From:

The Idea of Wilderness - From Preshistory to the Age of Ecology , Max Oelschlaeger, 1991, Yale University Press, 477pp, copyright 1991 Yale University

CHAPTER SIX

John Muir

Wilderness Sage

If there is such a thing as an awakening, .Muir's eyes were opened by the mountains in the early seventies. His ioumals and letters from Yosemite are filed with references to baptism in light and water. ... He was trying in a sacred world, and as he partook of its reality and being he became a part of a world which was not a chaos, but a cosmos. ... Like Thoreau, he recognized his sacred spiritual state as opposite to the profane. He was cleansed by being converted from conventional or traditional man back into natural man. This was what it meant to be awakened. This is what he meant when he wrote to his brother that he had been baptized three times in one day and had "got religion." --Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way

Posterity has treated John Muir well, for the richness of his intellectual and institutional legacy continues to grow. In two decades, and especially in the ten years since the Muir archives were opened, the traditional view that he merely reiterated the tired truths of transcendentalism has been abandoned. A case can be made that he stands intellectually with Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold as a thinker whose work yet exerts major influence on contemporary American ideas of wilderness. In instrumental terms, Muir is the father of the American conservation (now preservation) movement; his influence is most visibly manifest in the activities of the Sierra Club, direct contributions to the creation of no fewer than six of America's premier national parks, and the radical amateur tradition in conservation. He is best understood as one of that rare breed whose life unifies theory and praxis: an American scholar who not only speculated about but also changed the world.

Inevitably, reinterpretations of men like John Muir (1838--1914) must occur, and in his case the past decade has been an unusually fruitful period

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of reassessment.' Yet, in spite of his evident achievements, the intellectual and cultural significance of his life and thought is difficult to categorize and comprehend. The established view is that Muir is simply a lesser transcendentalist, dimly mirroring the insights and following the methods of Emerson and Thoreau. He has also been interpreted as a Romantic, as a primitivist, and as one whose primary contribution to American culture was the popularization of wilderness philosophy. In short, Muir is often seen as merely bringing the idea of wilderness to public attention rather than contributing to its evolution. Justification for interpreting him as a "publicizer" rests in the popularity and influence of his writings, which converted countless Americans to the conservation cause. But to think of him as a nineteenth-century public relations person for conservation is to miss the philosophical meaning of his idea of wilderness." Muir's journal and published works from 1867 on confirm his dismantlement of a JudeoChristian-based anthropocentrism and an unmistakably clear grasp of a biocentric perspective on wild nature. His writings separate his wilderness philosophy from New England transcendentalism and include dimensions even Thoreau's idea of wilderness did not attain.' Furthermore, his wilderness theology--a profoundly insightful evolutionary pantheism-is a complementary development that revivifies an archaic sense of the sacrality of all being.

At least three problems deny ready passage to understanding Muir's idea of wilderness, however. One is that he wrote voluminously, more as a naturalistic essayist in the tradition of Gilbert White than as a systematic philosopher. Although there are passages of philosophical prose in his writings, he is not one to push an argument. One of his contemporary biographers candidly states that his forte is not "philosophical argument; he tends to make discrete statements, a series of insights and apercus, that pile up but don't really build a case. I often find myself wishing he would go into some point more deeply, instead of skipping past it."' As a result, Muir's insights must be sifted out line by line, since nowhere is there a complete gathering of his philosophical writing. Even then, any assertion of a systematic bent or conceptual center in the collection faces a formidable challenge.' To claim that Muir advances a biocentric idea of wilderness is thus to take on the burden of proof. Yet throughout his work we find a relentless questioning of the anthropocentric viewpoint on nature-the stance of the modernist, designated by Muir as Lord Man--and a continual affirmation of a biocentric perspective, where the human being has become an empathetic part of rather than scientific observer apart from nature.

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As Richard Rorty explains, the aim of edifying philosophers "is always the same--to perform the social function which Dewey called 'breaking the crust of convention.' " In his wilderness philosophy, as his recent biographers unanimously agree, Muir challenges the prevailing sociocultural paradigm: Modernism, the paradigm that reduces nature to matter-in mechanical-motion and sees in the wilderness only a challenge to the imposition of human values. So viewed, Muir's idea of wilderness presents an alternative view of humankind's relation to nonhuman others. Edifying philosophy is a protest, a reaction "against attempts to close off conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through hypostatization of some privileged set of descriptions."6 Muir breaks with the CartesianNewtonian paradigm and advances a rival idea of nature-as-an-organism that in many ways resembles earlier ideas of nature that rose in critical response to Modernism. In striving to achieve an empathetic relation with nature, and in viewing it as alive, Muir's idea of wilderness has a clear affinity with the Paleolithic mind. In other words, Muir's idea of wilderness is incommensurable with the idea of nature-as-a-machine.

A second problem is that Muir's nature vocabulary appears to be more theological than philosophical. Some passages in his texts give the appearance of being a popularized but orthodox version of physico-theology, where proof of God's eternal and transcendent existence is found in the beauty and design of nature. One early biographer observes that his "love of nature was so largely a part of his religion that he naturally chose Biblical phraseology when he sought a vehicle for his feelings. No prophet of old could have taken his call more seriously, or have entered upon his mission more fervently."7 Yet Muir's use of biblical phraseology illuminates his deepest thoughts, for the substrate of his psyche was grounded in the rigorous biblical instruction he received as a child. As Northrop Frye suggests, such socialization, apart from any religious value per se, provides, an "imaginative survey of the human situation which is so broad and comprehensive that everything else finds its place inside it."8 Recent biographies confirm that Muir's idea of wilderness would likely be cast in a religious rather than a philosophical or scientific vocabulary. Although his writings abound with scriptural allusions and metaphors, his seemingly orthodox religious vocabulary does not carry traditionalJudeo-Christian presuppositions with it.' in his late twenties, Muir underwent a religious conversion in the wilderness, a hierophany that suffused nature with sacrality and underlay the conceptualization of his mission. Animated by this epiphany, he achieves a level of cosmological sophistication that few have noticed, mistaking his biblical metaphors as an ex-

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pression of either conventional religious sentiment or transcendentalism. Michael Cohen, however, catches the essence of Muir's religious language, observing that his "was a wild and true voice which revealed the most radical, that is to say the most essential and deeply rooted Muir, pantheistic, ecstatic, and possessed by the cosmic vision."'"

Finally, Muir's original ideas are sometimes overlooked because he wore so many hats. Known well as a wilderness trekker, scientific observer, prolific and popular writer, and passionate conservationist, he is not often considered from a philosophical perspective. Yet that Muir attempts to comprehend the cosmic context--the entirety of the world, the things in the world, and the relations among them--creates a third problem in understanding his wilderness philosophy. While we live in an age of specialization, his intellectual reach was immense. Accordingly, philosophical interpretation presents a trying task since he knew nor only science but politics, not only the wilderness but human ways. One mark of intuitive geniuses is that, in climbing to the top of the mountain, they can share that vantage point with ordinary men and women. John Muir nor only climbed mountains, but he was able to communicate at least part of the importance of what he contemplated to the public; his writing achieved almost immediate popular acclaim. Educated Americans of the later nineteenth century were ready to read about the wilderness, mountain vistas, and giant sequoias, perhaps motivated by some lingering sense of what had been lost within the course of their own lifetimes. So, in spite of his lack of recognition as a fundamental thinker, we find in his work the very "underpinning of granitic truth," to use Thoreau's phrase, for a comprehensive wilderness philosophy.

Roots of a Wilderness Sage

The seeds of Muir's passionate lifelong attachment to the wilderness were planted in his childhood. Nature in any guise was a vital source of solace throughout his life, and especially during his youth. Escaping the routines of the farm, John would revel in the wild plants, animals, and vistas of the Wisconsin countryside. Flocks of migrating waterfowl set his mind wandering; bugs and tadpoles, trees and plants, virtually any lifeform, were of equal interest to him. By retreating alone into wild nature the harsh, even perverse treatment experienced in human company literally vanished. The contrast of the peace and beauty experienced in nature with the conflict and abuse imposed by his father--in the name of God cannot have failed to have had a deep, albeit unmeasurable, influence on

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the adult Muir. Frederick Turner argues that Muir's "experiences with the natural world of his Scots childhood had given him a kind of psychic and spiritual base, and in his early years at Fountain Lake he had drawn sustenance from this during the apparently endless days of his servitude until the kinship he felt for nature had deepened into a genuine need." L' In his twenties, after leaving the University of Wisconsin, he lived for a time in Canada, exploring the Canadian shores of Lakes Huron and Ontario. Here the countryside presented opportunities for extended sojourns into areas devoid of humankind. On one such trek Muir experienced an epiphany, collapsing into tears over the sight of an exquisite flower (Calypso borealis). "So unexpected was it," Turner writes, "and so surpassing its beauty here in the monochromatic swamp that Muir sat down beside it and wept. In the very center of his loneliness, here was this joyful beauty, fully at home." A skeptic might interpret such an episode as a result of fatigue or anxiety or as a meaningless outbreak of emotion. Yet this experience might also be seen as hierophany, as a religious experience occurring during a solitary wilderness encounter." This newer-engendered epiphany was not the only time wild nature provided a psychological catalyst for Muir, confirming for him the unity of self with cosmos. In letters to his sisters and to Jeanne Carr he observes that he took "more intense delight from reading the power and goodness of God from 'the things which are made' than from the Bible. The two books, however, harmonize beautifully, and contain enough of divine truth for the study of all eternity." Increasingly, Muir turned to nature rather than the Bible; but as Cohen points out, he thought of nature as a book, the Book of Nature, and he "read it largely as an early nineteenth-century scientist might, with the assurance that it was a sacred book.""

