Raymond Barnett

Introduction

 

Where have you been, Phaedrus, and where are you going?—Socrates

We must cultivate our garden.—Voltaire

Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever facts may lead me—Sherlock Holmes

 

Six thousand years ago, in what we now call south-central Europe and central China, our Neolithic ancestors lived in villages and towns ranging from dozens to thousands of inhabitants.  They lived well, with plentiful time for play, story-telling, making love, and creating beautiful objects from gold, silver, ivory, and stone. 

 

These villages and towns were typically located in well-watered areas with rich soil, or in wetlands teeming with waterfowl and aquatic life, attracting vast herds of migratory ungulates, as James Scott shows.  Their economy was a mixed one, combining the best of three levels.  The old hunting of large animals and gathering of smaller animals as well as a wide variety of fruits, seeds, and tubers was the first layer (HG).  Thousands of years of close observance and interaction with their habitats had permitted these early humans to develop sophisticated management techniques to encourage and maximize what they foraged from their habitats, including the judicious use of fire, coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, thinning, and selective harvesting. This "tending the wild" (as M. Kat Anderson terms it; see Sources at end) was the second layer of their economy (HGT).

 

Finally, during the last several thousand years, they had domesticated certain plants and animals that were tame-able and demanded minimal care.  This early stage of agriculture consisted only of what I term gardening: small plots that yielded adequate nutrition for each family that tended such a garden, and small, easily tended animals such as jungle fowl and early pigs.  Such gardening was the third layer of the Neolithic economy, which incorporated and complemented the earlier first and second layers.

 

Gardeners of Gaia. This early form of agriculture was vastly different than the all-demanding, labor intensive drudgery of vast, ploughed fields of monoculture crops that came much later, which I term intensive agriculture.  We might characterize this Neolithic subsistence economy incorporating three levels by the term "hunting/gathering/gardening." (HGG) Its modest demands of time and energy permitted the rich social and cultural life characteristic of human cultures of this mid-to-late Neolithic period.  Since the later Greek term Gaia represents the earth, then these hunting/gathering/gardening cultures might be called Gardeners of Gaia. Indeed, distinguished scholars (such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari; see Sources hereafter) wonder whether these Gardeners of Gaia might not have achieved the apex of human happiness and prosperity during our species' tenure on the earth.

 

Long-established as well as newly-discovered (see James Scott) archeological evidence shows that the Gardeners of Gaia societies were solidly egalitarian.  While there were apparently no strict roles assigned to either gender, males tended to be mostly the hunters and artisans, especially metallurgy; females tended to be mostly the gatherers and makers of ceramic objects and baskets.  Usually, grave goods indicate that females were the most highly respected and honored members of these cultures, and that descent was tracked through the female line, a matrilineal system (as established by Marya Gimbutas for Europe and Liu for China).  But clearly this was no matriarchy; both males and females had important and respected roles in society, a situation Riane Eisler has termed gylany (gy indicating the female aspect, an indicating the male, from the Greek roots). 

 

Violence occasionally occurred in these societies; they were not idyllic utopias.  But the archeological evidence and judgment of most scholars (R. Gabriel and A. Metz, as well as John Keegan) indicates that violent outbursts were not frequent and not widespread.  There is no evidence of chieftains or warrior classes, nor weapons specialized for killing humans. Particularly compared to the devastation of the ensuing Iron Age, characterized by the rise of patriarchal warrior states, as chronicled by the scholars cited above, these Neolithic cultures were for the most part peaceful—though, again, not utopias. 

 

And most importantly, these cultures of hunter/gatherer/gardening villages and towns were not momentary, fleeting Camelots.  There were some 46 in Europe, 19 identified so far in China (see Gimbutas and Jiao, respectively), each lasting many centuries, often millennia, and when they disappeared they were replaced by similar cultures of villages and towns which also lasted centuries and millennia.  The archeological evidence, in fact, establishes that these cultures existed continually in parts of Europe (Gimbutas) and China (Lee, and Jiao) from the late Paleolithic to the late Neolithic—some 10,000 years! 

 

While the details of the hunting/gathering/gardening economies varied within these dozens of cultures, shifting with the seasons and the weather, as emphasized by James Scott, and while the defining traits of the art and decorative objects also varied, the social organization—egalitarian, gylanic, extremely knowledgeable about the natural world—was surprisingly similar among them.  And the art, the location and traits of cemeteries, the goods contained in graves, the objects made by the artisans of the society, all indicate a similar way of thinking about the world and their place in it among these peoples.  This evidence (which we'll examine in early chapters) indicates that this worldview common to early human cultures for 10,000 years was most importantly based upon three pillars. 

 

The Immanent Worldview. First, these peoples were completely focused on the everyday, this-worldly here and now.  The natural world in which their economy was imbedded was respected and considered to be sacred and sufficient.  They gloried in the natural world, regarding it as not just the basis of their nutrition and health, but the basis of their esthetics and their reverence.  This was not so much a religion, in our western sense of the word, but an attitude, an appreciation, an acknowledgment that the natural world was all, and was enough.  They considered that humans needed nothing more to be fully and richly human (as we might say today).  This way of seeing the world is described as an immanent worldview.  The physical, manifested, here-and-now immanent world is full reality.  These people neither imagined nor needed other realms of existence.  They were happy and secure in the immanent world.

 

Anthropologists Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris studied the tombs, seal stones, and temple objects of the Minoan culture on Crete, the longest-surviving citadel of the Neolithic immanent worldview. "The construction of the tomb (at Koumasa) was apparently geared towards—and the needs of community and ancestors were perhaps believed to be served by—not the worship of a personified deity, but alignment to the cycles of the natural world…(In) the twentieth century's preoccupation with human and emotional affairs…we may have been missing evidence of a very different experience and very different concerns, ones to do with bones and heat, life and the dead, animals and plants, the weather and the passing of time." The Immanent world.

 

Gaiacentrism. Secondly, these Neolithic Gardeners of Gaia did not consider humans to be anything special.  Humans were kin to all other living things.  Their intimate knowledge of their environment and their fellow creatures convinced them that in all important respects, they and their fellow creatures shared all their important traits, that all contributed to the healthy functioning of the whole.  That is, their view of life was not the least anthropocentric, human-centered.  Their view of the world and of life, rather, was earth-centered, or Gaiacentric (again adopting the Greek word for "earth" and the earth goddess). 

