Writing the wilderness : a study of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin

This study of the writings of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin focuses on the various paradigms they explored as they developed theories about humankind's relationship to wilderness. Thoreau evolved over the course of his three trips to Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857 from a destructive pioneer understanding of wilderness towards a biocentric and Native American understanding of wilderness as home, though he never completely understood a Native American mindset and never found a paradigm that enabled him to understand his disturbing epiphany on Mount Katahdin during his first trip.

The esteemed preservationist John Muir moved beyond Thoreau in his wilderness philosophy as he studied a wide variety of paradigms from many disciplines. Over the course of forty years of reading and writing, he developed a philosophy that incorporated both creationism and evolution to explain the creative process but shunned the Calvinism of his father and purely mechanistic science, opting instead for a science that allowed for spiritual and intuitive insights. Though his vision of nature surpassed the most popular artistic, athletic, and scientific understandings of his time, he used tropes from these popular genres as he wrote to his Eastern audience. He rejected a Native American understanding of nature but was able to understand and appreciate the extremes of nature better than anyone writing before him.

Mary Austin's wilderness writing diverged from that of Thoreau and Muir in her emphasis on human relationships to the desert. She studied a variety of people and their relationships to the land, including white men, who often lose their souls in the desert; white women, who usually bind themselves in society and never develop a relationship to the land; Native Americans, who live in harmony with the land but who also lead harsh lives; and Latin Americans, who, for Austin, combine the best of both white and Native American worlds so that they live in harmony with the land without facing the harsher exigencies. Her emphasis on the communal relationship to the land points the way towards "bioregional" ecophilosophies of our time.