The Invention of Nature

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.