 

Goodison and Morris, again, on Neolithic seal stones in Minoan culture: "Females are important, but the focus of attention seems to be the natural world: sun, animals and plants. Ritual activities apparently included dance, animal and bird disguise, touching parts of dead animals, carrying vegetation, concern with bones and possible sun worship." Examining objects in the temple repositories of the great palace at Knossos, they observe that the culture "is strongly involved in the domains which make up the 'natural world', as expressed through the snakes, animals, flowers and the sea." The earth and its creatures are central, not humans above all others.

 

Yin-yang dualism. Thirdly, these people saw that the world and its creatures exhibited distinct dualisms everywhere, and that reality emerged from the complementary (rather than antagonistic) interaction of these dualisms.  Heat and cold waxed and waned with the seasons, as did light and dark, and wet and dry.  Both interacting poles were necessary, with neither being "good" or "bad"; they complemented each other. Creatures generally came in male and female, though surely they noticed that these, too, could be mixed and combined in varying proportions.  Strength and weakness, joy and grief, life and death all played their varying roles in the world; all were part of the proper functioning of reality.  This view of life, described so well by the ancient Chinese, as chronicled by the brilliant Joseph Needham, may be called the yin-yang dualism aspect of reality.

 

"Know the strength of man / But keep a woman's care…Know the white / But keep the black…Know honor / But keep humility…The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang / They achieve harmony by combining these forces" proclaims the Tao Te Ching, the ancient collection of aphorisms which survive a Neolithic origin to pass into the realm of written history in China.

 

The First Age of Humans. The three-pillared Immanent worldview of late Paleolithic and Neolithic humans, then, was utterly and fundamentally different than the worldview of humans throughout most of their subsequent history.  This original worldview defines the early 10,000 years of hunting/gathering/gardening human culture on both extremes of the great Eurasian continent (Europe and China).  We may call this, then, the First Age of Humans: the Age of the Immanent, with its accompanying Gaiacentricm and yin-yang dualism. Though it lasted for some ten millennia, the First Age of Humans ended, at about 2,500 years BCE (somewhat earlier in Europe, later in China), and its defining worldview was thereafter persecuted and largely forgotten. The ensuing second age was based on a completely contrasting worldview:  transcendent, anthropocentric, patriarchal misogyny. 

 

The Transcendent Worldview. People in the next age of humans now put emphasis on another, transcendent realm of existence rather than the this-worldly, here-and-now immanent realm, as described by Joseph Campbell.  This newly paramount realm was inhabited by an all-powerful "God" or "gods" in Europe, and Shangdi (Ultimate ancestor) and Tian (Heaven) in China.  People were now focused on an anticipated afterlife in the future, in a realm usually located above or otherwise removed from the earth—transcendent.  The early religions of Judaism and Hinduism, and their offshoots Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are examples of the transcendent worldview.

 

Anthropocentrism. Now humans were considered separate from their fellow creatures and the natural world—and vastly superior.  The natural world, in fact, existed to be brutally subjugated and exploited for the benefit of its human masters. As the book of Genesis describes it: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth'". The nonhuman creatures of the world were not kin, with no important features in common with humans, so they could be arbitrarily killed and manipulated to the benefit of humans, with no rights or recourse. 

 

Patriarchal Misogyny. Lastly, and very important in these new cultures, human males were superior to females, and were granted by the transcendent "gods" with the right to rule over female humans, to buy, sell, and treat them however they wished, just as humans could treat nonhuman animals (as emphasized by Campbell).  While the existing accounts of Jesus suggest he accepted females, the Christian religion was molded by Saul of Tarsus, later known as St. Paul, who in 1 Timothy 2 set forth what would guide the early church and up to a mere century ago, and casts a long shadow over the religion to this day (particularly the Catholic realm): "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty."

 

This misogyny is not a Western phenomenon; the place of women in Asia is in many ways even more subjugated than in the West, as reflected in the long historical practice in China and elsewhere during this second age of selling daughters to serve rich families or brothels during droughts or famines. Misogyny is a worldwide feature of the age of transcendence.

 

The Second Age of Humans. The age of humans characterized by the worldview of transcendence, with its accompanying anthropocentrism and patriarchal misogyny, is the Second Age of Humans, and might be called the Age of Transcendence (or, with James Joyce in Ulysses, simply "the nightmare").  An additional trait of this age, setting it apart from the Age of Immanence, is the startling frequency and savagery of violence, directed by the new institution of patriarchal states supporting a weapon-wielding class of warriors (as documented by John Keegan). This age occupies virtually all of what we call "history," beginning in most formulations with the advent of states and writing, at about 2,500 BCE.  While the Age of Immanence lasted ten thousand years, the Age of Transcendence has, thus far, lasted only some 4,500 years—less than half the duration of the Age of Immanence. 

 

What has happened to the old worldview of immanence, Gaiacentrism, and yin-yang dualism during this Second Age of Humans?  Have the Gardeners of Gaia ceased to exist? Certainly the old worldview has retreated far on the world stage; but it has not disappeared.  It has continued to exist through the Second Age, though as a marginalized, underground component of society in contrast to the urban elite's new worldview, certainly inferior in power and prevalence to the new worldview of transcendence, anthropocentrism, and patriarchal misogyny.  We shall in later chapters trace its continued existence during the Second Age, relying heavily on Mark Elvin's research on the phenomenon in China, and recognizing the resurgence of organic gardening in Farmers Markets across the West.  But certainly the immanent worldview has been displaced as the acknowledged dominant approach to living in the world, particularly by the elites ruling the institutions of the state and society.

 

Until recently.  Beginning in the late decades of the nineteenth century CE (formerly designated as AD), the immanent worldview has returned to the public stage.  Largely forgotten though never absent, it has become more prominent in the affairs of nations, and even become a public force to be reckoned with.  The ancient worldview found new life in the paintings of Claude Monet in Europe and Georgia O'Keeffe in America, and in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, and AJ Dickinson. It gained growing power in two new movements emphasizing the immanent world:  environmentalism and science, which find themselves working together.  Practitioners of the scientific method found, to their initial surprise, that the evidence they gathered on the forces and processes shaping the world sharply contradicted the transcendent, anthropocentric, patriarchal misogyny worldview, and to the contrary supported an immanent, Gaiacentric, yin-yang dualism view of reality—though they generally had no inkling that such a worldview had long ago been the prevalent human worldview (the exception being Joseph Needham).

