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[19], chapter two Muir as Practitioner of the Post-Pastoral On a May morning in 1903 two men pose for a photograph at Glacier Point above Yosemite Valley in the heart of the Sierra Nevada of California. They have slept the night in the open and have woken under a blanket of four inches of snow. Down in the valley a banquet is being prepared for them, together with fireworks and a light show to be projected onto the three-thousand-foot-high granite walls. Up here, in the clear morning air, they are escaping all that. They pose for a camera, nevertheless, perhaps with a sense that this could be an important moment for the landscape behind them. It is certainly a turning point in the history of American conservation , one that will also have repercussions around the world. I like to ask audiences in England which of the two men in this photograph is the president and which is John Muir. (In Scotland now, they might be able to recognize their own John Muir, born in Dunbar, forty kilometers east of Edinburgh, in 1838.) Is it this stocky figure in riding breeches with the neckerchief knotted loosely in the style of a frontiersman? Or is it this lean, suited man with the ridiculously large sprig of a plant hanging from his lapel? Paradoxically, they each seem to be transgressing the expected stereotypes by having apparently exchanged clothes, somehow, overnight. In fact, the lean, long-bearded man is John Muir, who at this stage of his life was regarded as a wilderness sage and was already the founding father of the American conservation movement, having become the first president of the Sierra Club in 1892. What this photograph symbolizes is the end of the frontier and its rediscovery as an essentially inner experience in national parks. In 1901 Muir had developed the concept in his book Our National Parks, the key notion of which was to preserve distinctive American landscapes for the “re-creation,” as Muir called it, of all future generations of Americans. A second paradox of this photograph is that while the far domes of Tuolumne Meadows in the distance were protected nationally within Yosemite National Park by the statute of 1892, the state of California still held jurisdiction over the valley itself, leasing it out for pig farms and orchards. This meeting with 19 20 muir as post-pastoral practitioner [20], President Theodore Roosevelt had been requested by Muir in the hope of curtailing California’s mismanagement of the valley. Actually, two years after this photograph was taken, California receded the valley to the nation. Late in the afternoon the two men descended to the valley, politely avoided the bizarre entertainments California politicians thought appropriate here, and camped out under the natural spectacle of the orange evening walls of El Capitan. They were like two backpackers playing truant, which actually they were. For the third paradox of this photograph is that what appears to be an escapist tourist pose in front of Yosemite Falls is both that and more. Not for the first time Muir had used a camping trip as a mode of conservation work. From this kind of pastoral “escapism,” Muir knew that insights might come that could effect change at both a personal and a political level. Muir and the president were here enacting a pattern of short-term renewal, by seeking to reconnect their inner nature with external nature—a pattern that has become the model for human survival in Western urbanized societies. The boundaries between the city and the country, between work and leisure, between “weekenders” and wilderness inhabitants, and between inner nature and external nature were being broken down in 1903 both within Muir’s personal lifestyle and the culture in which he was active . Muir’s writing is important to us now precisely to the extent that it reveals the possibilities to be gained from transgressing the boundaries of forms of knowledge and experience that we have erected between culture and nature. Why John Muir? Yosemite 1903 and Scotland 2003 A century after that day in 1903 we are still struggling to know what Muir’s statement that “going to the mountains is going home” might mean for our species. Surely mountains, compared with the valleys or the coasts, are the last places we should think of as our home. And what exactly did Muir mean by saying that for “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people . . . mountain...

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