This pantheistic belief can be persuasive - particularly if you see a profoundness in nature and the universe. You cannot have worked and played in the outside world and not felt the spiritual forest.
John Burroughs, who like John Muir and both students of Emerson and Thoreau, makes a case for his case for a pantheistic outlook. Burroughs writes, "Conceive of God in terms of universal Nature--a nature God in whom we really live and move and have our being, with who our relation is as intimate and constant as that of the babe in its mother’s womb, or the apple upon the bough. This is the God that science and reason reveal to us--the God we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and from whom there is no escape, who is, indeed, from everlasting to everlasting."
John Muir certainly agreed and wrote, "Most people are on the world, not in it--have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching, but separate.
Instead of taking the (traditional) Mosaic position of tending the forest for "the greater good" of humanity (a term coined by forester Gifford Pinchot) the pantheistic approach is to keep all hands off. The modern, "deep ecology" movement has taken a pantheistic turn and it forms the basic foundation for the radical environmental movement and maybe even a significant influence on the channeled environmental movement.