 

The Return of the Immanent. The logical and inexorable consequences of the transcendent, anthropocentric, patriarchal misogyny worldview—the degradation of the natural world, and the subsequent existential threat to not just human "civilization" but indeed human survival itself—has manifested itself in the phenomena of climate change, pollution, and plummeting biodiversity (chronicled recently by many, most tellingly Bill McKibben and David Orr).  In response, the newly-returned Age of Immanence and its accompanying Gaiacentrism and yin-yang dualism, proclaimed by science and environmentalism, has risen to prominence and begun an epic battle against the governing Second Age of transcendence (again chronicled by many, most recently David Wallace-Wells).  With the return of the immanent worldview, a Third Age of Humans has come into being, an age of violence and conflict rooted in the stark differences of the two competing worldviews.  The issue of which will prevail is very much in doubt, though the incredible power and dominance of the Age of Transcendence surely must be considered the more likely victor. 

 

The Third Age of Humans. We shall see in subsequent chapters that this Third Age of Humans will be the last age of humans on earth.  Either the transcendent worldview will prevail, leading within a century or two to the destruction of the earth's biological and geological foundations, and thus the likely extinction of humans along with many other plant and animal species.  Or the immanent worldview will prevail, led by women, children, and the occasional male scientists and environmentalists.  This outcome would usher in the Return of the Immanent as the culmination of the Third Age, permitting continued human existence on the planet.  E.O. Wilson envisions a smaller population of humans once again living in companionship with their fellow creatures, sharing the earth and its bounty as they did for ten millennia before the ascent of the Age of Transcendence four thousand five hundred years ago. 

 

Can we, today, influence the outcome of this great struggle?  Certainly.  As a first step, to find the clarity of conviction requisite to any possible victory, by learning our species' story—the whole story.  (As Socrates inquired in 370 BCE: "Where have you been, Phaedrus, and where are you going?").  This evidence-based story tells us that humans have, in the past, lived in harmony with the earth in prosperous, peaceful, human cultures characterized by the immanent, Gaiacentric, yin-yang dualism worldview—the Gardeners of Gaia.  This story, rooted in archeological findings, establishes that such a human culture and worldview is realistic and feasible. 

 

The immanent worldview of the Gardeners of Gaia is not only realistic and feasible, but is also the normative human story.  The First Age of Humans lasted 10,000 years, two-thirds of the span that humans have assembled in villages and towns with a culture.  The subsequent Second Age of Humans has only lasted 4,500 years—less than a third of the time on earth of humans with a culture.  The Age of Transcendence is rightly seen as an aberration, an unfortunate detour in the story of humans.  But no—the Age of Transcendence is more rightly considered a dead-end in the human story, leading as it has to the present destruction of the biological and cultural underpinnings of the earth and humans, with a massive, sixth wave of extinctions already rippling across the planet.

 

So understanding the human story means we must also understand how the Second Age of Humans replaced the early worldview, and how its transcendence, anthropocentrism, and patriarchal misogyny must inevitably lead to the current destruction of the biological and geologic systems on which life depends—the climate crisis unfolding before us.

 

Once this whole story of the Three Ages of Humans is well-known and understood, then the issue can be joined with a full understanding of its origins, its consequences, and its urgency.  More humans can be persuaded of the importance of the Immanent worldview, of the pernicious consequences of the Transcendent worldview.  And led by powerful women, children, and male allies from science and environmentalism, perhaps the probable victory of transcendence, anthropocentrism, and patriarchal misogyny might be challenged, even overturned.

 

Restoring the immanent worldview, Gaiacentrism, and yin-yang duality to the earth's human culture will be a true homecoming for humanity.  Though the details of the culture and its infrastructure will of course be modern, the basic approach to humans living their lives will be that of the First Age.  People will be comfortable "in their skin." Cities will have large expanses of green space, in which their inhabitants play and rest.  City centers will be for pedestrians, with shuttles bringing visitors in from peripheral areas where electric vehicles are parked. Children will grow up learning and loving the local plants and animals of their region, filled with wonder at the color and diversity of life around them—of which they are an integral, related part.

 

And there will be lots of organic gardening, of course, vegetable and flower gardens around most homes, and gardens set aside next to apartment buildings. The vast hundred- and thousand-acre monoculture fields of the old industrial, pesticide- and oil-fueled agriculture will be carved up and much of it given back to woodland and prairie, for our kin to return and thrive.  What remains in rural areas will be smaller organic garden plots, multicultured mixtures of vegetables and ornamentals, part of whose bounty will be used to feed the chickens and pigs, or composted to enrich the soil. 

Once again, finally, humans will thrive on a thriving earth, coexisting with our kin so long into the future as the universe gives us.  The Gardeners of Gaia.

 

So let us begin the story.  We start by examining the Paleolithic and Neolithic evidence that establishes our knowledge of the great First Age of Humans and its characteristics, in south-central Europe and central China.  We then explore how that Age was destroyed and replaced by the Second Age of Humans, including evidence indicating that the process may have happened differently in Europe (as explored by Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey) than in China (as established by Elvin).  We then trace the continued, improbable underground existence of The Gardeners of Gaia with their immanence, Gaiacentrism, and yin-yang dualism during the 4,500 years of the Second Age, discovering that despite continual persecution, their persistence was more pronounced in China than in Europe.

 

We end the story with a look at the fruits of the Second Age's worldview, how unbridled human exploitation of the earth, abetted in modern times by fossil fuels, market capitalism, and the servants of those interests, must inevitably lead to the degradation of the earth and the extinction of much of life before a balance is able to re-establish itself. 

 

Can we save the habitable earth, and humanity's rightful place on it? 

 

Can we restore the Gardeners of Gaia and bring back the first Age of Humans, in a modern form? 

 

Let us begin the story. 

 

 

Introduction Sources:

M. Kat Anderson, 2005, Tending the Wild

Joseph Campbell, 2013, Goddesses: mysteries of the feminine divine

Jared Diamond, 2005, Guns, Germs, and Steel; also 2004, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Riane Eisler, 1987, The Chalice and the Blade

Mark Elvin, 2004, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

R. Gabriel and A.Metz, 1991, From Sumer to Rome: the Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies

Marija Gimbutas, 1991, Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, 1998, Beyond the Great Mother

Yuval Noah Harari, 2011, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind

Tianlong Jiao, 1995, Gender Relations in Prehistoric Chinese Society: Archaeological Discoveries

James Joyce, 1914, Ulysses

John Keegan, 1993, A History of Warfare

Li Liu, 2005, The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States

Bill McKibbon, 1989, The End of Nature; also 2019, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself  Out?

