TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS

OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
KEVIN MICHAEL DELUCA

Environmentalism has been sustained by a mythic discourse about heroic individuals

discovering and saving pristine wilderness. Although a successful rhetorical strategy,
this mythic discourse erases a complicated history and has significant political costs.
Some contemporary wilderness activists are enacting a new wilderness vision that inte-
grates wilderness and social concerns in a way that opens environmentalism to unex-
pected yet promising alliances with justice activists, unions, and corporations.

If, even as conservationists, we see the human and the natural economies as necessar-
ily opposite or opposed, we subscribe to the very opposition that threatens to destroy
them both.
—Wendell Berry, Home Economics (1987)

urrently there is growing concern over the role of the market in environmental-
C ism as corporate executives sit on the boards of major environmental groups,
corporations “sponsor” Earth Day, and third-wave environmentalism (derisively
dubbed “market environmentalism”) promotes the trading of pollution credits. Such
concern is certainly warranted. Too often, however, the concern is predicated on
imagining environmentalism to be as pristine as the wilderness it valorizes. That is,
concern over corporate influence is dependent on a sanitized myth of environmen-
talism that erases awareness of the historical conditions of its emergence. The role of
the market in environmentalism, however, is not new. Indeed, arguably, environ-
mentalism was born of industrialism. In this essay I want to remember the role of
the market during key moments in the birth of preservationism—the first wave of
environmentalism. More specifically, I will recall the ways in which railroad compa-
nies practiced a corporate rhetoric that utilized the discourse of sublime wilderness
to promote designations of national parks in the interests of development and
tourism.

Kevin Michael DeLuca is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication and an adjunct in the Institute
of Ecology at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

© Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Vol. 4, No. 4, 2001, pp. 633-652
ISSN 1094-8392
634 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Such a history is counter to the current mythic narrative of American environmen-

talism.1 The premise of this essay is that myths are rhetorical discourses that have
political consequences, both positive and negative. The myth that currently sustains
environmentalism is entwined with environmentalism’s origin myth and revolves
around the achievements of heroic individuals who fight against corporate industri-
alism and save wilderness. The origin myth valorizes John Muir and his saving of
Yosemite. In this essay I will treat the founding myth of environmentalism as a
rhetoric and will then trace its beneficial and detrimental political consequences.
Such a tracing suggests that mythic environmentalism is exhausted and prompts a
consideration of the historical conditions that enabled the emergence of environ-
mentalism, with a particular focus on the role of corporations. This historical resit-
uating of environmentalism offers new possibilities for environmental politics. The
essay will close with a consideration of alternative trajectories for environmentalism.

LIVING MYTHS
Roland Barthes’s discussion of myths in Mythologies is most apropos for our
purposes. Barthes argues that myth is depoliticized discourse in the sense that it
naturalizes that which is political and historical. So, in his example, a newspaper
photograph of a black soldier in a French uniform naturalizes French colonialism
in Africa. For Barthes, “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is
to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them
a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an
explanation but that of a statement of fact.”2 The mythic narrative of American
environmentalism has focused on heroic individuals, usually writers. So, for exam-
ple, in Roderick Nash’s classic Wilderness and the American Mind the history of
environmentalism is anchored in the life stories and thoughts of Henry David
Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. Although Nash pays some attention to
larger cultural discourses, even these are read through the prism of individualism.
The prism of individualism simplifies and clarifies a complex and contradictory
historical process. This slant is evident in Nash’s table of contents, where the
esteemed triumvirate is given three chapter headings: “Henry David Thoreau:
Philosopher,” “John Muir: Publicizer,” and “Aldo Leopold: Prophet.” In the opening
paragraph of the Muir chapter, Nash writes, “Wild country needed a champion, and
in a self-styled ‘poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. And ornith-natural, etc!-!-!’ named
John Muir it found one.” The problem of the heroic individual approach is readily
apparent in Nash’s account of the saving of Yosemite. In his rush to praise Muir and
Muir’s editor at Century magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, Nash neglects to
mention (never mind explain) that Yosemite Valley had already been preserved
before Muir set foot in the Sierra Nevadas. The U.S. Congress protected Yosemite
Valley as a state park in 1864. Muir arrived in Yosemite in 1868. Of the battle that
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 635

Muir did figure in, historical accounts suggest that in the effort to create Yosemite
National Park the Southern Pacific Railroad was the crucial force. Nash’s heroic
individual lens eclipses the role of the railroad, so his only mention of the Southern
Pacific Railroad greatly reduces its actual role to an irrelevant incidental: “In all
probability Johnson received assistance from the powerful Southern Pacific
Railroad.” As this essay’s later discussion of this episode will make clear, Southern
Pacific’s role was central, not ancillary.3
Nash is not alone, though, but merely one manifestation of the tendency to dis-
tort the history and practice of environmentalism through the lens of heroic indi-
vidualism. Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s clarion call to
environmental action, The Quiet Crisis—a New York Times bestseller—was orga-
nized around environmental heroes. Nine of the 14 chapters are headlined by envi-
ronmental heroes, including Thoreau and Muir. The celebratory 25th anniversary
edition adds eight chapters and six more heroes. Lawrence Buell’s pioneering work
in the emerging field of ecoliterary criticism, The Environmental Imagination:
Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, as the title sug-
gests, both gives an account of the canonization of the “Green Thoreau” and con-
tributes to that project. The pattern of heroic individualism repeats in Max
Oelschlaeger’s ambitious The Idea of Wilderness, wherein the holy trinity of Thoreau
(“It is no exaggeration to say that today all thought of the wilderness flows in
Walden’s wake”), Muir (“In instrumental terms, Muir is the father of the American
conservation (now preservation) movement”), and Leopold (“The third giant of
wilderness philosophy”) assume their privileged position in the table of contents,
joined there by the poets Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder. Since Oelschlaeger’s
account uses a philosophical perspective that focuses on the realm of ideas, he dis-
cusses neither Yosemite nor railroads and does not explore the rhetorical-political
discursive practices, both linguistic and material, that instantiated wilderness as a
reality in American culture. My point is not that the accounts of Nash, Udall, Buell,
Oelschlaeger, and others are wrong, but, rather, that they present a persistently par-
tial perspective that constitutes myth and that this partiality has important conse-
quences, both positive and negative.4
This mythic narrative is not simply present in retrospective chronicles, but is
enacted in the daily rhetorical practices of environmentalism. It is particularly obvi-
ous in the relationship of several mainstream environmental organizations to cer-
tain individuals: the Sierra Club beatifies John Muir, the Audubon Society James
Audubon, and the Wilderness Society Aldo Leopold. This myth of heroic individu-
als finding and then saving wilderness is clearly illustrated in the Special 100th
Anniversary Edition of Audubon titled The Century of Conservation. This issue rec-
ognizes “100 Environmental Heroes,” highlighting ten, all of whom fit the pattern
of heroic individualism: Ansel Adams, David Brower, Rachel Carson, Marjory
Stoneman Douglas, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Roger Tory Peterson, John D.
636 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Rockefeller Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, and Edward O. Wilson. Even the possible
anomaly of Rockefeller Jr. is framed to fit the myth:

