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I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it's the way that God communicates to us more forcefully.
God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people and through the great books of those religions; through art and literature and music and poetry.
But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation. We don't know Michelangelo by reading his biography; we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness which is the undiluted work of the creator.
And you know -- [applause] -- if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammed had to go to the wilderness in Mt. Harrod 629, climb to the summit, rest one angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran squeeze from his body.
Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt.
Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the honey of wild bees and all of Christ's parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the [Fellowgram], the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd.
The reason he did that was that's how he stayed in touch with the people. It's the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop they did the same thing; they used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.
And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the all mighty. They used these parables and the reason Christ did that was that's how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets.
He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literal sophisticated people of their day and they would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds.
And they were able to say, he's not telling us something new; he's simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the creator. We haven't been able to discern or decipher them into the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.
You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This is where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to understand this and articulate it.
Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders and philosophers were telling the American people "You don't have to be ashamed because you don't have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe because you have this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That's going to be the source of your values and virtues and character.
If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the central unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of American culture, whether it's Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. All of them.
Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this country, an international best seller, was
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