The Invention of Nature (50 page)

For the rest of his life Muir fought for the protection of nature. Man and Nature had been a wake-up call for some Americans, but where Marsh wrote one book that encouraged the protection of the environment mainly for the economic profit of the country, Muir would publish a dozen books and more than 300 articles that made ordinary Americans fall in love with nature. Muir wanted them to stare in awe at mountain vistas and towering trees. He could be funny, charming and seductive in his pursuit of this goal. Muir took the baton of nature writing from Humboldt who had created this new genre – one that combined scientific thinking with emotional responses to nature. Humboldt had dazzled his readers, including Muir, who then in turn became a master of this kind of writing. ‘Nature’ itself, Muir said, was ‘a poet’ – he just needed to let it speak through his pen.

Muir was a great communicator. He had the reputation of being an incessant talker – bursting with ideas, facts, observations and his joy for nature. ‘Our foreheads felt the wind and the rain,’ one friend commented after listening to Muir’s stories. His letters, journals and books were equally passionate, packed with descriptions that transported the reader into the woods and mountains. On one occasion, when he climbed a mountain with Charles Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Muir was amazed how a man so learned about trees could be so untouched by the magnificent autumnal scenery. While he was jumping around and singing to ‘glory in it all’, Sargent stood ‘cool as a rock’. When Muir asked him why, Sargent replied, ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve.’ But Muir was not allowing Sargent to get away with this. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ Muir countered, ‘there you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say “Come, Nature, bring on the best you have: I’m from BOSTON.” ’

Muir lived and breathed nature. One early letter – a love letter to sequoias – was written in ink that Muir had made from their sap, and his scrawl still shines in the red of the sequoia’s sap today. The letterhead stated ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co, Nut time’ – and on he goes: ‘The King tree & me have sworn eternal love.’ When it came to nature, Muir was never afraid of letting go. He wanted to preach to the ‘juiceless world’ about the forest, life and nature. Those defrauded by civilization, he wrote, those ‘sick or successful, come suck Sequoia & be saved’.

Muir’s books and articles exuded such a playful joy that he inspired millions of Americans, shaping their relationship with nature. Muir wrote of ‘a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices’ and of trees in a storm that were ‘throbbing with music and life’ – his language was visceral and emotional. He grabbed his readers and took them into the wilderness, up snowy mountains, above and behind stupendous waterfalls and across flowering meadows.4

Muir liked to cast himself as the wild man in the mountains. But after his first five years in rural California and the Sierra, he began to spend the winter months in San Francisco and the Bay Area to write his articles. He rented rooms from friends and acquaintances and continued to dislike the city’s ‘barren & beeless’ streets, but here he met the editors who commissioned his first pieces. Throughout these years he remained restless, but as his brothers and sisters wrote letters from Wisconsin, reporting on their marriages and children, Muir began to think about his future.

It was Jeanne Carr who introduced him to Louie Strentzel, in September 1874, when Muir was thirty-six. Louie was twenty-seven and the only surviving child of a wealthy Polish emigrant who owned a large orchard and vineyard in Martinez, thirty miles north-east of San Francisco. For five years Muir wrote her letters, and regularly visited Louie and her family, before he finally made up his mind. They became engaged in 1879, and married in April 1880, a few days before his forty-second birthday. They settled at the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez – but Muir continued to escape into the wilderness. Louie understood that she had to let her husband go when he felt ‘lost & choked in agricultural needs’. Muir always returned, refreshed and inspired, ready to spend time with his wife and later his two young daughters whom he adored. Only once did Louie accompany him to Yosemite Valley where Muir pushed her up the mountains with a stick pressed to her back – to his mind a helpful gesture, but it was an experiment that was never repeated.

Muir’s sketch of pushing Louie up a mountain in Yosemite (Illustration Credit 23.3)

Muir accepted his role as farm manager but never enjoyed it. Then, when Louie’s father died in 1890, he left her a fortune of almost US $250,000. They decided to sell parts of the land and hired Muir’s sister and her husband to run the remaining estate. Muir, who was now in his early fifties, was glad to be relieved of the daily work on the ranch so that he could concentrate on more important issues.

