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Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, Charts Humanity's Only Future on a Changing Planet
Earth Wisdom charts John Muir’s amazing wilderness adventures and explores the worldview that sprang from them: a way of seeing the world unique in the West, with echoes only in the Taoism of ancient China. So challenging is earth wisdom that the environmental movement has kept it hidden in Muir’s little-known journals for a century. But Muir’s worldview now provides the “new way of thinking” called for by Pope Francis to rescue humanity from the existential threat of climate change; Earth Wisdom shows how and why, touching on the needed changes in our economy, society, and way of life.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 14, 2016
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March 14, 2023
Four Books in One
This particularly amazing book, The Earth Wisdom of John Muir, (2016) in three main parts, is actually a combination of 4 books in one: (1) a biography, (2) a religious exegesis, (3) a history of the environmental movement, and (4) a blueprint for human survival.
The book is ambitious, but it seamlessly blends these seeming disparate components of history, biography, philosophy, and futurism into a highly persuasive argument for new, more respectful approach to humanity’s life on Planet Earth. In this book, Dr. Barnett asserts that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” offers us a path – as individuals and as a society – to becoming whole and enlivened by connecting with our roots in the natural world.
While not without its share of “doom and gloom” about the scary future of climate change for our species, overall Barnett presents a positive message about how love for the planet and an appreciation for the immanent world view that is common to both Taoist philosophy and modern science can make us whole with the Earth once again. Barnett’s thesis is that “Muir’s travels and observations engendered an immanent, this-worldly view, which finds ultimate meaning and glory in the natural world itself, in its physical array of creatures, elements, and processes—which included spirituality, beauty, and love.”
A Brief Muir Biography
Part One, “Muir’s Rambles & Worldview,” traces John Muir’s amazing wilderness adventures and explores the worldview that sprang from them. At the heart of this recounting of adventures is our discovery of Muir’s opposition to anthropocentrism and his embracing of the immanent view of the sacred. Barnett labels Muir’s world-view “Earth Wisdom” and states that most mainstream accounts of John Muir neglect this crucial aspect of Muir’s philosophy.
For this section, Dr. Barnett quotes extensively from Muir’s thoughts written in his private journals, not found in his mainstream publications.
Barnett explains how foundational Muir’s thousand-mile walk was: “When in September of 1867 he scribbled “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe” on the opening page of his journal, Muir clearly saw his upcoming walk from Indiana to Florida’s Gulf of Mexico as something special. Even so, he could not have imagined it would spark the creation of a new way of looking at the world, a stance that a century later would provide the best hope for saving human civilization from the gravest threat of its entire history on the planet.”
Additional chapters in this biographical portion of the book, seen through the Taoist lens, covers Muir’s life of discovery in the Sierra and Alaska, and his embrace of the phenomena of the natural world, and incorporating his rich human friendships, including marriage and children.
The Tao of Muir
Part Two, “The Tao of Muir,” outlines some basic principles of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, including some resources other than the Daodejing (popularly better known in the West by its old spelling, Tao the Ching) that are less known by westerners. This section concludes that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” is highly congruent with what Dr. Barnett identifies as the three pillars of Taoism.
The Three Pillars of Taoism
The three pillars, in Barnett’s language are as follows:
1st. “This world is our true home.” This means a view that not merely rejects the idea of an after-life, but which actually embraces death as a crucial phenomenon allowing for the epic of evolution to proceed. John Muir commented about death in a positive way: “Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…. How beautiful is all Death! “ Muir here seems to appreciate that for evolution to proceed, current living things must make way for future living beings. The Taoist philosophers were in accord: Taoist sage Zhuangzi says: “Life arises from death, and death from life.” Elsewhere, this sage advises a cripple who has just been rebuffed by a clueless Confucius, “Why don’t you simply make him (Confucius) see that life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides—and thus free him from his cuffs and fetters?”
This understanding of death as a natural / sacred part of the life process, and as an essential part of the evolutionary process when viewed with deep-time eyes, is essential. I recommend further exploring these ideas in a modern, scientific context through the writings of Connie Barlow.
2nd. “Kinship with all creatures.” Dr. Barnett explains: “The second pillar of the immanent view of Earth Wisdom and Taoism recognizes that in this world, humans are intimately related to every other living creature, and join other creatures in fully participating in the grand cycles of earthly existence. This second pillar may be described as a kinship view of human life: we are kin to all other life forms, and they to us. The corollary to kinship, of course, is that humans are nothing extraordinary.” Taoist sage Zhuangzi said:
“You were born in a human form, and you find joy in it. Yet there are ten thousand other forms endlessly transforming that are equally good, and the joy in these is untold.”
