John Muir and the modern passion for nature

Environmental History

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 8-19

  Worster, Donald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NATURE CONSERVATION;

EID: 13944276801     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/10.1.8     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. John Muir, "The San Gabriel Mountains," Steep Trails, vol. 8, The Writings of John Muir, Sierra Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 147-48. The identity of Muir's fellow camper is unknown, although some years later a party found at the camping site a hermit dead in his cabin who may have been the hopeful immigrant. Another possibility is Carlos R. Cruz, who one month after Muir's hike in the canyon bought a cabin in the area;
2. Carlos R. Cruz, however, was from Monterey, California, and was already married with two children. See A History of Eaton Canyon Natural Area and Adjacent Ranches (Pasadena: County of Los Angeles Department of Parks & Recreation, n.d.), 6-7;
3. and Pasadena Star News, 24 February 1923.
4. John Muir, My Boyhood and Youth, vol. 1, Writings of John Muir 4.
5. For an introduction to this debate, see Robert C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
6. A provocative beginning toward this goal is Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
7. See, for example, Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997);
8. Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
9. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983);
10. and Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 125-39.
11. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), vii.
12. There is no satisfactory history of Muir's boyhood life in Scotland, from 1838 to 1849;
13. the best available accounts are Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973),3-23;
14. Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (New York: Viking, 1985), 16-27;
15. John Warfield Simpson, Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 23-33;
16. and Muir's own account in My Boyhood and Youth. See also T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950 (London: Collins, 1986);
17. and Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2001).
18. Muir's years in Wisconsin, including his days at the state university, are thoroughly described in Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 39-113.
19. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, vol. 1, Writings of John Muir, 354-55. The original version, which here differs little from the printed one (he capitalizes "Republican"), can be found in The Microform Edition of the John Muir Papers, published by Chadwyck-Healey (1986), reel 23, frame 111.
20. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 353. Other species, he argues, "are earthborn companions and our fellow mortals" (357).
21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 554. Tocqueville's traveling companion, Gustav de Beaumont, marveled at how hostile the pioneers of upstate New York seemed to be toward "the trees, their enemies."
22. Quoted in George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America, abridged ed. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959), 124.
23. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 451. See the very brief chapter 7, "What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Toward Pantheism," 451-52.
24. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 452.
25. For other analyses of Muir's religious development, see Mark Stoll, "God and John Muir," in John Muir: Life and Work, ed. Sally M. Miller (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 65-81;
26. Dennis C. Williams, God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002);
27. and Donald Worster, "John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism," in Donald Worster The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184-202.
28. See also, for useful background, Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
29. Quoted in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 2. For the original journal see Microform Edition of the John Muir Papers, reel 23, frame 152.
30. The best account of Muir's intellectual development in California is Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
31. John Muir, "Additional Notes... High Sierra," 19 June 1875, in Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains, 208. The original journal can be found in Microform Edition of the John Muir Papers, reel 24, frame 1160.
32. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, vol. 2, Writings of John Muir, 220.
33. According to the San Francisco Examiner (25 January 1916), Muir's estate was worth $250,000 when he died late in 1914, $ 184,000 of which was cash deposited in San Francisco and Martinez, California, banks, the rest being the market value of his land holdings. In today's dollars that would be equivalent to $4,584,666 (http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/).
34. See also Arno Dosch, "The Mystery of John Muir's Money," Sunset, 36 (February 1916): 20-22, 61-62.
35. Michael P. Branch has recently published the journals from Muir's 1911-1912 international travels, John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001).
36. The effort to set aside Yosemite Valley and its surroundings as a national park is told in Holway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965);
37. and Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
38. Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 1-37.
39. William J. Cadman and LoEtta A. Cadman, History of Rocky Point, Oregon (n.p., 2002), chapter 10;
40. Klamath Historical Society, Klamath Echoes 2 (1965): 21, 48, 68.
41. See also Maury Klein, The Life & Legend of E. H. Harriman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
42. See Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 83-87;
43. and William Kittredge, Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 54-55.