In the eyes of his father and all religious fundamentalists young Muir was on the path to spiritual ruin, since to them the wilderness was an abhorrent and evil place. From our vantage point he was verging on recognition of the sacrality of all existence. So viewed, Muir's Canadian epiphany was important in determining, both practically and intellectually, the course of his life. His breakdown on seeing the solitary Calypso borealis was not an index of fatigue or neurosis but a religious experience, a sign of psychic development, of self imaginatively becoming one with cosmos. Only many years later was this process completed, springing forth into a hull-blown wilderness theology--a remarkable post-Darwinian pantheism. But through his epiphany in the Canadian wilderness, divinity and its pervading sacrality--now free of the strictures of society--were

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manifest for him in nature. Muir now recognized nature as a reality that enframed and transcended all being, including himself. ¹⁵ At this time it cannot be fairly said that Muir was a pantheist. Though the customary Judeo-Christian view of wild nature, and of God's relation to creation, was becoming increasingly untenable, the God that he conceptualized was still transcendent and apart from creation. Arguably, he was now passing from an orthodox theism through a panentheistic zone of transition toward pantheism. Muir's new idea of God as manifest in nature helped him reconcile his developing sense of self with the streams of past influence: his religious indoctrination in supernaturalism and his love of the wilderness. By equating God with nature, Muir served the motive for metaphor--that is, the human desire to identify with the world of which we are a part--and reconciled these divergent streams of influence: supernatural and natural. Perhaps he had also intuitively realized John Dewey's explicit objection to supernaturalism as standing "in the way of an effective realization of the sweep and depth of the implications of natural human relations."¹⁷

_{Interestingly, and perhaps crucially, Muir never became an atheist, never explicitly rejected the Calvinistic theology of his youth. He simply outgrew the constrictions of conventional faith and developed a theology of the wilderness. By 1868, at age thirty, he had undergone what is best described as a religious conversion experience, and this transformed his view of nature and virtually everything else. After his conversion Muir's life was marked by a sense of mission. He became a "mountaineer," part sauntering scientist (geologist and botanist) and part wilderness theologian. Muir ultimately found God and celebrated the divine presence in the wilderness; the churches in town were part of civilization and all its torments. He abandoned the anthropocentric theology of Calvinism, replacing it with a biocentric wilderness theology rooted in a consciousness of the sacrality of wild nature. In his life "he was led from mystery to mystery with a deepening, widening religious awe, one that went far beyond the confines of conventional Christian practice. There would always be a certain amount of orthodox baggage that he carried within him .... But it would become lighter and lighter over the years so that in his late years some would call him a mystic or pantheist."}17 _{Nature became his temple. He wrote, "The dearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."}18 _{And as with Thoreau, intuition was his principal avenue of access to the truths of wild nature; his idea of wilderness grew through later reflection on these immediate encounters."}

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_{Muir was atavistic, a specimen as exotic as an aborigine walking the streets of New York City, a throwback to the Paleolithic mind. The visible details of his life tend to obscure the remarkable character of the man and his experiences--a life in which so many variables interrelated in such an unpredictable way that, in retrospect, he appears almost as a hero in a Thomas Hardy novel. In the final analysis one must say that John Muir lived to experience the wilderness, to seek that Thoreauvian "Sympathy with intelligence" that is the greatest end to which some people aspire. If anyone lived and thought according to the credo of Thoreau's masterful essay "Walking," John Muir did.} 20 _{For Muir "home," in the most fundamental sense of the word, became the wilderness. Civilization, rather than defining the locus of human beingness, was something to be tolerated, not celebrated. He wrote that "going to the woods is going home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally."" Crucially, Muir recognized that whatever humankind might be, one's essential human beingness could be known only in relation to the nonhuman other. Thus Muir's mature idea of wilderness eradicated the ontological boundaries drawn between wilderness and civilization. The flowing whole of nature was the ultimate reality, the process in which life and death (and all other human conceptualizations were merely part of everything else.}

_{Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing--going some where, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.... Rocks now from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and now in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart."}

_{John Muir and Emersonian Transcendentalism}

_{The longstanding scholarly view of Muir as transcendentalist is rooted in the assumption--not grounded in Muir's writings--that his idea of wilderness mirrors an Emersonian perspective. Transcendental philosophy did influence Muir. As Muir read the writings of Emerson and Thoreau at the University of Wisconsin, the theocratic paradigm of his father faced an intellectual challenge beyond the felt insufficiencies of childhood. Although his university experiences helped prompt the kind of intellectual reevaluations that many students experience on leaving home and parents, by no stretch of the imagination can even the Muir of his uni-}

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_{versity years be thought of as above all a transcendentalist. The fabric of his early intellectual life was woven of many threads; among these sources might be included the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Romantics more generally, as well as the thinking of various members of the scientific community who were moving toward an evolutionary view of not only the earth but the cosmos. Muir's thinking, his worldview, was already in process before he encountered New England transcendentalism.}

_{Emerson's ideas provided psychological support for a young man who, like Thoreau before him, was out of step with materialism and everyday American culture. But there was no Copernican revolution, no sudden conversion to Emersonian transcendentalism. Muir's idea of wilderness is closer to Thoreau than to Emerson. As Michael Cohen argues, although a transcendental tradition "flowed from Emerson to Thoreau and Muir, neither of the younger men were strict followers of Emerson. If the self they began to discover was suggested in Emerson's essays, both men found in practice that they had to entrust themselves to Nature far more than Emerson did. The old sage had argued that Nature was the first influence upon the mind of Man, but for Muir Nature became the alpha and omega of life. And so he parted with his teacher when he realized that he would be more faithful to the primary influences on his life."" Others have argued that Muir's wilderness philosophy differs in several ways even from that of Thoreau. George Sessions contends that Muir "overcame the subjectivism of Transcendentalism to a much greater extent than did Thoreau."" However this may be, the basic issue is whether Muir is to be understood as either an epigone of Emerson and the school of New England transcendentalism or as a fundamental, independent contributor to the idea of wilderness. If the former, then students of the idea of wilderness need read Muir merely to find concrete illustrations of the philosophical principles set forth in Emerson's essay "Nature." So viewed, Muir's writing is reduced to a mere exemplification, through concrete description, of the universal forms described by Emerson. In fact, the record shows that although Muir admired "Nature," he disagreed with much that Emerson claimed, and in any case went fundamentally beyond the shallow idealism of Emerson vis-a-vis wild nature.}25

_{In chapter 5 1 attempted to show through textual example that Emerson's nature philosophy, though he insisted on the importance of immediate, individual encounter, is rooted in an abstract idealism where wild nature is reduced to a mirror of the human mind, thereby facilitating the discovery of Absolute Spirit or God. "Nature" is Emerson's working out of this part philosophical, part theological position. A more representa-}

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_{tive title for "Nature" would have been "The Discovery of God through the Human Use of Nature," since Emerson interprets nature against a traditional religious and anthropocentric backdrop of human purpose and meaning. George Santayana suggests the difference between the genteel tradition and a thinker such as Muir in the following paragraph.}

_{A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert."26}

_{In contrast to Emerson, the mature Muir does not approach nature with an established belief in a transcendent God and then find in nature's beautiful panoply confirmation of that belief. Rather, he actually finds divinity in wild nature. Understandably, since his writings are suffused with passages that attribute nature's beauty to God's glorious handiwork, and even confirm God's existence through encounter with wild nature, he may appear merely to be reiterating Emersonian notions.}27 _{But this is not the case; Muir achieves an original relation to the universe to which "Nature" alludes. In effect, Muir becomes Home religiosus, whereas Emerson simply substitutes transcendentalism for a conventional religious orientation based on Scripture." For Emerson the ultimate outcome of encounter with nature-confirmation of God's existence--is virtually the same as biblically based faith, except that it is intellectually more justifiable since the conclusion appears as consequence of philosophical argument rather than religious conditioning, and is psychologically more convincing since faith rests on transcendental reason rather than the Bible. But nature has been reduced to epiphenomenon, mere phenomenal surrogate for God, confirming the glory of the human soul that can comprehend such a marvelous truth.}

_{A second fundamental difference between Emerson and Muir is that the New Englander always remains a theist. In contrast, through his original relation to the universe Muir experienced a religious conversion that led him to realize the sacrality of wild nature. The traditional anthropocentric God of Judeo-Christianity-the God of Daniel Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who privileges humans above all other elements of creation-is metaphysically transformed from an eternal and transcendent creator}

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_{(theism) into a temporal, immanent, and continuing process of divine creation (pantheism). This God incarnate suffuses the natural world, a world still in process; wild nature is ensouled, and no aspect of creation is privileged over any other, for all is sacred. Muir, of course, did not arrive at his wilderness theology all at once; but a close reading of his journal and published works confirms the progression of his thought toward an evolutionary pantheism.}

_{Unquestionably, Muir revered Emerson and benefited by reading his work. He apparently believed that Emerson had a better way of explaining God's relation to creation. Not satisfied with his own exposition of this relation, Muir greatly anticipated Emerson's visit to the Sierras in 1871.}

_{"I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean." This is strong praise, but Muir was to be disappointed; Emerson was not allowed to accompany him on an extended backwoods excursion. "His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be led to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping." The Bostonian attitude gave Muir second thoughts about the transcendental school that surrounded Emerson. "And to think of this being a Boston choice! Sad commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism." But he remained loyal to Emerson the man, still thinking of him as a friend even though he was disappointed in the visit and with the "glorious transcendentalism": "I quickly took heart again,--the trees had not gone to Boston, nor the birds; and as I sat by the fire, Emerson was still with me in spirit, though 1 never again saw him in the flesh."" The question of method is also instructive. Muir approaches nature from the standpoint of a radical and intuitive empiricism rather than an abstract idealism. By directly seeing God in nature, Muir cuts through the cake of social convention and achieves an immediate felt unity with the web of life.}30 _{To Muir books are essentially sterile, "at best signal smokes to call attention." His manner of approach was direct encounter without scientific category, religious presupposition, or philosophical method. "One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographer's plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul. All that is required is exposure, and purity of material. 'The pure in heart shall see God!'"}31 _{The methods of transcendentalism are to Muir just so much encumbering}

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_{baggage. The qualitative dimensions of experience, which for the modernist are ephemeral, contingent, and merely subjective, are for Muir real and objective characteristics immediately known. The learned treatises of scientist, philosopher, or religionist--which assume the truth and validity of socially defined categories--were themselves subjective. Muir's books, all that he needs, are found in nature. "Reading these grand mountain manuscripts displayed through every vicissitude of heat and cold, calm and storm, upheaving volcanoes and down-grinding glaciers, we see that everything in Nature called destruction must be creation--a change from beauty to beauty."}32_{' Of course, only the truly awake, the intuitively aware, the "sensitive soul," can read these messages; if there is to be any method then we must silence the mind and thereby bracket doxa. "Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter." J~ Thoreau, nor Emerson, is Muir's true kindred spirit.}34

_{The Fundamentals of Muir's Wilderness Theology}

_{in marked contrast with Emerson, the mature Muir equates nature with divinity. He is not a transcendentalist but a pantheist who, over the course of a lifetime of intuitive encounter with and subsequent reflection on the wilderness, develops an authentic wilderness theology. The entire world becomes a living and sacred community in which all creatures have purpose in their own right and no species enjoys special privilege. This totality is still in process, a living and glorious manifestation of God incarnate. Muir also abandons any conventional scientific view of nature (mechanistic materialism) and sees in the plants and animals, even the water and rocks, a world of living creatures and spirits that are more than mere matter-in-motion. Therein lie the outlines of his wilderness philosophy and a formidable challenge of exegesis. The development of Muir's idea of wilderness is marked by three moments, beginning with his realization that all of nature is animate, passing through a panentheistic zone of transition, and culminating in a biocentric-pantheistic wilderness paradigm.}.35

