Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, the conservation movement kicked off at the same time as the 2nd Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Railroads, steel, scientific progress, communication (telegraph), early electrification and combustion engines converged to create a giant leap from a society that was still largely rural and centered around agriculture, to one of rapid urban and industrial growth. With that, however, came an immense demand for natural resources. In the Americas, the land had been seen as endless in what it could provide. Even before industry kicked into high gear, the fallacy of infinite resources was already being felt. A number of voices in the 1800s began to speak to the need to conserve and manage natural resources. Two would forever be remembered for making conservation a way of life, rather than some fringe movement.
John Muir never intended to be the voice of the movement, but his writings about his journeys and the nation’s natural wonders captivated people in a way others like him had not achieved. Gifted as an inventor and user of technology, Muir wasn’t anti-progress. He had an innate connection to nature since he was young, and as he became an adult, a clear sense of the perils of destroying nature.
Donald Worster’s book, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, follows Muir from his birth in Scotland, to his move to the United States, and traces his travels as Muir explored a still wild, but rapidly changing, United States. He would become best known for his fight to protect Yosemite, but he would inspire many others in the movement with his writings of the many places he would explore.
Muir wasn’t the stereotypical nature wanderer, or foe of technology and business. He did travel the wilds, but built machinery and inventions, and would eventually run successful farms in California with his family. He would bring with him clocks he invented into the wilderness. It was, however, a work accident which almost cost him an eye, that finalized his commitment to exploring and defending nature. He would write, “I made haste with all my heart, bade adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery and determined to devote the rest of my life to studying the inventions of God.”
Worster, in his otherwise solid biography, tries to downplay Muir’s Christian beliefs, because of Muir’s rocky relationship with his fundamentalist father, and perhaps Worster’s own views. However, Muir never abandoned his religion, even if he did distance himself from his father. Muir wrote, “Every landscape…and every one of its living creatures…and every crystal of its rocks…is throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God.”
Like many naturalists of the age, Muir was influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin. Worster seems to be a Darwin enthusiast, not acknowledging the long-recognized scientific flaws in Darwin’s model. Muir, like others, read Darwin’s work as a call to study and understand nature. Not looking too deeply into the science, or the implications the theory would soon have for eugenics, Muir did have issues with the violence of nature Darwin claimed was inevitable and inherent. At least in that, Darwin was right to some extent. Darwinism didn’t turn Muir from God. Worster admits Muir “…continued to feel a surge of piety whenever he rambled in the wild outdoors…All was beauty. All was God.”
Recent claims that Muir was a racist have been made largely by people who have little endeavored to read the works of Muir, understand the times he lived in, or have taken comments out of context. In the zeitgeist of our day, one can be labeled a racist if you know a racist, or live among them, or never speak out against them. Guilt by association. While Muir wasn’t an open activist for natives or black Americans in the Civil War era in which he lived, Worster writes, “Whatever Muir may have missed about the deeper turmoil of southern blacks’ lives, he met them more or less as equals and shared the intimacy of their homes to an extent that few white northerners, or white southerners, ever did.”
Worster also pointed out Muir’s belief “of the right of Native Americans to defend their homelands” and that “Indians everywhere were part of the divine Creation and, as such, had a right to live free and defend themselves from intruders.” Hardly the beliefs of a white supremacist. It’s a shame that the Sierra Club, which Muir founded, has sought to distance themselves from Muir. Tellingly, though, not all at the Sierra Club agreed with the revision-writing of the past. Of course, many modern champions of protecting the lands have only recently started to recognize these lands were stolen from natives, and even then, do so shallowly with no deep understanding of history.
John Muir, however, has left a legacy few of his critics will ever replicate.
Theodore Roosevelt was, by any estimation, a disruptive, unstoppable force who charted his own path. Like Muir, Roosevelt was always attracted to nature. He used it to transform himself from a sickly kid, to the icon of living the Strenuous Life. He would champion wildlife management standards used to this day, and massively expanded what would become the national park system. He too wasn’t against progress, but knew wanton destruction of nature wouldn’t benefit people, in his time, or in the future.
