Review
Title: The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History
Eds.: Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: scholarly essays, Mormon history, environmentalism
Year of Publication: 2019
Number of Pages: 376 (appendix and notes begin on p. 263)
ISBN13: 978-1-60781653-9
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Lately an interesting and surprising number of texts about environmental/social collapse—or at least radical, irreversible change–have fallen into my hands. (This kind of thing has happened to me before. I’m convinced the gods of questioning and yearning conspire to drop such piles of books into our hands when we’re ready, if we let them.) Yuval Noah Harari’s trilogy, beginning with Sapiens, purports to recount a true history of our species and to make projections about where we’re going. Harari is cheerful about it, but I’m a little appalled: are we really about to imagine ourselves into irrelevance? Imagination is our distinctive feature, he says, but he points to explorations in technology and medicine that suggest this is exactly the trajectory we’ve placed ourselves upon.
Be patient: I’m getting to the book at hand, in a kind of sideways fashion.
Deena Metzger’s “Extinction Illness” (https://carolynbaker.net/2019/01/05/extinction-illness-grave-affliction-and-possibility-by-deena-metzger/) and Entering the Ghost River similarly reflect their author’s profound concern about the devastation our carelessness brings down upon ourselves. Bill McKibben’s Falter, coming as it does after his treatise on The End of Nature, examines a frightening number of ways we humans have pushed our planet and our societies to near-damnation. And Rebecca Solnit’s clear, logical argument that “Climate Change is Violence” in Call Them By Their True Names delineates almost inarguably the relationship between our refusal to address the causes and consequences of climate change, and the decline of safety and compassion in our human interactions.
In fiction, Octavia Butler’s Parable series posits a near-future postapocalyptic exodus from burned-over, violence-ridden cities to minimalist, grounds-up new beginnings. Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus takes place in a dismayingly parallel universe, a fire-eaten Los Angeles where water is as scarce as clean air and the characters’ sense of their very humanness has nearly disappeared. These novels remind me (as so much in real life does since I first read it) of Doris Lessing’s brilliant Mara and Dann and its sequel, which tell the story of a royal sibling pair who must start civilization over again when their own implodes due to tragic mismanagement, irreversible climate change, and sheer human obliviousness.
Which brings us to Rogers’ and Godfrey’s book.
No, this isn’t a book directly about climate change, or the ways Mormons have contributed to it. It’s not even solely about the ways Latter-day Saints have changed and affected the environment of the American West, although many of the essays are “about” that. Instead, this collection, consisting of thirteen essays and a talk by Marcus B. Nash describing scriptural references to proper relations between humans and environment, takes on for perhaps the first time through a Mormon lens the timely contemporary questions that environmental studies requires us to address if we are to survive the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.
By “through a Mormon lens,” I don’t mean a theological one alone. The theme of the essays taken together is that in its origins, Mormon doctrine declares the earth and its resources living, spiritual entities whose stewardship is in the hands of the humans who share them. (Nash’s talk encapsulates this doctrine.) But, in responsible and well-documented fashion, the essays—by historians of geography, environmentalism, the American West, and Mormonism—show that as settlers and pragmatists, Mormons succumbed—inevitably, I think—to the American imperative to “multiply” (more than to “replenish”), overgraze, strip, and turn to profit all that the mountains and fertile valleys of the West had to offer. Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young began with deep respect for God’s bounty; Young, in particular, allowed the pioneers to do as they must to make the desert “blossom as the rose,” to quite ambivalent effect.
The essays are organized in three sections, with an orientating introduction by Rogers and an “Epilogue” by BYU humanities professor George S. Handley. Part I, “Theology and Ideology,” includes two essays outlining in detail the process I summarize in the previous paragraph. The first, by Weber State University history chair Sara Dant, notes wryly that though Brigham Young’s famous “pronouncement that ‘there shall be no private ownership of the streams…nor the timber…These belong to the people’” cannot be substantiated (29), it is nonetheless attributed to him as a foundational statement of Mormon land policy. However, Thomas G. Alexander, professor emeritus of western American history at BYU, author of the second essay in this section, shows how communal forgetfulness elided the implications of this “policy.” Loss of memory–failure of imagination!–is perhaps the saddest trait characterizing the shadow that falls like a knife between humans, environment, and civilization. Alexander’s essay deconstructs this trait in relation to early Mormon settlers in Utah in ways we could all take to heart regarding what’s happening now planetwide.
Part II of The Earth Will Appear…, entitled “Perception and Place,” consists of four fascinating essays about how those early Mormon settlers inserted themselves on the land. In “The Natural World and the Establishment of Zion, 1831-1833,” Matthew C. Godfrey, one of the editors of the collection, writes that when the early Saints moved to Jackson County, Missouri, they saw it as an Eden, a “community of flourishing agricultural fields, interspersed with industry.” Now, though, it’s “concrete, asphalt, strip malls, and highways” (84)—but it still holds the imagination of Latter-day Saints because it was designated at one time as Zion. Our ability to imagine, as Harari well knows, directly influences our behaviors toward the land we live on, and the resources therein.
Other essays in this section (by Brett C. Dowdle, Richard Francaviglia, and Betsy Gaines Quammen) treat the sometimes devastating “environment shock” that exacerbated Mormon immigrants’ already high culture shock as they arrived in the arid West—and vice versa, as missionaries crossed the Atlantic to take the gospel to England and other European countries; the compelling stories hand-drawn maps of the region tell about their makers’ sense of drama and possibility; and the surprising Mormon/Gentile cooperation that characterized the creation of Zion National Park.
When I first looked at the Table of Contents of this collection I wished that the essays had been organized differently—not thematically but chronologically. But then I realized, as I perused the third section, “Agrarianism and Urbanism,” that that’s exactly how they’re sequenced. First came the ideology; then came the need to impose pragmatic perceptions on the new land; and then, in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, the contradictions arose. Do we respect and honor these mountains, these valleys, or do we gouge them and graze them, strip them and sterilize them, in order to use their goods for our “good”?
Written by Jeff Nichols (no relation), Brian Frehner, Brian Q. Cannon, Nathan N. Waite, and Rebecca K. Andersen, the five essays in the final section take the reader from 1847 to the present, chronicling and analyzing grazing and water rights issues from 1847 to 1938; the limits of expansion; Spencer Kimball’s 1973 injunction to “plant a garden,” and the quarries and gravel pits that dot the Wasatch Front as we speak. Taken chronologically, then, these essays comprise a narrative with a prototypical arc—an underlying belief/behavior stretched to its limit, ignored, inadequately returned to, and now struggling to be reborn. As with all good scholarship, these narrative moments are well documented, finely argued, articulately developed. And as with all good scholarship, much remains to be done.
The collection is bookended by Rogers’s thoughtful discussion of what “environmental history” is, and Handley’s equally attentive concluding remarks. While Rogers explains that environmental historians look at the relation between inventive, industrial humans (including religious communities) and a vulnerable earth, Handley lists a number of questions that could still benefit from scholarly probes. “Research on the roots of contemporary attitudes and practices might have ramifications too,” he says, “for understanding how and why Mormons eat as they do, how they conceive of city planning and land use, why and when they have been willing to support public transportation or public lands, what their changing views of air pollution have been, and what their views are of science and its relation to policy” (260). I’m fascinated by the reach that “environmental history” can have for those of us who want to preserve and care for the earth so that it can sustain us in “these the latter days,” when extinction and end times seem nearer and more daunting than ever before. Although it’s only a beginning, this collection of essays, explaining how Mormons have made and can still make environmental history, helps lead the way.