Three-quarters of a century ago John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the founder of Standard
Oil, took a trip with his family to Wyoming’s jagged Teton Mountains, which rise
above the dell of Jackson Hole. He fell in love with the valley. . . . Rockefeller decided
to establish a front company, the Snake River Land Company, to buy up land in the
area. . . . Today, his efforts to preserve the Tetons are recognized as one of the most
notable conservation victories of this century; the highway connecting Grand Teton
National Park with Yellowstone National Park is called the John D. Rockefeller
Memorial Highway.5

As a son suitably removed from the stain of corporate oil, Rockefeller Jr. stumbles
across wilderness and is inspired to save it.
It is significant that the mythic narrative of environmentalism relies primordially
on the myth of wilderness. That is, that wilderness exists a priori, an essence outside
history and culture. Within the myth of environmentalism, wilderness is a given, a
sanctuary from industrialism, a refuge from society, a panacea to the ills of civiliza-
tion. The power of the myth of wilderness is evident most paradoxically in the
many debates over eight years surrounding the Wilderness Act (passed in 1964).6
Even as proponents puzzled over how to define wilderness, even as proponents and
opponents struggled over what would count as wilderness, even as the participants,
in other words, created wilderness, wilderness was assumed to exist. This is the
power of myth: “What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined,
even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used
it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. . . . myth is con-
stituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory
that they once were made.”7 The social construction of wilderness is made natural
and then, in turn, functions as the a priori grounds for a politics.
Mythic wilderness remains the staple of mainstream environmentalism. In an
obvious instance, saving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remains a battle cry and
focus for organizing. But the emphasis on pristine wilderness is also evident in the
continuing stream of wilderness images flowing from the various environmental
groups, especially in the form of calendars. The Sierra Club, in an issue touting its
100th year of outings designed to inspire environmental activism, lists 20
“Centennial Trips,” all to mythic wilderness. All told, around the world the Sierra
Club is sponsoring 348 trips this year, all to destinations that fit the mold of mythic
wilderness. There is not a single trip to an inner city, toxic waste area, or other envi-
ronmental sacrifice zone. There is not a single trip to a “wilderness” that challenges
the mythic version and imagines humans inhabiting wilderness, not humans apart
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 637

from wilderness—visitors that do not remain. In short, there are no outings

designed to inspire a commitment to environmental justice or a different vision of
wilderness.8
This power of mythic wilderness perseveres even in the face of Nash’s noted
deconstruction. “Wilderness,” Nash writes in the opening lines of his study, “has a
deceptive concreteness at first glance.” And at last glance, as its concreteness has
beguiled even those who suggest otherwise. In his closing discussion of national
parks, Nash writes, “Essentially, a man-managed wilderness is a contradiction
because wilderness necessitates an absence of civilization’s ordering influence.”9 So,
after hundreds of pages tracing the various social constructions of wilderness
throughout Western history, Nash closes by positing an essence of wilderness that is
violated by human interference. Both Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind and
Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness make evident the constructedness of wilder-
ness yet read as descriptive rather than critical histories. As a result, both authors
implicitly grant wilderness a core essence.
Contemporary research suggests a different historical narrative: American envi-
ronmentalism not as the tale of heroic individuals saving a found object, wilderness,
but as the confluence of conflicting discourses conspiring to create a wilderness
vision. Through a complicated interaction of sublime, Romantic, corporate, indus-
trial, technological, scientific, philosophical, and literary discourses a new way of
framing the world came into being. The denizens of environmentalism did not
stumble across wilderness, but, rather, they created it in concert with multiple cul-
tural discourses. Wilderness does not preexist the human but instead is a human
product. This is not to say, for instance, that humans created forests. It is to say that
a forest has no essential meaning and, indeed, can mean many things, from home
to board feet of lumber to food source to wilderness. Which meaning holds sway is
a social and political achievement, not a natural fact. Different meanings have dif-
ferent social, political, and environmental consequences, as the current struggle
over slaughtering/harvesting ancient/old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest
makes abundantly clear. A brief historical recounting of the founding of wilderness
in Yosemite will highlight what the mythic narrative erases.
The reasons for choosing this site are obvious. Besides being the world’s first
wilderness park, Yosemite remains a potent icon for both the environmental move-
ment and American identity. Yosemite, as the springboard for Muir’s career and the
founding of the Sierra Club, is seen as the birthplace of the environmental move-
ment. Through the work of numerous photographers, from Carleton Watkins to
Ansel Adams, the places of Yosemite Valley have become iconic images in the
national imagination. Finally, the pattern of the preservation of Yosemite served as
a model for the creation of other national parks, especially with regard to the roles
of railroad companies and wilderness images.
638 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

INVENTING YOSEMITE: TRAINS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND POLITICS

