| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature. By Dennis C. Williams. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. xiv + 246pp. $39.95.
Dennis C. Williams introduces his volume as a "narrative of the conclusions" at which he arrived in his "exploration of several issues related to Muir's thought" (p. x). The first issue, and the principal focus of the book, concerns Muir's association with evangelical Protestantism. The second issue probes Muir's relationship with science, and, finally, Williams explores the tensions of Muir's relationship with "faith and science" and how it "shaped his behavior as an author and a political activist" (p. x).	1
God's Wilds presents, in fact, an excellent contribution to our understanding of the depth and species of Muir's religious attitude and how his theological commitments informed his life and work. Muir was raised in a home heavy with the theology of Reformed Scottish Presbyterianism and he inherited and maintained "a fundamental set of orthodox Christian values" (p. 6) about people, nature, and the relations between them. The schema is familiar and as persistent and powerful as it is, ultimately, troubling. Nature stood as symbolic of the character and glorification of God; as the human race rebelled against nature so it rebelled against God and "condemned itself" (p. 6).	. . .

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