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

by Heacox, Kim

In 2013, atmospheric CO2—a greenhouse gas that traps solar radiation at the surface of the earth and warms the climate—reached 400ppm for the first time in perhaps three million years, and the level is rising about three parts per million per year. The last time atmospheric CO2 was that high, sea level was roughly 65 feet higher than it is today. California, the most progressive state in the nation, has passed a law to slow the rate of increase. That is, California still pumps more CO2 into the air each year than it did the year before, and it’s more enlightened on this issue than any other state. In Oklahoma, people might wonder about the National Severe Storms Laboratory raising the Fujita Scale of tornado intensity from F6 to F8 while their senator, James Inhofe, stands by his claim that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public.”

  Kevin says calmly and quietly that climate change is not only real, it’s a global catastrophe-in-the-making due to our rising numbers, our rising levels of consumption (more gasoline-powered cars and bigger homes in the US and elsewhere), and our addiction to burning coal, oil, and other hydrocarbons that produce CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

  Why the concern? Storms, fires, and droughts will intensify and become more common. They already have. Sea level, today eight inches higher than it was in 1900, will continue to rise, likely at an accelerated rate, and be three to six feet higher by the close of the twenty-first century. “Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow,” writes Tim Folger in National Geographic Magazine, “the existing greenhouse gases would continue to warm the Earth for centuries. We have irreversibly committed future generations to a hotter world and rising seas.” Oceans will turn acidic as atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by seawater and converted into carbonic acid.

  The Earth will survive, top scientists say. Humanity will survive. But civilization will radically change as we face what novelist James Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency,” a generations-long crisis in a post-growth world that we’ll need to manage with focus and dignity. Adds Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International, this challenge “will require a major evolution in human values, politics and personal expectations.” Say good-bye to shopping. Say good-bye to malls.

  “SO THEN,” a passenger asks Kevin, “you believe in climate change?”

  “It’s not a belief,” Kevin says again, calmly, quietly. “Climate change is a fact supported by overwhelming scientific consensus.” To debate it is to give credibility to an argument that shouldn’t exist.

  But it does exist. Despite the best science that documents human beings burning more and more fossil fuels, and pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere, the debate goes on. As best-selling author Mary Pipher notes:

  Newscasters and talk show hosts often go to great lengths to present both “sides’’ of a story. But not all points of view are equally credible. Some are based on knowledge and careful study of a question. Others come from hired guns or ideologues . . . For an honest analysis of a situation, we need the media and the talking heads to distinguish between experts and propagandists and between objective analysis and public relations.

  One passenger mentions Republican congressmen who say carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a problem because people are also made of carbon.

  Laughter ripples through the crowd. Some passengers shake their heads.

  Kevin samples the chocolate and says, “Watch the glaciers. Listen to the ice. The ice does not lie.”

  According to Pipher, a grandmother therapist who lives in Nebraska, “People avoid facing problems they have no idea how to solve.” In The Green Boat, her book that focuses on how to revive our capsized culture, Pipher talks about moving from “trauma to transcendence.” First comes awareness, followed by pain, acceptance, and then finally, action. The trick is to see insurmountable problems as golden opportunities, as chances to invent new sources of energy, new models of sustainable living, new ways to honor and preserve the beauty and diversity of the natural world.

  Author Bill McKibben, one of America’s leading environmentalists, knows about action. He’s written extensively about climate change, marched on the White House and been arrested there for protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline. The pipeline would carry oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to refineries in Texas; he calls it “a 1,700-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent.” Time is running out, he says. The climate crisis is deepening and may be inevitable before it’s fully realized. We’re sleepwalking into the future. He recommends that we find a suitable bad guy—the oil giants, the pushers in our addictions—and stop giving them taxpayer subsidies as they make the highest profits in history; that we stop letting them buy elections and corrupt our democracy. Instead, McKibben says, given their power and influence in remaking our world, we should name major hurricanes after them: Hurricane Exxon, Hurricane British Petroleum, Hurricane Shell.

  If that seems severe, recall that John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, leading environmentalists in their day, men of vision and action who righted many wrongs, called greedy capitalists “timber thieves” and “fools.”

  Saving the natural world and finding our rightful place in it can be a nasty business.

  AND FULL OF IRONY.

  Ice doesn’t lie, but glaciers can deceive. Natural systems are complex, with tipping points, thresholds, oscillations, and feedback loops.

  Kevin explains that while the world grows warmer, and glaciers everywhere retreat, one or two in Glacier Bay hold steady, and even threaten to advance. Why? Warmer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska create more storms that slam into the highest coastal mountains in the world. Precipitation increases. At lower elevations, where it used to snow, it rains, which starves many glaciers of new ice. As such, they retreat. But here’s the irony. At higher elevations, where it once snowed, it snows more. What few glaciers begin from those high catchment areas are well-fed, even robust.