Before John Muir had ever set foot in Yosemite, it had been preserved as the
world’s first wilderness park. In 1851, Captain James Savage and the Mariposa
Battalion stumbled upon Yosemite Valley in pursuit of their genocidal goal of
cleansing the region of Native Americans. For the Ahwahneechee, Yosemite was not
wilderness but home. The campaign of the Mariposa Battalion in the 1850s literally
and figuratively cleared the ground for the construction of Yosemite as pristine
wilderness. One of the soldiers, Lafayette Bunnell, admired the scenery and, recog-
nizing the tourist potential, established a toll road in 1856. In less than a decade,
Yosemite Valley passed from Ahwahneechee home to tourist attraction and wilder-
ness icon.10 The initial proposal to preserve Yosemite Valley originated, notably,
with industry—the tourist industry. Isreal Ward Raymond, the California agent of
the Central American Steamship Transit Company, forwarded a draft of the
Yosemite bill and Watkins’s 1861 photographs of Yosemite to California Senator
John Conness in a February 20, 1864 letter advising Congress to “prevent occupa-
tion and especially to preserve the trees in the valley from destruction.” Conness
routed Raymond’s proposal to the General Land Office and then introduced the bill
to Congress in March 1864. The legislation passed, and President Abraham Lincoln
signed it into law on June 30, 1864, thereby deeding Yosemite Valley and Mariposa
Big Tree Grove to the state of California “for public use, resort and recreation.” In
the few months between Raymond’s drafting and Lincoln’s signing, pristine images
of Yosemite Valley quickly became iconic of an American vision of nature itself—
“the one adequate symbol for all that California promised.” The legislative protec-
tion of this national “natural” landscape placed preservation policy as the
cornerstone of American environmental politics.11
The fundamental role of landscape photography in the creation and promotion
of Yosemite as the world’s first wilderness area “for the benefit of the people, for
their resort and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time” points to the cru-
cial role of images—images created by the new technology of the camera and pro-
mulgated by the new tourist industries, especially railroads.12 Environmentalism
has deployed wilderness images as a key rhetorical strategy ever since.
Although Muir was a factor in the preservation of Yosemite as a national park in
1890, the involvement of Southern Pacific Railroad was crucial. Muir wrote two
articles for Century magazine in August and September 1890 that were part of the
effort to persuade Congress to set aside Yosemite as a national park. (It is worth not-
ing that Watkins’s imagistic construction of Yosemite runs through Muir’s essays,
especially in the form of 22 illustrations among the 30 pages, many of which imitate
Watkins’s iconic photos.) Nash credits Muir with setting forth the parameters for the
park that Congress created, writing “a park bill following John Muir’s specifications
passed both houses of Congress with little discussion.” However, as historian Richard
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 639

Orsi convincingly demonstrates in his aptly titled “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber
Baron’: The Anomalous Partnership of John Muir and the Southern Pacific
Company for Preservation of Yosemite National Park,” it is clear that Southern
Pacific Railroad was the crucial player. Although Muir complained that “every train
rolls on through dismal smoke and barbarous melancholy ruins” and suggested that
instead of using pamphlets to promote “scenic routes” the railroads should adver-
tise “the route of superior desolation—the smoke, dust, and ashes route,” Southern
Pacific was long a wilderness park supporter. Since the early 1860s Southern Pacific
had supported trips by artists, writers, and photographers to Yosemite and had dis-
seminated their works around the world. Indeed, Southern Pacific had been sup-
porting Muir’s travels, research, and writing since the 1870s. In this practice
Southern Pacific was a pioneer in the relationship between the railroads and
national parks, a relationship that lasted until the 1950s. Indeed, in 1898 Southern
Pacific founded the monthly magazine Sunset, which accomplished the comple-
mentary goals of supporting artists and promoting natural scenery. Literally, then,
through photographs, paintings, and literary essays the railroads fashioned a cor-
porate rhetoric that promulgated park formation and wilderness preservation.13
Of course it is important to remember that it was a relationship born not simply
of corporate beneficence but pecuniary self-interest. As part of their land grants the
railroads owned enormous tracts of land in the West. Promoting the spectacular
wilderness scenery of the West served the twofold purpose of luring folks to ride the
trains as tourists and persuading them to settle in the West as pioneers. As historian
Alfred Runte concludes, “Among all the publicists of the region, the railroads were
without rivals in their ability to bring the West into the living rooms of the
American people. Whatever the medium or the occasion, national parks were pri-
mary attractions for promotional efforts. As masterpieces of nature, the parks set
the standard for artworks that the railroads hoped would attract both settlers and
tourists to the romantic West.”14
I would be remiss not to note that many Southern Pacific executives also per-
sonally favored preservation policies for reasons that exceeded company interests.
As Orsi notes, “With leaders from these other fields [education, science, art],
Southern Pacific officials shared a rational, scientific world view and the modern
pursuit of ‘efficiency,’ as well as an older romantic faith in the spiritual benefits of
communion with nature. Support for conservationism among the railroad’s lead-
ers, then, stemmed naturally for [sic] their private beliefs, as well as the changing
needs of a dynamic company.” Southern Pacific executives were among the Sierra
Club’s charter members, and owner Edward Henry Harriman bequeathed his large
estate in New York to the state as a wilderness park. More to the point, Southern
Pacific executive William H. Mills championed preservation issues in his newspaper
the Sacramento Record-Union (co-owned with Southern Pacific), published Muir’s
preservation appeals, and served on the State Yosemite Valley Commission from
640 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

