Transcript
Speaker: Today on the Outdoorsy Educator podcast, I'm thrilled to welcome someone who has spent much of his life exploring the relationship between people, nature, and the landscapes that shape us.
Speaker: Historian and author, Donald Worcester. Donald is one of the leading environmental historians of our time and the author of several influential books exploring the history of our relationship with the natural world, including his biography of John Muir.
Speaker: In this conversation, we talk about Muir's life, his enduring influence on the conservation movement, and why his ideas about wild places, exploration, and our connection to nature still matter today.
Speaker: I'm really excited to bring you this conversation with Donald Worcester.
Speaker: And on this week's episode of the Outdoorsy Educator podcast, we are honored to have with us Donald Worcester. Donald, how are you today? I'm fine today. Good, good. Glad to hear it. ah i've I've recorded a little introduction that I've just played for the audience, but why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker: Well, I am of immigrant stock, as every American is, I suppose. Native peoples who been here for thousands of years. But my parents, my ancestors came to United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. They came from England and also my grandmother's family from Scotland.
Speaker: done Not Dunbar, but the other side, the you know the the side of the the country where the great poet Robert Burns grew up. So that was their background.
Speaker: I grew up in in the state of Kansas with my grandmother and grandfather particularly. But in the nineteen late 1930s, my parents, who just got married, were finding a hard to find work. And so they became Dust Bowl refugees.
Speaker: And I was born in the Mojave Desert of California, which is my only tie with John Muir, really, even though I've been to John Muir's country a lot into his house and and so on. But like Muir, I ended up in California.
Speaker: But then after the war, came back, grew up, and then moved to New England for many years for my education and for teaching. and also the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. So I have been around the world a bit, and I spend a lot of time these days in China, off and on. I was teaching there for about 10 years.
Speaker: And and ah China is one of these places my my dad is has visited, and it's very much near the top of my list. How your experiences been in China?
Speaker: Oh, I love the country. I love the people. I found great harm harmonious relationships with these people, great support and support.
Speaker: enthusiasm for meeting with the West. The government has its problems. lot of problems I don't like, but then I don't like authoritarianism. right I'm too much of a Western liberal for that.
Speaker: um But yeah, i've I've been treated extraordinarily well, and I love the texture of the country and the look of the landscape and the mountains. I've been all over china I love that. i've I've got a handful of friends that I know have been, and we've had a discussion about it, and to a person have fallen in love with the country. They truly have.
Speaker: All those grim, desperate places and industrial landscapes that really are quite awful. But it's got much more than that. It's got diversity. After all, it's is a country the size of the United States with four times its population.
Speaker: And so you you you are immersed in a great ancient culture there. And there is interest in American writers and nature writers and naturalists and so forth over there. much more They know much more about us than we know about them.
Speaker: Yes, it's one of those things that that sits in the back of my mind. If you ask the average Western human being, of which I am one, to name cities in China, we'll get stuck at about four or five. And as you just said, there's four times as many people as there is in the United States. And to me, that's appalling, and I need to do better.
Speaker: I was in the city at coastal city of Tianjin. ah this last earlier this year, actually, in March, February, March, and also in the city of Qingdao.
Speaker: Both of these are cities of 10 million people, but does anybody know their name yeah right outside of China? They will really will be known, and they're great cities, wonderful people there.
Speaker: I'm so glad you you've had a very similar experience to to people that I've spoken to about it because it's somewhere I would love to get to and love to explore. Now, we got in touch over a mutual fondness, affection for the life and times of John Muir. He's somebody that I've always had a passion to to learn more about. And this this last summer, when I was back home in Scotland, I did make the the trip to go to his birthplace where there's a a wonderful museum. it's It's small, it should be small, that's part of the charm, but it's really inspired me to learn more about his life and you and I have got in touch. What brought you or what brought John Muir to your attention years ago?
Speaker: I don't know when I first read John Muir. I lived in California on several occasions, including in the Bay Area, and I was already planning to do a book on John Muir at that point.
