Friday, 10 February 2023
“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.” — John Muir (1838 - 1914)
Like all controversial figures John Muir courted both admirers and detractors. Born in the coastal town of Dunbar, midway between Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, Muir was fond of nature and the outdoors from a young age, observing the bird- and wildlife in the countryside around his home. He grew up to become a naturalist, mountaineer, environmental campaigner and writer, publishing over three hundred articles and a dozen books.
When he was eleven years old his family emigrated to Wisconsin, in America, to set up a farm. The third of eight children he was expected to feed and look after the animals and help with clearing the land and the annual planting and harvest of crops. After leaving Scotland he received no further formal education, because he could not be spared from the farmwork. His strict Calvernist father believed all necessary lessons came from the Bible and regarded studying or reading anything else as frippery.
But Muir was a driven man and taught himself mathematics, philosophy, geology and botany from books he borrowed from neighbours. He began inventing time pieces and other clockwork-operated implements to 'make people's lives easier'. When he was sixteen years old he went on his first train journey, travelling to Jamesville to display his homemade mechanical inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair. Six years later he finally left home for good and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Instead of doing a degree in a specific subject, he studied a variety of different modules pertaining to his particular interests in engineering and the natural sciences.
His love of wild spaces continued all his life and, as an adult, he made his name in conservation, establishing the worlds first national park system when he saved California's Yosemite Valley from being destroyed by developers hoping to build on the burgeoning popularity of tourism. Nowadays, of course, Yosemite National Park and others like it are set up to accommodate thousands of visitors every year, but preservation orders originally advocated by Muir ensure that the regions' wilderness areas remain as unspoiled and natural as possible. Muir also established the Sierra Club, an environmental non-profit organisation with branches, or chapters, all over America which campaigns for the protections of the country's areas of wilderness and natural habitats. He was its first president; an office he held for twenty years.
Muir fell in love with Yosemite National Park the first time he visited and lived there for many years, working as a shepherd and mountain guide. It was here that he said he found his true religion. As the , James Hunt, writes in book Restless Fires (2012), “Many scholars feel that Muir’s baptism happened in California”.
As much as Muir was lauded for his environmental activism and writing in his own time and well into the twentieth century, in recent years political correctness and so-called 'wokeness' has somewhat tarnished the image of him as the hero who saved the wilderness in America and beyond. But, like all humans, he was a man of his time and was not without some flaws. The controversy around his personality appears to revolve around how he wrote and expressed himself with regard to the indigenous people. In today's terminology his remarks and attitude towards them would be seen as racist and abusive. While regarding nature and the creatures, large and small, within it, as a cathedral, he is said to have referred to Americans as subhuman, calling them: 'dirty', 'garrulous as jays', 'superstitious' and 'lazy'.
It is undeniable that Muir was a man of conflicts. It's debatable when and where his prejudices originated. I suggest there could be several possibilities. At its most elemental it could simply be ignorance about the kind of people those indigenous to America were. Alternatively, it could have been thoughtlessness about how he expressed his opinions, which negative as they were, would have been best kept to himself. Finally, it is possible that Muir was influenced by his father's Calvinist xenophobic attitudes which meant that anyone of a different faith or culture was to be feared and treated with extreme caution and even distaste. I would argue that this last is the most likely reason for Muir's views.
In later years Muir did acknowledge some of his earliest prejudices and moderated his language when speaking about Indigenous people, even describing them in favourable light as, for instance, in this lovely quote:-
“Native American Indians walk softly and they hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels.”
A further conflict in Muir's personality, particularly when viewed through a contemporary lens, lay in his penchant for machinery of all kinds and seeing the value in the new inventions offered by the Revolution which stood in direct opposition to his interest in the conservation and preservation of nature and open spaces. Even in this regard Muir was not consistent in his views, writing: "timber is as necessary as bread", thereby saying that it's permissible to fell trees for the purposes of house-building, heating and cooking, but not for clearing spaces for large-scale commercial development. Kat Anderson, an ecologist at the University of California in Davis, highlights another issue that was beyond Muir's control. As she explains:-
"The problem for Muir, for the National Park Service, for all of us, is that America was never a blank slate. And we know now Muir’s story was wrong. Native Americans in California, including those in Yosemite Valley, intentionally used fire to open land, increase pasturage, prevent even larger, more catastrophic fires and promote biodiversity. Muir’s sacred Yosemite was not a garden tended by God, as he wrote so passionately about — it was a garden tended by Native people."