1879 to 1889 before resigning in frustration over the mismanagement of the valley.
It is important to remember, though, that preservation was espoused within the
framework of industrial progress.15
In 1890 Southern Pacific provided the political muscle to give Yosemite federal
protection. “On March 18, 1890, Representative William Vandever of Los Angeles,
either at the request of the Southern Pacific Railroad or with its blessing, introduced
a bill in Congress for the establishment of a national park surrounding Yosemite
Valley.” Southern Pacific attorney and political organizer W. W. Stow persuaded
California’s congressional delegation to support the bill. More significantly,
Southern Pacific land agent Daniel Zumwalt, a lover of wilderness and personal
friend of Representative Vandever, in Washington D.C. to promote the formation of
Sequoia National Park, proposed enlarging Yosemite Park beyond even Muir’s ini-
tial proposal and spent the month of September 1890 pushing for the proposal’s
passage. It was Zumwalt’s version, not Muir’s, that passed the House and Senate on
September 29 and 30 and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on
October 1, 1890. As Orsi comments, “Most authorities credit Zumwalt with being
the moving force behind both the amendment and the miraculous last-minute pas-
sage of the Yosemite/Sequoia bill.” As Muir himself acknowledged, “even the
Southern Pacific R.R. Co., never counted on for anything good, helped nobly in
pushing the bill for this park through Congress.”16
The new national park left Yosemite Valley in the hands of the state, and in the
ensuing years Yosemite supporters were dismayed by the degree of exploitation,
commercialism, and degradation that the Valley suffered. Finally, in 1904, the
California Board of Trade, a group founded and led by Southern Pacific’s Mills, ini-
tiated a proposal to turn Yosemite Valley over to federal control. Southern Pacific’s
subsequent support proved vital in both mobilizing public opinion and twisting
arms in back rooms. Mills spearheaded the successful effort to raise public support.
Southern Pacific owner Harriman, in response to an entreaty from Muir, instructed
Southern Pacific chief counsel and lobbyist William Herrin to mobilize the rail-
road’s supporters in the California legislature behind the effort. After its passage,
Sierra Club member William Colby credited “the Hand of Providence,” but Muir
wrote to Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson that “we might have failed to
get the bill through the Senate but for the help of Mr. Harriman, though of course
his name or his company were never in sight through all the fight.” Muir wrote to
Herrin, “Many thanks for your Sacramento Yosemite work, the best thing ever done
for the mountains and the world carrying blessings for everyone, and covering a
multitude of real or imaginary railroad sins.”17
There was one last battle. The U.S. Congress had to accept California’s grant. But
the forces of the natural resources industries conspired to get the bill bottled up in
both houses of Congress. Muir again implored Harriman to intercede. Harriman
responded, “I will certainly do anything I can to help your Yosemite Recession Bill.”
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 641

His contacts with congressional leaders cleared the bottlenecks, the bill passed, and
President Roosevelt signed it on June 11, 1906, making Yosemite Valley part of the
national park.18
So after five decades of struggle by myriad parties, Yosemite was preserved as a
place of sublime wilderness, a national icon of a peculiarly American identity. This
alternative narrative of the saving of Yosemite highlights two crucial points erased
in the myths of wilderness and the founding of environmentalism. First, Yosemite
was not found and saved but created and saved. Wilderness is not a natural, uni-
versal essential object, but a contested social construction rooted in particular cul-
tures and historical periods. Yosemite as a place of pristine wilderness instead of
“home” or “site of natural resources” is the result of the work of photographers like
Watkins, painters like Albert Bierstadt, and writers like Muir. Second, Yosemite and
wilderness itself is also the result of the work of corporations. Southern Pacific was
fundamental in the creation of Yosemite, not only supporting many of the artists
visiting the Valley, but also widely disseminating their works in the general interest
of spawning tourism to wilderness as a leisure practice of elite urban dwellers and
in the specific interest of creating a public desire to see Yosemite. From the per-
spective of the myths, then, the successful political efforts to pass legislation to cre-
ate and preserve Yosemite as a wilderness park is in large measure the result of an
“unholy” alliance between “wilderness saint” Muir and “robber baron” Harriman
and his Southern Pacific Railroad.
The history of environmentalism in the United States, then, is not the history of
wilderness saints but the history of larger and often contradictory cultural dis-
courses. The creation of wilderness places is a process of political struggle. As geo-
grapher David Harvey notes, “the creation of symbolic places is not given in the
stars but painstakingly nurtured and fought over precisely because of the hold that
place can have over the imaginary. The fierce contest over images and counter-
images of places is an arena of action in which the cultural politics of places, the
political-economy of their development and the accumulation of a sense of social
power in place frequently fuse.”19 The creation of Yosemite as a wilderness park rep-
resented the victory of the cultural beliefs in sublime wilderness, in wilderness as a
balm for the soul of industrial urban dwellers, and in wilderness as a symbol of a
distinctly American heritage. Most significantly, perhaps, it was also a victory for
the railroads and tourism as economic forces.

CONSEQUENTIAL MYTHS, NEW POSSIBILITIES

If places are not found but constructed through political struggle, then place con-
struction is fundamentally a rhetorical process and it is as rhetoric, not history, that
the myths of wilderness and environmentalism must be judged. First, by any mea-
sure, the myths of wilderness and environmentalism must be judged astounding
642 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

successes. Deploying a political strategy based on the rhetorical figures of pristine

wilderness and heroic individuals produced enormous dividends. In a country in
the throes of industrialization and driven by progress, environmentalists managed
to slow the voracious consumption of nature and to actually preserve certain areas
“for all time.” More than that, though, they nurtured a wilderness vision and envi-
ronmental consciousness that has become part of the fabric of American identity
and culture. This was more than a cultural achievement, however, as environmen-
talists have succeeded in institutionalizing the love of wilderness and environmen-
tal awareness in numerous laws and governmental organizations. Their success is
evident in the preservation of the national parks, the Wilderness Act, numerous
antipollution laws and regulations, and the establishment of the Department of the
Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. These achievements have been
replicated at state levels and internationally. The enormity of this success cannot be
overestimated. It represents a sea change in consciousness in the blink of an histor-
ical eye.
So why deconstruct wilderness? Why change a successful rhetorical strategy
hinging on heroic individuals? I admit that such a process is fraught with danger.
What makes sense theoretically can be harmful politically. That said, I still think
that the deconstruction of the myths of wilderness and environmentalism poten-
tially benefits environmental politics. Barthes writes of how myths purify and sim-
plify history in a manner that erases the traces of human activity, that is, politics:
“myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and mak-
ing contingency appear eternal. . . . In passing from history to nature, myth acts eco-
nomically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
essences. . . . Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. . . . all that
is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it
comes from. Or even better: it can only come from eternity.” In a stark example,
Yosemite’s Lake Tenaya, the site of Captain Savage’s capture and exile of the
Ahwahneechee, is later rhapsodized about in newspaper accounts as “so high and so
lovely in its surroundings that hunters and prospectors say they have heard angels
singing in the New Jerusalem.” The Ahwahneechee’s haven is transformed into the
tourists’ heaven. Cleansed of politics, Yosemite is read within an Edenic frame and
then used to constitute a politics.20
The origin myth of environmental politics is that John Muir and others of his ilk
came across wilderness and were so inspired that they dedicated their lives to sav-
ing it. An account of the corporate roots of Yosemite belies the belief in the mythic
origins of environmentalism anchored in the formation of the first wilderness
parks. Quite clearly, wilderness parks are the products of industrial capitalism and
serve a role within the paradigm of industrial progress. The parks had no clear envi-
ronmental mission and were not even ends in themselves but means to extend
industrial development. Further, the sublime feeling produced by wilderness is not
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 643