_{Muir's idea of wilderness perhaps pivots on his one-thousand-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico (r867). He left Indianapolis with fairly orthodox religious beliefs. Embarked on an odyssey of discovery, he was able to resolve intellectually what he must have realized, if only intuitively, as a contradiction from his earliest days in Wisconsin. Muir's Calvinist father had forced him to bend nature to agricultural purpose. How it must have}

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_{pained Muir to clear and burn the trees and brush, turn the soil, and reduce nature to a mere servant of human purpose. What had provided a home for myriad creatures was reduced to smoke and ash, a diverse biotic community transformed into a biological monoculture that soon depleted the soil.}

_{Set in the context of our study (see above, chapters I and z), the apostasy that Muir struggled to overcome was perhaps grounded in the Neolithic revolution: the age when humankind left Eden. Of course, we run the risk of overstating the importance of the agricultural revolution in determining the course of Western history. Yet surely that change initiated a process of sociocultural transformation that (for many reasons) created an ostensibly absolute divide between civilization and wilderness, between the primitive forager and the sophisticated agriculturist. Christianity can be seen as culminating the rationalization of agriculture, and Daniel Muir personified the Christian outlook on the natural world. No sooner had the first family farm been "won" from nature than Daniel Muir acquired a new property, nearly a half-section of timbered land, and set young John to clearing the forest. The harvest from the first farm had declined through the elder Muir's failure to maintain soil fertility. Yet Daniel Muir was simply living out the practical implications of his theology. Nature to him was primarily a commodity, and he was enervated theologically from feeling anything for wild nature; at stake were his soul and worldly success.'" Wealth was a clear sign that one was among the elect, predestined for a Heaven above this godforsaken wilderness.}

_{John Muir was nearly thirty when he began to walk from Indianapolis toward the gulf. "My plan," he observed in a fashion reminiscent of Thoreau, "was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest."" Like Thoreau's retreat to Walden, Muir left society behind, in search of something vital to life. As he trekked into the wilderness, he dropped traditional interpretations of wild nature by the wayside. He found not only the wilderness, the Cumberland Mountains, myriad plant and animal life-forms, but something else as well: the beginnings of a new way of experiencing wilderness, of perceiving and thinking. He was becoming a radical empiricist, opening his mind to speculative thought and the truths of intuition. Turner explains that Muir's jottings, recorded in the journal of r867, take on an "aboriginal tone... in which the distinctions prevalent in Western civilization between men, plants, and animals begin to be broken down and are replaced with a kind of mystical reverence for all forms of life."'" This assertion is correct, and yet}

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_{Muir's dawning awareness of the animate nature of all creation, and his so-called mystical reverence for life, are two distinct though complementary developments.}

_{The phrase "mystical reverence for life" carries pejorative connotations, implying that the veneration of organic being is independent of reason, grounded only in some intrinsically private feeling that objective thinkers do not experience.}39 _{Yet paradoxically, respect for the web of life is consistent with present-day biological and ecological knowledge. All organic being is intertwined into a living whole apart from which the existence of any single organism or species is not possible.}40 _{Muir's appreciation of these facts was revolutionary, far in advance of the conventional wisdom, but speculative rather than mystical is a more accurate appellation. Through speculative thought Muir realized that an animistic or organismic viewpoint possessed far greater explanatory possibilities than mechanism. Immediate experience revealed to him that mechanistic materialism --that is, nature viewed from a Cartesian-Newtonian perspective--was an enormous simplification of and abstraction from the reality of the natural world. The animate vitality of nature pervaded the cosmos. And since all of creation was alive rather than inert, it followed that a human being might feel kinship with the natural world: Muir here verged on recovery of the Paleolithic mind. Yet he did not reach this idea in one speculative insight. It was the outcome of a three-stage process (chronology) that was simultaneously psychological and intellectual.}

_{His A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, drawn from his journal of 1867, exemplifies the beginnings of this process. The book does not present a rigorous, ad seriatim account of philosophical analysis but rather reveals a psyche in transition. Throughout his childhood, much like cynegetic or archaic people, Muir had felt wild plants and animals to be kindred spirits, sources of solace, of wonder and adventure. Farming, as Turner suggests, threatened his sense of an affinity with the wilderness. "placed in an adversarial, exploitative relationship, an unremitting hand-to-hand combat with the land, he began in his adolescent years to imagine some way of being and thinking that would allow him to continue to love that with which he struggled."}41 _{So framed, the walk was the beginning of Muir's search for meaning, for a path with a heart."}

_{Near the end of his trip he contracted malaria and was bedridden; this protracted period of inactivity permitted him to reflect on his experiences of the previous months, and during his recovery Muir broke through to a clearly defined animistic perspective. On the journey this pattern had been obscured by the vivid details if his adventures. So pervasive was the}

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_{transformation that he perceived even plants and inorganic matter-in what surely must be seen as an evolutionary insight far in advance of its time--as endowed with spirit. "Plants," he wrote, "are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with!"}43

_{Virtually all of Muir's later works (beginning in r868, during his first summer in the Sierras) manifest this animistic vision.}44 _{After viewing Vernal and Nevada falls in Yosemite he was struck by the impression that "water does not seem to be under the dominion of ordinary [Newton's] laws, but rather as if it were a living creature, full of the strength of the mountains and their huge wild joy."" Even glaciers (frozen water) seemed alive and to have a mind of their own. Cohen captures this speculative bent to Muir's thinking; Muir witnessed (at Tuolumne Divide) that "a glacier had flowed uphill and over a ridge into Tenaya Canyon. This was a lesson about life. The tops of the mountains flowed into the bottom of heaven, the finite merged with the infinite. The message of an old Zen saying was clear: 'When you get to the top of the mountain, keep on climbing.' "4" On his trip to Alaska in 1879, after a glorious day's ascent to Glenora peak that concluded a two-hundred-mile trek, Muir felt the spirit of life pervading all creation. "The plant people seemed glad, as if rejoicing with me, the little ones as well as the trees, while every feature of the peak and its traveled boulders seemed to know what I had been about and the depth of my joy, as if they could read faces."" And in Our National Parks, perhaps his most widely read book, he clearly expressed his animistic vision. "When 1 entered this sublime wilderness the day was nearly done, the trees with rosy, glowing countenances seemed to be hushed and thoughtful, as if waiting in conscious religious dependence on the sun, and one naturally walked softly and awe-stricken among them. I wandered on, meeting nobler trees where all are noble, subdued in the general calm, as if in some vast hall pervaded by the deepest sanctities and solemnities that sway human souls."}48

_{Although the notion of natural entities as animate pervades Muir's 1867 journal, his pantheism and biocentrism developed more slowly. The first apparent movement away from a Judeo-Christian-inspired anthropocentrism began on his walk to the Gulf of Mexico. "The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or}

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_{render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator."}49 _{This was a radical departure from the conventional wisdom and a logical extension from an animistic perspective. If all of creation was animate, then no absolute distinction of human life from the remainder could be metaphysically legitimate. (Compare this to Emerson's comfortable and traditional viewpoint that distinguishes the human soul from the rest of creation.) Almost simultaneously Muir extended the logic of the position and began to develop a biocentric perspective.}

_{How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! how blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! With what dismal irreverence we speak of our fellow mortals! Though alligators, snakes, etc., naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.'"}

_{Yet Muir's wilderness philosophy remained incomplete. He had rejected orthodox Christian theology and its accompanying anthropocentrism but had not yet experienced the religious conversion that allowed him to see wild nature as itself divine." The Muir of A Thousand-Mile Walk is best understood as a panentheist rather than a pantheist, for he yet held God's essence apart from wild nature. Charles Hartshorne explains that "if' pantheism' is a historically and etymologically appropriate term for the view that deity is the all of relative or interdependent items, with nothing wholly independent or in any clear sense non relative, than 'panentheism' is an appropriate term for the view that deity is in some real aspect distinguishable from and independent of any and all relative items, and yet, taken as an actual whole, includes all relative items."" This distinction helps us understand the evolution of Muir's wilderness theology. The philosophically pivotal section of A Thousand-Mile Walk occurs at the end of Muir's recovery from malaria. A lengthy entry for October 15--"a great wild day" he spent wandering among the palmetto--confirms the thoroughgoing nature of his animistic vision, and his conviction that orthodox Christianity was both selfish and narrow-minded. He knew that the conventional wisdom was "that plants are perishable, soulless creatures, that r only man is immortal, etc.; but this, I think, is something that we know very nearly nothing about. Anyhow, this palm was indescribably impressive and told me grander things than I ever got from human priest." Muir now explicitly recognized that all creatures were as alive as he and that}

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_{they spoke a language more truthful than the priest, for the cleric in any guise viewed the world of nature in an orthodox way. All nature will fable, Thoreau reminds us, if we but let it. Muir did.}

_{I am now in the hot gardens of the sun, where the palm meets the pine, longed and prayed for and often visited in dreams, and, though lonely to-night amid this multitude of strangers, strange plants, strange winds blowing gently, whispering, cooing, in a language I never learned, and strange birds also, everything solid or spiritual full of influences that I never before felt, yet 1 thank the Lord with all my heart for his goodness in granting me admission to this magnificent realm."}

_{But Muir remains at this juncture a panentheist, for he thought of God's essence as apart from creation and prayed to this God for revelation. In this regard his view paralleled Emerson's, for nature confirmed that which could not be otherwise known. And yet he was breaking though the barriers of Modernism to a depth of sensibility both paralleling and transcending that of the Paleolithic mind.}

_{After completing his walk to the gulf, Muir left by boat for Cuba, and while there (thwarted in his plans to journey on to South America) learned of an economical passage to California. He later looked back on the stillborn plans for an epic trek through South America as fortunate, for in California he finally found his path with a heart. There he discovered Twenty Hill Hollow, a beautiful valley near Yosemite. This section of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf is reminiscent of Thoreau's "Natural History of Massachusetts," replete with detailed geological descriptions and observations of all manner of plants and animals. Most important, Muir experienced another epiphany. "Never," as he put it, "shall I forget my baptism in this font. It happened in January, a resurrection day for many a plant and for me." The sun washed down in what Muir described as a golden flood, illuminating the dowers. The parallel here to the blinding light that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus is obvious, for that light ultimately lead to revelation. So, too, would this California light, the "sunshine for a whole summer ... condensed into the chambers of that one glowing day," be the key to Muir's own revelation.}

