On Ecological Interpretation

Abstract

This article works on the interdisciplinary grounds of phenomenology and ecology, analyzing and dialoguing with the thought of preservationist Freeman Tilden, to provide the hitherto underutilized concept of interpretation as an avenue for addressing current ecological crises. This analysis provides data for the phenomenologist to enter their own dialogue with Tilden on eco-philosophy. The article concludes with the story of a pebble, exploring from a different angle the process and import of the writing of this article, contextualized ethnographically from the position of the author’s own double-employment as a scholar of aesthetics, and interpretive park ranger.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is to bring together two separate yet vital lines of inquiry within the broader conversation of ecology within our era: philosophy, particularly from a descriptive phenomenological approach, and the philosophy that undergirds what state and national park rangers in the United States refer to as “interpretation”. The vitality of this combination lives, on one hand, between the awareness that we have entered the “Anthropocene era”, being “a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes” (Chua and Fair 2019), and on the other hand needing to engage the challenges of this ecological shift, in dialogue with the preservationists with “boots on the ground” within the very cultures that have had the greatest impact in causing this transition in era. Countries like the United States, which have contributed in no small part to our transition to the Anthropocene era, thereby bear a responsibility in addressing the ecological crises indicative of this time. Addressing such crises will require contributions from both the intellectual and the practical, by those who can consider the philosophical underpinnings of this era, and by those who have “boots on the ground” attempting ecological preservation in their practice. I have thus written this article, both as a scholar who writes in the tradition of philosophical phenomenology, and as a park ranger with the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

From this vantage, it seems clear that any philosophical engagement with our current ecological status be articulated in dialogue with the thought and philosophy of those who have devoted their lives to ecological preservation. An important aspect of this dialogue is how we negotiate the world as a “tool-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962, trans. Macquarrie) with a world that meaningfully exists for itself beyond our usage of it. Our awareness of this “world for itself” has become ever more limited for most people due to the urbanization of most cultures, which has divorced people from what that “world for itself” communicates to the human–person pre-linguistic meaning, which now all but requires interpretation by those who have intentionally sought it out. In this endeavor, Freeman Tilden’s landmark work, Interpreting Our Heritage, is among the greatest philosophical treatments on this act of interpretation. This “world for itself”, being the “natural” objects which do not bear an explanation for their presence through human intentionality, I call the “ecological world”. For instance, the tree planted outside of my study window within a city is not part of the ecological world, because it was planted, and is continuously maintained in its current form, by human activity. Trees within a forest that, while they can be visited by humans, nevertheless are not planted or maintained by that human activity, may reasonably be called a part of this “ecological world”. The purpose of this article is to explore in dialogue, primarily with Freeman Tilden, how this divorce between the ecological and human world has continued to widen since the middle of the twentieth century, and how authors such as Tilden provide resources on how we might understand and address the consequences of this divorce, through the pedagogical act of interpretation.

This article is therefore divided into two major segments. Within the first, the philosophy of Freeman Tilden will be presented, with particular emphasis upon his usage of the term “interpretation,” and its connection to my own ethnographic experience as a state park interpretive ranger in Oregon, USA. The purpose of this section is to provide, in an objective way, the raw data of a philosophy rooted deeply within experiences of the ecological world. Any earnest philosopher seeking to cultivate an investigation into ecology cannot but benefit from being rooted in conversation with Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage, a text widely regarded as the philosophical foundation for the interpretation and preservation of the ecological and cultural sphere that is American state and national parks. The second section of this work will then be my own reflection, an investigation of the ecological world, in conversation with Tilden’s work, that reveals the communication of pre-linguistic meaning. To interpret this meaning requires a blend of pedagogical, scientific, literary, and religious elements, designed to bring the reader into Tilden’s notion of “appreciation”, which, as this article will explore, is an essential component in developing human awareness towards ecological preservation.

