John Muir: Nature’s Evangelist?

Donald Worster presented the Jan. 19 January Series lecture entitled, John Muir and the Religion of Nature. Worster is professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas and author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.”

Worster began with remarks about the photos of nature scenes he found on the walls of his room within Calvin College’s Prince Center. He used these as examples of how Muir’s Religion of Nature has crept into contemporary religion, even Calvinism. Even so, contemporary society, as a whole, fails to give Nature the attention our primordial connection to it would seem to require.

“Nature is usually avoided in polite academic society, avoided in political works, ignored in our business and economic work. It’s too old fashioned and has implications,” Worster said. “Why has nature fallen out of favor. . . To dismiss the movement to conserve and protect places like Yosemite is bad history. It misses just how subversive to hierarchy and tradition the love of natural beauty can be. The ideas of freedom, equality and brotherhood connected to a love of nature is rooted in a revolutionary vision of a non-hierarchical and egalitarian society.”

Worster then summarized John Muir’s life. Known as the “Father of American environmentalism” and founder of the Sierra Club, Muir was born in Scotland 1838 and immigrated to the Wisconsin frontier at age 11. A University of Wisconsin dropout and conscientious objector, he set off on a solo, one thousand mile trek that took him to the Florida coast and then across the Ohio river. This walk across America set him on course as an advocate for nature and the wilderness. Muir’s advocacy is also credited as having been vital to the founding of national parks.

Worster’s brief biography did fail to mention bigoted statements about native peoples in Muir’s writings. Mark Davis Spense, in his book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, notes that “The Sierra Miwok that Muir encountered in the Yosemite high country, for instance, seemed ‘dirty,’ ‘deadly,’ and lazy.’“ Muir wrote, “They had no right place in the landscape.”

Philosophically, Muir rebelled against the Judeo-Christian human-centric view of the world, the idea that the Earth was created for man. Worster offered this quote describing the Judeo-Christian God from Muir’s book, Man’s Place in the Universe. “He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentlemen in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet at a half- penny theater.”

Muir’s Religion of Nature was an inherent rebellion against class inequalities, hierarchy and empire, borne of his loathing for England’s upper classes.

“Muir found his god in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” Worster said. His was a “duo-theism with God and Mother Nature as co-equal deities of the world, God and Nature, two artists working in harmony and gender equality.”

Worster offered this quote from Muir’s journals: “The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. No wonder when we think that we all have the same Father and Mother.”

This description of Muir’s spiritual connection with nature, which could be defined as being closer to  animism than theism, brings to mind the contemporary works of Derrick Jensen, especially A Language Older than Words. Jensen shares how all of Nature, the animals, plants, rocks and trees speak a language older than words, a language that we today no longer hear or comprehend. This was no doubt the same language Muir heard on his travels through the wilderness of America, an America that had not yet seen the environmental destruction we see today.

Jensen writes, “I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I’ve known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life–every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale–and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. All humans, too, are struggling to be sane, struggling to live in harmony with our surroundings, but it’s really hard to let go. And so we lie, destroy, rape, murder, experiment, and extirpate, all to control this wildly uncontrollable symphony, and failing that, to destroy it.”

Before closing, Worster admitted that John Muir did not remain loyal to his own ideals in later life. After coming into quite a bit of money, he settled comfortably into upper class, capitalist America. Jeffrey St. Clair confirms this in his book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, “In 1899, railroad tycoon Edward Harriman put together an expedition of naturalists, scientists, painters and fellow robber barons to explore the coast of southeast Alaska. The shrewd head of the Union Pacific even rented the services of John Muir, the father of environmentalism and founder of the Sierra Club, thus striking a bond between corporate villains and mainstream greens that thrives to this day.”

Worster concluded, “When such success comes to people, they change their companions and change their views as well . . . despite changes in his bank account, he never thoroughly repudiated his views. This is the Muir we need to understand under better and remember.”

This writer disagrees. Throughout radical American history, the impact of social movements has been weakened when the ruling class co-opted them and made them a functioning part of the existing “system.”   In addition to remembering Muir’s contributions to the environmental movement and the National Park system, we need to remember how easy it can be for the powers that be to co-opt, side-track and disempower the forces of justice and change. This lesson from the past could help those working for change to not repeat it in the present.

Let’s also remember to listen to Nature like Muir did in his younger years. It may be hard to hear what the animals and trees are saying, but let’s give it a try. If we are going to save this planet from human destruction, we need to learn, listen to and abide by Nature’s words.