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Force for Nature
A new biography recounts the passions and exploits of famed naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir.
By Frank Graham Jr.
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
Oxford University Press, 535 pages, $34.95
In early May 1868, John Muir hiked into California’s Yosemite Valley for the first time. The area was already a state park, rimmed by the Sierra’s high, forested walls and waterfalls, and of such beauty that it brought from the young Scotsman a desire to wander “these love-monument mountains, glad to be a servant of servants in so holy a wilderness.”
Here was an expression of the reverence with which Muir approached wild places. He had already forsaken his father’s fundamentalist religion and traditional houses of worship as inadequate to the glory of the real world. Now he found in Yosemite, Sequoia, and other landscapes “nature’s cathedrals, where all gain inspiration and strength and get nearer to God.”
Mingling his Bible-haunted prose with a scientific accuracy of observation, he became within a few years America’s best-known and most effective conservation leader. The nation, already harboring some disquiet about the heady but exploitative rampage that had conquered its frontier, was now open to a voice from the wilderness. Like a great musician, Muir’s genius was to project his conviction and passion. His books, which explain why wild places must be preserved, resonate with readers to this day. A founding member of the Sierra Club, he lobbied aggressively to push the national park ideal. Muir’s writings helped stimulate conservation efforts for decades following his death in 1914, and the National Wilderness System, established in 1964, is a direct outcome of his argument.
His adventures, achievements, and contradictions are chronicled in a richly documented new biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, by Donald Worster. Why another book about Muir? Earlier authors often portrayed him chiefly in the context of the conservation movement, the California landscape, or national park history. Worster, a noted environmental historian at the University of Kansas, has chosen to set Muir against the background of his Scottish heritage and the broad social and cultural climate of his time. He sees conservation’s cultural origins in the reforms springing from liberal democratic ideals that Muir generally supported, including “the abolition of slavery, emancipation for women, opposition to militarism and war.” (During the Civil War, Muir “skedaddled” to Canada to escape the draft.)
Muir was born in 1838 in Scotland, where for a decade his father, Daniel, tried to subdue his son’s waywardness with threats and beatings. Even after Daniel moved his large family to Wisconsin in an ill-considered bid for riches as a farmer, father and son did not see eye to eye. But Muir never needed his father’s lash to push him to extremes, in work ethic or wilderness adventures. He labored long, punishing hours both on the farm and, later, in factories. Gifted with a quirky inventiveness, he devised various gadgets, including a bed that sounded a morning alarm and tilted him onto the floor, ready for a new day. Worster calls Muir’s bedroom “a little chamber of wonders.”
Migrating to California in 1868, Muir found a permanent home and sublimity. On his first day in the Central Valley, he sat down in a meadow and, with a botanist’s fervor, counted all the flowering heads (7,260, from 16 species) within a square yard. Realizing he needed money to fund his expeditions, he became a shepherd for a time, but found work as a forester more satisfying, though an admirer later assured the public he cut only windfalls. His later tenure as a farmhand ended with some bitterness over the constant attentions he paid to the farmer’s wife.
Mostly, he wanted to know the mountains better than anyone else. “More than ever, he saw that his method of opening others’ eyes must be through scientific exploration and scientific explanation,” Worster writes. “The beauty of the natural world would be revealed through an immersion in facts and mechanics. If he had a social purpose, it was to become a mountain naturalist—particularly adept in the history of glaciers—and to publish his findings to the public.”
Muir pushed himself to the limit, taking enormous risks on cliffs and glaciers, scaling trees as well as mountains. “He was never content until he climbed all the way to the top,” Worster comments. Climbing 13,000-foot Mount Ritter in the eastern Sierra, alone and without a blanket or other equipment, he found himself stranded halfway up a sheer cliff, hanging by his fingertips; he somehow managed to pull himself to the topmost crag. (Colleagues were appalled by his lack of preparation for such expeditions.)
But he lived to tell the tale, and others like it, in popular books and magazine articles. His increasing influence on the course of wilderness protection and the creation of national parks is recounted well by Worster, who also describes the split in the conservation movement—with Muir and his followers on one side and President Theodore Roosevelt and the utilitarian forester Gifford Pinchot on the other. During the early 1900s the factions warred chiefly over the extent to which forests should be logged. Muir was for preservation, though he recognized the need for compromise and he acknowledged that some forests must be lumbered in the public interest to preserve other, more “holy” groves.
The great irony of Muir’s life was that, near the end, he lost his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley, a near-twin of Yosemite, to a dam for which there were other options. But he was ever the optimist. Through familiarity with wilderness, he wanted the public to understand how nature worked, both spiritually and scientifically. Even in the face of the worst storm or earthquake, Muir assured us that Mother Nature was “trotting us on her knee to amuse us and make us good.”
