The John Muir Newsletter, Spring 2000
NEWSLETTER M Transcendentalist by L. Mikel Vause, Weber State University he term "transcendentalist" evokes an interesting image. Generally when one thinks of a transcendentalist, the image of a little brown-skinned mystic, sitting in lotus position chanting "ommm" comes to ihind...
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| Summary: | NEWSLETTER M Transcendentalist by L. Mikel Vause, Weber State University he term "transcendentalist" evokes an interesting image. Generally when one thinks of a transcendentalist, the image of a little brown-skinned mystic, sitting in lotus position chanting "ommm" comes to ihind. Although American transcendentalism certainly does have Far Eastern roots, one ascribing to that title is Br more likely to be found tramping around the back country rather than curled up on a mat contemplating the ilssence of existence. The founder of American transcendentalism is Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Sage of Concord." It was Emerson who, with the publication of Nature in 1836, really initiated transcendentalism in this ipuntry. He was not without help though, for he was proceeded by other American writers who also saw the Rvalue of wildness and, through their writings tried to Istablish an environmental ethic. They include folks like Washington Irving who, with his Knickerbocker Tales, Introduced his readers to the natural wonders of New York's Catskills. Along with Irving, William Cullen Bryant preached the gospel of nature in his poetry and James Fennimore Cooper sought a wilderness ethic, a flan for preservation of wild lands through his novels, particularly The Pioneers published in 1823. Yet it was Emerson who had the greatest impact. For example, when Henry David Thoreau was attending Harvard University mA working as a lunch room janitor, he was exposed to Emerson's Nature and he knew that he had found his lientor. Upon graduation from Harvard, Thoreau immediately moved to Concord to "sit at the feet of the Sage." It was Thoreau who sought to put Emerson's theories to the test, and did so in 1845 when he recycled the remains of an old Irishman's shanty and built his cabin on the banks jjf Walden Pond in an attempt, he wrote, to "live life deliberately. . .on its own terms." For two years Thoreau conducted his experiment, the results of which are recorded in Walden or, Life in the Woods. Upon completion of his experiment, Thoreau returned again to the human community saying "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more for that one."1 He went on to declare that Emerson was right, that by visiting wildness one could unite the idea and the actual, that complete harmony among living things is possible. The next major person to put Emerson's ideas to the test was John Muir. While studying science and mechanics at the University of Wisconsin, Muir was exposed to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. He was taken by the insights he found regarding the concept of natural harmony and, after he recovered from an accident that left him temporarily blind, Muir eschewed formal education for the "University of the Wilderness." Beginning in 1866 with his thousand mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir adapted Thoreau's experiment of two years at Walden Pond into a lifelong commitment to America's western wilderness which included a visit to Utah's Wasatch mountains. According to Michael P. Cohen, a Muir scholar and biographer, Muir predicted Utah's industrial and developmental future by the remark that "It is better to have crowded parks and forests than no parks and forests. Getting people into the woods, even too many people into the woods, was perhaps the only step that could be taken."2 This scenario will be reflected in the upcoming 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. Unfortunately, for the past fifty years the works of John Muir have been generally looked upon as mere UN I V E R-S 1 T V OR (continued on page 3) f> /v c i r= i c page 1 News & Notes JOHN MUIR ON STAGE!! A John Muir festival was held at the Willows Theater in Concord, CA, March 31-April 1, 2000. The festival included a musical called "Mountain Days," as well as a forum on Muir. Unfortunately, the announcement was made too late for our deadline. Call (925) 798-1300 to learn if any revivals of the play are planned. . . . A NEW MUIR BOOK Cherry Good, a young Englishwoman, has followed Muir's trails in Scotland and North America. To quote from her book, I wrote this book on the road, as I followed John Muir's trail from Scotland to the American Midwest, through the inland waters and forests of Canada and the lush humidity of America's Deep South to the glacial meadows and crystal lakes of California's High Sierra. It wasn't easy. In my attempt to get as close as I could to the places which John Muir loved, I stayed in no hotels, slept in no comfortable beds. Each night, whether it rained or snowed or blew sand, I camped and wrote. In the California and Arizona deserts I slept on the bare earth without a tent, worried about rattlesnakes, and came into close contact with a tarantula. On my first visit to the High Sierra I fretted constantly about black bears. In the New Zealand autumn I relinquished any hope of ever being dry again, and in