A Spiritual Duty

On December 2, 1942, Richard Lieber gave a speech at Turkey Run State Park, Indiana. The event was the 25th anniversary of the Indiana state park system. As would be expected, the speech was epideictic in nature. Lieber managed to do quite a bit more than merely celebrate the occasion. In the midst of the festive atmosphere he was able to promote his vision of a greatly expanded park system and warned his audience against changes in the system.

What really struck me most in this short speech was Lieber's reverent attitude towards the land. He had been highly instrumental in setting up and administering the park system in its formative years. He also spent a great deal of his time after public service campaigning and lobbying for the benefit of the parks. He was clearly driven and his speech betrays his motivation in several key passages. Conservation for Richard Lieber was a spiritual duty. He was not beyond patriotic pleas in his persuasions but it seems that the root of his motivation lay in his spiritual relationship with the land. Lieber was an immigrant, originally from Germany. He was too late to be a pioneer but held a deep respect for those that preceded him. Realizing that in the classic "man against nature" theme, humans had gained the upper hand, he sought to save some of the wildness for its own sake. As he said at one point, "... state parks are a dedication to the soul of the land."

Lieber then pulls a trope from his pocket and says, "They (state parks) will, through their ancient rocks, hills, shores and giant trees continue to preach a silent but mighty sermon to the generations yet unborn, of the struggles, hopes and ambitions of pioneer days." Lieber realized a basic tenet of environmentalism in the closing paragraph of his speech:

It is the land on which we all depend in the last essence. It is the land and the very soil, the trees and water, the dales and hills which we love. Without vision a land will die. Without inspiration we remain disconnected from the immortal order of all things.

Our state parks; let us preserve the sources of our inspiration.