Owen Yager, MTS ’23

“I didn’t grow up religious, but from a young age I’ve found whatever divine presence is out there in the American West’s nature. There are so many crises facing those natural expanses, though, from existential crises prompted by climate change to deep societal divisions rendering them inaccessible and unprotected. I want to be able to help heal a few of those problems.”

Owen Yager, MTS ’23, is a first-year MTS student studying how the sacred interplays with movements and communities in and around the American West’s natural spaces.

Environmental Roots

I got to grow up in Boulder, Colorado, with a family that made sure to share the natural spaces around us. My dad had been on a trip with the National Outdoor Leadership School, spent some time as a wilderness guide and started a cross-cultural educational travel company that had a big focus on getting kids to value nature. When my sister and I got old enough to go out on adventures with him, he was sure to take us out. He first helped me put on skis when I was three years old and the next summer, when I was four, he took me on my first backpacking trip. 

It was a one-night, one-and-a-half mile out and back hike. I had a little school bag with both of our underwear in it and he had a trekking pack that was more or less a refrigerator, carrying everything else that we needed for a night camping. We went up by a lake and, for the first time in my life, I got to see the way that water looks as the sun sets over the high alpine. Since that first adventure, I have found an all-encompassing joy in how still everything is in those sunset moments, with trout hitting a lake’s surface and sending out radiating rings over the water and a distant clatter of some dislodged rock mixing into the wind. As I grew older, my parents kept creating opportunities for my sister and I to get out into nature, and I kept finding that joy in natural spaces.   

Later on, I started to work with those spaces. I rode horses in high school, which turned into work with a lamb ranch and a horseback guiding company. I spent this last year in Yerington, Nevada, a town of about 3,000 people, on a rangeland restoration AmeriCorps contract, running irrigation systems, planting native species, and removing invasive plants. In that work, I have found both deep purpose in a sense of taking care of nature in the West and some of the same joy that I’ve found in recreating in it. 

I am still working on defining precisely what causes that joy and makes those spaces so special. A part of it is physical, I know. When my skin feels a mountain breeze, it is my skin and no one else’s that has that sensation; there is no wind-proxy in the form of a cameraman or recording studio. In that physicality, my being can be completely subsumed by space in a way that I have not been able to find anywhere else. There’s an unknowability to those natural spaces, too, in their incomprehensible age and the constant mystery of what insect might be hiding under a rock, what chute might be on the other side of a crag, or what the view might be if you stand just three feet over to your left. They are sublime and their sublimity inspires me, terrifies me, comforts me, and connects me to something greater than myself. 

Finding Religion 

The travel company that my dad ran had a focus on religion as a part of people’s experience. My community growing up was largely composed of the company’s instructors, meaning that I was always surrounded by people who were keenly aware of the sacred’s importance and of the varied ways that it can manifest. They taught me a bit about what the sacred meant to different people and how they accessed it through stories and practice, but my childhood passed without me getting deep investment in what religious meaning could look like. 

That changed when I took my first formal religion class in the winter of my sophomore year at Carleton College. I still remember the course number: Religion 122, “Introduction to Islam.” I had already dabbled a bit with classes in history and art history, which I had enjoyed, and I walked into “Intro to Islam” thinking that it would be something fun to experiment with before I committed to the English major. I realized pretty quickly how flexible of a category “religion” is in the academy and how much fun I could have with defining a religious course of study that examined the things that I value. Two weeks into the course, I thought to myself: “I’m going to major in religion.” I declared that spring, with one course under my belt, and haven’t looked back. 

During the rest of my undergrad, I tried to find ways to link the study of religion to the natural world, particularly in the West. In the class “Lived Religion in America,” I wrote a paper on how Edward Abbey’s texts could be thought of as religious. I worked with a professor looking at a group of students at our college that essentially created a religion, rooted in nature worship, as a form of religious protest in the ‘60s. My largest project was a thesis on El Capitan, the rock wall in Yosemite that Alex Honnold climbed without a rope, positioning it as sacred in an American social context by following a civil tradition of celebrating the sublime. 

Doing More Than Being Happy Outside

When I graduated and moved out to Nevada in the summer of 2020, I started to think about the limitations of the work that I had already done. I felt that I had done a decent job of exploring why I thought that natural spaces were special, particularly through my thesis. While I was writing it, though, I had started to think about how little it did politically; it had an almost entirely poetic focus. 

I have spent time around two community archetypes: white, suburban, liberal communities that have the resources to recreate outdoors and invest in conservation, and white, rural, conservative communities for whom land use is a much more backyard issue, with natural resource extraction and agriculture forming economic backbones. 

I love these communities, and I have learned that they have a lot of problems, including their distrust of each other and each other’s values and their lack of inroads for people—especially those of marginalized identities—not already in them. Reflecting back on what I had not been able to do with my previous work, I realized how much more there was that I could do, drawing on my comfort with both of these blocs, to help work on both this distrust and this lack of accessibility. 

Looking Forward 

At HDS, I hope to be able to align myself with two critical conversations: how to find common ground between liberal and conservative environmental communities, and how to open social doors into and out of them and the spaces to which they hold access. 

This fall, I am beginning to learn a bit about this: I am taking a class with David Holland and Catherine Brekus on narratives of American religion, where I am hoping to better acquaint myself with how nature and conceptions of the sublime have played into the comingling of American mainstream culture and American religious identities. 

“Weather Reports,” taught by Diane Moore, is a class centered on a conversation series led by Terry Tempest Williams and focused on religio-sacred approaches to climate change, which should be fear-inducing and hope-inspiring and equip me to better engage in conversations around the natural environment using religious language and tools. 

I have only been in Boston for a little while now, but the opportunities that have already presented themselves—these classes, the speakers that are coming to Harvard’s campus, the intellectual community that I get to be a part of—have made me so excited for the next two years and, more than that, for the way that the next two years will prepare me to go off and do good work. I can’t wait for all of it. 

Submitted by Owen Yager; top photo by Jonathan Beasley, second photo courtesy of Owen Yager