Born into a family of position and wealth, one might have thought Roosevelt was guaranteed success in life. This success was not preordained. Battles with sickness and health conditions plagued him for years. Through the powerful will he would wield throughout his life, he chose to overcome his deficiencies. Heading into the woods was part of his plan, and he would always hold “a staunch belief in the healing powers of nature.”
His father, a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, would be an influence in his life, as would other naturalists. T.R. wasn’t the first great conservationist. Others like John Audubon preceded him, and previous presidents had begun to protect lands. As Douglas Brinkley writes in is exhaustive biography, The Wilderness Warrior, Roosevelt and others were “reviving conservationist convictions that had been stalled by shortsighted politicians,” but Roosevelt would make conservation mainstream in a fashion none before him had accomplished.
Roosevelt left us with a vast goldmine of writings, unmatched by any other president or politician. Thousands of letters, articles, and dozens of books he wrote, are both a treasure and headache to examine by the many biographers that have tried. Indeed, they have little excuse to misunderstand Roosevelt – and some still have – with so much documentation. Brinkley’s book focuses on T.R.’s voluminous writings and actions regarding nature, intertwined with his history of traveling the world, rising into politics, leaving to fight in the Spanish American War, and soon to become president. T.R. was like an unstoppable, inevitable “meteor of his age,” as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge aptly stated.
Some historians have took issue with T.R. who was simultaneously the big game hunter, and the nearly fanatically defender of nature. In reality, the “animal rights” movement that was taking hold in his time, didn’t ban hunting or eating animals. It attacked aristocratic hunting that wasted the animals, and inhumane, unhealthy slaughterhouses. Brinkley writes, “Roosevelt complained [the slaughterhouses] weren’t regulated in any way shape or form..[he] simply wanted hunting and the treatment of domestic animals regulated. Species extinction, torture of animals, overhunting, lack of seasonal limits, cock and bull fighting – such activities were anathema to his gentlemanly outlook on life.”
The changes being implemented in his time are why now many animals avoided extinction. T.R. himself evolved “from buffalo skinner to buffalo protector.” In fact, the groundwork he and others laid “…are essentially the hunting and animal rights codes American society abides by in the twenty-first century.” Codes that brought many animals back from near-extinction and manage their well-being.
In his second term as president, Roosevelt took a more aggressive approach to protecting land, angering many in various industries. Never one to back off from a good fight – after all, he never feared breaking monopolies and fighting corruption, to the dismay of some of his allies – he would protect millions of acres of land across the country, and even in the then far-flung territories of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
T.R. would meet John Muir, and as president, camp with him in the wilderness, and would support his efforts. Like Muir, T.R. became enamored with Darwin’s writings, as it seemed to give naturalists a scientific foundation. One wonders what the well-read Roosevelt would think about Darwin’s model being used for the basis for eugenics, or its abandonment by many modern scientists?
Nonetheless, T.R. believed every man “should hike, camp, hunt, and fish. Men could find exhilaration in the wild…[T.R. wrote] ‘Let us, therefore, Boldy face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully, resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and word, resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.'” Who talks like that anymore?
He didn’t go “gently into retirement” and “crusaded for conservation to prevail over the global disease of hyper-industrialization.” While many lands and animals were protected, his warnings against the growing acceptance of the disastrous way industry treated the air and waterways, would be unheeded for many decades. Yet, “Even as his sunlight dimmed, he held firm to his visionary stances on wildlife protection and sustainable land management.”
We live in an age where most people agree that smog-filled skies and undrinkable rivers are not acceptable. Some environmentalists have forgotten, or don’t know, that since the 1970s, T.R.’s vision has returned and largely succeeded. However, there are still challenges. People never go outside, are unconnected with the natural world, and our industrial farming is an environmental disaster. We are paying for these realities with our health
It may be time to once again look to the leaders of our past for guidance to find the right path.
Darrick Dean 