Speaker: But um how did I get interested in John Muir? Well, in the early nineteen ninety s I was planning to do a um study of the history of the progressive conservation movement the United States, the period from, 1870 to 1920, 50-year period.
Speaker: to nineteen twenty fifty year period but I didn't really want to do a traditional narrative history of the movement. I thought I would do it in the form of a biography, two two biographies.
Speaker: The first one was of John Wesley Powell, whose name John Wesley suggests the Methodist movement. He grew up in a Methodist culture and tradition.
Speaker: His parents immigrated to the United States in the eighteen thirties about the same time that John Muir's family up in Scotland was getting ready to immigrate.
Speaker: They came from a more Scottish, radical, Calvinist sect of people in Scotland. But here are these two guys, both came as immigrants with their parents to the United States. They lived within 50 miles of each other at one point on the word Wisconsin area, Southern Wisconsin.
Speaker: And then they both, in the year 1867, I think it was, I haven't worked this out, but in the 1860s, right after the Civil War, they both took off for the West.
Speaker: They both ended up in the American West. John Wesley Powell exploring the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon area. and Muir going to California and walking to Yosemite Valley, which is just then being celebrated as another great landscape feature.
Speaker: So these two guys were two Johns in the West, I called them. right And I had a lot of fun with this kind of genre biography. But I was interested in biography because I thought it would tell me on a more personal level why this movement took took form and what we can learn about it in today's terms.
Speaker: There's been a lot of controversy about that movement in recent terms, and much of has fallen around John Muir himself as a controversial figure. Some people have rejected him completely because they say he's a racist or a bigot.
Speaker: And I thought, this is not the John Muir I knew. and I didn't write the book to... to support him or defend him against these charges, but they have been vicious and unthoughtful and ignorant in some cases. People who knew nothing about his life would pick out some passage in a book or a note he wrote around a campfire and then have blown this into a whole hypothesis about the man.
Speaker: His bust was removed from the Sierra Club. He was the founding father of the Sierra Club. They have rejected him and sent him to the basement out of sight because he irritates some of the board members and members of the of the Sierra Club.
Speaker: That really appalled me. But I started with John Wesley Powell because I thought I would not like him as well as John Muir. I thought John Wesley Powell was well known, but neither of these guys had had a biography.
Speaker: really a full-blown biography since the 1940s. And so I thought I would do one of John Wesley Powell first. I was not so happy with him because he seemed to be the more of the scientific managerial sort who was interested in economic development more than Muir was. And I thought I would be more drawn to Muir, the kind of figure of the wilderness celebrating the wild countries and places and beauty of the countryside.
Speaker: As it ended up, I think I liked John Wesley Powell a little more than John Muir. John Muir had a lot of personality quirks. okay I don't think i would really find him as a good a trail companion as I would Powell.
Speaker: But that sort of surprised me. But I went to Muir because I grew up in a religious tradition, a Protestant religious tradition that my grandmother had and her family had brought from Scotland.
Speaker: to my home state of Kansas. And they become farmers there and I knew something about that tradition. It was like a Calvinist jerk church in the United States that takes the name of the the Church of Christ.
Speaker: But it was founded in new in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and moved west. And I grew up in a little of tiny church or congregation.
Speaker: in Kansas so that in some ways just Muir was still part of it all his life he couldn't get out of that tradition and I can't either really you can't get out of these traditions that we're growing up with I mean whether they're national or church or religion we'll always be a Judeo-Christian in some ways of in a generic sense but I was also um taken by John Muir's religious tradition and The fact that these two guys, both named John, go west in the same year, both from Protestant immigrant families, to me was a way to get into the heart of what we mean by conservation and its dimensions, its multiple dimensions in the United States.
Speaker: Yeah, I find this is so interesting and I love that you brought up the the controversy that can be around John Muir and I don't pretend to be an expert at this at all, but reading, I've read about half of your book, I'm walking through it currently, and the the other things I've read, it does seem that some of the attacks are taken out of a context and be out of the time that John said or wrote these things. And I think we have to be very, very careful with that because I'm sure there's things that we are saying now that in a hundred years oh yeah could be frowned upon. We'll be looked through a different lens. And I just, I proceed with caution when it comes to condemning somebody from a long time ago because of things they they said. By our own standards. That's a always mistake. It prohibits understanding and complexity of understanding.