During the years that he had run the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez, Muir never lost his passion for Yosemite. Encouraged by Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of the nation’s leading literary monthly magazine, the Century, Muir began to fight for the wilderness. Every time he visited Yosemite Valley he saw more changes. Though the valley was a state park, the enforcement of regulations and control was lax. California was managing Yosemite Valley badly. Sheep had grazed the valley floor barren and tourist accommodation cluttered the landscape. Muir also noted how many wildflowers had disappeared since he had first visited the Sierra two decades earlier. In the mountains, outside the boundaries of the park, many of Muir’s beloved sequoias had been felled for timber. Muir was shocked about the destruction and waste – and would later write that ‘no doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing through the hands of a French cook would have made good food’.5

Relentlessly pushed by Johnson, Muir turned his love of nature into activism and began to write and campaign for the creation of a national park in Yosemite – like Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the first and so far only one in the country, which had been established in 1872. In the late summer and autumn of 1890, Johnson lobbied for a Yosemite National Park in Washington before the House of Representatives, while Muir’s articles for the popular Century ensured a widespread recognition of the fight thanks to the magazine’s nationwide distribution. Lavishly illustrated with stunning engravings of the canyons, mountains and trees of Yosemite Valley, the articles carried the readers into the wilderness of the Sierra. Valleys became ‘mountain streets full of life and light’, granite domes had their feet in emerald meadows and ‘their brows’ in the blue sky. The wings of birds, butterflies and bees stirred the ‘air into music’ and cascades were ‘whirling and dancing’. The majestic falls foamed, folded, twisted and plunged while clouds were ‘blooming’.

Muir’s prose transported the magical beauty of Yosemite straight into America’s parlours, but at the same time he warned that it was all about to be destroyed by sawmills and sheep. A huge swathe of land needed protection, Muir wrote, because the branching valleys and streams that fed into Yosemite Valley were as closely related as the ‘fingers to the palm of a hand’. The valley was not a separate ‘fragment’ but belonged to the great ‘harmonious unit’ of nature. If one part was destroyed the others would go down too.

In October 1890, only a few weeks after Muir’s articles had been published in the Century, nearly 2 million acres were set aside as Yosemite National Park – under US federal control rather than Californian state control. In the middle of the map of the new park, though, like a huge blank, was Yosemite Valley which remained under the negligent stewardship of California.

It was a first step but there was still so much to do. Muir was convinced that only ‘Uncle Sam’ – the federal government – had the power to protect nature from the ‘fools’ who destroyed trees. It was not enough to designate areas as parks or forest reserves, their protection needed to be watched and enforced. And it was for those reasons that Muir co-founded the Sierra Club two years later, in 1892. Conceived as a ‘defence association’ for the wilderness, the Sierra Club is today America’s largest grassroots environmental organization. Muir hoped that this would ‘do something for wildness and make the mountains glad’.

Muir continued to write and campaign tirelessly. His articles were published in big national magazines such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and of course Underwood’s Century – and his audience continued to grow. By the turn of the century, Muir had become so famous that President Theodore Roosevelt requested his company on a camping trip to Yosemite. ‘I do not want anyone with me but you,’ Roosevelt wrote in March 1903. Two months later, in May, the barrel-chested President, who was an avid naturalist but also enjoyed big-game hunting, arrived in the Sierra Nevada.

President Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir on Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley in 1903 (Illustration Credit 23.4)

They made an odd pair: the thin and wiry sixty-five-year-old Muir and, twenty years his junior, the stout and rugged Roosevelt. They camped for four days at three different places – among the ‘solemn temple of the giant sequoias’, in the snow high up on one of the huge rocks, and on the valley floor below the grey perpendicular wall of El Capitan. It was here, surrounded by majestic granite rocks and the soaring trees, that Muir convinced the President that the federal government should at last take control of Yosemite Valley away from the state of California and make it part of the larger Yosemite National Park.6

Humboldt had understood the threat to nature, Marsh had assembled the evidence into one convincing argument, but it was Muir who planted environmental concerns into the wider political arena and the public mind. There were differences between Marsh and Muir – between conservation and preservation. When Marsh had made his case against the destruction of forests, he had been a proponent for conservation because he was essentially arguing for the protection of natural resources. Marsh wanted the use of trees or water to be regulated so that a sustainable balance could be achieved.

