"The nature lover and conservationist John Muir is at once famous and indistinct in the minds of most people. Doubtless there are ardent souls who could give a credible account of his life, but not many — not even among those who share the passion that led Muir in 1867, at age 29, to embark on a thousand-mile walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and drove him to continue rambling hither and yon throughout his long life. Muir is revered but remote. He needs a substantial biography to bring him into focus.
Donald Worster aims to fill that gap. One of the founders of environmental history, the author of a well-received biography of the explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell and long a student of the landscape and history of the American West in particular, Worster brings superb scholarly credentials to the task. What he lacks is the ability to tell a story. Readers with a merely casual interest in Muir aren’t likely to persist. But the doughty ones who stay the course will be rewarded. The record of Muir’s life that Worster has scrupulously assembled, fascinating in its own right, takes on added significance as Worster sets it in context.
Donald Worster aims to fill that gap. One of the founders of environmental history, the author of a well-received biography of the explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell and long a student of the landscape and history of the American West in particular, Worster brings superb scholarly credentials to the task. What he lacks is the ability to tell a story. Readers with a merely casual interest in Muir aren’t likely to persist. But the doughty ones who stay the course will be rewarded. The record of Muir’s life that Worster has scrupulously assembled, fascinating in its own right, takes on added significance as Worster sets it in context.
Worster frames his narrative in a surprising way, as an exemplary tale about the rise of liberal democracy. For authority he cites Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: “In a seldom-noticed chapter of the book, Tocqueville noted that the liberal democratic revolution seemed to encourage a strong feeling for nature. Its philosophical tendency, he wrote, is to tear down the traditional doctrines of Christianity and put in their place a new religion of nature, or what he called ‘pantheism.’ ”
What Tocqueville deplored, Worster celebrates. In his telling, Muir’s passion for nature is best understood alongside a mostly gradual, if at times dramatic, shift in American society toward racial equality, equality between men and women, and the like — a shift which, in Worster’s reckoning, entailed liberation from Christian orthodoxy. “Traditional Protestantism,” with its emphasis on economic productivity and self-denial, “was weakening its hold, and Muir was one of those cutting away at its roots.”
The tale begins in Scotland, in the seaport of Dunbar, where Muir spent his first 11 years. His father, Daniel, a successful merchant, was a man of intense religious convictions who was dissatisfied with traditional denominations. Ultimately Daniel Muir was drawn to the restoration movement associated with Alexander Campbell, which claimed to return to the unspoiled beginnings of the Christian faith, free of the excrescences that had built up in the intervening centuries. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, where the Campbellite movement began, settling in Wisconsin. Young John was expected to work hard and long, and his father was a cruel taskmaster. Many years later, in “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth” (1913), Muir recalled the frequent beatings he received, sometimes accompanied by ranting sermons. Little wonder that Muir grew up to reject his father’s creed.
But Muir did not settle into bitterness. On the contrary: he took an inexhaustible delight in the natural world, seeing in it the hand of a God who differed greatly from the grim deity of his father.
To get a palpable sense of this delight, which was at the very core of Muir’s life, it would be helpful to supplement Worster’s account with another new book, Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy, by Bonnie J. Gisel, with images by Stephen J. Joseph (Heyday Books, $45). These extraordinary images of plant specimens Muir lovingly collected, now digitally restored and enhanced, along with writings from his notebooks and elsewhere, show how he combined exacting attention to the stubborn particularities of nature with frankly mystical rapture at its splendors.
And yet, as Worster makes clear, Muir came close to setting aside this great love after he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s. A rather aimless period followed until he found a job in Indianapolis at Osgood, Smith & Company, a steam-powered factory that made wooden hubs and spokes for wagon wheels. Muir excelled at the job and was soon promoted. He took an intense interest not only in the technical aspects of the factory but in questions of efficient management, going so far as to chart a typical day’s labor with the aim of “harmonizing all human behavior in the factory with the rhythm of machines,” as Worster writes. That John Muir, of all people, should thus anticipate the notorious “scientific management” studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor seems incredible. But Worster shrewdly observes at the outset of the book that Muir, “regardless of where he traveled, would remain a Lowland Scot all his days,” and he could easily have become another dynamic industrialist in the Scottish diaspora.
One day, while Muir was repairing a belt for a circular saw, a file flew into his face, temporarily blinding him. Although he healed nicely and regained his sight, the shock of the experience made a lasting impact. “Those weeks of darkness,” Worster writes, “had wrought a permanent change in his thinking, and that change would gather force during the spring and ensuing summer. He would never go back to Osgood, Smith. He would throw down his tools, abandon forever any career in industry or invention, and seek his own independent way on earth.”
In a film or a novel, this turning point might be dismissed as heavy-handed, but real life isn’t so fastidious. From this decisive moment, Muir went on to become “John Muir,” lean and bearded, roaming everywhere from the Yosemite Valley to the Mojave Desert, fighting the good conservation fight (though his heart was never in politics), writing articles and books that prepared the way for the modern environmental movement.
Worster reproaches his subject for backsliding: “As he aged and became more prosperous and prominent, with a national following to lead, he became more traditional in his beliefs — by no means reverting to a conservative, evangelical Christianity, but sounding more and more like a typical theist or Transcendentalist seeking beyond nature a God in heaven, a Creator of the world’s material forms, or a great Spirit hovering over the earth.”
Worster goes so far as to attribute this alleged change in Muir’s outlook to the effects of “money and fame,” which “had made him more of a conformist than he seems to have realized.” I see no warrant for this ungenerous judgment. Muir’s mature faith was formed by the time he left Osgood, Smith — and it always contained a strong sense of divine presence. When Muir decided to leave the factory behind, he wrote, he bid “adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery”; instead he would spend his life “studying the inventions of God.” For Muir, as Worster acknowledges, this faith wasn’t threatened in the least by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whom he defended as a “devout and indefatigable seeker after truth,” though Muir vigorously rejected the notion that evolution disenchanted the world, leaving us to come to terms with nature red in tooth and claw.
When the Scottish mystic died, he left an estate worth the equivalent of more than $4 million today, thanks to hard work and frugality. He suffered disappointments, losses and vexations, and yet to the end possessed an unshakable assurance in the goodness of things that made him akin to Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well.”
A PASSION FOR NATURE
The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