Muir expressed this same idea equally clearly, when he wrote,
“Now, it never seems to occur to these far- seeing teachers that Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one.”
To emphasize his point, he wrote,
“I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”
Thus, Muir, like the Taoists, forthrightly rejects the anthropocentric view that is still dominant in our world today. I am struck by the thought that this concept of kinship with all creatures resonates well with Albert Schweitzer’s concept of “Reverence for Life.”
3rd Interlocking Duality. The third pillar of the immanent worldview that Muir and the Taoists saw clearly in their sojourns in the world was the way certain clusters of phenomena work together to produce and support the whole; there is a duality to existence.” The Taoists visualize this in the model of two interlocking curved shapes – the taijitu 太极图 symbol – popularly known in the West as the “Yin-Yang symbol.” A classic example of yin-yang interaction together generating reality is the observation that rocks are solid, with a brutal strength: yang; while water is flowing, with its own subtle strength: yin. This idea is fully developed in the Tao te Ching and elsewhere in Chinese Taoist philosophy.
As Dr. Barnett notes, this is not a pure duality of opposites – “crucially, each of the dual elements has a bit of the other right in the middle of it… Yin and yang are not mutually exclusive or battling with each other; they are not opposites. Rather, everything—including every person—is composed of complementary elements of yin and yang.” Both are valid, both necessary; reality is the balanced interplay between them.
Muir did not create such a full-developed philosophical system as the Taoists, but nonetheless he embraced in his life the principles of complementary aspects of nature. He described the yin and yang interaction of rocks and water in a way evocative of that of the Taoists:
“Vapor from the sea; rain, snow, and ice on the summits; glaciers and rivers—these form a wheel that grinds the mountains thin and sharp,… and crushes the rocks into soils on which the forests and meadows and gardens are growing.”
Like the Tao te Ching says, “Nothing is weaker than water, But when it attacks something hard, or resistant, then nothing withstands it.” Elsewhere, Muir wrote of light and dark, storms and quietude, large and small. He observed:
“Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”
Isn’t Muir’s view of the water cycle describing the “whirling and flowing” of Nature something visually represented so well in the taijitu symbol?
Where the Tao celebrates the Male-Female duality, Barnett notes that unlike many 19th century men, John Muir accepted women as equals and friends, and he delighted in playing with small children as much as engaging in discussions with notable scientists and prominent literary men. At that time, “a male treating females and flowers with attention and respect equal to that conferred upon males was highly unusual.”
Barnett summarizes:
“Muir’s 19th century articulation of Earth Wisdom, the three-pillared immanent worldview in the West—earth is our home, we are kin to the rest of creation, and reality is generated by complementary interactions of dualistic phenomena—constitutes his first legacy to the Western world. Others in the West had broached one or another of the three pillars—Heraclitus, St. Francis of Assisi, Alexander von Humboldt, early feminists in England and America—but it was Muir who brought them all together, and introduced them to early modern Western society in his writings, particularly his journals, and his stirring life.”
Comparing many quotes of Muir with that of Taoist sages, Barnett concludes that while he “would not claim that Muir’s ‘God’ (or his ‘Mother Nature’) is neatly synonymous with China’s ‘Tao,’ it seems clear that what Muir is getting at when he uses the various terms examined above is well within the variety of concepts that have been advanced to describe ‘the Tao.’”
Muir was “an accidental Taoist” as he came to his own version of Taoism coincidentally, based on his observations of nature. But this is precisely why the two approaches are so similar — they both result from careful and sustained observations of nature. Dr. Barnett says, “China’s version of the earth-centered, immanent philosophy of life is Taoism; Muir’s version is Earth Wisdom.”
Comparing the two, it soon becomes clear that careful observation of nature is also an approach to another modern world view: Science.
The author, himself a scientist in the field of evolutionary biology as well as being a Chinese scholar, proclaims that both Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” and Taoism offer a critical way of thinking that is also embraced by modern science. He says:
“Here, then, is the secret of the surprising similarity between Muir’s Earth Wisdom and China’s Taoism. The world, upon close and unbiased inspection by whomever is sauntering through it with fully open eyes and a mind free of prior bias, reveals itself in a this-worldly, immanent outlook fundamentally different than the transcendent, other-worldly views of the major religions, East or West.
