Believing in Yellowstone: The Moralization of Nature and the Creation of America's Eden

As the ice on the Yellowstone Plateau began to melt from thousands of years of deep glaciation, new life emerged, and humans followed the retreating ice in search of animal and plant sustenance. Archaeologists, paleontologists, and historians trace the melting ice and the existence of human life in Yellowstone back at least 11,000 years (Cannon, 1993; Haines, 1977). Yet most popular knowledge, and our most powerful American myths about the brave "discovery" of Yellowstone by white Euro-American mountain men, reach back a short 200 years, only 1.2 percent of the span of time that humans have been known to inhabit the region. During these 200 years—as more groups came to inhabit the Yellowstone area—its natural resources took on new meaning. Deep moral and spiritual disagreements formed then are the bedrock upon which contemporary conflict in the area takes place.

This chapter recounts America's early relationship with Yellowstone. How did the meaning of Yellowstone change from the time it was "discovered" and made a national park? More specifically, how, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was Yellowstone sacralized and moralized? In sociology, this relates more generally to how aspects of social life that are thought to be about instrumental or material preferences become invested with moral and religious meaning (Zelizer, 2010). Similarly, work in psychology has theorized the processes of "moralization," whereby utilitarian preferences are converted into values (Rozin, 1999; Rozin and Singh, 1999). For example, the act of smoking in American society underwent a process of moralization beginning in the late 1960s. What was once a behavioral preference, a mere taste or personal choice, is now a morally laden act, something viewed by many as disgusting and wrong. When a practice such as smoking—or in this case, the use of Yellowstone—becomes moralized, it is more likely to receive "attention from governments and institutions, to encourage supportive scientific research, to license censure [and] to recruit the emotion of disgust" (Rozin, 1999, p. 218). This process of institutionalization through science, law, and public sentiment legitimizes a new moral order about aspects of life that were before thought to be about material preferences or mere taste.

What does this mean for the historical development of Yellowstone, and the recent rise of conflict? In this chapter I make the historical argument that the use of natural resources in Yellowstone underwent a process of "moralization," whereby instrumental and material relationships with nature were invested with moral and spiritual meaning. This process had important institutional effects on politics in the area (e.g., more government attention, scientific research, censuring, public sentiment, emotional disgust). As a sort of scaffolding for explaining this process of moralization, I document the emergence and interaction of three "moral visions" of Yellowstone. By moral vision I mean a bundle of practices, beliefs, and feelings groups (and individuals) use to discern right and wrong, good and bad, desirable and undesirable, just and unjust about the natural environment. Using these three ideal types to structure my historical and analytical framework, I begin with the early days in the Yellowstone area as my starting point for this moralization process. New ideas began to emerge in the Yellowstone area and throughout the nation about the meaning of nature, its economic and noneconomic value, and how humans ought to relate to it. This moral upheaval was paired with large-scale social and economic change in the United States that created a context of opportunity to institutionalize these new moral visions into daily life. I focus on these historical contingencies throughout, drawing on larger developments in American life, as well as local developments in Yellowstone itself.

Before jumping into the story of moralization in the area, a brief introduction to the utilitarian, spiritual, and biocentric moral visions will be useful. I define the utilitarian moral vision as a bundle of practices, beliefs, and feelings oriented toward the physical transformation of nature for useful purposes. The utilitarian vision is not simply a crass materialism, amoral greed, or purely economic approach to nature. It moralizes nature by defining what it is good for (e.g., resources, practical use), but it also moralizes the work one does in nature, as well as the workers themselves. Making utilitarian use of the land not only provided material gain, but it satisfied deeper narratives about the self-made man, manifest destiny, rugged individual will, inevitable progress, and the traditional (Protestant) valuation of hard work. Land is seen as a resource for consumption, but that does not negate the deeper relationships with the land that go far beyond economic dependence. There are deeper affective bonds rooted in physical interaction and interpersonal, community, and cultural experiences in particular spaces that transcend economic valuation and inform what it means to live a "good" life and be a "good" person.

The spiritual moral vision refers to a bundle of practices, beliefs, and feelings oriented toward nature that emphasize aesthetic beauty, "living" nature, personal experience, and theological obligation. This approach is influenced by religious impulses in 19th-century transcendentalist thought that emphasized emotion, intuition, aesthetics, wildness, and immanent divinity. It represents attempts by thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to (re)sacralize nature in response to materialist and consumerist pressures of American life. This vision is also a reaction against the tendency in Western culture that renders the divine as "transcending" the world, separating the divine from a disenchanted nature. But this moral vision finds goodness in this world, because the earth is not "a dead, inert mass" but "has a spirit" (Nash, 1989, p. 37). The romantic wilderness ideals of Thoreau and Muir play a large role in the GYE, especially because of symbolism of Yellowstone as America's "Eden." But this moral vision also taps into more everyday experiences such as kinship with animals, gardening, going on walks, or feeding birds. Thus, to live the good life is to be in communion with nature, and a good person is one who not only experiences this community but, according to Muir, also values and protects its least "practical" members because even "poor creatures, loved...