an innate, universal feeling but a culturally conditioned response. Within the dis-
courses of the late 19th century, the sublime becomes not so much a feeling but a
commodity, produced through specific techniques. It is a commodity sold to
tourists, who themselves are products of the industrial practice of tourism. These
myths have embedded within them class, race, and cultural dimensions that fissure
belief and suggest their rhetorical and political exhaustion.
The deconstruction of wilderness is not so much the choice of a particular the-
orist but a larger cultural process happening at this historical moment in the circles
of both theory and practical politics. In academic circles, to put it simply, environ-
mental studies has discovered poststructuralism. Numerous scholars in multiple
disciplines are now declaring that wilderness is neither an essential object nor uni-
versal, but rather a particular social construction.21 Interestingly, the response to
this discovery by the discoverers is to dismiss wilderness entirely. This is the
response of true believers to disillusionment. If the myth of wilderness is not true,
then it does not exist. Paradoxically, then, this response is still insisting on concep-
tualizing wilderness on its original mythic terms. I believe, however, that the neces-
sary deconstruction of wilderness does not necessitate its destruction. Indeed, to
recognize wilderness as a social construction would also seem to entail recognizing
that such an important social construction will be with us for quite a while. Just
because something is a contingent social construction does not mean it is
ephemeral.
Insisting that wilderness live up to its mythic pristine standard or junking it has
also infiltrated the political arena. Opponents of environmentalism often argue
against designating areas as wilderness because such areas are not absolutely pris-
tine, or they will put a road in an area and then argue it cannot be wilderness. This
anti-environmentalism goes under several names, including the “Wise Use,”
“Brown,” or “county” movement, and includes groups such as The Center for the
Defense of Free Enterprise, Mountain States Legal Foundation, Alliance for
America, People for the West, and the National Cattlemen’s Association. These
groups have also effectively used the standard of pristine wilderness against wilder-
ness advocates by championing human welfare—witness the title by Wise Use
leader Ron Arnold: Ecology Wars: Environmentalism as if People Mattered. Most
commonly, anti-environmentalism exploits the separation of wilderness/civiliza-
tion or nature/culture, often in the form of claiming that environmental protection
hurts economic growth—an environment versus jobs argument evident in Arnold
and Gottlieb’s Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking
America.22 So the very premise of the rhetorical figure of mythic wilderness—its
separation from human civilization, “an area where the earth and its community of
life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”
(1964 Wilderness Act)— is also its greatest weakness in the face of the counter-
rhetoric of anti-environmentalism. Linked to mythic wilderness as its sublime
644 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

object, environmentalism has had difficulty mounting an effective response.

Indeed, one of the potentially most effective responses, that wilderness and civiliza-
tion are integrally entwined and that the latter fundamentally depends on the for-
mer, is a priori ruled out by the definition of mythic wilderness.
The rise of the environmental justice movement has made clear an even more
serious problem with respect to environmentalism’s attachment to mythic wilder-
ness. The estimated 7,000 environmental justice groups in the United States have
emerged in response to a blind spot of mainstream environmental groups. In their
focus on wilderness, traditional environmental groups have neglected the environ-
ments people inhabit, most notably the environments of poor people and minori-
ties, which tend to bear disproportionately the burden of pollution, because they
are neither pristine wilderness nor aesthetically sublime. This perspective hinders
the ability of environmental groups to forge coalitions across race and class lines,
coalitions that are necessary to challenge the practices of industrialism. As activist
Carl Anthony succinctly and incisively summarizes, “With its focus on wilderness,
the traditional environmental movement on the one hand pretends there were no
indigenous people in the North American plains and forests. On the other, it dis-
tances itself from the cities, denying that they are part of the environment.” It is key
to note that both urban and rural environmental sacrifice zones are ignored in a
wilderness frame. Although it may not be surprising that the Bronx or inner-city
Los Angeles tends to be neglected, the defacing of Appalachia by strip mines has
been productively challenged not by Audubon or the Sierra Club but by
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an environmental justice group.23
In response to the challenge of the environmental justice movement, some of the
mainstream environmental groups have been attempting to foster partnerships with
grassroots environmental justice groups, with varying degrees of success. At a Sierra
Club centennial celebration, Executive Director Michael Fischer called for “a friendly
takeover of the Sierra Club by people of color. . . . [or else] remain a middle-class
group of backpackers, overwhelmingly white in membership, program, and
agenda—and thus condemn[ed] to losing influence in an increasingly multicultural
country. . . . The struggle for environmental justice in this country and around the
globe must be the primary goal of the Sierra Club during its second century.”24
Fischer’s analysis is both brutal and honest, but the ability of a group like the
Sierra Club to make such a transformation depends on questioning the rhetorical
strategy of deploying the myths of pristine wilderness and the usual heroes as the
key rhetorical figures for environmental politics. Preaching pristine wilderness as
the sublime object of environmentalism prevents environmental groups from
forming coalitions with civil rights groups and unions to effectively challenge
industrial practices that degrade the earth, because such a concept of wilderness is
indigenous to a particular cultural formation (white, upper class, and urban). Many
minority groups, working-class and other class groups, and rural inhabitants do not
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 645

share that culturally conditioned belief in wilderness. They do not go to wilderness