Muir, by contrast, interpreted Humboldt’s ideas differently. He advocated preservation, by which he meant the protection of nature from human impact. Muir wanted to keep forests, rivers and mountains in pristine conditions, pursuing that goal with a steely persistence. ‘I have no plan, system or trick to save them [the forests],’ he said, ‘I mean simply to go on hammering & thumping as best I can.’ He also galvanized public opinion and support. As tens of thousands of Americans read Muir’s articles and as his books became bestsellers, his voice reverberated boldly across the North American continent. Muir had become the fiercest champion for the American wilderness.

One of his most important fights concerned the plan to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a lesser known but equally spectacular valley within Yosemite National Park. In 1906, after a major earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco, which had long struggled with water shortages, applied to the US government to dam the river that ran through Hetch Hetchy in order to create a water reservoir for the growing metropolis. As Muir took up the battle against the dam, he wrote to Roosevelt, reminding the President of their camping trip in Yosemite and the urgency to save Hetch Hetchy. At the same time, though, Roosevelt received reports from the engineers whom he had commissioned, claiming that the dam was the only solution to San Francisco’s chronic water problem. With the battle lines drawn, this became the first dispute between the claims of wilderness and the demands of civilization – between preservation and progress – that would be fought on a national level. The stakes were high. If parts of a national park could be claimed for commercial reasons, then nothing was truly protected.

As Muir wrote more rousing articles, and the Sierra Club urged people to write to the President and politicians, the fight for Hetch Hetchy became a nationwide protest. Congressmen and senators received thousands of letters from concerned constituents, Sierra Club spokespeople testified before government committees and the New York Times declared the fight a ‘universal struggle’. But after years of campaigning, San Francisco won and the construction of the dam began. Although Muir was devastated, he also realized that the whole country had been ‘aroused from sleep’. Though Hetch Hetchy was gone, Muir and his fellow preservationists had understood how to lobby, how to run a national campaign, and how to act in the political arena – thereby setting a model for future activism. The idea of a national protest movement on behalf of nature was born. They had learned hard lessons. ‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’ as Muir said.

Throughout those decades and battles, Muir had never stopped dreaming of South America. In the early years after his arrival in California, he had been certain that he would go, but something else had always intervened. ‘Have I forgotten the Amazon, Earth’s greatest river? Never, never, never. It has been burning in me for half a century, and will burn forever,’ he wrote to an old friend. In between climbing, farming, writing and campaigning Muir had found the time for several trips to Alaska and then for a world tour to study trees. He had visited Europe, Russia, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand but had not made it to South America. In his mind, though, Humboldt had remained with him throughout these years. During his world tour Muir stopped in Berlin, and had walked through the Humboldt Park which had been built after the centennial celebrations and paid his respects when he went to see the Humboldt statue that stood outside the university. His friends knew how much Muir identified with the Prussian scientist and therefore called his expeditions ‘your Humboldt trip[s]’. One even shelved Muir’s publications in the explorer section of his library ‘under Humboldt’.

Muir tenaciously clung to the idea of following the footsteps of his hero. If anything, as he became older his lifelong wish to see South America grew stronger. There was also less holding him at home. In 1905, his wife Louie died and then both his daughters married and had their own families. When Muir reached his seventies, an age when other men would have thought about their retirement, he still did not give up his dreams. He now turned his thoughts in earnest to his Humboldt exploration. Maybe it was the writing of his book My First Summer in the Sierra, in spring 1910, that renewed his wish to fulfil the dream of his youth – after all it had been his urge to be ‘a Humboldt’ that had made him leave Indianapolis and had brought him to California more than forty years previously. Muir bought a new edition of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and reread it from cover to cover, marking and annotating the pages. Nothing would stop him. No matter how much his daughters and friends protested, he had to go ‘before it is too late’. They knew that he could be stubborn. He had so often talked about the expedition, one old friend said, that she was certain Muir would not be happy until he had seen South America.