Alone and Outside the Wilderness: Moving Beyond Muir Part 3
Another look at influences on Muir's idea of "wilderness," and reasons to move past it
John Muir is on the outside. He’s not here to be a part of nature; he’s here to stand in reverent awe. He is an observer, a watcher. A namer, Latin classifications rolling off his tongue.
John Muir is alone. Even as he camps with sheepherders and artists; even as he himself woos more tourists to Yosemite Valley, or serves as the president of a social club; even as he consistently runs into whole groups of people whose homes are in the mountains he travels; the image he wants us to remember is that of Muir, the solo traveler, clambering up a glaciated summit.
The individual, adventuring white man who comes to rename the landscape—what better illustrates the colonizing spirit?
Muir is a man of dualisms: the wild and the cultured, the evil and the good. Human versus nature, the dirty against the clean. Like many of his era, these dualisms tie together the scientific and religious aspects of his thinking: the doomed heathen and the saved are written onto the landscape, put in their respective places.1 Those who would be clean, who would come worship in the cathedral of the mountains, are worthy of wilderness; those who do not, who would dare to defile such places by declaring kinship with them, are to be cast out. That removal allows for the ostensibly cool, rational naturalists to come in and properly identify, label, and manage the terrain. The epistemological frameworks of Muir and his compatriots partner here with U.S. military forces and the still-nascent Park Service to empty, claim, and control places that we come to know as “wilderness,” such as Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks, or the John Muir Wilderness between them. It is the entire complex of colonial forces—institutional and cultural both—in action, aided by the enthusiastic scribblings of Muir and other boosters of his time.
But am I myself not like Muir? I come to the mountains seeking solitude and rapture. I come for reckless scrambles across rock and ice for which I am ill-equipped, exhilarating climbs that take me to the mountaintop, breathless, scanning all that is around me, giddy at the sight of it and the sense—if only for a moment—that it is mine alone. Half tumbling down the path to the next valley, drunk on beauty and in search of the next fix of grandeur, I go, secretly appreciative of the thick and churning bureaucracy that keeps others away from these spaces, allows me my solitary delusions. Whatever judgment I might pass here, it is for the sake of seeing more clearly how my own thoughts and dreams still bear the mark of his, and what other ways of imagining, knowing, and experiencing the wild I have yet to try.
For the delusion of a solitary wilderness is also quickly fading, as anyone who has sought it out in the national parks in recent years knows. One is more likely to endure lines of cars, crowds with selfie sticks, and bluetooth boomboxes than to have something resembling a remote mountaintop encounter with the holy. For everyone has come to get their taste of “Nature,” that which they presume they don’t have at home, not knowing that what they are really seeking is Muir’s domesticated sublime, a particular way of looking at a landscape while pretending not to be a part of it.2 Even less are they likely to think of it as the curious result of the Romantics and now-outdated, reductionist scientific thinking, the human as the great and neutral observer who can know and analyze and describe all things.
Not that it didn’t allow us to learn a great deal. Muir himself, his observations of glaciers, set the groundwork for new understandings in glaciology. Yet with it we lost so much. Most of all: we forgot how to be in community with these lands he so insistently helped set apart. Might they have been lost, crushed under the machinery of industry, had he not intervened? Yes, that was one possibility. But another possibility was there, remains there, even if it is now harder to recover: that chance of living with the land, lightly, within limits. To throw Nature in one place, Humans in another, was to say: we can never learn those limits, we refuse to do so, we are such a danger we must fence ourselves out. And in our blindness, in refusing to believe that anyone could be less harmful upon the land than the waves of Europeans coming and devouring it, we relentlessly pushed everyone out all at once, regardless of their circumstance.
Muir’s racism-laden cosmology meant that he did not understand how humans and the more-than-human world might be wild together, in reciprocity. That to keep humans outside was to set us up for failure; an inability to see how we might be capable of acting in concert with nature in all the places we dwell led to deterioration of our skills for working with our non-human community. And in search of some lost feeling, of a wildness that should be with us in all time, we bring our unskilled electronics-wielding selves barging down upon those few places we have “set aside.”
Muir’s racism denied the history of the places he was in, and so made it more difficult for us to truly know them. It denied the role of the people already there, and threatened the existence of their skills at wildcraft. And, in the end, it turns back and also threatens that which he hoped to save. By cutting us off from Nature, and saying we have no part in it—by creating “wilderness”—we lose our our ability to ensure that wildness can continue.
