The John Muir Newsletter, Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 4 NEWSLETTER John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa By Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno ■; ;rt?Jxcerpted from Michael Branch's new book, John Muir's Last turney: South to the Amazon and East to Africa; Unpublished irnal and Selected Corresponden...
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| Summary: | Volume 11, Number 4 NEWSLETTER John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa By Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno ■; ;rt?Jxcerpted from Michael Branch's new book, John Muir's Last turney: South to the Amazon and East to Africa; Unpublished irnal and Selected Correspondence. Copyright © 2001 by fl§and Press. Published by Island Press/Shearwater Books, Wash- Bgton, D.C., and Covelo, California. All rights reserved. Hardcover $27.50. ISBN 1-55963-640-8. To order John Muir's Last Journey, please call Island Press at (800) 828-1302, or place your order at the Island Press website, www.islandpress.org. ve had a most glorious time on this trip, dreamed of nearly half a century — have seen more than a thousand miles of the noblest of Earth's streams and gained far more telling views of the wonderful forests than I ever 1 hopedfor. ■— John Muir to Katharine Hooker, written from the Amazon delta, September 19, 1911 I. Seeing Muir Whole When we think of John Muir, a number of images typically I come to mind. There is the Muir we associate with the glory |||California's Sierra Nevada, the mountains he spent much of his life exploring and studying, and which he affectionately called the Range of Light. There is Muir the environmentalist, who helped protect Yosemite as a national park, who formed and led the Sierra Club, shaped the emergent national park idea, defined the preservationist wing of the American environmental movement, and fought to the bitter, gtragic end to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed and inundated in what became a landmark battle in lAmerican environmental history. Then there is Muir the Accomplished naturalist, whose early studies in Sierra geology were the first to prove Yosemite's glacial origins, and Swhose later botanical studies won him the admiration of scientists worldwide. Perhaps we think of Muir the hiker, ;i;;who walked 1,000 miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, or Muir the intrepid explorer, who in seven trips to Alaska — many undertaken alone or with just a few native guides — discovered dramatic features of the northern landscape. Of course Muir was also a gifted mountaineer whose many climbs, whether into a Douglas Fir crown in a windstorm, behind a Yosemite waterfall by moonlight, up the sheer face of Mt. Ritter alone, or along the dark, snowy shoulders of Mt. Shasta, have become legendary. Some may think of the young Muir who was so talented an inventor, or of the older Muir, who was the confidante of presidents and the friend of prominent journalists, artists, writers, and industrialists. Finally, from these and many other remarkable experiences emerges Muir the nature writer, a man who, though he himself often described writing as an unfortunate distraction from nature and a sadly indirect way to communicate its sacredness, produced works of environmental writing that distinguish him as one of America's most eloquent and influential literary voices on behalf of the aesthetic, ecological, and spiritual value of wilderness. Amidst these various activities and accomplishments, however, there is another Muir of whom we know far too little, and of whom scholars and admirers of Muir too rarely speak: John Muir the world traveler. Though "John O' Mountains" has been variously remembered as the wild child of the Wisconsin wilderness, the guardian angel of the blessed Sierra, and the grand old man of Alaska, his several significant journeys abroad have been largely forgotten, or in the case of his last, to South America and Africa, little known. In order to fully understand how global were Muir's interests as a traveler, botanist, and environmentalist, it is imperative that we recognize the vital role of international travels in Muir's life and work. In his first trip abroad, taken in 1864 at age twenty-six, Muir made a seven-month botanical excursion across the border, to the wilds of Canada in order to study flowers. Almost thirty years later, in the summer of 1893, he toured Europe, visiting Scotland, Norway, England, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Ireland, in order to meet with fellow natu- (continued on page 3) UNIVERSITY OR page 1 News & Notes MUIR DUNBAR BIRTHPLACE THREATENED John Muir's birthplace, an eighteenth century structure in Dunbar, Scotland, thirty miles east of Edinburgh, is scheduled for renovation by the governing authority, the East Lothian Council, which Muir's descendants and others describe as a plan to gut it and create a virtual reality museum. Letters and e-mails of protest have been sent to Dunbar by all of Muir's major biographers, by environmentalists, and others. Muir's birthplace, currently a museum, is the number one tourist attraction in Dunbar. The Muir Birthplace Trust, with a grant of one-half million dollars, plans to gut the interior of the structure and to construct a tower within the walls of the building through which openings would permit the public to view Muir videos and other memorabilia. Graham White, a member of the national John Muir Trust and an