like to thank the Institute staff: Director Donald Ottenhoff, Carla Durand, and Elisa Schneider.
Librarians have helped immensely in locating sometimes difficult-to-find sources, and I am especially grateful to Bev Ehresmann at the Alquin Library at St. John’s University and Jackie Hemond of the Salem Free Public Library, in Connecticut. Bob and JoAnne Pokrinchak and Yuanjin Chen kept my temperamental computer going long enough to finish the book.
Hans Christoffersen, the editorial director of the Liturgical Press, helped me find the right publisher for this book. I have been hugely fortunate in all the support and encouragement I received from Wilderness Press, especially from editors Susan Haynes who was insightful and enthusiastic from the start, and Donna Poehner whose expertise and many fine suggestions improved the book; also for the artistry of designers Annie Long and Scott McGrew. Along with Molly Merkle, they have all been wonderful to work with.
As always, family members have provided inspiration and sanity, along with lots of laughter and joy, during the compiling of the book. They are: Virginia Rowthorn and her husband, Michael Apel, and their children, Anna and Nathaniel; Perry and Hayley Zinn-Rowthorn and their children, Jackson, Beckett, and Juliette; and Chris and Hiroe Rowthorn and their children, Kieran William and Hannah Anne.
As always, my greatest thanks are reserved for my husband, Jeffery, who first discovered John Muir with me on a weekend camping trip many years ago to Yosemite National Park. By coincidence, just last week a tattered brown paper bag dropped from that trip’s hiking guide with two John Muir quotations written on it: “One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of nature…inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look at any of her operations, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty.” I had scribbled those words, and on the same scrap, Jeffery had copied another Muir quotation, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for I found, I was really going in.”
We are still out for that walk, and I heartily thank all who have traveled with me along the way, those mentioned here and everyone else who has been part of this joyous journey.
Foreword
THIS BOOK IS INVALUABLE BECAUSE, among many other things, it reminds us what a talented writer John Muir was. In fact, his writing was in many ways his single greatest contribution. In that glorious first summer in the Sierra, he created a new grammar and vocabulary of wildness, a rhetorical engine that powered the environmental movement for a century. He is on fire with an ecstasy that still seems new and fresh to read. It is very hard for a writer to do this without slipping into sentimental mush, but Muir knew how to combine anecdote and exclamation in a way that lets you feel the sincerity of his love for this newfound world.
Muir’s writing could only explode in our minds, of course, because he was doing something so new at that time. The solitary hiking adventurer is a stock figure now, but not then. And Muir pushed it at every opportunity. Consider his accounts of climbing a whipping pine tree in the middle of a giant wind storm so he could be tossed like a sailor in a mast, or of running toward an earthquake in Yosemite Valley so he could see the sparks the boulders threw out as they descended. What excited him excited others, though most would doubtless have been too scared to emulate him.
But very few explorers of that type have done the other thing that Muir did—taking on the hard work of organizing to preserve the things he loved. Think about what an accomplishment the Sierra Club was: it basically set the template for the crusading nonprofit, fighting political battles for those who simply couldn’t. And think of what it produced: great heroes like David Brower, who followed in Muir’s footsteps as an adventurer but also a politico. Muir may have lost Hetch Hetchy, but he set up the group that saved the Grand Canyon!
Muir was one of those rare Americans who changed the way we see the world. He helped free our minds and our bodies—he was a liberationist par excellence, and the great wheeling freedom of his words shines through to this day. Pack a rucksack, grab an apple and a copy of this book, and go find someplace suitable to read it!
Bill McKibben
AN AUTHOR, EDUCATOR, AND ENVIRONMENTALIST, Bill McKibben is the founder of the grassroots climate-change campaign 350.org and the author of a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Earth, and The Global Warming Reader.
Introduction
NO SINGLE AMERICAN has done more to preserve our wilderness than John Muir. A self-taught botanist, inventor, glaciologist, geologist, ornithologist, and writer, Muir had already become the American wilderness’s most ardent defender by l903 when he guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip in Yosemite. Roosevelt had read Muir’s book, Our National Parks, published in l901, and he wanted to experience the wilderness world of which John Muir wrote so eloquently. The President left behind his Secret Service agents and stepped into the wilderness with five mules, a cook, and John Muir. It was a turning point for the conservation movement: during his term of office, Roosevelt would go on to establish 148 million acres of national forest, five national parks, and twenty-three national monuments.
Until John Muir wrote about America’s mountains, valleys, deserts, forests, and canyons, wilderness was commonly considered something to be conquered, tamed, used, and exploited for commercial gain. It took Muir to promote the idea that nature had meaning, beauty, and value in itself. As Muir documented his adventures in his journals and letters to friends and turned them into articles and books, the idea of wilderness and its contribution to human health and wholeness began to change.
This book, in Muir’s own words with short comments by the compiler, illustrates John Muir’s tremendous appeal, including his rich and luminous images of the natural world, his sense of nature’s holiness beyond doctrine or creed, his passionate protest against the scourging and degradation of the environment, his belief that all creation is an interconnected web of life, and his conviction that immersion in the natural world will heal the weary, stressed, overworked urban dweller.
The Wisdom of John Muir is a compilation of more than 100 of John Muir’s most evocative writings drawn from his diaries, journals, and essays. It is designed for people who love the beauty of nature and want to read about it at its best. I hope this book will touch its readers wherever they are along the continuum of knowledge of John Muir and the natural world. It may serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with Muir but who have grown up visiting our national parks. It will offer some close readings of Muir’s texts to those who have already been exposed to his thought. The casual reader can pick up The Wisdom of John Muir and turn to topics of interest, or read the book through from cover to cover:
Chapter 2 offers a picture of the pristine Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains before they were touched by human intervention.
If it is sheer adventure you are looking for, start with Chapter 7 to learn how Muir narrowly escaped death on frigid glaciers and icy mountaintops.
Go to Chapter 9 for John Muir’s fierce defense of the environment.
To renew your own desire to experience a sense of wonder in the natural world, start with Chapter 6.
To marvel at nature’s overflowing, inexhaustible abundance, read any essay in Chapter 8.
Chapter 11 opens to the reader fresh views of Alaska as experienced for millennia by First Nations peoples.
Wherever you begin or however you read this book, John Muir is bound to touch your imagination, kindle your heart, and renew your own love for Earth.
THE BOOK’S