A Citizen of the Community of Nature

Abstract

In 1868, Muir moved into Yosemite Valley, which the federal government had just assigned to the state of California to preserve for public use and recreation. A native of Dunbar, Scotland, he identified himself as John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe, a citizen of the community of nature. Eager to experience a season of snow and ice, he took a job as a sawyer and handyman at a hotel in the valley. For two years, Muir made Yosemite his wilderness university. A University of Wisconsin drop-out and aspiring inventor, a nobody in the eyes of the world, Muir concentrated on cultivating his own garden, by incorporating the beauty of nature into his daily, lived experience. I'm in the woods woods woods and they are in me-ee-ee, he wrote to his friend, Jeanne Carr, after a visit to a sequoia grove in the fall of 1870. The King tree & me have eternal love, he rejoiced, sworn it without swearing and Ive taken the sacrament with Douglass squirrels drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple drips I am writing this woody gospel letter. When seen with sunbeams in it, the color of sequoia juice the most royal of all royal purples. ... I wish I was so drunk & sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like a the Baptist eating Douglass squirrels and wild honey or wild anything, crying, Repent for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand (p. 173). Until his death in 1914, Muir did just that. A founder and patron saint of the modern conservation movement, he taught millions, in books and articles in popular magazines, that nature never betrays a heart that loves her and that every person, not just the rich or well-educated, has an innate passion for its sublime properties. Muir led the fight to make Yosemite a national park. He fought against the plan to dam the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water to San Francisco. And in 1892, he became the first president of the Sierra Club, a position he held for the rest of his life. In A Passion for Nature, Donald Worster provides a beautifully crafted, richly detailed, and sophisticated biography of Muir. Acknowledging that