Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :My First Summer in the Sierra
But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
So extravagant is Nature, with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event: uppercase-N Nature is about to duke it out with lowercase-m man. As you might imagine, lowly man, with his tiny toenails and little stone tools, ain't got nothin' on Nature, with her giant mountains and great rivers and all.
As the capitalization of the word suggests, Nature is God to John Muir. Every day, he attends his church of the wilderness. And as one of those little, lowercase-m men, he bows down to Nature and "her choicest treasures."
To Muir, Cities are dirty. And urban-dwelling men and women are not much above rodents, because their lifestyles shape their values. So he implores us all to get out of Dodge and come worship in the cathedrals of Nature. This kind of thinking was what preceded the newer, New Materialist scholarship; now, most ecocritics believe urban centers to be as wild as National Parks, and National Parks to be as "impure" as cities.
As time moves forward, the still-young Ecocriticism movement grows and diversifies.