Is there an aspect of earthly human joy that Muir epitomized, and that he inspires in others, that might be worth holding onto? Joys such as can be found both in practice of the sport of mountaineering, or in the experience of long, lingering walks in terrain not dominated by human structures? Undoubtedly. This is surely one kind of joy for which humans have aptitude, and Muir wrote convincingly, and inspiringly (for some), about it. That he is a hero among mountaineers is sensible enough.
But ought he remain a hero for all of us? Should he be our guidepost for how we think about wildness and wilderness, about nature and the community of beings to which humans belong, in the future? What if he bequeathed a worldview that not only led to gross injustice—the continued displacement of Indigenous people around the globe, even today for the sake of creating national parks—but an idea that is, in the end, self-defeating? The outdoor recreational industry that Muir helped inspire is cannibalizing its own reason for being, as humans without the resources of character to practice self-restraint go questing after the emotional experiences Muir helped popularize.
I am not looking to replace Muir with some other singular, solitary hero. I am seeking, instead, practices that help us back into a world where the hierarchical dualisms that fed Muir’s settler imagination (which include all the tired dualisms of our times such as gender and race, in addition to the human/nature hierarchy) are less dominant.
This is one of the reasons why I began practicing using the name “Nüümü Poyo” rather than “the John Muir Trail” on my hike earlier this summer, in solidarity with others trying to restore this name to common usage.3 Nüümü is the Paiute word for “people”, and also the name the Paiute call themselves. (This is a common practice for many Indigenous groups, in which the word for “people” amongst a given group is also the word by which a group self-identifies.) Nüümü Poyo, then, is “the people’s trail.” What a contrast, from the lone individual explorer represented in John Muir, to the collective enterprise of being, together, a people. And not a people on the outside looking in, with cameras and surveying equipment, but with the knowledge and tools for fostering life and growth with the land: burns that reduce those insects that might kill the oak trees, gathering of plants that need thinning in order to thrive.
As many different groups regularly traversed the routes going in and out of the Sierra, there surely must be more such names, though I do not know them yet. But I can imagine them, a multiplicity of referents, a wild criss-crossing of paths and descriptions. Strange that naturalists, so commonly found in wilderness areas, should be so dedicated to pinning down what they see and making sure they have the single right name, the correct location in some rigid (increasingly obsolescent) Linnean taxonomy. We can, instead, complicate the social situation, and refuse to be limited by the labels on present-day signage or Park Service permits; we can insist, “this, too, is the name of this place,” and help us all get a little further down the path to a different way of relating to these places.
But what else? Where do we go from here in our conception of wilderness, or of wildness? I don’t think it’s by dwelling much more on the figure of John Muir, so I think that’s a wrap on this short series.
Though I’d like to end with one short piece of recommended reading. Originally, I was conceiving of this third post as a bit of the blow-by-blow of how Muir’s conceptions mapped onto racist frontier ideology and the harmful consequences of that, as well as the way they fed into the construction of the notion of “wilderness.” I think those points have been stated well enough, though, even if not fully explored, and I felt like my attempt was basically a paraphrasing of William Cronon’s now famous essay “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” I went back and revisited that piece, and decided I didn’t think I could improve much upon it. Cronon’s writing is excellent and accessible and the piece is absolutely worth reading if you never have; it’s available freely on his website. It’s become indispensable to those thinking about the idea of wilderness and the nature/culture split, especially as it plays out in settler-colonial contexts. I highly recommend, especially if the insistence here on “wilderness” as the wrong frame for our relation with the natural world isn’t resonating, and you’d like to dive more into the arguments around that.
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Meg
Muir’s religiosity is often overlooked by his modern secular fans, but he is known for carrying a Bible and a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost around with him in the backcountry.
William Cronon, whose essay is linked further below, writes about the way in which the Romantics help transform the concept of wilderness from a “waste,” a place of dread, to a place of awe, in which one experiences the sublime. He points to Muir as emblematic of the further calming and domestication of the sublime; in Muir’s writing the mountains are often tranquil, full of sunshine, there to welcome the human visitors.
Jolie Varela of Indigenous Women Hike is one of the most vocal advocates for this.