_{Every trace of dimness had been washed from the sky; the mountains were dusted and wiped clean with clouds--Pacheco Peak and Mount Diablo, and the waved blue wall between; the grand Sierra [Range] stood along the plain, colored in four horizontal bands:-the lowest, rose purple; the next higher, dark purple; the next, blue; and, above all, the white row of summits pointing to the heavens.}

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_{It may be asked, What have mountains fifty or a hundred miles away to do with Twenty Hill Hollow! To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. They rise as a portion of the hilled walls of the Hollow. You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature."}54

_{Mensuration, and therefore a Cartesian-Newtonian perspective, was but a puny tool that disguised rather than revealed truth. The Sierras, of course, were one hundred miles away. But to the lover of wild nature those mountains were immediately present, a palpable reality indicative of nature's ever-present and enframing backdrop. Muir no longer confronted a nature reduced to mere matter-in-motion, known only by quantification of objective characteristics frozen in timeless mathematical truth, but was embraced by a living nature of which he was a part. Through his thousand-mile walk to the gulf, a path which ultimately led him to the mountains of California (1868), Muir had found his place in the cosmos, becoming part of a living world of kindred spirits.}

_{A second conversion experience, one that moved him beyond the panentheistic remnant of his Calvinistic past, occurred during his first summer (1869) in the high Sierras. He left society, in Thoreauvian fashion, so that "I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage." In the mountains the revelation of the previous summer was reaffirmed in a new vision.}

_{We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from!}55

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_{Muir's cognitive revolution was nearly complete: the conversion experiences cleared the way for a radical new wilderness paradigm. He now saw earth as one community of life everlastingly in process and virtually unlimited (infinite in its manifestations), and he had transcended the egotism that set humankind apart. Furthermore, he had abandoned the religious cant that salvation lay in eternal life after death. Such dogma was now revealed as a sterile human conceptualization reinforced by social convention and practice. Life and death were now understood as aspects of a larger cosmic scheme--the natural, wild process was the reality, the immortality, the glory, and the beauty. "Life seems neither long nor short, and we rake no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality."}56 _{Muir was not concerned with the salvation of one individual's insignificant and selfish soul, for he had left that orthodoxy behind. Near the end of the summer (September z) he reached what can only be understood as an abiding understanding of the Heraclitean reality of the natural world-an insight that was to strip the stings of mutable existence, and the notion of death, of their pain.}

_{One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature-inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, 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; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.}57

_{This insight remained constant throughout his life. In August 1872 he observed that "there need be no lasting sorrow for the death of any of Nature's creations, because for every death there is always born a corresponding life."'" And near the end of his life he wrote, in Our National Parks, thatto an observer upon this adamantine old monument in the midst of such scenery, getting glimpses of the thoughts of God, the day seems endless, the sun stands still. Much faithless fuss is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout mountaineer,}

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_{for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything worth seeing. One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.}59

_{Yet there remained a missing piece in Muir's wilderness theology-God incarnate. Although the idea that everything that exists is unified in a single process pervades his journal as early as 1867-68, he had not yet reached the conception that this all-inclusive unity was itself divine. In A Thousand-Mile Walk he prayed to God for a revelation, and in My First Summer he spoke of angels, implying that he still maintained supernaturalistic convictions. But by 1873 Muir's belief in such a transcendental realm apart from appears to have been abandoned. At the least he had reached a middle ground, that is, a panentheism that allowed for both the divinity of creation and a separate existence for a divine cosmic presence.}60 _{He had long studied the wonder of creation, the myriad species, and the interrelations among animate entities and the land, and he now saw nature itself as divine, for "all of the individual 'things' or 'beings' into which the world is wrought are sparks of the Divine Soul variously clothed upon with flesh, leaves, or that harder tissue called rock, water, etc." A few months later Muir observed that the "rocks and sublime canyons, and waters and winds, and all life structures--animals and ouzels, meadows and groves, and all the silver stars--are words of God, and they now smooth and ripe from his lips." Although the journal for r873 allows no definitive interpretation, it reveals a pantheistic perspective in that nature is conceived as a temporal manifestation of a divine soul. Read in context (that is, his conversion experiences and the evolutionary framework underlying his research), there is some reason to think that he was verging on denial of any absolute distinction between Divine Soul or God--as eternal and infinite-and creation itself--as temporal and finite. "What is 'higher,' what is 'lower' in Nature!" was the question he posed to himself. And he answered that "all of these varied forms, high and low, are simply portions of God radiated from Him as a sun, and made terrestrial by the clothes they wear, and by the modifications of a corresponding kind in the God essence itself." 6' Such a position--that the essence of God is changed--cannot be reconciled with any variant of pantheism that conceptualizes nature as a divine but merely temporal manifestation of a divine and eternal cosmic spirit.}

_{By 1879 Muir had reached a conception of God as entirely incarnate. Ten years in the mountains, free of religious convention while living in the immediacy of ongoing evolution, had revealed that God was nature, a}

_{P. 191 John Muir}

_{sacred living temporal presence in everlasting process. This was a speculative insight of sweeping proportion, for it restored wholeness and meaning to a world rent asunder by Modernism. Muir now understood Genesis as religious metaphor, for through actual encounter with wild nature he knew that "the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation." 6' As Joe Barnhart explains, "Pantheism has not known what to do with the idea of God as experiencing succession. Pantheism [typicallyl cannot recognize time as a part of God's own being.""' Muir appeared to have accepted the reality of time and its implications, for he no longer believed in a transcendent God remaining apart from nature. In the mountains of California he realized that he was witnessing an unending process of creation. He felt that "in very foundational truth we had been in one of God's own temples and had seen Him and heard Him working and preaching like a man."}64 _{This analogy must not be taken lightly, for it is incongruent with conventional Judeo-Christian theology (theism). Muir's God was like a human--temporally bound with a natural world. The heresy here is overwhelming, for the human being was not made in God's image, but God was fashioned by analogy in the same fashion as humankind, and thus was grounded in process: birth,life, and death. Muir had committed the same apostasy as Giordano Bruno: by making divinity incarnate, providence was denied, since there could be no supernatural spectator apart from the world with a divine plan in mind. And humankind could no longer be the chosen species awaiting eternal salvation while witnessing an essentially meaningless because preordained passage of time. Time for Muir had become real and irreversible, and the human being--both body and soul--bound totally with time.}

_{Muir, in other words, had realized that humankind enjoyed no special dispensation, and therefore he abandoned the doctrine of special creation and any supernaturalistic account of the human soul. In a passage (written in 1873) that parallels Thoreau's description of the sandbank in Walden, he posited the terrestrial origin of the human species. "Such a being is man, who has flowed down through other forms of being and absorbed and assimilated portions of them into himself, thus becoming a microcosm most richly Divine because most richly terrestrial, just as a river becomes rich by flowing on and on through varied dimes and rocks, through many mountains and vales, constantly appropriating portions to itself, rising higher in the scale of rivers as it grows rich in the absorption of the soils and smaller streams."}65 _{Muir thus overturned that dramatic inversion of Western culture by which the palpable reality of nature had been denied as mere appearance and the phantasmagorical, that is, the transcenden-}

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_{tal--God and Heaven--claimed as reality. This rejection of supernaturalism was fundamental to the evolution of Muir's biocentric outlook on the natural world.}

_{Muir believed in God throughout his life, but his God was neither the Cosmic Hitler of Daniel Muir nor the Transcendental Oversoul of Emerson, but a God incarnate and in process. Muir's completed wilderness paradigm thus represents a theological antithesis of orthodox Judeo-Christianity. His panentheism was perhaps an understandable zone of transition; but given his adolescent conditioning, the years of intimate, emotionally charged intercourse with wild nature, and his sense of the cosmos's unity, pantheism seems an inevitable outcome. Muir's outlook is clearly more a wilderness theology than metaphysics. A thoroughgoing evolutionary metaphysics did not appear until the process-relational philosophers of the twentieth century (Samuel Alexander and Whitehead). Indeed, Muir was not versed in the technical language of metaphysics. He was more interested in working through theological questions about creation and the origin of the human species than scholarly philosophical issues. Yet, as Alasdair Maclntyre argues, "Pantheism as a theology has a source, independent of its metaphysics, in a widespread capacity for awe and wonder in the face both of natural phenomena and of the apparent totality of things. It is at least in part because pantheist metaphysics provides a vocabulary which appears more adequate than any other for the expression of these emotions that pantheism has shown such historical capacity for survival."}66

_{Some, of course, would point to Muir's wilderness theology as generally muddled thinking, an unlikely combination of faith and reason. Environmental malaise is one thing, so they might argue, but there is nothing to be gained in our endeavors to clean up the earth and conserve the wilderness by bringing in "god-talk."}67 _{Yet Muir's god-talk provides an alternative vocabulary to that of Modernism. His pantheism was a reflective outgrowth from his childhood religious indoctrination, his adult religious experiences in the mountains, and his evolutionary perspective on nature. Pantheism allowed him to see the world steadily, and whole, and was thus complementary with both his psychic needs and his intellectual commitments. Indeed, all these were woven into a seamless fabric. And, crucially, there is no inconsistency in such a pantheistic reconciliation of faith and science. True, Charles Hartshorne explains, the Bible ...nowhere says in so many words that God is the whole of things, but no more does it say that he is not the whole. The "pan-}

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_{theistic" issue had not arisen, and so the wrong solution could not yet be given. (We so easily forget that our sophistication is a danger as well as an opportunity.) Of course "no graven image" of God was permitted, but what sculptor knows how to image the whole of things! What is there in the Bible to show that the word "God" refers to less than, or even other than, the all-inclusive reality--except a few passages which would discomfort traditional theists as much as they would any pantheist, e.g., "God walked in the garden." And Paul says that we live, move, and have our being "in" God. Precisely."}

_{John Muir, Evolution, and Biocentrism}

_{John Muir was squarely in the center of the first generation of human beings who began to struggle with the lessons of evolution, and he attempted to do so geologically, biologically, and ultimately philosophically. Muir grew up with Genesis 1.26: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' " Genesis, as many commentators observe, emphasizes humankind's "supreme place at the climax of God's creative work.""' Once set upon his life's work, Muir came almost immediately into opposition with creationism, achieving an evolutionary and proto-biocentric point of view in A Thousand-Mile Walk. "This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever." 70 Within a few years Muir also came to reject the catastrophist theory of geology, seeing with his own eyes that Yosemite Valley had been created by glaciers. The notion that Yosemite was primarily a consequence of a cataclysmic subsidence, and only secondarily or tertiarily the result of glaciation, harmonized with religiously inspired doxa but not with the speculative mind of a radical empiricist. Yet Muir went far beyond geology in his evolutionary outlook, ultimately bracketing the prevailing nineteenth-century ideology of Lord Man. He came to believe that humankind was merely one among many natural kinds existing within an interrelated community of life on earth and that through a combination of religiously inspired arrogance, economic greed, and sheer ignorance Lord Man was blindly destroying that web of life.}

