John Muir

This essay reads American writer and conservationist John Muir’s unpublished letters and journal produced during his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps in dialogue with British writer and social critic John Ruskin’s better-known views on Switzerland in Modern Painters and elsewhere.

This is a draft of the chapter. For the authoritative version please consult the book at http://bookshop.cabi.org/default.aspx?site=191&page=2633&pid=2251

John Muir (1838-1914), botanist, geologist, natural historian, conservationist, philosopher, writer, and self-confessed 'tramp', is one of the 'the grandest character[s] in national park history' (Mills 1916, p. 25). In addition to being one of the founding fathers of the United States National Park System, and being especially associated with the creation of the Yosemite National Park, Muir influenced the nature and direction of the conservation and national park movements throughout the world (Fox 1981; Nash 1982; Cohen 1984; Worster 2008). As Powell (1977, p. 108) argued, the 'commitment to activism in the international wilderness movement is John Muir's best memorial'. However, Muir’s significance for tourism is much greater than the direct effects of his activism which helped protect a number of areas in the western United States as national parks, monuments and reserves – as important as that is. Instead, Muir, perhaps more than anyone else of the time, helped shape what many people in the United States, and later throughout the developed world, imagine a national park to be, and therefore served to substantially influence the way in which tourism to natural areas, and what would now likely be termed as ‘ecotourism’, was developed. For Muir, it was not only important to gaze upon nature’s wonders in terms of appreciating the sublime, but also to directly experience it through walks, rambles and overnight camps. This is especially significant, not only in terms of the growth of nature-based tourism, but also with respect to the role that tourism may play in both appreciating nature and providing an economic alternative to forms of land use that may otherwise reduce aesthetic and/or environmental values (Hall 1992; Runte 1997; Hall and Frost 2009). As a result, Muir was therefore instrumental in the development of the paradox faced by many national park agencies - to encourage both conservation and visitation to national parks as well as promoting national parks as visitor attractions in their own right (Frost and Hall 2009).

By opposing the dualistic paradigm implicated in the Kantian sublime and eventually resulting in man’s mastering of the material world, this essay upholds Christopher Hitt’s notion of “ecological sublime” as a more respectful mode to relate with the natural environment. Hitt’s revision of the sublime is significant to overcome the false separation of nature and culture (the concept of “internaturality” is here offered in substitution), while fostering the abrogation of the anthropocentric stance that deeply marked the first phases of American history. Despite the multiple contradictions emerging from both their writing experiments, John Muir’s essays and Emily Dickinson’s poetry are here proposed to articulate a more biocentric view of the interlacings of the human and nonhuman.

The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden illuminates both the foundations and after-effects of humanity's deep-rooted impulse to manipulate the natural environment and create garden spaces of diverse kinds. Gardens range from subsistence plots to sites of philosophical speculation, refuge, and self-expression. Gardens may serve as projections of personal or national identity. They may result from individual or collective enterprises. They may shape the fabric of the dwelling house or city. They may be real or imagined, literary constructs or visions of paradise rendered in paint. Some result from a delicate negotiation between creator and medium. Others, in turn, readily reveal the underlying paradox of every garden's creation: the garden, so often viewed as a kinder, gentler, 'second nature,' results from violence done to what was once wilderness. Designed as a companion volume to Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, this richly illustrated collection of provocative essays is edited by Annette Giesecke, Professor of Classics at the University of Delaware, and Naomi Jacobs, Professor of English at the University of Maine. Contributors to this wide-ranging volume include photographer Margaret Morton, landscape ethicist Rick Darke, philosopher David Cooper, environmental journalist Emma Marris, and food historian William Rubel.

