Settler Nativism: the Myth of Nature and Wilderness, Muir and Thoreau (White-supremacy and Conservation pt.2)

Henry David Thoreau

John Muir

Definition of "Wilderness" in the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964

"Natural Landscape" as defined on Wikipedia

Nature and Wilderness are both colonial inventions. They exist as places to escape the supposedly superior white-settler-civilization which seeks to dominate wild(er)ness (Gen 1:26). These are both forms of Imperialist Nostalgia which longs for that which it destroys.

These also erase Indigenous peoples and their histories. A "natural landscape" that existed before being "acted upon by human culture" in this continent would tens of thousands of years ago. Wildernesses are not only places created to save white masculinity from being feminized by industrialized urban life (see: Muscular Christianity/Mormonism), they were also created through the displacement, massacre, and genocide of Indigenous peoples.

John Muir, “Father of the National Parks,” assured readers they'd be safe in the wilderness in his 1901 “Our National Parks”."Bears are a peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour. Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence." 

Muir and his fellow Sierra Club members were influenced by the romantic naturalism of Thoreau.

Thoreau proposed that American greatness arose as “the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.”
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For both Muir and Thoreau, they simultaneously wanted Indigenous peoples destroyed and used the stolen lands to become native, to become closer to God, to become American. (see: Settler Nativism)

The time they lived in is part of an explanation, but not an excuse. Muir is remembered for his moral respect for non-human life. What kind of morality cares more about “animal people” than about some human beings?

​How is this still present in conservation, outdoor culture, and veganism?

See the New Yorker's "Environmentalism's Racist History," for more.