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_{The idea that human rights were not privileged above all others further extend the dimensions of Muir's apostasy beyond pantheism. So farseeing was this idea, so out of step with mainstream culture, that it remains to this day a subject of philosophical, legal, and economic debate. The Endangered Species Act, designed to protect flora and fauna from eradication at human hands, has been criticized as blocking economic progress and human interests. The argument, advanced by C· D· Stone, that trees and other natural entities, such as rivers and perhaps even ecosystems,}

_{should have legal standing has been assailed as nonsense, since (according to Stone's critics) nothing has value independent of cultural context. And Aldo Leopold's land ethic--which advances from Muir's premise that all creation has rights--has been denied cognitive validity by a generation of analytic philosophers The wilderness philosopher Holmes Rolston suggests that the nub is simply put: "Can there be an environmental ethic in a primary, naturalistic sense, one where natural things are morally considerable in their own right!" Further, ought nature in some sense be followed! "Can it be a tutor of human conduct!"}72 _{Muir answered these questions affirmatively.}

_{Once freed of his father's immediate influence and creationism's shackles, Muir began to realize that all things on earth, indeed, in the cosmos, are interrelated His evolutionary studies at the university were merely a first step. By the time he spent his first summer in the Sierras his viewpoint had surpassed that of his mentors at Wisconsin, and he was beginning to suspect that his idea that nature could be read like a sacred book was not entirely accurate. "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like .., o,, must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains-beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken."}73 _{Muir was here thinking ecologically, although he did not characterize himself as an ecologist; he thought of himself as a mountaineer Nevertheless, his position is consistent with the idea of nature-as-an-organism and an ecological worldview.}

_{The question is to define as precisely as possible the term ecology.}74 _{By suggesting that Muir was thinking ecologically we mean that he not only began with the insight that all things are interrelated but heeded the methodological implications of that premise. The idea that the life world is exactly that--a seamless living whole--is, as Neil Evernden argues,}

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_{"something conventional ecology begins with but quickly forgets. For the very notion of interrelatedness contradicts the Cartesian premises which biology, in seeking to be scientific, readily accepts. Hence, there is a substitution or re-interpretation effected whereby 'interrelated' is taken to mean 'causally connected.' The two terms may sound similar, but they reflect different beliefs about the nature of relationship."}75 _{In adopting an ecological perspective Muir cast off the methodological constraints of Modernism, and therefore a traditional perspective on the human species, nature, and civilization. The knowledge Muir sought was not to the end of a Baconian-Cartesian power over nature but insight into (among other questions) humankind's place in nature: not as Lord Man but as a biotic citizen.}

_{George Sessions characterizes Muir as a mystical ecologist; evidence of an almost prehistoric empathy or Thoreauvian sympathy with the plant and animal world pervades Muir's work. Muir observed that "most people are on the world, not in it--have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them--undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate." But perhaps proto-ecologist is a " better term than mystical ecologist, for he was far more a radical empiricist than mystic. "There are," Muir argued, "no square-edged inflexible lines in Nature. We seek to establish a narrow line between ourselves and the feathery zeros we dare to call angels, but ask a partition barrier of infinite width to show the rest of creation its proper place." His affinity with nature was (in methodological terms) grounded in an openness to relations that are as arguably real as the notion that nature can be understood through a machine metaphor and efficient causation. Muir knew through his observations that the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview was merely a perspective, not the definitive scientific viewpoint. And he was intuitively aware of organic wholeness. "Most civilized folks cry morbidness, lunacy upon all that will not weigh on Fairbanks's scales or measure to that seconds rod of English brass. But we know that much that is most real will not counterpoise cast-iron, or dent our human flesh."'" Here Muir was bearding the lion in its den, for the modernist believes that only primary qualities capable of mensuration are real and that wholes are simply collections of parts. But for a radical empiricist, much that is real eludes the cognitive grasp of Modernism, including comprehension of Home sapiens as a part of nature.}

_{Roderick Nash argues correctly that Muir anticipated the ecological insights of Aldo Leopold, for Muir never systematically developed his thinking on ecology per se.}77 _{Yet this is entirely understandable, for ecology}

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_{did not yet exist as a discipline. And neither did an explicitly holistic and organismic paradigm. There were neither such process-relational philosophers as Alfred North Whitehead nor such systems theorists as Ludwig von Bertalanffy for Muir to consider. His incipient holism and organicism came from the Romantics and Thoreau, and the traditions of natural theology, rather than from any paradigmatic reformation. Ernst von Haeckel (1834-1919), usually recognized as the founder of ecology, was Muir's coeval, and though the smell of ecology was in the air, even Haeckel did not fully realize its theoretical (inferential) dimensions.}78 _{He thought of Oekologie as a descriptive term, and it remained for others to comprehend the dynamic principles inherent in the ecological paradigm. In consequence, ecology as an evolutionary science did not nourish until well into the twentieth century. Interestingly, Haeckel was--like Muir--a pantheist. Anna Bramwell insightfully argues that "the extraordinary influence of Haeckel and his successors can be attributed, in part, to the quasi-religious appeal, the incipient pantheism of his picture. But there is a deeper appeal; the return to a god-impregnated nature, which had been banished from the North [and Western culture more generally by Christianity. This void ... could now be filled, and filled by a convincing science-oriented ethic, that did not depend on received myths." 79 Clearly, Haeckel and Muir were in many ways responding to the same cultural circumstances, most pointedly the collapse of the argument from design and the realization that faith in God's providence was untenable. So viewed, both Haeckel and Muir were confronting the scientific question of how the human species was related to the rest of nature and the ethical question of what--if anything--did life mean?}80 _{Classical science, as epitomized by the Baconian-Cartesian perspective, provided no answers and therefore no ethical guidance, for humankind was conceived as nothing more than the master and possessor of nature.}

_{Even during his first summer (18h8) in the Sierras Muir was struck again and again by human blindness to the community of life. Reflecting on poison ivy he observed that "it is somewhat troublesome to most travelers, inflaming the skin and eyes, but blends harmoniously with its companion plants, and many a charming newer leans confidingly upon it for protection and shade.... Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, 'Why was it made!' goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself." Viewing nature ecologically, Muir recognized that in the wilderness all plants and animals, including poison ivy and rattlesnakes, were}

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_{parts of an organic whole. Only from a narrow anthropocentric and ecologically false human perspective were these things pernicious. Similarly, Muir observed that "'sheep men' call azalea 'sheep-poison,' and wonder what the Creator was thinking about when he made it--so desperately does sheep business blind and degrade."" Yet azalea had more right to exist on mountain slopes than sheep. Muir even questioned an anthropocentric view of climatological variation. "When an animal from a tropical climate is taken to high latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates." In retrospect, Muir appears more a proto-ecologist, or even deep ecologist, than a nature mystic. Through observation he repeatedly confirmed that all things were in process, and that Homo sapiens--like it or not was part of the web of life. From his ecological vantage point Muir anticipated the shape of our own so-called environmental crisis, for he recognized that Lord Man lived in oblivion to the fact that all living things are interconnected. Farmers and ranchers provided almost perfect examples of what Muir now understood to be the environmental consequences of human short-sightedness and narrowness. His own experiences in Wisconsin were sufficient grounds to indict the farmer, and he had seen in California that ranchers would graze hordes of "hoofed locusts" on mountain meadows with often ruinous results--destruction of rare species or even an entire alpine ecosystem. "The glory of these forest meadows," Muir wrote, "is a lily (L. parvum).... And to think that... sheep should be allowed in these lily meadows! after how many centuries of Nature's care planting and watering them.... And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens.""}

_{Muir was perhaps most sensitive to the assault on North American forests set in motion by unrestrained deforestation. Logging dramatically affected watersheds. Rainfall, formerly slowed naturally by the forest canopy and root system, and allowed to percolate into the ground, now rapidly ran off denuded mountain slopes, eroding and carrying off the life sustaining soils (themselves accumulated over eons), and causing siltation and flooding problems at lower elevations in the watershed. Muir equated the unrestrained cutting of virgin forest with "robbery and ruin," and argued "that a change ... to a permanent rational policy is urgently needed}

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_{nobody with the slightest knowledge of American forests will deny."} 84 _{Muir had realized that human avarice, particularly the economic greed engendered by capitalism, was virtually unchecked.}

_{Foresters would fell titans hundreds, even thousands of years old, take out only the heartwood and abandon the rest, failing even to replant the forest, raped and pillaged in a matter of years. "Any fool," Muir argued, "can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones." He wondered why humans would cut a tree thousands of years old for no more reason than to use a cross-section to build a dance floor, since from his empathetic and ecologic perspective the tree was a living patriarch to be revered. "Great trees and groves used to be venerated as sacred monuments and halls of council and worship. But soon after the discovery of the Calaveras Grove one of the grandest trees was cut down for the sake of a stump! The laborious vandals had seen 'the biggest tree in the world,' then, forsooth, they must try to see the biggest stump and dance on it." SS Perhaps it is fair to say that John Muir, in recapturing an almost Paleolithic awareness of the relations between humankind and nature, began thinking like a forest: the trees were kindred spirits, and going into the woods was going home. A green world with its forests intact was a far richer and more interesting world, and a better world than one where humankind exploited nature for the ephemeral, merely economic purposes of Lord Man. Almost beyond question Muir had rejected the notions that humankind could be adequately understood as Homo oeconomicus and that human beings stood in merely economic relations to nature. He had become Home religiosus, and through the wilderness a window onto the universe had been opened, for in the wilderness he stood reunited with an eternal mythical present--the point of origin.}

_{Crucially, Muir advanced from his ecological vantage point on the community of life to the then radical notion that infrahuman species had rights. Given the intellectual context of the nineteenth century, any premise that the ]and, plants, and animals had rights bordered on lunacy."" Even such luminaries as George Marsh, whose Man and Nature revealed the adverse consequences of human modification of the natural landscape, stayed within the encompassing frame of Modernism. Marsh was primarily concerned with using resources efficiently and maximizing social utility. And the U.S. Supreme Court, ostensibly a citadel of enlightened mid-nineteenth-century opinion, viewed Negro slaves as property and thus denied them recognition as human beings. The Northern victory in the}

_{P. 199 John Muir}

_{Civil War, of course, ended the practice of slavery and extended basic rights to all human beings. But Muir's idea that natural entities had rights just as human beings started no war. Although legions of idealists were prepared to battle for the rights of slaves, few were prepared to uphold the rights of flora and fauna to free existence.}