2. Freeman Tilden’s Philosophy of Interpretation

While this article largely dialogues with Tilden from the basis of the phenomenological tradition, it is worth noting at the outset that Tilden was not steeped in or, it seems, even much aware of phenomenology. Philosophically, Tilden is clearly connected to the American literary and intellectual traditions of his time. Ralph Waldo Emerson is his chief philosophical interlocutor, evidenced by his frequent citations of Emerson, going as far as to refer to him as “our greatest American philosopher”; similarly, the spiritual context Tilden brings into his philosophy is by way of the mainline American protestant tradition, as evidenced by his citing of a sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick as a source for defining interpretation. (Tilden et al. 2007) Tilden’s rootedness in an American context invites new insights for scholars who apply a phenomenological approach to the study of ecology. For instance, Tilden writes: “In most of such places the [park] visitor is exposed, if he chooses, to a kind of elective education that is superior in some respects to that of the classroom, for here he meets the Thing Itself—whether it be a wonder of nature’s work, or the act or work of man”. (Tilden et al. 2007) In this short apologia for the educational purposes of parks and other sites for natural and cultural preservation, Tilden demonstrates an innate sensitivity in his writing and methods towards the famous Husserlian aphorism that “wir wollen auf die “Sachen selbst” zurückgehen” (we ought to return to the things within themselves) (Husserl 1901). It is, however, not directly a phenomenological attitude that Tilden seeks to explore within this philosophy, but instead develop a philosophical concept of interpretation.

This concept of “interpretation” is arguably the greatest contribution Tilden offers to our contemporary exploration of ecology, a contribution provided most substantively in Interpreting Our Heritage. Through a series of interlinking definitions and examples, Tilden defines interpretation as a kind of vocation, writing that “Thousands of naturalists, historians, archaeologists, and other specialists are engaged in the work of revealing, to such visitors as desire the service, something of the beauty and wonder, the inspiration and spiritual meaning that lie behind what the visitor can with his senses perceive. This function of the custodians of our treasures is called interpretation” (Tilden et al. 2007). For Tilden, interpretation does not, or ought not, stray from the things in themselves, disclosing their meaning through an experience of absolute immanence. Yet this experience often requires a custodian, or “guide”, with sufficient exposure to and training in this unique mode of meaning-disclosure, to let the thing reveal itself to the visitor as much as possible. It is from this initial point that we see the pre-linguistic quality of interpretation, with oral or written description being only the means to facilitate the revelation of meaning within cultural and national treasures, not the source of the meaning itself. Tilden presents an exemplar of this functionality by referencing Crater Lake National Park, “where the interpretation takes the visitor beyond the point of [their] aesthetic joy toward a realization of the natural forces that have joined to produce the beauty around [them]” (Tilden et al. 2007). Flowing directly from the aesthetic experience, interpretation reveals what facts and information are necessary to delve deeper into the world as it is within itself.

Taking a second angle on interpretation, Tilden further defines interpretation by a “dictionary definition”, in tandem with two more “conceptual” presentations. For the former, he writes that interpretation is “[a]n educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information” (Tilden et al. 2007). Tilden shows some hesitancy in providing this definition; as he was a writer whose study derived from and was enmeshed in first-hand ethnographic research into American state and national parks, such a “dictionary definition” seems too vague. Tilden thus nuances his definition with “two brief concepts of interpretation”. The first is for the interpreter’s “private contemplation”: “interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact”; to this is added a second concept developed for “contact with the public”, where “interpretation should capitalize mere curiosity for the enrichment of the human mind and spirit” (Tilden et al. 2007). We again see interpretation in its role as educational custodian or intermediary, linking together aesthetic experience into a deeper experience of things in themselves, facilitated by factual information where necessary, to the purpose of revealing that meaning to the “visitor.”

Upon the conceptual foundation of “interpretation”, Tilden builds an ecological philosophy for preservation. However, before analyzing Tilden’s philosophy, it is worth furnishing a full picture of Tilden’s purpose, by enumerating the six principles of interpretation that ballast and structure Interpreting Our Heritage. They are:

• Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.
• Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.
• Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.
• The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.
• Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.
• Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentations to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program. (Tilden et al. 2007)

The thorough exploration of Tilden’s principles is a task beyond the reach of this current article; it is nevertheless worth highlighting that each principle is developed in its own chapter in Interpreting Our Heritage, allowing for relatively easy antecedent study by the scholar wishing to study how any particular principle fits into the whole of Tilden’s philosophy. For our current purposes, we can highlight that Tilden’s principles address the early signs of the ecological divorce that would lead to our current Anthropocene era. His mode of addressing these signs is largely a nuanced pedagogical approach that presents a nuanced means of using information about objects present to the pedagogue, in order to present a “whole”, designed for a “provocation” that is in proportion to their capacity for understanding. We might describe Tilden’s aim as the interpreter, a kind of teacher, facilitating a wise encounter with the ecological world, designed to provoke a chance in understanding.