occasional contributor to this newsletter, began a campaign in late spring to reverse the ongoing plans for the site. No public comment on the hitherto secret plans had been invited, and Muir's great grandson in Napa Valley, Bill Hanna, an honorary patron of the Birthplace Trust, announced that the plans were an unwanted surprise to him. Bowing to the outcry, the Council set up an extended period of public commentary through the summer, leaving White to conclude that the earlier plans would be dropped. For further information, readers may check the net at: www.savejolmmuirhouse.org.uk ************ William R. Swagerty new director of the John Muir Center for Environmental Studies It is with great pleasure that we introduce our readers to the new director of the Center. He is William R. Swagerty, a well-known and highly respected scholar and teacher specializing in environmental history. He has been appointed Associate Professor of History at the University of the Pacific as well as Director of the Center and of UOP's newly expanded program in environmental studies. He comes to the Center from the University of Idaho where he was a member of that History Department for almost twenty years. Bill Swagerty holds a B.A. from the Colorado College in Colorado Springs and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His scholarly interests include environmental studies in general, Northwest environmental issues, Native American history, Canadian and American comparative westward movements, and other topics. He has served several visiting stints on the staff of the Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, including curating its major exhibit "America in 1492" as its Quincentennial exhibition. He has served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and for its Handbook of North American Indian Project, and for a variety of other institutions on film and other projects. He has written dozens of articles and papers, and edited for publication a number of monographs and proceedings volumes. He is currently under contract for two books, one of which focuses on Lewis and Clark. In our next issue, Bill will write a feature which will further infroduce him to our readers. ************ Editor's Note: An error crept into the article by Parker Huber entitled "A Quiet Way" in our Spring 2001, issue. The name should have read Anne H. Winger. ************ ETHICS, PLACES AND ENVIRONMENT A relatively new journal of great interest has come to the attention of our staff, and we wish to notify our readers of this publication. It is Ethics, Places and Environment. It began to publish three years ago in England, and appears three times a year. Recent articles include: "Moral sentiments and reciprocal obligations: the case for pension fund investment in community development" by Gordon Clark. "Ethics, reflexivity and research: encounters with homeless people" by Paul Clike, Phil Cooke, Jenny Cursons, Paul Milbourne and Rebekah Widdowfield. "Aesthetic, social and ecological values in landscape architecture: a discourse analysis" by Ian Thompson. "Social justice and the ethics of development in post-apartheid South Africa" by David M. Smith To subscribe contact the journal's American address: Carfax Publishing Taylor & Francis Customer Services Department 325 Chestnut Street, 8,h Floor Philadelphia; PA 19106 FAX: (215) 625-2940 ************ Mamie Kimes who, with her late husband, Bill, helped immortalize John Muir in the world of scholarship, prefers for herself the designation of "Mountaineer." She and Bill followed in the footsteps of their hero Muir, and for a generation climbed mountains throughout the world, from 1945 to 1968. She writes: I grew up on a large ranch in the San Joaquin Valley northeast of Hanford, California. My brother and sister and I drove a Shetland pony and buggy to a rural school about two and (continued on page 10) NEWSLETTER Volume 11, Number 4 Fall 2001 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ Staff ♦ Editor Sally M. Miller Production Assistants . 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. w page 2 John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael P. Branch ralists and visit such celebrated landscapes as the glacial fjords of coastal Norway, the English Lake District, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, the Lakes of Killarney, and the Scottish Highlands. A decade later, from May, 1903 to May, 1904, Muir toured the world, primarily in order to study trees. Traveling at first with Harvard botanist Charles S. Sargent and then on his own,: Muir went to Europe, Russia, the Far East, the Middle i M, Australia, and New Zealand, before returning to San Francisco via Honolulu. Muir's world tour, made when he was . I idy in his mid-sixties, confirmed his passion for international travel and nature study, and whetted his appetite for a 0 age to South America and sub-Saharan Africa, the two m ijor areas of the globe he had not yet seen. Muir's final international journey — the final major journey of his life and the brie he proclaimed his most rewarding — is lesser known ■even than the Canadian excursions and the world tour, and is lh( ibject ofJohn Muir's Last Journey. . The True Beginnings of the Last Journey ;r to understand the significance and poignancy of John last journey, we must revisit his first major journey, Hned 1867 thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis, Indian i i: ybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day'" (Slory, 145). Even