Australia I forded rising creeks and was chased by aggressive ostriches, don't laugh, those powerful feet pack a helluva wallop, enough to break your leg and associated body parts. The book, being issued in the United States on April 21, Muir's birthday, is: On the Trail of John Muir, published by Luath Press Limited, 543/2 Castlehill The Royal Mile, Edinburgh EH1 2 ND, (Fax: 0131-4324) $14.95. Terry Gifford has written a review of this book; it appears in the Book Review section of this issue. . . . YOSEMITE THEATER PRESENTS A NEW LEE STETSON SHOW Yosemite Theater presents "The Tramp and the Roughrider." Join John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt at their historic meeting at Glacier Point! This new production, featuring Lee Stetson as John Muir, and Doug Brennan as President Theodore Roosevelt, illuminates the 1903 encounter between these two extraordinary characters as they trade opinions, stories and adventures, and talk of "doing some forest good." If you are going to be in Yosemite, be sure to check out the Yosemite Theater located at the Visitor Center in Yosemite Valley. . . . SIBERIAN PLEA FOR THE SEQUOIAS To President William Jefferson Clinton, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20500; Fax: (202) 456-6212; e-mail: president@whitehouse.gov SAVING CALIFORNIA'S GIANT SEQUOIAS Dear Sir, The staff of the Botanic Garden of the Irkutsk State University is in agreement with your great idea to protect all 400,000 acres of the Giant Sequoia's forest habitat and mountain watersheds, not just the 35,000 acres of Sequoia groves themselves. It should be nominated as a World Heritage Site due to its natural and cultural value, I suppose. It is an international genetic resource treasure. Thank you for your support of conservation of the Earth's bio-diversity. Good luck! With best regards! On behalf of the staff, I remain, Dr. Victor Kuzevanov, Botanic Garden of the Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russia. . . . FIELD SEMINAR SCHEDULES Yosemite Association has announced its schedule for the year 2000 field seminars in Yosemite National Park. Courses range from leisurely one-day strolls around the Valley to strenuous week-long backpacking trips and cover a wide variety of topics, including natural history (wildflower walks, botany courses, butterfly diversity, geology courses, and much more); day hikes, photography seminars; Native American basketry; and drawing, painting, writing, and poetry workshops. Seminars are open to the public and present college-level material for adults who are physically capable of the required hiking. Teenagers (ages sixteen and up) may enroll in specified courses if accompanied by an adult; however, infants and young children may not attend classes (except, of course, the many family courses). College credit in the form of "professional" units is available for designated courses through the Extension Division of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. (See each course description.) Many school districts accept the professional credit for teacher salary scale advancement. For more information contact: Yosemite Association, P.O. Box 230, El Portal, CA 95318; Phone: (209) 379-2321; Fax: (209) 379-2486; e-mail: YOSE_Association@nps.gov; WEB: www.yosemite.org ( c o n t i n it e d o n page 7 ) ¥%■-' NEWS TETTER Volume 10, Number 2 Spring 2000 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University ok the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Staff Editor Production Assistants . Sally M. Miller Marilyn Norton, Pearl Piper All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2 John Muir: American Transcendentalist, by L. Mikel Vause (continued. . .) travelogues which provided readers with beautiful descriptions of some of America's wild places when in reality they are some of the best and most important contributions to American Transcendental literature. In books such as The Mountains of California, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, and My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir provides aitistic treatments of vital social and philosophical problems, and his stories reinforce and dramatize his commitment to wilderness preservation and conservation.3 Muir's first and foremost calling in life was to draw his fellow humans, through closer contact with wild nature, back into a harmonious bond with their creator, a higher spiritual relationship with God and thus a more sensitive and responsible society: Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is necessity, and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.4 These concepts are not unique to John Muir, but were commonplace in the writings of his mentors, Emerson and • loreau: "in wilderness is the preservation of the world" 'diking) — "in the woods we return to sanity. . ." (Nature). Muir knew the works of Emerson well; he carried Emerson's Nature with him during his travels and was also very familiar with the works of Thoreau.5 At age thirty-three Muir met and established a strong friendship with Emerson upon Emerson's visit to Yosemite.6 Because of the influence of Emerson, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Walter Brooks and other transcendental writers, Muir saw in nature divinely directed harmony, of which he said: "A touch of