While Tilden’s definitions and principles particularly highlight the vocational quality within interpretation, what Tilden has in mind for the model of an interpreter is not primarily a matter of employment. It is not his aim, for instance, that some portion of people are to take up a particular job, but that interpretation is a mode of being, that each person ought, as best they can, to function as an intermediary between the meaning derived from the aesthetic experience of the ecological world, and the conveyance of that meaning to fellow human beings less developed in their capacity to take in the meaning of that aesthetic experience. Put another way, nearly every person can recognize the aesthetic pleasure derived from perceiving the ocean, or a mountain; interpretation is concerned with using the elements of art, science, and pedagogy to deepen that aesthetic pleasure into an appreciation of these objects as beautiful, as appreciable, as worth preserving. Interpretation is therefore anyone acting in the intermediary role of bringing this transition in understanding about within others.

Tilden bounds the importance of this intermediary role in two ethical considerations: first, that it contributes to the flourishing of human life to know the world outside of, to provide some Husserlian language, the “natural attitude” of functional cares and activities. (Applebaum 2012) Tilden sees the cultivated leisure of the “happy amateur” as a curative for the “week-end neurotic” who “[having] no training in the fruitful and pleasurable use of leisure” find themselves lost within an experience of ennui. (Tilden et al. 2007). In his Interpreting Our Heritage, Tilden associates this experience to the social ills that faced the Romans glutted with the spoils of conquest after the Mithridatic wars in the first century. This connecting of his diagnosis of the social ills of his time with ancient history is more than just a literary flourish. It displays that, while Tilden saw the widening divorce between the ecological and human, he did not yet see this divorce as the substantive transition into the Anthropocene era we can observe today.

The concept of the “week-end neurotic” of Tilden bears a striking resemblance to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s argument, writ large, was that “[o]ur politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” (Postman 2005). Postman, speaking from the place of a media critic, diagnoses this problem as coming from a “great media-metaphor shift… with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense”, wherein all topics are relegated to how they might most entertainingly be expressed. It is of course both possible and suggestive to consider how the preponderance of screens beyond the TV that Postman originally critiqued, and particularly those of the smartphone, had exacerbated this “dangerous nonsense” (Postman 2005). For Tilden, the curative to this “dangerous nonsense” was pedagogical: to teach people the means to discover fruitful leisure that is not the mere passive consumption of visual media designed to hold our attention, but not excite much of our thinking. Postman’s own views seem more skeptical of any curative.

It would seem that today, in our Anthropocene era, we could define the problem expressed by both Tilen and Postman as articulating the process of humans steadily being divorced from any contact, or even opportunity for contact, with the ecological world. Tilden saw the early signs of this divorce and interpreted, by the means of a historical political referent, to a civilization flush with its own imperial might, and thus susceptible to decadence. Postman, later in the twentieth century, recognized that it was not merely the risk of the American people growing indulgent; it was the radical change from the more substantive and serious print media, to the more sensationalized and entertainment-based means of communication still used, and in many ways further perfected, today. Pairing the two, we may chart the expanding gap of a world in which an encounter with the ecological world can be a place for deriving meaning, to a distinctly human world in which objects are ever more defined, not only by their usefulness as tools, but as objects for our pleasurable consumption.

