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"I only
went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till
sundown,
for going out, I found, was really going in."
~John Muir
Join us this
Monday 4/18 for a screening of John Muir in the
magnificent, spiritual, and awe-inspiring film about Muir, the
father of the
environmental movement and the founder of the Sierra Club, the
oldest and
largest grassroots conservation organization in the
April 18 PBS
watch a preview
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/about-the-film/1789/
(Sorry, if you
are not in the
John Muir
Nature’s
Witness
By Anna Maria
Gillis
Excerpt:
It’s on his
journey of scientific inquiry, first to the Gulf and in his first
summer in the
leaves much of his Calvinist background behind, says Worster.
A man of his
time, Muir was raised with the view from Genesis that God has
given man dominion over all of nature. But in A Thousand-Mile
Walk to the
Gulf, based on his journals from that period published
posthumously in
1916, Muir adopts a humbler view: “The world, we are told,
was made
especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the
facts. A
numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find
anything,
living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat
or render in some
way what they call useful to themselves.” He goes on to say,
“From the dust
of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has
made Homo
sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature,
however
noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions
and our
fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this
laborious
patchwork of modern civilization cry ‘Heresy’ on every
one whose
sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary
epidermis of
our own species.”
Other
nineteenth-century thinkers—Humboldt, Emerson, Thoreau,
Ruskin—looked at nature for inspiration, and Muir knew their
work, but
Muir went further. He may be regarded, says Worster in an
interview, “as
a religious prophet,” one whose religion was Nature.
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-03/Muir.html
John Muir quotes:
"When we try
to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else
in the universe."
"One touch
of nature makes the whole world kin."
"Everybody
needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
"Most people
are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or
relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and
rigidly alone
like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. "
"How narrow
we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How
blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!"
"Yet how hard most people work for mere
dust and ashes and care, taking
no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time
to get in
sight of their own ignorance."
"Muir has
profoundly shaped the very categories through which Americans
understand and envision their relationships with the natural
world," writes
Holmes.[6] Muir was noted for being an ecological thinker,
political
spokesman, and religious prophet, whose writings became a
personal guide
into nature for countless individuals, making his name
"almost ubiquitous" in
the modern environmental consciousness. According to author
William
Anderson, Muir exemplified "the archetype of our oneness
with the
earth",[7] while biographer Donald Worster says he
understood his mission
to be, "Saving the American soul from total surrender to
materialism."[8]
more complete
biography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir