JOHN MUIR (1838-1914)
The Father of Our National Park System
by Lee Stetson

John Muir engaged wildness with perhaps more enthusiastic love and passionate courage than any American before or after him. Usually alone, with little more than bread and tea for sustenance, often without coat or blanket, Muir eagerly explored the mountains of the American West. His lively and poetic accounts of the events and thoughts that befell him during his travels have within them a powerful ability to move and even transform folks. He “broke the mold” at a critical time in American history and remains remarkably relevant. 

As a carrier of Muir’s ideas, I’ve found a profound joy infecting others through the medium of his words and storytelling. Sharing his simple, eloquent, rock-bottom truth allows many to accept the possibilities that lie in the process of creation. This last is especially vital, for many deny, in their modes of behavior and thinking, that creation is in fact an ongoing process. The rain forest, the swamps, the sea, the wetlands, the mountains, are not for them the source of new creations, creatures, green things, and all the fascinating and necessary microscopic unknowable, but are too often just places to dig for dollars. 

Muir has much to say to this sort of person. 

Presenters, storytellers – artists of every kind – can help nurture into being a population who view wealth as being rich in the gifts of the natural world, who come to that understanding so beautifully articulated by Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The sciences can do much to provide us with the keys to such an understanding, but the arts too have a vital part to play – to galvanize within us a feeling response, to help us joyfully celebrate our gains, and find solace while deeply bemoaning our losses. 

It used to be, of course, that our place on this planet was well claimed by feeling. As indigenous people, we were once naturally contained and nourished by our immediate environment, and we integrated and celebrated that environment in our art – dance, music, community rituals and celebrations, poetry, song, and perhaps above all, storytelling. These artistic expressions of our collective and sustaining voice contained our values, aspirations, understandings and our Gods. Others have observed, and it has long so seemed to me, that the things we now need desperately to learn are the very old truths that we once knew well. Muir’s greatest gift was in revisiting this simple eloquent truth.

Presentation, as an interpretive tool, can be a principal medium for a gentle awakening, another means by which we humans can move toward becoming a better beast. They can be, as Tennyson writes in his poem “Ulysses,” used to “fulfill this labour, by slow prudence, to make mild a rugged people, and through soft degrees, subdue them to the useful and the good.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Stetson, Lee. The Wild Muir. Yosemite Association, 1994.

Turner, Frederick. Rediscovering America – John Muir in His Time and Ours. Viking Press, 1985.

Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. U. of Wisconsin Press, 1945.

Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Oxford University Press, 2008.

LEE STETSON

Lee Stetson has been interpreting the character of John Muir in Yosemite National Park since 1983 to hundreds of thousands of Park visitors. Additionally, the Muir shows have toured throughout the country to universities, parks, museums, wilderness, and environmental organizations from Washington D.C. to Hawaii, and have been presented in Scotland, in Japan, and Canada. Lee has produced other interpretive presentations on President Theodore Roosevelt, John Wesley Powell, and pioneer women. Lee is interviewed and provides the voice of Muir in Ken Burn’s “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” a documentary released in the fall of 2009.        

QUOTES

“I decided that as long as I lived I would hear the birds and the winds and the waterfalls sing. I'd interpret the rocks, and learn the language of flood, storm and avalanche. I'd acquaint myself with the wild gardens – and the glaciers – and get as near to the heart of the world as I could.  And so I did.” 

“Climb the mountains, get their good tidings! Nature's peace will flow into you, as sunshine flows into the trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off, like autumn leaves.”

“Earth hath no sorrow that earth cannot heal.”

“Everyone needs beauty, as well as bread, and places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” 

“I used to envy Adam, the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I, too, have lived in "Creation's dawn.'' Nature is forever at work building up and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, chasing everything out of one beautiful form and into another, an endless song.” 

“Storms of every sort tell the same story. Earthquakes, floods, cataclysms of nature – however lawless and mysterious they may first appear – are only variations on God's love, harmonious notes in the song of creation. True, earthquakes and the inner earth fires over which we float keep this whole rocky globe boiling and quaking forever, but all is so arranged that on the very slags and cinders of our good star, baby blue eyes grow.”

TIMELINE