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Selected Writings of John Muir: Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 377) - Hardcover

Muir, John

 
9781101907627: Selected Writings of John Muir: Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 377)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101907622 ISBN 13: 9781101907627
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A new collection of the seminal writings of America's first naturalist and the founder of the modern conservation movement.
AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY ORIGINAL.

This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska, we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays--helped galvanize American naturalists, and led to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN MUIR was born in 1838 in Scotland, and immigrated with his family in 1849 to the United States. In 1892, he and his colleague Robert Underwood Johnson founded the Sierra Club, of which Muir was president until his death; he was also influential in establishing four national parks. Controversial during and after his lifetime, his writings on wilderness preservation became the impetus for the modern environmentalist movement. Muir died in 1914 in California.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the best-selling author of fifteen books, including the environmental classic Refuge and most recently, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. She has received numerous awards and honors for her commitment to peace and ecological consciousness. She lives in Utah and Wyoming.

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Earth—Planet—Universe
 
John Muir is a man I would have loved to have met on the trail. I would have enjoyed walking with him through Tuolumne Meadows in his beloved Yosemite listening to him discuss each wildflower by name; tell stories of each peak he climbed and the weather on that day; what he saw and how he felt. I wonder if he would have ranted and raved or kindly addressed and advocated for these wildlands in his lifelong pursuit to protect them.
He might have said as he did in his essay, ‘‘The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” published in his book, Our National Parks: ‘‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
And I would have agreed with him.
I like to imagine that he could walk with me now in the red rock desert of the Colorado Plateau where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona share a common boundary point in what is known as the Four Corners. We would stand on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in shared awe, where he once stood and proclaimed that it was ‘‘as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other can˜ons in our firemoulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world.”
We might have discussed a wild life versus a domesticated one, and he would have exclaimed, ‘‘I have been too long wild” without any thought of changing his passionate stance toward the virtues of a life lived outside.
And then, I would have asked him to visit Big Flats outside of Moab, Utah, now a series of oil and gas drilling sites that look like monstrous, mechanical ravens with their heads rising up and down as they peck on carrion in the red sand on the edge of Canyonlands National Park, which now feels like an annex for the fossil fuel industry.
He might have expressed a longing for a reprieve in the cool alpine air of the Flathead Reserve, now Glacier National Park in Montana, where he said, ‘‘Give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.” And I would have had to describe to him that out of the some 150 glaciers visible during the seventy-six years of his life, a century after he’d left this Earth only 25 remain, and that glaciologists now predict the glaciers will be gone in fifteen years.
I would sit down with Mr. Muir in the shade of a juniper tree and speak of our warming planet, warming from an increased use of carbon through our excesses of driving cars, traveling by plane, and our societal and global dependence on coal, oil, and all manner of fossil fuels. We would speak of a population of billions and rising.
Perhaps he would inquire about water, being the citizen scientist he was, forever curious, always two steps ahead mentally, and say something to the effect of, ‘‘Oil is optional, water is not,” as the photographer Edward Burtynsky recently said after having spent a lifetime taking pictures of mined and spent landscapes, where toxins fan out at a river’s delta like a bloodred hand on the planet.
And then, I can envision we would time-travel back to Yosemite Valley during the days that Congress shut down the government, from October 1 to 16, 2013, because they could not agree on how to fund our national debt. During this dispute, our national parks were closed to the public. The lands rested. The deer and bears and hawks returned momentarily to the uncommon quiet of wild nature and to savor the silences. But the resourceful Muir would have found a way in, and we would have walked quietly, joyously up the trail to Vernal Falls and baptize ourselves once again into the Church of Awe and cleanse ourselves momentarily of grief. We would have sat very near the falls, wet from the ecstatic spray, and he would have recounted the time when he watched the moon through the veil of water as he braved his own annihilation just for the experience of standing behind the vertical torrent. Neither one of us would be able to tell if our tears were of joy or sadness, both of us knowing they spring from the same source: a love of beauty and all things wild.
What I would ask John Muir at that tender moment is, ‘‘When you wrote ‘John Muir–Earth–Planet–Universe’ inside the cover of your notebook, how did you know we were made of stardust? How did you understand a planetary consciousness when a hundred years later we are just beginning to comprehend your prescient words, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe?’ “
Donald Worster, the historian and author of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, sees the Scottish-born naturalist’s legacy as a spiritual one. At a forum about Muir at Stanford University he said:
We should think about John Muir as the inventor of a new American religion. I don’t mean to put America in there exclusively, because people all over the world have responded to him . . . I think he is a religious prophet, and a lot of people in this country have followed him or followed those ideas . . . He’s important for the great work he did for getting our national parks and forests and wildlife refuges and wild places and beauty in our consciousness and concerned about saving them. I think he’s also important . . . as a kind of measuring stick for understanding where we were as a people and where we ought to be today . . .
Consider me one of Muir’s followers, even disciples, of his wild joy, walking behind him on the path of wilderness protection. I am grateful that Everyman’s Library has chosen to publish this John Muir Reader in the nick of time.
*
When I was in college I worked at Sam Weller’s used bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sam knew I loved nature and nature writing. He took me aside one day after work.
“‘I want to show you something,” he said. We walked up the stairs into his office. ‘‘We just picked up a library from an estate sale. I thought you would appreciate this.” On his desk were eight volumes of a set of John Muir’s writings. ‘‘Two of the volumes are missing,” Sam said. ‘‘But you don’t come across things like this very often.” Always the businessman, Sam said, ‘‘I’ll give it to you for a good price.”
Sam’s ‘‘good price” meant I worked free for a month, but it was worth it to a budding naturalist who cherished Muir. Missing was a two-volume biography, The Life and Letters of John Muir, byWilliam Frederic Bade (1923, 1924), which Sam helped me to locate.
This special ten-volume set was published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston between 1916 and 1924. They printed 750 sets. Ours was number #551. These books, bound in green buckram with brown leather patches bordered in gold glued to their spines that bear the name ‘‘JOHN MUIR,” were respectfully placed alongside Carson, Abbey, and Stegner. The first volume had a handwritten manuscript fragment glued to the first page before the title appeared: hence ‘‘The Manuscript Edition.” Muir’s own script, penned in sepia ink, read ‘‘learn that as these [landscapes] we now behold have succeeded those of the pre-glacial age, so they in turn are withering and vanishing to be succeeded by those yet...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101907622
ISBN 13 
9781101907627
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
824
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
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Deutschland

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