Joseph Needham, 1956, Science and Civilisation in China, v. II

David Orr, 2016, Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward

Plato, 370 BCE, The Socratic Dialogue Phaedrus

James Scott, 2017, Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States

Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey, 1998, Rethinking Figurines: a Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas

David Wallace-Wells, 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth

Edward O. Wilson, 2016, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

In Part One of this series, we saw that when the young John Muir encountered the Native Americans of the Sierra Nevada in 1869, that culture was in the midst of a holocaust, brought on by the brutal usurpation of their homes and traditional hunting-gathering lands by the onslaught of Anglo-americans after the discovery of gold in 1848.  In shock and undergoing terrible suffering, the Native Americans were honestly and accurately described by Muir in his journals.  Yet in recording their distressing, disheveled appearances and manners, he yet persisted in affirming the positive aspects of their culture, and insisted that they were his "fellow beings" and "brothers."  And he wondered:  "Perhaps if I knew them better I should like then better."

 

A decade later he got that opportunity.  A mere dozen years after America's purchase of Alaska from Russia, Muir made the first of five trips to that raw, young land, in quest of the passion of his life: glaciers!  He took a commercial steamer from Seattle as far up the Alaska coast as it went (the rough village of Wrangel), hired a Tlingkit canoe and four paddlers (from different tribes, all), and explored the remote coast north for 400 miles, until the winter storms beat him back.  With him was a Presbyterian minister, S. Hall Young, who stopped at dozens of Native American villages to preach and offer education to their youths.  Muir came to know his paddlers very well, and the people of the villages at which they stopped. 

 

Just as his experiences with the Native Americans of the Sierra Nevada were profoundly influenced by the status of their culture—shattered, in that instance—so his experiences with Alaska's Native Americans were critically influenced by the status of their culture.  While the early Russian fur traders had brought diseases of "civilization" to the tribes, with resulting epidemics, and while there were some early gold seekers and missionaries there in 1879, by and large Alaska's Native Americans had not yet experienced the holocaust that had afflicted the Sierra Nevada tribes. (That would come, with the Klondike gold rush of 1896.) Their villages were still extant, for the most part, with the populations pursuing their ancient social economies.  Pre-holocaust, then, giving Muir the opportunity to observe and record a Native American culture reasonably similar to what it had been for thousands of years.

 

Let's listen to what he says of them in his journals (later published in Travels in Alaska; pages refer to the 2002 Modern Library edition). 

 

"The (Indian) women, seated on the steps and platform of the traders' shops (in Wrangell village), could hardly be called loafers, for they had berries to sell, basketfuls of huckleberries, large yellow salmon-berries, and bog raspberries that looked wondrous fresh and clean…After patiently waiting for purchasers until hungry, they ate what they could not sell, and went away to gather more.

 

"As the day advances, a fleet of canoes may be seen along the shore, all fashioned alike, high and long beak-like prows and sterns, with lines as fine as those of the breast of a duck. What the mustang is to the Mexican vaquero, the canoe is to these coast Indians. They skim along the shores to fish and hunt and trade, or merely to visit their neighbors, for they are sociable, and have family pride remarkably well developed, meeting often to inquire after each other's health, attend potlaches and dances, and gossip concerning coming marriages, births, deaths, etc. Others seem to sail for the pure pleasure of the thing, their canoes decorated with handfuls of the tall purple epilobium…"

 

"A little excursion to one of the best huckleberry-fields adjacent to Wrangell…In the afternoon, when the baskets were full, all started back to the camp-ground…I was the first to arrive at camp. The rest of the party came in shortly afterwards, singing and humming like heavy-laden bees. It was interesting to note how kindly they held out handfuls of the best berries to the little girl (remaining at camp), who welcomed them all in succession with smiles and merry words that I did not understand. But there was no mistaking the kindliness and serene good nature."  (24-27)

 

Muir visited a "deserted Stickeen village" up the coast from Wrangell, quite possibly a settlement that had been wiped out by disease (brought by Russians or Americans) some years before.  "The magnitude of the ruins and the excellence of the workmanship manifest in them was astonishing as belonging to Indians. For example, the first dwelling we visited was about forty feet square, with walls built of planks two feet wide and six inches thick. The ridgepole of yellow cypress was two feet in diameter, forty feet long, and as round and true as if it had been turned in a lathe…The nibble marks of the stone adze were still visible...Each of the wall planks had evidently been hewn out of a whole log, and must have required sturdy deliberation as well as skill. Their geometrical truthfulness was admirable. With the same tools not one in a thousand of our skilled mechanics could do as good work. Compared with it, the bravest work of civilized backwoodsmen is feeble and bungling. The completeness of form, finish, and proportion of these timbers suggested skill of a wild and positive kind."(56) ("Wild" is always a compliment for Muir.)

 

As in the Sierra Nevada in 1869, Muir contrasts the admirable Native American ways with that of his Anglo-american colleagues, in this case early gold-seekers: "The (miners') taverns along the Cassiar gold trail were the worst I had ever seen, rough shacks with dirt floors, dirt roofs and rough meals. (Note that Muir still finds "dirt" distasteful, whether associated with Anglo-americans or Native Americans.) The meals are all alike—a potato, a slice of something like bacon, some gray stuff called bread, and a cup of muddy, semi-liquid coffee like that which the California miners call 'slickens' or 'slumgullion.'  The bread was terrible and sinful. How the Lord's good wheat could be made into stuff so mysteriously bad is past finding out. The very devil, it would seem, in wicked anger and ingenuity, had been the baker." (68f)

 

At the end of this lengthy walking tour of the gold mine region:  "We arrived at Telegraph Creek, the end of my two-hundred mile walk, about noon. After luncheon I went on down the river to Glenora in a fine canoe owned and manned by Kitty, a stout, intelligent-looking Indian woman, who charged her passengers a dollar for the fifteen-mile trip. Her crew was four Indian paddlers. In the rapids she also plied the paddle, with stout, telling strokes, and a keen-eyed old man, probably her husband, sat high in the stern and steered. All seemed exhilarated as we shot down through the narrow gorge on the rushing, roaring, throttled river, paddling all the more vigorously the faster the speed of the stream, to hold good steering way. The canoe danced lightly amid gray surges and spray as if alive and enthusiastically enjoying the adventure…In unskillful hands the frail dugout would surely have been wrecked or upset." (69f)

 

 

