Passion For Nature Research Articles

John Muir and the Religion of Nature

John Muir certainly ranks among the most importtant conservationists and naturalists in American history. Yet we haven’t had a full biography of Muir for well over half a century. So the recent publication of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford, 2008) is a welcome event—especially since Donald Worster, one of the founders of the field of environmental history, is its author. In this issue, Worster comments on Muir and the “religion of nature” and then responds to questions from Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa.

A passion for nature: the life of John Muir

am hopelessly and forever mountaineer, John Muir wrote. Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own is nothing. In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's special self is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes Muir who was successful fruit-grower, talented scientist and world-traveler, doting father and husband, self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was a pathway to revelation and worship. For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers wealth of insight into the passionate nature of man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

A Citizen of the Community of Nature

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

Climate Change and the PSO-HNS

Climate Change and the PSO-HNS

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

Christianity to Ecology: John Muir’s Walk through America

From a very early age the American environmentalist John Muir displayed an unusual passion for nature. His view of nature as a benevolent entity was at odds with the Judaeo-Christian culture which dominated his time. The young John Muir found it increasingly difficult to accept the kind of cultural perspective on nature which then prevailed. In 1867, after a serious accident, Muir made up his mind to devote his life to the contemplation of nature. In order to do so he decided to walk in the footsteps of his intellectual role model, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who had explored the Amazonian forest. Before he could do that, Muir had to walk all the way from Indiana to Florida. Muir’s thousand-mile walk is the story of an individual adumbrating an ecological counter-culture of his own through the act of travelling across the American territory.

The Great American Pantheist

A Passion for Nature . The Life of John Muir. By Donald Worster . Oxford University Press, New York, 2008. 543 pp. $34.95, £18.99. ISBN 9780195166828. Drawing on Muir's private correspondence, Worster offers a detailed, scholarly account of his subject's experiences, friendships, and foundational role in the American conservationist movement.

Climate Change and the PSO-HNS

Climate Change and the PSO-HNS

Hilary Owen Meredith King

Hilary King, who died suddenly aged 58, was an internationally renowned epidemiologist specialising in diabetes. He was born in Leeds, England, on 31 July 1949, the son of an English...

Constance Fenimore Woolson: selected stories & travel narratives

American writer and world traveler Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840 1894) was author of more than fifty short stories, four novels, a novella, and numerous poems and travel essays. During her lifetime, she achieved both popular and critical success, but much of her work is no longer available. This volume, as the first anthology to collect representative samples of her stories, travel sketches, poems, and correspondence, represents a major advance toward re-establishing her place in nineteenth-century literature and letters. As these pieces demonstrate, Woolson offered keen observations on the issues she cared most deeply about, namely the cultural and political transformation of the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the status of women writers and artists in the nineteenth century, and the growing implications of nationalism and imperialism. Woolson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and began her career writing regional travel stories about the closing of the American frontier in the old Northwest Territories (now known as the Great Lakes region). During the Civil War, she worked for a variety of Union causes and in 1873 moved to St. Augustine, Florida. Traveling throughout the South, she wrote stories and travel narratives that highlighted the wholesale changes facing Americans after the Civil War. In 1879, Woolson left the United States for Europe. There, she engaged her passion for nature and exercised her gift for social satire. In her European writings, she deplored the Americans slavish devotion to the ubiquitous guidebooks of the nineteenth century, and she chose instead to spend long periods of time in one place in order to better learn about it. Throughout her time in Europe (including visits to North Africa), Woolson often commented that she could not describe landscapes, only experience them. By the time of her death in Venice at age fifty-three, she had become convinced that the colonial agendas of the United States and Europe would transform landscapes and peoples in far-reaching and ultimately dangerous ways. This collection features selections from each of the three distinct periods of Woolson s career and includes a chronology of her life and travels. Focusing primarily on Woolson s short stories, editors Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean also include a representative letter, poem, and travel sketch for each section. Victoria Brehm is associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University. She is editor of three anthologies, including A Fully Accredited Ocean: Essays on the Great Lakes and Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits: Stories of the Great Lakes. Sharon L. Dean is professor of English at Rivier College and is author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound and Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art.

