The Secret to John Muir's Success

John Muir hiked around in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and climbed a lot of peaks. He wrote about them also. Many of us think of him as the original and the most powerful voice for conservation in California. He and his associates were successful in saving Yosemite Valley from being turned into a reservoir, but lost the battle for nearby Hetch Hetchy. He could be considered the granddaddy of American conservation. As we face the biggest ecological threats since the Cretaceous Extinction, we should consider how John Muir accomplished what he did.

John Muir did not argue that setting aside wilderness was a good investment for society. He did not base his life on the conviction that we need to save wild biodiversity because it might come in handy for agriculture or forestry, or because trees protect watersheds. Thousands of people since Muir’s time, including me, have made this argument in books. Muir’s enthusiasm was based almost entirely on his love of the forests and mountains. If you read The Mountains of California, Muir’s Swedenborgian ecstasy is unmistakable in every paragraph. He loved the natural world so intensely that his thrill was contagious to everyone who knew him and to all who continue to read his writings.

Muir was the kind of man who would visit one of his friends in a cabin in the mountains; then, when a storm began, instead of staying inside, he would run out into the storm and experience the fulness of its power. He would watch the powerful winds bend the trees, some of them almost to the ground. He claimed it was no less safe to be outside in a storm than inside a cabin. Not only that, but during the storm he climbed the highest nearby peak, and climbed to the top of the tallest tree on that peak! He was the kind of man who would, without very much preparation, decide to go climb a mountain: running, leaping, and grasping onto vertical cliffs. When he found himself stuck in a place where he thought he would surely die, his strength was renewed and he scrambled to the top of the peak. The kind of energy that comes out of people in extremis would pour out of Muir all the time.

Muir did not look; he beheld. One way he did that was by thinking about the processes that were going on behind the scenery. He did not just see glacial lakes; he saw the processes by which glacial lakes were gradually filled with sediment and vegetation, and how lakes connected by streams were different from lakes isolated on the tops of granite peaks.

Muir saw a world that has vanished. He saw Native Americans hunting and foraging in the mountains, before the campaign to exterminate them proved largely successful. The California legislature put a bounty on Indians. Some, such as the Chumash, became extinct as tribes, though their genes live on; others, such as the Yokuts, had at least some cultural continuity. Moreover, the major disturbance that Muir saw was shepherds bringing sheep through the mountains, which damaged the vegetation and trampled the clear water of the lakes. He did not imagine the extent of disturbance that we see today even in the most protected places.

Muir’s writing was not, from my viewpoint as a writer, very good. He used every possible superlative and simile and metaphor for everything from a mountain peak to a dormant brown sedge. My soul feels tuckered-out after reading just a page of his book. And when he started writing about squirrels, watch out! I can do little better than to quote some of his description of the Douglas squirrel:

“He threads the tasseled branches of the pines, stirring their needles like a rustling breeze; now shooting across openings in arrowy lines; now launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the knotty trunks...punctuating his most irrepressible outbursts of energy with little dots and dashes of perfect repose. He is...a fiery, sputtering little bolt of life, luxuriating in quick oxygen and in the woods’ best juices...”

Muir made no attempt whatever at scientific accuracy. He just jotted down his observations, and how he felt about them; he had no time for scientific description—he used his time instead to make more observations. Sometimes he even got cause and effect backwards. Consider this passage: “The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty.” I think he really meant this; he thought the wind blew as it did because it loved the trees. We usually think of the little trees at timberline to have the shape they do because of their responses to the wind, over evolutionary and physiological time; but to Muir, the winds blew strong because that is what the little timberline trees need. But, you see, he left the scientific description, just as he left the practical values of the trees, to other people. He was too busy being ecstatic.

And it is that ecstasy that made his work successful, and that is why we remember him.