Nature makes the whole world k >>."7 The uniqueness of Muir is found in the fact that he iihotonly espoused the teachings of his mentors, but personified them daily, from the time of the accident in which he nearly lost his eyesight as a young man until the day of his death. By his constant climbing, hiking, and running in nature and by his example in written word and vocal testament, Muir was instrumental in preserving the natural environment, not only for his contemporaries, but also for future generations. John Muir also actualized transcendental (cachings by his promotion of the establishment of National Parks and Monuments. The Yosemite Wilderness Preserve came about as a result of the bill called "The Yosemite Act" which was signed into law by Benjamin Harrison on September 30, 1890. The Preserve later was expanded and became Yosemite National Park in 1906 in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1908, also because of Muir's influence, Roosevelt made the Grand < anyon a National Monument. Muir wanted all of humankind to experience the transcendentalist relationship to the divinity he found in Harmonious natural settings. Muir found this in all the wild places he visited but most in the "Holy Temples" of his beloved Sierras. He wanted humans to try to find a "sacred niche," whether, like Thoreau's, it was "only about one and a half or two miles from Concord"8 or, like Muir's, in the isolation of the untouched wilds of Yosemite. John Muir's life in the wilderness exemplified the combination of thought, feeling and action of a representative American Transcendentalist. These examples pervade Muir's writing, often occurring in otherwise very scientific explanations and travelogues of his adventures in his beloved wilderness. Uniting the ideal and actual they stand out, on the printed page as "Islands" in the oceans of rocks, trees, flowers, animals, waterfalls, and glaciers: In the morning everything is joyous and bright, the delicious purple of the dawn changes softly to daffodil yellow and white: while the sunbeams pouring through the passes between the peaks give a margin of gold to each of them. The spires of the fir in the hollow of the middle region catch the glow, and your camp grove is filled with light. The birds begin to stir, seeking sunny branches on the edge of the meadow for sun-baths after the cold night, and looking for their breakfasts, everyone of them as fresh as a lily and as charmingly arrayed. Innumerable insects begin to dance, the deer withdraw from the open chaparral, the flowers open and straighten their petals as the dew vanishes, every pulse beat high, every life-cell rejoices, the very rocks seem to tingle with life, and God is felt brooding over everything great and small.9 By using such illustration, Muir hoped to entice his reader's inner-spirit to awake from its dull, civilization- induced slumber. Like Thoreau, he wished to "wake his neighbors," to spark the curiosity that is in every living being, to force the human animal from a life of domesticated comfort back into nature. Muir taught that "in God's wildness lies the hope of the world — the great fresh, un- blighted unredeemed wilderness,"10 which parallels Thoreau's statement "in wilderness is the preservation of the world." With anxious hope Muir invites all then to: Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." Muir wanted to share with others the blessings he had found in his sacred back-country. In fact, because he felt obligated not only to his neighbors but also to God for these blessings, he started to advertise the benefits of the hinterlands. This sense of obligation came from what Muir felt was a divine call while recovering from his eye injury. He reasoned, "God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.'"2 As a result, the knowledge Muir mm page 3 John Muir: American Transcendentalist, by L. Mikel Vause (continued. . .) received in what he called "the University of the Wilderness"13 required him to try and help others to find nature's fountains of truth. Muir likened himself to the forerunner of Christ, John the Baptist, because of his fervent desire to win converts: Heaven knows that John the Baptist was no more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains.14 With his transcendental predecessors, Muir asserted that the exaltation of the Ideal World is available to all humans, agreeing with Emerson's assertion, in Nature (1836), that "This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men."15 He knew that in order for humans ever to be able to make sense out of the turbulent Actual World in which they live, they needed the divine inspiration and enlightenment that was to be found only in nature. Muir saw the harmony in nature as perfect examples of a uniting of the Ideal and Actual Worlds, thus suggesting to humanity that such a union was in fact possible and, as everyone could see, was a much preferred state of existence. "If civilized man would only seed the wilderness, he could purge himself of the desiments of society and become a 'new Creature.""6 It was this type of result that Muir sought when he included in his writings, such descriptions as the following: I sat a long time beneath the tallest fronds, and never enjoyed anything in the way of a bower of the wild leaves more strangely