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Show 284. and make a "new departure." Here was a utilitarian argument which the twentieth century ecologist would begin to use insistently. The wilderne was a place where natural processes continued to function unimpaired. Wild areas and wild life would always be important to Man as sets of standards and virgin stock for "fresh starts." Without this possibility, the quality of life on earth would continue to decline until it was hopelessly "felted together." SACRED ANIMALS AND THE STRIFE IN NATURE "Wild Wool" is such a well written and ingenious argument, one tends to forget that it is hardly a complete statement of Muir's own response to wildlife. In trying to create an effective argument, he had ommitted much of his own vision. What had happened to his essentially sacred bond to animals? Is it possible that the man who spoke of eating the sacred meat of Douglas squirrels, grouse, mountain sheep, and bears, beasts and birds filled with essences of Sequoia lightening, spruce buds, meadow grass, daisies, pine burrs, and wasps - is it possible that this man did not recognize the full animism of his own vision? His way of understanding animals followed an essentially sacred path toward ecological vision. He studied wild sheep and squirrels as Eskimos studied the wolf, yet he failed to recognize the kinship of his own thinking with that of the ss |