by Andrea Wulf
Relentlessly pushed by Johnson, Muir turned his love of nature into activism and began to write and campaign for the creation of a national park in Yosemite – like Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the first and so far only one in the country, which had been established in 1872. In the late summer and autumn of 1890, Johnson lobbied for a Yosemite National Park in Washington before the House of Representatives, while Muir’s articles for the popular Century ensured a widespread recognition of the fight thanks to the magazine’s nationwide distribution. Lavishly illustrated with stunning engravings of the canyons, mountains and trees of Yosemite Valley, the articles carried the readers into the wilderness of the Sierra. Valleys became ‘mountain streets full of life and light’, granite domes had their feet in emerald meadows and ‘their brows’ in the blue sky. The wings of birds, butterflies and bees stirred the ‘air into music’ and cascades were ‘whirling and dancing’. The majestic falls foamed, folded, twisted and plunged while clouds were ‘blooming’.
Muir’s prose transported the magical beauty of Yosemite straight into America’s parlours, but at the same time he warned that it was all about to be destroyed by sawmills and sheep. A huge swathe of land needed protection, Muir wrote, because the branching valleys and streams that fed into Yosemite Valley were as closely related as the ‘fingers to the palm of a hand’. The valley was not a separate ‘fragment’ but belonged to the great ‘harmonious unit’ of nature. If one part was destroyed the others would go down too.
In October 1890, only a few weeks after Muir’s articles had been published in the Century, nearly 2 million acres were set aside as Yosemite National Park – under US federal control rather than Californian state control. In the middle of the map of the new park, though, like a huge blank, was Yosemite Valley which remained under the negligent stewardship of California.
It was a first step but there was still so much to do. Muir was convinced that only ‘Uncle Sam’ – the federal government – had the power to protect nature from the ‘fools’ who destroyed trees. It was not enough to designate areas as parks or forest reserves, their protection needed to be watched and enforced. And it was for those reasons that Muir co-founded the Sierra Club two years later, in 1892. Conceived as a ‘defence association’ for the wilderness, the Sierra Club is today America’s largest grassroots environmental organization. Muir hoped that this would ‘do something for wildness and make the mountains glad’.
Muir continued to write and campaign tirelessly. His articles were published in big national magazines such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and of course Underwood’s Century – and his audience continued to grow. By the turn of the century, Muir had become so famous that President Theodore Roosevelt requested his company on a camping trip to Yosemite. ‘I do not want anyone with me but you,’ Roosevelt wrote in March 1903. Two months later, in May, the barrel-chested President, who was an avid naturalist but also enjoyed big-game hunting, arrived in the Sierra Nevada.
President Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir on Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley in 1903 (Illustration Credit 23.4)
They made an odd pair: the thin and wiry sixty-five-year-old Muir and, twenty years his junior, the stout and rugged Roosevelt. They camped for four days at three different places – among the ‘solemn temple of the giant sequoias’, in the snow high up on one of the huge rocks, and on the valley floor below the grey perpendicular wall of El Capitan. It was here, surrounded by majestic granite rocks and the soaring trees, that Muir convinced the President that the federal government should at last take control of Yosemite Valley away from the state of California and make it part of the larger Yosemite National Park.6
Humboldt had understood the threat to nature, Marsh had assembled the evidence into one convincing argument, but it was Muir who planted environmental concerns into the wider political arena and the public mind. There were differences between Marsh and Muir – between conservation and preservation. When Marsh had made his case against the destruction of forests, he had been a proponent for conservation because he was essentially arguing for the protection of natural resources. Marsh wanted the use of trees or water to be regulated so that a sustainable balance could be achieved.
Muir, by contrast, interpreted Humboldt’s ideas differently. He advocated preservation, by which he meant the protection of nature from human impact. Muir wanted to keep forests, rivers and mountains in pristine conditions, pursuing that goal with a steely persistence. ‘I have no plan, system or trick to save them [the forests],’ he said, ‘I mean simply to go on hammering & thumping as best I can.’ He also galvanized public opinion and support. As tens of thousands of Americans read Muir’s articles and as his books became bestsellers, his voice reverberated boldly across the North American continent. Muir had become the fiercest champion for the American wilderness.
