrifice of spiritual truth for political power. The Club would spread a secular gospel that was Protestant and progressive, Thus it would become flat and tasteless. The Club would be a serviceable tool when it came to dealing with government and bureaucracy; the trouble was that it would also create, in the persons of Mather and others, exactly the flat tasteless bureaucrats who would shape the National Park Service in the early twentieth century. The ideals which the Sierra Club subscribed to in its Articles of Incorporation became the ideals of a utilitarian kind of recreation. By 1912 the Sierra Club Bulletin would publish with approval the words of Horace McFarland: The primary function of the national forests is to supply lumber. The primary function of national parks is to maintain in healthy efficiency the lives of the people who must use that lumber. This position was a return to Ruskin's attitude about mountain enjoyment, his belief that the mountains could be best appreciated from the places where all could view them, the child, the old person, the cripple. This was a kind of Benthamite aesthetic which endorsed "the greatest good for the greatest number." Though Muir knew that grandma could |