Back on the coast after another several hundred miles by canoe with their Stickeen, Chilcat, and Sitka Native-American paddlers, Muir records this gathering in his journal: "I greatly enjoyed the Indians' camp-fire talk this evening on their ancient customs, how they were taught by their parents ere the whites came among them, their religion, ideas connected with the next world, the stars, plants, the behavior and language of animals under different circumstances, manner of getting a living, etc. When our talk was interrupted by the howling of a wolf on the opposite side of the strait, Kadachan (one of his paddlers) puzzled the minister (Young) with the question 'Have wolves souls?' The Indians believe that they have, giving as foundation for their belief that they are wise creatures who know how to catch seals and salmon by swimming slyly upon them with their heads hidden in a mouthful of grass."(94)

 

The chieftains of the Native-American groups Muir and Young encountered were almost always highly impressive, in Muir's estimation. Here is his description of remarks by a Chilcat chief following a sermon by Rev. Young offering to educate the tribe's children: "At the last meeting an old white-haired shaman of grave and venerable aspect, with a high wrinkled forehead, big, strong Roman nose and light-colored skin, slowly and with great dignity arose and spoke for the first time:

 

" 'I am an old man,' he said, 'but I am glad to listen to those strange things you tell, and they may well be true, for what is more wonderful than the flight of birds in the air? I remember the first white man I ever saw. Since that long, long-ago time I have seen many, but never until now have I ever truly known and felt a white man's heart. All the white men I have heretofore met wanted to get something from us. They wanted furs and they wished to pay for them as small a price as possible. They all seemed to be seeking their own good—not our good. I might say that thorough all my long life I have never until now heard a white man speak. It has always seemed to me while trying to speak to traders and those seeking gold-mines that it was like speaking to a person across a broad stream that was running fast over stones and making so loud a noise that scarce a single word could be heard. But now, for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river, eye to eye, heart to heart. I have always loved my people. I have taught them and ministered to them as well as I could. Hereafter, I will keep silent and listen to the good words of the missionaries, who know God and the places we go to when we die so much better than I do.' "  (129f) ))

 

Towards the end of his trip, Muir sums up his experiences among his men and in the dozens of villages he visited:  "The most striking characteristic of these people is their serene dignity in circumstances that to us would be novel and embarrassing. Even the little children behave with natural dignity, come to the white men when called, and restrain their wonder at the strange prayers, hymn-singing, etc. This evening an old woman fell asleep in the meeting and began to snore; and though both old and young were shaking with suppressed mirth, they evidently took great pains to conceal it. It seems wonderful to me that these so-called savages can make one feel at home in their families. In good breeding, intelligence, and skill in accomplishing whatever they try to do with tools, they seem to me to rank above most of our uneducated white laborers. I have never yet seen a child ill-used, even to the extent of an angry word. Scolding, so common a curse in civilization, is not known here at all. On the contrary the young are fondly indulged without being spoiled." (104f) (boldface and italics by Barnett)

 

It is shortly after his return from this trip that Muir confronts the Colonel involved in California's "Indian Extermination" campaign at John and Mary Swett's dinner party (see Part One of this blog series), barking to his face that the soldier was engaged in a "mean and brutal policy," that he should be "ashamed to carry it."

 

This is the evidence, then.  John Muir a racist against the Native Americans of Alaska or the Sierra Nevada?  I think not.  His honesty in portraying the appearances and manners of the Sierra Nevada tribes in the midst of their holocaust might give the impression of racism to those who know little of Muir.  But when his thoughts and actions are more fully known, it is clear. 

 

John Muir was not a racist, but to the contrary an admirer and staunch defender of North America's Native Americans, all the while honestly portraying the terrible burden they endured during their Sierra Nevada holocaust, and its affect upon them.  Isolated instances in his journals or private letters when he occasionally expresses distaste for the appearances or actions of the holocaust-scarred Sierra Nevada Native Americans cannot be taken out of the much broader context of his many expressions of admiration of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska tribes; his touching enthusiasm for Alaska's Native American life, especially; his insistence that Native Americans were fully human "brothers"; and his heated in-the-face defense of California's Native Americans to a U.S. Army Colonel. 

 

His stance is all the more striking by virtue of its rarity at the time.  In 1869, he was virtually alone among public figures in his insistence of the admirable qualities of Native American culture, and of that people's right to be considered as fellow humans, "brothers" even.  In 1879, he had been joined by only one other public figure, Helen Hunt Jackson, an Easterner whose sympathy and understanding of the great injustices perpetrated on California's original inhabitants led to her 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor.  When the book, sent to every member of the U.S. Congress, was overwhelmingly ignored, Jackson recast her "message" in the form of a popular novel, 1884's Ramona, written in a frenzy by the dying Jackson. 

 

This book was a great success financially, spawning more than half a century of "Ramona Festivals" in southern California—but for all the wrong reasons.  The plight and injustices of the southern California Native Americans depicted in the novel were shrugged off by the reading public, which instead was entranced by the romance of the Californio culture of Spanish haciendas and ranches during the 1820s and 1830s (the object of the early 20th century festivals).  Considering Ramona a failure, Jackson died in San Francisco the year after the novel's publication, on the very night that Muir called upon her home there to inquire after her health.

 

Muir and Jackson were joined by only one other Anglo-american in the late 19th century who spoke up for California's Native Americans.  In 1885, the year that Jackson died, a young Harvard graduate named Charles Lummis arrived in Los Angeles (by foot, from Chicago).  He promptly founded successful magazines (Land of Sunshine, then Out West) celebrating the Southwest (a term he coined).  In both his magazines and lawsuits, Lummis sought to protect the region's Native Americans, and initiated programs to provide education and employment for their youths. Muir was a constant contributor of funds to these endeavors, and you can find Muir's signature in the visitors' book of Lummis' preserved home, El Alisal, north of today's downtown Los Angeles, in Montecito Heights. 

 

A century on, many of California's Native Americans still struggle with the legacy of the holocaust their people endured.  But many have parlayed their courage and intelligence to successfully establish themselves in the Anglo-American culture which took over their old homeland, and they have prospered.  To all of these descendants of a time of terrible injustice and tragedy, and in recognition of the too-rare admiration and understanding extended to them by John Muir, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Charles Lummis, this blog is respectfully dedicated. 

"Did you know that John Muir was a racist against Native Americans?" 

The question took my old college roommate by surprise, at the end of a human development class he was teaching at Tufts University, in which Muir had been mentioned.  It certainly caught me by surprise when he relayed the incident.  I had read the biographies of Muir, as well as his books and journal entries, for my 2016 book about him—without encountering such a charge. 

