Abstract
To anyone who has ever walked in a national park and felt connected not just to a particular place, but to a larger cosmos, religious studies scholar Kerry Mitchell has ideas and stories worth hearing: he traffics in the social construction of transcendent experiences.
In Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks, Mitchell argues that it is not simply the natural beauty of parks that triggers a sense of spiritual and aesthetic transcendence. Instead, the National Park Service, through decades of deliberate management, organizes parks to make such individual experiences possible. Indeed, when John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, began to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt and other elites to create a national park system, this was the very mission he had in mind. Muir wanted the whole nation to see and feel what he experienced, whether it was the “cathedral walls” in Yosemite or the giant sequoia trees in the southern Sierras, “hushed and thoughtful” at twilight. But for people to have subtle experiences similar to Muir’s, the land must be saved from commercial development. In Mitchell’s pithy formulation, “Wilderness needed to become public to remain private” (p. 14).
Mitchell acknowledges other motives for forming national parks and other missions in the parks’ first decades. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., in his 1865 report to the governor of California recommending a state park at Yosemite, noted that British aristocrats trained for their leadership of the empire through outdoor adventures. A park system in America would do the same for the whole nation, not just its elite. Similarly, in his 1943 essay, “The National Parks in Wartime,” director Newton B. Drury asked, “Can these experiences fail to strengthen the conviction that this is a nation worth fighting for?” (p. 29).
After the Second World War, during the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the park service finally conceptualized its mission as a framer of public religion and began to systematically execute design plans. Mitchell credits director Freeman Tilden’s 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage for a brilliant reboot of Muir. At one level, Tilden described the national parks in the language of capital accumulation, the most legitimate public discourse of the era. Parks functioned as “treasures,” leading to the “enrichment of the human mind and spirit.” “We can use these precious resources, so long as we do not use them up” (p. 37).
But it wasn’t economic capital that Tilden thought the parks should accumulate. Rather, the parks should help individuals accumulate stories about their experiences in nature. Some of these stories would come through ranger interpretations. Tilden, though, thought the strategic key to “interpreting our heritage” required rangers to know when to be silent: “the interpreter acts only as a scout and a guide. He leads his group to the most alluring scenes he has discovered, and is silent” (p. 38). Consequently, the park would become for the visitor “a precious personal possession. It is the individual’s shock, his apprehension, his discovery: and what he discovers is more than what he sees and hears. He has discovered something of himself, hitherto unrealized” (p. 38).
Mitchell shows how the park service made the Muir/Tilden vision a real possibility for visitors. Mitchell celebrates the demands of the long 211-mile trek on the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney. “The JMT hikers carry wilderness in their bodies, in the ways that they move, speak, and interact. For them, wilderness and civilization are ways of seeing the world as much as they are the world that is seen” (p. 57). What the JMT hikers for the most part don’t see, and Mitchell does, is how the park service makes this possible. The hikers aren’t bushwhacking their own trails, constantly focusing on where to go next. The John Muir Trail was originally built as a stock trail and is still “maintained like a road” (p. 59). Consequently, hikers can afford to lose themselves in contemplative reverie. As one interviewee explained, “I think everything around me is a god . . . every rock . . . every tree . . . everything” (p. 67).
At Yosemite, Mitchell reminds us that the park receives thousands of visitors a day during the summer. How then does it convey a wilderness experience? Yosemite’s design provides a partial answer. “Managers design structures and services to provide safe, controlled, and inconspicuous access to the environment” (p. 94). Mitchell refers to this design practice as leading to the “blurring of the boundaries among nature, state, and the individual,” an essential launching pad for state-sponsored nature spirituality. The visitor center, with its famous 23-minute film, Spirit of Yosemite, offers a sanctuary from the crowds and noise in the valley floor and the discomforts, uncertainties, and dangers of hiking in the park’s backcountry. In effect, the viewing room of the center becomes a kind of faux “nature’s cathedral.”
But it is the park rangers who lead hikes and give lectures who get most of Mitchell’s attention. Tilden gave each ranger freedom in interpreting the parks, and, in turn, the rangers restrain themselves, creating “interpretative silences” for visitors to exercise their own freedom. Mitchell contrasts a Native American ranger who narrates the history of the indigenous people at Yosemite and sings a prayer to another ranger who plays the flute and reads from astronauts and cosmonauts quoted in the 1988 book The Home Planet, about the profound impacts of seeing earth from space (pp. 105–114). The author views their choices as confirming the stance of Robert Wuthnow and other religious scholars who argue that individual choice in American religion becomes a liberal capitalist society.
Individuals do make interpretative choices. However, to paraphrase Marx, people make interpretative choices under conditions not chosen by themselves. Besides their material circumstances, interpretation occurs through culture: stories, myths, images, icons, and semiotic codes. What I call the “cultural re-enchantment of nature” flows through a few fundamental streams. One stream is from the Transcendentalists, such as Thoreau and Muir. A second stream began in the late 1950s when the Hopi in the Southwest, alarmed that the atomic tests in New Mexico signaled a prophecy about the “gourd of ashes” destroying the world, sent messengers to tribes across the United States to resist cultural assimilation and resurrect native spiritual traditions.
A third stream flowed from the Apollo space missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club in 1969, sponsored an ad campaign featuring photos of earth from space with the slogan “EARTH NATIONAL PARK.” British chemist James Lovelock, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in this period, studied the photos and came to see distinctions between organic and inorganic parts of earth (like air, water, and rocks) as inaccurate: earth is a giant superorganism, which he named Gaia. Other intellectuals began to theorize that Gaia was sentient at some obscure level, in turn sparking tremendous upheavals in many theologies. The two rangers in Yosemite, while making individual choices, thus both chose from the main streams of the same culture.
The culture of enchantment has declined in the past decade. In the long run, if not revitalized, enchantment’s demise will threaten the park system’s state-sponsored spirituality since visitors will not have an adequate stock of knowledge to frame transcendent experiences. Two additional threats might also emerge. If the parks become more commercialized, whether through retail development within them or through drilling, mining, and timber harvests in adjacent lands, then the tranquility necessary for spiritual reflection might vanish. Similarly, climate changes might alter landscapes such that the parks can no longer blur the nature/society boundary, leaving them exposed as rural development projects. In these scenarios, the National Park Service will need to rethink its Muir/Tilden mission.