more important than Mungo Park in inspir- ingMuir's early dreams of international exploration was the great German explorer and scientist Alexander von Hum- ;boldtj;who served as a model of the sort of broad minded, philosophically inclined natural scientist that Muir aspired to become. It was largely through Humboldt's account of his South America travels that Muir developed his most burning ambition: to explore and study the tropical rainforests of the great Amazon basin. ■■Muir's letters from the mid-1860s demonstrate unequivo cally that he developed high hopes for a voyage to South America before his 1867 industrial accident. The most telling of these letters, written to a friend on the day following his misfortune, makes clear how serious he was about the southern journey: "For weeks," he wrote, "I have daily consulted maps in locating a route through the Southern States, the West Indies, South America, and Europe — a botanical journey studied for years. And so my mind has long been in a glow with visions of the glories of a tropical flora; but, alas, I am half blind. My right eye, trained to minute analysis, is lost and I have scarce heart to open the other" {Thousand, xvi). And as his vision slowly returned, Muir more fully admitted the strength of his passion for the journey. "For many a year," he commented, "I have been impelled toward the Lord's tropic gardens of the South. Many influences have tended to blunt or bury this constant longing, but it has outlived and overpowered them all" {Thousand, xviii). Muir's journal of the epic walk — the first of his sixty extant journals — was posthumously published in 1916 as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, and it has received a great deal of well-deserved critical attention since then. What has received far too little attention, however, is the fact that Muir's ultimate goal for the walk was not the Gulf of Mexico, but rather South America. Cedar Keys was not a destination but an unplanned, illness-induced stopover on a longer trip toward the greatest of the world's river basins, as Muir's own description of his travel plan makes clear. "I had long wished to visit the Orinoco basin and in particular the basin of the Amazon," he wrote, describing his ambitions for a truly Humboldtian adventure. "My plan was to get ashore anywhere on the north end of the continent, push on southward through the wilderness around the headwaters of the Orinoco, until I reached a tributary of the Amazon, and float down on a raft or skiff the whole length of the great river to its mouth" {Thousand, 96). When a ship arrived in Cedar Keys bound for Havana in early January, Muir decided he would add a Cuban sojourn to his plans; however, Muir's beachcombing and botanizing along the Cuban coast, while enjoyable, failed to fully restore his strength. He finally decided, regretfully, that his ambitious journey to the Amazon could not be effected under such adverse circumstances, and would have to be put on hold. Muir's decision in that moment of postponement changed the course of his life, and radically influenced the development of American environmental concern, protection, and literature as we now know them. "I could not find a vessel of any sort bound for South America, and so made up a plan to go North, to the longed-for cold weather of New York, and thence to the forests and mountains of California," wrote Muir, who had seen a brochure boasting of the geological and botanical wonders of the Sierra Nevada (Clarke, 58). "There, I thought, I shall find health and new plants and mountains, and after a year spent in that interesting country I can carry out my Amazon plans" {Thousand, 96). It proved a fateful decision, for upon his arrival in San Francisco, via the Isthmus of Panama, in late March, 1868, John Muir walked into the Sierra, into Yose-mite, and into history. III. A Dream Long Deferred It might be said that the John Muir we have come to know and page 3 John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael p. Branch appreciate is the figure who developed during the forty-four year hiatus between his first and second attempts to reach the Amazon. Nearly everything we know of Muir's contributions as a writer, mountaineer, scientist, natural philosopher, and environmental advocate follows from his auspicious arrival in California. But if, after Muir's first glimpse of the Sierra, "the rest is history," then the history of Muir's life and travels as it has commonly been told remains incomplete. For during the four decades spanning Muir's better known adventures, he continued to dream of the Amazon journey that had been thwarted in his youth, and he never relinquished hope that he might someday complete the voyage that had been so earnestly begun when he left Indianapolis in 1867. In 1908 Muir, now a national icon and a famous scientist, preservationist, and writer, turned seventy years old. His wife, Louie, had died three years earlier, and his daughters, Wanda and Helen, had begun to give him grandchildren; he had begun to excavate old dreams and memories by dictating material for his autobiography; activist work had begun to limit his opportunities to travel; and his advancing age seemed to increase the urgency of his literary affairs. In a letter of March 2, 1911, Muir described the several books he was then working on, adding that "I have also planned a book describing other Yosemites, another on mountaineering. one on trees, one or two on Alaska, two or three on earth