One of his most important fights concerned the plan to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a lesser known but equally spectacular valley within Yosemite National Park. In 1906, after a major earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco, which had long struggled with water shortages, applied to the US government to dam the river that ran through Hetch Hetchy in order to create a water reservoir for the growing metropolis. As Muir took up the battle against the dam, he wrote to Roosevelt, reminding the President of their camping trip in Yosemite and the urgency to save Hetch Hetchy. At the same time, though, Roosevelt received reports from the engineers whom he had commissioned, claiming that the dam was the only solution to San Francisco’s chronic water problem. With the battle lines drawn, this became the first dispute between the claims of wilderness and the demands of civilization – between preservation and progress – that would be fought on a national level. The stakes were high. If parts of a national park could be claimed for commercial reasons, then nothing was truly protected.
As Muir wrote more rousing articles, and the Sierra Club urged people to write to the President and politicians, the fight for Hetch Hetchy became a nationwide protest. Congressmen and senators received thousands of letters from concerned constituents, Sierra Club spokespeople testified before government committees and the New York Times declared the fight a ‘universal struggle’. But after years of campaigning, San Francisco won and the construction of the dam began. Although Muir was devastated, he also realized that the whole country had been ‘aroused from sleep’. Though Hetch Hetchy was gone, Muir and his fellow preservationists had understood how to lobby, how to run a national campaign, and how to act in the political arena – thereby setting a model for future activism. The idea of a national protest movement on behalf of nature was born. They had learned hard lessons. ‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’ as Muir said.
Throughout those decades and battles, Muir had never stopped dreaming of South America. In the early years after his arrival in California, he had been certain that he would go, but something else had always intervened. ‘Have I forgotten the Amazon, Earth’s greatest river? Never, never, never. It has been burning in me for half a century, and will burn forever,’ he wrote to an old friend. In between climbing, farming, writing and campaigning Muir had found the time for several trips to Alaska and then for a world tour to study trees. He had visited Europe, Russia, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand but had not made it to South America. In his mind, though, Humboldt had remained with him throughout these years. During his world tour Muir stopped in Berlin, and had walked through the Humboldt Park which had been built after the centennial celebrations and paid his respects when he went to see the Humboldt statue that stood outside the university. His friends knew how much Muir identified with the Prussian scientist and therefore called his expeditions ‘your Humboldt trip[s]’. One even shelved Muir’s publications in the explorer section of his library ‘under Humboldt’.
Muir tenaciously clung to the idea of following the footsteps of his hero. If anything, as he became older his lifelong wish to see South America grew stronger. There was also less holding him at home. In 1
905, his wife Louie died and then both his daughters married and had their own families. When Muir reached his seventies, an age when other men would have thought about their retirement, he still did not give up his dreams. He now turned his thoughts in earnest to his Humboldt exploration. Maybe it was the writing of his book My First Summer in the Sierra, in spring 1910, that renewed his wish to fulfil the dream of his youth – after all it had been his urge to be ‘a Humboldt’ that had made him leave Indianapolis and had brought him to California more than forty years previously. Muir bought a new edition of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and reread it from cover to cover, marking and annotating the pages. Nothing would stop him. No matter how much his daughters and friends protested, he had to go ‘before it is too late’. They knew that he could be stubborn. He had so often talked about the expedition, one old friend said, that she was certain Muir would not be happy until he had seen South America.
In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books. Then, on 12 August, Muir boarded a steamer in New York. He was finally travelling towards ‘the great hot river I’ve been wanting to see’. An hour before the ship left the harbour he dashed off one last note to his increasingly distraught daughter Helen. ‘Don’t fret about me,’ he assured her, ‘I’m perfectly well.’ Two weeks later Muir reached Belém in Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon. Forty-four years after he had left Indianapolis for his walk south, and more than a century after Humboldt had set sail, Muir finally set foot on South American soil. He was seventy-three years old.
