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The impression given by this book is that Muir was daringly pragmatic in his thinking and something of an eclectic about his intellectual-theological underpinnings; he proceeded on the basis of a rather romantic faith that could also make use of Enlightenment thought, including elements of Darwin's critical theory. Muir's "wild is superior" stance, which has been influential in the formation of the modern environmental movement, reflected his synthesis of natural theology, Christian primitivism, and perceptions of what Scripture implied about the origin of the natural world. At the same time, with a strong practical bent, he developed a prophetic style of politics that combined an appeal to enlightened social élites with the demagogic language of populists and preachers:
The issue for this prophet in the wilderness was repentance. Muir had a problem with the arrogance of human civilization. Bashing the sophistication of civilization came naturally for the son of a Disciples of Christ preacher. The Disciples' antagonism toward formal theology and exclusive dogma, in addition to the scathing rants of the Old Testament prophets and the ethical envelope-pushing of Jesus, who would take a whip to drive money changers out of the temple, gave Muir a rather large set of role models, whose soapboxes he liked to borrow.
While his passion for "the wild" was deeply romantic, Muir was no mere dabbler in contemporary scientific thought; for example, he acquired a state-of-the-art understanding of glaciers, their formation, and their continuing significance for the environment. Out of this combination of rooted faith and disciplined scientific analysis, Muir developed a rhetorical urgency that did much to shape public thinking at the turn of the 20th century; clearly his urgency continues to be important as the same issues are only more acute in the century just begun.
Lloyd Burton's Worship and Wilderness is the most complex, most ambitious, and most valuable of these books. Burton is concerned with public policy but boldly begins with an insistence that policy must be informed by a fundamentally different orientation. He contends that we are suffering from "a growing environmental crisis engendered in no small part by modernism's divorce of the wild from the wise, the scientific from the sacred, and the spirit from the flesh." In response, we must return to an indigenous spirituality that nurtures experiences that are extrarational, transcendent, and unitive. He casts a very wide net over available traditions of spirituality and urges that attentiveness to Native American attitudes toward the land is critical for the future.
From that basis, Burton turns to a consideration of "law" and the way in which notions of "exploration" and "conquest" have led to a dismissal of Native American spirituality and to the abuse of Native Americans as a matter of public policy. He traces a series of legal enactments that served to freeze out religious awareness in the interest of treating land as a market commodity, converting public land to private ownership in wholesale ways. The Native Americans who represented a challenge to such a theory of economic development were "eliminated" from public discussion by dislocation and relocation to reservations.
Yet Burton also observes, in the present, a "historic shift" back to an appreciation of communal sensibilities that may be the way out of the win-lose posture of bald economics:
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