Speaker: Let go on about an example of this. I was asked after the Muir book came out to speak at Stanford University. And I went to this room with a huge audience there, 400 people perhaps, packed in, because Muir has still a big reputation.
Speaker: they did They tell me not to prepare anything. I would just be asked questions like this. Right. Right. But one of my friends was on the podium with me, a professor at Stanford, who will go nameless here, but he led he has been leading the charge against Muir among the historians.
Speaker: And he complained that Muir's images of American Indians were really hurtful and negative. And he turned open the book, My First Summer in the Sierra, one of Muir's most famous books, still in print.
Speaker: And he turned to a passage where Muir describes a group of Indians coming around curve in the path around the mountain. And he said they look like bears shuffling along from, he was alone up there in the mountains and on the trail himself.
Speaker: And he was a little bit nervous and frightened by this whole pack of people who clustered around him and pulled at his clothes and asked for tobacco and money and alcohol.
Speaker: And he was appalled and he said they're a disgrace to nature. And my friend quoted this on the stage and the audience soaked it all in.
Speaker: And I said to him, well, my friend, if you would just turn the page you would find a very different Muir. I'm surprised that you as a great scholar have not done so.
Speaker: You know, you you you profess to understand the guy and you don't read the whole thing. That was a little passage that Muir included in the book from his notes. It was from a scrap of paper that he wrote by a campfire one night.
Speaker: But if you turn the scrap over and it's been preserved, he says, on the next page, he was ashamed of himself for the way he talked about these people.
Speaker: They too are God's creatures. They are my brothers, he says. And he quotes Robert Burns, a man's a man's all that, you know. And he says, someday we will be brothers the world or.
Speaker: Now, how can you miss that? The guy is ashamed of his hostility and his insensitive comments. And he a apologizes. He is concerned about these people too. He's not just criticizing them. So if you don't turn the page over and you don't read the whole thing and you condemn somebody by our own standards today, well, you're missing a whole bit of the story.
Speaker: Yeah, I think sometimes people are they're they're just looking for what they want to find. And as soon as they found that shred of, quote-unquote, evidence that supports that predetermined belief, they stop looking.
Speaker: And it's it's a terrible shame. Well, and in this case, what are they trying to do? I think they're trying to condemn the the environmental movement today for its preservationist nature orientation, wildness, parks, national parks.
Speaker: and they think these are all just part of imperialism. And that's not quite the way I see it. I think they are, in some ways, some of the best things that we have done as a culture and as a people.
Speaker: And we ought to understand them that way. we But so, if you want to debunk the environmental movement, who do you go to? You go to John Muir, because he is in so many, many ways, the father of this movement.
Speaker: He's probably the most famous figure that comes from that era. So he died in 1914. So in the years from the 1860s to 1914, the man was around, published, writing, leading, founding the Sierra Club, doing things like that.
Speaker: So you go after him and you try to find some condemnation of him in there. And there are condemning comments. I won't say they're not, but... right He often tries to balance his judgment.
Speaker: And he's a much more complicated man than people realize. And that includes some many of his followers. I couldn't agree more as I'm working through your book, which I don't know if we've actually said the name, A Passion for Nature. I'm finding that he was far more complex than I i realized.
Speaker: And every time you think you have, you know something about him, there's another layer, as you said, turning the page. Right. Well, I opened the book with a moment when he meets ah an immigrant from Mexico in Eaton Canyon, north of Pasadena, Altadena, in the l L.A. area.
Speaker: He's camping with this guy. And he's drawn to him as a fellow who's enthusiast about the outdoors, nature, and who's out there because he he loves the camping and trails and so on, just as Muraday does.
Speaker: And they hit it off, they talk way into the night. He did this all the time with people, black slaves in the South. He may not have um argued against some of the racial policies publicly as much as others did, but he was fairly familiar with the problems in in California, the Chinese and so on.
