Review: The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History

Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey, eds., The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2019).

Reviewed by Jon England, Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University

            In April of 2013, Elder Marcus B. Nash of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Quorum of the Seventy gave a lecture at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center Symposium. In his lecture, titled “Righteous Dominion and Compassion for the Earth,” Nash explained that the Mormon environmental ethic revolves around the concept of “stewardship” and the need to care for God’s creations. Coincidentally, just a few months later, historians Jedediah Rogers and Matthew Godfrey began exploring the possibility of a book on Mormon environmental history. The result is The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden, a collection of essays from both established scholars and young historians of Mormon environmental history.

            In the first essay, Rogers takes us through the historiography of Mormon environmental history and identifies some of the gaps. He references Lynn White Jr.’s 1967 assertion that Christianity is to blame for environmental degradation. This has become a central debate in environmental history, and each author approaches it through the context of their various subjects. Sara Dant gets at the roots of Mormon environmental ethics by questioning the legitimacy of a Brigham Young quote: “There shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people.”[1] I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that she reminds historians to double check their sources. She also identifies the tension within the Mormon environmental ethic between communal stewardship and a market economy. Thomas Alexander’s “Lost Memory and Environmentalism” works to confirm Dant’s conclusion. Mormon settlers began with an environmental ethic (a bit of a misguided ethic, but an ethic nonetheless), which they forgot as they secularized their sense of entrepreneurship. As a result, the Wasatch Front environment suffered with overgrazing, air pollution, and a decline of native species.

            Most environmental histories of the Latter-day Saints deal with their time in Utah and settling the West. Matthew Godfrey, however, shows that over a decade before Brigham Young attempted to make the “desert blossom as a rose” in northern Utah, Joseph Smith was teaching the Saints to do the same thing in Missouri. And Brett Dowdle provides an insightful look at how American Mormon missionaries in England and British converts in the U.S. perceived new environments.

            Richard Francaviglia takes us back to the Great Basin and posits that Mormons used and created maps that show how they viewed the land they were settling. These maps obviously proved essential in building cities, but also expressed the vision Mormons had for their settlements. Betsy Gaines Quammen delves into land policy with an examination of the history and founding of Zion National Park. She convincingly asserts that Thoreauvian ideals of wholesome nature converged harmoniously (for the most part) in Zion with Mormon perceptions of practical wilderness use. Jeff Nichol’s essay, however, argues that the Mormon sense of stewardship had its limits. Echoing Dant and Alexander, Nichol exposes the tensions within Mormon environmental thought of communitarian ideals and market successes within the context of the livestock industry. Communal projects, such as shared ranges, helped establish Mormon communities, but overgrazing became more prolific as Utah moved toward a market economy. Overgrazing livestock changed the local environment in disastrous ways.

            Another way Mormons changed their environment was through irrigation. Brian Frehner complicates the history of reclamation projects with the story of St. Thomas, Nevada. Mormons founded St. Thomas in 1865, and for decades struggled to keep it afloat only to watch it literally sink under the waters of Lake Mead in 1938. In 2002 however, remnants of the town reappeared due to the diminished flow of the Colorado River. The story of St. Thomas is one of both success and failure and shows that reclamation projects never fully accomplished their purpose to control nature in the Southwest.

            The last few essays focus on the diminishing agrarian culture of the Church through the twentieth century.  Brian Cannon shows that this change came despite Mormon leaders’ efforts to keep the Church’s agrarian identity. Nathan Waite illustrates how Church president Spencer W. Kimball looked to preserve the connection between the land and the Church by encouraging members to maintain gardens. Rebecca Anderson offers a fascinating look at the history of place and memory by comparing Ensign Peak to the gravel pits that line Beck Street just to the north. While Ensign Peak represents the early Mormon vision of what Zion could become, the gravel pits show the reality of development.

            George Handley provides a fitting conclusion to this collection with a summation of what Mormonism has to offer environmentalism. He also identifies what’s at stake. Mormonism has yet to embrace its own environmental ethic in an effective way. Fortunately, this collection represents a possible turning point as it reflects the growing concern among Mormons, particularly among the younger generation, for the environment.

             The authors touch on issues specific to Utah such as over-development and smog, and global issues like climate change, but not in-depth, leaving room for more discussion and analysis. Just as Elder Nash’s lecture (which is included in the appendix) opened the door for more conversation around the Mormon environmental ethic, Eden lays the groundwork for more substantial work in the environmental history of Mormonism.

[1] Sara Dant, “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land: Brigham Young’s Environmental Ethic,” The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden, 29

Review: Joseph Smith Papers Documents, Volume 8: February-November 1841

The Joseph Smith Papers Documents, Documents 8: February-November 1841 reveal Joseph Smith’s life as he endeavored to build a city and expand the faith that he led. These documents also reveal the interstices between these two projects. Through correspondence, revelations, sermons, financial documents, meeting minutes and other significant documents, Volume 8’s editorial team helps readers to understand the multifaceted growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after its first large-scale transatlantic push and before the introduction of temple liturgy.

In the documents created over ten short months, readers begin to see how Joseph Smith’s life was complicated by the many forms of government that he oversaw. Most notably, to me, Joseph Smith and his followers strove to build a city that offered a liberal view of religious tolerance to any who would live in it. The Nauvoo City Council Book records, “Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Latter-Day-Saints, Quakers, Episcopalians Universali[s]ts Unitarians, Mahommedans, and all other religious sects and denominations whatever, shall have free toleration and equal Privilieges in this City.” Joseph Smith himself promised to hear any case wherein any person “guilty of ridiculing abusing,  or otherwise depreciating another in consequence of his religion or of disturbing, or interrupting any religious meeting, within the Limits of this City,” could be fined up to $500 and receive six months imprisonment.[1]

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MWHIT Lecture: Quincy Newell to discuss her new book on Jane Manning James on June 4, 2019

Guest Post: An Introduction to The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History

We welcome this guest post by friends of the JI Jedediah S. Rogers, one of the editors of the Utah Historical Quarterly, and Matthew C. Godfrey, Managing Historian and one of the General Editors of the Joseph Smith Papers.

In 2012 the renowned environmental historian Mark Fiege published The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. In that book, Fiege took well-known events in American history and examined them through the lens of environmental history. This approach generated fresh and fascinating insights into subjects ranging from the construction of the transcontinental railroad to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. As William Cronon noted in the Foreword, “No book before it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’”[1]

Inspired by Fiege’s innovative approach, we started discussing the need for more historians to use the environmental lens to explore events in Mormon history—a subfield it seemed to us that did not self-consciously much swim in environmental history waters. As colleagues at Historical Research Associates, Inc., we had worked on projects for a variety of clients that presented us with opportunities to explore environmental history using a number of analytical approaches. This, in addition to our training and publications in both environmental and Mormon history, gave us confidence that we had something to say on the subject. Both of us recognized that a handful of scholars and writers—Richard Jackson, Terry Tempest Williams, Tom Alexander, George Handley, and Jared Farmer, to name a few—had examined the interactions of Saints with nature, but we believed this was largely an underutilized approach in Mormon history.

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