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
chapter one
Earth-Planet, Universe
Commentary
DANIEL MUIR MADE A GOOD LIVING operating a feed and grain store in Dunbar, Scotland, a fishing and farming town on the North Sea. He and his second wife, Ann Gilrye Muir, and their growing family first lived over the store, but when income permitted, they moved to a house next door. Perhaps most people would have rested content with a stable, a profitable business, and a solid family, but not John Muir’s father, Daniel.
Daniel was a complex man, driven by deep religious convictions and always seeking a better path of being faithful. From his Scottish Presbyterian roots, he sought a simpler expression of the faith more in keeping with early Christian communities. When he learned that the fledgling Disciples of Christ had established centers in Wisconsin, he decided in late l848 to emigrate. Canada, reported to have vast open prairies suitable for farming, was a possibility, but he chose Wisconsin because of the church and because there were other Scottish families in the area.
In February of l849 Daniel Muir set off on the six-week journey with John, age 11, Sarah, age 13, and 9-year-old David. They left behind Ann and the four other Muir children until Daniel could find suitable farmland and build a homestead.
The family sailed from Glasgow to New York City and then traveled to Buffalo where they continued their journey through the Great Lakes and then by wagon to Fountain Lake, near Portage, Wisconsin. For the next eight years, Daniel and his sons chopped away the oak and hickory forest, pulled out roots and rocks, built a simple house, planted winter wheat and corn for the draught animals and vegetables for themselves. In the winter the work was bone-chilling, and in the summer they baked under the blistering sun. As John Muir wrote in the memoir of his childhood, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, “I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy.… And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long lines of zigzag fences.… Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.”1
Whether the children were sick or well, Daniel drove them to work from dawn to dusk. Twice John almost died—once from pneumonia and once when he was overtaken by toxic fumes from a well he was digging.
Believing that the Fountain Lake farm wasn’t fertile enough, Daniel bought Hickory Hill, a new half-section of land (320 acres) five miles from Fountain Lake. As John recalled, “…we began all over again to clear and fence and break up the fields for a new barn, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking, chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-raising.… ”2
An insatiable reader, the young John Muir was constantly borrowing books from friends and neighbors, but farm work kept him from attending school in America until entering the University of Wisconsin in l861. Always fond of “wildness,” as he called natural areas, John dreamed of the planet’s most distant and wild places. Not surprisingly, the books that particularly influenced him were: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1795) by his fellow Scot, Mungo Park, and Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814) by the German naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt.
The Muir children’s only free time was Sunday afternoon after church, Sunday School, and farm chores. Their only vacation days were Independence Day and New Year’s Day, but John and his brothers made the most of it. His father had built the boys a simple plank boat for fishing and swimming in Fountain Lake. John reveled in running through the oak groves and the grass-filled meadows. He delighted in springtime’s gift of wild flowers. He was particularly fond of lilies. He knew the identity of every bird, and he awaited the arrival of migratory birds that flocked to the Muir fields. His blood quickened to the haunting call announcing the loons’ return to the lake. The sights, the sounds, the music, and the scents of winter unfolding
