John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

by Heacox, Kim

  Muir had written to Johnson, “The long drawn-out battle work for Nature’s gardens has not been thrown away. The conscience of the whole country has been aroused from sleep, and from outrageous evil compensating good in some form must surely come.”

  “The most significant thing about the controversy was that it occurred at all,” Roderick Nash would observe. “One hundred or even fifty years earlier a similar proposal to dam a wilderness river would not have occasioned the slightest ripple of public protest . . .”

  Many people were stunned to hear of Muir’s death. He had always seemed so boundless, robustly alive, eternally young. Among those who knew him best, however, it was no surprise. Hetch Hetchy had wounded him gravely. That he should leave as he did, without fanfare—his final manuscript on the hospital table beside him, committed to the wild beauty of Alaska and the power of words—made a fitting end.

  And a powerful beginning.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  in perpetuity

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1916, as a war-ravaged Europe staggered through zeppelin raids on Paris and the endless bloodbaths of the Isonzo and the Somme, President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection on a platform of keeping America neutral, one that would win him a narrow victory. Everybody talked about Gil Anderson, who’d driven a Stutz more than 102 mph at Sheepshead Bay, New York. And about Margaret Sanger, who’d written Family Limitation, a lightning rod pamphlet (later a book) on contraception and population control: She would soon open the first birth control clinic in the United States (in Brooklyn), be arrested nine days later, and be jailed for a month.

  The National Park Service was established as an agency focused on preservation and enjoyment and placed in the Department of the Interior, unlike the US Forest Service, a multiple-use agency that resided in the harvest-minded Department of Agriculture. And William Skinner Cooper, a thirty-two-year-old assistant professor of botany from the University of Minnesota, arrived in Glacier Bay to conduct field studies in primary plant succession, how a landscape returned to life after a cataclysmic event—glacial ice and retreat—had scoured it down to bedrock. Cooper had read Travels in Alaska, published only the year before (a few months after Muir’s death). He’d studied the works of Muir, Harry Fielding Reid, Grove Karl Gilbert, and others who’d mapped the glacial footprints of Glacier Bay, the tracks of ice through space and time, the land and sea a living testimony to resilience, wildness, and change.

  How many times had glaciers ebbed and flowed here? And why? What caused an ice age? What produced profound shifts in the Earth’s climate over vast reaches of time? Seventy-five years had passed since Louis Agassiz first proposed that ice once ruled the higher latitudes and altitudes of the world. By 1916, scientists knew that the Pleistocene epoch, beginning roughly 1.8 million years ago and ending 12,000 years ago, was in fact a time of many ice ages, of major advances punctuated by relatively short interglacial periods. Glaciers came and glaciers went. Why?

  ENTER MILUTIN MILANKOVITCH, a Serbian mathematician who specialized in astronomy and geophysics and believed the explanation lay in seasonal and latitudinal variations of solar radiation received by the Earth. Jailed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during part of the war, Milankovitch continued to make computations by hand, reaching back 600,000 years. He concluded that three cycles of different lengths combined to shift the planet’s energy budget by as much as 20 percent, giving rise to the Earth’s dynamic climatic regimes.

  First, the shape of the Earth’s ellipse around the sun stretched out from one position and back every 96,000 years. Second, the planet’s axis tilt relative to the solar plane increased or decreased every 41,000 years. And last, the Earth did a complete wobble on its axis every 23,000 years, giving us different configurations of the Zodiac. As such, 12,000 years from now the North Star would not be Polaris. Through the millennia, Milankovitch said, these three cycles variously cancelled or augmented each other; this augmentation was enough to radically change the Earth’s climate at times. Other variables also came into play: extreme solar and global volcanic activity, albedo, chaos, feedback loops, and local factors such as earthquakes and (over great distances of time) the rise of mountain ranges like the Himalaya. And if Svante Arrhenius were correct, human activity played an increasingly significant role as well, given our growing population and industrial footprint that each year pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

  Milankovitch would work for decades to fully develop his theory, yet already, by the time William Cooper arrived in Glacier Bay, his results were creating a stir among scientists. This was no small accomplishment; academics made tough critics. Consider Milankovitch’s fellow theorist Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and paleoclimatologist who the year before, in 1915, completed a bold and elaborate explanation of continental drift. Wegener provided compelling evidence on many levels, such as fossils, rock types, and coastline patterns. However, he couldn’t explain the driving force behind the drift.

  That force, convections in the Earth’s semimolten mantle that floats plates of the crust in various directions, would not be discovered until after World War II. And so Wegener’s theory, exquisite in its detail but lacking a key element, earned him a flood of derision, especially from the United States. If what he proposed were true, one geologist later announced, then geologists would have to “forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again.”

