John Muir

Mary Colwell

Description

John Muir is regarded as the 'father of America's national parks' and is a towering figure in the history of that country's involvement with ecology. Born into a harsh home in Dunbar, Scotland he would often escape to revel in the birds and wildlife of the area. When his father suddenly uprooted the family and moved to the United States, the oppression he associated with his childhood continued - and so did his involvement with the natural world. Despite the difficulty of his formative years Muir grew up to be a man of great joy - first an inventor and then an explorer, he found his haven in the mountains of Sierra Nevada. He was a fascinating character: on the one hand a recluse, who sought solitude, and on the other a passionate activist, determined to save the places he loved. A strong believer in both God and the essential goodness of humanity, he was the founder and first president of the Sierra Club. This wonderful memoir pays tribute to a giant of ecology and is essential reading for lovers of natural history.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• USA
• Natural history
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745956671
• Langue: English

Extrait

John Muir
John Muir

The Scotsman who saved America s wild places
MARY COLWELL
Text copyright 2014 Mary Colwell This edition copyright 2014 Lion Hudson
The right of Mary Colwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Books an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com/lion
ISBN 978 0 7459 5666 4 e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5667 1
First edition 2014
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image: RGB Ventures/SuperStock/Alamy
For my wonderful dad who treasured the ordinary and marvelled at the spectacular, 22 October 1932 - 20 March 2013.
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 DUNBAR BOY

CHAPTER 2 EARLY AMERICAN DAYS

CHAPTER 3 THE YEARS OF LABOUR

CHAPTER 4 LEARNING AND INVENTING

CHAPTER 5 THE TRANSITION YEARS

CHAPTER 6 A LONG WAY FROM HOME

CHAPTER 7 THE BEST LAID PLANS

CHAPTER 8 COMING HOME

CHAPTER 9 JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS

CHAPTER 10 OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

CHAPTER 11 ALASKAN ADVENTURES

CHAPTER 12 PREPARING FOR THE FIGHT

CHAPTER 13 THE LAST BATTLES

EPILOGUE JOHN MUIR TODAY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to my husband and sons for putting up with my writing when I could have been sailing and cycling, to Chris Boles who shares my passion for John Muir, and to Peter France, my encourager, critic, and friend for many years.
Foreword

John Muir s name is rarely included in the pantheon of greats as far as most environmentalists are concerned. Unlike Rachel Carson, often top of the list, especially in the USA, or Fritz Schumacher, always in there somewhere. Despite being seen by many as the founding father of conservation , name-checking John Muir here in the UK would excite little interest, let alone enthusiasm among those in today s loosely-defined green movement, let alone those outside it.
As a relatively new admirer (having stumbled across the Muir Woods National Monument on a visit to San Francisco a decade or so ago), Mary Colwell sets out to explore that conundrum. And there s absolutely no doubt that John Muir was indeed a quite extraordinary man. Equally, there s no doubt that the author eloquently captures what it was that made him so special as a naturalist, pioneering explorer, botanist, glaciologist, mystic, writer and activist.
And part of this extraordinary life is that he lived through extraordinary times. Arriving in the USA in 1849 (after 11 years growing up in Dunbar in Scotland), he died there 65 years later in 1914 - a period of unparalleled growth in the US in terms of population, industrialisation, growth, and environmental devastation.
Muir s response to that growth and destruction was fascinating. It wasn t until the 1890s that he took on the campaigning role for which this founding father is now revered. In that role, he was one of the founders (in 1892) and the first President of the Sierra Club, still one of America s most admired and influential NGOs today. Before that, for 30 years, he was a traveller (early in his life, as the author puts it, he was more like a cork bobbing on an ocean rather than a man with a mission to fulfil ), a reveller in and devotee of nature ( wilderness pumped through John s veins ), a farmer (though more out of family duty than out of any natural calling) and, above all, a writer.
It took him a while to realise that this was his real calling - there were many points in his life where it was his friends and mentors that had to urge him to focus more purposefully on his writing. His style was lyrical and deeply spiritual ( he wrote like a preacher, but his congregation was as yet undefined ). His description of the sequoia forests of California as God s first temples is indicative of the kind of panentheism that sustained him throughout his life - not so much worshipping nature in itself as worshipping God in every nook and cranny of nature. And no other author had quite the impact on gathering environmental sensibilities than he did.

