JOHN MUIR, CANNY CONSERVATIONIST

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Wendell Berry, Given

There are many lenses through which we can view the life and work of John Muir. And there are many lenses through which he viewed his own life. Of course, all of the lenses view the parts of a whole life and are interdependent, as are the various lenses of our own lives. By knowing some of the lenses of his life, we are able to observe how we think about them and, thus, to make a determination about what to think. This has been the point of most of the little meditations for our classes and in seeing how we think we are exercising and training our attention through the practice of meditation. Every person's life we engage deeply enough can be seen through a number of such lenses. Our own lives are equally interesting and an amalgam of images through different lenses.

I have chosen John Muir (1838-1914) for this piece because a long-term interest in his life, but also because I think his life illustrates concern for issues that are immediately present for us in the 21^st century. I am not certain that these issues could be considered “fault lines,” as that seems to refer to semi-permanent, if not permanent, gaps in society inhabited on either side by entrenched interests. But there are some recurrent themes in the history of modern times that emerge, then settle back, then reemerge. One of these themes is the fate of our planet. It is no small matter that we are beginning to pay more attention to climate change and the ways in which human activity and behavior are altering how the earth and its life-sustaining encircling envelope of forces is responding to us. John Muir devoted his adult life to comforting and protecting Mother Nature in ways that were new to the public at the time but which today would be considered part of the package of the environmental resistance movement, so used are we now to the civil resistance actions of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-war Movement during the Vietnam War, the #MeToo Movement of recent years, sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, and even immolations. But in Muir's time, there were only a few tactics that could be used to get the public's attention and those included back room arm-twisting in governmental suites. To a certain extent, then and now, the success of a movement depended on media coverage and the voice of a charismatic personality. John Muir, with the help of his friend Robert Underwood Johnson of The Century Magazine, became the voice of environmental consciousness.

Muir didn't begin his work as a fully formed activist. His background was Calvinist with a transition to the ideas of the Transcendentalists (Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Walter Rollins Brooks) who believed that matter and spirit were in harmony and never more so than in nature. He explored woods, meadows, and bogs wherever he traveled. But it was an accidental eye injury in 1867 that nearly blinded him that brought him to a new purpose of spending his life studying plants. From then on, he traveled and wrote about his experiences in nature. When he settled in San Francisco he explored the Yosemite Valley, climbing its peaks and being ecstatically thrilled by all its beauty. He traveled to Alaska, British Columbia, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, and Panama. Everywhere he went he was embedded in nature. His writings detailing his travels and experiences have the feel of an evangelist and that is what he was to become. He was a popularizer of nature's beauty and expansiveness before he became an advocate for her vulnerable resources. The writings documenting his travels were from the perspective of the micro- and the macro-, detailing both the diversity of flora and the immense spans of her valleys and mountains, as well as the mercurial nature of her weather moods.

Would it be too much of a stretch or too much hyperbole to say that Muir's own coming of age was an evolving experience from rapture to rupture? I ask the question that way to emphasize how I see the maturation of the human experience from the pure innocence of childhood to the realities of life's vicissitudes and exigencies. It is acceptable even in our times to refer to the “innocence” of childhood and its loss as we grow older and get roughened around the edges by our frictions and contacts with other people and events. Environmentalists are prone to lamenting such losses as if they were, indeed, a subtraction from our lives. I happen to see this as a normal progression through life, with each of us growing into some version of adulthood that accommodates the inevitable changes we all experience. Instead of seeing this as a loss, I see it as a gain in perspective and a normal and healthy way to grow older. Here is Muir in the glory of his childhood (from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913):

“This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature's warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were in school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature's pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!”

John Muir was as innocent as any one of us in childhood and maintained some of that guileless charm as he matured and became a spokesperson for the integrity of the earth. In fact, my reading of his life's story leads me to suspect that his quirkiness also included a conscious effort to be the showman and publicizer of the natural phenomena he was attempting to save. In this way, he was demonstrating a willingness to compromise his own jubilant acceptance of truth and beauty in service of conserving and preserving what he could of Nature's body, a body increasingly vulnerable to the economic interests of shortsighted politicians and aggressive and acquisitive developers.

