The Invention of Nature

Emerson, though, was so impressed by Muir’s knowledge and love for nature that he wanted him to join the faculty at Harvard University where he himself had studied and still sometimes gave a lecture. Muir refused. He was too wild for the establishment on the East Coast, ‘too befogged to burn well in their patent, high-heated, educational furnaces’. Muir longed for the wilderness. ‘Solitude,’ Emerson warned him, ‘is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife,’ but Muir was unmoved. He loved seclusion. How could he feel lonely when he was in a constant dialogue with nature?

It was a dialogue that worked on many levels. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, Muir had become convinced that in order to understand nature one’s feelings were as important as scientific data. Having initially set out to make sense of the natural world by ‘botanizing’, Muir had quickly realized how restricting such an approach might be. Descriptions of texture, colour, sound and smell became the trademarks of his articles and books which he would later write for a non-scientific audience. But in his letters and journals from his first years in Yosemite, Muir’s deeply sensual relationship with nature already leapt from almost every page. ‘I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me–ee–e,’ he wrote, or ‘I wish I was so drunk & Sequoical,’ transforming the sequoias’ strength into an evocative adjective.

The leaves’ shadows on a boulder were ‘dancing, waltzing in swift, merry swirls’ and the gurgling streams were ‘chanting’. Nature talked to Muir. The mountains were calling him to ‘Come higher’, while the plants and animals were shouting in the morning, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!’ He spoke with waterfalls and flowers. In a letter to Emerson he described how he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and how they had replied, ‘It’s all Love.’ The world that Muir discovered in Yosemite was animated and pulsating with life. This was Humboldt’s nature as a living organism.³

Muir wrote of the ‘breath of Nature’ and the ‘pulses of Nature’s big heart’. He was ‘part of wild Nature,’ he insisted. Sometimes he became so much one with nature that the reader is left guessing what he was referring to: ‘Four cloudless April days filled in every pore & chink with unsoftened undiluted sunshine’ – Muir’s pores and chinks, or those of the landscape?

What had been an emotional response for Humboldt also became a spiritual dialogue for Muir. Where Humboldt had seen an internal force of creation, Muir found a divine hand. Muir discovered God in nature – but not a God who reverberated from the church pulpits. The Sierra Nevada was his ‘mountain temple’, in which the rocks, plants and the sky were the words of God and could be read like a divine manuscript. The natural world opened ‘a thousand windows to show us God’, Muir had written during his first summer at Yosemite Valley, and every flower was like a mirror reflecting the Creator’s hand. Muir would preach nature like an ‘apostle’, he said.

Muir was not only in conversation with nature and God but also with Humboldt. He owned copies of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative

, Views of Nature and Cosmos

– all heavily annotated with hundreds of Muir’s pencil marks. He read with great interest about the indigenous tribes that Humboldt had encountered in South America and who regarded nature as sacred. Muir was fascinated by Humboldt’s descriptions of those tribes who punished the ‘violation of these monuments of nature’ severely and those who had ‘no other worship than that of the powers of nature.’ Their god was in the forest just like Muir’s. When Humboldt wrote about the ‘sacred sanctuaries’ of nature, Muir turned it into the ‘sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras’.

Muir’s own index on the back page of his copy of Humboldt’s Views of Nature. He listed subjects such as ‘influences of forests’ and ‘forests & civilization’, noting the pages that dealt with the impact of trees on climate, soil and evaporation as well as the destructive force of agriculture and deforestation (Illustration Credit 23.2)

So obsessed was Muir that he even highlighted the pages that referred to Humboldt in his Darwin and Thoreau books. One topic that particularly fascinated Muir – as it had George Perkins Marsh – was Humboldt’s comments on deforestation and the ecological function of forests.