One Love-Harmony of the Universe
Streams of the River of Life
Peace to Every Living Thing
Appendix 2: Chronology of John Muir’s Life and Work
Appendix 3: Selected Resources
Dedication
KIERAN WILLIAM
AND
HANNAH ANNE,
WITH DEAREST LOVE
Acknowledgments
I AM FILLED WITH GREAT GRATITUDE to many people who have helped bring this book to fruition. First, of course, is John Muir himself, whose magnificent writings have inspired and informed my life. I am grateful to the host of Muir scholars and biographers, present and past, who have written on John Muir’s life, especially Linnie Marsh Wolfe and William Frederic Badè whose books still set a high standard of scholarship, and Muir’s most recent biographers, Frederick Turner and Donald Worster. I am grateful to the Sierra Club and the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific for making available online most of John Muir’s works.
Special thanks are due to my hiking companion and friend, Cynthia Shattuck, who urged me to stop talking about John Muir and to start compiling this book. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to three talented friends whose patient reading of the entire manuscript resulted in many valuable suggestions: David Bingham, inspired by John Muir, is a self-described “tree hugger,” the founder of Salem Land Trust, and serves on numerous volunteer boards and commissions involved with community participation in environmental protection, policies, and planning; Hilary Thimmesh, OSB, President Emeritus, and former professor of English at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota; and George Willauer, former professor of English at Connecticut College who taught courses on nature writers.
I am grateful to the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in Minnesota for providing accommodation, warm fellowship, and a beautiful natural environment to begin researching the book. Especially I would 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