Speaker: And he wasn't part of their oppression, I don't think. So I think we have to, as you say, turn the page over, i said it earlier, and and so And take the whole context of these people, not just condemn them for one sentence or one image that you get, because they may have repudiated it later on.
Speaker: Yes, and I love that the the way you're describing it. John Muir, it seems obvious to me, this ah regret with what he thought was, and he was writing down his his innermost feelings for himself. It wasn't a ah public apology because you know this was is his own realizations and for the betterment of his own soul. And and I think there's something lovely about that.
Speaker: He had no idea that he was going to use that campfire moment and scrap for a book. He didn't even plan the book at that point. It came much later in his life. And he just shoveled in everything into that book that he had in his notes without really reading it through for effect.
Speaker: Of course, today, the effect would be very different. People would say, oh, my God, look at this man. The same was true with his meeting with African Americans who had just been liberated by the Civil War as he marched through, walked through Georgia and all these states between Indiana and Florida.
Speaker: He met a lot of African-Americans who were freed. And he didn't always describe them in the most positive way. But he also, there's images of him riding, getting on a horse, a little African-American kid and riding across streams and holding on for dear life. He was close and he stayed overnight. He ate with people who were not his race.
Speaker: He was quite open to all kinds of people. All he cared about was that they shared his love enthusiasm for the natural world. And that enthusiasm was very infectious.
Speaker: Yeah, it really is. and And I can feel it in the writing in your book. I think you've done a great job telling his story. I was curious what you would think John Muir might think of the national park system today, 110 plus years after his death.
Speaker: I've just gotten back from Glacier National Park in Montana, which is probably the most gorgeous mountain park we've got in the American system.
Speaker: It's just so stunning. I stayed in a little cabin and there, but which belonged to some friends as an inholding. I watched the wildlife. I saw bears, bighorn sheep, moose, deer, of course, and ah birds of all sorts.
Speaker: And the lineup of cars trying to get in there one morning was a mile long. goodness And so the people were really crowding into this park to see it for themselves.
Speaker: Muir would been ecstatic about that. I think he would have said, the parks are working just as I wanted them to do. I wanted people to get in there. of course, these people are all coming with cars and ah RVs and so on.
Speaker: But he agreed that that might be essential to get letting the people in. But when they got in, they dispersed. And you didn't see them or hear them much, unless you went to a trailhead or something like that, where there'd be some cars parked.
Speaker: But that was a that's a big, big park. And people know there are grizzlies in there, and they still want to come and see them. They want to see grizzly bears. They want to see moose.
Speaker: the book see them from a safe distance of course um i've i've made i've made it up to the grand tetons into yellowstone but not over to glacier and that is way up there on the list uh it just looks simply magical up there i'm glad you had such a good experience oh yeah let's go into the sun highway that was built through there the engineering of that road is magnificent and revealing, and you just feel in intimately in the Rockies.
Speaker: Intimately. i mean, you're going around these curves with great towering mountains on all sides, lakes, glacial lakes and ponds, and it's a stunning place, and it should be in the public domain.
Speaker: Nobody should own it. and But yet it should be open to all kinds of people. And in fact, you see a lot of immigrants from all over the world. You see Native Americans sometimes in that park.
Speaker: um You know, it's it's serving one of the as one of the treasures of a democratic society. yeah it It really is. And I think as a country, whatever ups and downs this country has, you know, whether politically or anything else, the national park system I've always felt is is the crown jewel.
Speaker: this This country is full of so many incredible places. And I'm excited one day to get up to Glacier and see it for myself. Well, Wallace Stegner, the American writer, was a great environmentalist and a wilderness lover.
Speaker: said that the national parks were the best idea we ever had. i don't know whether that's quite true because we've had a lot of good ideas. Right. For people and voting and democracy and no kings and all the rest. but But, you know, this it is a great idea and it has had global influence. I think when i I came away quite inspired by what common ordinary people had accomplished in establishing a park system.