Barnett argues that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” is not just biocentric, but goes even further. Muir broadened his spiritual vision “to include not just plants and animals, but rocks and water as entities also bursting with spiritual life.”
Dr. Barnett explains:
“Muir’s radical shift of view from anthropocentrism, then, goes beyond biocentrism to include the whole planet. Everything, the entire immanent world, is alive. We may call his view, then, Gaiacentrism, an outlook that decisively dethrones what Muir time and again [sarcastically] refers to as ‘Lord Man.’”
History of the Environmental Movement
New York Times Headline - Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation (1970)Part Three of Barnett’s book begins with a brief history of the environmental movement, before moving on to a literal Blueprint for Human Survival.
Muir’s Gaiacentric world view was not merely philosophy; Muir put the idea into tangible action. Thus, Muir did not merely act to protect plants and animals, but entire mountain ranges, forests, valleys, waterfalls, and rivers.
One of the especially beautiful places he sought to protect was a river and a valley, with its waterfalls and verdant flowery meadows – the Hetch Hetchy Valley, located within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park, and so should already have been considered protected. But the City of San Francisco drowned that Valley in 1923, after John Muir and his followers lost a long battle between 1905 and 1912 with the City.
Barnett shares with others the conclusion that the scope, intensity, and tactics of the battle to save Hetch Hetchy created the modern environmental movement, and that John Muir, more than any other single person, marshaled that battle. But after that time, perhaps because that battle was lost, Barnett feels the environmental movement has gone somewhat astray, turning to more practical arguments. While they extolled Muir’s first pillar, the wonder and awe of the natural world, they emphasized the benefits to humans of wilderness preservation, and the financial costs to humans of pollution. It is still anthropocentrism, though a more enlightened version of it. As author Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in 1954, “The wisest, the most enlightened, the most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it will defeat itself, and the earth will have been plundered, no matter how scientifically and farseeingly the plundering has been done.”
While Barnett doesn’t discuss it, this failure of the environmental movement to stand by its founding principles, may be why so few environmental groups actively support the restoration of Hetch Hetchy.
A Blueprint for Human Survival
In my mind, one would think that the 1968 NASA “Blue Marble” image of our planet, showing it as one beautiful blue and white globe with no borders, would have, certainly by now, persuaded most people on Earth that we were “one planet, undivided” and need to respect and revere all people and all forms of life. John Muir anticipated this NASA image – and even embraced a cosmic perspective, not just a planetary one, when he wrote:
“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
Dr. Barnett says that this global vision of the commonality among all people and all forms of life on earth requires a radical shift not just in thinking, but in our economics, forms of government, and lifestyles.
Had meaningful responses to climate change begun to be gradually phased in shortly after the initial 1988 announcement by Hansen, the threat could have been handled relatively easily, and catastrophe averted. Three decades of refusal to seriously address the issue, however, had presented humanity by 2012 with a very different scenario. Dr. Barnett shows that this was primarily to the very successful efforts of Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Heartland Institute. What is now required to avert the specter of civilization’s collapse on the planet was wrenching change focused into a short window of time.
As Bill McKibben writes, in the face of such a threat, we should immediately stop drilling, coal mining, and fracking for fossil fuels – anywhere – and to start immediately building solar panels and windmills at a breakneck pace all over the world.”
In a study released during Earth Day in 2015, a group of leading scientists and economists said that we truly need to go even further: “Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”
But what has happened instead? The United States has opted out of even this limited Paris Agreement, and the Trump White House moved swiftly in precisely the opposite direction, to rapidly open up even formerly protected public lands to expanded oil drilling, throughout the West, and even in the critical caribou habitat of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not to mention the continental shelf on both coasts. (Fast forward to 2022, well after the publication of Barnett’s book, even President Biden ordered massive oil releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in a bid to tamp down runaway gasoline prices, and in 2023 the newly-Republican-controlled Congress clearly plans to stop President Biden’s broader efforts to wean the economy off the fossil fuels that drive climate change.)
In Barnett’s view, “The crushing inertia of a world view solidly based on the notion that humans are the center of the world, superior to other life forms and not constrained by the laws governing the rest of life, is relentlessly preventing the necessary urgent responses to climate change.”
To change the world we need some big ideas, and a big change in world view.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude this review with two final quotes which serve to summarize Barnett’s book, though written many decades earlier.