to pine in awe before the sublimity and they do not go to wilderness to play—to
hike, rock climb, camp, kayak, canoe, mountain bike, and so on. The focus on
wilderness as something apart from humanity is an appeal that excludes them.
Similarly, although John Muir (or Thoreau or Leopold or Ansel Adams or David
Brower) as rhetorical figure has inspired many to love wilderness and has achieved
important political victories, many people from different cultural backgrounds are
not inspired by the wilderness adventures of solitary white men.
The benefits of the deconstruction of mythic wilderness and environmental
heroes, then, are twofold. First, it dismisses the belief that wilderness is a natural
object that people will “naturally” respond to. This naïve belief is well illustrated by
Muir’s interactions with his sheepherder companion during his first summer in
Yosemite. When the sheepherder refused to go look at Yosemite Valley and even had
the temerity to deride the tourists who spent time and money to do so, Muir
responded with exasperated disbelief and pitied the sheepherder as a poor,
benighted soul. But wilderness is not a natural fact—it is a political achievement.
When environmentalists keep this in mind, they will never take for granted that
others will necessarily share their feelings about wilderness once they are exposed to
it. In other words, deconstruction highlights the fact that preserving wilderness
always requires political struggle. Preservation also requires cultural education. Too
often when certain people, say loggers or urban dwellers, do not revere wilderness,
environmentalists dismiss or ignore them. This tendency has earned environmen-
talism a reputation as an elitist movement and has isolated it from potential allies
in the struggle against the depredations of industrialism. Instead, environmentalists
need to accept that wilderness does not have value in and of itself (indeed, “value”
is always a relative term), but instead has social value that must be communicated
and fought for.
My account of the corporate roots of environmentalism also questions the ben-
efits of a polarized debate between the dichotomy of good nature-lovers and bad
corporations (and everyone else who is not a nature-lover). This dichotomy cer-
tainly runs between corporations and environmentalists, but it also exists within the
environmental movement itself, rivening and weakening it. I am not in any way sug-
gesting that environmentalists should unquestioningly embrace market solutions
or corporate partnerships. I do want to suggest that environmentalists are operat-
ing on a complicated social terrain, that simplistic dichotomous thinking is often
counterproductive, and that what is needed is careful attention to specific situations
and the ability to negotiate among multiple possibilities that always contain both
benefits and hazards. Total revolution is not likely but change is guaranteed. The
form that change will take is what is at stake. In the end, I am advocating a form of
environmental judo that recognizes its always compromised position and seeks to
exploit the spaces and contradictions within the corporate industrial system. The
646 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

case of the preservation of Yosemite is instructive. The mining and logging indus-
tries opposed setting aside Yosemite as a wilderness park, but the tourist industry,
especially the railroad and publishing companies, supported it. Corporate support
was essential to the preservation of Yosemite. Muir’s alliance with Southern Pacific
Railroad was not a sellout but a tactical negotiation of a complicated terrain that
achieved a spectacular political victory.

WILD SPECULATIONS
A final word on wilderness and myths: Both are good and necessary.
Environmentalists can refashion a concept of wilderness that builds bridges among
the disparate activist groups and certain corporate players. The goal of such a
refashioning will not be the revelation of “true” wilderness, but the construction of
a new myth of wilderness that will build on the first 100-plus years of environmen-
talism and set a course for the coming years. The form of such a myth is not pre-
dictable, but will be the result of multiple rhetorical practices and political
struggles. Still, I would like to suggest one possibly productive practice.
Environmental justice activist Dorceta Taylor argues, “The environmental justice
movement is also more ideologically inclusive than more traditional ecology
groups. It integrates both social and ecological concerns much more readily. . . . It
does not treat the problem of oppression and social exploitation as separable from
the rape and exploitation of the natural world. Instead, it argues that human soci-
eties and the natural environment are intricately linked and that the health of one
depends on the health of the other.”25 Taylor’s comments suggest a way of recon-
ceptualizing wilderness so as to bridge the chasm between wilderness and civiliza-
tion, nature and culture. Importantly, the resources for such work exist within the
traditional environmental movement. Academic deconstructionists, Wise Use
advocates, and environmental justice activists on the whole all tend to be either hos-
tile or indifferent to wilderness. To abandon wilderness or to allow it to become a
devil term with which to tar environmentalists, however, is to abandon a powerful
if flawed rhetorical figure, an ideograph with considerable resonance. The task,
then, is one of reconstructing and redeploying wilderness.
The conventional sources of environmentalism can be a resource for this recon-
struction and redeployment. For instance, Thoreau writes, “I wish to speak a word
for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and
culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of
Nature. . . . I am interested in each contemporary plant in my vicinity, and have
attained to a certain acquaintance with the larger ones. They are cohabitants with
me of this part of the planet, and they bear familiar names. Yet how essentially wild
they are!”26 Thoreau’s contention of humanity’s fundamental connection to wilder-
ness is echoed and amplified in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 647

and There. From its beginnings Leopold was the symbolic head of the Wilderness
Society. It is significant that although the Wilderness Society has emphasized pris-
tine wilderness, both Leopold and one of its founders, Bob Marshall, read the rela-
tion between wilderness and civilization much more complexly. On their web page
(<www.wilderness.org>), the Wilderness Society proclaims “Our goal is to ensure
that future generations will enjoy the clean air and water, wildlife, beauty and
opportunities for recreation and renewal that pristine forests, rivers, deserts and
mountains provide” (emphasis added). In praising the Wilderness Act, the society
comments, “It enabled Congress to set aside selected areas in the national forests,
national parks, national wildlife refuges, and other federal lands as units to be kept
permanently unchanged by humans; no roads, no structures, no vehicles, no sig-
nificant impacts of any kind.” Clearly, the Wilderness Society embraces the myth of
pristine wilderness. By contrast, Marshall, in his person, embodied a connection
between wilderness and social justice. When he died suddenly at the age of 39, his
$1.5 million estate was divided among three causes: social advocacy and trade
unions, civil liberties, and wilderness preservation. For as Gottlieb observes: “The
liberation of society, Marshall proclaimed, was a condition for the liberation of
Nature, and the liberation of the natural environment from its would-be exploiters
was an essential condition for social liberation.”27 Similarly, although Leopold priv-
ileged wilderness, it was a wilderness understood as the foundation of civilization:
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called
civilization.” Even more importantly, Sand County Almanac is primarily a medita-
tion on the relation and integration of wilderness and civilization. This is evident
from the foreword, where Leopold argues, “Conservation is getting nowhere
because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land
because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a com-
munity to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Leopold’s
famed land ethic is about the relation of humanity and wilderness, not about pris-
tine wilderness apart from culture: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries
of community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals collectively: the land. . . .
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-
community to plain member and citizen of it.”28 As such, Leopold’s work provides
an important resource for reconceptualizing wilderness.
Some contemporary wilderness activists are enacting a new wilderness that holds
promise for integrating wilderness and social justice concerns in a way that may open
environmentalism to fruitful alliances with justice activists. In one notable instance,
Julia “Butterfly” Hill lived for two years in Luna, a 1,000-year-old redwood targeted
for cutting, descending only when Pacific Lumber agreed to spare Luna. Tree-sitting
is a tactic made popular by the radical environmental group Earth First! as a way of
saving ancient forests. The particular tree-sit that Hill joined had started in October
1997 and was significant for its location. It was not in pristine wilderness but on a
648 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