sculpture, etc., two or three on travels abroad, and one on animals, etc." Weighing his literary ambitions against the magnetic pull of wilderness travel, Muir decided, as he had so many times before, that making books would have to wait. Shortly before his seventy-third birthday, Muir responded passionately to a friend who had inquired whether he had finally given up the idea of voyaging to South America: "Have I forgotten the Amazon, Earth's greatest river? Never, never, never. It has been burning in me half a century, and will burn forever." During late winter or early spring, 1911, Muir began to plan in earnest for what he knew would be his last chance to fulfill the long-held dream of reaching the great river. Perhaps thinking of one of his favorite poetic lines — "'twill soon be dark," from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "To J. W." — Muir wrote to his friend Robert Underwood Johnson that he hoped to reach South America "before it is too late." Having tied up what loose ends in California he could, Muir left San Francisco on April 20, 1911, bound by rail to the East. During the three months between his arrival in New York and his August 12th departure for the equatorial rain-forests of Brazil, Muir was tremendously busy lobbying influential public figures on behalf of Hetch Hetchy and arranging for publication of his autobiography and his Yosemite book, which he had not yet completed. In reading the many unpublished letters written to Muir in the weeks preceding his departure, it is striking how energetically Muir's friends and family attempted to dissuade him from taking the solitary voyage. Politely dismissing the admonitions that he was too old, too ill, or too important to undertake the voyage, Muir resolved to reach the Amazon despite the objections of sympathetic friends who did not fully share his passion for wilderness. As he contemplated the upcoming journey, Muir seems to have felt a keen sense of impending separation from loved ones, combined with a conviction that a trip so important to him as a person and as a naturalist had to be made before it was too late. To his friends and family — and particularly to Helen, his often infirm daughter who was now the mother of an infant son named Muir — he wrote tender letters of concern offering paternal words of advice and encouragement. Muir's sense of loneliness and mortality, as well as his sense of urgency to begin the voyage, were intensified by the unfortunate loss of many of his close friends to the ravages of old age. In a poignant letter to Helen, Muir speculates on the recent deaths of three of his closest friends: "Your letter received yesterday telling our dear Sellers's death Sunday made me sad," he wrote. "I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling." Given the objections voiced by his friends and family, the anguish caused by the recent deaths of several close friends, the worries about Hetch Hetchy Valley, the grueling task of completing the Yosemite manuscript, and the lonely prospect of traveling, old and alone, into the Amazon jungle, it is remarkable that Muir's journey happened at all. Despite these discouragements, Muir's resolve to visit the Amazon seems never to have wavered throughout this period. "It's kind of you to care so much about my loneliness in my travels," he wrote to a concerned friend, "but I'm always fortunate as a wanderer and fear nothing fate has in store." On the eve of his departure he wrote that "I start tomorrow for the great hot river I've been wanting so long to see, and alone as usual." But Muir remained sanguine about his solitary travels; "oftentimes our loneliest wanderings are most fruitful of all," he commented. On August 10, 1911, Muir finished the manuscript of his Yosemite book, and just two days later went down to the Brooklyn Harbor to begin what was to be his last great journey. In 1868 the young John Muir had hesitantly deferred his South America journey, and had instead come to New York and caught a ship to California. Now, forty-four years later, he was back, and, at long last, he was Amazon bound. IV. The 40,000-Mile Odyssey Muir's epic voyage began on August 12, 1911, when he left Brooklyn and sailed south through the Atlantic and Caribbean to Belem (then Para), Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon. From here Muir steamed 1,000 miles up the great river, fulfilling his dream of following Humboldt's tracks into the greatest river basin on Earth. Near Manaus, at the confluence of the Amazon and Rio Negro, Muir spent an exciting week observing trees, plants, birds, and reptiles, and making a special trip into the thick jungle in an ultimately unsuccessful search of the rare, gigantic water lily, Victoria regia. Though the infre- quency of up-river steamers prevented him from going another 1,000 miles into the interior, as he had hoped, Muir was deeply satisfied with his Amazonian jungle experience at the completion of the trip that he had begun four decades earlier. Returning to Belem Muir then sailed to Rio de Janeiro, where he admired the glacially-sculpted landscape and the view from the surrounding mountains before continuing south along the Brazilian coast. From Santos, Brazil, Muir began his quest to find a rare tree of the Araucaria genus, Araucaria braziliensis, which he knew to be native to southern Brazil. Now far off the routes taken by the few tourists who visited this region during the page 4 John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael p. Branch