impressive. Only spread a fern frond over a man' s head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in. The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain, — a magic wand in Nature's hand, — every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan is a still dell, what poet has sung this? It would seem impossible that any one, however encrusted with care, could escape the Godfulinfluenceofthe.se sacred fern forests.17 It is these "Islands of Ideality" that act as Muir's literary tools for reshaping humanity, to bring humans back to their previous embryonic Godlike state, just as God used the glaciers to reshape the earth and create places like Yosemite. These "Islands of Ideality" are the tangible examples of how mortals can unite the Ideal and Actual Worlds and again and forever rub shoulders with the great creator. Sometimes when in the wilderness, Muir would come upon an "Island of Ideality," a place in which one is set free from the turbulences of the Actual World common to human society. Muir maintains that it is in these "Islands" that one can transcend one's physical limits and commune with divinity. The "Islands" represent perfect examples of how life should be lived and, according to Muir, are the types of things that humans need to be truly happy. Muir referred to these places as "terrestrial manifestations of God." Probably the best example in Muir's writings of the transcendental experience is found in the chapter entitled "Mt. Ritter" in The Mountains of California. This is truly representative of the ultimate transcendental experience - one that could happen only to one who has gained enlightenment by living a life in harmony with the divine and natural laws of Ideality. In constant contact with the Ideal realm which he found in the wilds of the Sierras, Muir experienced divine communion, the communion that takes place, according to Emersonian philosophy, as a result of one's transcending from the world of the Actual into the divine realm of the Ideal. It is this kind of transcendence that Muir participates in on Ritter and which he provides to his readers so as to entice them to desire the same divine blessings he himself experienced: I succeeded in gaining the foot of the cliff on the eastern extremity of the glacier, and there discovered the mouth of a narrow avalanche gully, through which I began to climb, intending to follow it as far as possible, and at least obtain some fine wild views for my pains. Its general course is oblique to the plane of the mountain-face, and the metamor- phic slates of which the mountain is built are cut by cleavage planes in such a way that they weather off in angular blocks, giving rise to irregular steps that greatly facilitate climbing on the sheer places. I thus made my way into a wilderness of crumbling spires and battlements, built together in bewildering combinations, and glazed in many places with a thin coating of ice, which I had to hammer off with stones. The situation was becoming gradually more perilous; but, having passed several dangerous spots, I dared not think of descending; for, so steep was the entire ascent, one would inevitably fall to the glacier in case a single misstep were made. Knowing, therefore, the tried danger beneath, I became all the more anxious concerning the developments to be made above, and began to be conscious of a vague foreboding of what actually befell; not that I was given to fear, but rather because my instincts, usually so positive and true, seemed nitiated in some way, and were leading me astray. At length, after attaining an elevation of about 12,800 feet, I found myself at the foot of a sheer drop in the bed of the avalanche channel I was tracing, which seemed absolutely to bar further progress. It was only about forty-five or fifty feet high, and somewhat roughened by fissures and projections; but these seemed so slight and insecure, as footholds, that I tried hard to avoid the precipice altogether, by scaling the wall of the channel on either side. But, though less steep, the page 4 John Muir: American Transcendentalist, by L. Mikel Vause (continued. walls were smootherthan the obstructing rock, and repeated efforts only showed that I must either go right ahead or turn back. The tried dangers beneath seemed even greater than that of the cliff in front; therefore, after scanning its face again and again I began to scale it, picking my holds with intense caution. After gaining a point about halfway to the top, I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall. There would be a moment of bewilderment, and then a lifeless rumble down the one general precipice to the glacier below. When this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the first time since setting foot on the mountains, and my mind seemed to fill with a stifling smoke. But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self, bygone experience, Instinct, or Guardian Angel, - call it what you will, - came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been home aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete. Above the memorable spot, the face of the mountain is still more savagely hacked and torn. It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling eras and piles of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag in the blessed light. How truly glorious the landscape circled around this noble summit! - giant mountains, valleys innumerable, glaciers, and meadows, rivers and lakes, with the wide blue sky bent tenderly over them all. But in my first hour of freedom from that terrible shadow, the sunlight in which I was laving seemed all in all. Looking southward along the axis of the range, the eye is first caught by a row of exceedingly sharp and slender spires, which rise openly to a height of about a thousand feet, above a series of short residual glaciers that lean back against their bases; their fantastic sculpture and the unrelieved sharpness with which they spring out of the ice rendering them peculiarly wild and striking." John Muir's travels in America's backlands resulted in many important contributions to the American people, not only in the form of wilderness preserves, national monuments, and parks but also through his work in science and philosophy. The parks and preserves are but monuments to Muir's spiritual quest. Muir was first and above all one who was seeking truth, which he found in nature. He was able to observe first-hand the wonders of God's workmanship and artistic craft in the canyons of Yosemite as well as in the swamps of Georgia and on the glaciers of Alaska. It was from this type of first-hand experience that Muir formulated many of his theories regarding the "tools of Nature," i.e. glaciers, earthquakes, water and wind thus reinforcing the Emersonian concept of the uniting of the Ideal and Actual which naturally provided greater insight into a higher "conduct of life." Another result illustrated by Muir in his record of the Mt. Ritter experience is what Thoreau called "heightened sensibility." This higher insight enabled Muir to notice the most minute wonders in natural settings, to see oceans in the dew drops and worlds is a grain of sand just as Thoreau saw "forests in orchards." Muir personified the concepts of transcendentalism by his actual pursuit of divinity in the wilderness. His missionary zeal that so strongly affected his writing reflected his desire to help motivate others to seek out and make some contact with divinity. By his own example Muir sought to lead humanity away from the bleak doctrines of Calvinism into a more realistic, optimistic future existence: "I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness."19 ENDNOTES 1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 562. 2. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 313. 3. John Muir, The Mountains of California (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1977); John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf {Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916); John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916). 4. John Muir, Our National Parks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 1. 5. Herbert F. Smith, John Muir (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965), p. 27. 6. William Frederic Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), vol. I, pp. 252-62. 7. Smith, p. 18. 8. Bade, 11:268. 9. Muir, The Mountains of California, p. 178. 10. Muir, Our National Parks, p. 56. 11. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, editor, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 317. 12. John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., 1913), p. 228. 13. Ibid., p. 228. 14. Wolfe, p. 86. 15. Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections From Ralph Waldo Emerson: an Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 35. 16. Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, pp. 11 -12, 71, 211 -12. 17. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 41. 18. Muir, The Mountains of California, pp. 63-65. 19. Bade, II: 29. page 5 Book Reviews On the Trail of John Muir Cherry Good. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2000 By Terry Gifford Bretton Hall College, Leeds University This is a biography that is also a guide. It contributes nothing new to Muir scholarship, but it does draw on recent research into the Scottish context of the Disciples of Christ and into the Canadian experience of Muir. Cherry Good has herself been "on the trail of John Muir" and is keen to help others follow this trail from Dunbar to Wisconsin, to Meaford, Ontario, to the Bonaventure graveyard in Georgia, to California. She offers street directions, addresses, telephone numbers and websites. The front pages contain the most useful set of maps yet assembled for Muir enthusiasts in one volume. Among the full-page ads for conservation groups in the back you'll find that Scotwalk.co.uk is offering guided walks in coastal Dunbar and in Skye where the John Muir Trust has bought three estates to be managed in the spirit of John Muir, like their three other estates in Scotland. This is a lively, unstuffy, if brief biography that provides an extremely useful point of entry to both John Muir studies (an up-to-date bibliography includes entries for "children's books" and "articles") and active involvement in conservation (including an urge to fight commercial inroads into Scotland's "newly created national parks" which haven't actually been newly created; yet the first will be designated in summer 2001). This is a book ahead of its time which will bring many more people