EARTH – PLANET – UNIVERSE

1 R E A R T H — P L A N E T — U N I V E R S E T E R R Y T E M P E S T W I L L I A M S 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 wild- flower 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, over-civilized 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 pro- 2 W I L L I A M S Y claimed 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 cañons in our fire-moulded, earthquakeshaken , 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 and 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 citizenscientist he was, forever curious, always two steps ahead mentally, and say something to the e√ect that ‘‘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 blood-red 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, E A R T H — P L A N E T — U N I V E...