ILA AND JOHN MELLOW PRIZE: Bugbee’s Wilderness: Metaphysical and Montanan

Abstract

henry bugbee was born in New York City in 1915. This may not seem the most fortuitous birthplace for an interpreter of the wild rivers of Montana, but we might also remember that John Muir, interpreter of the High Sierras, was born in Scotland. Perhaps the movement west is an important prelude for such a vocation. Bugbee studied philosophy at Princeton and then at Berkeley, but before he could finish his graduate work, he was called for naval service in the Pacific. The time at sea was a formative wilderness experience, on which his writing draws heavily. Returning from sea, he finished his PhD and took a teaching position at Harvard. Not many years later, he took a position at the University of Montana, to teach philosophy, fly-fish, and be at home in the wilderness. “The theme of reality as a wilderness” recurs throughout The Inward Morning, and the sense of wilderness he has in mind is clearly the sacred space of Henry Thoreau and John Muir, rather than the howling wasteland faced by the puritan and pioneer or Gifford Pinchot’s crop of timber (Bugbee, Inward Morning 128). America’s reverent romance with wild country stands in the background of his reflections, but he dwells on the meaning of wild country only through extended personal anecdote. The wilderness of mountains and seas is a light he wishes to shine on everyday experience; it is not so much the subject of the work as the teacher. Two decades later, Bugbee returned to the theme of wilderness in the other direction. The context for this was the advent of the new Wilderness Preservation System and the public hearings to determine which de facto wildernesses would become wildernesses de jure. In “Wilderness in America,” he reasons from the metaphysical and pedagogical significance of wilderness to the political exigencies of conservation.