_{Muir realized early in life that Judeo-Christian attitudes, reinforced by the Protestant ethic and industrial technology, underlay the economic exploitation of wild nature. As his thinking developed, questions of both guiding ends and appropriate controls on human actions became increasingly important. Although such concerns had probably nagged him as he pressed nature into service on the farm in Wisconsin, once he saw the larger world they grew even more urgent. Muir could not think that Home sapiens was the ultimate climax of God's work or that human purposes were more important than any other. Sheep were more than "food and clothing," whales more than "storehouses of oil," plants more than other useful items "for us." Yet he realized that the conventionally pious could not see that humankind was deeply entwined in the community of life. He began to notice the inner contradictions in the modern view that humans were born to reign over nature, arguing that those who proclaimed that God made nature for Lord Man, those "profound expositors of God's intentions," had glossed over the other side of nature, such as human eating animals and crop-eating insects. "Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these)," he asked wryly. "Oh, no! Not at all!," replied his Euthyphro, his Everyman. "These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the Devil." Muir could no longer accept the doctrine of original sin any more than special creation, nor the explanation that evil was the Devil's work.}

_{Now, it never seems to occur to these farseeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation! And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit--the cosmos! The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge"}

_{Muir also came to question human arrogance and pride in dominating nature, believing that nature's ways were superior to prevailing cultural}

_{P. 200 John Muir}

_{practices and that human beings who lived in harmony with nature's economy lived a better life. One example was his outlook on the relative merits and demerits of wild and domesticated animals. Compared to human methods that produced such animals as domestic sheep, "nature's method of breeding and reaching seems to lead to excellence of every sort."}88 _{In a famous essay entitled "Wild Wool," Muir argued that the wool of wild sheep was superior to that of the domestic breeds and that both human beings and sheep would be improved by an infusion of wildness. "A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men and sheep.""' Reveling in the beauty of butterflies, he observed that even if we regard them "only as mechanical inventions, how wonderful they are. Compared with these, Godlike man's greatest machines are as nothing." Observing the cleanliness and orderliness of natural plants and animals, he noted how "strange that mankind alone is dirty"90}

_{John Muir in Cultural Context}

_{Regrettably, Muir's seminal work has generally been ignored by the intellectual community.}91 _{Contemporary environmental philosophy and history too often disregard the past. Since, as Morton White suggests, we live in an age of analysis, then perhaps we can understand why the past is neglected. Time, and therefore history, is not real to the children of Descartes. Furthermore, Muir never organized the elements of his biocentric philosophy into a comprehensive treatise. Clearly, his work was more than anticipatory; he was on the cutting edge of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and the associated attempt to understand its ethical implications. Donald Worster argues that the Darwinian paradigm and theory of evolution returned to Western "thought an awareness of natural kinship that appears to be universal among pagan cultures, including the so-called primitive peoples of the world." 9' Insofar as our contentions that the Paleolithic mind was rekindled in Muir and that he saw the world evolutionarily and therefore ecologically are correct, then any systematic study of his writings must recognize that he advanced many of the principles that define contemporary biocentrism. Simply stated, John Muir had realized that humankind was merely one species among many; that the human species was bound with the community of life through interdependent relationships; that all members of the community of life had their own (teleonomic) ends, the actualization of which was necessary to their well-being and survival; and that Home sapiens had neither intrinsic right nor religious justification to thwart those purposes. Consequently, it was}

_{P. 201}

_{incumbent upon the human species to rethink its ethical relation to the rest of creation.}

_{Like the conservation movement itself, determination of the consequence of Muir's wilderness philosophy is in process. Steven Fox argues that Muir was the philosophical inspiration for the radical amateur tradition in conservation, especially as this movement was and remains distinct from the professional, utilitarian tradition epitomized by Gifford Pinchot and the conservation establishment. (See below, chapter g, for further discussion.) According to Fox, the radical amateur tradition revolves around the philosophical center established by Muir and is at base profoundly antimodern. "Drawn from an incongruous range of intellectual and political backgrounds, antimodernist thinkers converge on a single point: modern progress--implying cities, technology, and human arrogance-as ambiguous at best, probably nothing more than a harmful illusion that exchanged sanity and wholeness for less important physical improvements." 9) Fox attempts to establish his case (that Muir's thought is antimodernist) by distinguishing antimodernism from another stream of critical thought which he calls the radical tradition. He contends that this radical tradition--flowing our of Marx--has found a home in America through the "progressive-New I)eal lineage in government." Among its identifying characteristics are its materialism, skepticism of religion, urban orientation, and, crucially; its "liberal [here read Judeo-Christian and Marxian] view of history as progress." According to Fox, the antimodernist tradition, in distinction from the radical tradition, views the history of civilization as "decline and regression." Further, it is "quirkily religious," "oriented toward rural and wilderness areas," and "esthetic and spiritual in values." Interestingly, Fox believes that antimodernism has been "overcome by the general course of events," even though "antimodernist thinkers comprise an impressive roster of the most powerful and original minds [Thorstein Veblen, Henry Thoreau, Henry George, T. S. Eliot, Lewis Mumford] in American history.""}

_{If Fox is correct that antimodernism is pragmatically moribund, then the answer to the question as to whether wild nature has a future is academic. For in terms of his own argument the institutions of Western liberal democracies will inexorably grind on, grounded in the beliefs that progress is a law of nature and that humankind is superior to and apart from the rest of creation, in a last fey surge of economic growth and environmental imperialism.}95 _{Fox's view is much like the opinion expressed by Roderick Nash near the end of Wilderness and the American Mind: neither sees the wilderness as having any realistic future, and both agree that the pro-}

_{P. 202 John Muir}

_{fessional conservation movement--which dominates both governmental policy-making and implementation, as well as educational policy in the nation's colleges and universities--is merely part of the modern project. As Robert Paehlke observes, "Too often agencies established to protect and conserve end up indistinguishable in outlook from the interests they are established to regulate.""}

_{What Fox proposes in his study is in effect a revisionist reading of the American conservation movement, pivoting in part on the thought of Muir and more generally upon antimodernism. His point, as a historian of the conservation movement, is that the official view of conservation has neglected the antimodern strain, and that in consequence much of the reforming potential of conservation has been thwarted.}97 _{Even more pointedly, "the Muir tradition of the radical amateur in conservation has barely been acknowledged, much less interpreted." 98 The ecologist David Ehrenfeld advances a similar and supporting thesis in his book, Conserving Life on Earth, distinguishing between resource and holistic schools of conservation, and explicitly associating Muir with this latter view. Resource conservation (Fox's professional tradition) uses the bandages and palliatives of mainstream ecology to ensure that advanced industrial societies extract the last measure of value from the natural world, and accordingly does not question the underlying ethical assumptions of that culture. Holistic conservation (Fox's radical amateur tradition) actually attempts to reconcile "the needs of men with the requirements for stability of the natural world."" Neil Evernden's remarkable study, The Natural Alien, goes beyond Ehrenfeld's analysis toward Fox's point--humankind's efforts to conserve life on earth paradoxically conceal from view the underlying presuppositions of Modernism itself.}

_{Muir might also be understood as a postmodernist instead of an antimodernist. Insofar as antimodernism ideologically converges on a rejection of the idea of progress, then it is an oversimplification of a complicated historical movement, and an interpretation of Muir as a postmodernist is preferable. Modernism is a complicated concatenation of ideological presuppositions, including ideas that progress is inevitable, that the power of science and technology is unlimited, that humankind represents the apex of creation, and that the natural and cultural worlds can be understood on the basis of a machine metaphor. Truly, Muir's wilderness paradigm is radically disconcordant with these assumptions. Accordingly, Fox is correct in arguing that Muir's wilderness philosophy possesses all the identifying characteristics of antimodernist thought, although we demur from thinking of Muir's pantheism as "quirkily religious," since}

_{P. 203}

_{theism, for example, appears profoundly peculiar from the perspective of philosophical naturalism.}

_{But to think of Muir and kindred spirits like Thoreau as antimodernists is to enable the continued dominance of the environmental movement by resourcism or resource conservation.}100 _{The world-in-force, as all the lessons of anthropology and sociology confirm, is resistant to fundamental change. If Muir's thought, and that of the radical amateur tradition in conservation, is itself defined only through opposition to the status quo (Modernism), then it is at best a final, futile effort of protest against nearly overwhelming forces of history. Yet if we understand Muir as representing the leading edges of postmodern thought, then our assessment of the contemporary relevance of his life and thought changes dramatically. Setting Muir in a postmodern context is based in part in understanding him as a proto-ecologist-that is, as a thinker who in the late nineteenth century started to come to grips with the lessons of evolution and the failures of modern culture. John B. Cobb argues that postmodern thought generally is identified by an ecological or holistic perspective, which, among other attributes, eliminates mind-matter and subject-object dualism. A postmodernist is one "for whom the vision of the interconnectedness of all things has become the inclusive context within which" virtually all things and relations--both theoretical and practical--are seen.}101 _{In short, to think as a postmodernist is to presuppose, as Muir did, that the world is an interdependent and unified whole in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; in other words, the many parts that constitute the world system are internally related.}

_{Viewed thus, Muir's work bears all the marks of constructive postmodernism rather than deconstructive antimodernism. Muir's idea of wilderness is not so much antimodern as positively visionary; he presents an alternative set of presuppositions, concepts, and/or vocabulary for understanding reality. Constructive postmodernism, David Griffin argues, "involves a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious institutions. It rejects not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the [classical] ... natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview." As we have seen, Muir's wilderness paradigm affirmatively incorporates all of these elements (the scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious). Furthermore, constructive postmodernism "opens itself to the recovery of truths and values from various forms of premodern thought and practice that had been dogmatically rejected by modernity," but does not seek to return to some golden age in the past.'"' Muir seeks to revivify an ancient idea of a living, organic nature that can be known}

_{P. 204 John Muir}

_{immediately and qualitatively. The final chapter has yet to be written; but insofar as Rorty is right in asserting that "we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood," then Muir's role in the history of the West shall continue to grow.'"' His is a bold and alternative vision, yet consistent with fundamentals of the human project: for he believes that human beings can know God, truth, and beauty.}

_{Footnotes for Muir Paper}

_{Footnotes: Chapter 6.John Muir}

_{1. See Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacyl The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, I98I), reissued as The American Conservation Movement: lohn Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, rg85); citations herein are from the Wisconsin edition. See also Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: lohn Muir nnd American Wlldemers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, rg84); and Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: lohn Muir in His Time and Our Own (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), reissued as a Sierra Club Books edition, I98r.}

