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Show 371. California, with her incomparable climate and flora, is still, as far as I know, the best of all the bee-lands in the world. The California of the future might be a suitable land only for bees. Few readers recognized the full impact of these words; after a decade-long attempt to make Californians see that much of their State was not a desert, Muir suggested that they might just as well cultivate a taste for wastelands. That was what they were making of their State. Perhaps because Muir's own feelings were tangled, ambivalent, and too embittered with the losses he had seen, he ended up writing a satire which was too subtle. Certainly Scribner's seemed unaware of his message, since they illustrated "Bee Pastures" with a romantic etching of shepherd and sheep, just as they had earlier illustrated Muir's "Glacier Meadows of the Sierra" with a similar sketch. Muir objected to such a picture, but his answer from Johnson, his editor, was that the illustration "was praised as a piece of sentiment." Perhaps he had moderated his position too much in the seventies, in trying to make peace with the society in which he would have to live, he had chosen to accept Man's right to find a home in Nature, his right to make improvements in order to make a home. Even while he attempted to attack the myths of the American West as either desert or garden, even while showing that Nature did not divide her realm so simply, he had accepted the image of the American farmer, reposing on |