Author's Response: Worship, Wilderness, and Cultural Coevolution

Summary

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Burton offers a response on the remarks given by several writers regarding his book, Worship and Wilderness. He views that his work recognizes the teachings of all the traditions, which represents aspirations, that no one of them is inherently superior or inferior to the others, and the true measure of any culture group's environmental ethic is less a matter of the substance of its religious and spiritual teachings than of how well its members honor aspirations in daily life.

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Author's Response: Worship, Wilderness, and Cultural Coevolution

When I learned that Worship and Wilderness was to be featured at an Author Meets Reader panel at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, at first I felt grateful. I would be able to discuss in an open forum with knowledgeable colleagues the results of a research and writing project to which I had devoted much of the previous six years of my life. But I also felt just a little trepidation, and for the same reason: my work would be subject to some fairly strict public scrutiny by critics well versed in the fields constituting the subtitle of the book.

Under the strict scrutiny standard of review, I could only hope the panelists would conclude that I had a compelling scholarly interest in bringing Worship and Wilderness into being, and that I had done so by means least intrusive on the traditional disciplinary boundaries separating the subtitle fields of culture, religion, and law as they pertain to the management of our commonly held public lands. As I learned at the panel presentation and as the written critiques in this forum generally reflect, my colleagues seem to have decided in the affirmative on the former question, and perhaps have cast a split vote on the second.

Flirting With Theory Development

One of the observations that panel chair Marianne Constable made in her introductory remarks at the 2003 LSA meeting was echoed there...

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