  One passenger mentions that in another thirty years Montana’s Glacier National Park will probably be without glaciers. Another says that last summer was the worst fire summer in Colorado’s history, and this summer is even worse. And then come the torrential rains, and floods. A voracious reader, Kevin mentions a column in Orion magazine where Derrick Jensen writes, “October 2012 was the 323rd consecutive month for which the global temperature was above average. The odds of that happening randomly are literally astronomical.” In his film Chasing Ice, environmental photographer James Balog documents glaciers disintegrating in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and Colorado. The largest glacier in Greenland retreated more in the last ten years than it did in the previous one hundred, he says. The surfaces of many Greenland glaciers are pockmarked by dark stains of dust, carbon soot, and algae that act as solar heat absorbers and accelerate melting.

  What does all this mean? “Many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable,” says writer Naomi Klein in her article “Capitalism vs. the Climate” in Nation magazine. Vigorous economic growth never existed in human history until we began to burn fossil fuels and pump CO2 into the atmosphere, a trend that continues to go only one direction: up. The climate change crisis is therefore so vexing and fundamentally at odds with our good guy image of ourselves, and our mantra of Economic-Growth-Forever, that denial is easy.

  “The bottom line,” Klein writes,

  is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year.

  Klein concludes with an observation by University of Surrey economist Tim Jackson that “we are therefore caught in the untenable bind of . . . crash the system or trash the planet.”

  LITTLE WONDER we don’t want to face it.
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  In 2010, when the Scottish government issued a press release titled “John Muir Legacy Lives On,” Sierra Club Chairman Carl Pope said,

  Through his visionary work preserving America’s most pristine wilderness, John Muir bent the arc of history. We simply would not have wilderness to save if Muir had not fought to protect it. In an era of climate change, we are challenged, again, to bend the arc of history. The Sierra Club is honored to share John Muir’s legacy with the John Muir Trust and the Scottish Government. Together, we can face the greatest global challenge of our generation.

  KEVIN takes the opportunity to tell passengers good news about the great Alaska lands act of 1980. It built on Muir’s vision, changed Glacier Bay from a national monument to a national park, and added many new national parks and wildlife refuges and other preserved lands—more than one hundred million acres total—to the maps of Alaska. Jimmy Carter, inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, who was inspired by Muir, signed the act into law in the final weeks of his presidency. He dared to take criticism from many don’t-tread-on-me Alaskans who said the act “locked up” their state. Carter shrugged it off, saying you may not appreciate this now, but the next generation will.

  AS THE CRUISE SHIP begins to leave Margerie Glacier, somebody spots a kayak halfway between the ship and the glacier, impossibly small and vulnerable from the ship’s rail. Everybody watches the paddler boldly approach the ice wall, apparently undaunted by the size and danger of it all.

  Is it madness? A death wish of some kind?

  “What’s he doing?” a passenger asks.

  “He’s having a big adventure in wild country,” Kevin says. “That’s what people do in their national parks.”

  THAT NIGHT in Bartlett Cove, at park headquarters, at the southern end of the bay, Kevin joins his fellow rangers for dinner and conversation. There’s no television, traffic, or malls, only the tides and forest and birds, the occasional bear and moose, the distant blow of a humpback whale. All during dinner the conversation spins around mountain goats and a recent kayaking/camping trip to Queen Inlet and Gloomy Knob. Kevin mentions that he’s going to take next summer off and hike the entire 215-mile John Muir Trail, beginning in Yosemite and ending atop Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States. It’s something he has wanted to do for forty years. Last year Kevin ran the Boston Marathon and ranked thirty-ninth out of more than one thousand in his age group. He’s in his mid-fifties, doesn’t carry an extra ounce, lives on less than twenty thousand dollars a year, has a fine singing voice, and is content.

  He and his fellow off-duty rangers pull out guitars and tell stories. Always stories. They talk about wildness and science, and new modifications to the Milankovitch Cycles, and theories on plant succession, why things are the way they are, out beyond what poet Mary Oliver calls “the machinery of our wits.” They talk about the initiative that appears on California voting ballots every few years to tear down the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Can you imagine? The very idea creates its own electricity.

  A few rangers live year-round in the nearby town of Gustavus, a friendly place, like Glacier Bay, reachable only by boat or plane, with a population of about 400 people; 300 moose; 200 dogs; 100 ukuleles, banjos, and guitars; 50 bald eagles; 10 horses; and 5 bears, most of them black bears, though a few brown bears show up now and then.

  Bumper stickers say, What’s your hurry? You’re already here. Or, I’d rather live here than have a career.

  Like John Muir, Kevin is himself something of a glacier, flowing through space and time. He reads Muir’s books (all still in print) and talks about a Declaration of Interdependence to make us less self-involved and money crazy and more dedicated to the natural world and our own human community. His fellow rangers are his family; they sustain him with friendship; they work to make park visitors better understand the importance of the natural world. They’re a tribe, of sorts, these rangers, with their own fire to share. They talk about traveling during the winter, but also about staying in Alaska, something John Muir never did, though he was tempted, no doubt, after that first epic canoe journey in 1879. A good woman awaited him in California, so he went south to a life of husbandry, fatherhood, farming, activism, sacrifice, and fame.