  Like Muir, Cooper found the truth at his feet, in little plants and subtle patterns that had stories to tell—for those willing to slow down and look. His father had exposed him to mountains at an early age—first in the Blue Ridge and Adirondacks; later the Colorado Rockies—and he came to love science and mountaineering. According to a friend, he also developed a passion for the kind of nature writing “strongly reminiscent of that of John Muir.” At Johns Hopkins University, Cooper studied geology under Harry Fielding Reid, who had known the great “Professor Muir” in Glacier Bay. He transferred to the University of Chicago, where, according to historian Theodore Catton,

  Cooper studied under Professor Henry Chandler Cowles, whose seminal work on “successional development” in plant communities in the Lake Michigan sand dunes had helped establish the new school of “dynamic” ecology. Together with University of Nebraska ecologist Frederic Clements, whose grassland studies proceeded independently yet parallel to his own work, Cowles introduced the concept of successional stages of plant communities leading to a “climax community” or steady state . . . Walking his graduate students in their minds’ eyes through these dunes, Cowles planted a seed that would eventually germinate Cooper’s study of plant succession in Glacier Bay.

  Cooper visited and photographed every glacier and inlet except Johns Hopkins that first summer, 1916, and made careful observations, and established nine permanent one-meter quadrats “in three sites of varying distance from the glaciers” that he would visit every five years or so to “make a close study of changing soil and plant composition.” He described his work as “exceedingly modest.”

  The modesty would end, however, when Cooper, like his hero John Muir, transcended himself to find the writer and activist within, who would fight to save the wild country he loved. It was something—somebody—he never thought he’d be, but once committed he had no intention of backing down. Glaciers shape the land; the land shapes the man.

  Since Muir’s final visit, in the summer of 1899, and the massive earthquake that rattled the region that September, the glaciers of Glacier Bay had continued their retreats north, in some cases opening entire new waterways. To begin a journey in the spruce-hemlock conifer forest of the lower bay, deglaciated the longest, and to proceed north through successive stages of vegetation—the dominant plants of each stage getting smaller and smaller, from trees down to shrubs down to mosses and lichens near the tidewater ice fronts—was more than a journey through space, as Cooper had learned from Cowles. It was a journey through time
, measured by changes on the land and in the sea, a bay coming back to life, a universe unto itself, a Tlingit homeland, a scientific laboratory, and one day a national park, an international biosphere reserve, and a world heritage site—if people sacrificed; if they fought for it. In a nation increasingly crowded, industrial, and dedicated to economic growth, where every man with a pencil, suit, shovel, or saw was what Frederick Jackson Turner called “an expectant capitalist,” wild places didn’t stay wild by accident. They had to be loved, honored, defended.

  And so William Cooper, a modest plant ecologist, dug deep and found the John Muir within.

  AT THE ANNUAL MEETING of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Boston in 1922, he presented his initial Glacier Bay findings from the field summers of 1916 and 1921. So excited were his colleagues, they began to talk of how Glacier Bay could be permanently protected, perhaps as a national monument, or even a national park.

  “In the first case,” wrote Robert F. Griggs, a fellow botanist, “it is necessary only to convince one man [the president] of the advisability of the action, while in the second six hundred, more or less [both houses of Congress], must be converted to the idea.” Get the monument first, Griggs reasoned; the park will follow, though it may take years. Griggs had recently returned from expeditions to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, in the Katmai region on the Alaska Peninsula, seven hundred miles west of Glacier Bay, and successfully campaigned for Katmai National Monument, established in 1918. The following year, the year Teddy Roosevelt died, Grand Canyon National Park was established after having been a national monument (created by TR) for more than a decade.

  Disinclined toward boldness, or to assume leadership or take credit that belonged to others, Cooper would later say it was Barrington Moore, former president of the ESA, who first proposed that a committee be established to seek permanent protection of the Glacier Bay region. Perhaps. But the task of chairing that committee fell to Cooper, and from then on he was the point of the spear.

  “A MONSTROUS PROPOSITION,” announced the Juneau Daily Empire,

  It is said the proposed National Monument is intended to protect Muir Glacier and to permit the study of plant and insect life in its neighborhood. It tempts patience to try to discuss such nonsensical performances. The suggestion that a reserve be established to protect a glacier that none could disturb if he wanted and none would want to disturb if he could or permit the study of plant and insect life is the quintessence of silliness. And then when it is proposed to put millions of acres, taking in established industries and agricultural lands and potential resources that are capable if supporting people and adding to the population of Alaska, it becomes a monstrous crime against development and advancement. It leads one to wonder if Washington has gone crazy through catering to conservation faddists.

  One observer would note that Cooper “defended the concepts of the proposed monument in the same newspaper . . . also pointing out all the things the newspaper had not bothered to ask him about.”

  THE SAME YEAR, 1922, Cooper assumed command of his committee to safeguard Glacier Bay from so-called “development and advancement,” the famously private expatriate T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, one of the most important poems of the twentieth century, wherein he said “I can show you fear in a handful of dust.” Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton died early that year. Never comfortable in flat, green, rainy England with all its starched Edwardian finery, he sailed back to South Georgia, the island he called “the Gateway to the Antarctic,” suffered a major heart attack, and was buried facing south among Norwegian whalers in the land of ice where his greatness shone best. And Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his other writings, described modern man as little more than a zoo animal trapped in invisible cages of his own making, pacing between the wishes of the individual and the requirements of society, driven by dissatisfaction, always wanting more: more money, more freedom, more land, more time.