hillside above the town of Stafford, California. The Earth First!ers chose this location
after a mudslide caused by the clear-cutting destroyed seven homes in Stafford.
Significantly, Stafford is a lumber town. The siting of this Earth First! tree-sit links
wilderness and social concerns. This linkage is echoed in Butterfly’s rhetoric, which
explicitly articulates the inextricable twining of wilderness and social issues.29
In numerous interviews, Butterfly deftly weaves wilderness issues with human
concerns and a critique of corporate practices that manages to displace the jobs ver-
sus environment debate. Instead of letting jobs or social justice be the test of all
wilderness issues, Butterfly places wilderness as the ground for environmental and
social concerns. Further, she does this all the while reducing herself to synecdoche,
consistently claiming that she herself and her actions are merely symbols for larger
struggles against environmental devastation and corporate avarice.
Speaking to Time Magazine Online, Butterfly said: “After being up here a few
days, I realized that what was happening here was not only destroying the environ-
ment, but people’s lives as well. I gave my word to this tree, the forest, and to all the
people whose lives are being destroyed by the lumber companies, that my feet
would not touch the ground until I had done everything in my power to make the
world aware of this problem and to stop the destruction.” These points are elabo-
rated in an interview with ABC News Online: “For the first 100 years of this com-
pany’s existence it was locally and family run and operated. Charles Hurwitz used
money financed illegally to hostilely take over Pacific Lumber. When his corpora-
tion took over, they increased the rate of cut by three times the amount previous.
What they are doing here will leave this area not only without any of our original
ancient Redwood trees but will also leave this area with no jobs. I am standing up
for these people and these forests whose voices are not being heard.”30
Butterfly presents an engaging and sophisticated analysis of justice that encom-
passes environmental and social dimensions through a grounding in wilderness.
Instead of people first, it is wilderness first but with a recognition that caring for
wilderness is caring for people. For Butterfly, adding people is not merely a polite
gesture, but a recognition of the essential connection between wilderness and peo-
ple. Consistently, Butterfly links the tree and forest and people. She is a tree-hugger
and people-hugger. In this position Butterfly is reaffirming the insight of Marshall:
that in the exploitation of wilderness people are inevitably exploited. Clear-cutting
the redwoods destroys people’s homes. Butterfly is also proffering a complicated
notion of wilderness. It is not out there, far away. It is in many places and it is inti-
mately connected to human lives. Indeed, wilderness is the ground of humanity’s
being. Humans do not so much live in an environment as dwell in wilderness.
In revealing the fundamental relation between wilderness and people, Butterfly
challenges the triangulation strategy that links corporate jobs and people against
wilderness. Instead, Butterfly consistently connects the practices and greed of a spe-
cific corporation to the destruction of both wilderness and jobs. Clear-cutting at
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 649

excessive rates destroys both trees and jobs, forests and communities. In the end, then,
Butterfly is offering and enacting a wilderness environmentalism that grounds caring
for people in caring for wilderness. This is a different vision than the myth of pristine
wilderness and offers the possibility of reimagining human-wilderness relations.
Yes, wilderness is a social construction and one that is worth preserving. Such a
struggle must not center on issuing proclamations of divine revelations of wilder-
ness as sacred spaces and denouncements of the unimpressed as maleficent or igno-
rant. Instead, preservation must rest on the recognition that wilderness is not a
divine text but a significant social achievement. The preservation and expansion of
that achievement depends on making arguments about the worth of wilderness to
the social and biological worlds and on forging uncommon alliances. It also
depends on acknowledging global corporate industrialism as a complicated and
contradictory system that presents myriad opportunities for pressing significant
social change, often through the deployment of industrial practices against each
other—for example tourism and fishing against logging and mining. Surely
Thoreau was right: in wildness is the preservation of the world. Just as surely, in the
social world is the preservation of wilderness.

