The Invention of Nature

As he observed the world around him, Muir realized that something had to be done. The country was changing. Every year Americans claimed an additional 15 million acres for fields. With the advent of steam-powered reapers, grain binder machines and combine harvesters that cut, threshed and cleaned grains mechanically, agriculture had become industrialized. The world seemed to spin faster and faster. In 1861 communication had become almost instantaneous when the first transcontinental telegraph cable connected the whole of the United States from the Atlantic coast in the east to the Pacific coast in the west. In 1869, the year of Muir’s first summer in Yosemite and also the year that the world celebrated the centenary of Humboldt’s birth, the first transcontinental railway in North America reached the West Coast. Over the past four decades the railway boom had transformed America and during Muir’s first five years in California another 33,000 miles of tracks were added – by 1890 more than 160,000 miles of tracks snaked across the United States. Distances seemed to shrink in tandem with the wilderness. There was soon no more land to be conquered and explored in the American West. The 1890s were the first decade without a frontier. ‘The rough conquest of the wilderness is accomplished,’ the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare in 1903.

The railway not only provided fast access to remote places but also drove the standardization of ‘railway time’ which would bring four time zones to America. Standard time and watches replaced the sun and the moon as a way to measure out lives. Humankind, it seemed, controlled nature and Americans were in the vanguard. They had land to till, water to harness and timber to burn. The whole country was building, ploughing, churning and working. With the rapid spread of the railway, goods and grain could be transported easily across the huge continent. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing country, and as farmers moved into the cities and towns, nature became increasingly removed from daily life.

In the decade after his first summer in Yosemite, Muir turned to writing to ‘entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness’. As he composed his first articles, he studied Humboldt’s books as well as Marsh’s Man and Nature

and Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and

Walden. In his copy of The Maine Woods

he underlined Thoreau’s call for ‘national preserves’ and began to think about the protection of the wilderness. Humboldt’s ideas had come full circle. Not only had Humboldt influenced some of the most important thinkers, scientists and artists but they in turn inspired each other. Together, Humboldt, Marsh and Thoreau provided the intellectual framework through which Muir saw the changing world around him.

For the rest of his life Muir fought for the protection of nature. Man and Nature had been a wake-up call for some Americans, but where Marsh wrote one book that encouraged the protection of the environment mainly for the economic profit of the country, Muir would publish a dozen books and more than 300 articles that made ordinary Americans fall in love with nature. Muir wanted them to stare in awe at mountain vistas and towering trees. He could be funny, charming and seductive in his pursuit of this goal. Muir took the baton of nature writing from Humboldt who had created this new genre – one that combined scientific thinking with emotional responses to nature. Humboldt had dazzled his readers, including Muir, who then in turn became a master of this kind of writing. ‘Nature’ itself, Muir said, was ‘a poet’ – he just needed to let it speak through his pen.

Muir was a great communicator. He had the reputation of being an incessant talker – bursting with ideas, facts, observations and his joy for nature. ‘Our foreheads felt the wind and the rain,’ one friend commented after listening to Muir’s stories. His letters, journals and books were equally passionate, packed with descriptions that transported the reader into the woods and mountains. On one occasion, when he climbed a mountain with Charles Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Muir was amazed how a man so learned about trees could be so untouched by the magnificent autumnal scenery. While he was jumping around and singing to ‘glory in it all’, Sargent stood ‘cool as a rock’. When Muir asked him why, Sargent replied, ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve.’ But Muir was not allowing Sargent to get away with this. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ Muir countered, ‘there you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say “Come, Nature, bring on the best you have: I’m from BOSTON.” ’