 

Then I discovered a 2017 NY Times article which detailed genocide of California Native Americans in the Sierra Nevada.  "Muir's view of Indians is depressing and painfully devoid of empathy," the article claimed.  "The Indians he saw on trails struck him as filthy."  Somehow, it seemed to suggest, Muir was sympathetic to, possibly a contributor to the mistreatment of the Native Americans. 

 

 Soon I had first-hand experience of the notion.  While donating a copy of my book (Earth Wisdom: John Muir, accidental Taoist, charts humanity's only future on a changing planet) to the Yosemite archival library, the Native-American receptionist looked up from the book in her hands, with Muir's photo on its cover.  "He said we were an ugly people," she solemnly pronounced.  As I stood gaping at her, she rose and led me to a nearby table, where two books on the California genocide were prominently displayed.  And nodded knowingly to me. 

 

Puzzled, I soon returned to the original sources to investigate the charges.  Here's what I found. We'll consider a letter from an acquaintance of Muir's in which his attitude to Native Americans—and actions expressing that attitude—are plainly described.  And we'll look at Muir's intimate, spontaneous thoughts expressed in his journals as he encounters Native Americans: in the Sierra Nevada in 1869 and in Alaska in 1879.  Then you can decide for yourself whether John Muir was a racist against Native Americans.

 

First, the letter.  Several months after his return from his first trip to Alaska in 1879, Muir was at a dinner party in the San Francisco home of John and Mary Swett, one of several guests.  John Swett was the state Superintendent of Schools, and Muir had stayed in the family's attic rooms during several winters, "scribbling" about his year's outdoor adventures (and becoming a great favorite of the Swett children).  Among that April, 1880 night's guests was an officer involved in the U.S. Army's "Indian extermination" campaign then occurring.  The letter quoted here was written a few days after by Mary Swett, to her friend Louie Strentzel, who would marry Muir soon.

 

"He (Muir) not only excels in argument, but always takes the highest ground—is always on the right side. He told Colonel Boyce the other night that Boyce's position was that of a champion for a mean, brutal policy. It was with regard to Indian extermination, and that Boyce would be ashamed to carry it…Further, Muir is so truthful that he not only will never embellish sketch or word-picture by any imaginary addition, but even retains every unsightly feature lest his picture should not be true."

 

This revealing letter not only points to Muir's championing of Native Americans and his bold, in-your-face opposition to their mistreatment, but also hints at how the misperception of Muir's racism might arise.  Critical to a proper understanding of what Muir saw and unflinchingly described in the Sierra Nevada of 1869 is an awareness that the Native Americans he encountered were experiencing the first generation of a holocaust that had destroyed their traditional culture and way of life. 

 

The Spanish had begun the holocaust along the California Coast in the 1700s with the establishment of their Missions and their subjugation of the coastal Native Americans to serfdom on the newly appropriated Mission lands.  The foothill and mountain tribes, though, were largely spared the theft of their homelands and the destruction of their way of life.  Then gold was discovered in 1848, and as the Anglo-american and Chinese prospectors swarmed over the foothills, conflict arose with the Native Americans in those lands, who quite understandably resisted the theft of their homelands and the murder of those who protested. 

 

The Mariposa Battalion, a band of armed vigilante Indian-hunters, rode into Yosemite Valley in the late winter of 1851, burning the homes and food stocks of the Native Americans there, and murdering the males they could find.  In the decade and a half until the young Muir arrived in California, these scenes were repeated throughout the Sierra Nevada.  The Native Americans were brutally expelled from their homelands, and relegated by the usurping Anglo-americans to marginalized areas unwanted by the new conquerors.  The hunting and foraging resources that formerly sustained them were denied to them, or grudgingly tolerated if no Anglo-americans wanted the areas. 

 

The Native Americans had no standing in the "laws" of the invaders.  Murder of the males and rape of the women, as well as kidnapping of the youths for servants, was widespread and without recourse to the victims.

 

So when the young Muir drives a herd of sheep into Tuolumne Meadow in the summer of 1869, the Native Americans he encounters are in the very midst of a holocaust that has utterly destroyed their way of life and banished them from their homes and hunting-gathering lands. 

 

Is it to be wondered that Muir, who in Mary Swett's testimony "is so truthful that he not only will never embellish sketch or word-picture by any imaginary addition, but even retains every unsightly feature lest his picture should not be true," paints a "depressing" picture of the Native Americans he encounters there?  Is there any way he could truthfully describe a happy, handsome people full of vitality and enjoying their lives? 

 

The exceptional thing about Muir's depiction of the Sierra Nevada Native Americans he encounters in 1869 is how often he insists on crediting them with admirable traits, how persistently he compares their culture favorably above those of his fellow Anglo-americans, how often he reminds himself (and his future readers) that these struggling people are still "fellow beings" of Muir and his kind, how they in fact are, still, their "brothers."

 

And most importantly, John Muir was perhaps the only Anglo-american at this time to actually see the Native Americans of California, to look closely at them, to honestly observe and describe them, and to wonder what was going on with them.  Considering that the Native Americans of California's Sierra Nevada were experiencing the first generation of a holocaust that had destroyed a way of life thousands of years old, it is not remarkable that what Muir saw was often jarring, unsightly, depressing, and sad.  He saw it and described it, always accepting and declaring that these were human beings he was observing, and that there were aspects of their culture he found admirable. Their humanity was never in doubt—in his eyes, at least.

 

Let's listen to excerpts from his 1869 journals (later published as My First Summer in the Sierra; pages indicated are from the Modern Library 2003 edition). These excerpts will be uncomfortable to all of us, in places.  But please note how he admires much about the Native Americans and insists on their humanity, even as he observes their—to him—puzzling sadness and dishevelment.

