The Muir Mystique : After 150 Years, the Naturalist Has Become Patron Saint to All Environmental Factions, but His Legacy Is Still in Dispute

Back when California was wild, John Muir once ventured out in a Sierra Nevada gale, shinnied to the top of a 100-foot Douglas spruce, and let the wind whip him around “like a bobolink on a reed.”

“Never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion,” Muir later wrote in “The Mountains of California.” With the treetops “rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy,” with his ear “close to the Aeolian music of its topmost needles,” he clung to his perch for hours, drinking in the colors and textures of nature and frequently closing his eyes “to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”

Although the sights and sounds and scents of the natural world are not as sweet as they were then, Muir’s efforts to keep that world pristine earned him a place near the top of America’s totem pole of mythologized figures.

Thursday is the 150th anniversary of Muir’s birth, and from Dunbar, Scotland, where he was born the son of a hell-fire preacher, to Los Angeles, where he died of pneumonia in December, 1914, people will celebrate “John o’ the Mountains’ ” life.

Movement Splintered

Meanwhile, the environmental movement he helped launch has splintered into an array of philosophies, and the activists who find themselves immersed in the battles Muir helped trigger can’t agree on the exact nature of the man’s legacy--as evidenced by the fact that some will celebrate his birthday with hikes and readings, while others have declared “a national day of outrage” against the U.S. Forest Service to protest what is happening to the wild world Muir revered.

“Muir is like the Bible for the environmental movement,” said Michael P. Cohen, author of the 1984 biography “The Pathless Way, John Muir and the American Wilderness.” Because his writings can be quoted to support an array of positions, Cohen said, “he tends to be viewed as the spiritual father of environmental activism no matter what your role in the spectrum.”

Which explains why environmental mainstreamers and radicals alike see themselves as Muir’s legitimate successors.

According to Dave Foreman, founder of the renegade environmental group Earth First! (whose motto is “No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!”), “Muir epitomizes what’s best about the grass-roots citizen activist.”

Sierra Club chairman J. Michael McCloskey, on the other hand, said, “Late in his career . . . Muir finally came to grips with the fact that he needed to become a lobbyist” and understand the process of legislative give and take. The 442,000-member Sierra Club, of which Muir was the first president, has evolved into the most powerful environmental force on Capitol Hill--and in the process, some say, has been co-opted by the very forces it is supposed to be fighting.

Whichever end of the environmentalist spectrum Muir might now be on, his significance is beyond dispute.

Thursday is officially Muir Day in America. Alaska has a Muir Glacier, Wisconsin a Muir Lake, and more places in California are named after him than anyone else (30 schools have Muir in their names). A poll by the California Historical Society ranked him this state’s most important historical figure, above Junipero Serra, John Steinbeck, Walt Disney and William Randolph Hearst.

Until recently, though, even Muir devotees knew more about the myth than the complex man behind it, according to the three authors who have published Muir biographies in the 1980s. They attribute this, in part, to the fact that Muir’s family has fastidiously sheltered the myth from public scrutiny, only 15 years ago making public most--though not all--of his personal papers.

There’s never been much disagreement about Muir’s childhood and youth. Emigrating from Scotland in 1849, the Muir family homesteaded wilderness land in Wisconsin, clearing it, farming it, then, when its fertility had been depleted, moving on to another swatch of forest a few miles away, Frederick Turner writes in his 1985 biography, “Rediscovering America.”

There the Muir boys began again the “heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.” Days of steady labor combined with their Fundamentalist father’s evening tirades--as well as occasional beatings--left little leisure time.

Nevertheless, the boys stole the minutes they could to exalt in “the glorious Wisconsin wilderness.”

Muir also found time to read Shakespeare, Plutarch, the romantic poets, Milton, and the work of other authors that compassionate neighbors had introduced him to. And later, working in a cellar for hours before dawn, he whittled ingenious mechanical inventions, including an alarm clock contraption that dumped late sleepers onto the floor.

Those inventions eventually provided Muir’s escape from the drudgery of the farm. After walking from the homestead to the state fair at Madison, where his gizmos were a big hit, Muir stayed on to work in a machine shop. He later spent 2 1/2 years at the University of Wisconsin, and although he had no previous formal education, he developed a solid knowledge of science.

As Muir later wrote, however, his real education began when he matriculated into “the university of the wilderness.”

This belief in education by immersion is one reason Muir has such appeal to the modern environmental movement, which in many cases grew out of the backpacking trend in the 1960s.