Speaker: And that's the people John Muir wanted to see reached by these parks. They should have an opportunity to go there. They couldn't buy property and own it, but he wanted them to go and and feel free to use it and engage with the natural world as he did.
Speaker: He didn't come from a rich family background. Right. He wasn't in this for for a financial gain. No, he wasn't in it for gain. And he certainly was not there because he was a rich boy who,
Speaker: His parents had given him all all the advantages of life. He'd had a rough, tough life, actually, as an immigrant kid. He was constant growing up. And he wanted to share things with other people. He had a good feeling for the common people, ordinary people, and a great faith in them.
Speaker: And I think that faith has been justified when you go to Glacier. Yeah, there are things there that I don't like. And I thought the park needed more and better maintenance, but then budgets have been cut recently to move the money to Washington, D.C. for various projects and so on. So it's not the ideal world we wanted, but it will come back.
Speaker: It will be there. It will be there for hundreds of years. Absolutely. And i'm I'm so glad that it will be. ah when you I was curious as to how the knowledge your knowledge of John Muir has been received by students today. If they were going to walk away with an understanding about John Muir, what would you really hope that they take away? i mean, not just about the man himself, but about the lessons he's taught and what they can do to carry these lessons forward.
Speaker: I spoke once on at a conference on leadership at Yale. And i I called John Muir a kind of unintended leader.
Speaker: He didn't intend to lead anybody anywhere. But over the years, he accreted a lot of following around the United States and all over the world. I mean, he found books of his, his books that he had published on the shelves of people living in the Amazon basin.
Speaker: I mean, All over the place. Yeah. So he was a worldwide figure by the time he got to be 70 years old or thereabouts. um So i I think that young people reading him today should probably think, here is an example of a guy who became a leader, who had an opportunity to lead.
Speaker: in a way that he would never have had in the old world. And I'm sorry, but even in Scotland, he would not have had this opportunity. No, not at all. But he got out to the United States and people were ready for it. And they, and he took the lead and he'd galvanized a lot of people through his books, his writings.
Speaker: He didn't, he was not a natural writer. He had to work hard at this. And some people think, well, he didn't work hard enough, but, uh, one He had a farm to run, he had big a big farm, in his family's, his wife's father's place, he had that to run.
Speaker: So he had a lot of things in his life going on, but he became quite a leader. And of course, I know he he was also leading a lot of people who had money. They were rich.
Speaker: There were many of his friends were quite rich. Some of them were quite powerful, the heads of corporations. You know, a railroad corporation, for example. But Muir was not necessarily subservient to them.
Speaker: i wouldn't call him subservient at all. He was quite critical of them at times. But he was he was careful not to cross the line get and get them upset.
Speaker: But he was, I think that was way was lots of people. And he had a magical touch with people. They all liked him. They all thought he was a wonderful talker. They could go on and on and on about everything. And that was very engaging to a lot of people.
Speaker: His enthusiasm, I mean, his his power of and faith and virtue in in people, his faith in their virtue. Yeah, I think he's there's so many lessons to be learned there. And you're right that from my reading, he didn't he didn't sort of look up to people who perhaps had a lot of wealth. They were all, as he would say, God's children and and all equal to each other.
Speaker: And i think, I mean, I don't know too much about his relationship with Teddy Roosevelt. um I'd love it if you could share a little bit about another but camping in the Sierras together, I believe for a few nights. i but oh That was a big disappointment and a kind of foiled embrace.
Speaker: Right. Muir and Teddy Roosevelt were thrown together. Roosevelt was out west and as president. ah Muir was brought in take him on a camping tour. He had failed doing this with Emerson, who had come.
Speaker: Teddy was really ready to go. But they went out with a ranger and somebody, I think, from the Secret Service protecting Teddy Roosevelt.
Speaker: So they weren't absolutely alone, but they they talked all night. Each of them was a talker. and they And they competed and so on, but they both had great enthusiasms.
Speaker: Teddy thought Muir was not up to all the natural history standards that he would have had. And Muir was very disappointed that Roosevelt did not use the political power he had to accomplish things like save the Yosemite National Park from dam builders and so forth. So there was mutual dis disappointment, I think, on both sides.
