The king of naturalist writers
Oliver Rackham
THE EIGHT WILDERNESS DISCOVERY BOOKS by John Muir Diadem Books, £16.99, pp. 1030 John Muir (1838-1914) was a Scots- American; ploughboy, inventor, drop-out, tramp, climber, shepherd, glaciologist, founder-president of the Sierra Club, camping companion of a president of the United States, and recipient of four hon- orary degrees. If any one person began the conservation movement in America, it was he. (He would have called it the preserva- tion movement — conservation was then a bad word.) His influence among political ecologists in the United States now stands higher than ever before.
His life's work was centred on the Sierra Nevada, the inland Alps of California. He arrived there in 1868, and settled down to the life of an obscure adventurer and glaciologist. The gold-diggers had come and gone, and the Indians had been sup- pressed. The 'frontier spirit' — settlers' and lumbermen's fatal mixture of greed, igno- rance, and tragic optimism, 'making a blade of grass grow in the place of every tree' — was beginning to close in on California. His fear that the natural wonders of the moun- tains were being mainly frittered away, as so much else already had been, made him into a political ecologist and a famous man.
Muir, like other excellent naturalists, was driven by a marvellous sense of wonder and delight in the world of nature that is easily thought of as childlike. He was a hero: he would go off by himself for weeks into the mountains in winter without tent or blan- ket; on finding a great waterfall he would crawl behind it at night to observe the moon-rainbow. (This book contains per- haps the most hair-raising of all climbing adventures.) He was a catastrophist: when a hurricane was coming, he went into the woods to study it in action, and climbed a 100-foot tree to get a better view. How he would have celebrated the eruption of Mount St Helens, or the Yellowstone fires, or the English hurricane of 1987!
As a master of descriptive prose Muir is unsurpassed. In swift sparkling phrases he brings to life some far-away scene, or cap-
tures the jizz' of an unfamiliar tree, or leaps over what might have been a complex and boring argument. Were his books fic- tional they would be great literature. Can it really be true that (as his biographers assure us) he hated writing?
Unlike many soi-disant ecologists today, he was not content with generalisations, but insisted on knowing the untidy complex facts of life. Reading his observations and inferences, one forgets that ecological sci- ence was then embryonic. It is a delight to follow how, in less than a page of trenchant argument, he demonstrates that a certain species of pine is dependent for its survival on periodic fires, in a way that is different from the fire-dependence of other pines. To establish such a result today would involve a three-year research grant and 20 pages of number-crunching in the Journal of Ecology; and even then, more or less uncertainty would hang about the conclu- sions, depending on whether the reader could understand, or agreed with, the statistical method used.
Some have criticised Muir for not having a directly explicit philosophy of the world of nature, as his predecessors Emerson and Thoreau did. He declined to be bogged down in metaphysics: he let the observa- tions speak for themselves.
Of all the writers of the ancient world who have come down to us, it is the Hebrews who had the finest understanding of and sympathy for their fellow-creatures. Muir, a devout Scot, had the Bible beaten into him as a boy; he writes in the spirit of the Psalms and Song of Songs. Of the alli- gator he writes, as the Book of Job might have put it:
Honourable representative of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror- stricken man by way of dainty!
For him, God created plants, animals, and the environment in their own right, not as slaves or prisoners of mankind. Some polit- ical ecologists blame the dead hand of what they imagine to be `Judaeo-Christianity' for the world's evils; let them read Muir.
Muir is also a counter-example to the notion that all American biology is obsessed by controversy about evolution. Like many Christians of his time, he saw no conflict between creation and evolution. For him, the spiritual meaning of Nature lies elsewhere. Darwin comes into this book as an authority on the archaeology of sheep.
He was one of the pioneers of the Amer- ican ideal of Wilderness, parts of the world peopled by animals and plants unaffected by civilisation. A hundred years on, this idea is less clear: we now know that Indians had been influencing the landscape of America for thousands of years. He, alas, was too late to see much of the Indi- ans of California, but he did learn from the magnificent, unsuppressed Tlingit peoples among the Alaskan glaciers.
I am not sure that it was good to re-issue Muir as an omnibus volume. He wrote eight separate books: he did not expect the reader to share his enthusiasm over 1,000 unrelieved pages. There is no index, and a perfunctory table of contents: the reader wishing to savour and re-read a favourite passage is in for a long search. There are two inadequate maps, hidden on pages 294 and 716. Few original illustrations are reproduced, most in the wrong places and unreferenced.
Let not these criticisms deter anyone from reading the book. Muir was the king of naturalist writers. Anyone who has enjoyed Gilbert White or Ted Ellis, the naturalists or Patrick Leigh Fermor the traveller, or C. S. Lewis the divine, or Tyn- dall the glaciologist, or Whymper the climber, will rejoice in the clarity and panache and humour here. Muir achieved surprisingly much in his lifetime, but even in America the evils which he fought out- lived him and are still rampant here and there today; in other countries they are as active as ever. May the book inspire some latter-day Muir to denounce, with equal panache, the vain frittering away of tropical forests and mangroves, or, nearer home, of peat-bogs and moorland!
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