He had the ability to reach through the page, take the reader by the hand, and guide them to singing streams, towering trees, intimate conversations with wildlife, and ranges of mountains so beautiful they made him fall on his knees in prayer. He was the voice of the wild, and the tip of his quill glowed with divine love.
One of Mary Colwell s recurring questions is this: Who has taken up that baton? On the literary side of things, that s a hard question to answer, not least because that kind of Wordsworthian lyricism (in poetry or prose) is so deeply out of fashion. For instance, the writer Alastair McIntosh (brought up on the Isle of Lewis) would undoubtedly be counted as one of today s most influential writers on the relationship between humankind and the natural world, but his style is so much more economic, so much terser.
It s no accident that Alastair McIntosh draws so heavily on the residual fragments of wilderness to be found in Scotland. You won t find such wilderness elsewhere in the UK, and it s disappearing fast in literally every corner of the world. Contemporary campaigners may still romanticise about the wild, but it has less and less authentic resonance these days, let alone the kind of real, emotional power that it did in the nineteenth century.
Which is why John Muir will be seen by many as an improbable role model for today s environmental battles, let alone as the hero the world is searching for to help guide us into the future . Though most environmentalists will wholeheartedly endorse Muir s belief that today s environmental destruction can only be stopped if people learn to love and respect the land , and would share his sorrow that people s souls are being filled with the crass trappings of consumerism rather than with beauty and truth, the unattainable purity of his Earth first credo has not aged well.
As is borne out by the fact that the philosophical approach of his constant antagonist and personal nemesis - Gifford Pinchot - has fared much better. Pinchot s Wise Use movement - the forerunner of concepts like sustainable yield management and sustainable development more broadly - is the dominant leitmotif in today s environmental debates.
Just compare Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as they fought it out hammer and tongs, between 1908 and 1913, over the campaign to stop the Hetch Hetchy Valley being turned into a vast reservoir to provide the burgeoning population of San Francisco with the water it so badly needed even then. Pinchot first:

The object of our forest policy is not to preserve the forests because they re beautiful or wild or the habitat of wild animals; it is to ensure a steady supply of timber for human prosperity. Every other consideration is secondary.
And then John Muir:

These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
Muir lost; Pinchot won. The pristine wilderness of Hetch Hetchy was duly and irreversibly desecrated . One hundred years on, the fact that Hetch Hetchy s water still sustains San Francisco through the duration of the current - and ever-worsening - drought across the state of California reveals just how far beyond nature s limits our industrialised, consumptive way of life has taken us.
And that s Mary Colwell s most profound challenge to her readers. Could it be that decades of diligently seeking some accommodation, between, on the one hand, humankind s boundless needs and aspirations, and, on the other, nature s bounded resources and fragile integrity, should now be seen as a worthy but ultimately forlorn failure? Should we be giving up on today s dominant pragmatism - and reinventing instead Muir s uncompromising defence of (what s still left of) the natural world?
For me, personally, that s never likely to be the conclusion I ll come to. But John Muir s life and work have been important to me for a long time. At different points, they ve provided both a reality check on the compromises I make every day in the name of sustainable development, and at other times a licence to allow his kind of panentheistic spirituality to keep my heart and soul anchored in a different kind of reality.

Jonathon Porritt August 2014

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future www.forumforthefuture.org .
His latest book, The World We Made ( 24.95, Phaidon) is available from www.phaidon.com/store
Introduction

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

The best way to think of John Muir is to imagine a Scottish combination of the wildlife broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, the wilderness explorer Bear Grylls, the environmental theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the animation characters Wallace and Gromit. To this eclectic mix add a very large dose of good humour and simple, honest kindliness, and John Muir begins to emerge - a giant of the past and perhaps the hero the world is searching for to help guide us into the future.
In his lifetime, John Muir inspired millions to cherish nature, much as Sir David does today. He was similar to Bear Grylls in that he was a hard-muscled, rugged wilderness man who survived alone for weeks on end on iron rations - in his case a loaf of bread, a packet of tea, and a copy of the poetry of