John Muir: My First Summer in the Sierra

I have long known about John Muir:  born in Scotland where there is a John Muir Trail along the Forth coastline, the father of American Conservation and founder of The Sierra Club.  What I didn't realise was his prowess as a climber, although he is very matter of fact about this.  I was fascinated to read in this book of some of the rock climbs he pioneered in the Yosemite area with virtually no equipment other than boots; some of these climbs are considered more than respectable even today.

I loved this book.  It describes his first foray into the High Sierra and what is now Yosemite National Park.  He was employed by a sheep rancher to to help drive his sheep from the hot and arid summer lowlands of the coastal plain up into the lush grasslands of the Sierra for the summer and eventually back down to the home ranch when the first storms of Autumn arrived.  He describes his first visit to Yosemite Valley in 1869.  Although, many years ago, I naively thought that Yosemite was pure and untouched wilderness (too much Ansel Adams!!!) I quickly realised that that is not the case - even Adams complained in a 1930s letter to his fiancee in San Francisco of the traffic jams in the valley.  Even so I was fascinated to discover that even in 1869 there was at least one hotel in the valley and tourists were already being catered for.  Despite all of my 21st century knowledge of American wilderness I very much enjoyed reading what it was like in the mid 19th century.

I was very pleased to read Robert MacFarlane's 2007 introduction to the book, however, as this very much puts it into context.  MacFarlane says of him that he grew to resemble the land he loved so much; he described himself as 'poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural. etc!!!'. There are says MacFarlane, so many Muirs:  long-distance tramp,  mountaineer, geologist, explorer, botanist, activist and the nature writer who communicates the joy of being out of doors.  He says of him that he is often thought of as third in a list which includes Thoreau and Emmerson at its top but it is his ablity to communicate that makes him at least as important as either of his predecessors.  In North America, MacFarlane relates, Muir is thought of as a prophet and as 'Father of the National Parks'.

In 1875 Muir wrote, "wilderness is a necessity; and mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."  The fact that landscape might be valued not in terms of economic or agrarian resources, but in terms of its profound spiritual effect is the legacy that he bequeathed to us today.  Robert MacFarlane also quotes from American novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner who said "we simply need....wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."  This reminds me of green therapy as written about by Richard Mabey in Nature Cure.

John Muir had an incredibly hard and bleak upbringing in Scotland by his Calvanist father and this continued after their move to America to be farmers.  However, in the course of that one summer in 1869, he describes his spiritual conversion from the son of a preacher-man to a child of nature.  When, in 1868, on arrival in San Francisco he inquired as to the whereabouts of the nearest wild place; he was directed to Yosemite and so signed on as a shepherd to lead sheep up into the high country and Yosemite.  He writes lyrically of his experiences.

Although admiring Muir, Robert McFarlane points out that he is not without his faults.  First of all he points out that he suffers from the kind of misanthropy that gets environmentalists a bad name.  He loathes the tourist and we hear the voice of the human-hating wild walker, the elitist ecologist: only those who look properly, only those who can apprehend nature's magic, should be allowed into these places.  More worryingly MacFarlane points out his attitude to the  Native Americans who were driven out of their lands in Yosemite.  He refers to them as dirty, superstitious, deadly, quarrelsome and wife-stealing.  He points out that the Yosemite that Muir experienced seemed in part so wild because its previous inhabitants had been evicted from it.  Yosemite was not empty but emptied out.  MacFarlane argues that Muir did not see this clearly enough.  He did subsequently, however, come to know them better and much later in life he would spend time living among various tribes.  He eventually became a significant advocate of Native American rights an history.

After that first summer, Muir hardly left the vally at all for six years.  In fact he became an early psychogeographer.  He said, "I must drift about these love-monument mountains, glad to be a servant of servants in so holy a wilderness."  So, says MacFarlane, drift he did; embarking on the derivé: climbing and exploring, walking thousands of miles, discovering living glaciers, mapping the distribution of giant redwoods, and building up the formidable archive of natural experience which would issue into his prose.

Later in life he turned political and began to lobby for the preservation of the landscapes he loved.  He founded the Sierra Club and was instrumental in the establishment of National Parks.  One main achievement was to explain the sense of the spiritual worth of wildness.  He asked not what wild places can do for us but what they can do to us.

Robert MacFarlane concludes his introduction by arguing that the cost of losing our wild places would be devastating and he quotes Auden who stated that 'A culture is no better than its woods.'

Sadly we are rapidly heading to a state where humans may become the first species to orchestrate its own extinction.  The planet would recover although our species would not.  We need the planet far more than it needs us.