OCR Text |
Show 482. His faith became the principle of the Sierra Club's Outings, and it also informed the tone of most of the essays which became Our National Parks, where Muir would be "inciting people to come and enjoy them, and get them into their hearts." The trouble with Muir's optimistic outlook, and the tone it took in the late nineties, was that in his great faith, he failed to make distinctions: The tendency nowadays to wander in the wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but'as fountains of life. Who could object to this kind of sentiment? Yet these are the words of a man who had once been disgusted by the ways of tourists. When Muir became not so much the defender of wilderness as the champion of recreation and the booster of Parks, he was failing to heed his own distinction between a right relation to Nature and a wrong one: Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red unbrellas, - even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times. In 1981, it is easy to be frightened by this expansive and |