Since Postman’s writing, the gap between engaging with the world as it is, and the world as we can terraform it for the purpose of human pleasure, has grown wide enough to suggest the name of the “Anthropocene era”. With more than half of the world’s population now living in urban areas (Ritchie et al. 2024), there is no guarantee that most of human beings alive today will have, or even can have, the experience of natural ecological flora and fauna that are, in some sense, not determined by human intentionality. The trees which emerge in regular intervals along the streets of my city were planted specifically for the purpose of human aesthetic pleasure. Should some limb become troublesome to that end, it will be lopped off, unless doing so hinders some other human’s aesthetic sensibilities. The quarrel arising from the cutting of this limb will be between two humans, with neither party owning any ethical responsibility to the tree itself. Venturing out of the city, I am greeted with the monocultures of suburbanite lawns, and then the agricultural production industries, both of which are maintained with rigorous application of tools, both chemical and mechanical, and the curtailing of any encroaching “pest” or “weed” that would seek to grow on grounds designated for human usage. The “pest” asserts itself as there for itself, and as it is within the designated human world, must be eliminated. Venturing even further out, I may find the appearance of trees on rolling hills, and for the moment believe I have found a forest, an ecological zone; the shock of discovering a mile further down the road the stark emptiness of clear-cut tree trunks in a generally and unnaturally square pattern, as well as the silence brought by the rapid removal of any larger fauna such as birds or squirrels residing within that area, will disabuse me of the notion of having ever left the Anthropocene world designed for and by humans. At last, I might park my vehicle and attempt an encounter with “the great outdoors” by visiting a state or national park. Even this, however, is imperfect at best, and illusory at worst: the maintenance of a park requires the constant shaping of the ecological world for the ease and pleasure of park visitors. The human person is still entertained, “amused”, as Postman noted, by a space cultivated for their passive consumption, by campgrounds with water, electric, and sewage hookups, and trails maintained from any falling tree branches or encroaching bushes. Tilden’s central curative for this condition is to propose the interpreter as drawing the “week-end neurotic” into an experience of that aspect of the world around them that, despite these limitations, still bears some marking of not being merely present for their pleasure or enjoyment. The meaning, instead, comes from being displaced from our role of central arbiter of ontological value—i.e., that tree on the street has value because of the shade it provides me—and returned to the negotiation of a relationship—i.e., the trees, beetles, ferns, and deer which surround me have made their home here, and I am presently their guest. From this displacement comes the opportunity for appreciation, and by that, the chance to cultivate a desire for preservation.

This chain of appreciation as the conscious attitude that leads to ecological preservation is the second ethical consideration that Tilden develops through his use of the term “interpretation”. That the Anthropocene era has ushered in a host of ecological challenges and crises is a widely accepted fact, even if particular challenges and crises remain controversial. Further, we may assume that addressing these challenges to the preservation of the ecological world will require a reduction in our own human world. This intellectual assent, however, does not in itself cause a meaningful change in our conscious orientation to the world. If my first and continual encounter with naturally occurring flora and fauna are those in the human world, defined in their placement and continued existence by their status as objects for human use and/or pleasure, the ecological world remains merely a place for a different kind of that aesthetic enjoyment, or as the hitherto untapped potential for an expansion of the human world. What is missing is the vital importance of teaching people to, in a sense, love the ecological world precisely for what it is, beyond what it can do for the person. Tilden’s aphorism on this account, borrowed from an interpretation manual, is: “Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection” (Tilden et al. 2007). Interpretation furnishes the necessary preconditions for understanding. We here must not take this to mean that language is the primal engagement by which the park visitor attains a kind of cognitive information. The goal is instead to engage on both the cognitive and the affective level of understanding, in order to develop a state of appreciation. Language, thus, functions as a facilitator, as one tool that eases the conscious transition from pleasurable consumption to active engagement with the ecological world. Here, I may speak from my own experience as an interpretive ranger, when I confirm that words, gestures, and other human-to-human forms of communication are only beneficial to the interpretive process as they help in achieving the fundamental goal: to get visitors to slow down, to look, to consider, or to employ their own receptivity to natural phenomena and imagination to stretch, for instance, into understanding such mundane wonders as the fossilized clam they hold within their hand, still clear and sharp in the contours of its shell. That said fossilized clam being a living creature millions of years ago becomes the informational aspect that deepens this wonder, but only when the imagination confers these scientific facts onto the particular object placed before the park visitor. Appreciation has a hard time developing when any of these elements of patience, information, and material examples are not present. The first and essential task of understanding is therefore accomplished when the visitor is able to look at the ecological world, not as it discloses itself as so much set-dressing for the bundle of work and leisure activities which form the fume and furor of a human world left up to its own devices, but instead with that combination of information and imagination, that forms an understanding of the thing that is there largely outside of current human activities. It is for this reason that Tilden refers to interpretation as not instruction, but “provocation” (Tilden et al. 2007). Put another way, a visitor to a national or state park in Colorado might find themselves somewhat perplexed, watching a somewhat excitable park ranger press their face against the trunk of a seemingly random tree, their loud nasal inhalations demonstrating their relish in smelling the wood. Quite often, children recognize the appropriate response to this scene with only perfunctory conversation; other visitors may require the auxiliary prompting of the enthusiastic ranger language: “does the ponderosa pine smell like butterscotch, or vanilla to you?” More often than not, whether a whiff reveals the distinctly butterscotch or vanilla linguistic opinion, the real meaning has been conveyed: the visitor has been provoked into the understanding that they are in a forest rich with a scent so sweet, we can only partially compare it to the best of our man-made confections.

