Brigham Young on the Environment* The Celestial Environment
Brigham Young is one of the few men in history who could claim
the privilege of personally occupying, settling, and placing the
stamp of his own personality on a large part of the earth's
surface. He founded a hundred communities over hundreds of
thousands of square miles of the continent; and after over a
century they are still in existence, some of them, in those
places where the bulldozer and chain saw have not yet completed
their devastation, still bearing visibly the marks of his
genius. For Brigham was keenly aware of his unique opportunity
to lay the foundations of a new civilization and of the awful
responsibility that weighed upon anyone who presumed to alter
the face of nature and create an environment in which
generations yet unborn would be obliged to live. It does not
often fall to the lot of mortal men to set foot, let alone to
settle, in a land as fair and undefiled as in the morning of
Creation, but that part of the world into which B