As naturalist Edward Hoagland points out in a recent essay, Muir “put his legs and his life on the line in continual tests of faith. . . .” The most important of his early wanderings was the 1,000-mile walk Muir made from Indiana to Florida in 1867.

This departure into the wilds, Turner writes, was “. . . the beginning of one man’s singular rediscovery of America, the America that had been sheer potential in the European mind before its existence had become known and that, having been discovered, had then in a curious way been disregarded.”

The rediscovery of wild nature continued the next year, when Muir took a steamer to San Francisco, then hiked for the first time into the Sierra Nevada, “the range of light.”

Found Mystical Enlightenment

During these expeditions, if not earlier, Muir’s sense of spirituality changed. He rejected the biblical notion that man was put on Earth to conquer the wilderness and dominate all other creatures.

Cohen, among others, believes that Muir found something akin to mystical enlightenment in the wilds.

“Those of us who believe that Muir is the spiritual leader of the environmental movement believe that his mystical experience is directly of the wild,” said Cohen, who teaches English at Southern Utah State College. “I suggest it was an archetypal experience. . . . The spirit of place overtook him.”

Whether there are inherent values in nature worth preserving--spiritual values perhaps--was a central issue when Muir was fighting to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierra, and it underlies much environmental debate now.

“You can see the environmental movement returning to Muir all through this century,” said Stephen Fox, whose 1981 book, “John Muir and his Legacy: The American Conservation Movement,” was the first work to use the Muir family’s documents. “There’s no way to exaggerate how much of a change there has been in public environmental values over the last 30 years. There’s been a revolution and that’s permanent.”

And the thrust of that revolution, as Fox sees it, has been to move away from “science and technology and deadhead rationalism” toward an environmentalism of “religion, love of nature, aesthetic rather than material concerns.”

“That’s still the issue,” he said. “Do we buy progress as it’s usually defined, or do we redefine it to include bears and trees? It’s a completely different world view, deeper than socialism or anarchism or any of the isms around, because it challenges the basic premises of modern existence. As defined by Muir, it goes to the roots of our whole culture.”

“The philosophy Muir outlined . . . is what (Earth First!) is about today,” said Dave Foreman. As Foreman defines that philosophy, it is very similar to the non-anthropocentrism of the deep ecology ideals Earth First! embraces: “Wilderness deserves to exist for its own sake; second, all things are connected; third, the true wisdom is out there in the wilderness, and not in books--you need direct experience with wilderness to become enlightened.”

‘Fighting Brush Fires’

The main problem with the environmental movement in the years since Muir, Foreman believes, is that it has “allowed itself to be trapped in the role of loyal opposition, fighting brush fires and reacting instead of acting.”

The movement, Foreman adds, has been trying to “make industrialism work by cleaning up some of its worst excesses . . . instead of coming up with an alternative vision of how forests should be managed, which is something Muir did.”

With that in mind, Earth Firsters have promised to celebrate Muir’s birthday Thursday by climbing onto platforms high in old-growth trees slated to be cut, and performing similar acts of civil disobedience in protest of what its members say are the strictly utilitarian, economically unsound and destructive timber cutting policies of the U.S. Forest Service.

(“There’s no doubt that logging and other commercial developments on national forests serve a utilitarian purpose, but we have a society that consumes a lot of material goods, and they need to be produced someplace,” said George Leonard, associate chief of the United States Forest Service. It’s interesting to note, Leonard said, that “after 80 years of managing forests, basically with Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian policies, there is still a tremendous amount of resources on the national forests for people to argue about.”)

Although he agrees that Muir’s passion for nature can legitimately be evoked to support similar passion today, Turner and others see this zealotry as being rooted in his early Fundamentalism, and “a tendency to get into angels and Satan opposition, where the angels were those who were on their side . . . and the satanic elements were developers, mindless destroyers, timber barons. . . .”

“I think it’s unfortunate to have it cast in this way, simply because nothing is ever quite so simple, and also because a kind of strident righteousness has a tendency to put people off,” Turner said.

Alston Chase, whose book “Playing God in Yellowstone--the Destruction of America’s First National Park” stirred up heated debate among ecologists when it was released in 1986, sees Muir’s legacy in a similar light.

Chase credits Muir with defining the issues and getting environmentalism rolling. But he disparages Muir for the same passion others applaud.

“He certainly was one of those who helped to turn environmentalism into a kind of secular religion. . . . His appeal is an emotional appeal. His language is emotional, very biblical language.

