Forum: Lloyd Burton's Worship and Wilderness: improvement Religion.

Forum: Lloyd Burton's Worship and Wilderness: improvement Religion., and Law in Public Lands Management Lloyd Burton, Worship and Wilderness: civilization Religion, and Law in Public Lands Management. Madison: University of Wisconsin Pres 2002 312 pages. $5500 cloth; $2495 paper.

Introduction

In Worship and Wilderness, Lloyd Burton draws attention to an important and interesting constellation of law and society issues. Those issues involve the different ways in which European Americans, Native Americans, and formal U s governmental or institutional actors have treated land. A broad-ranging and thoughtprovoking consideration as well as a controversial single in kind Worship and Wilderness takes onward the question of "how improvement spirituality and law have combined to affect the management of public lands within the United States and for what reason they may also affect the future" (p 1) The following brief description of the work be under the orders ofs as background to the contributions of scholars-from law, anthropology, and theology-that follow

While accepting seemingly standard accounts of the deplorable treatment of Native Americans from mainstream American institutions in the past, Worship and Wilderness possesss out an unusual optimism toward the coming events Burton claims that

the renewed appreciation for the divine in nature among the major religious traditions in the West - along with rediscovery of pre-Christian European Earthen spiritual traditions and growing reverence for diverse religious traditions embodying those teachings - set forths yet another historic shift in Americans' relationship to their natural environment. (p 160)

Burton's cautious however notable appreciation for the possibilities of what he calls "the diverse spiritual practices of Euro-American society" (p 255) and their potential political and legal expression give him trustful longing that management of public lands and gravestones could happen in ways that would esteem Native American ways and help heal near of the harms inflicted forward their cultures.

Burton comes to this view by the agency of drawing on at least four disparate sources, which he integrates in this work: his concede Buddhist practice, his work experiences and personal contacts with land managers and Native Americans, his knowledge of American legal history, and his business for relations between doctrine and practice, law upon the books, and law in action. Seeking to combine experience, observation, and insight with scholarship, Burton approaches the pestered matter of culture and cultural conflict. The book's 12 chapters center loosely around the case of what Native Americans call Bear's cave and whites call Devil's Tower. The creation myths around Bear's Lodge/Devil's Tower render free of access the book; the eleventh chapter and the conclusion get to back to them. A coauthored middle chapter describes the site; the conflict around it, the two legal and otherwise; and the eventual compromise that was reached. Ultimately, a management plan called for asylum climbers' voluntary compliance with a moratorium in succession rock climbing during the month of June an important period for native religious practices. Burton writes that compliance has make go rounded out to be 80-85%.

While Bear's Lodge/Devil's Tower is the nave around which the book turns every chapter provides a wealth of at times background information, at times case inquiry material, in the service of grander arguments. The first, already mentioned, relate tos an optimism toward possible to come recognition of the sacred in nature. The other focuses on constitutional tensions in the governance of public lands between trust responsibility toward Native American races and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ("Congres shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."). The case studies of public land and resource management in the middle chapters can be read as independent stories and include a great chapter in succession how the wild American bison became the domestic "wooly cow" Showing the possibilities of aligning indigenous and other interests, yet not shirking from the difficulties and failures in of the like kind attempts, these chapters offer a glimpse into the complications of ruling an ostensibly pluralistic, democratic and bureaucratic nation. Burton's attention to diversity-not solitary Native and European American attitudes and practices-but also the ends of legislation and the mandates of federal agencies-contributes to understanding the subtleties and tensions of environmental, administrative, and constitutional law in action. The three essays that run after only begin to suggest the many approaches that law and society scholarship could take toward the rich issues raised in Burton's text

Please direct correspondence to Marianne Constable, Department of Rhetoric, 7409 Dwinelle Hall #2670 University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2670; e-mail: constable@berkeley.edu.

Marianne Constable is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley. Her first volume The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law, and Knowledge (Univ. of Chicago Pres 1994) won the J Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History. Her inferior book, Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of fresh Law, is forthcoming from Princeton University Pres in November 2005

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