The nineteenth-century invention of the category of the "spiritual"as opposed to being religious was deeply entangled within American Romanticism's larger project of reenchanting nature. While this relocation of spiritual authority out of the church and into the woods and wilderness echoes some of the larger dynamics of secularization that have long been a problematic for theories of Romanticism (see Abrams 1971), it also birthed a form of nature religiosity that still colors, for better and for worse, much contemporary American environmental thought. One of American Romanticism's most consequential legacies in the present, this chapter argues, is in an ongoing American predilection for sanctified landscape. This predilection is buttressed by models of conversion and self-transformation that have deep roots in Emersonian Transcendentalism and its larger dilations within postbellum culture. If this is where the sublimity of the New World has sometimes met the "woo-woo" of the New Age, this green spirituality and its attendant aesthetic forms has nevertheless inculcated viable forms of environmental politics, from legal frameworks for preservation and conservation to more radical forms of civil disobedience and environmental activism.

RESUME-Les politiques publiques environnementales souffrent des effets néfastes d’une entente tacite entre élites politiques et élites économiques. Indépendamment des références philosophico-politiques, une caste oligarchique politico-économique internationale gère, de manière substantiellement unitaire et tendanciellement autocratique, les affaires environnementales selon le modèle du développement durable, matérialisation d’une perspective utilitariste, anthropocentrique et ressourciste qui, essentiellement, considère que la biodiversité n’est rien d’autre qu’une réserve de ressources naturelles à la disposition de l’humanité. Désormais, une double transition éthique et politique est nécessaire pour préserver l’intégrité des systèmes naturels et pour soutenir le développement des sociétés humaines.

ABSTRACT-Environmental public policies are suffering the harmful effects of a tacit agreement between political and economical elites. Heedless of philosophical-political references, an international politico-economical oligarchic caste is largely united around dealing with environmental issues based on the sustainable development model, which is an expression of a utilitarian, anthropocentric perspective. Moreover, for this model biodiversity is in the main merely a reservoir of natural resources for human use. A dual transition – both ethical and political – is thus urgently needed to preserve the integrity of natural systems and support the development of truly human societies.

Donald Worster’s A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir is a magisterial biography. It is the place to begin
for understanding John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish immigrant and popular U.S. Gilded Age and
Progressive Era naturalist most famous as the self-appointed spokesperson for Yosemite Valley, the founder of
the Sierra Club, and the most outspoken opponent of the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley by the City of San
Francisco. Worster explores Muir’s tensions and contradictions. He also astutely analyzes Muir’s religiouslyinflected
“passion for nature.” He clarifies that Muir was not a neo-Transcendentalist, let alone a Buddhist, but
rather an evangelist for nature (creation) who never fully left behind the biblicist, anti-creedal, and antiinstitutional
sensibilities of the Campbellite Protestantism of his father.

Long overlooked, the natural philosophy and theosophy of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) made a surprising impact in America. Thomas Jefferson, while president, was so impressed with the message of a Baltimore Swedenborgian minister that he invited him to address both houses of Congress. But Swedenborgian thought also made its contribution to nineteenth-century American literature, particularly within the aesthetics of American Transcendentalism. Although various scholars have addressed how American Romanticism was affected by different currents of continental thought and religious ideology, surprisingly no book has yet described the specific ways that American romantics made persistent recourse to Swedenborg for their respective projects to re-enchant nature.

In A Language of Things, Devin Zuber offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. By tracing the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Vachel Lindsay all variously responded to Swedenborgian thought, Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic that came to unfold between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5062

