Yosemite in winter. Credit: Tuan Luong

A pleasure of doing this blog is the people who write in suggesting ideas and then make good on them. Last week someone I don’t know emailed me with the above heading and the suggestion that we should cover it on Tikkun Daily because “Spiritual Progressives can draw sustenance from it.” I asked him if he could write a post explaining why. Here it is, in three parts, with our thanks, from Jan Garrett, who is a (nearly) life-long Unitarian Universalist and a professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green KY.

I

Like many others in this country, last week I spent my evenings watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” directed by Ken Burns and co-produced by Dayton Duncan, on my local public television network. The series contains five nearly 2-hour episodes, with inspirational scenery, powerful wildlife footage, and an engrossing, often inspiring, human story spanning more than a 150 years, replete with heroes and villains, mystics, poets, journalists and scientists with hearts, and statesmen who occasionally do the right thing.

John Muir

Full episodes have been available online since their original showing but they will be removed after October 9. Perhaps shorter clips from the series will still be available. The series will apparently also be run on PBS stations beginning at a rate of one episode per week. In the following notes, based mainly on the first and sixth episode in the series, which I viewed a second time online, I hope to interest Tikkun Daily readers in the spiritual experience of immersing yourself in the entire series.

http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/

Consider the following: compassion, democracy, justice, respect for the interdependent web, responsible search for truth and meaning, inherent worth and dignity of every person. I’ve excerpted these values from a longer list of Unitarian Universalist Principles, but so far as I can tell Tikkun embraces them too. They are also values associated with what George Lakoff, in his Moral Politics and elsewhere, calls the Nurturant Parent Family set of moral metaphors. Those familiar with Lakoff’s and Rabbi Lerner’s writings will note the similarity between Lakoff’s Nurturant Parent values and those associated with what Lerner calls the Left Hand of God.

Tikkun readers may recall Lerner’s frequent point that there is an intimate link between radical amazement or wonder at creation and the prophetic impulse toward justice and for healing of individuals and society. The creators of this series on the National Parks and many of the eloquent voices in it, whether by living writers or past environmental heroes channeled by contemporary scholars or actors, seem to understand this connection.

II

A repeated pattern in the history of park preservation has been the story of individuals, sick in body or soul from industrial or commercial pursuits, migrating to wild areas or areas not yet subject to the pressures of urban life, learning to live simply and to understand their surroundings and their nonhuman and human neighbors, finding themselves healed by the experience, then discovering in themselves a capacity to share in words, painting or photographs the values discovered, becoming powerful advocates for their preservation in perpetuity.

George Hartzog, former National Park Service director, notes the connection between what Lerner calls radical amazement at the natural world and insight into the inherent dignity of human beings: “You can’t stay alone in the park, you can’t stand there silently in the presence of the giant Sequoia, you can’t help but recognize that you are a part of something that is way beyond whatever you envisioned this world might be. You can’t stand there all alone without understanding that there is a power that is greater than anything you’ve ever experienced. And you are connected to that power. It permeates all of us. And when you understand that, it improves your relationship with your fellow man because you realize that he has the same capacity, he has the same access. He is your brother.”

The spiritual dimension is evident not only in the scenery and the words of the principal voices in the series, but also in the titles of the episodes, such as “The Scripture of Nature” and “The Morning of Creation.”

Apart from the scenic and wilderness areas themselves, the great protagonist of the first episode is John Muir. Yosemite gives birth to the idea of National Parks, although Yellowstone was the first national park to be officially designated such. Muir had both a scientist’s and a mystic’s appreciation for the lands he wished preserved from commercial development. He wrote of his experience, “This is still the morning of creation… Creation is still going on… Anything is hitched to everything. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.”