  What was success, exactly? A ghost? A mirage? A bigger this, a faster that? A neurotic dog chasing his own tail? And once he catches it . . . then what? Who wrote the definitions of success, development, advancement? If Alaska needed more people, as some capitalists said it did, how many more? When did “more” become “too many”? At what point, if ever, did we awaken to see the futility of it all?

  Scholars have pointed out that Eliot’s poem, shifting as it does between satire and prophecy, speaks to the hopelessness and meaninglessness of our existence; after all, we all become dust. The rich might have nicer coffins than the poor, but in the end they’re not aware of it and are no more comfortable. The choir sings about the kingdom of Heaven, not the gifts of the Earth. Thousands of flowering meadows become shopping malls and housing tracts, and millionaire developers want more, and children stay indoors to eat processed food and watch five hours of television a day. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” poet Mary Oliver would ask.

  John Muir had observed, “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity . . .”

  We’d better think carefully about what we’re doing.

  One day in 1889 while walking on the California coast, Muir had struck up a conversation with a young amateur botanist and mountain guide named Enos Mills. Inspired, as were others by John of the Mountains, Mills buckled down and launched a campaign to safeguard his beloved Colorado from runaway development. Calling himself “the John Muir of the Rockies,” he spearheaded a campaign to create Rocky Mountain National Park, no easy task. But all great opportunities mask themselves as insurmountable problems. In 1915, the year after Muir died, Rocky Mountain National Park was established. “I owe everything to Muir,” said Mills, who’d lobbied for the park for more than a decade. “If it hadn’t been for him I would have been a mere gypsy.”

  Two years later Mount McKinley National Park was established in interior Alaska, again through a decade-long effort, not of one man but two: Charles Sheldon, a wealthy hunter/naturalist in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, and Belmore Browne, a mountaineer/writer who in 1912 had come within one hundred meters of being the first man to stand atop Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America, with its seventeen glaciers spilling down magnificent granite gorges to braided rivers and the tundra below. Both Sheldon and Browne found strength and inspiration in the life and works of John Muir.

  BY THE TIME William Cooper began his campaign to establish Glacier Bay National Monument a few years later, the US National Park Service had become a no-nonsense outfit headed by Stephen T. Mather, a Sierra Club member and arch-opponent of the Hetch Hetchy Dam and the utilitarian policies of the Forest Service. He’d made a fortune in borax mining and brought to his new job an authenticity some found refreshing, others threatening. Early on, he often used his own personal fortune to help finance the service, saying, “I got my money out of the soil of the country, so why should I not be praised for putting a little of it back? That’s only decent acknowledgment.”

  Critics charged that the national parks were expensive irrelevances at best, communist enclaves at worst. Park advocates cried baloney, adopting a staunch defense. “Without parks and outdoor life,” asserted Enos Mills, “all that is best in civilization will be smothered.” He said the wilderness character of the parks are the best thing we have to “rebuild the past” and “keep our nation young,” and will only grow in value over time, so long as we keep and protect them.

  With America still recovering from the recent war, and the west largely undisturbed during those years, writer John C. Van Dyke (capitalizing the word “Nature” as Muir had) asked, “Was there ever a time in human history when a return to Nature was so much needed as just now? How shall the nations be rebuilt, the lost faith and hope renewed, the race live again through the Great Mother who we have forsaken?”

  New voices bega
n to speak out—Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, Benton MacKaye, Robert Sterling Yard, Olaus Murie—as vigorous defenders of the last wildernesses, each a disciple, in his own way, of John Muir. If these places disappeared, they said, we’d lose far more than we’d gain. Picking up on Frederick Jackson Turner’s appeal to a national identity, Leopold, a Wisconsinite like Turner and Muir, wrote that,

  many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are [due to] the impress of the wilderness and the life that accompanied it . . . if we have such a thing as American culture (and I think we have), its distinguishing marks are a certain vigorous individualism combined with ability to organize, a certain intellectual curiosity bent to practical ends, a lack of subservience to stiff social norms, and an intolerance of drones, all of which are distinctive characteristics of successful pioneers. These, if anything, are the indigenous part of our Americanism, the qualities that set it apart as a new rather than as an imitative contribution to civilization.

  And how can we expect to preserve these institutions, Leopold concluded, “without giving so much as a thought to preserving the environment which produced them and which may now be one of our effective means to keeping them alive?”

  Yes, these protected wild places were great for having fun. But as Roderick Nash would point out, they’re much more: “They maintained the opportunity for successive generations of Americans to acquire the characteristics of pioneers and to acquaint themselves firsthand with the conditions that shaped their culture.”