OCR Text |
Show 465 meaning: keep back, set apart, make an exception for future use. The disciplined behavior of making Reserves suggested discretion, a willingness to stop the rampant rape of the West. Muir should have been appalled to see the change in terminology when Forest Reserves became National Forests. If the standard history of the period is right, the movement toward conservation took direction under Roosevelt and Pinchot as it began to cultivate its own language and values. This was a movement toward nationalistic, rationalistic, technocratic efficiency which would have appalled Muir, or at least the rebellious Muir who had left machines in order to learn the news of the universe and pledge allegiance to the earth. Muir could see it coming in the language. Even in the middle nineties, as his satirical portrait of the language of the ravaging hordes suggested, he knew that the battle for the ecological future of the West would be won or lost in the field of semantics, because the way men perceived Nature would be heavily determined by the language they used when they described her, as well as by the actions they engaged in at her expense. Muir could see through the humanistic and paternalistic double-talk of the western rapists. Could he make the American public see through this kind of destructive habit of expression which clothed their real motives in a tissue of self-congratulating lies? Or would Muir, like many of his eastern allies, find himself only able to speak to America by using her language, and would he thus fall into misstating his own case, finally |