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Show 521 for the norms of the past rather than those of the future. . . . No, America was not changing i t s mind about wilderness, but was moving with tremendous momentum away from i t s Jeffersonian conscience. America was embracing a "highly organized, technical, and c e n t r a l l y planned," seemingly efficient businesslike or bureaucratic organization. The nation would, as one engineer put i t , "relegate a l l such archaic questions to the past, and concern [ i t s e l f ] with that which confers the greatest good upon the g r e a t e s t number." But Everson's hope, so well expressed, might represent a watershed for late twentieth century t h i n k e r s . We might review the failure of Muir and the Sierra Club, and t r y to discover what kept this "implicit religious a t t i t u d e " from gaining an e x p l i c i t status. What did keep Muir and h i s colleagues from making the strongest possible plea, in s p i r i t u a l terms, for a new view of l i f e in America? What kept them from turning t h i s defeat into a spiritual victory? This, I think, is the most f e r t i l e ground for an investigation of the b a t t l e over Hetch Hetchy, and the first thing one notices i s that Muir might have made more powerful arguments had he regognized, at the onset, that the battle would be l o s t . His hope that he could fight this battle on his opponents' ground blunted and diminished the effectiveness of his own arguments. Yet he made far fewer concessions to u t i l i t a r i a n r h e t o r i c than his a l l i e s . His i n t e g r i t y during the battle was a landmark in the geography of environmental Politics. |