within hearing of Muir's call to "do something for wildness." The American West As Living Space Wallace Stegner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987 By Anne Loftis Portola Valley, CA This book is based on a three-part lecture series that Wallace Stegner delivered in 1986 during the last decade of his life. He states his thesis in his opening words: "The West," he says, "is a region of extraordinary variety within its abiding unity, and of an iron immutability beneath its surface of change. The most splendid part of the American Habitat, it is also the most fragile." Speaking with the authority of a first-hand knowledge of many years, he goes on to pronounce strong judgments about the land and the people connected with it. For almost half a century he himself held a dual role as an advocate-defender-partisan in environmental battles and as an interpreter of regional history and folkways. He says of this long association: ". . .1 have been personal because the West is not only a region but a state of mind." We know from Stegner's own writings and from Jackson Benson's biography of him that this intimate relationship began early in his life. He may have been the last major American writer of the twentieth century to have lived on the frontier - on virgin prairie land in Saskatchewan near the Montana border where his father tried to grow wheat. The experience left him with a habit of attentiveness toward landscapes without people. Stegner may be best remembered as a Pulitzer Prize- winning novelist and longtime director of the creative writing program at Stanford. In these lecture-essays he speaks knowledgeably about the interpretation of the West by writers from Owen Wister to Joan Didion. He is more interested, however, in what was said by essayists Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Frederick Jackson Turner and Bernard DeVoto, and by Major John Wesley Powell, who led the first successful river expedition through the Grand Canyon and spent a large part of the rest of his life in a federal bureau in Washington trying to implement policies based on his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region. Stegner turns to Powell's Report to identify the area of his concern, the region that begins west of the 98th meridian, and which, except for the coastal strip of Washington, Oregon and California, has an average natural rainfall of less than twenty inches a year. For Stegner, as for Powell, this is the defining characteristic of the West, the inescapable fact which should determine the way people live in it. It could not be settled like the states farther east where family farms increased the ratio of people on the land. In dry country, Stegner, says, "quarter-section homesteads were no use to a cattle raiser. But 160 acres of intensively cultivated land were more than one family needed or could handle." He heaps his most eloquent scorn on the consequences of reclamation law. "The hydraulic society involves the maximum domination of nature." He refers to "the unrestrained engineering of western water" as "original sin." Stegner acted on such objections as far back as 1955 when he edited a Sierra Club book that helped to persuade Congress to block the building of two dams that would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument. Stegner reserves some praise for the federal agencies that preserve and protect public land. The land bureaus, he says, "have been the strongest impediment to the careless ruin of what remains of the Public Domain and they will be necessary as far ahead as I, at least, can see." He had had an inside look at their administration when, twenty years earlier, he had been called by the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, to work for a short time in that department in Washington. The pessimism he expresses in these essay-talks reflects the effect on him of the very different political climate in Washington when President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt encouraged a "sagebrush rebellion" among Western cattlemen, timber merchants and growers. The pressures of growth seemed to be relentless. He noted that in the eleven public lands page 6 states the population had gone from 4 million in 1900 to 45 million in 1984. He was amazed that "in a reckless moment" he had once spoken of public land as "part of the geography of hope." As it turned out, the situation improved during the last years of Stegner's life. Although the population growth was continuous and would only increase, there was a different response in Washington. Bruce Babbitt, the Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton Administration, had read Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell and absorbed his ideas. Babbitt honored the principles of such predecessors in office as Gifford Pinchot and Stewart Udall. Wallace Stegner, historian-interpreter of the West, might have lost some of his pessimism - and the acerbity that makes these essays so memorable. News O T E S (continued. ) Sequoia Natural History Association has a similar program of field seminars and backpacking trips in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Par https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1060/thumbnail.jpg |
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