Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History
Author(s)
Merchant, Carolyn
Abstract
Surveys the views of environmentalists about Native Americans and African Americans. John Muir’s perception of Native Americans was shaped by personal experience. Early contact with some groups led him to see them as unworthy of the wilderness, although a later encounter caused him to believe that some groups were ennobled because they lived closer to a state of wildness. He maintained conventional stereotypes of blacks. Henry David Thoreau, by contrast, was an advocate of abolition and possessed an ethic in which the individual was in partnership with the entire human community and the natural order. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic did not exclude minorities, although he was not an advocate for minority rights. His ideals postulated a partnership among humans and between humans and nonhumans.