 

 "One of the Indians from Brown's Flat got right into the middle of the camp this morning, unobserved. I was seated on a stone, looking over my notes and sketches, and happened to look up, was startled to see him standing grim and silent within a few steps of me, as motionless and weather-stained as an old tree stump that had stood there for centuries. All Indians seem to have learned this wonderful way of walking unseen, making themselves invisible…

"How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably a great many, extending far beyond the time that Columbus touched our shores, and it seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels…their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

"How different are most of those (affects) of the white man, especially on the lower gold region…These are the white man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the (Sierra Nevada) Range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced…."  (p. 71, 73f)

 

 "We had another visitor from Brown's Flat today, an old Indian woman with a basket on her back. Like our first caller from the village, she got fairly into camp and was standing in plain view when discovered…Her dress was calico rags, far from clean. In every way she seemed sadly unlike Nature's neat well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of the wilderness. Strange that mankind alone is dirty…  (p. 78)

 

Later, lamenting his reliance on bread in his diet, Muir again admires a Native American trait and laments its lack in Anglo Americans:  "Like the Indians, we ought to know how to get the starch out of fern and saxifrage stalks, lily bulbs, pine bark, etc. Our (white folks') education has been sadly neglected." (104, 06)

 

"Soon after my return to camp we received a visit from an Indian…come to hunt deer. One that he had killed a short distance from here he was carrying on his back, its legs tied together in an ornamental bunch on his forehead. Throwing down his burden, he gazed stolidly for a few minutes in silent Indian fashion, then cut off eight or ten pounds of venison for us, and begged a little of everything he saw or could think of—flour, bread, sugar, tobacco, whiskey, needles. We gave a fair price for the meat in flour and sugar and added a few needles.  A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness—starvation and abundance, deathlike calm, indolence, and admirable, indefatigable action succeeding each other in stormy rhythm like winter and summer. (p. 277f).

 

Approaching Mono Pass: "I found the blue arctic daisy and purple-flowered bryanthus, the mountain's own darlings, gentle mountaineers face to face with the sky, kept safe and warm by a thousand miracles, seeming always the finer and purer the wilder and stormier their homes… In this fine company sauntering enchanted, taking no need of time, I at length entered the gate of the pass…

 

"Just then I was startled by a lot of queer, hairy, muffled creatures coming shuffling, shambling, wallowing toward me as if they had no bones in their bodies…What a picture they made contrasted with the others (flowers, birds, snowy banks) I had just been admiring. When I came up to them, I found that they were only a band of Indians from Mono on their way to Yosemite for a load of acorns. They were wrapped in blankets made of the skins of sage-rabbits. The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have a geological significance…I tried to pass them without stopping, but they wouldn't let me; forming a dismal circle about me, I was closely besieged while they begged whiskey or tobacco, and it was hard to convince them that I hadn't any. How glad I was to get away from the gray, grim crowd and see them vanish down the trail! Yet it seems sad to feel such desperate repulsion from one's fellow beings…To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our species must surely be unnatural….I must wish them Godspeed, and try to pray and sing with (the poet) Burns, 'It's coming yet, for all that, that man to man, the world over, shall brothers be for all that.'" (293ff)

 

Muir descends to the foot of the canyon and observes the women of the band gathering wild rye grain.  "A fine squirrelish employment this wild grain gathering seems, and the women were evidently enjoying it, laughing and chattering." 

"Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better." (303f) (Barnett boldface)

 

So—the first phase of the development of Muir's views of Native Americans: the Sierra Nevada, 1869.  Sharp, clear, true, honest. But realizing he was missing something.  "Perhaps if I knew them better, I should like them better."  Are these the views of a racist?  We see Muir admiring them often, even as he contrasts and criticizes his fellow Anglo-Americans.  We see Muir presenting honest descriptions of Native Americans in the midst of a holocaust, and upon occasion expressing distaste for their appearance and actions.  Does this make Muir a racist? I think not, when the full picture of his 1869 summer in the Sierra Nevada is considered.  But of course you can make up your own mind, based on the evidence here. 

 

If we can fault Muir for anything in 1869, it was for not realizing, or caring to understand, the historical circumstances that had led to what he observed and recorded.  How we yearn to hear Muir say, "A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness—starvation and abundance, deathlike calm, indolence, and admirable, indefatigable action succeeding each other in stormy rhythm like winter and summer.  But of course, these are a once-proud and happy people now in the midst of a shattering holocaust brought on by our brutal Anglo-american theft of their ancient land and murder of their people.  Could we survive such a catastrophe?"

 

But no; Muir does not attain this perspective, at least not in 1869.  He was young, and had spent his first months in California as a solitary shepherd in the valley below.  That is to say, he was incredibly ignorant of the history of California and the tragic drama still playing out between its Native Americans and his fellow Anglo-americans. 

 

But the Sierra Nevada in 1869 is not whole picture, for Muir.  Our judgment as to his purported racism has more to be considered. Much will change when he travels to Alaska in 1879.  He is a decade older, and no longer so blithely ignorant.  And the Native-American culture he encounters there is pre-holocaust.  He spends more time with them, and experiences their culture before it is shattered.  In our next blog, we will follow the mature Muir in Alaska, as he travels by canoe up the uncharted coastline, in pursuit of the true passion of his life: glaciers!

 

Next.  John Muir: Racist or Admirer of Native Americans? Part Two: Alaska 1879

 

 

 

My buddy Al and I were like teenagers with a new car, though the calendar said we were well into our 70s. It was a sunny September day; two ultra-lightweight kevlar canoes shipped from the Adirondacks of New York were strapped atop my Subaru; and we were zipping up the curves of the deep Feather River Canyon in the Sierra foothills east of Chico. An hour ahead, lakes galore awaited us in the aptly-named Lakes Basin region of the northern Sierra Nevada between Graeagle and Lake Tahoe.

We’d kayaked there last summer, hitting many of the lakes with launch sites accessible by car. But this trip we determined to paddle on Big Bear Lake, a half mile from any road. That meant what in the Adirondacks was called “a carry” of our canoe and gear. Impossible with our 42-pound kayaks from last year. These kevlar vessels today, though, only weighed 12 pounds. But they were 10 feet long, awkward to heft, and the trail was rocky, windy, and choked with tree roots. I’d devised—well, jury-rigged is more descriptive—a carrying rig to mesh me and my canoe on the trail. Would it work?

It’s a strange drive, up the Feather River Canyon. At the start of the drive, coming out of the Central Valley, the rock comprising the canyon walls is granite, beautiful granite much as you see in Yosemite Valley today. But halfway up the canyon, something weird happens. Our beautiful granite disappears, and the canyon walls become a combination of greyish and bluish rocks of entirely different texture, looking very worn and almost “tortured.” What the heck was this all about?  Read More 

“Every excursion that I have made in all my rambling life has been fruitful and delightful, from the smallest indefinite saunter an hour or two in length to the noblest summer’s flight…All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go.” –John Muir journal entry, June 1890

Well, I agree with Muir here, of course, but must wonder if Saint John would have added a qualifying comment had he ever gone snorkeling off the coast of Hawaii. For my money, no rambling saunter or excursion ranks higher in the awe and excitement scale than 40 minutes cruising a tropical coastline’s coral reef. Tammy and I recently returned from 10 days exploring the south coast of Maui, immersing ourselves (literally! ) in five different underwater locations, and we still glow with the grandeur of the worlds we explored.

