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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 12 CHAPTERS are arranged by themes that roughly follow the sequence of events in John Muir’s life. Highlights of his life introduce each of the chapters, and brief, reflective comments accompany the selections to explain or elaborate upon their particular contexts. All the section and selection titles are taken from John Muir’s own words.

On his travels, John Muir’s pattern was to find a campsite after 15 to 20 miles of “tramping,” have his supper of black tea and hard bread, and in the campfire’s glow, record in his journal his impressions of the day just passed and write letters to friends. This accounts for the freshness and sense of immediacy and naturalness in Muir’s writing. His 60 journals and voluminous letters were solely meant for his own purposes and to share with a small circle of friends. He never intended that they would be published. His friends had other ideas. So impressed were they by Muir’s vivid descriptions of the mountains and lakes, flowers, and cascading waterfalls, they tried to persuade him to turn his letters into articles. Muir was resistant. Writing for friends and family was one thing, and he enjoyed it. Writing articles took a more self-conscious effort, and every time he started to write for a wider audience, Muir felt his creative energies drying up. He would laboriously weigh each word and phrase, continuously crossing out and revising again and again. But he persevered and in 1872 he published his first article.

Writing books, Muir felt, would be completely out of the question. In a Christmas day letter to a friend in 1871, he complained, “Book-making frightens me because it demands so much artificialness and retrograding.… Moreover, I find that though I have a few thoughts entangled in the fibers of my mind, I possess no words into which I can shape them.… These mountain fires that glow in one’s blood are free to all, but I cannot find the chemistry that may press them unimpaired into booksellers’ bricks. True, I can proclaim that moonshine is glorious, and sunshine more glorious, that winds rage, and waters roar.… This is about the limit of what I feel capable of doing for the public. But for my few friends I can do more because they already know the mountain harmonies and can catch the tones I gather for them, though written in a few harsh and gravelly sentences.”¹

The influential New York publisher, Robert Underwood Johnson, who had visited Muir in Yosemite, provided a breakthrough. Johnson assured him that writing books is easy! All Muir needed to do was select his best essays and arrange them in a logical order; each essay would become a chapter. Muir did just that, and his first book, The Mountains of California, came out in 1894. It is a gem in prose-poetry, and it almost immediately established Muir as a commanding spokesman for the earth, as a writer who described nature’s wonders so vividly, that many readers wanted to see for themselves the wild beauty Muir described so eloquently.

And now, almost 100 years after John Muir’s death, we need him more than ever. Our planet is in peril. There is so much despair and darkness in our world. Climate change is remaking the global village. Storms, fires, droughts, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, blistering temperatures, Arctic chill, the extinction of species—the earth is suffering severely. The future of human life on earth is becoming uncertain. Despite the host of scientists and ecologists exhorting us to pay attention to Mother Earth, for the most part, their warnings are ignored. We wonder why.

Have we as a people lost our link with the earth? Has our advanced technological society robbed us of the feeling of real soil under our feet or of the wind at our backs on a steep mountain trail? Have we become an indoor people? Are we more comfortable ensconced in front of the computer monitor than sitting on the beach watching the setting sun splash its dazzling palate of colors across the western sky? Have we become like Paul, the fourth-grader in San Diego referred to in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, who plays indoors because “… that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”²

Richard Louv made the startling statement that this generation of children is the first to be raised inside, enticed to stay there by their indoor comforts and their huge array of alluring toys, most of them electronic. He has named the phenomenon “nature deficit disorder” which he defines as “… the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.”³

Described in another way, Wendell Berry, the naturalist, writer, and organic farmer has said, “Our children no longer learn how to read the Great Book of Nature from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.”⁴

Living away from direct contact with nature, humankind severs the link that for millennia has kept us close to the earth. Away from regular contact with the earth, we don’t know the serenity of a dense redwood forest, neither its scents nor sounds. We don’t know earth’s countless species and creatures. Our children are more likely to see nature’s artifacts at museums of natural history than in actual nature where the deer and the antelope play. They visit the zoo to see captive animals that have been plucked from their native habitats, or they go to aquariums where whales and dolphins have been trained to follow human commands. They are more likely to see alligators wrestled at a reptile ranch than to observe an alligator swimming freely in the Florida Everglades. Children who still play out of doors typically do so in a manicured suburban yard or a city playground rather than in the woods or along a muddy brook.

Not only are children staying indoors with all its attendant perils, their parents and grandparents are inside with them. And we can see what this lifestyle is doing to us. Rates of depression are on the rise. In l933, when the Oglala Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear made his now well-known statement that “… Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard,” he could not have imagined how true his words would become.⁵

Turned away from the natural world, we are indifferent to the many ways earth is groaning and suffering. We don’t empathize with the earth, and we don’t feel earth’s pain. As the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle wrote in the memoir of his childhood, The Thunder Tree, “I believe that one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live. We lack the widespread intimacy with the living world.… fewer people organize their lives around nature, or even allow it to affect them profoundly.”⁶

What is urgently needed is the restoration of the connection between the human world and the world of nature, nothing short of a conversion—a turning around—to the earth so we may see earth with fresh eyes in all its extreme beauty and fragility. This is why we need John Muir, whose writings build that essential bridge between the natural world and our imaginations. Muir’s passion for the natural world evokes our own passion. Dire facts of the fate of the earth won’t motivate us to rebuild and restore Mother Earth. Only a passion for “wildness,” to use John Muir’s word, is strong enough to inspire us to protect our beloved planet. As David Toolan wrote in At Home in the Cosmos, “Loyalty to the earth: that’s our mantra we have been seeking. Without love of, and loyalty to the earth, there can be no justice to the earth, no ecological ethic for our time. What we require is a new and enlarged social contract—a contract with the earth.”⁷

Only love, compassion, passion, and connection to the ground of our being can dispel the darkness and heal the earth and ourselves. I live in the hope that we can turn our hearts back to the earth and, like John Muir in his time, that we in ours may let the earth become our teacher.

John Muir believed that life’s most essential lessons were learned in the University of the Wilderness. He was not talking about books and lectures and learned professors, not about a Harvard or a University of California, nor about Europe’s ancient halls of learning, but about the universe itself as life’s elemental teacher. The supreme University of the Wilderness is the universe itself, the university that is here under our feet and all around us in the soaring mountains and golden grain, in the expanse of the high prairie, from sea to shining sea, and in every drop of dew and shower of rain. The universe is the primary teacher, artist, economist, revealer of the Divine, and healer of all. It is the dandelion poking its face up through the cracked city sidewalk, the falling autumn leaf, the rhythm of the rolling tide, the burst of spring in every tree and flower. Earth’s wonders are everywhere. We need only eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to embrace, and a passion to stand up for earth’s rights. As John Muir said, “Try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”⁸