“The trouble with that is that when you start appealing to the emotions, you often don’t think as clearly as you should,” Chase said. “Too often . . . we oversimplify environmental issues. We pay less attention to what the scientists are saying about the ecological issues than we should.”

An example, Chase says, is Yellowstone Park, which he argues has been treated as if it were an isolated ecosystem, without much regard for the impact of encroaching humankind.

William Penn Mott, director of the National Park Service, would seem to agree, at least in part, with Chase’s assessment. With the population explosion and automobile explosion and air pollution and acid rain drifting hundreds of miles from their sources, the problems of protecting wild land aren’t as simple as they were in Muir’s time, he said.

To demonstrate that it can be done, though, Mott pointed to the battle to limit plane flights over the Grand Canyon, in which “Congress recognized for the first time that silence is an attribute of the national park system and deserves to be protected like other resources. . . . I’m sure John Muir would agree to that, because one of the things he commented on often in his writing was that the sounds of nature were so inspirational.”

In fact, although Muir was a legendary talker himself, he found the sounds of nature preferable to the sounds of humanity, which is one reason many of his supporters and detractors mention misanthropy as one of the traits in his complex personality.

Not the ‘Naive Muir’

But, while there is an undeniable disgust for the acts of humanity in some of his work, Muir was neither the misanthrope nor the innocent recluse some make him out to be, Cohen and others say.

“The view of the naive Muir, the fellow who didn’t know what was going on in the cities, the perfect nature boy, is a fiction” created “largely by Muir’s editor and himself,” Cohen said.

The Muir who helped to save Yosemite and to create the national parks system “was not the mythical Muir,” Cohen said. “He was the one who could meet men of prominence and power and persuade them. He was the one who understood the power of conservation politics. This later Muir made his compromises.”

He became friends, for instance, with railroad magnate--and, some would argue, large-scale exploiter--E. H. Harriman. And while Muir could say, with apparent sincerity, that he was richer than Harriman--”He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want, and Mr. Harriman has not”--he didn’t hesitate to call on his materialistic friend, who would eventually become a key player in Muir’s fight to save Yosemite.

“The process Muir went through personally was one that many grass-roots environmentalists for the Sierra Club went through,” Michael McCloskey said.

“They fell in love with a place--in his case Yosemite and the Sierra--saw it endangered, and learned that they had to work with others (to preserve it).”

“Muir and (Aldo) Leopold both were great philosophers of nature, and we need more of them, more and more of them, to protect nature’s works,” said Gaylord Nelson, counselor for the Wilderness Society and the originator of the first Earth Day in April, 1970. But “we aren’t growing any people to replace them, that’s the problem,” he said.

“I see people who are committed, and doing good things about the environment,” said Paul Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. “If Muir met these people he’d be impressed that there are still Trojans out there fighting the best they can.”

But Pritchard worries that the movement has become too legalistic and legislatively oriented.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to become an instrument of bureaucracy and that’s a tremendous mistake,” he said. For instance, “the (Environmental Protection Agency) is loaded to the gills” and can’t even carry out the laws on the books, let alone add new laws to cover “the 300 new chemicals created every year and the 3,000 waiting.”

Still, Pritchard and others say that Muir would probably be encouraged by some things that have happened since his death, including legislation such as the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and endangered species legislation--even though most of those acts haven’t lived up to the expectations of the environmentalists who pushed for them.

Muir Would Be Horrified

But Muir’s enthusiasm for such victories would almost certainly be outweighed, they say, by his horror at such problems as the depletion of the ozone layer, toxic waste and nuclear waste, the pollution of the Great Lakes and America’s ground water supplies, continued overgrazing, soil erosion, urban sprawl and the destruction of tropical rain forests.

What would Muir think were he to scramble up a spruce today and survey the American landscape?

“The high-tech environmental challenges would boggle his mind,” said M. Rupert Cutler, president of the Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife.

At the same time, though, the basic issues are the same now as they were when Muir was launching the movement, he said: “The contest between those who favor a stewardship approach to the environment, who see man as part of a natural ecosystem as opposed to those who want to make a fast buck off resources is very much the same.”

“I think Muir would be as despondent as hell,” Pritchard said. “I think he would wonder what change had occurred in the psyche of man, that he would be willing to tolerate what we now accept as the norm.

“I think that he would go back into the wilderness and wonder, ‘How is it that mankind is really so incapable of committing himself to understanding the importance of silence in his daily routine, the importance of the diversity of wildlife in his daily routine, the importance of clean skies and naturally flowing water in his daily routine?’

“I think Muir would have a hard time making it today.”