Muir biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, summarized the way John Muir saw the world:
“Man must be made conscious of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would see that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.”
John Muir contrasted this selfish appropriation of Earth’s resources by mankind with the abundance that Earth actually possesses:
“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”
– John Muir, in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).
This particularly amazing book, The Earth Wisdom of John Muir, (2016) in three main parts, is actually a combination of 4 books in one: (1) a biography, (2) a religious exegesis, (3) a history of the environmental movement, and (4) a blueprint for human survival.
The book is ambitious, but it seamlessly blends these seeming disparate components of history, biography, philosophy, and futurism into a highly persuasive argument for new, more respectful approach to humanity’s life on Planet Earth. In this book, Dr. Barnett asserts that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” offers us a path – as individuals and as a society – to becoming whole and enlivened by connecting with our roots in the natural world.
While not without its share of “doom and gloom” about the scary future of climate change for our species, overall Barnett presents a positive message about how love for the planet and an appreciation for the immanent world view that is common to both Taoist philosophy and modern science can make us whole with the Earth once again. Barnett’s thesis is that “Muir’s travels and observations engendered an immanent, this-worldly view, which finds ultimate meaning and glory in the natural world itself, in its physical array of creatures, elements, and processes—which included spirituality, beauty, and love.”
A Brief Muir Biography
Part One, “Muir’s Rambles & Worldview,” traces John Muir’s amazing wilderness adventures and explores the worldview that sprang from them. At the heart of this recounting of adventures is our discovery of Muir’s opposition to anthropocentrism and his embracing of the immanent view of the sacred. Barnett labels Muir’s world-view “Earth Wisdom” and states that most mainstream accounts of John Muir neglect this crucial aspect of Muir’s philosophy.
For this section, Dr. Barnett quotes extensively from Muir’s thoughts written in his private journals, not found in his mainstream publications.
Barnett explains how foundational Muir’s thousand-mile walk was: “When in September of 1867 he scribbled “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe” on the opening page of his journal, Muir clearly saw his upcoming walk from Indiana to Florida’s Gulf of Mexico as something special. Even so, he could not have imagined it would spark the creation of a new way of looking at the world, a stance that a century later would provide the best hope for saving human civilization from the gravest threat of its entire history on the planet.”
Additional chapters in this biographical portion of the book, seen through the Taoist lens, covers Muir’s life of discovery in the Sierra and Alaska, and his embrace of the phenomena of the natural world, and incorporating his rich human friendships, including marriage and children.
The Tao of Muir
Part Two, “The Tao of Muir,” outlines some basic principles of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, including some resources other than the Daodejing (popularly better known in the West by its old spelling, Tao the Ching) that are less known by westerners. This section concludes that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” is highly congruent with what Dr. Barnett identifies as the three pillars of Taoism.
The Three Pillars of Taoism
The three pillars, in Barnett’s language are as follows:
1st. “This world is our true home.” This means a view that not merely rejects the idea of an after-life, but which actually embraces death as a crucial phenomenon allowing for the epic of evolution to proceed. John Muir commented about death in a positive way: “Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…. How beautiful is all Death! “ Muir here seems to appreciate that for evolution to proceed, current living things must make way for future living beings. The Taoist philosophers were in accord: Taoist sage Zhuangzi says: “Life arises from death, and death from life.” Elsewhere, this sage advises a cripple who has just been rebuffed by a clueless Confucius, “Why don’t you simply make him (Confucius) see that life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides—and thus free him from his cuffs and fetters?”
This understanding of death as a natural / sacred part of the life process, and as an essential part of the evolutionary process when viewed with deep-time eyes, is essential. I recommend further exploring these ideas in a modern, scientific context through the writings of Connie Barlow.
2nd. “Kinship with all creatures.” Dr. Barnett explains: “The second pillar of the immanent view of Earth Wisdom and Taoism recognizes that in this world, humans are intimately related to every other living creature, and join other creatures in fully participating in the grand cycles of earthly existence. This second pillar may be described as a kinship view of human life: we are kin to all other life forms, and they to us. The corollary to kinship, of course, is that humans are nothing extraordinary.” Taoist sage Zhuangzi said:
“You were born in a human form, and you find joy in it. Yet there are ten thousand other forms endlessly transforming that are equally good, and the joy in these is untold.”
Muir expressed this same idea equally clearly, when he wrote,
“Now, it never seems to occur to these far- seeing teachers that Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one.”