Muir arrived in Yosemite in 1869. Born in Scotland but raised in Wisconsin, his father a very strict Presbyterian, Muir quickly learned science and technology and served industry for a few years as an inventive genius. But he soon quit his industrial work and started on a long mile walk to Florida, studying plants and beginning a journal. At first intending to travel farther south, he was persuaded that the West might be more conducive to his health. Arriving in San Francisco, he walked across the Central Valley to Yosemite. In his writing he infused the idea of wilderness and scenic preservation with a religious fervor, transforming the Christianity he had learned from his father. His Christianity was rooted in nature, in the worship of God’s creation. He refers to Yosemite as “the range of light”; “we are in the mountains and they are in us. The flesh and bone tabernacle seems transparent, neither old nor young but immortal.” Yosemite became for him the sanctum sanctorum of the Sierra.

Historian William Cronon describes Muir as “an ecstatic holy man.” Muir “celebrated trees by crawling to their tops and experiencing storms from their perspective.” He saw that nature is “born every single day new” – a version of the theology of continuous creation. He practiced “unconditional surrender to nature” and “contemplated the life of a raindrop.” He determined to “preach nature like an apostle.”

Muir’s God was not ”the stern and wrathful God of his Presbyterian father.” He saw humans as “part of an interconnected web of being” so that for him “going out [into wilderness]… is really going in.”

As Dayton Duncan, the series co-producer, put it, “Deep in our DNA is the memory of when we were not separate from the natural world. [Going to a national park] is like going home.”

III

Early in the 19^th century Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of wilderness, “here is sanctity which shames our religions.” Thoreau called for “little oases of wildness” returning us to who we really are.

At the time the United States seemed inferior to Europe in ancient architectural monuments, but people soon realized that nature in North America was “closer to creation” than anything in Europe.

The idea of a national park was already dreamed in 1832 by frontier painter George Catlin. Wallace Stegner much more recently proclaimed “the national parks [as] the best idea America has ever had.” Even those who think our best idea to be the rights in the 1776 Declaration or the Bill of Rights will sometimes give the national park idea second place.

The parks have been at the center of a constant struggle in the United States between materialist tendencies and those who understand nature as “breathing place for the national lungs.”

Muir tried to “preach nature like an apostle.” One of his eventual converts was Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903 Muir and Roosevelt, then President, spent three days, at TR’s urging, camping together and conversing in Yosemite, with nobody except a few park personnel in the background. Back in Washington TR was a strong supporter of the national park idea.

Roosevelt proclaimed the purpose of the national parks as “the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” This phrase is inscribed on the West gate of Yellowstone, the first official national park. In the words of Terry Tempest Williams, the parks were considered “a covenant with the future.” The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope asks, “what could be more democratic than owning together” these magnificent lands?

But as one teller of the story puts it, “Every [scenic] national park will have someone who loves it deeply and wants to exploit the hell out of it.”

A constant challenge arises from the pressure to realize the democratic purpose of the parks. Often that seemed to mean trying to make them accessible to everybody, a goal promoted by the federal government’s increased investment in Park facilities, greater citizen access to automobiles since WWII, and the interstate highway system built during the 1950′s. But these changes carried with them the risk that visitors would collectively “love [the parks] to death. On the one hand, as the series notes, countless American families forged intimate connections in the Parks. The park experience transmitted love of place from generation to generation. The education conducted by park staff provided a learning experience common to people from a wide variety of class and ethnic backgrounds, an apprenticeship in citizenship. On the other hand, there were 62 million visitors annually by the mid-1950′s, about the time my parents took my brothers and me to the major parks, mostly in the West. Lovers of the parks worried that “The people are wearing out the scenery.” But attendance at the parks has only increased since then, with 255 million visitors in 1990 and about 300 million visitors in 2000.

The series demonstrates that the national park idea has constantly evolved, is always being debated: What is their purpose, who should control them, where should their boundaries be? Originally established to preserve scenic places, national park sites now include wildlife refuges and historical sites like the Lincoln Memorial and those important in the civil rights movement. They even include the locations of “our greatest mistakes,” a southern plantation that preserves shacks in which slaves were housed, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historical Site in Colorado, and the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

Check your local listings for airtimes.

http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/tv-schedules/