The Yosemite E-Book

John Muir

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'All these colours, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine.' Having spent significant time obsessively exploring and learning about the Sierra, John Muir's passion for and belief in preserving the wilderness steadily grew. He believed that excessive grazing and logging would result in its eventual destruction, and so campaigned to designate the area as a protected national park. In 1890, the US Congress passed the National Park Bill, and The Yosemite and Sequoia national parks were established. At the time of writing, Muir's views on conservation of the wilderness were totally radical; today, environmental activists are too often brushed aside in favour of something faster, easier, and cheaper. Muir not only educates us in the particulars of the botanicals of this spectacular landscape, but also inadvertently traps us in his web of enthusiasm for the beauty and significance of Mother Nature. The Yosemite gives us the tools to construct a detailed mental map of the Sierra, and leaves us with the resolution to be more compassionate and environmentally mindful. First published in 1912, and with a new introduction from Muir authority Terry Gifford, the message in The Yosemite is perhaps more pertinent now than it ever was. There is a lot to thank Muir for, not least opening our eyes to the earth beneath our feet.

Leseprobe

The Yosemite

John Muir’s quest to preserve the wilderness

John Muir

www.v-publishing.co.uk

– Contents –

Series IntroductionForeword by Terry GiffordChapter 1The Approach to the ValleyChapter 2Winter Storms and Spring FloodsChapter 3SnowstormsChapter 4Snow BannersChapter 5The Trees of the ValleyChapter 6The Forest Trees in GeneralChapter 7The Big TreesChapter 8The FlowersChapter 9The BirdsChapter 10The South DomeChapter 11The Ancient Yosemite Glaciers: How the Valley was FormedChapter 12How Best to Spend One’s Yosemite TimeChapter 13LamonChapter 14Galen ClarkChapter 15Hetch Hetchy ValleyPhotographs

– Series Introduction by Terry Gifford –

We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.

Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that.’

Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.

– Foreword by Terry Gifford –

The Yosemite starts out as a guidebook and ends up, in its final chapter, revealing itself to have been, all along, a campaigning book. The book’s outline is very much that of a guidebook to a remarkable landscape from the pen of the only person who could introduce the reader with such authority, intimacy and enthusiasm to this unique watershed that, when better known, was to become one of the wonders of the world. But one of its spectacular and lesser known valleys, the Hetch Hetchy, was under threat to be flooded as a reservoir for the water-hungry San Francisco, recently devastated by fire. Whereas The Mountains of California had set out to change people by bringing them closer to nature, The Yosemite hoped to recruit people to protect nature. Along the way Muir indirectly offered a spiritual guide to a specific, rich, ecology through his model of personal narratives of observant uplifting engagement with the ancient processes of evolution and the immediate forces of landscape change and adaption. Although written by a seventy-four year old ‘wilderness sage’, the book is derived from the journals and articles of an alert and inspired younger man continually making discoveries about the connection between his inner nature and the wild nature where he feels completely at home.

In Muir’s unassuming, friendly manner, he leads the reader into the mountains, as he himself had innocently left the city behind: ‘Arriving by the Panama steamer, I stopped one day in San Francisco and then enquired for the nearest way out of town’. He found himself in an environment which he saw with fresh eyes, always aware of the living landscape of the Yosemite. Of the Nevada Falls he writes: ‘the roaring of the falling river, seems as if it might be the hopper of one of the mills of the gods in which the mountains were being ground’. This is a perfect metaphor for a process taking place before his eyes from a place where others would simply be lost for words in the face of a 600 foot waterfall. Muir not only wants the reader to see a miracle beyond the visual miracle, but to get out there and make direct contact with nature: ‘One must labour for beauty as for bread, here as elsewhere’. The spiritual is not to be attained without the physical, for the exercise of the body, for Muir, is the way to activate the connection between inner and outer nature. Similarly, the movement and forms of the clouds ‘publish the work of the winds’. A detached cloud might rise up a wall of rock to descend and ‘sweep imposingly along the meadows, trailing its draggled fringes through the pines, fondling its waving spires with infinite gentleness’.

This being close to California’s San Andreas Fault, Muir can provide a guide to ‘Earthquake Storms’ in one chapter of this book. Whilst living in the valley he witnesses the collapse of a pinnacle called ‘The Eagle Rock’: ‘I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had long been studying, pouring to the valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime spectacle – an arc of glowing, passionate fire, 1,500-foot span, as true in form and serene in beauty as a rainbow in the midst of the stupendous, roaring rock-storm’. This is the observation of a moment, visualised so vividly we can almost smell its after-effects. It is an aesthetically sublime moment, but it is also a moment of scientific discovery for John Muir. The talus boulders he had been studying were not derived from slow erosion and an accumulation of occasional small rockfalls, but from single cataclysmic moments such as this – ‘earthquake storms’. Muir is unstoppable: ‘Eager to examine the new-born talus I ran up the valley in the moonlight and climbed upon it before the huge blocks, after their fiery flight, had come to complete rest’.

It gets worse – ‘A Ride on an Avalanche’ (don’t try this at home). Frankly, he was lucky. ‘When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking.’ As usual, Muir’s intuition as an experienced resident in this volatile habitat enables him to not only survive, but relish the relationship: ‘This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced.’ The book moves towards recommending some more safe, but no more demanding, ‘excursions’ in a chapter called ‘How Best to Spend One’s Yosemite Time’. There’s a famous photograph on sale in a Yosemite bookstore of a tourist sitting in front of the beginning of a park information video which is titled ‘How to spend a day in Yosemite’. Muir would be amused. He offers a three-day camping excursion in just two pages.

And here’s the strategy of Muir – now the co-founder of the Sierra Club that is the defender of the newly designated Yosemite National Park – to bring people out of the cities, through this book, to see and support the preservation of a life-changing landscape, that includes not one but two Yosemite Valleys – ‘Nature is not so poor as to have only one of anything’. Muir makes the case for the majesty of Hetch Hetchy as the counterpart of Yosemite Valley itself. However, like anything worthwhile, he says, in his final chapter, it’s under attack ‘by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators’. The book’s final words leave the reader’s ears ringing and mind turning: ‘Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.’ Muir lost this fight and died soon afterwards – his biographers say, from a broken heart. But it was in The Yosemite that he made his case, eloquently enacting his passionate strategy, and made his final stand. We can only delight in reading his witness and try to live up to it in our own challenging times.

– Chapter 1 –

The Approach to the Valley

When I set out on the long excursion that finally led to California I wandered afoot and alone, from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, with a plant-press on my back, holding a generally southward course, like the birds when they are going from summer to winter. From the west coast of Florida I crossed the gulf to Cuba, enjoyed the rich tropical flora there for a few months, intending to go thence to the north end of South America, make my way through the woods to the headwaters of the Amazon, and float down that grand river to the ocean. But I was unable to find a ship bound for South America – fortunately perhaps, for I had incredibly little money for so long a trip and had not yet fully recovered from a fever caught in the Florida swamps. Therefore I decided to visit California for a year or two to see its wonderful flora and the famous Yosemite Valley. All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world’s wildernesses I first should wander.