a storehouse of resources: they saw commercial timber but overlooked the many noncommercial species and other interconnections that a later, ecological eye would discern in the same woods. Imagination was in effect when John Muir and early members of his Sierra Club hiked into California’s mountains and found overwhelming joy and inspiration in places they trained Americans to think of as secular cathedrals—rather than the frightening, dangerous, and worthless places that high mountains had been for most people through the ages.
collective action, not the splendid products of any blueprint.6 Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights but regarded those rights as seeds that yielded different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics, the art that is human nature. Others were much harsher in attacking Wordsworth’s idea that nature should be a teacher. John Stuart Mill called all political appeals to nature nasty and obscuring: they superstitiously projected human values onto
industrious and rational” Europeans.5 No wonder Edmund Burke, attacking certain theories of natural rights, announced, “Art is man’s nature”—that is, as social beings, we are what we make ourselves through collective action, not the splendid products of any blueprint.6 Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights but regarded those rights as seeds that yielded different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics, the art that is human nature. Others were much harsher in attacking Wordsworth’s idea that nature should be a teacher. John Stuart Mill called all political appeals to nature nasty and obscuring: they superstitiously projected human values onto
Europeans arrived to claim the continent. Outside the United States, there were plenty of critics of colonial land grabs, including Adam Smith and the jurist William Blackstone. Within the United States, for some of the same reasons, there was pressure to defend the European claim in richer terms than “might makes right.” So, twenty-four years after John Quincy Adams’s self-assured speech on the presumptuousness of savages, the jurist James Kent claimed that a version of Lockean natural right was the foundation of European claims to North America. He offered a key to understanding why the continent had to belong to its European settlers,
humanity has outstripped geology.
a storehouse of resources: they saw commercial timber but overlooked the many noncommercial species and other interconnections that a later, ecological eye would discern in the same woods. Imagination was in effect when John Muir and early members of his Sierra Club hiked into California’s mountains and found overwhelming joy and inspiration in places they trained Americans to think of as secular cathedrals—rather than the frightening, dangerous, and worthless places that high mountains had been for most people through the ages.
collective action, not the splendid products of any blueprint.6 Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights but regarded those rights as seeds that yielded different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics, the art that is human nature. Others were much harsher in attacking Wordsworth’s idea that nature should be a teacher. John Stuart Mill called all political appeals to nature nasty and obscuring: they superstitiously projected human values onto
industrious and rational” Europeans.5 No wonder Edmund Burke, attacking certain theories of natural rights, announced, “Art is man’s nature”—that is, as social beings, we are what we make ourselves through collective action, not the splendid products of any blueprint.6 Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights but regarded those rights as seeds that yielded different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics, the art that is human nature. Others were much harsher in attacking Wordsworth’s idea that nature should be a teacher. John Stuart Mill called all political appeals to nature nasty and obscuring: they superstitiously projected human values onto
Europeans arrived to claim the continent. Outside the United States, there were plenty of critics of colonial land grabs, including Adam Smith and the jurist William Blackstone. Within the United States, for some of the same reasons, there was pressure to defend the European claim in richer terms than “might makes right.” So, twenty-four years after John Quincy Adams’s self-assured speech on the presumptuousness of savages, the jurist James Kent claimed that a version of Lockean natural right was the foundation of European claims to North America. He offered a key to understanding why the continent had to belong to its European settlers,