John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature

John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature

The Jahangirnama: memoirs of Jahangir, emperor of India

This translation presents an engaging portrait of an intriguing emperor and his flourishing empire. The Emperor Jahangir is probably best know in the West as being the father of Shahjahan, who built the Taj Mahal. His reign was one of great prosperity, and his passion for art and nature encouraged a flowering that some say rivalled European art during the rule of the Medicis. In penning his memoirs, Jahangir followed a tradition begun by his great-grandfather, the Emperor Babur. Jahangir's memoirs, however, provide not only the history of his reign, but also his reflections on art, politics, and private details about his family including the suicide of one of his wives and selections of poetry written by members of his harem. One of Jahangir's stories describes his astonishment at witnessing the fall of a meteorite, an event that so amazed him that he ordered that a dagger be made from its metal.

Kenichi Fukui (1918-1998)

K enichi Fukui, director of the Institute of Fundamental Chemistry in Kyoto, Japan, passed away on 9 January 1998. Fukui was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry ([1][1]) in 1981, jointly with Roald Hoffmann, for their independently developed theories concerning the course of chemical reactions. Fukui conceived the theory of frontier orbitals, which are the outermost orbitals in a molecule, similar to valence orbitals in atoms. In the early 1950s, he proposed that HOMO (the highest occupied molecular orbital) and LUMO (the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital) play a dominat role in reactions, and he called these the frontier orbitals. Fukui discovered that the symmetry of the frontier orbital itself governs chemical reactions, finding that chemical reactions involved neither a square of the frontier orbital, nor an electron density. Based on a solid quantum-mechanical foundation, Fukui was able to naturally incorporate the idea of orbital and orbital phase into his theory. At that time, chemists had tried in vain to solve the challenge of chemical reactions. Once awakened by this insight, chemists around the world were able to explain and predict the course of organic reactions, as if solving a jigsaw puzzle. His theory is now a permanent part of chemistry. The Woodward-Hoffmann rules ([2][2]) came about as a result of collaborative work between a genius of organic chemistry and an excellent theoretical chemist. Fukui's background and expertise encompassed both these fields, and his huge commitment to science is self-evident. However, it must be remembered that he was interested in a great number of pursuits, including leisure activities such as walking and reading. Moreover, he had a passion for nature and was deeply concerned about environmental issues. Fukui will be greatly missed; for so many years, scientists have relied on his knowledge and sound reasoning. ![Figure][3] YOMIURI SHIMBUN 1. [↵][4]For more on Fukui and the 1981 Nobel Prize, see . 2. [↵][5]The Woodward-Hoffmann rules state that a reaction is forbidden if the symmetry of the orbitals is not conserved during the reaction. [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: pending:yes [4]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [5]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference 2 in text

In Memoriam: Dioscoro S. Rabor, 1911-1996

Dioscoro S. Rabor, preeminent Philippine zoologist and conservationist for more than half of the 20th century, died 25 March 1996 in College, Laguna, Luzon, Philippines after a prolonged illness that prevented him from conducting the field work he loved so much. He is survived by his wife of nearly 60 years, Lina N. Florendo Rabor, five of their six children, and 11 grandchildren. Joe Rabor was born in Cebu City, Philippines, on 18 May 1911. He received his B.S. (1932) and M.S. (1934) from the University of the Philippines and worked toward his Ph.D. in 1957-58 at Yale University under S. Dillon Ripley. He received an honorary Sc.D. from Silliman University in 1974. Although he is best known for his work with birds and mammals, his scientific expertise included ichthyology and herpetology as well. His teaching and professional experience included some 30 positions, with professorships at Silliman University, 1947 to 1967; Mindanao State University, 1967 to 1975; and the College of Forestry, University of the Philippines at Los Bafios (UPLB), 1975 to 1976. He served as Project Director for the Migratory Animal Pathological Survey (U.S. Army, SEATO Medical Project) for the central and southern Philippines from 1964 to 1970, and, after his retirement, as a consultant in Wildlife Biology and Management at UPLB until he became ill in 1992. Rabor's passion for nature consumed his whole life-and the lives of his family as well. From 1935 to 1977, he led more than 50 expeditions into the forests of 25 islands in the Philippine Archipelago. Lina joined him on most of these trips, and as each child was born, they came along too! Each of their four daughters is named after a bird (Iole Irena, Nectarinia Juliae, and Ardea Ardeola) or a fish (Alectis Cyrene), and all became physicians. His series of expeditions with family and students resulted in the most thorough documentation of the birds and mammals of the Philippines ever. His field catalog for birds alone approached 60,000 entries, with most of his specimens deposited in the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), Yale Peabody Museum (YPM), Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH), Smithsonian Institution (USNM), Rabor Memorial Collection at UPLB (some 10,316 birds), and American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). To date, 69 new bird taxa, including 8 species (5 described by Rabor with Ripley or Austin L. Rand) and 61 subspecies(39 by Rabor and Rand, Ripley, or John E. duPont), have been named from Rabor's collections. Two species, Napothera rabori (Rand, Fieldiana Zoology 39:377-378, 1960) and Aethopyga linaraborae (Kennedy, Gonzales, and Miranda, Auk 114:1-10, 1997), have been named after Joe or Lina. An equally impressive list of new mammal species resulted from his field efforts as well. During his career, he authored no fewer than 87 scientific and popular books and articles, coauthoring 10 with Rand, 8 with Ripley, and 3 with duPont. Included among the accolades of Rabor's career were a Fulbright Fellowship to the FMNH, Guggenheim Fellowships to FMNH and YPM, and research associateships with YPM, FMNH, USNM, DMNH, and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. He was a member of the planning committees for the following International Ornithological Congresses: XIV, Oxford, 1966; XV, The Hague, 1970; and XVI, Canberra, 1974. He joined the AOU in 1951 and was elected a Corresponding Fellow in 1958.