To emphasize his point, he wrote,
“I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”
Thus, Muir, like the Taoists, forthrightly rejects the anthropocentric view that is still dominant in our world today. I am struck by the thought that this concept of kinship with all creatures resonates well with Albert Schweitzer’s concept of “Reverence for Life.”
3rd Interlocking Duality. The third pillar of the immanent worldview that Muir and the Taoists saw clearly in their sojourns in the world was the way certain clusters of phenomena work together to produce and support the whole; there is a duality to existence.” The Taoists visualize this in the model of two interlocking curved shapes – the taijitu 太极图 symbol – popularly known in the West as the “Yin-Yang symbol.” A classic example of yin-yang interaction together generating reality is the observation that rocks are solid, with a brutal strength: yang; while water is flowing, with its own subtle strength: yin. This idea is fully developed in the Tao te Ching and elsewhere in Chinese Taoist philosophy.
As Dr. Barnett notes, this is not a pure duality of opposites – “crucially, each of the dual elements has a bit of the other right in the middle of it… Yin and yang are not mutually exclusive or battling with each other; they are not opposites. Rather, everything—including every person—is composed of complementary elements of yin and yang.” Both are valid, both necessary; reality is the balanced interplay between them.
Muir did not create such a full-developed philosophical system as the Taoists, but nonetheless he embraced in his life the principles of complementary aspects of nature. He described the yin and yang interaction of rocks and water in a way evocative of that of the Taoists:
“Vapor from the sea; rain, snow, and ice on the summits; glaciers and rivers—these form a wheel that grinds the mountains thin and sharp,… and crushes the rocks into soils on which the forests and meadows and gardens are growing.”
Like the Tao te Ching says, “Nothing is weaker than water, But when it attacks something hard, or resistant, then nothing withstands it.” Elsewhere, Muir wrote of light and dark, storms and quietude, large and small. He observed:
“Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”
Isn’t Muir’s view of the water cycle describing the “whirling and flowing” of Nature something visually represented so well in the taijitu symbol?
Where the Tao celebrates the Male-Female duality, Barnett notes that unlike many 19th century men, John Muir accepted women as equals and friends, and he delighted in playing with small children as much as engaging in discussions with notable scientists and prominent literary men. At that time, “a male treating females and flowers with attention and respect equal to that conferred upon males was highly unusual.”
Barnett summarizes:
“Muir’s 19th century articulation of Earth Wisdom, the three-pillared immanent worldview in the West—earth is our home, we are kin to the rest of creation, and reality is generated by complementary interactions of dualistic phenomena—constitutes his first legacy to the Western world. Others in the West had broached one or another of the three pillars—Heraclitus, St. Francis of Assisi, Alexander von Humboldt, early feminists in England and America—but it was Muir who brought them all together, and introduced them to early modern Western society in his writings, particularly his journals, and his stirring life.”
Comparing many quotes of Muir with that of Taoist sages, Barnett concludes that while he “would not claim that Muir’s ‘God’ (or his ‘Mother Nature’) is neatly synonymous with China’s ‘Tao,’ it seems clear that what Muir is getting at when he uses the various terms examined above is well within the variety of concepts that have been advanced to describe ‘the Tao.’”
Muir was “an accidental Taoist” as he came to his own version of Taoism coincidentally, based on his observations of nature. But this is precisely why the two approaches are so similar — they both result from careful and sustained observations of nature. Dr. Barnett says, “China’s version of the earth-centered, immanent philosophy of life is Taoism; Muir’s version is Earth Wisdom.”
Comparing the two, it soon becomes clear that careful observation of nature is also an approach to another modern world view: Science.
The author, himself a scientist in the field of evolutionary biology as well as being a Chinese scholar, proclaims that both Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” and Taoism offer a critical way of thinking that is also embraced by modern science. He says:
“Here, then, is the secret of the surprising similarity between Muir’s Earth Wisdom and China’s Taoism. The world, upon close and unbiased inspection by whomever is sauntering through it with fully open eyes and a mind free of prior bias, reveals itself in a this-worldly, immanent outlook fundamentally different than the transcendent, other-worldly views of the major religions, East or West.
Barnett argues that Muir’s “Earth Wisdom” is not just biocentric, but goes even further. Muir broadened his spiritual vision “to include not just plants and animals, but rocks and water as entities also bursting with spiritual life.”