  One ranger mentions that somebody recently went to Muir Point and found the old cabin that Muir built there with Harry Fielding Reid and Reid’s geology students. Today, it’s a pile of moss-covered chimney rocks about five feet high, deep in a spruce forest. Nothing more. The timbers have rotted into the ground. A silence falls over the conversation. Though the cabin site has been mapped with GPS waypoints of its exact location, rangers consider it bad form to use technology to find it. They like to find the cabin on their own, those few who give it a try. It’s a grail, a holy place, no longer visited by steamships that toot their whistles and belch black smoke and off-load eager tourists in their Victorian dresses and feathered hats.

  AND THERE JOHN MUIR greeted them, lean and spry, the ice-chief still, fifty-two going on twenty-five that magical summer of 1890, his namesake glacier rising behind him. He loved his time among the glaciers, the freshness of it making him feel “happily rich” and young again, far from what he called the “defrauding” duties of civilization.

  Eleven years before, as he made his way north, he’d written to his fiancée Louie and her parents, “The world is all before me,” paraphrasing Milton’s Adam and Eve. This was Alaska, Muir’s home away from home, his glacier garden, his wildest dream, a place of healing distances and open space.

  As it remains today.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to many dedicated people: Melanie, my wife, sat by me for three weeks and chased down the most elusive sources as I compiled endnotes. My literary agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, embraced this book early on and found it a home. Jon Sternfeld, a razor-sharp editor and student of history, gave me many good ideas that improved the story. Thanks also to Kate Hertzog, who did a beautiful job of copyediting, and project editor Meredith Dias. Hank Lentfer and Nick Jans read an early draft of the prologue and made valuable comments. Tom Banks, Greg Streveler, Melinda Webster, and Dan Henry read the full manuscript and caught many small mistakes, and some big ones. If others remain, they’re mine. For photo research, I thank Jim Simard and Sandy Johnston at the Alaska State Library (Juneau), Trish Richards at the Holt-Atherton Library (Stockton), Allaina Wallace at the National Snow and Ica Data Center (Boulder), and Artemis BonaDea with the National Park Service in Glacier Bay. Additional thanks to Kevin Richards and Brad Mason, park rangers in Glacier Bay, and John Baston and Lori Varsames, gracious friends in Alameda.

  ENDNOTES

  Epigraph

  “The Master Builder chose for a tool . . . seasons.” Gifford, John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings, 395.

  “I learned from Muir . . . a boulder.” Young, Alaska Days with John Muir, 105.

  Prologue

  xii: “the Range of Light.” Muir, The Yosemite, 5.

  xiii: “To seek knowledge.” Muir, Travels in Alaska, 178.

  xiii: “Gilded Age.” Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, 305–6.

  xiii–xiv: “citified… which suggests . . . cynicisms.” Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, 111.

  xiv: “Nothing dollarable is safe.” Muir, Letter to the 1908 Governor’s Conference on Conservation.

  xvii: “the invisible breath of the sky.” Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, 40.

  xvii: “gospel of glaciers.” Muir, Letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, 5/3/1895.

  Chapter One

  3: “That wild Muir.” Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 204.

  4: “From cluster . . . goddesses.” Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 65.

  5: “Hold fast . . . keep cool.” Young, Alaska Days with John Muir, 41.

  5: “The Blue Bells . . . How he did it . . . All that night . . . indomitable spir
it.” Ibid., 44.

  7: “O Friend Beloved . . . land of mists . . .” Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 65.

  7–8: “sisters under the skin . . . Surely you would not . . . Farewell.” Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 208–9.

  8: “the world’s prizes.” Ibid., 23.

  8: “Round-faced . . . unsmiling and uncomfortable.” Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 62.

  9: “the doleful . . . lark.” Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 209.

  9: “So truly . . . the heaven he is in.” Ehrlich, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary, 150.

  9: “chief of protocol for the party.” Bohn, Glacier Bay: The Land and the Silence, 43.

  10: “God has to . . . lessons.” Ehrlich, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary, 58.

  11: “All drawbacks overcome . . . a tramp.” Ibid.

  11: “He appeared . . . a pair of shoes . . .” Ibid.

  11: “Dutifully but resentfully, John paid.” Ibid.

  11: “the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way.” Ibid., 62.

  11: “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.” Ibid., 58.

  12: “compact solid mountains of ice.” Bohn, Glacier Bay: The Land and the Silence, 38.

  13: “compact solid mountains of ice.” Ibid.

  14: “a desolate, snow-covered . . . failed us altogether.” Muir, Travels in Alaska, 172.

  14: “Who are you?” “Friends . . . missionary.” Ibid., 173.

  Chapter Two

  15: “seal-hunters . . . meat and skins.” Muir, Travels in Alaska, 173.

  18–19: “Muir was a devout theist.” Young, Alaska Days with John Muir, 97.

  20: “John, do you remember . . . bread for lunch.” Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 43.