Yet, in light of the oft-critiqued contemporary endeavors to address the ecological crises of the twenty-first century, the somewhat optimistic view contained within Tilden’s proverb merits some special consideration. The visitor who understands the fossil may still leave only with the impression that, gathered in sufficient quantity, such pretty rocks might furnish a pretty profit, and the scent of the ponderosa pine might make a promising mulch or construction material. The keen mind bent upon the many human usages of our “natural resources” will find a variety of appreciation alien to Tilden’s design, and retrograde to any preservation endeavors. In drawing out this distinction, Husserl’s critique of scientism in his Crisis of the European Sciences provides some insight. Husserl writes:

“The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the “prosperity” they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people”.

(Husserl 1970, trans. Carr)

Husserl presents the worldview of his contemporaries as steeped within a kind of scientism where the scientific information about a thing is already, or risks, overshadowing the experience of the thing in itself. It could well be argued that Husserl’s theory as to the effects of this positive scientism is worked out practically in Tilden’s eco-philosophical engagement. Such an argument would explain Tilden’s ambivalence towards facts and information, clearly evidenced within his second principle. The “fact-minded people” of Husserl become for Tilden the visitors who can only see the forest for the lumber, providing mild aesthetic ambiance at best, and preliminary resources for exploitation at worst. Tilden’s view remains largely optimistic, however, that most visitors have the capacity, in fact the need, to engage within a deeper experience of the ecological world. This engagement is first purely aesthetic, but through interpretation can unify into a greater understanding of the things as they are, and their ecological relationship to one another.

Such is not to say that Tilden is unaware of the very challenges present within the advent of the Anthropocene; indeed, this awareness is at the foundation of Tilden’s essentially aesthetic philosophy. Tilden demonstrates some of his structural finesse in the sixteenth and ultimate chapter of the original Interpreting Our Heritage, by articulating the essence of his philosophy in terms of “vistas of beauty” and places of ugliness. In terms of the latter, Tilden summarizes the problem in a way that remains apropos within our context today:

There is no deep villain in this very human drama. There is only a saddening imbalance that was bound to ensue. Man does not live by bread and gadgets alone. Take beauty out of his life: a googol of dollars and a Lucullan luxury will not fill the void… The imbalance is here. It is shockingly manifest. Because of an erupting population, we see the places of natural beauty retreating from millions as fast as they seek and move toward them; urban slums where people feebly degenerate; roadways lined with the horrible corpses of junked automobiles and with the vulgarities of clamoring commerce; our air polluted with fumes and our rivers and lakes and estuaries so laden with filth and chemicals that fish are killed and humans endangered.

(Tilden et al. 2007)

The images of ugliness derived from the wasteful imbalance within our ecological relationship to these “places of natural beauty” have received fresh examples in the long and difficult road of ecological preservation into the twenty-first century: where Tilden saw “urban slums”, we may today with equal effectiveness note the spiritual and physical suffering of climate refugee camps and tent towns throughout the world, the decay and waste of airplane graveyards and the desolation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, (Adkins 2024). Nevertheless, Tilden does not ascribe to any person or group the blame for this imbalance, no “deep villain”, but a deeply human drama between our need to live within the human world, one of technological advancement, comfort, and control, and our need to return to the ecological world. The appeal of a controlled ecology of objects defined by their tool-being and/or consumable pleasure, like sugar-free sweeteners to a hummingbird, satisfies the aesthetic desire that impels us toward the beautiful, but fails to nourish the internal capacity for appreciation and preservation of that which is outside of our pleasure. Tilden is not ideologically motivated to point blame for this condition on any group, philosophy, or economic system; it is the danger of human ignorance that Tilden fundamentally sees as the root of a vulgarized, ugly world. This can be ameliorated pedagogically, by a meaningful and examined experience of the beautiful, assisted by the interpreter. Tilden’s definition of this difficult beauty, in general as well as specific to any particular example of ecological or “natural” beauty, rests largely on a traditional Western philosophical engagement with the three transcendentals of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty; as he states, “the love of beauty… becomes the guide toward the perception of the Good and the True”. Tilden largely sees the Beautiful as something inherent to being, but disclosing itself exclusively as “only a gorgeous greeting. Behind that curtain lies an infinite world of detailed beauties. As we develop realization of those composing elements, we know that there can be nothing ugly in nature. Nothing” (Tilden et al. 2007). This difficult, provoking beauty is present throughout the ecological world, and requires a change in conscious attitude in order to recognize and countenance it for was it is: vital to our human flourishing. This is why, for Tilden, the interpreter holds a special intermediary role. As he states, “the very business of the Natural Park Service is the custodianship and interpretation of beauty. How could it be otherwise? The interpreter, whether naturalist or ranger or historian or mechanic, is a middleman of this precious cultural wealth” (Tilden et al. 2007). We thus have, from Tilden, an eco-philosophy which views the ecological world as being intrinsically good, the experience of which can lead, helped by the wise interpreter, to achieving a conscious state of appreciation for the thing as it is, within itself. This appreciation Tilden sees as both essential to human flourishing, and vital in the process of preserving our ecological and cultural wealth.