This course offers an interdisciplinary study of the American natural environment and the role it has played in shaping American identity. We anchor our study by looking at the way ideas of the natural environment and the lands and waters of North America have been constructed throughout cultural history -- as kindred spirits by Native Americans; as a “howling wilderness” by the early European colonists; as a boundless inventory of resources that were "ours for the taking" by right of Manifest Destiny; as a school for the spirit by the New England Transcendentalists; as a precious inheritance in need of stewardship and preservation by 19th century conservationists such as John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt; as a crisis of global warming, environmental degradation and Sixth Extinction by Deep Ecologists.
Philosophically, we explore the influence on early colonists of Biblical and
Enlightenment thought, of the European Romantic movement, and the moral ambiguities of the American land and environment in relation to the slave experience and U.S. policies of "Indian Removal." We explore ideas of European Romanticism that gave rise to Emersonian Transcendentalism (America’s first homegrown philosophy), the competing theories behind forest management, the national park movement, and wilderness preservation and. more recently, the revival of Native American holistic values in ecological paradigms.
Beginning with Thoreau, who “went to the woods to learn to live deliberately, “ we read
primary texts of American nature writing, arguably one of America’s finest contributions to world literature, and we experiment with keeping nature journals. Finally, we discuss the bridging of the so-called "two cultures," science and art, in the work of writers Ed Abbey and Annie Dillard, paleontologist Loren Eiseley, and conservationist/activists Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Al Gore.

For John Muir, nothing truly wild is unclean. Dirtiness is the result of human influence. Muir’s view finds an echo in the works of those writers, such as Robinson Jeffers, who regard urban environments as wild places that have, over time, become increasingly polluted by human beings and their works. It is clear that such misanthropic views can be criticised on moral grounds; however, they deserve to be criticised on aesthetic grounds too. To adapt Yuriko Saito, they indicate a failure to appreciate the human world on its own terms.

Sustainable development: Preservation and conservation of nature

The basic concepts in modern thinking about the environment were laid down in the mid-19th century. The sustainable-development paradigm is essentially a synthesis between two main currents of thought that emerged in that period, one calling for preservation, the other for conservation. A century and a half later, it is often still possible to recognize them in the paradigm.

Sixty years separate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death (1778) from John Muir’s birth (1838). Muir is not considered a philosopher, and Rousseau is not considered an environmentalist, but each man had an abiding passion for the solace occasioned by long walks in nature, and saw in Nature* an expression of God. Each loved the mountains, whether hiking or appreciating them from a distance, and each shared a love of flowers, and of moving water, and each saw himself reflected in the cold, still waters of alpine lakes. This paper addresses the parallels between these men, and the divergences and convergences, which until now have not been sufficiently explored.

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Mountains inspired Romantic idealizations of nature and became a refuge from the industrializing West. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, a new model of masculinity emerged that was fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness.

Sustainable development is rooted in the history of two divergent movements – for the preservation of nature, and for the conservation of natural resources – and of their relationship with the natural sciences. Ecology has played a central role in this history. As a societal paradigm that is at once ecological, political, and economic, sustainable development is supposed to embody ideal policy for all societies, and to overcome the opposition between these two diverging views of man‑nature relationships. An analysis of international texts devoted to sustainable development emphasizes certain fundamental, interdependent principles: true democracy, social sustainability, and respect for the resilience of ecological systems. Despite formal concessions to preservationists with the recognition of the intrinsic value of biodiversity, the sustainable development concept is clearly anthropocentric, and is in direct line of descent from conservationism. As its fundamental principles are not implemented in an integrated way, its ritual evocation fail to hide strong ethical and political contradictions, rendering it merely an impotent utopia.

In 1908, author and Sierra Club founder John Muir raged against the damming of a river flowing through the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite.  Nonetheless, Congress authorized the dam in 1913, and construction was completed in 1923.  In 1987, responding to continuing public outcries, the US Secretary of the Interior proposed restoring the Hetch Hetchy Valley by draining the reservoir which provides the city of San Francisco with 85% of its total water needs.  In 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger directed a review of the many Hetch Hetchy restoration studies prepared by public agencies over the past 20 years.  The cost of restoration?  An estimated $10 billion. 