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Editors’ Choice
Notebooks from New Guinea:
Field Notes of a Tropical Biologist
By Vojtech Novotny (Translated by David Short)
Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $34.95
As modernization stretches into the vast corners of our world, New Guinea may be one of the last truly wild places left on the planet, its flora, fauna, and culture both understudied and misunderstood. But a new compilation of field notes from Vojtech Novotny, head of ecology and conservation biology at the Czech Academy of Sciences and a longtime researcher in New Guinea, provides a rare glimpse into the world’s largest tropical island. Driven by the need to escape a mundane lifestyle as a lab biologist, Novotny found himself tagging along on an expedition to study tropical insects that live in fig trees in New Guinea. His journey takes us through a random series of research adventures, from collecting weevils to the way an effort to document herbivorous and predatory insects led to the creation of a rainforest soccer league. Novotny’s witty prose is honest and infectious, illuminating the exhilarating, yet exhausting, world of scientific field work in an unfamiliar ecological and cultural landscape. “Many biologists are like migratory birds—they nest and reproduce in the temperate zone, but regularly migrate to warmer climes in search of spiritual fodder,” writes Novotny. “As this story shows, not even in biologically hugely important New Guinea, on whose territory live five percent of all the world’s animal and plant species, is research run to the kind of sensible strategy that might be expected from such a rational activity as science.”—Katherine Bagley
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Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa
By Mark Seal
Random House, 232 pages, $26
Joan Root was a daring filmmaker and a passionate conservationist. While the former took her around the globe and face-to-face with deadly cobras, scorpions, and hippos, it was likely the latter that got her killed. In this meticulous biography, Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal diligently portrays Root’s path from a tall, shy, and beautiful blonde growing up in Kenya to her adventures with her husband, Alan Root, as they crafted seminal wildlife films and fought to save her beloved Lake Naivasha. Root is hopelessly devoted to her charismatic husband, joining him to dive with crocodiles and soar above Mount Kilimanjaro in a hot-air balloon. But when he leaves her for another woman, Root’s purpose shifts to the destruction of the lake in her own backyard. Here, Seal paints a bleak picture of a nearly lawless country where unchecked poaching and runoff from endless rose farms are destroying “a lake of wondrous beauty.” Root, who made many enemies among poachers, was ruthlessly murdered in the middle of the night; her killers were never caught. Wildflower is a compelling tale of a remarkable woman who lived and died for the land and the creatures she loved.—Katherine Tweed
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The Plot to Save the Planet
By Brian Dumaine
Crown Publishing, 265 pages, $25.95
From algae-based biofuel to smart grids, the clean energy industry is vast and overwhelming to an outsider. In The Plot to Save the Planet, Brian Dumaine, the editorial director of Fortune, offers an upbeat, accessible primer on the largest and most promising fields of green technology. He takes a bottom-line approach: Saving the planet is, and will continue to be, a boon for business. Each chapter presents a balanced perspective on the promise and current pitfalls of a specific technology or energy source, including new biofuels, electric cars, solar advances, efficient buildings, wind power, and even nuclear power. Dumaine isn’t a cheerleader for industry; he acknowledges that many technologies need massive capital and innovation before they can be implemented on a grand scale. Yet he doesn’t discount any schemes altogether, and warns that there is no time to waste. “We are dumping the real costs—the droughts and floods caused by global warming, air pollution, and world conflicts—on our children and their children.”—Katherine Tweed
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Film Review
Film Review
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
By Ken Burns
Florentine Films and PBS, 12 hours
Airing September 27 – October 2, 2009
$18.98 for a single DVD, $99.99 for the full set
One summer when I was a teenager, my family piled into our minivan and drove from New Jersey to Arizona, pit-stopping at Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks, the Petrified Forest, and Mesa Verde. To me, earning a National Parks Passport stamp at each entrance gate practically equaled seeing the parks themselves. Turns out, I’m what filmmaker Ken Burns calls a national park collector. In his six-part documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” Burns introduces more than 50 unique characters, including the Gehrkes, a childless couple that, in the 1920s and 1930s, traveled from park to park in “a revolving parade of new Buicks.” The documentary, which opens with awesome imagery of spewing lava and raging rivers, offers lots of spectacular footage and chronicles many of the system’s milestones, from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1903 Yellowstone visit to that park’s gray wolf reintroduction in 1995. There’s black-and-white footage of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and gorgeous shots of bison and other grand wildlife, interspersed with compelling observations by park rangers, historians, and nature lovers alike. The 12-hour program, over six nights, is so captivating that it seems much shorter. And it tells a uniquely American tale. Burns says, “For the first time in human history, land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time.”—Michele Wilson
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