NOTES
1. I am using environmentalism as a general term that encompasses mainstream groups such as the
Sierra Club as well as radical groups such as Earth First!. Though there are important differences
among the strands of environmentalism, one of the arguments of this essay is that they share a com-
mon mythic narrative.
2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 143. Although I am adopting
Barthes’s perspective on myth as naturalized discourse that is politically powerful because it erases
its human constructedness, i.e., its history and politics, I am neutral with respect to his semiologi-
cal methodology and I reject his contention that the “right” speaks in mythic language while the
“left” tends to speak in real language. Indeed, if the environmental movement is considered to be
on the “left,” then the discussion in this essay of the important myths of environmentalism coun-
ters Barthes’s claim that “Left-wing myth is inessential” (147).
3. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, rev. ed. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Vail-Ballou, 1973),
130–33.
4. Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books,
1988); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation
of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea
of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 171, 172, 205.
5. Todd Wilkinson, “Saving the Tetons: John D. Rockefeller Jr.” Audubon 100, no. 6 (1998): 88.
6. One good source for examining these voluminous debates is the Sierra Club archives in the Bancroft
Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
7. Barthes, Mythologies, 142.
8. “Sierra Club Outings 2001: One Hundred Years of Wilderness Adventure,” Sierra (January/February
2001): 61–108.
650 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
9. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 1, 273.
10. For accounts of the killing and forced removal of Native Americans from lands that became
national parks, especially Yosemite, see Rebecca Solnit, “Up the River of Mercy,” Sierra 77 (1992):
50–57, 78, 81–84; Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American
West (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994); Mark Spence, “Dispossessing the Wilderness:
Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal, 1864–1930,” Pacific Historical Review (1996): 27–59;
and Robert Keller and Michael Turek, American Indians & National Parks (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1998).
11. R. Cahn and R. G. Ketchum, American Photographers and the National Parks (New York: The Viking
Press, 1981); “Raymond, Israel (1864) Letter to Honorable John Conness,” in Yosemite: The Story of
an Idea, by Hans Huths, 66–67; Sierra Club Bulletin 33 (1948): 47–48. Starr was quoted in Alan
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 135.
12. The bill quoted in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 191.
13. For an account of that relationship see Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the
National Parks (Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1994). The massive crush of tourists in
the national parks is leading to a revival of that relationship. A recent cover story in USA Today
explains that the National Park Service is constructing a light rail system and will ban private vehi-
cles in the Grand Canyon by the year 2003: T. Watson, “Remaking the Grand Canyon:
Overburdened Park Plans to Crowd Out Traffic, Noise,” USA Today, August 20–22, 1999, 1A–2A.
The John Muir articles are “The Treasures of the Yosemite” (The Century Magazine [August 1890]:
483–500) and “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park” (The Century Magazine
[September 1890]: 656–67). Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Binghamton, N.Y.: Vail-
Ballou, 1973), 132; Muir quoted in R. Orsi, “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber Baron’: The Anomalous
Partnership of John Muir and the Southern Pacific Company for Preservation of Yosemite National
Park,” Pacific Historian 29 (1985): 141.
14. Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery, 11, 12.
15. Orsi, “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber Baron’,” 143.
16. Runte, Trains of Discovery, 54; Orsi, “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber Baron’,” 148; Muir, Sierra Club
Bulletin 1 (January 1896): 275–76.
17. Colby in a letter to Muir quoted in Orsi, “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber Baron’,” 150; Muir quoted
twice in Orsi, 151, 150.
18. Quoted in Orsi, “‘Wilderness Saint’ and ‘Robber Baron’,” 151.
19. David Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996),
322.
20. Barthes, Mythologies, 142, 143, 151; Solnit, Savage Dreams, 220.
21. The deconstruction of nature came first and then wilderness more recently. For arguments about
and accounts of the social construction of nature, see: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1945); Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1992); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of
Modern Science (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, Inc., 1989); and Raymond Williams,
“Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 67–85. For the
argument that wilderness is also a social construction, see, besides Nash, William Cronon, “The
Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History (January
1996): 7–28; the contributors to Cronon’s edited volume Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the
Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of
TRAINS IN THE WILDERNESS: THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 651
Wilderness. In “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response: A Study in the Rhetoric of
Preservationism” (The Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 [1981]: 245–58), Christine Oravec provides
one of the few rhetorical studies of an episode in the first 100 years of the environmental movement
when she looks at John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy controversy. Not surprisingly, Oravec looks
through a traditional lens and sees Muir as a heroic rhetor and, in this case, a tragic one.
22. The Wise Use literature is quite extensive. Key titles from movement leaders include Ron Arnold,
Ecology Wars: Environmentalism as if People Mattered (Bellevue, Wash.: Free Enterprise Press, 1987);
Arnold and Alan Gottlieb, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking
America (Bellevue, Wash.: Free Enterprise Press, 1993); Gottlieb, The Wise Use Agenda (Bellevue,
Wash.: Free Enterprise Press, 1989); and William Pendley, War on the West (Washington, D.C.:
Regnery Publishers, 1995). For critical accounts, see John Echeverria and Raymond Eby, Let the
People Judge: Wise Use and the Private Property Rights Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,
1995); David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, the New Right, and
Anti-Environmental Violence (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994); and Sharon Beder, Global
Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green
Publishing, 1998).
23. “A Place at the Table: A Sierra Roundtable on Race, Justice, and the Environment,” Sierra (May/June
1993): 28, 57. Evidence supporting the claim that race and class unduly influence who bears envi-
ronmental degradation burdens has become overwhelming. Accounts of the environmental justice
movement that are good starting points include: Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and
Environmental Quality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); and Jim Schwab, Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue-
Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994). In 1990
the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP) sent a series of letters to the coalition of mainstream
environmental groups known as The Group of Ten, charging the coalition with racism and classism
in their perspectives, issue selection, and hiring practices: “Your organizations continue to support
and promote policies that emphasize the cleanup and preservation of the environment on the backs
of working people in general and people of color in particular” (Southwest Organizing Project,
“The Letter that Shook a Movement,” Sierra [May/June 1993]: 54).
24. “A Place at the Table,” 51.
25. Dorceta Taylor, “Environmentalism and the Politics of Inclusion,” in Confronting Environmental
Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, ed. Robert Bullard (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 53–62.
26. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions and Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 205.
27. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 15. Gottlieb also provides an account (15–19) of how the Wilderness
Society, after Marshall’s death, veered away from social concerns in favor of advocating on behalf of
a pristine wilderness to be preserved for the elite who can appreciate it. Significantly, part of this
direction was motivated by a fear of being tarred “Communist.”
28. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1949/1968), 188, viii, 204.
29. Butterfly’s ubiquitous presence in multiple media is one testament to her effectiveness. Besides
her international presence in outlets from Europe to Japan, she has appeared repeatedly in every
major newspaper in the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, as well as in newsweeklies such as
Time and Newsweek. She has been featured in women’s magazines ranging from Family Circle to
Ms. She has been interviewed on many Internet sites and radio stations. She has appeared on
major television news programs, including an extended segment on NBC Dateline. In environ-
mental circles she has become something of a folk hero and spokesperson, the subject of several
652 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
independent documentaries, and an invited speaker at the memorial service for the archdruid
David Brower.
30. The Internet can be an ephemeral source of information. I attained the transcripts of these two
online interviews at Julia Butterfly Hill’s tree-sit website, <www.zerocircles.com/luna/>. Another
current site of information about her activities is <www.circleoflifefoundation.org>.