To conclude our direct treatment of Tilden, we may consider his distinct articulation of humanity’s existential relationship to and need for the ecological world. Tilden writes, “we live with the Fact. And this Fact is, that in the presence of unsullied, unexploited, ‘raw’ nature, we are lifted to a height beyond ourselves”. It is this experience of being “lifted to a height beyond ourselves” (Tilden et al. 2007), the deep, essential grounding of his own philosophical engagement, that simultaneously stretches out to connect fundamentally with a phenomenological engagement.

3. Conclusions: The Story of a Pebble

There is a story behind the writing of this article: it holds the uniquely self-contained quality, which binds the investigations of this article back to the ecological, the phenomenological, and inevitably the religious, which has been in the background of this research. It is a story which stems from the category of experiences that suggest universality: the proverb, the anecdote, the morality play, the tale that brings together countless threads into a comprehensible and satisfying whole. By this, I mean something like David Tracy’s conception of “the classic,” or “the fragment”; a thing that discloses itself in infinite interpretations. (Tracy 1998)

This is the story of a rock.

The impetus for this article was a prolonged conversation between a dear colleague and myself, on how to apply Husserl to modern ecological crises. We reminded ourselves of Husserl’s wisdom, to “return to the things themselves,” and examined an agate, a special stone found on the coast of Oregon. Agates are stones I am quite familiar with as a park ranger on the coast of Oregon. As we inquired into the existence of this thing, we discovered an entry point into the history of the world. In our hands were minerals pressed by heat, pressure, and time, into extraordinary shapes, containing the memory of depths of the ocean crust and the shifting might of ocean waves. This is a thing I find precious, manifesting the opportunity for imagination to meet the “thing in itself”, and forming a story. Then, further, the story of this particular agate between my scholarly colleague was brought into the familial heritage of hunting the precious thing, The Agate, which could be found by the patient eyes of my mother as we walked Oregon beaches in my childhood. The agate was a precious thing I could find and touch, unlike all the precious jewels I had seen locked behind museum glass or locked cabinets.

One day, many years later, a man died in my park. That day I shared the agate I had been considering with my academic colleague for weeks. Unlike with my fellow scholar, my ranger coworker and I directed the traffic around, protecting the foliage as elephantine RVs had to battle for the thin roads with an ambulance, and later, the chaplain. My ranger friend then wrapped that agate in a chain and made me a necklace. He brought it to me the next day, as we walked in the forest around my park, sharing a cigarette as we considered how little death had seemed to change the flow of campers around us. I could not avoid the understanding that the agate, in that moment of becoming a necklace, became part of human history. I wore it for months, proudly. My moment with a shared humanity before death, that was simultaneously insignificant before the agate’s own mineralogical history.

The debates and dialogues my academic colleague and I held coalesced into a central question of how the phenomenological method might apply to ecology, which turned into a co-authored a paper for the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, on the spirituality of preservationists John Muir and Freeman Tilden through dialogue with Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. It seemed like the stone on the necklace had a quality akin to Marion’s Icon (Marion 2012), disclosing itself ever further. At the conference which initially sparked this current article, I brought this agate, as a kind of material evidence, to be examined by all participants.

During the question-and-answer period, a question was asked, “how is this experience religious? Is it not just philosophical?” This question troubled me for the rest of the conference. What is “religious”? Was not this interpenetration of the angst of death, the knowledge of time both human and ecological, the almost ritualistic conversation around the nature of a particular totem, religious? My answer came in a pile of stones.