Horatio Ross presentation album

Abstract Horatio Ross (1801–1886)1 was an aristocrat whose enthusiasm for photography was second only to his passion for nature, Scottish culture and sport. Born at Rossie Castle, Forfarshire, on 5 September, 1801, Ross was named in honour of his godfather, Lord Horatio Nelson, Napoleon's boldest foe, and an intimate friend of his father. At the age of 18, he joined that gallant regiment, His Majesty's 14th Light Dragoons from which he retired in 1826 with the rank of Captain. Ross served as a Member of Parliament with integrity and honour between May 1831 and December 1834, representing the boroughs of Aberdeen and Montrose, and played a prominent role in debates concerning agriculture and game laws. In December 1834, Ross married Justine Henrietta, whose father was chief of the MacRae clan of Ross-shire. Their happy union of more than 50 years produced five sons: Horatio Stefenberg John, Hercules, Colin, Edward (Ned), and Robert Peel.

Family History

Peter, a clergyman’s son, the only child of a late marriage, was born in ‘92. To his father's superlatively unstable career and change from place to place, he attributed not only his own tendency to gyrovagrancy—but the passion for nature, for the elemental, for width of vision, for adventure in human contingency that for him was character and fate. For the parsonages in which his childhood was spent looked in rapid turn on the watery business of the Mersey, the chimney stacks of Birmingham, the ivied fragments and vistaed landscape of Hazelcrom, on Yorkshire moors, and the expanse of tidal flood at Southampton. The Reverend Walter Michaelham, a rebel spirit clad picturesquely in Pauline pate and beard, with haggard, restless eyes, might in other circumstances have been an anarchist. But the temperamental egotism, irritibility, energy and heroic generosity that might (half a century later) have been enlisted by Socialism and Revolution found vent in a rebellious Evangelicanism. At Oxford as a young man, he was a fierce opponent of the Oxford movement, then for most a living memory.Evangelical reaction was gaining strength and the prospect of discrediting Tractarianism captured his imagination. Pusey a ghost from sad years appeared infrequently in the pulpit, amongst the rising generation, at least, a diminishing influence, a robed stooping figure, going to and fro the Cathedral, and little more. Wilberforce was in a weak way. Jowett professed Greek, Arnold poetry. With the latter many of the rising generation professed affinity. And there were those of exploratory and dialectic turn of mind to whom the legacy of Whately was a stronger appeal than the teaching of Keble or Pusey.

Wild Life of Scotland

PASTORAL life has charms for a large proportion of the reading public, if one may judge from the quantity of literature dealing with its scenes and events. Perhaps the strain under which men now work in cities, has. resulted in a reaction in favour of a return to nature. Certain it is that there is a demand for simple papers on subjects of outdoor natural history; and though much of the supply to meet is not above criticism, still the taste for descriptions of rural scenes and wild nature is well worth cultivation. Mr. Crawford has a passion for wild nature. He would like to rehabilitate some of the isolated hills and woodlands of Scotland with the reindeer, beaver, and wild boar; but the general opinion of his correspondents appears to be: “We cannot afford to grow wood for beavers to gnaw, or for boars to whet their tusks on.” To see nature at her best in Scotland, he has gone away beyond enclosures, and has observed and judged of her ways for himself. This collection of papers, which represent the result of his observations and meditations, are typical of the forms of life in the woods and waters of Scotland; they are pleasantly written and attractively illustrated, and will interest all country naturalists.