_{2. There are a few studies of the philosophical implications of Muir's work; see, e.g., Bill Devall,"John Muir as Deep Ecologist," Environmental Review (Spring ry82). To his credit, Roderick Nash recognizes Muir as an important figure in the wilderness movement, but other intellectuals (e.g., Lynn White, Jr., Paul Taylor) ignore his work despite its conceptual precedence. Wilderness practitioners (foresters, ecologists, and wildlife scientists) and preservationists have been more attentive to Muir's writings: see, e.g., John Daniel, "The Long Dance of the Trees:' Wi[derness 51 (Spring I~88): '9-34·}

_{3. The word biocentrism (bios means life) connotes the idea that life is at the center of existence, the most basic principle of being.}

_{4. Stephen Fox, "Author's Response:' in Bill Devall, review of John Muir and His Legacyl The American Conservatron Movement, by Stephen Fox, HumboldtJournal of Social Relations g (Fall-Winter I981-82): Ig7}

_{5· See, e.g., John Muir, The Wilderness World oflohn Muir, ed. Edwin Way Teale (Boston: Houghton Mifnin, IgSq), esp. sec. 7, "The Philosophy of John Muir." This material runs a scant thirteen pages (31r-23). See also J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethics Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, Ig8y). Callicott argues that although Muir advocated the idea that humans had ethical responsibilities to nonhuman others, he "neither fully articulated nor fully grounded it, as Leopold did, in a supporting matrix of ideas" (r+3).}

_{6. Porty, Mirror ofNature, 379~ 377}

_{7· William Frederic BadP, "introduction," in John Muir, A Thorrsand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston: Houghton MiMin, I9I6), xxi. One might com-}

_{Notes to Pages 174-177 t Notes to Pages 178-182 413}

_{pare Muir's use of biblical phraseology with Nietzsche's in Thus Spake Zarathustra.}

_{8. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ~9643, rIr.}

_{9. The word orthodox comes from the Greek root orthodoxein, which means right or true opinion, especially as defined by traditional authority. Orthodoxy of any kind (religious, economic, political) is directed toward maintaining an established belief structure rather than facilitating its modification. Some readers interpret Muir's views on God and creation as consistent with traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs. But such interpretation hinges precariously on an argument committed to the premise that belief in God's immanence is orthodox, since Muir clearly expresses that belief.}

_{10. Cohen, Pathless Way, IzS}

_{11. Turner, Rediscovering America, 56-57·}

_{12. Turner, Rediscovering America, 116. These two interpretations are not necessarily contradictory. Many techniques, including fasting and sleepless vigils, have been used to promote religious experiences.}

_{13. John Muir, Letters to a Friend: Written To Mrs. Ezra Carr, 1866r879~ cited in Cohen, Pathless Way, Io9 See also Turner, Rediscovering America, lzo.}

_{14· Cohen, Pathless Way, rog.}

_{15· See Callicott, Land Ethic, for a useful discussion of differences between this kind of ecologically based holism and the mystical holism of some Eastern philosophies and religions. In the Hindu equation that Atman = Brahman, for example, the diverse natural world is dismissed as an illusion. "The unity of things is thus substantive and essential and the experience of it homogeneous and oceanic" (III). In distinction, an ecological perspective views the diverse world of natural things as an internally related whole, where individuals are defined in relation to that nexus of relations. Clearly, then, there are still real--qualitatively and quantitatively discriminated-things and selves. "The multiplicity of particles and of living organisms ... retain, ultimately, their peculiar, if ephemeral, characters and identities. But they are systemically integrated and mutually defining. The wholes revealed by ecology ... are unified, not blankly unitary; they are 'one' as organisms are one, rather than 'one' as an indivisible, homogenous, quality-less substance is one" (Irr).}

_{16. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, '934), 80.}

_{17· Turner, Rediscovering America, 7r.}

_{18. Muir, Wllderness World, ~rz.}

_{19. Muir kept a journal throughout his life, and he mined it to produce his}

_{books, with many passages being almost verbatim transcriptions. The journal itself is in part the product of later renection.}

_{20. See Cohen, Pathless Way,'40-4+· Cohen recognizes the Thoreauvian strain in Muir, although he largely interprets Thoreau along lines of transcendental orthodoxy. Muir had read much of Thoreau's work, including "Walking" and Maine Woods.}

_{21. Muir, National Parks, ro8.}

_{22. John Muir, My First Summer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Igrr), z36.}

_{23. Cohen, Pathless Way, 51.}

_{24· Sessions and Devall, Deep Ecology, 47.}

_{25· Muir's annotated copy of "Nature" is in the Yale University Library rare book room.}

_{26. George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," cited in Sessions and Devall, Deep Ecology, 47.}

_{27· Some scholars suggest that Muir uses the term God so liberally in his writing to win support for his wilderness cause; this is dubious.}

_{28. Dewey's distinction in A Common Faith between religion and religious experience here applies. Emerson is a religionist who experienced a crisis of faith and set out to recapture his belief system. For Muir, by contrast, wilderness was a religion and all creation was sacred. As Dewey explains, a religion "always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective 'religious' denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It does not denote anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and that historic religion or existing church. For it does not denote anything that can exist by itself or that can be organized into a particular and distinctive form of existence. It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal" (9-Io).}

_{29. National Parks, 144~ '45~ r47, r49}

_{30 The affinity of Muir's methods (his radical empiricism, intuition, and speculative thought) with such later thinkers as William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead is remarkable. See John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), esp. 54, 78, and I7z-73. for similarities with James and Whitehead; see Pete A. Y. Gunter, "Bergson and a Post-Modern World," in David Ray Griffin, ed., Process Philosophy and the Postmodern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, I~8~), for comparisons with Bergson.}

_{31. Wilderness World, 318.Compare Matt. 58: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."}

_{32· First Summer, 229.}

_{33· Wilderness World, jrq.}

_{34· If the case that Muir is not a transcendenralist needed further buttressing, there is ample evidence. For example Muir and Emerson are almost diametrically opposed as they look on nature's landscape and see the impact of the human animal. Emerson is relatively sanguine about the human prospect, indeed prideful in what humankind has accomplished in converting nature to human ends. "The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors.... By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon!" (Emerson, Selected Writings, Igr).}

_{Muir's outlook is quite different.}

_{35· For a clear and concise discussion of theism, panentheism, and pantheism see J. E. Barnhart, Religion and the Challenge of Philosophy (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1975)· The term pantheism comes from the Greek words pan and theos, meaning that everything is God. "For a pantheist, God is the whole of reality. Nothing exists outside his own being" (ISz). In other words, the world is God. The word panentheism "stresses the point that the world is in God as a real and vital part of his being. The world is not thought of as an illusion or a mere appearance of God but as integral to his life. Yet at the same time, God's consciousness is his own and is distinguishable from the world. According to this way of thinking, the world is something analogous to the body of God" (ISz). Panentheism is like traditional theism in maintaining belief in a separate essence of God, particularly insofar as that essence of God is transcendent and therefore unchanging. But panentheism is unlike classical theism in two distinct ways. First, "the finite creatures within God are not simply the passive effects of God but are also causes having an impact on one another and consequently on or in God" (rSz). And second, rather than God giving all meaning to the world, for a panentheist "the world of finite beings also provides meaning to God's life. While he does not need you or me or any one particular world of finite realities, God nevertheless needs some particular world of finite entities to enrich his everlasting existence and to give it stimulus and meaning, as well as 'embodiment'" ('53)}

_{36. Some critics believe that of all the world's religions Christianity is the most selfish and egotistical, for its primary concern is individual salvation.}

_{37· Thousand-Mile Walk, 1-3.}

_{38. Turner, Rediscovering America, 142. Turner observes that the notion of spirit in nature is "one of the hardest heresies missionizing Christians had to extirpare, and it is somewhat startling to meet it here in the thought of one whose background was so strongly Christian" (153)·}

_{39. Passmore's attack, in Responsibility for Nature, on environmental philosophers is based on his belief that they are antiscientific nature mystics. This claim cannot be sustained. See also above, n. 15.}

_{40 See Eugene Odum, Ecology (New York: Holt, Rineharr and W~nston, 1963); and Amos Turk et al., Environmental Science (Philadelphia: W B.}

_{Saunders, 1974)·}

_{41· Turner, Rediscovering America, 57.}

_{42. On the importance of such a quest see among others Dolores LaChapelle, "Toward an Understanding of Psychology as the Study of the Relationship between Nature Within and Nature Without," Contemporary Philosophy It (March Iq89): Io-14; Duerr, Dreamtime, esp. 104-24; and Shepard, Thinking Animals. Shepard argues that the human mind needs nonhuman others to develop. "By presenting us with relared-otherness-that diversity of non-self with which we have various things in common--they further, throughout our lives, a refining and maturing knowledge of personal and human being" (z49). Duerr suggests that the quest itself, the intentional crossing of the divide between wilderness and civilization, is essential to even the possibility of psychic maturation. "To get to the point of origin... a person needs what the indians call 'reverence.' Humans must become unimportant before the other beings of nature" (Iro).What modernists, and some scientists and philosophers, Duerr continues, "call a 'disease of the mind'... [is actuallyl the dissolution of an analytic attitude, making it possible for an archaic mode of perception to reveal itself, which is normally kept under lock and key by cultural conditioning" (Izr). LaChapelle, citing Jung, argues that "we forget that we ace still primates, that we still have to take into account those primitive layers of soul.... We all need psychic nourishment. We do not find it in the apartment house from which no green lawn, no tree in blossom can be seen. We also need a permanent connection with nature.... With all my heart and thought, 1 believe in the human need for roots" (Ir).}

_{43· Thousand-Mile Walk, I40·}

_{44· Here the term animism is chosen over Qanpsycbism. Muir was not engagIng mechanistic materialism per se as an explicit philosophical doctrine, bur was instead articulating the impressions he had of the natural world as alive. Alternatively stated, Muir was responding empathetically to the wilderness, as characteristic of archaic people to this day, rather than viewing nature from the standpoint of Modernism. Whether we characterize Muir as animist or panpsychist, any assumed ontological separation between human beings as ensouled and nature as nothing but matter-inmotion is bracketed. Spinozism, Leibnizianism, and Whiteheadianism are all philosophical elaborations of the theme that insentient matter does not exist.}

_{45· First Summer, I88.}

_{46. Cohen, Pathless Way, 41.}

_{47· John Muir, Travels in Alaska (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Iq7y), 96.}

_{48. National Parks, 325·}

_{49· Thousand-Mile Walk, Ij6. Turner believes--based on his idea that Muir edited his journal soon after the original entries were made, perhaps in January I868--rhat the Thousand-Mile Walk contains no "substantive changes," although "textual scholars will find a great many inconsistencies of a minor nature" (Rediscovering America, 373)· FoX believes, by contrast, that the journal is a "more pointed" indictment than the version published in the book (American Conservation, jgI).}