On the Western Coast of Ireland lay the cairns: massive, prehistoric structures of this civilization before linguistic records. As conference participants, we were invited into one massive cairn that had been partially excavated and reconstructed, a structure of stones that interred the bones of humans with names we shall never know. I did not feel comfortable going in, and so sat outside and pondered the cairn. My agate in hand, I considered the human before recorded language, building the burial mound. I thought of the children, small as any child today, rolling up the largest rocks they could lift. It was a clear enough conclusion, intuitive and primordially ritualistic, when I cast my agate onto the cairn, releasing one story more amongst the ancient tales.

This is the story of a rock. It shall go beyond when I am dead. It is possible, two thousand years from now, a curious archeologist may stumble across an Oregon agate in a cairn, once ancient, rebuilt, then that ancient again. They will know that, at this historical period, people of the American Pacific Northwest might cast their precious stones in Irish cairns. It may be the continuing story of that rock.

This experience, deeply personal, remains yet evidently universal to something in the human experience. Before the recording of history, and thereby before anything that we might call a “historical consciousness” (Seixas 2004) as we understand it today, cairns were constructed by humans who recognized some essential meaning to be created in the gathering of stones in relation to the dead. This event, and the philosophical antecedents which it engenders, carried in its incitement nothing of the linguistic; indeed, in this story of a rock, it was in the quieting of internal dialectics striving to construct meaning from the phenomenon, and that the pre-linguistic, largely aesthetic communication of the space, of the embodied act of ancient peoples moving stones, came to the fore.

I returned to the coast of Oregon, and resumed my work as an interpretive ranger, tasked with sharing the wonder of these little rocks, that within themselves contain such potential for meaning. I discovered that linguistic communication, in being relieved of the primal spot within the cultivation of the ecological meaning that bounded these explorations of the rock, is well equipped for the construction of meaning through Tilden’s variety of interpretation. As such, the experiences which have been conveyed here, and more besides, found pedagogical expression in a talk I began giving at my state park. I reproduce my notes for that talk here:

Every pebble holds a story of billions of years in coming to us: stories of titanic geothermal conditions, of ages of weathering by sea and storm, of pressure, heat, and time. What is fascinating about that is, the moment you hold a pebble in your hand, it enters the human world, human history as well. Whether you throw it away, use it to pave sidewalks, or make it the chief adornment in the finest necklace, what we choose to do with every stone speaks to who we are. It becomes, in a sense, historic.

Does not a crumble of sandstone have no less an interesting tale than our cherished diamonds? Yet, the beautiful is difficult; we do not see it in all things at first. A theory has been presented, I see it most among the Thomists and Aristotelians, that because of this, we must train the young in the discipline of beauty. But this has not been my experience of teaching children, and adults, with the patience to be a learner again. Instead, seeing the beauty in mundane things simply requires finding that spark of resonance in people. It is the Imago Dei that recognizes our shared image in the thing, with our mutual Creator. The sculptor and architect both see marble as a tool, as their art, on one hand, constructs all we see, use, and enjoy. But all of us, regardless of vocation, can conjure from a mote of sand the wealth of all creation, which is to know its story.

I would then conclude this talk by giving each participant a stone, and telling them, “Now this stone is part of your story. It will outlive you but be changed by you. It is to find your acres of diamonds, (Conwell 2008) in Oregon agates, in West Virginia coal, in that ecological world we must encounter as precious, deserving its own space now, its own terms to discuss with the human condition”.

To conclude, I speak to those bold scholars, ecologists, activists, and nature-lovers who earnestly seek, in certain ways, a human civilization which rightly countenances our ecological relationship in an Anthropocene era not defined by repeated and worsening climate crises. Such endeavors require a deep interdisciplinarity, an attunement of the mind to hear with appreciation the works from the heritage of our greatest philosophers, preservationists, and the heritage of faith which has held a mirror to the human experience for thousands of years. Interpretation, Freeman Tilden’s great philosophical contribution to this interdisciplinary conversation, stands as an engaging starting place for such interdisciplinary work. I have argued in this chapter that, from such a starting point, a more comfortable crossing of the Rubicon between the secular ecological and philosophical investigations and the theological can grant a clear view as to what may increase our re-connection back into our ecological context. This is not to remove the human sphere of technological advancement, of cityscapes and the wonders of scientific exploration; merely, it is to recognize a means to convey the value of our ecological world, in and of itself, as essential to both the fullness of human experience, and to forming the re-valuation of that ecological world, such that it might best be preserved for the future.