There is no question that there were tensions in Muir's life and that compromises might have come with some difficulty, as they seem to do for someone whose causes are supported by passion and scope. Muir's religious background in Calvinism and its severities transitioned to the more open and welcoming philosophy of the Transcendentalists and he found within that system of thought a comfortable combination of focus on matter and spirit. He learned to work within the real world of politics by cultivating relationships with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and the people in positions of legislative influence and power. He wasn't always successful in overcoming the waves of zeal and energy that exploitation of the “frontier” of America brought to the lives of its citizens. To some extent, Americans in the early years of the 20^th century were enamored of the myth of the frontier (based almost solely on an essay by Frederick Jackson Turner) and the can-do spirit of the people who explored it and conquered it. There are vestiges of this mythical mindset even today in the minds of those who believe that any country can live and thrive without cooperating and compromising on issues of national importance. There was, and is, a blindness to the reality of our interdependence among nations and peoples. Muir was cognizant of the interdependence that he witnessed in nature and acknowledged it in his efforts to preserve Nature's health and integrity. He was no stranger to compromise when he took up the cause of the Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite National Park.

Developers were eager to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley and the Tuolumne River, especially after the devastating earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906, when the water needs of the city of San Francisco proved their reservoirs to be woefully inadequate. Yosemite National Park had been established by then (1890), as had the Sierra Club (1892) with Muir as its president (and Muir to serve for several decades). Muir led the opposition to such engineering and had both presidents Roosevelt and Taft on his side but the lobbyists for the project overcame the opposition and convinced President Woodrow Wilson to authorize the dam into law in 1913. John Muir was to live only one more year but it must have been a heartbreaking event for him. It was one more demonstration that compromises and the events they lead to are not always of one's liking and may, indeed, result in harmful consequences and destruction. With increasingly dwindling natural resources and a large world population, we are facing many of the same compromises Muir faced with perhaps greater consequences for greater numbers of people. Yet, who could argue against a water supply for thousands then and now millions? The decisions are not always easy but often necessary. But my view is that full maturity means that we acknowledge that sometimes good ends are accomplished by less-than-pure means and, in reverse, that bad ends are sometimes preceded by pure and golden intentions.

“It appears, therefore, that Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples.” (From Hetch Hetchy Valley, 1912)

So it is with losses and gains. What we see as a loss on one day might result in a gain on another day. It isn't that we “lose” innocence as much as we grow and gain a new perspective. It seems to me that we layer on over our childhood innocence and open minds the experiences with and in the world that shape us. We don't so much lose the joyous capacities of youth, as much as we harden our outlooks and add prejudices to opinions. Competing interests will always compete and more so with contracting resources. But perhaps with a perspective that accommodates multiple uses of natural resources along with a mindset that honors nature's grand sanctity, the means to thoughtful ends might be achievable. Is it possible that what now seems to be an expression of “frontier” exploitation might be viewed as restorative or sustainable? The idea of ecology was not known as a set-aside discipline in Muir's time, as it is now. However, Muir often used the word “home” as a metaphor for nature and man's place in it. The root meaning of eco- is house or home. Ecology is the study of nature as a home. It is the home we know as the earth, sailing along in the cosmos, the only true home for all of us.

“The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” (From The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West, 1901)

I am trying to make the case for opening our minds to the endless possibilities they contain. All of us don't have access to all capabilities, but we do have access to the possibilities that our minds can imagine. I believe one place where we can safely and comfortably imagine them is in the spaces we set aside for meditation. We can open them up and work with the creativity we are gifted in order to support how we think, how we train our attention, and then what we do. If we practice thinking in this way, then we are not as apt to be swayed by what someone else tells us we should think or do. Our minds are as sacred as the places Wendell Berry refers to above. There are no unsacred minds, only sacred minds and desecrated minds. How we think determines what we think. What we think, in turn, helps us decide what we can and should do. If Woodrow Wilson had thought that all places were sacred, then would the dam across the Tuolumne River have been built? On the other hand, if Hetch Hetchy hadn't evolved the way it did, would we now celebrate the likes of John Muir who became a conscience for the future development and exploitation of the great earth? There is no doubt that our childhood innocence plays into this drama as well as greater recognition of the needs of our fellow human beings. How we strike the balance is, in part, dependent on how we see and describe the world and what metaphors we use in how we think. How do you think?