It had all begun with Humboldt and with a walk. ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,’ Muir wrote after his return, ‘for going out, I found, was really going in.’
In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books, and campaigning.
1 Humboldt’s dream of a canal across the Panama isthmus had still not come to fruition. Instead, a railway now crossed the narrow stretch of land from Colón to Panama City. Completed only thirteen years previously, in 1855, it had been used by the tens of thousands of people who had gone to California during the gold rush.
2 Muir marked in his copy of Views of Nature and Cosmos the sections where Humboldt had written about the ‘harmonious co-operation of forces’ and the ‘unity of all the vital forces of nature’, as well as Humboldt’s famous remark that ‘nature is indeed a reflex of the whole’.
3 Humboldt had often explained how everything was infused with life – rocks, flowers, insects and so on. In his copy of Views of Nature, Muir underlined Humboldt’s remarks on this ‘universal profusion of life’ and the organic forces that were ‘incessantly at work’.
4 Only Muir’s stern father was displeased with his son’s nature writing. Daniel Muir, who had left his wife in 1873 to join a religious sect, wrote to John: ‘You cannot warm the heart of the Saint of God with your cold icey topped mountains.’
5 Muir had underlined a similar idea in his copy of Thoreau’s book The Maine Woods which read: ‘But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure … a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.’
6 Roosevelt kept his promise when Yosemite Valley as well as Mariposa Grove were added to Yosemite National Park in 1906.
Epilogue
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.
One of Humboldt’s greatest achievements had been to make science accessible and popular. Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas, one orator had declared during the 1869 centennial celebrations in Boston. Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.
Another reason why Humboldt has faded from our collective memory – at least in Britain and the United States – is the anti-German sentiment that came with the First World War. In a country such as Britain, where even the royal family felt they had to change their German-sounding surname ‘Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ to ‘Windsor’ and where the works of Beethoven and Bach were not played any more, it is hardly surprising that a German scientist was no longer popular. Similarly in the United States, when Congress joined the conflict in 1917, German-Americans were suddenly lynched and harassed. In Cleveland, where fifty years earlier thousands had marched through the streets in celebration of Humboldt’s centennial, German books were burned in a huge public bonfire. In Cincinnati all German publications were removed from the shelves of the public library and ‘Humboldt Street’ was renamed ‘Taft Street’. Both world wars of the twentieth century cast long shadows, and neither Britain nor America were places for the celebration of a great German mind any more.
So why should we care? Over the past few years, many have asked me why I’m interested in Alexander von Humboldt. There are several answers to that question because there are many reasons why Humboldt remains fascinating and important: not only was his life colourful and packed with adventure, but his story gives meaning to why we see nature the way we see it today. In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.
Humboldt’s disciples, and their disciples in turn, carried his legacy forward – quietly, subtly and sometimes unintentionally. Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly rooted in Humboldt’s vision – although many have never heard of him. Nonetheless, Humboldt is their founding father.
As scientists are trying to understand and predict the global consequences of climate change, Humboldt’s interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His beliefs in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines, are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking.
One look at the latest 2014 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows just how much we are in need of a Humboldtian perspective. The report, produced by over 800 scientists and experts, states that global warming will have ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems’. Humboldt’s insights that social, economic and political issues are closely connected to environmental problems remain resoundingly topical. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said: ‘There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers.’ Or as the Canadian activist Naomi Klein declares in This Changes Everything (2014), the economic system and the environment are at war. Just as Humboldt realized that colonies based on slavery, monoculture and exploitation created
a system of injustice and of disastrous environmental devastation, so we too have to understand that economic forces and climate change are all part of the same system.
Humboldt talked of ‘mankind’s mischief … which disturbs nature’s order’. There were moments in his life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets. The human species could turn even those distant stars ‘barren’ and leave them ‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing with earth.
It feels as if we’ve come full circle. Maybe now is the moment for us and for the environmental movement to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero.
Goethe compared Humboldt to a ‘fountain with many spouts from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them’.