Speaker: That's so interesting. It's something I'm looking forward to reading ah more more about. um I have two final questions for you before we end this conversation. And one is I'm kind of looking forward. And I was curious if there was any one book other than your own that you might recommend to somebody who wants to have a better understanding about our relationship with the natural world.
Speaker: You mean... In general. Yes, just in general. Just, you know, inspired by Muir, perhaps, conservationist, how can we better take care of our planet? Is there anything you would, any book you would recommend that our audience take the time to read? haven't thought this through very much.
Speaker: But there are, of course, great environmentalists in the British Isles, too, to Monon and many other parts of the world. In the United States, we have a lot of good books on these people. I think probably the writings of Wallace Stegner, his biography of John Wesley Powell would be an important book here because he saw Powell as a man who was interested in preserving the beauty of nature as well as turning it into dams and hydro projects.
Speaker: there's ah There's a great work on Mark Catesby, who was an 18th century naturalist in the South. there's a lot I would just get their own books and read them.
Speaker: okay I don't think the biographers are so satisfactory for the most part. It's better just to read their own works. Right. Yeah, straight. Yeah, get it straight from the source.
Speaker: Absolutely. My final question for you today is, and we'll take John Muir out the equation, I suppose. But I was curious if you had a day where you could go for a walk in the woods up in the wilderness for a day and go with anybody from history, somebody you know, somebody you don't know, dead, alive, famous, not famous, somebody you could go for a walk in the woods with and pick their brain. who Who might come to mind? Who would you like to go with? Probably Rachel Carson.
Speaker: I think she she was um an incredibly brilliant writer and thinker about things, and I'd like to ask her a bunch of questions. But her contemporary Aldo Leopold is another one, so I'm thinking about people.
Speaker: But Muir would be fun. I think Muir would talk on and on, as perhaps I'm doing, and we would wrestle for control. and so on, but I would like to hear Muir and meet him. And I've met a number of great environmentalists, Gary Snyder, for example, I'd love to listen to him talk.
Speaker: But Rachel Carson strikes me as being one of the most important figures in our history, in world history, her passions and so on, and her experiences along the Maine coast and the sea.
Speaker: I really like to hear her talk about those much more, why she was drawn there, what she found, Why the sea was so eighty important to her.
Speaker: Excuse me. oh yeah is she something I think the name may be familiar to me, but I'm ashamed to admit I don't know much about her. So that I will be looking at looking her up this week. Environmental movement owes more to Rachel Carson probably than any other.
Speaker: person, particularly her book Silent Spring on pesticides. But The Sea Around Us, that was the book that really made her famous. And it came out, I think, in 1951.
Speaker: it was a bestseller all over the world and went into almost 40 languages in translation. it And it's to me right at the heart, I am now an oceans person living close to the Oregon coast. Yes.
Speaker: And her book is just eye-opening because the oceans are still a wild place, really quite wild for the most part, not all all of it, but still quite wild.
Speaker: Showing a human influence, yes, but why she was drawn in 1950s and how her book became so successful and drew it drew attention to what is 70% of the planet's surface, great oceans.
Speaker: is to me a remarkable thing. And I would like to know, i'd love just to hear her talk about all of this. that's That's a wonderful answer. And it sounds like she, when I think of John Muir, I think of a sense of wonder that he must have had. And it sounds like she carried that same wonder in her soul.
Speaker: praise in a book she wrote for her nephew a sense of wonder oh there we go there we go well uh you communicated that beautifully because that that was the word that kept coming to my mind as uh you were talking well donald worcester i feel like i could sit and talk to you for hours but we should wrap this up this has been an absolute pleasure and i cannot thank you enough for being here with me today thank you alistair thank you
Speaker: Thank you again to this week's guest and I hope today's episode was as enjoyable for you as it was for me and perhaps even inspired your next adventure. If you did enjoy the show, please be sure to subscribe, leave a review or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more information at theoutdoorsyeducator.com or follow us on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. Until next time, thank you so much for listening to The Outdoorsy Educator Podcast.