Part of the kick in snorkeling is just how odd and different your new world is. Humans don’t belong underwater; we have to return to the surface to breathe periodically or rig an upward-directed breathing tube on our face (if we’re snorkeling). But stick a mask on and dip below the surface and a breathtakingly beautiful and unexpected world blooms before your eyes. Thousands of creatures are suddenly there, darting and slithering and gliding or sitting in a fantastically-sculpted landscape.

The sheer spectacle is stunning: an entire world that is not apparent from your beach chair  Read More 

Kids certainly complicate—and enliven—your life. Last week Tammy and I found ourselves on the overnight California Zephyr train from Sacramento to Denver. Considered America’s most beautiful train ride, our journey crossed the Sierra Nevada the first day, and the Rockies the second, following the Colorado River 238 miles through gorgeous canyons in Utah and Colorado (Ruby, Gore, Glenwood). After a night in Denver near Union Station, we set out early over the continental divide in our rental car to Steamboat Springs, where we were to meet our daughter Ashlyn near the midpoint of her 3,100-mile backpacking trek along the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from Mexico to Canada.

She had begun two months earlier at the border in southern New Mexico, hiking with a buddy she’d made two years earlier on the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail (AT). In the CDT’s first week they found themselves fording the Gila River 200 times one day and nearly as many the next, bulldozing through willow-dominated streamside vegetation that left whipmark gashes on their legs. Several weeks later they hiked through Georgia O’Keeffee’s Ghost Ranch, Read More 

We sloshed through the narrow canyon’s trickle of water, sheer walls rising 40 feet above us on either side. These slot canyons off the Colorado River meander endlessly, but our attention was on the water wetting our Crocs: was it getting warmer? Another curving 25 yards: yes. Distinctly warmer now. Our kayaks and gear were some quarter mile behind us, tied up to bushes along the river’s bank. Another turn, and a solid wall 20 feet tall loomed before us, with a narrow ribbon of—hot!—water snaking down its right side. On the left side: a rickety metal ladder slapped against the wall. I looked at Al: would we trust it? Pondering this, we heard noises from above, beyond the wall. I stepped gingerly onto the first rung, my mind made up. There was clearly a party going on up there!

Getting here had been a tale of almost as many twists and turns as this canyon. Back in January, Al asked if I wanted to join him in a “Geology of the Mojave Desert” course, to be held at a field station smack in the middle of that southern California desert. In February, yet (it’s a high desert, quite cold in the winter).

Desert rocks don’t fascinate me as they do Al, but I’d come along for the ride. A jaunt in Al’s new Yaris (mileage equal to a hybrid) 400 miles south to L.A., then another couple of hundred miles due east to the Mojave. While Al was rock-sleuthing, I’d camp and explore nearby Afton Canyon, Read More 

Plotting our first trip out of town in our Chevy Bolt EV (electric vehicle)—and back—was approached like a military campaign. The route to oldest daughter Heather (and our precious grandkids) was as always: over to Hwy 5, south to below Williams, Hwy 505 southeast to Vacaville, then Hwy 80 into San Francisco over the Bay Bridge. A distance of 175 miles or so.

We had charged up the Bolt on the sunny afternoon before we left: somewhere between 200 and 238 miles of sunbeams hummed in the battery, depending on a variety of factors: our speed (faster gave us fewer miles), our smoothness (pronounced acceleration and deceleration ate up miles also), and how much juice we devoted to heating (seat warmers were negligible; making the interior cabin toasty decreased our miles). On the other hand, using the “regenerative braking” paddle on the steering column diverted energy of braking back to the battery. Cool.

While we were happy with the deal we got from the dealer (end of the year, 2018s due in soon), they had prepared us not at all for the task of recharging the vehicle on a trip; not a word of advice or a hint of how to proceed. We googled charging stations,  Read More 

“Every excursion that I have made in all my rambling life has been fruitful and delightful, from the smallest indefinite saunter an hour or two in length to the noblest summer’s flight…All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go.” –Muir journal entry June 1890
“One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.” –Journal entry late 1872

Recently a couple of outdoor-loving buddies have told me about opportunities they have to contribute to the education of kids about the natural world. My friend George is a child psychologist in Boston, who’s meeting with New England Aquarium folks to chat about how he might contribute to their excellent already-established youth programs. My friend Richard is the caretaker of a swatch of shortgrass prairie in Oklahoma, with a lodge nearing completion on site. What might they contribute, and how? Did I have any ideas for them?

My guiding principle in these questions has recently become to ask myself: “What would John Muir do?” This determination is a result of several decades of outdoor adventuring in conjunction with a close reading of Muir’s reflections on his own (much more impressive) “saunters”. Never have I encountered a person with a clearer vision of reality and a better understanding of what it means to be fully human than John Muir.

Muir was clear on two things, particularly. First, we are children of the universe, particularly our own planet earth, and to know ourselves we have to know our foundations. This means getting out of cities and away from smartphone screens on regular and frequent sojourns in the natural world that is our home. “Every excursion that I have made in all my rambling life has been fruitful and delightful, from the smallest indefinite saunter an hour or two in length to the noblest summer’s flight…All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go.”

Second: we get to know our foundation not through reading books about it, but by experiencing the natural world, what he called “the wild world.”  Read More 

November’s first Tuesday was mainly sunny in Northern California. The heart of our solar system showered an abundance of free energy on my roof, which was promptly captured and converted to electricity by the solar panels we put there this spring (see May 9 blog, The Laggard, Part 1). That electrified sunshine passed to my garage and via a charging port straight into our newly-purchased Chevy Bolt EV (Electric vehicle). By late afternoon, we had 238 miles of juice in the car. We’ve been driving on sunbeams for three weeks now.

And the surprising thing is how extremely enjoyable the Bolt is to drive. I never dreamed saving human civilization on the planet would be so fun. It’s been a kick, for several reasons. First: no gas stations. No standing around like sheep while we all pump explosive material (!?!) into our cars. Did I really do that?

Second: EV’s are silent and clean. No more clatter and sputtering as an engine warms up and struggles to move the vehicle. No more engine! No more oil to keep track of and maybe drip under the car. We depress the pedal, and the EV pulls away effortlessly, eagerly, smooth as silk.

Third: Remember those scenes in Star Wars when Hans Solo jumps the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace, leaving the stodgy craft of the Empire far behind? Our Bolt EV can’t do Solo’s “.5 past light speed,” but it does go from zero to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds. Seriously.  Read More