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Show 448 in turn be its greatest weakness. When these men came to be recognized as "preservationists," they would find that though they were almost all professionals, they had no formal professional standing as "spokesmen for the tradition of man-in-nature." And since they established themselves as a secular organization, they could not call themselves spiritual leaders. How could you be a secular pantheist? As Donald Worster recently has argued, their real spiritual roots were probably Protestant, and their values were Protestant ones: Ascetic Discipline, Esthetic Spirituality, and Egalitarian Individualism. Their movement suggested, then, a kind of redirection of a religious reformer's zeal into the secular realm. Thus today Roderick Nash, one of the most influential of modern speakers for wilderness, is forced to deal with the question "Can We Afford Wilderness" by introducing the accepted fact that "We gave up our belief in a god of the mountains and sea and crops and harvest." Though a man like Nash might wistfully entertain a fantasy of a history where our reverence for Nature had not vanished, still he must finally justify our need for wilderness in modern and diminished subjective or psychological terms: "It follows that to obtain wilderness, all one has to do is produce wilderness feeling in a given individual." Something central to Muir's philosophy was lost as preservation" took on an institutional and organizational form in the Sierra Club. The speaker of the King Sequoia letter was left behind. Somehow the miraculous and authentic conversion he believed in - the vision which came out of ii |