In 1963, Glen Canyon Dam slammed shut on the Colorado River and began filling Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the US after Lake Meade, also on the Colorado.  In 2000, the worst drought in a century began draining the lake faster than the Colorado River could fill it.  By 2005, Lake Powell had reached its lowest level since Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock and Neil Armstrong leapt onto the surface of the moon.  Backed by the Sierra Club, many began calling for the restoration of Glen Canyon and the draining of Lake Powell.  Sales of Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” (1968), a keynote chapter of which is “Down the River,” a eulogy for Glen Canyon, skyrocketed, as did sales of his eco-sabotage novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (1975), the central fantasy of which is the dynamiting of Glen Canyon Dam. 

Water policy in the arid West has always shaped, and been shaped by, literary texts.  The words of John Muir and Edward Abbey continue to inform debates that will decide the fate of some of the largest, most expensive water management projects in the US.  This presentation will examine the intimate, if uneasy, relationship between literature, water policy, and public discourse in the arid West.  I argue that a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the role of literary texts and other cultural productions in these debates will aid policy makers and the public in crafting successful, long-term water management strategies.

The literature on ‘mountain mysticism’ includes a wide array of interpretations: Reductively, mystical states experienced on mountains may be viewed as neuro- logical or psychological epiphenomena. Anthropomorphised as mystical agents themselves, the mountain is seen as capable of engendering non-ordinary aware- ness. This article makes space for interpretations falling outside of or combining such constructivist and universalised interpretations by first examining what ontological interpolations may be available after ‘the peak has been reached.’ I track the mystic’s descent ‘back’ to ordinary consciousness as a pivotal determi- native moment in the narrative construction of mystical noesis. I consider three examples of 19th and 20th century nature mysticisms (naturalist John Muir, Vedantic sage Ramana Maharshi, journalist Rob Schultheis) to illustrate my asser- tion that it is the mystic’s grappling with the paradox inherent in the ontological trauma of descent which performs the pivotal negotiation between the collapsed boundaries of subject/object or self/Other that characterizes mystical experience. I suggest further that we look to this narrative grappling as inevitably determining the content of the experience of noesis itself. Rather than reasserting a radical constructivism, I point more specifically to ‘descent’ as one juncture in which a remarkable ontological agency directly engages with the mystic’s moment of self- construal.

Abstract
From the medieval greenwood to plantation forestry, nineteenth-century poetry and fiction is filled with references to trees. Susan Oliver looks at ecological crisis and the complex relationship between people and woods as trees were replaced by grass in a rapidly changing world.

This essay posted on my blog 'Susan Oliver Writing From . . .  is a response to arial photos of Greenland. It's my second blog essay on this topic, with new photos taken at the end of August 2016. The theme is glaciers and the essay includes comments and thoughts about ice, ice surveys, conservation projects, artistic responses to natural phenomenon, and literary treatments of ice and glaciers.

HIGH SCHOOL YEARS IN SOUTH PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, 1953-1957 (five pages). I went to a fine high school but most of my learning took place around two other local institutions, an extraordinary Scout troop and the public library. There is a lot to tell, so it takes five pages to tell it:

(1) Why we got a street named after Frank Stoney. In the Scouts I learn about leadership and work with others to honor a leader who mentored youth for decades. I start a practice of getting to know a few places intimately, in this case the Arroyo Seco and Kings Canyon.

(2) The "life-giving" public library & John Muir. Almost daily visits to the local public library lead to finding a book that changed my life, and a lifelong habit of stopping in at libraries wherever or whenever I could.

(3) Powell, Ritchie & the "San Pasqual River." A tongue-in-cheek account of the square block where I grew up, the little stream that flowed and sometimes raged through it, and two very accomplished fellows from a previous generation who used to live nearby.

(4) Uncle Art, science & emotion. At a family gathering in Yosemite Valley I talk with my Uncle Art, a Stanford biology professor, about science and emotion. He and I disagree, and I begin to understand how opposing opinions can arise from very different points of view.

(5) Fairness & bigotry.  I become aware of some of the discrimination going on against minority ethnic groups but learn only many years later that a lot more was occurring behind the scenes. This is about things that happened to me or my friends or about which I have direct knowledge.