_{50· Thousand-Mile Walk, g8-99, emphasis added. Here as elsewhere Muir employs terms, such as "unfallen" and "undepraved," that appear Calvinistic even while he is standing that orthodoxy on its head.}

_{51· During this pivotal phase of his life, recounted in First Summer and Thousand-Mile Walk, Muir effects a veritable paradigmatic revolution-viewed philosophically--or undergoes a conversion experience--viewed psychologically. As both Turner and Fox clearly see and decisively establish, Muir transcended the anthropocentric Christian paradigm. According to Fox, "This was the central insight of Muir's life, the philosophical basis of his subsequent career in conservation" (American Conservation, 53)· And, according to Turner, "Muir was stating the bedrock principle that would in time become the basis of the American environmental movement" (Rediscovering America, 154)·}

_{52· Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, rg48), 89. Although we cannot here argue the case systematically, Hartshorne contends that nothing in the Bible precludes thinking of God pantheistically, that is, as an all-inclusive reality.}

_{53· Thousand-Mile Walk, gr, gj, emphasis added.}

_{54· Thousand-Mile Walk, rrI, zrI-Ir, emphasis added.}

_{55· First Summer, j-4, 15-I6 See also Turner, Rediscovering America, 377·}

_{56. First Summer, jq. This insight was foreshadowed in Thousand-Mile Walk, where Muir criticized the death orthodoxy imposed on town children. He also questioned the superstitions, rooted in the Old Testament view of Sheol (compare, e.g., isaiah 5·I4)~ that gripped the human species, for we "are haunted by imaginary glooms and ghosts of every degree. Thus death becomes fearful, and the most notable and incredible thing heard around a death-bed is,'I fear not to die' "}

_{57)· First Summer, 242-}

_{58· Linnie Marsh Wolfe, lohn of the Mountains: The Unpublished lournals oflohn Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), I68-69. Muir's notion of the imperishable and unspendable wealth of the universe is analogous to Whitehead's notion of the primordial nature of God.}

_{59· National Parks, Ior.}

_{60. Hartshorne sketches three possibilities in Divine Relativity. The panthe istic view is that "God is merely the cosmos, in all aspects inseparable57· 58. from the sum or system of dependent things or effects." The panentheistic view is that God "is both this system and something independent of it." And the theistic view is that God "is not the system, bur is in all aspects independent" (90)·}

_{61. Unpublished lournals, I37-38~ 153-54~ '37, I38. The year 1873 was his most prolific for journal writing.}

_{62. Travels in Alaska, 67. This passage can be read as consistent with panentheism, but on balance Muir is best read as a pantheist.}

_{63· Barnhart, Challenge ofPhiloso9hy, ISZ-53 See also Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, IgSj), esp. I-zS, for an insightful and succinct discussion of deity and remporality. They argue that the only consistent way "to relate the supreme to awareness and to the world is to admit a temporal aspect of deity" (19)· A"d See chap. Io, below.}

_{64· Travels in Alaska, 68.}

_{65· UnpublishedJournals, 138, emphasis added.}

_{66. Alasdair Maclntyre, "Pantheism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 6:35}

_{67· See Evernden, Natural Alien, and Koh~k, Embers and Stars, for penetrating critiques of those who desacralize the natural world by viewing it solely as an objective phenomenon.}

_{68. Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967), 8-9.}

_{69. Oxford Annotated Bible, z, n. I.z6-27.}

_{70· Thousand-Mile Walk, I40·}

_{71· Compare Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing! Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Angeles: William Kaufmann, 197')}

_{72. Rolston, Philosophy Gone Wild, II. Of course, Muir was well aware that nature may speak with more than one tongue. Cohen argues correctly that "Muir was too careful a naturalist to ignore the violence in Nature" (Pathless Way, 164) In short, he knew that ants bit, parasites fed on the blood of other creatures, and that life itself necessitates death.}

_73.

_{First Summer, 157-58}

_{74.See Robert McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ig85), 1-27, for discussion of problems in defining the term ecology.}

_{75· Evernden, Natural Alien, 76.}

_{76. W~lderness World, jr3, 3lj, jzo.}

_{77· Compare Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Izg, and Callicott, Land Ethic, z+3.That Muir's ecological vision was incomplete goes with the reality of human finitude. Cohen, among the contemporary biographers, presents the most penetrating analysis of Muir's insufficiencies.}

_{For example, although Muir in many ways rekindled a Paleolithic mode of awareness of nature, he "never managed to integrate completely the figure of Native Man into his ecological vision" as did Thoreau (Pathless Way, 189). Or, unlike Leopold, who entertained penetrating questions about human nature in relation to the living land, Muir "was never aware of the significant bond forged between hunter and hunted, when [the human species] ... became a part of the flow of energy in Nature" (184) Unable to answer the nettlesome questions accompanying his contention that humankind improved by becoming part of nature's flow, he would have been "hard pressed to explain why Californian indians had nor been ennobled by their surroundings" (186).}

_{78. The point stands only with an important qualification made by Worster in Nature's Economy. Ecology as a branch of biology perhaps begins with Haeckel. "But the study of ecology is much older than the name; its roots lie in earlier investigations of the 'economy of nature.' The major theme throughout the history of this science and the ideas that underlie it has been the interdependence of living things. An awareness, more philosophical than purely scientific, of this quality is what has generally been meant by the 'ecological point of view.' Thus, the question of whether ecology is primarily a science or a philosophy of inrerrelatedness has been a persistent identity problem. And the nature of this interdependence is a parallel issue: Is it a system of economic organization or a moral community of mutual tolerance and aid)" (378)}

_{79· Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century 45.}

_{80. Haeckel and Muir came to different answers to these questions. Most germane to our inquiry is the fact that Haeckel still believed that progress was a law of nature. That doctrine is untenable, since nature does nor define progress. The question is basically, "What constitutes progress!" The modern mind believes that society will get better and better each and every day as a matter of course. If nothing else, Muir called that naive outlook into question.}

_{81. First Summer, z6, z+.}

_{82. Thousand-Mile Walk, Iqr.}

_{83· First Summer, 94-95·}

_{84· National Parks, 17z}

_{85· National Parks, jgz, 302·}

_{86. See Worsrer, Nature's Economy, esp. r80-84, for discussion of nineteenth-century ethical (Victorian) outlooks on nature. He points out that only a few could look at plants and animals biocentrically and that Charles Danvin towered over all others. In the Descent of Man, accordto Worster, Darwin attempted to denonstrate an inner moral as well as outer physical continuity among all species. Evn more crucially, "The evolution of moral behavior within a natural context had for Darwin its final issue in civilization. As art and music were born of an ancient struggle for survival but have grown beyond that purely utilitarian purpose, so morality evolves toward something more than usefulness or expediency. In its Last and highest stage it becomes a self-transcending sense of mercy, sympathy, and kinship with all of animate existence, including the earth itself" (18z). Muir's biocentric thinking was also on the cutting edge of the evolutionary paradigm. See also Mayr, Philosophy of Biology, 75-91·}

_{87· Thousand-Mile Walk, 138, 138-39}

_{88. First Summer, lqr}

_{89. John Muir, "Wild Wool," in John Muir, Wilderness Essays (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 3980), 242·}

_{90. First Summer, 160, 58.}

_{91. Paul W.Taylor's Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), for example, makes no reference (bibliographic or otherwise) to Muir. Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" also neglects his work.}

_{92. Worster, Nature's Economy, 184}

_{93. Fox, lohn Muir, 352·}

_{94· Fox, lohn Muir, 354, 355, 354, 352·}

_{95· The best contemporary study of the concatenation of ideology, institutions, and environmentalism is Robert C. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future Of Progressive Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, I989). Paehlke, like Fox, attempts to see ideas and institutions in historical process, and he makes clear the intrinsic riskiness of this project. Paehlke's treatment is judicious and balanced, and his argument that Western culture will either rise or fall with the basic institutional framework now in place is both reassuring and frightening. Paehlke makes a cogent case for the premise that environmentalism can have a major effect in reshaping the course of events.}

_{96. Paehlke, Environmentalism, 175·}

_{97· Fox argues that of the three "historical overviews of conservation, one (by J. Leonard Bates) treats it as a democratic protest against selfish economic interests; another (by Samuel P Hays), as an exercise in scientific management and modernization; a third (by Michael Lacey), as a reaction against Herberr Spencer in favor of an evolutionary positivism that urged human intervention in the natural world. But all three deal only with professional or utilitarian conservation" (American Conservation, 35')·}

_{98. Fox, American Conservation, jSr.}

_{99· David W Ehrenfeld, Conserving Life on Earth (New York: Oxford Uni-}

_{100. The terms conservation and preservation mean different things to different people. See O. H. Frankel and Michael E. Soule, Conservation and}

_{Notes to Pages 203--205}

_{and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I~81). Evolutionary biologists, for example, use the terms in different ways than do resource economists. For resource economists conservation means saving resources now for consumption later. Frankel and Soule use conservation "to denote policies and programmes for the long-term retention of natural communities under conditions which provide the potential for continuing evolution, as against 'preservation' which provides for the maintenance of individuals or groups but not for their evolutionary change. Thus, we would state that zoos and gardens may preserve, but only nature reserves can conserve" (4)· There can be no argument that one definition is right, and another wrong; what is crucial to inquiry is that we are clear on how we use the terms. Frankel and Soule also endorse an ethical view much like Muir's, observing that "nothing but incisive action by this generation can save a large proportion of now-living species from extinction within the next few decades"}

_{101· John B. Cobb, Jr., "Ecology, Science, and Religion: Toward a Postmodern Worldview," in Griffin, ed., Reenchantment of Science, 106. Cobb identifies two specimens of postmodern thought that center on ecological thinking: deep ecology (which he contends departs "radically from the Western tradition") and a postmodern ecology (or, as he puts it, a postmodern ecological worldview). Interestingly, Cobb's panentheistic commitments lead him to attack pantheistic views of the interconnectedness of all things. My judgment is that, given rigorous definitions of pantheism, panentheism, and theism such as those proposed by Charles Martshorne and Joe Barnhart, Cobb's view of interconnectedness might be interpreted as implying a disconnected God (i.e., supernaturalism). See chap, to, n. +, below, for further discussion.}

_{102.Griffin, Reenchantment of Science, x, xi. Such a return is in fact not possible, as witness the almost compelling evidence that the "fall of man" was engendered by dramatic climatological changes. Drought either diminished the carrying capacity or destroyed the Paleolithic grasslands and thus the biological basis of the cynegetic economy.}

_{103. Rorty, Mirror of Nature, j89.}