As far as I can determine from his writings, he lived entirely off of tea and bread. I doubt, however, that this was his entire source of physical energy. But the thrill of nature seemed to be his entire source of mental and spiritual energy. Nothing less than this, on our part, can get modern people to save the natural world. People have to love the natural world, which means they have to see us love it. What that means is, if I see you out on a nature trail, I am going to walk up to you and start talking about the plants, and from there, the entire ecosystem. You might think I’m a little crazy, but you might start loving the natural world too.

This does not mean, however, that Muir never performed scientific experiments. The next essay will be about a whimsical experiment that Muir performed on the animals of the forest.

The Thoughtful Observer

Yes, that’s what David Rains Wallace is. Thirty years after I bought it, I finally read his book Idle Weeds: The Life of a Sandstone Ridge. Wallace described the hidden life of a midwestern hill, day and night, throughout a typical year. I have not encountered such thoughtful observation except in the writings of Thoreau. The things you can discover by close observation! I hadn’t thought what a disaster for animals an ice glaze could be, cutting off their surface access and even the sharp ice cutting their feet. I didn’t know you could hear earthworms and harvestmen on the forest floor. Here is a sample of how closely Wallace observed a storm:

“The strange orange light intensified as thunder began. The rumbles and flashes were fait, seeming to come from high in the clouds, but it began to rain hard anyway. The light turned an extraordinary apricot yellow; the outlines of the trees were a sepia brown tiny against it. Then the sun set and the apricot modulated to a more normal pink. Gray clumps of cumulus appeared and spread until the western horizon was the color of slate. The thunder ceased, and crickets and an occasional katydid began to call, responding perhaps to changes in air pressure. A few fireflies still flashed their cold green lights in the woods, but much more numerous were their larvae, which resembled stubby millipedes and crawled on the ground. Some had luminescent abdomens, although they did not flash as brightly as the adults. Instead they glowed with a light so soft that they were conspicuous only on cloudy nights. They seemed to be everywhere on this warm, moist evening—wandering green or yellow glows that often faded mysteriously as the observer approached and the frightened larvae took refuge under a stone.”

Like Thoreau’s observations, Wallace’s book is not about an unspoiled wilderness but about a second-growth forest heavily impacted by humans. It has an old apple orchard, the fruits of which are still gathered by poor people. He explains how a forest hemmed in by subdivision development can quickly degrade even if it is officially protected. Raccoons search through garbage, and overbreed, and disease breaks out; and cats eat birds from the forest. And Wallace describes scenes very much like what I see in Oklahoma: men dumping large garbage (such as an old water heater) in the forest and then threatening people—using a shotgun—who criticize them for doing so. Humans are a part of nature, even the ones who despise it.

Wallace does not present nature as comfortable and cozy. He describes horrifying events, even though they are on what is to us a very small scale. This provides something of a plot to the book. Near the beginning, you meet the tree shrew mother, and throughout the book you discover how precarious her survival is. Her offspring eat their dead siblings, and even then barely survive. And at the end, only one shrew survives. I remember that when I was a child I watched a robin build a nest and lay eggs in the mulberry tree by my window. Then one day a blue jay attacked the nest and simply destroyed the eggs. Nature can be brutal. In Wallace’s book I encountered both the beauty and the brutality.

Wallace makes us feel the value of even a degraded spot in the natural world. The soil is precious; and if it were not for the living component of the soil, says Wallace, “its value would decline to that of gold and gems.”

Not all of Wallace’s writing is like this. Another book, Klamath Knot, though it too had much careful observation, is filled with confusing speculations, such as, why would evolution waste energy making legs on an amphibian larva if most tadpoles are going to die anyway? It is, he further says, uneconomic for millipedes to have so many legs. What do they need them for? And maybe chicken houses are superorganisms. He speculated that mushrooms may be degenerate flowers, and that mosses have almost no sexual recombination. These observations are pretty far off. Wallace is at his best when he is observing, not speculating.

Some of the happiest people who have ever lived have been those who closely observed the natural world, such as Thoreau, Edwin Way Teale, Herbert S. Zim, Hal Borland, and David Rains Wallace.