Dr. Barnett explains:
“Muir’s radical shift of view from anthropocentrism, then, goes beyond biocentrism to include the whole planet. Everything, the entire immanent world, is alive. We may call his view, then, Gaiacentrism, an outlook that decisively dethrones what Muir time and again [sarcastically] refers to as ‘Lord Man.’”
History of the Environmental Movement
New York Times Headline - Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation (1970)Part Three of Barnett’s book begins with a brief history of the environmental movement, before moving on to a literal Blueprint for Human Survival.
Muir’s Gaiacentric world view was not merely philosophy; Muir put the idea into tangible action. Thus, Muir did not merely act to protect plants and animals, but entire mountain ranges, forests, valleys, waterfalls, and rivers.
One of the especially beautiful places he sought to protect was a river and a valley, with its waterfalls and verdant flowery meadows – the Hetch Hetchy Valley, located within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park, and so should already have been considered protected. But the City of San Francisco drowned that Valley in 1923, after John Muir and his followers lost a long battle between 1905 and 1912 with the City.
Barnett shares with others the conclusion that the scope, intensity, and tactics of the battle to save Hetch Hetchy created the modern environmental movement, and that John Muir, more than any other single person, marshaled that battle. But after that time, perhaps because that battle was lost, Barnett feels the environmental movement has gone somewhat astray, turning to more practical arguments. While they extolled Muir’s first pillar, the wonder and awe of the natural world, they emphasized the benefits to humans of wilderness preservation, and the financial costs to humans of pollution. It is still anthropocentrism, though a more enlightened version of it. As author Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in 1954, “The wisest, the most enlightened, the most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it will defeat itself, and the earth will have been plundered, no matter how scientifically and farseeingly the plundering has been done.”
While Barnett doesn’t discuss it, this failure of the environmental movement to stand by its founding principles, may be why so few environmental groups actively support the restoration of Hetch Hetchy.
A Blueprint for Human Survival
In my mind, one would think that the 1968 NASA “Blue Marble” image of our planet, showing it as one beautiful blue and white globe with no borders, would have, certainly by now, persuaded most people on Earth that we were “one planet, undivided” and need to respect and revere all people and all forms of life. John Muir anticipated this NASA image – and even embraced a cosmic perspective, not just a planetary one, when he wrote:
“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
Dr. Barnett says that this global vision of the commonality among all people and all forms of life on earth requires a radical shift not just in thinking, but in our economics, forms of government, and lifestyles.
Had meaningful responses to climate change begun to be gradually phased in shortly after the initial 1988 announcement by Hansen, the threat could have been handled relatively easily, and catastrophe averted. Three decades of refusal to seriously address the issue, however, had presented humanity by 2012 with a very different scenario. Dr. Barnett shows that this was primarily to the very successful efforts of Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Heartland Institute. What is now required to avert the specter of civilization’s collapse on the planet was wrenching change focused into a short window of time.
As Bill McKibben writes, in the face of such a threat, we should immediately stop drilling, coal mining, and fracking for fossil fuels – anywhere – and to start immediately building solar panels and windmills at a breakneck pace all over the world.”
In a study released during Earth Day in 2015, a group of leading scientists and economists said that we truly need to go even further: “Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”
But what has happened instead? The United States has opted out of even this limited Paris Agreement, and the Trump White House moved swiftly in precisely the opposite direction, to rapidly open up even formerly protected public lands to expanded oil drilling, throughout the West, and even in the critical caribou habitat of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not to mention the continental shelf on both coasts. (Fast forward to 2022, well after the publication of Barnett’s book, even President Biden ordered massive oil releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in a bid to tamp down runaway gasoline prices, and in 2023 the newly-Republican-controlled Congress clearly plans to stop President Biden’s broader efforts to wean the economy off the fossil fuels that drive climate change.)
In Barnett’s view, “The crushing inertia of a world view solidly based on the notion that humans are the center of the world, superior to other life forms and not constrained by the laws governing the rest of life, is relentlessly preventing the necessary urgent responses to climate change.”
To change the world we need some big ideas, and a big change in world view.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude this review with two final quotes which serve to summarize Barnett’s book, though written many decades earlier.
Muir biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, summarized the way John Muir saw the world:
“Man must be made conscious of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would see that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.”
John Muir contrasted this selfish appropriation of Earth’s resources by mankind with the abundance that Earth actually possesses:
“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”
– John Muir, in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).
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