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John Muir and the Modern: Passion for Nature
Donald Worster
| IF WE FOLLOW John Muir very long, he will wear us out with his incessant gab. The man never stopped talking, and he talked with everyone he met—white farmers, black freedmen, women of all ages, hordes of children, ministers of the gospel, a canoe full of Tlingits paddling along the Alaska coast. Mostly they talked, and talked passionately, about nature. |
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In the summer of 1877, Muir set out from the dusty plains of Pasadena, California, climbing toward what he called a "little poem of wildness" in the looming San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way he came upon an immigrant from Mexico camped on the banks of Eaton Creek; predictably, Muir struck up a conversation with the dark stranger that lasted well into the night. In halting English his campfire host told about his dream of settling there amidst the oaks and chaparral, irrigating a vineyard and harvesting honey. Since leaving his native land, he had rambled a great deal—hunting, prospecting, and mining throughout the Southwest—but was now ready to make his home in this canyon paradise, to "make money and marry a Spanish woman."1 |
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Muir was touched by this man's dream, which so closely anticipated his own. In another three years he would find himself married and settled in a northern California valley, likewise raising children and baskets of fruit. The two men had more in common than a love of talk and a future of money and marriage; Muir sensed in his host a shared passion for mountains, tumbling streams, and beds of wild flowers buzzing with feeding bees. |
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A passion for nature can still draw people together across lines of race, class, and gender. On any weekend thousands of Californians from all walks of life go hiking up a hundred canyons, watching quail running across the trail, sniffing the tang of sagebrush, searching for stars above the urban haze. Despite their differences, nature provides a common topic of conversation for those people—a world that they did not create but are hungry to experience, a flash of primeval wildness that stirs common passions and dissolves social categories. |
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Getting back to that nature has become one of the most popular pursuits in the modern world. It has wrought many visible consequences, including, for example, the preservation of Eaton Canyon as a county park and the San Gabriels as a national forest. Preserving nature (a movement that rightly looks to Muir as founding father) has become both a national and a global cause. Scholars have written many words on the history of that movement, but no one has adequately explained the motivation behind it. Is it biology or is it culture that pulls us toward nature? And if it is culture, or learned behavior, what learning do we have in common? |
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In his autobiographical My Boyhood and Youth, Muir claimed that his enthusiasm for nature was present from childhood, deriving, he felt, from a "natural inherited wildness in our blood."2 Innocent of modern philosophical debates between cognitivists and physiologists, he was anticipating the views of the latter, arguing that he had been born with an instinct that drew him away from civilization, an impulse over which he had little rational control.3 |
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