It is also entirely possible that some of the damage to Muir's reputation occurred due to associations he made in the course of his travels and activism or when others writing about him have misquoted him. His interactions with men of dubious integrity included the supremacist Joseph LeConte (1823 - 1901) and eugenicist David Starr Jordan (1851 - 1931). The most injurious of these wrongful attributions were claims about the 'removal' of Native American from Yosemite National Park made by another eugenicist, Madison Grant (1865 - 1937), not by John Muir. It is true that Muir was acquainted with Grant and Jordan, but he did not share their desire to allow only white settlers into the Park. In fact, he was fully alert to the destruction whites were capable of, as he wrote in his book, The Yosemite (1912):-
“These temple destroyers, devotees of
ravaging 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.”
In My First Summer in the Sierra, written in 1911 and published five years later, Muir mused:-
“How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows; probably a great many, extending far beyond the time Columbus touched our shores.”
Muir also noted how Indigenous peoples interacted with the landscape while living in harmony with nature, observing:-
“By their fires they made talk to improve their hunting grounds and make it better for themselves and the wild animals.”
I would argue that these remarks show a deep respect for the original inhabitants of the Sierras and that it was merely his terminology in describing Native Americans which was unwise, but that in the course of his work he learned a lot and came to revise his opinions.
It is unfortunate that the Sierra Club, which John Muir founded as an organisation tasked with protecting not only the natural state of America's wilderness areas, but also their history and legacy, should be one of the biggest culprits in denigrating Muir's efforts at conservation. Sullying his name by citing incorrect and unreliable sources, all in the name of misguided political correctness, goes against at least part of the Club's purpose, that of preserving history as well as the landscape. History, after all, is rarely perfect. Instead of attempting to eradicate it simply because people find it unsavoury, it should be left alone so that past mistakes can be acknowledged and learnt from.
With their emphasis on spirituality, it should come as no surprise that Muir was influenced by the thinking and work of Henry David Thoreau (1817- 1862) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882). Not only did their ideas reflect Muir's own feelings about the natural world, but they were also an unconscious rebellion against his Calvinist upbringing. He argued that nature was a living, organic entity and it should be 's responsibility to look after it.
In conclusion, as someone who is passionate about looking after the environment and as we approach the 185th anniversary of his birth, I would like to advocate the celebration of the positives of John Muir's legacy. We must not forget that he was a man of his time and a product of his upbringing. Like all humans he was not without faults, but ultimately he was a hero, taking important steps towards preserving the wildernesses of his adopted country — a move which was observed and followed the world over.
California celebrates John Muir Day on April 21 each year.
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REFERENCES
Brune, Michael (2020) Pulling Down Our Monuments. Sierra Club, Washington, DC https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club (accessed 10 February 2023)
Colville, Mary (2014) John Muir: The Scotsman Who Saved America's Wild Places. London: Lion Hudson Books
Hunt, James B. (2012) Restless Fires: Young John Muir's Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867–68. Mason, Georgia: Mercer University Press
Mair, Hanson & Nelson (2021) Who Was John Muir Really? Earth Island Journal. Berkeley, California https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/who-was-john-muir-really (accessed 10 February 2023)
Muir, John (1916 & 1917) My First Summer in the Sierra. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company / The Riverside Press https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/32540
Muir, John (1912 & 1913) The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company / The Riverside Press https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/18359
Muir, John (1911 & 1916) The Yosemite. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company / The Riverside Press https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7091
Muir, John Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir (accessed 10 February 2023)
Worster, Donald (2008) A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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