early twentieth century, Muir traveled by rail inland from Santos and then by small steamer up the Iguacu River into the heart of the Brazilian wilderness, where he at last found vast forests of Araucaria braziliensis. He remained in the forest for more than a week, spending nearly every hour of daylight, regardless of the weather, making precise observations of the unusual tree in its native habitat. ■ "Muir next returned to the coast and sailed south to Montevideo, Uruguay, and then Buenos Aires, Argentina. From coastal Argentina he began the second of the great tree quests of his voyage, traveling west across the South American-continent to Chile, where he hoped to find the even more rare, cousin of Araucaria braziliensis, Araucaria imbricata, the so-called Monkey Puzzle Tree. Muir, however, had no certain information about where the tree might be found, and instead simply followed his botanist's instincts five hundred miles south, from Santiago to Victoria, where, after an arduous mountain journey through rough terrain and up to snowline, Muir at last discovered the forest he had crossed the continent to see. He spent an ecstatic day studying and sketch- Vlonkey PuzzleTree before sleeping out beneath its branches in the Andean night. Delighted with his observations of the Monkey Puzzle forest, Muir was soon off again, n hi ling to Santiago and then back across the pampas to Buenos Aires. From Buenos Aires he returned to Montevideo seeking a ship bound for South Africa, where he intended to continue his travels and botanical studies. The second major phase of Muir's journey began in early December, when he sailed for South Africa, via the Canary Islands •— then a grueling 35-day ocean voyage that clearly suggests Muir's deep desire to study the flora and landscape of the African continent. After spending Christmas and New Year's at sea, Muir at last arrived in Cape Town in mid- January, 1912. ft From coastal South Africa Muir began yet another great tree pilgrimage — this time to Adansonia digitata, the African baobab — traveling inland by rail to search for the tree near the famed Victoria Falls of the Zambezi River. Among the oldest living things on earth, the baobab is believed to live .up to 2,000 years. Little wonder that Muir was so determined : to: find this remarkable tree, or that he so delighted in studying the baobab when at last he found it growing near Victoria Falls. Indeed, after observing and sketching the baobab Muir declared the experience one of the most rewarding of his life. ■ ■ ;ft; Traveling to the southeastern coast of Africa, Muir sailed north to Mombasa, in present-day Kenya, where he began the next leg of his journey. In early February he went inland by rail across the wildlife-rich Athi plains to Nairobi, and then on to the shores of Lake Victoria. Taking a small boat across the great lake, Muir studied central African flora on his way to Ripon Falls, where he watched the waters of the Nile beginning their 3,000-mile course to the sea. Muir then returned to-coastal Africa, where he spent a few days studying trees as he prepared for the long homestretch of his journey. In late February Muir sailed north: through the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and Gulf of Suez, then through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean Sea to Naples, Italy. On March 15 he began the final leg of his travels, first plying the sea along the mountainous coast of Spain, then sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar into the North Atlantic. After weathering unusually severe storms at sea, John Muir arrived safely back in New York on March 27, only a few weeks shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. He had traveled 40,000 miles since leaving America the previous summer, and had not been ill a single day. (to be continued. . . .) WORKS CITED Note: All undocumented quotations are from John Muir's Last Journey. Clarke, James Mitchell. The Life and Adventures of John Muir. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. Bade, William Frederic, ed. Introduction to A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, by John Muir. 1916. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992. Branch, Michael P., ed. Introduction to John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa. Washington, D.C: Island, 2001. Muir, John. John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa. Ed. Michael P. Branch. Washington, D.C: Island, 2001. — The Mountains of California. 1894. New York: Dorset, 1988. — The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. 1913. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989. — A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. Ed. William Frederic Bade. 1916. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992. Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1945. Buddhism and the 'Subversive Science' David P. Barash (This article appears with the permission of the author. It first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the issue of February 23, 2001.) Buddhism is "in," and has been for about 2,500 years, if only for a few decades in the West. Ecology, too, is "in," but for only about 30 years, since the first Earth Day, in April 1970. Buddhism is a religion ■— or a spiritual/philosophical tradition ■— whereas ecology is a science. Buddhism is Eastern; ecology is Western. And yet, the twain have already met. This meeting of the minds, Buddhist and ecological, results from similar insights into the nature of reality — indistinguishable from the reality of nature — and how we fit in. People who follow ecological thinking (including some of our hardest-headed scientists) may not realize that they are also embracing an ancient spiritual tradition. Many who espouse Buddhism — succumbing, perhaps, to its chic Hollywood appeal — may not realize that they are also endorsing a world- view with political implications that go beyond bumper stickers and trendy, feel-good support for a "free Tibet." "If you are a poet," writes the contemporary Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, "you will see that there is a cloud in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper." The beloved Vietnamese monk goes on to include the logger who cut the trees, the logger's mother, and so forth. If you, too, can see the cloud in this sheet of paper, then page 5 Buddhism and the 'Subversive Science' by David P. Barash maybe you also are a poet, a Zen master. or an ecologist. Regardless of who sees it, there really is a cloud in this sheet of paper, as well as a bark beetle, a handful of soil, a bit of bird poop, even the gasoline that powered the logger's chain saw. It is even possible that if you were to chronicle the history of those carbon atoms currently part of the paper you are now holding, you would find that they were once part of Peter the Great, a woolly mammoth, or (and!) A Komodo dragon, before they found themselves incorporated into the loblolly pine that eventually became this particular sheet of paper. The ecological concept is easy to grasp, although often difficult to act upon. It is also remarkably similar to the fundamental insight of Buddhism: the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things {prattiiya-samutpada, in Sanskrit; paticca-samuppada, in Pali). Traditional Tibetan Buddhists repeat, over and over, that all things have at some time been our mothers, just as we have at some time been theirs. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches about "in- terbeing," the fact that we and all other things "inter-are." In the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, devotees have long been advised to practice self-restraint and consideration for others; in the other great Buddhist perspective, Mahayana, followers are enjoined to liberate all beings from suffering. Throughout, the underlying principle is compassion, which means something quite different from empathy, sympathy, or even doing good or being nice, not to mention easy phrases about "feeling your pain." The touchstone, instead, is a Buddhist teaching that is among the most difficult for Westerners: the concept of "no- self." But it requires less denial of common sense than one might think, especially if it is reformulated as "interdependence," or, as sometimes translated, "dependent co-arising." In short, for Buddhists there is no self, because each of us arises in conjunction with others, dependent on and inseparable from those others. Everyone is composed entirely of non-self stuff, atoms and molecules that each shares with everyone and everything. For Buddhists and ecologists alike, we are all created from spare parts scavenged from the same cosmic junk heap, from which "our" components are on temporary loan, and to which they will eventually be recycled. (When, in the closing image of Gary Larson's hilarious eco-parable There's a Hair in My Dirt, a friendly family of worms concludes by looking smilingly up at the reader as though to say, "We'll be seeing you soon," they are factually, ecologically, and Bud- dhistically right.) And so, our "existence" is not a distinct and separable phenomenon. Genuine compassion, in the sense of suffering with, is easy — in fact, unavoidable — insofar as no one is distinct from the recipient of his or her concern. A major Buddhist text, the Avatamsaka ("Adorning the Buddha With Flowers") Sutra, consists of 10 insights into the significance of "interpenetration" between beings and their environment. The British poet Francis Thompson said it this way: "All things . . near and far, hiddenly to each other, connected are, that thou canst not stir a flower without the troubling of a star." John Muir glimpsed the same principle: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." For ecologists, no less than poets or Buddhists, it is the basic rule: connectedness, inseparability, food webs, trophic levels, community interactions, call it what you will. At one point in the Origin of Species, Darwin speculated playfully that by keeping cats, English spinsters made London a more pleasant and flower-full place. His idea was as follows: Cats, as everyone knows, eat mice. Mice, as fewer people realize, occasionally destroy the nests of bumblebees, which are typically dug into the ground. And bumblebees, of course, pollinate flowers. So more cats, fewer mice. Fewer mice, more bumblebees. More bumblebees, more flowers. Therefore: more cat-lovers equals more flowers! No one has ever tested Darwin's proposal. But many other such connections have been elucidated; they are the stuff of ecology, no less than of Buddhism. Here is one example, recently reported in Science: a project originally conceived to investigate the causes of periodic infestations of gypsy moths, a pest introduced from Europe that, about one year in ten, causes great damage to forests in ea https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1065/thumbnail.jpg |
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