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Book Review
| John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures. Edited by Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xii + 281 pages. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $29.95; Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice. By Terry Gifford. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006. x + 201 pages. Appendices, notes, index. Cloth $39.95.
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| Not many figures in American environmental history have received as much attention by historians, biographers, and literary critics as John Muir. Because the basic elements of his biography have been well known since the publication of Linnie Marsh Wolfe's Son of the Wilderness (A.A. Knopf, 1945), subsequent scholars have worked to understand Muir in the light his times, or theirs, and suggest why understanding Muir continues to be important in contemporary settings. These two contributions to John Muir scholarship continue that tradition, but take two very different tacks. |
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The first, Sally Miller and Daryl Morrison's John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures is a collection of papers presented at the 2001 California History Institute meeting, which focused on John Muir. This work continues the biographical tradition of expanding our understanding of Muir and further fleshing out his biography and personal context. Established Muir scholars such as Ron Limbaugh, Daryl Morrison, Ron Eber, Bonnie Gisel, Daniel Phillippon, and Michael Branch, as well as new Muir scholars and others contributing to Muir's context, including Ruth Sutter, Char Miller, Barbara Mossberg, James Warren, and Corey Lewis, extend our biographical awareness of Muir and his place in the histories of California, conservation, and American society at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing attention on Muir's circle of family and friends, the controversies that whirled around Muir's work (both while living and posthumously), ongoing interpretation of his literary product, and the travels that informed his writing. Over the years, Muir conferences and the volumes that have emerged from them have served to highlight some of the best in recent scholarship on the man who often serves as an icon in environmental hagiography. John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures is no different in this regard. |
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Poet and ecocritic Terry Gifford's Reconnecting with John Muir takes a different path. For him, Muir is an icon whose life and work have inspired him to develop a practical approach to literary ecocriticism that he calls "post-pastoral" criticism. In the tradition of Muir scholars such as Michael Cohen, Gifford asks what reading Muir can contribute to contemporary understanding of environmental issues. To do this, Gifford engages in "narrative scholarship," a technique in which the author is present in the text, exploring and explaining directly to the reader the ways in which the contemporary author interacted with the historical subject and projects ways in which this might be significant to the reader. For Gifford, the significance is both personal—as illustrated by a series of poems inspired by following Muir to places highlighted in Muir's nature writing—and practical. |
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Some of the most useful parts of Gifford's exploration come in his discussion of the directed writing projects through which he has led students, ranging from children to university age, to heighten and deepen their environmental awareness. In so doing, they experienced for themselves the process Muir went through in his experiences of nature and his attempt to mediate those experiences for others. In the end, Gifford achieves his intention of using "Muir as a symbol of integrated knowledge and multiple modes of discourse" (p. 13) and contributing to an understanding of how "reading, researching, teaching, and writing can be seen to inform each other in the activities of an ecocritic aware of the dangers of idealization of environmental literature" (p. 14). |
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At first, the multiple modes of discourse that Gifford uses as he unpacks what the symbolic Muir means to him may feel uneven and confusing, but by the end of the work, one comes to realize that Muir's way of melding passion with pragmatism may continue to serve his practical purpose of getting people out into nature and helping them develop a deep appreciation of the inter-connectedness he found there in settings far beyond his "Range of Light." Thus, this book should prove useful to many who act as "environmental educators" broadly conceived through teaching, reading, researching, and writing. |
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Dennis Williams is professor of history and geography at Southern Nazarene University and the author of God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature (Texas A&M, 2002). He is currently researching the Rio Savegre watershed in Costa Rica. |
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